Читать книгу Sea Loves Me - Mia Couto - Страница 8

I are sad. No, I’m not mistaken. What I’m saying is correct. Or perhaps: we am sad? Because inside me, I’m not alone. I’m many. And they all fight over my one and only life. We go along reaping our deaths. But we only have one birth. That’s where the problem lies. That’s why, when I tell my story, I mix myself up, a mulato not of races but of existences.

They say I killed my wife. In real life, I killed one who didn’t exist. She was a bird. I let her go when I saw that she didn’t have a voice, that she was dying without so much as a complaint. What dumb creature was it that came out of her through the fissure of her body?

Very well, Your Honour, you, a doctor of the laws, have asked me to write down my story, and that’s what I’m going to do, a little bit every day. What I’m going to tell you, you’re going to use to defend me in court. But you don’t even know me. Does my suffering interest you, sir? It doesn’t matter to me either. Here I am talking away about this and that, but I don’t want anything, I don’t want to get out any more than I want to stay. These six years that I’ve been locked up in this cell have been enough for me to unlearn my life. Now, sir, I just want to be dying. To die is for such a long time, living is too short. I’ll stay in between. On my way to death. Do you think that’s funny? I’ll explain: the dying are allowed to do what they want. No one laughs at them. They anticipate respect for the dead, they are pre-deceased. When the dying insult us, we forgive them for sure. If they shit in their sheets or spit on their dinner plate, we clean up after them, no questions asked. Please, Your Honour, help me. Fix it so that I can be dying, sub-dead.

After all, here I am in this prison because I decided to become a prisoner. That’s the plain truth, no one pointed the finger at me. Sick of myself, I informed against me. I gave myself up. Maybe on account of being tired of waiting for a time that never came. I can wait but never get anything. When the future arrives it won’t find me. When all is said and done, where am I? Isn’t this time the place of my life?

I’m going to leave my thoughts to themselves, and get straight to the story. I’ll begin with my brother-in-law Bartolomeu. The night he came looking for me, that was when disaster began to strike.