Confession of the Lioness (11 page)

I contemplate my legs and think how they are now dispensable. I almost miss the time, a while ago now, when I was paralyzed, as if my lower limbs no longer spoke the same language as the rest of my body. That's what I yearn for today: a language my body doesn't understand and that I can only speak in my dreams.

*   *   *

Our feet are born in our head, our whole body begins in our head, just as the rivers descend from the sky.
That's what my beloved grandfather, Adjiru Kapitamoro, used to say, and up to this day I think he was right. My legs went to sleep when my head awoke. One day, when I was twelve years old, I fell to the floor next to the bed like an empty sack. The family crowded around me, and Adjiru pulled at my father's jacket:

Was it you, Genito?

I quickly answered in order to protect my old father. No one was to blame, and there was a likely explanation. I'd just had bad dreams during the night, with visions that I dared not remember. They pulled me to my feet and I collapsed again, devoid of any internal support.

Of all times now, in the middle of all this war
, my father lamented.
She's going to be yet another burden.

Since when was a daughter a burden?
Adjiru queried.

In childhood, one's body only has one use: to play. But not in Kulumani. The children in our village asked their legs to help them run away in the face of gunfire, faster than bullets. This was the time when our villages were pounded by artillery. At the end of the day, the ritual was always the same: We would pack up our possessions and hide in the bush. For me, this procedure was a game, a recreation shared with the other children. In a world of explosives and blood, we would invent silent pastimes. In our nocturnal hiding place I learned to laugh inside me, to shout voicelessly, to dream without dreams. Until the day when my lower half was no longer mine. And I fell to the floor next to the bed.

*   *   *

After I became paralyzed, it was my grandfather Adjiru who, at the end of the day, would come and fetch me and carry me off into the forest in his arms. All the others had already withdrawn, and it was just me left, along with one or two worthless objects spread across the floor. While I waited for my grandfather's secure arms, one certainty gripped me ever more forcefully: I was a thing and I would be buried like an object in the dust of Kulumani.

I, Mariamar Mpepe, was doubly doomed: to have only one place in the world and to harbor only one life. An infertile woman in Kulumani is less than a thing. She merely embodies inexistence. People said it was my mother's fault that I was like that. Hanifa Assulua had been cursed. As a result of pressure from the Catholic priests, her family had barred her from being subjected to the rituals of initiation. My mother was a
namaku
, a girl who had never made the transition to womanhood. She had been baptized in the church, but she had never undergone the ceremony of the
ingoma
, which allows a girl to come of age. Hanifa was condemned to eternal childhood.

*   *   *

My father was certain: After my limbs weakened, I became an encumbrance. But he was unaware that something more serious than paralysis was happening to me. It's true that my pangs of hunger had grown less acute. On the other hand, I began to suffer from unexpected fits. They happened in late afternoon, before we were taken out to our hiding places in the woods. Only Sil
ê
ncia knew what was happening inside our room. According to my sister, during these attacks my behavior became totally different from before: I would crawl along on all fours with the dexterity of a quadruped, I would scratch the walls with my fingernails and roll my eyes ceaselessly. Hunger and thirst made me howl and foam at the mouth. To placate my raving, Sil
ê
ncia would place plates of food across the floor and bowls of water. Corralled in a corner of the room, my sister, sobbing with terror, would pray for me to stop licking water and biting plates.

It's a spell, it can only be a spell
, she whimpered.

Despairing over the cause of all this, Sil
ê
ncia reproduced the foundational myth of our tribe right outside our front door: In our garden, she buried a statue that had been secretly carved by my grandfather. Legend had it that a wooden statue, buried in the sands of the savanna by the first man, had turned into the first woman. This miracle occurred at the beginning of the world, but Sil
ê
ncia prayed night after night that the little wooden statue in our garden might receive the breath of life.

The statue would never gain a soul, but every time Sil
ê
ncia sensed that an attack was imminent, she would hurriedly dig up our little wooden sentinel and bring it to me. Then I would lull the statue as if it were my daughter, and as I rocked it gently, a mother's peace would grow within me. Afterward, I would crawl along, carrying the figurine that I fancied was my legitimate child in my mouth, like a female cat.

*   *   *

My legs might have been lifeless, but I never became my own prisoner. Every morning, children's voices would erupt into the garden.

Come on up, Mariamar, climb up on us!

The boys would take turns giving me piggyback rides and would carry me away far from home, scrambling around joyfully. Carried on their backs like a baby, I experienced every merry little game there was. Today, I can safely say this: I enjoyed a childhood delegated to me by other children. Hanging from someone's neck, riding on some nameless back, I wasn't even aware when my chest rubbed against a boy's sweat.

If you do that, your breasts will never grow
, my sister Sil
ê
ncia warned.

In Kulumani, breasts are a signal: Depending on their volume, mothers know when they should subject their daughters to the ritual of initiation. What to me was an innocent game was an insult as far as the village was concerned. Women saw me riding on the backs of boys and would turn their faces away in embarrassment. It's in the piggyback position that godmothers, the so-called
mbwanas
, carry the girls who are going to mutate into women to the ceremony. It was this that the women found unforgivable: I was anticipating and disrupting an occasion that they wished to keep sacred and secluded. As the daughter and granddaughter of people educated in Portuguese, I had no place in a world governed by outmoded rules. My sin became even worse because of the time of crisis in which we lived. The more the war robbed us of our certainties, the more we lacked the security of a past ruled by order and obedience.

*   *   *

One day, some boys went to Palma and stole an unused coffin. They brought it back at night and told me:

We've got a sedan chair for you.

