It's the fourth time you put the wet towel on the sheets, it's the fourth time I see your socks strewn about the room like little devices exploding with feet of feet in every corner of the room, it's the fourth time I lean over to pull two of your shirts out from under my shirt. I wonder if to close...
And how does it all begin or end? First, the Olimpia Cinema building did a "the end" and, as at the end of a movie, the letters went up little by little on the screen of the building; the Olimpia Cinema ended as movies end. Then the cinema turned into a haunting ruin of rats and kiloliters of urine,...
The Portuguese athletics coach Alberto Lário was arrested and spilled into a cell because he was staying illegally in the country. After his arrest, there was talk that he would be packaged, put on a plane and deported to his country, Portugal, as if it were an unsealed product. The coach has been begging for six years, from...
In the Chamanculo neighborhood, when you turn one of the corners of Diamantino Street, you can see a funeral home that works there: Araújo Funeral Home. A guy named Arcanjo used to work there. He worked in that funeral home for years and years and had a deviated eye that he used to take the measurements of the corpses in the hospital morgues. On Sundays,...
Another day ends, the supposed strike I managed to abort, and now it's time to return to my neighborhood. I will now strip off my police skin like a snake, put it on a wire hanger, and hide it in the commando's closet. I'm going to pass on to the night watchman the dispatch of two strikers that I handcuffed on the Avenue....
There was a chapas strike in Maputo, there was tear gas, there were people peregrinating with huge tongue-out staffs on the roads, and our government's solution was to put a patch of subsidy on that old transport fabric. Our life is made of subsidies. A few years ago, when the bakeries decided to put in more yeast....
I had a hunchbacked geography teacher who the first big lesson he gave us on the first day of school was about the location of the national library downtown. I don't forget that teacher walking up the stairs of the school and the shadow of his hunchback, attached to his body, crawling up the stairs like a...
I ran with my belongings to give to a friend who already had his bags packed and was running out of time to return to Maputo. I wanted him to put me in his suitcase. I did everything in a hurry, so that the little box of homesickness made a noise like a mug...
In that room, at Jose Macamo Hospital, we were a herd of patients eating sleep debris and grass on the beds of dirty sheets. My God, the nurses came dragging tubes of serum and we were the herd. Each patient had his own shepherd who stuck needles in him, who fixed the sheet in the corner of the bed,...
Carlos Cardoso woke up from death. He opened with his fingers the bullet buttons that closed the humid air of his life. The bullet shells fell empty of death on Cardoso's feet. He eyed the traffic that spilled pounds of horns on the road. His spine squawked like the hinges of a varnished door.