João squinted in the
luminous African sun that was creating heat ripples on the tarmac. The humidity was oppressive, the air
putrid. A dead bird, its entrails
exposed, was gently roasting on the simmering concrete near the aircraft’s landing
gear. A second bird pecked at the
carcass.
João briefly paused at
the threshold of the ramp propped against the plane’s hatch, wiped his brow
and, casually tossing his jacket over his shoulder, descended down the metal
steps, inhaling the sweet odor of jet fuel as he went. When he reached the bottom, he followed the
other passengers towards the main gate, above which a sign missing several
letters read: “Aerpoto Intercionl de Maputo.”
“Bless Africa,” he
thought. “Bless Mozambique.”
João
ambled wearily towards the main terminal, an unventilated expanse decorated
spartanly with yellowing posters of palm trees and beaches. A sign directed those disembarking into three
lines: one for Mozambicans, another for southern African residents, the last
for everyone else.
João joined a queue in
the third line behind a handful of passengers who, like him, were loosening
their garments in the oppressive heat.
When his turn came, a rotund woman with thick glasses and a sweat-stained
uniform leafed through his passport indifferently. Without looking up to confirm that the
resemblance of the person in the travel document’s photo matched that of the
passenger standing before her, she stamped the passport and lazily motioned for
the next passenger to approach. João was
waved through customs without having to utter a word.
The
baggage carousel was just beyond the customs line. No sign indicated which flight corresponded
to the luggage it would circulate. None
was needed. It was obvious by the low
volume of arrivals.
Minutes
later, the rusty apparatus sprang to life with a piercing screech that sent a
few birds perched on a nearby rafter scurrying.
Passengers on João’s flight from Johannesburg waited patiently for their
bags as the oil-deprived contraption creaked and whined. Finally, bags began to emerge.
João retrieved his
valise and, after withdrawing money from the airport’s single ATM, exited the
arrival gate where several policemen stood smoking, taking little interest in
the surrounding commotion caused by the exiting passengers. As João turned towards the terminal’s main
exit, a crowd of cab drivers motioned furiously at him. “Senhor, Senhor,” they cried out.
João momentarily paused, sizing up
his options. Then a boy pushed his way through the rabble, brazenly marched up to
him and, in one quick motion, grabbed the handle of his valise. He pivoted and began wheeling the bag
outside, pointing to a cabbie as he went, making João’s selection for him. Slightly taken aback by the boy’s temerity,
but only because he hadn’t been in Mozambique in 12 months, João obligingly followed his lead.
João,
the cabbie, and the boy made their way to the taxi and, when the cabbie opened
the trunk of his vehicle, the boy, who was probably not much heavier than the
valise himself, heaved it in roughly.
He then turned to João and, with a distressed expression, made a gesture
that mimicked placing food into his mouth.
“Por favor, Senhor. Por
favor. Estou com fome,” he pleaded. He was hungry.
João anticipated the request. He knew how things worked. Not that he resented it. The boy, like everyone in this country, was
trying to squeeze out a meager livelihood against great odds. “A necessidade não tem lei, mas a da fome
sobre todas pode,” João
thought, recalling the Portuguese proverb, “Necessity
knows no law where there is famine.” Yet, he had
erred.
Typically, he brought pocket
change left over from previous visits, but on this occasion he had
forgotten. As a result, the smallest
denomination of Mozambican Meticais he had was that dispensed by the ATM,
which was the equivalent to €6, far too much for a task that he had neither solicited nor
needed.
João managed to fish out his
backpack a spare €1 coin and, thinking it more than reasonable compensation,
handed it to the boy, who was still grimacing.
The boy recoiled. “I can’t change
that,” he said with a gasp. “It’s no
good. Meticais. I need Meticais.
Or Rand,” he added, referring to the South African currency.
“I’m sorry,” João said in
Lisbon-accented Portuguese, “it’s all I have.”
“No! I saw you get money,” he bellowed, pointing
to the airport terminal. “You have Meticais. You have what I need!”
João shrugged while getting into
the vehicle. “Really, I’m sorry,” he
repeated, rolling down the window.
The boy’s eyes pulsed with
hostility. As the taxi wheeled around,
he shouted with a scowl, “Go to hell, you dirty Portuguese dog. Go home!
Leave!”
The confrontation didn’t dampen
João’s spirits. He was happy to be back
in Mozambique regardless, and promptly engaged the cabbie in light banter
during the 15-minute ride to the Southern Sun Hotel, located on the waters of
the Indian Ocean.