From then on, they began to carry me everywhere inside the coffin. From my palanquin, I would see people stop to show me a respect that they had never given me before. Happy with this general veneration, I declared:

Mother, I want to live in a coffin forever.

But such deference eventually prevented me from realizing that my vanity was indeed sad: I had to cease existing in order for people to take note of my existence. I should yearn for that other carriage of flesh and blood, which had given me such pleasure before: the backs of the other children. But no. Swaying from side to side up there on my improvised throne, my heart was filled with the vanity of a queen.

Just watch my breasts grow now!

Don't wish for that, sister, don't wish to be a woman
, Sil
ê
ncia warned.

*   *   *

One morning, I awoke to find the coffin in pieces. It was my grandfather, Adjiru Kapitamoro, who had broken it. The old man had unexpectedly strode across the yard and smashed the wooden box to pieces. I even heard him yelling at my parents:

How can you allow this type of tomfoolery? She's a child, for God's sake …

I remember I cried as I looked at the broken planks. When she saw me furiously digging in the sand, Sil
ê
ncia thought I was looking for the statuette she had buried in the garden. But the grave had another purpose:

I'm burying my coffin.

*   *   *

All this happened before that unforgettable morning when, wearing my shoes and with my hair tidy, I went out with my grandfather. Nor did he explain the reason fully. Only these mysterious words:
You're going to receive the waters of God.

I was used to his fancifulness. It was he who, when I was still a young girl, had given me the name that would remain with me: Mariamar.

I'm not just giving you a name
, he said.
I'm giving you a ship to navigate between ocean and devotion.

These were his words on the occasion of my second baptism. And he said more: that I didn't need a ritual to be a woman. The woman I would become was already within me.

*   *   *

That morning when Adjiru came to fetch me heralded a day when something important was going to happen. Preparations for going out were completed in a trice: A comb was plowed through my unkempt hair and my feet were squeezed into some improvised footwear.

Have you put your shoes on?
my grandfather checked.

Why the need for shoes? For a long time now, they had been a mere ornament for me.

Do my parents know where we're going?

Don't be scared, I'm your principal grandfather.

And he chatted away while he tidied my hair.

Bless yourself, dear granddaughter. You're going to receive a miracle.

What miracle, Grandfather?

You're going to walk again.

Whether it was an illness or a curse, he couldn't remain resigned in the face of my descent into the condition of a wild animal. He took a deep breath before declaring:

We have a proverb that goes like this: “If you can talk, you can sing; if you can walk, you can dance.” Well, you're going to sing, you're going to dance, my dear granddaughter.

I looked at his arm as if it were the continuation of my own body. And indeed it was. How could I ever cut my second umbilical cord? Oblivious to my thoughts, Adjiru Kapitamoro wheeled me through the village in a little barrow, with the pride of someone invited to inaugurate the square.

Framed by the church door, the priest, Manuel Amoroso, stood waiting for us. The Portuguese missionary was the only white man we knew. We didn't distinguish the man by the color of his skin or by the language he spoke, or even by his vestments. What differentiated him from the rest was that he had no wife that we could discern. Nor children following in his footsteps.

Adjiru Kapitamoro!
exclaimed the priest, putting a flourish on every syllable as if he were chortling a jaunty song.

Indeed, Father.

For the first time, my grandfather's voice sounded fragile to me, as if it were seeking support. I looked at him against the light, as if to satisfy myself of his stature. And once again, I took a breath: Behind his outline, the church tower rose majestically. That was where our vertical journey to the firmament began. At that point, getting close to God seemed to me to require the effort of a mountaineer. The church was not inviting me to enter it, but rather to climb it.

I took time to get used to the brightness once inside. Then I began to adapt: I'd never seen a house with so much wall. The same cross hanging on Amoroso's chest dominated, on a much vaster scale, the center of the building. Upon the wooden crucifix rested this world's second white man: bearded, half naked, and covered in wounds.

Kneel before Christ
, Amoroso ordered.

She can't, Father. Have you forgotten why she's come here to the mission?

Let us help her. She must do it.

The two men suspended me by my arms and then let go. I collapsed like a wet cloth. I lay spread-eagled on the floor and from that angle contemplated Amoroso and Christ. The two white men were alike: sad and wizened, as if life were happening in some other, inaccessible place. Christ displayed his wounds, Amoroso exhibited his bereaved gaze. Both of them summoned me toward the great family of the suffering. Toward the family that, only in suffering, feels close to God.

*   *   *

So have you come to a decision regarding my little girl?

My grandfather was irritated by the use of the possessive. My little girl?

This granddaughter of mine will always be mine, and I'm leaving her here only until she can walk again
—these were his angry words as he left the church.
I myself will come and fetch her and take her back to our home when she can stand on her own two feet
, my grandfather promised emphatically.

The Portuguese priest didn't seem to hear. He was totally absorbed in contemplating the church ceiling as if he were looking beyond what he was actually seeing. He stood there motionless, unaware that Adjiru had already left. He was satisfied: In a predominantly Muslim region, the representation of a miracle could bring in believers and approval. Smiling, he told me:

When your dear old granddaddy dies, he'll go straight to heaven.

My grandfather will never die!

As far as I was concerned, Adjiru Kapitamoro's life was that of a tree: Rooted in the ground, he already belonged to the sky.

*   *   *

My grandfather's visits were the high point of the two years I spent at the mission. On some occasions, he would sit silently, gazing at the horizon. Other times, he wanted to know whether God was paying me any attention.

And how's your writing?
he would ask.

I'm always writing, Grandfather. Do you want to read it?