He discovered a bar in the nearby shopping centre, in one of the ugly, colorless, plaster buildings, and he colonized a quiet corner. It was one of those ’new Kenya’ places called ‘Baada Ya Mateso Hakuna Chuki.’ After The Suffering There is No Hate. Everyone called it Mateso. Suffering. Life in the bar was different and yet similar to the estate. To Kungu, the other drinkers seemed to be always reaching to be part of something. It was a national moment when they all turned to the seven o’clock news on one of the numerous TVs, but it was with a puzzled silence that they turned back to each other after they had watched the leaders they had elected. In the stream of crisis that seemed to be part of the new government, they would grimly snort and sip their beers. Laughter and buzz would build up till Manchester United or Arsenal came on, and then a hush would come over the place.
Kungu grew to like being part of the flickering emptiness, with its ephemeral national moments. He sensed that everyone in Kenya was doing the same thing: hungrily watching politics, talking Premier League and drinking away the years. After his eyes met a few flat, hard, challenging stares, he learnt not to directly look at anyone in Mateso but to watch people in the bar mirror. He became a regular, and even got a nickname – ‘Mzee Chochote.’ Mr Whatever – because he never ordered a specific drink but always asked the barman for ‘anything you have.’ For a long time he thought he was being uncomplicated and friendly. The waitresses, always giggly at his unnatural lightness and eyes that became big with alcohol, called him ‘Brownie’.
The sun had barely come up when he heard a knock at the door of the Buru Buru house. When he opened the door, there was a little boy standing there. ‘Sasa Uncle,’ the boy said from the nasal depths of his Down Syndrome condition. It was the court’s little town crier. Kungu had seen him around, greeting everyone and everything with the same loud ‘Sasa.’
‘Heeeeyyyyyyy, whas your name?’ Kungu said.
‘Unnnhh Unnnhhh. I want bread. I want TV TV TV. I want car. No dog. Heee heee heee.’
‘Heeeeeyyyyy, do you go to school? What did you learn yesterday?’
‘Mmmmm. Bread. I want bread.’ Kungu made him some tea, and the boy adopted him. The two estates idlers cut quite a figure. A tall, light, moon-faced man with a high forehead, scrappy beard and wild hair, all jangly and awkward with disuse, and a little puffed-up boy with a never-ending stream of snot. The boy’s mother always dressed him up in tight T-shirts that failed to cover his protruding tummy, and large shorts that were always slipping to his ankles. Everyone in the estate called him Bubu. His head was covered in ugly patches from the scissors his mother took to his hair every other day. Kungu soon bought a TV, and Bubu spent the long idle days seated on the floor entranced by the Cartoon Network.
Since Kungu had started going to the bar and sitting in the same small corner, he had been hearing noises coming from the third floor of the building. Mateso was on the ground floor. When Kungu asked the barman, he told him it was mad people jumping around. Kungu assumed it was one of those new churches. It would be quiet when he got to the bar around 3 p.m., then the noise would pick up slowly by four. By six, there would be shouts of exertion and some kind of dance music filtering down to his corner. By eight, the whole third floor would be lit up and then slowly die down, lights off by ten, when Kungu was going home.
One day Kungu got up from his table and decided to walk up the rickety set of metallic stairs still fresh with ugly streaks of oxyacetylene flame. The noises got louder as he clambered up. On the third floor he could hardly hear himself think as he walked down a small corridor and into a large room. Two of the walls were covered with large mirrors. Kungu saw individuals of all shapes and sizes straining in one form of movement or the other. The shoes of old men, their tits heaving from forty years of independence and goat meat, made indignant squeaks on the rubber floor. There were several TV screens and on each one a cheetah chased some kind of hog. In a side room he saw at least thirty women in some kind of aerobic activity, moving in unison. Their trainer seemed to be trying to bring the roof down with indecipherable shouts and cheers. Everybody was preoccupied with their reflection in the mirror.
Further up, in a separate enclosed square space, was a barbershop. Two young men hunched over customers in large leather seats. There were five others waiting, seated in a right angle. Kungu saw all this through a reflection in the large mirrors that took up one side of the barbershop. That was when he saw the girl in the mirrors. She was sitting in the corner. She had a long thin neck and pinched haughty features that cried of boredom and an old wisdom. She suddenly laughed at something that was said by one of the customers. The flash of pink from inside her mouth was that of a newborn baby.