A 51-year-old bachelor
with an average build, João had black hair worn combed back from his forehead,
and brown eyes deeply set behind an aquiline nose whose slope pointed in the
direction of a prominent chin. His skin
was olive-toned.
A small scar from a
childhood accident ran sideways down his check, and high on his arm was a
tattoo of a dragon. With his slightly
hooked nose, these were all that distinguished him.
João, in short, was
nondescript. His colleagues at a
furniture supplier outside of Lisbon where he worked joked that averaging the
facial and body features of every man in Portugal would yield the amiable, if
reserved, bean counter from the back office.
He was the perfect mean. João
liked it that way. He took pride in
it. He liked to blend in, to dissolve in
the crowd. Conspicuousness was no
virtue. Quite the opposite. The protruding nail, as the Japanese say,
gets hammered down.
João never would be
hammered down; his manner was a prosaic fit for his profession. He was neither gregarious nor introverted,
neither convivial nor dour. He was an
acquired taste, if hardly a repellant one, either. He had a few friends, but no more than
that. Woman, too, did not gravitate to
João, yet neither did they begrudge his company. He had tallied precisely three substantial
relationships in his five decades, one of which nearly culminated in
marriage.
That was long ago,
though. Much time had passed since then,
and though he once longed for companionship and even children, all dreams are
perishable, as were his own. João had a
routine—Benfica
matches on television whenever his beloved football team played,
church, cards—that
he was no longer willing to give up for a woman. None were worth it.
If
João’s daily routine was the organizing principle around which his life was
structured, he strayed from it once a year when, during the height of winter,
he fled chilly and damp Lisbon for Mozambique, a sunny southern hemisphere
sanctuary. A Brazilian businessman João
met at an actuarial conference was responsible for his annual treks to the
former Portuguese colony.
The businessman spoke
glowingly about Mozambique and its undiscovered beaches that were veritable
Edens. There you could cheaply rent undiscovered
seaside accommodations and luxuriate in the white sand, cerulean blue water,
and fiery orange sunsets over the Indian Ocean without tourist congestion.
The country, he
conceded, was politically unstable.
Tensions still ran high even though its horribly bloody civil war had
long since concluded. Violence here and
there was always possible without warning.
Crime was bad. The country was
also crawling with seedy Portuguese men looking for cheap sex, and whom the
desperately poor locals were eager to accommodate. For all of its shortcomings, however,
Mozambique had majestic natural beauty.
João was intrigued. The description appealed to his limited sense
of adventure. While he would not be on
his own territory in Mozambique, being a native Portuguese-speaker meant that
he would not be on altogether alien terrain, either. An excursion to the country promised to be a
happy compromise between imprudent risk-taking and gutless risk-aversion. Mozambique, then, perfectly suited a man of João’s
studied averageness.
The following winter,
he decamped Lisbon for Maputo. As his
Brazilian acquaintance suggested, he spent just a night in the country’s
capital before heading up north to its breathtaking coastline.
During successive trips he
ventured beyond the relative comfort and safety of secluded ocean resorts. His annual vacations now typically included
short stays in Mozambique’s bustling capital, and several days in Beira, the
country’s second largest city situated in Sofala Province, where the Pungue
River meets the Indian Ocean. Sometimes
he also ventured to nooks and crannies in far-flung places like Cabo Delgado Province on Mozambique’s
northern border with Tanzania.
This was João’s eleventh trip to
Mozambique. He always lodged at the
Southern Sun. The elegant tan-colored
hotel, with its terracotta-tiled roof and portico veranda, resembled an Italian
villa. Its finely manicured rear lawn
facing the majestic expanse of the ocean was its best feature, however. The open waters lay beyond a line of palm
trees and shrubbery on the far side of a pool and a small wall made of stone,
perhaps just waist-high, which delineated the hotel property from the public
beach.
The small structure also
delineated two Worlds: the First and Third.
João comfortably lounged on the side of the former. The lawn was green, the pool blue, and its
inhabitants almost exclusively white. It
was climate-controlled, commodious, sanitary.
The air smelled of jasmine and the ambiance was pleasantly casual. Time moved languidly.
Beyond the small partition was an
alternate universe: dirty, humid, and crowded.
The smell of decay was consuming, and the feeling of tension
palpable. Life was a struggle here, in a
pure Darwinian sense. The unexpected occurred
routinely, and tragedy was commonplace everywhere. Time was short.
