Several times I've had lunch in one of these vehicles there, near the Tunduro Garden. It's cheap. The owner of the car, a fat lady with huge coconut palms on her eyelashes, took ages to park the car, you had to be careful with the rail on the uncovered pans, you had to put half the car on the sidewalk and the other half on the road, but without spilling the bones floating in the feijoada.

Whenever I went there for lunch, after 1pm, one of the girls who was dressing the salad with her hand full of varnish-stained nails, with a bottle of oil stuck in her armpit, would announce to the owner of the small restaurant: "boss, the mechanic has arrived". And the lady shepherded the mechanic with her index finger into the car. The mechanic was a tall man, always in dirty overalls, and he obeyed like an altar boy: he bent down and got into the car. He would get into the car, but the sour smell that came from the chimneys of his armpits would linger outside for hours.

I didn't understand the work that mechanic was doing inside the car, yet every day there was no shortage of "boss, the mechanic's here". I remember one day, just any day, when that mechanic fiddled with the bunch of keys, touched the pedals of the car and the restaurant drove off; the peanut rail made crosswalks in the road, the rice covered the pits in the road and the soup didn't even stop pouring out at the "STOPs"; the lady running with a wooden spoon followed the restaurant that ran aground at a traffic light.

And one day, I decided to look through the rearview mirror at the mechanic working on the car. And it turned out that he wasn't a mechanic at all, but a poor, humble, damp man in his dirty overalls, who lived on the street and ate our leftovers like a dog.

Maybe they called him a mechanic because he fixed his hunger with the useless pieces we left on the plates. It was sad to see the man, inside the car, rolling around under what we left, wet with saliva from happiness under the leftovers. He fished grains of rice out of all the plates, licked our spoons like a mechanic pulling gasoline out of his mouth, and at the end he came out of the car completely dirty with happiness, rubbing his tongue on his fingers and bowing to the owner of the car: "See you tomorrow, Jenny".

There is no shortage of people in Maputo who live off leftovers, people who seem to have magnifying glasses in their eyes because they see whole, huge things in the leftovers.

From that day on, I started eating in that restaurant, counting on the mechanic. I would eat and leave more leftovers for the mechanic, it was as if I heard him asking me every time I took a spoonful: "Leave some meat on that bone, my boy".

I learned from this mechanic that leftovers can also repair and fix faults in the stomach. Today is Monday and if I were in Maputo I would hear "boss, the mechanic has arrived". And I'd see a mechanic in the rearview mirror struggling with a huge bone spanner and belching leftovers.