On the TV screens an elephant was trying to mount a rhino. People gaped, shaking their heads, and there was convivial laughter all around. That was the moment Kungu decided to sign up for the gym. He went to the desk where a large young man, one of the trainers, sat watching the TV. Kungu could not look away from his large muscled neck as he filled out of the forms. ‘Hey, even animals are getting into it. Becoming perverts. Now rhinos and elephants are doing it. I remember this pig that was always doing it with the dogs in my neighborhood,’ the trainer said with a strange earnestness. Kungu felt compelled to say something. ‘Yeah, that shit is Darwinian – the poor thing probably can’t find another rhino to screw,’ Kungu offered. The trainer looked at him, laughed and raised his palm. Kungu put his hand out and the guy slapped it hard. When Kungu looked up he saw the girl in the corner looking at him in the barbershop mirror. She was washing a customer’s hair. He put his hand up, as if to wave, and the girl responded with the subtlest of sneers. Kungu felt a sharp pain in his temples.
After that he came to the gym everyday. He would get onto one of the treadmills and, after adjusting the machine to a brisk walking pace, watch the girl in the mirrors. When there was no work she slumped in a chair and dozed with her long legs stretched out. When she opened her eyes she would catch him looking at her in the mirror in front of the treadmill. She would stare hard at him till he was forced to look away. One afternoon the intensity of her eyes scared him so much he adjusted the levels on the treadmill and started running. Her image blurred until he slammed the machine’s emergency STOP button before his legs gave way. He stepped off and heaved away, his chest aching. When he looked up, the girl in the mirrors was laughing.
On busy days, she washed hair and massaged temples from opening till closing. This was mostly on Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday evenings. He watched her pink mouth laughing with customers, and he hated her. On those days he would leave the gym, go downstairs to Mateso and drink himself silly. Once or twice on the way home he even thought of ignoring the turn to the Buru Buru house and driving back to Limuru. But then he’d feel her eyes on him at the gym and make a quick recovery. He started arranging his gym schedule around her work roster. Mondays and Thursdays were extremely slow at the barbershop. Those days he ran flat out on the treadmill under her bored, scornful stare. These became his 250 calorie days.
After weeks of running from her scorn, his stomach stopped jiggling. His slow shuffle on the treadmill became a loping stride, and his shoulders and neck seemed straighter. One day, drifting in and out of the mirror trying to catch her eye, he suddenly looked at the treadmill gauges and saw the impossible figure of 400 calories. Elated, he looked in the mirrors and caught her eye on him. Her bored look was gone. Instead a look of curiosity lingered on her face: a frank appraisal. Then it was gone. Her features became pinched again and the boredom and haughtiness returned, but with the hint of a smile.
Kungu started to lose himself in the calorie gauge of the treadmill machine. Some days he would go on for ten minutes without looking for her in the mirror. To maintain discipline he made friends with the trainers and exchanged pleasantries with several of the old men who came to the gym. Most of their stories were the same, they were suits who came to the gym to escape. They took to the treadmills, x-trainers and exercise bikes
with an enthusiasm that quickly faded into sweaty foreheads and strained breathing. He saw them watching him, hating his slow, smooth running figure, a 750-calorie runner. In the sauna, naked and sweaty, the old men talked politics through jiggling chins and stomachs. He declined when one or two invited him for a beer afterwards and felt vindicated when he noticed the girl looking at many of the old fat men with disgusted amusement.
One day as he left the gym, thinking he was cured of staring into the mirrors, he looked up and saw the girl in the corridor outside the men’s changing room. She was much shorter away from the mirrors, parts of her face were dry and old-looking. Her arms were covered in bangles. A waft of young sweat floated from her figure. As she passed she whispered: ‘Why have you been ignoring me?’
He went downstairs to Mateso and sat in his corner. ‘Buy me a beer,’ a deep voice demanded, shaking him out of his reverie. It was an old guy everyone called Twenty-five Years. He was a civil servant who started every sentence with ‘Twenty-five years ago … women were more beautiful, twenty-five years ago … Nairobi was a civilized place …’ Kungu gave him Kshs 200 and left.
The next day Bubu appeared on Kungu’s doorstep with his head freshly shorn, tufts of hair sticking amongst bare patches. Kungu put him in the Land Rover and drove to the barbershop. When he walked in with Bubu everyone stared at them. The two barbers sufficiently recovered and offered a greeting. The girl came over to Bubu, leaned over him and said, ‘Has Daddy brought you to get a haircut?’ Bubu stood up and hugged her. Everyone in the barbershop laughed. She turned to Kungu and said, ‘My name is Kaume.’
CORSINO FORTES
Translated from the Portuguese by DANIEL HAHN and SEAN O’BRIEN
CORSINO FORTES was born in 1933 in Mindelo on Cape Verde’s São Vicente Island. His first book Pão & Fonema (Bread & Phoneme) made an immediate impact. After this, he published Arvore e Tambor (Tree & Drum) in 1986. He finished what he has long seen as a trilogy in 2001 with Pedras de Sol & Substância (Sun Stones & Substance).