João was of the rarified First World,
but no stranger to its analog. To see it
up close was invigorating—the knowledge that one would be soon returning to a
more pleasant place made it so. Indeed, João
enjoyed exploring Maputo, Beira, and other Mozambican cities, imbibing the
local flavor. It made him feel alive,
close to God.
He wanted to know how people
survived in such trying circumstances.
Most tourists weren’t interested in such anthropological exercises. They gravitated to the familiar in unfamiliar
places, wanting nothing to do with those without anything. After all, vacations were about abdicating
all forms of responsibility, not taking them on.
João thought this unseemly. What was the point of travel if not to open
one’s experiential aperture? Better to
stay home, cossetted and carefree.
But worse than avoiding
deprivation where deprivation was the norm was to gaze at it from a safe
remove. Such poverty porn, voyeuristic
and cruel, was distressingly commonplace.
Local operators even offered prurient Europeans “familiarization tours”
of Maputo’s shantytown—from the comfort of a Land Rover, of course.
João gladly engaged Mozambicans,
and treated them with dignity and respect.
He was an outsider from another world, to be sure, and he had no
illusions otherwise. His life experience
was incomprehensible to the average Mozambican, and theirs to him, but he
refused to let that barrier be determinate.
“There but for the grace of God go I,” he would remind himself. He was proud of his Christian-inspired
egalitarianism. It made him feel
superior.
And yet João couldn’t resist the
Southern Sun’s back lawn. The stark juxtaposition
of wealth and despair on the respective sides of the wall was
intoxicating. He was ashamed of its allure,
as he wanted to believe himself above such lurid fascination, yet he would
spend hours staring out at the beach beyond the invisible partition.
Mozambican children and the occasional
couple frolicked in the sand during the day.
The waters themselves were fetid and dirty—open sewers drained directly
into the bay—so few dared wading in, though those that did could walk into the
surf a great distance without being submerged.
Small boats dangerously overcrowded with fishermen occasionally bobbed
by. The crafts were not propelled by
outboard motors, but by long poles that the sailors used as punts in the
shallows.
It was the occasional passersby
who approached the wall and peered at the hotel’s luxurious rear lawn that
particularly piqued João’s interest, though.
‘What were they thinking?’ he wondered.
What did they make of the opulence, which contrasted so starkly with
their own deprived existence? Did it
elicit anger or were they inured to life’s unfairness? He yearned to know.
After checking in following the
short ride from the airport, João retreated to his room, a clean, small suite
adorned with the basic amenities, and showered.
He then climbed into bed and slept a few hours before his alarm rang. He didn’t want to entirely succumb to
travel-induced exhaustion, lest it disrupt his sleep pattern. Consequently, in the early evening, he roused
himself, washed up, and walked down the beachside road to a seafood restaurant located
not far from the hotel.
The Jardim do Marisco was
jumping. A group of Americans were
seated near the entrance, yapping in their voluble manner. One didn’t need to speak English to identify
Yanks abroad. These human megaphones always
advertised their presence. A Portuguese
columnist once posited half-seriously that a country’s relative global heft was
discernable by the boorishness of its inhabitants when abroad. By this standard, American hegemony wasn’t in
doubt.
The rest of the dining room was
filled with Europeans, some of whom were chatting up the local Mozambican women
hovering shamelessly around their prosperous companions. João was seated at a table on the edge of the
dining room abutting the beach. The
plastic table was covered in a white tablecloth dotted with grease stains.
A charmless waiter took his drink
order and returned minutes later with a cold beer and listlessly placed it in
front of João. He took João’s dinner
order while two children holding up a mass-produced print of a herd of zebra
slowly shuffled by on the far side of the barrier separating the dining room
from the beach. Their deliberate gait
gave onlookers time to examine the artwork.
When they reached the end of the barrier, they pivoted and shuffled
slowly back in the other direction, giving each of the restaurant’s patrons a
second opportunity to view the print.
Ten minutes later, the stoic
waiter returned with a plate teeming with giant prawns, crabs, and fried fish,
and another with rice, French fries, and lemon slices. Famished, João wolfed down the meal, ordering
another beer to wash it down. Satiated
and content, he leaned back in his chair and watched the surf.
João, mindlessly rubbing rosary
beads in one hand while clutching a beer in the other, was lost in thought when
a wizened-looking Caucasian man in starched khakis and a striped oxford
approached. “Você é Português?” he
asked.
