Free Another Day of Life by Ryszard Kapuściński Page A

named Esperança. We are sitting in the inn on crates and stools, but the leader has settled in an armchair. Outside the window soldiers drift around the plaza, dissolving into the gloom, black, like darkness set in motion. “Why aren’t they going to their posts?” Farrusco asks, but he falls silent and gives no orders. The rest remain quiet; it was evidently a meaningless question, although the answer is known. It is obvious that going to their posts wouldn’t improve anything, wouldn’t help. This is a unit sentenced to annihilation; there is no saving it.
    “Bring in the one who came from the south,” Farrusco orders the people standing in the doorway, or rather in the place where there had once been a door leading to the wooden veranda and the square. “Listen to what this man says,
camarada,”
Farrusco tells me, because it turns out they have already talked to him in the afternoon and know what he has to say. In walks an extremely tired, jittery Portuguese. He has sunken eyes, he is unshaven and dirty, and looks like the personification of helplessness and abandonment. His name is Humberto dos Anjos de Freitas Quental. He is from here, he was born here—about fifty years ago, I would guess. A week ago he escaped to Namibia with his family. He left his wife and four children in a camp for Portuguese at Windhoek and decided to return himself. He wanted to return because his mother had stayed in Pereira d’Eça. His mother is eighty-one and has been running a bakery for as long as her son Humberto, who is standing here, has been alive. She told her son that she was not leaving and that she was going to keep on baking bread, which is always needed. “And you yourselves know,” Humberto tells us, “that in Pereira d’Eça you have fresh bread.” Yes, the whole unit knows that, living as they do on the bread baked by that woman and furthermore not paying for it, because this is a volunteer liberation army without money. When he left to take his family to Namibia, the supplies of flour were running out and his mother—who is deaf and doesn’t understand that there is a war on, and who for reasons of age no longer understands anything, except that as long as the world exists people will need bread—ordered her son to return with flour. She stayed there alone, so he decided to come back and bring her the flour, which was confiscated on the border, but he knows that a truck carrying flour has arrived today from Lubango, which means that his mother will again be baking bread and there will again be something free to eat, because she doesn’t ask for money.
    “We all love that woman,” Farrusco says, “even though she isn’t exactly for us, but she’s for life and bread, and that’s enough. Our people brought her the water that she needed. And they brought her wood. And she’s going to live just as long as we live, or maybe even longer. But I want you to tell these people who’ve come from Lubango what you heard in Windhoek and what they told you along the road in that place, what do you call it?”
    “It’s called Tsumeb,” said the son of the baker, “and it’s perhaps two hundred fifty kilometers from here. The Portuguese who fled there said that before long the South African army would advance into Angola and chase out the MPLA. They said the same thing in Windhoek. They said the army would move today, perhaps tomorrow. They have armor and an air force and they’ll occupy Luanda.”
    “How do you know?” asked Farrusco.
    “That’s what all the Portuguese say,” Humberto replied, “even though it’s a secret. In Windhoek, South African army officers came to our camp and asked who had served in the army, and if anybody wanted to join the forces that were going to strike Angola. And in Tsumeb, at the gas station, one white told me that the town was full of armored vehicles that would advance into Angola tomorrow or the next day to finish off the communists.”
    Farrusco told the baker ’s