Читать книгу Sea Loves Me - Mia Couto - Страница 11

Writing has made me tired of letters. I’m going to finish in a minute. I don’t need a defence anymore, Your Honour. I don’t want one. After all, I’m guilty. I want to be punished, I have no other wish. Not because of the crime, but because of my mistake. At the end I’ll explain what this mistake was. Six years ago I gave myself up, I arrested me by myself. Now, I myself am condemning me.

I am grateful for everything, Your Honour. I took up your time, for no payment. You’ll call me an ass. I know and accept it. But begging your pardon, Your Honour, what do you know about me? I’m not like others: I think about what I can put up with, not about what I need. What I can’t manage has nothing to do with me. God’s failing, not mine. Why didn’t God create us already made? Finished, like an animal which, once it has been born, only has to grow. If God made us live, why didn’t he let us rule our lives?

As it is, even when we’re white, we’re Black. With respect, Your Honour, you’re Black too, let me tell you. It’s a defect in the race of mankind, this race of ours which is everybody’s. Our voices, blind and broken, no longer have authority. We only give orders to the weak: women and children. Even they have begun to be slow to obey. The power of a minion is to make others feel even smaller, to tread on others just as he himself is trodden on by his superiors. Crawling, that’s what the job of souls is. If they’re used to the ground, how is it that they can believe in Heaven?

Unfinished, incomplete, that’s what we are, and we come to our end when buried. It’s better to be a plant, Your Honour. I’m even going to learn to be a tree. Or perhaps a little clump of grass, for a tree wouldn’t fit in here. Why don’t those witches I was talking about try and be plants, all green and quiet? If that had happened, I wouldn’t have had to kill Carlota. All I’d have had to do would be to transplant her; there would be no crime, no guilt.

I’m only afraid of one thing: of cold. All my life I’ve suffered from cold. Ague of the soul, not the body, that’s what I get. Even when it’s hot I still get the shivers. Bartolomeu, my brother-in-law, used to say: Away from home it’s always cold. That’s true. But I, Your Honour, what home have I ever had? None. Bare earth, without a here or a where. In a place like that, with neither arrival nor departure, you need to learn to be clever. Not the cleverness they teach you at school. An all-round cleverness, a cleverness with no fixed job in mind, no contract with anybody.

You can see from this last letter, Your Honour, that I’ve given up. Why am I like this? Because Bartolomeu visited me today and told me everything just as it really happened. Afterwards I realized my mistake. Bartolomeu came to my conclusion for me: his wife, my sister-in-law, wasn’t a nóii. He got proof of this over several nights. He spied on his wife to see if she had some other nocturnal occupation. Nothing, she hadn’t. She neither crawled round on all fours nor flew off like a bird. And so Bartolomeu was able to prove that his wife was a person.

Then I began to think. If my wife’s sister wasn’t a nóii, then neither was my wife. Witchcraft is a vice of sisters, an illness they are born with. But how could I have guessed it by myself? I couldn’t have, Your Honour.

I am a son of my own world. I want to be judged by other laws, beholden to my tradition. My mistake was not that I killed Carlota. It was that I surrendered my life to this world of yours which does not rest easy with mine. There, where I come from, they know me. There they can decide what my goodnesses are. Here, no one can. How can I be defended if I can’t obtain the understanding of others? I’m sorry, Your Honour: justice can only be done where I belong. When all is said and done, only they can tell that I didn’t know Carlota Gentina didn’t have wings to fly away with.

Now it’s too late. I only notice the time when it has already passed. I’m a blind man who sees many doors. I open the nearest one. I don’t choose, my hand merely stumbles across a latch. My life isn’t a path. It is a solid stone waiting to become sand. Very slowly, I’m becoming at one with the grains of the earth. When they decide to bury me I’ll already be soil. Seeing as I had no advantage in life, this will be my privilege in death.