“Yes, I am,” João replied with
surprise, affirming that he was from Portugal.
“Of
course you are. You’re practically the personification
of the country,” the stranger said with delight, “The motherland embodied. Anybody ever tell you that?”
“Never,”
João replied dryly.
“I’m
sorry. I hope I didn’t offend. I’ve had a few too many. “I’m Fabião,” he added, holding out his hand. “Mind if I join you?”
João was
slightly annoyed with the stranger’s impudence, but he smiled and shook his
hand. “Not at all. Please, sit,” he replied, motioning toward
the vacant chair opposite him.
Fabião
had a heavy brow, sunken, sallow cheeks, and thinning white hair. Salt-and-pepper stubble covered his ruddy
cheeks and recessed chin. His eyes were
small and dark yet conveyed sincerity and warmth. He looked like the charmingly roguish uncle
whose mischievousness was easily forgiven on account of his kind
countenance.
“So, my friend, where are you from
and what brings you to this wonderful wasteland?” he asked while sitting down.
“Lisbon,” replied João. “I’m here on vacation. And you?”
“Ah, beautiful Lisbon, birthplace
of Fernando Pessoa,” Fabião said with a flourish, referencing the Portuguese
poet. And, of course, home to
Benfica. I trust you’re a Benfiquista.”
“I trust you’re right.”
“Yes, of course.” Fabião then broke into song: “I’m from Benfica / It
fills me with pride / I have in me the spirit / That allows common greatness / I’m
from a brave club / That in the hardest of the battles / A rival has never met /
In this Portugal of ours / Being from Benfica / Is having in your soul / The
mighty flame / That conquers / It lifts you to the immense light / From the
sun, that high in the sky / Smiling gently kisses / Full of pride / The very
bright shirts / Vibrating through the fields / Like jumping poppies.”
“Bravo,” João said of the rendition of Ser Benfiquista, the club’s anthem.
“Very obliged,” Fabião replied, placing his hand to his heart. “My father was a dyed-in-the-wool Benfiquista.
He was from Lisbon and never lost his devotion to the club, even after
living in Faro for decades. He used to
sing that song every match day. It
didn’t even matter if Benfica was playing.
He’d sing it anyway!”
“Clearly, he was a great man,” João said.
“He was.”
“Do you live in Faro?”
“No, Braga,” Fabião replied,
citing Portugal’s third largest city located between Porto and the Galician city
of Vigo. “But I was born and bred in
Faro and that’s where my heart is. Can’t
make a living there, though. The market
crashed six months ago. All construction
ceased. Half-completed beach bungalows,
luxury hotels, trendy duplexes—been a contractor for 37 years and I’ve never
seen anything like it. The Scandinavians
building vacation homes vanished.
Gone. Sayonara. But I can’t
complain. I make ends meet on smaller
projects—installing windows, fixing pipes, that sort of stuff. It’s a life.
Can’t be that bad, I’m still able to vacation here. You, what do you do?”
“I’m an accountant. I work for a furniture distributor. Been doing it for decades. It’s steady and secure. I can’t complain, either.”
“What brings you down here?” asked
Fabião. “Beaches, bitches, or both?”
João chuckled. “I’ve been visiting Mozambique for
years. I came on a lark at first. I had never been to Africa, aside from a
brief trip to Morocco, but that hardly counts.
I fell in love with the place. ”
“It’s easy to do,” Fabião said,
taking a swig of beer. “It’s strikingly
beautiful. The food is delicious, as are
the women! Here’s to Mozambican ladies,”
he roared, prompting him to take another slug.
“And to think such a rich place is
so poor. The poverty and penury, deprivation
and dinginess—so sad. The Mozambicans
blame us for it. ‘Oh, the terrible
things the Portuguese did to us. The
barbarity. The injustice.’ Please!
He who cannot remember the past may be condemned to repeat it, but he
who obsesses over it won’t surmount it, either.
The country won its independence decades ago. What has it done since? Were there a Fourth World this Third World rat
hole would’ve plummeted down a notch!
It’s the same everywhere in Africa: Zimbabwe, Angola Congo, Nigeria,
Sudan. The Negro has squandered his
inheritance.”
João shifted in his seat nervously
and scanned the restaurant to see if anyone overheard his garrulous
companion. None appeared to have.
“The thing is, the Negro can’t
accept it. He can’t accept that he’s made
a hash of things, which is why he’s so fixated on the white man. That’s the real white man’s burden: to be forever responsible for his
forefathers’ sins. There’s a perverse
logic to all; the victim, after all, has no responsibility. He’s free—free to complain. There’s power in that.”