DANIEL HAHN is a freelance writer, editor, researcher, and translator. His translations include Creole, The Book of Chameleons, My Father’s Wives, and Rainy Season, all by Angolan novelist José Eduardo Agualusa. The Book of Chameleons won him the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Hahn is the editor of In Other Words, the journal for literary translators.
Poet, novelist, critic, dramatist, and translator, SEAN O’BRIEN is a leading figure in contemporary British poetry. His collections have garnered many awards, including the Cholmondeley Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the E.M. Forster Award, the Forward Prize, the Eric Gregory Award, and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
A Prostituta
The Prostitute
Antes de despedida. Ela. A grávida
de símbolos vários & bandeiras
múltiplas queria ser na noite de
vento a viola: a personagem
Before the farewell. Pregnant with
various symbols &
Under many flags she wanted to
be the guitar on the night wind:
a role
E cantou! nao o deserto, entre o
olhar e o oásis de cada manhã …
mas o respirar do sino de todas as
clausuras:
And she sang! not the desert,
between the glimpse and the
oasis of each
Morning … but the breathing of the
bell in all the cloisters:
“E se as ilhas saltassem de nós
mesmos
Saltassem dos estômagos sem
solo & subsolo
Spring from our stomachs with-
out ground or cellar
Que devoram o ontem E o
amanhã do arquipélago
That devour the past and the tomorrow of the archipelago
E recomeçando sempre …
And always beginning again
Entrássemos
para a manhã … Entrássemos para o mundo
If we enter the morning … If we enter the
world
Vazios de presente E vazios de presença
Empty of present and presence alike
Como
As
se a nossa dor nao tivesse passado
If our pain had no past
E o nosso amor nao tivesse futuro”
And our love no future”
Pecado Original
I Pass through the Days
Passo pelos dias
I pass through the days
E deixo – os negros
And leave their blackness
Mais negros
Blacker
Do que a noute brumosa.
Than the foggy night
Olho para as coisas
I look at things
E torno – as velhas
Till woodworm rots them
Tão velhas
Only filthy swamps
A cair de carunchos.
Of all the earth attest
Só charcos imundos
That here I left a footprint
Atestam no solo
And where I wash myself
As pegadas do meu pisar
The river runs blood-red
E fica sempre rubro vermelho
To be unable to escape
Todo o rio por onde me lavo.
To be unable ever to escape
E não poder fugir
And meet that destiny
Nao poder fugir nunca
That dynamites the rockfall in the heart.
A este destino
De dinamitar rochas
Dentro do peito …
Carta de bia d’ideal
Letter from Bia d’Ideal
19 deste mês
The 19th of the month
a barlavento das almas que sabiam
to windward of the souls that know me
Junzin! até na boca de Soncente
Junzin! Even to the people San Vicente
Bô nome agora ê Vário ô T. Thio Thiofe
Your name is Vario or T. Thio Thiofe
E Corsa de David dzê?
And I, Corsa de David, say
C’ma bô ê um negro negro greco-latino
You’ve become a black black Greco-Latin man
Ma! dvera dvera
But really – really
As ondas
The waves
já trepam
already climb
os degraus do teu poema
the steps of your poem
E quebram no violão da ilha
And inside the guitar of the island
Tectos d’Europa
The roofs of Europe
sob as nossas cabeças
break over our heads
Junzin! há muito
Junzin! A long time now
Que não bebes a água
Since you drank the waters
Da nossa secura
Of our thirst
It’s true – it’s true
Há one driba d’one
Years upon years
ma cinq’one e um dia
plus five years more, then a day
Que pedra ê regode pa sponja dnos coraçon
That the sponge of our hearts has wet the rock
C’ma spiga de sangue na dor dum concha de lête
And a conch of milk holds a thread of blood
Oh dor de cara contente
Oh the pain of a cheerful man!
dor calode
silent pain
dor sentode
pain in repose
dor lançado –
pain cast out
ma dor!
but pain always
C’ma dor de som na viola
The ache of the viola’s note
C’ma dor de s’mente na tchon
Ache of the seed in the earth
C�
�ma dor de vulcon na coraçon –
Ache of the volcanic heart
ma hoje!
but today
’M ca ta dzê
I will not say
merci
merci
thank you
thank you
danke schön
danke schön
Paquê!
Why?
Konde Djosa
When Djosa
saí porta fora
Went out of the door
c’se caxa d’engraxâ
With his shoeshine box