At that moment, the waiter
approached, quieting Fabião in mid-harangue.
The frowning fellow inquired dryly whether the two wanted anything
else.
“Let me ask you something,” Fabião
said, sending a chill up João’s back, as he expected something offensive to fly
off his inebriated companion’s tongue.
“Do you sell German beer?”
The waiter shook his head.
“How ‘bout Pilsner, you got any of
that?”
The waiter again shook his head.
“Fine, then give me another of
these,” he said, pointing to the lukewarm beer on tap in his glass.
“See that?” Fabião remarked after
the waiter disappeared. “His
attitude. The haughtiness. The disdain.
Mozambicans are all the same.
They hate us. They hate us
because of what we did to them, but they hate us more because we’re reminders
of their forfeited moral superiority, since we treated them no worse than they
treat each other. They can’t abide
it. The wretches, those Negros.”
João winced. Racism held no appeal to him. Never had.
A passerby in Oslo had called him a “vile Arab” during a school trip to
Norway, apparently because of his olive skin, and it had left a bitter
memory. It seared. But presently his concerns were more
pedestrian. He feared Fabião being
overheard and tried changing the topic by asking his bigoted companion where he
was staying, but it didn’t work.
“Do you disagree? Fabião
asked. “If so, what do you ascribe
Mozambique’s poverty? Is it fate’s cruel
whimsy?”
João wasn’t sure. What he did know was that civilizations rose
and fell. It was always so. Portugal once commanded a mighty empire, the
first and longest lasting of its European counterparts. Its explorers—Vasco
da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan, Bartholomeu Dias—conquered the seas, settled lands near and far, from
Nagasaki to Salvador. But today Portugal
was a land of faded glory, a museum piece.
Mozambique, unlike Portugal, had no glorious past and an
unknown future. Maybe it would be
magnificent. A place that produced
Benfica’s greatest player, indeed, one of football’s greatest ever, the elegant
and dignified Eusébio, could not be discounted.
João shrugged. “I don’t know. What I do know is that I have to go to the
bathroom.”
“Well, my friend, what is evident
to me may not be to you, and vice-versa,” Fábião
replied somberly. “‘What we see isn't what we see, but what we are.’ Pessoa said that. How true.”
“How true indeed,” João repeated before excusing
himself to go to the bathroom. He hoped the pause would reset the
conversation away from such fraught topics, but when he returned Fábião was
gone. A freshly delivered beer sat untouched on the table.
João waited patiently anticipating his companion’s
return, and eventually made the rounds of the restaurant and peered out onto
the beach in search of him. Fábião was nowhere to be seen. After twenty minutes, João departed,
returning to the Southern Sun by the beachside road, passing en route vendors
selling beer by campfire.
João woke up early the next morning and lay in bed
reading for an hour. He then showered, dressed, and ate a light breakfast
in the hotel restaurant before taking a taxi to Maputo’s Central Market, a
gloriously chaotic bazaar housed in an elegant Portuguese-colonial style
building.
After meandering around the venue, taking in the
lush and colorful mix of fruits and vegetables, tapestries and rugs, arts and
crafts, he ate a lunch of spicy chicken and rice at one of his favorite
eateries nearby and, feeling drowsy, returned to the Southern Sun. The
following day he would catch an overnight bus to Biera, a scheduled 15-hour
trip that often took much longer, so he was content to have a low-key day.
The hotel was eerily quiet. Aside from a couple nibbling on hors
d'oeuvres in the lounge and few businessmen tapping away on their laptops in
the foyer, the place was virtually vacant.
João liked it that way.
Typically, the hotel was overrun in the summer with well-lubricated
Europeans and menacing, voluble Yanks.
But on rare days the Southern Sun was a quiet oasis from the frenetic city
pulsing with anxiety and tension. This
was one of those days.
João retreated to his room to gather a few personal
effects and then made his way past the French doors to the back lawn. He nestled down in his favorite spot, a
wicker chair near the pool, and ordered a cold beer from a gruff waiter. The sun had crested and was beginning its
descent towards the horizon, turning the sky orange. A light breeze gently ruffled the leaves of
the palm trees on the other side of the glistening pool.
João was writing a postcard to his mother when,
upon glancing upward, his eyes locked with those of a man on the beach
motioning for his attention. Industrious
Mozambicans often congregated at the wall, enticing hotel patrons with carved
items, shirts, and other cheap
wares.
João typically ignored them, but the absence of any
other guests on the lawn, save for two women sunbathing, made the task more
difficult. He felt in the crosshairs.
He returned to writing, but eventually unable to
stand the weight of the man’s gaze any longer, João put down his pen and walked
around the pool’s perimeter to the wall and, bending down, greeted him. The skinny salesman looked to be in his
mid-twenties. He wore ripped red shorts,
a shirt with the letters “CIA,” and plastic sandals. In his hands he held several scarves and
beside him were two plastic bags filled with more.
“Take a look at these,” he said, handing João
several scarves. “They’re
beautiful. For your wife, girlfriend, or
mother. Made here in Mozambique. Genuine African.”
One of the scarves was burgundy and had a stylized
image of a giraffe and the other brown with yellow hieroglyphic-like
lettering. João examined both. The young salesman then handed him three
more.
“See, beautiful.
Silk. Genuine African. Top quality.
I’ll give you a good price. Best
price.”
“Oh?” João replied.
“What are you asking?”
“Special deal for you: 1,500 Meticais each.”
“Special deal for you: 1,500 Meticais each.”
João didn’t particularly want the scarves, much
less at the equivalent of over €35 a
piece. “No, that’s too much. Way too much.”
“Okay, what then?
What do you want to pay? I give
you good price.”
João was pondering a figure when he spotted small
tag on an inside fold of one of the scarves.
He drew it close and saw in small letters the words, “Made in
China.”
“I thought you said there were from here,” João
said, pointing to the small tag.
The salesman brusquely grabbed the scarf from João
and closely examined the tag. “These are from Mozambique,” he replied
defensively. “They’re designed
here. Right here in Maputo. They’re only printed in China.”
“But it says that they’re made in China,” João
said, contesting the point. “They’re not
local.”
“Yes they are,” the agitated salesman snapped. “I know the person who designs them. Made with African silk, too. Just produced in Chinese factories, but from
African material and African design.”
João gave the salesman a quizzical look.
“You don’t believe me?” the salesman asked with
annoyance.
Just then two other men quietly approached from
opposite directions. Both were also
carrying small tchotchkes and were perhaps drawn by the scent of a sale. João looked at the scarves again. It didn’t matter that they were knock-offs. His mother wouldn’t know the difference. But he was not going to pay top dollar for
them.
“Fine,” João said, “I’ll give you 500 Meticais for
the two.”
“What?” the salesman replied incredulously. “They’re worth more than that.”
“Maybe if they were actually made here.”
João’s
comment set the salesman off. “I told
you they’re from here. Are you calling
me a liar?”
João didn’t reply, but instead pointed to the tag.
“That means nothing!” yelled the salesman, his face
contorting in anger. “It’s just a
tag. Like I said, they’re designed here
and made with African silk!”
João, still squatting on the edge of the lawn,
shrugged. “Five-hundred Meticais for the
two,” he repeated. “If they were made
here I’d give you more.”
Just then, one of the two men who had approached
moments earlier, stretching out his arm, pulled João towards him, as if in an
embrace. Crouching and unprepared, João
lurched forward without resistance and, as he fell, the man pulled out a knife
with his free hand and thrust it three times into João’s chest. The assailant then pushed João backwards and
quickly absconded, as did the other two salesmen. For a moment, João, still crouching, blood
pouring from his chest, was motionless.
His backwards momentum having crested, he teetered in place on the
threshold that so enthralled him. Before
him was the wall and beyond it the beach, and behind him the hotel’s pool.
He looked down at his bloodstained shirt, then back
at the Indian Ocean, and finally up at the marmalade sky. The final movement was enough to shift his
center of gravity, and he fell backwards into the pool, his hand still
clutching the scarf.
There were no witnesses, and João’s motionless body
lay unnoticed in the now-reddening pool for several minutes. It was only discovered when one of the two
sunbathers got up for a drink and, spotting the lifeless body, blood seeping
from it, screamed in horror.
Two waiters ran out onto the lawn and gathered by
the pool while a concierge, maintaining his calm, ushered the two stunned
sunbathers inside and cordoned off the area.
João’s body remained untouched until the police arrived an hour later and
fished it out of the water. His limp
body was then zipped up in a body bag and taken away.
That evening, the pool was drained, scrubbed, and
refilled. By morning, the Southern Sun’s
back lawn was reopened. It was a
beautiful day. The hotel would be
busy.
