Free Another Day of Life by Ryszard Kapuściński Page B

son he could go home. Humberto had made an honest impression. But he didn’t seem too bright and was probably illiterate. We stayed alone in the room; it was still hot and close, even though it was past midnight. Some people were sleeping on the floor, propped against the wall, while others were coming and going for no known reason, without saying a word. “Check whether they’ve gone to their posts,” Farrusco told Carlos. “Send a few along the road toward the border. Let them go some distance and see what’s happening.”
    “What good will it do?” says Esperança. Her face was now darker than it had been in the evening.
    “Tell them to really go,” Farrusco says, “and not to be afraid and not to hide in the ditch.”
    “If they go too far,” the woman insists, “they could be cut off or ambushed. The enemy’s all around.”
    “All right,” says Farrusco, “but I want to know exactly where they are.”
    “Well, those patrols aren’t going to find out,” says Esperança, “because they’re going to die. Why do you want to stir up the army? We don’t have the strength to defend ourselves.”
    Comandante Farrusco’s unit numbers 120. It is the only unit on the southern front between Lubango and the border (450 kilometers) and between the Atlantic and Zambia (1200 kilometers). The only unit in a region one-third the size of Poland. All around, for scores, for hundreds of kilometers, stretches the barren bush, without water, without reference points—an unappeased wilderness of millions of barbed branches woven into walls, a hostile world not to be conquered, not to be penetrated. There is only the road to Lubango, the one route through it, like a corridor lined with barbed wire along which retreat is impossible because it is too far to go on foot and there is too little transport to carry the whole unit. It’s possible that at this hour, nearly two in the morning, the enemy has seized the road on both sides of the town and we are sitting here in the shadow of a steel-jaw trap waiting for somebody to trip the spring, at which point there will be a deafening snap.
    Diogenes and one other man from the convoy came in, and then Carlos returned. The leader asked if they had gone out on patrol and Carlos said yes. He sat on a crate and unbuckled his belt, to which he had clipped a whole arsenal of pistols, cartridges, and grenades. In colonial times Carlos and Farrusco had fought in Portuguese commando units. Both were farmer ’s sons from southern Portugal. After their army tours they stayed in Angola and worked as auto mechanics.
    Later Nelson told me what happened next: “When the MPLA uprising against FNLA and UNITA broke out that summer, there was also fighting in Lubango. But a lot of whites were fighting in the enemy ranks. In our region, in the south, the fate of the uprising hung in the balance a long time. One day a stocky, bearded man walked into headquarters and said, ‘I’ll show you how to do it—how to fight.’ That was Farrusco. He organized a unit, took Lubango, and later captured Pereira d’Eça and stayed there. He lacked arms. The whole time they had only their rifles and two 82-millimeter mortars. Farrusco and Carlos fired the mortars. They held them in their hands, without using the base, so both had burned palms from the hot barrels. Their hands were all blisters and sores.”
    Everyone is vigilant at the inn tonight—a dull, unarmed, expectant vigilance. The only ones asleep may well be the boys at the outposts on the edge of town and in the ditches, because the sleep of the young is stronger than fear, thirst, or even mosquitoes. The oil lamp is burning in the room; silence. Nobody wants to talk or even knows what to talk about. Everybody is waiting for the dawn, growing more enervated and sleepy. There is a sound of snoring from those asleep on the floor, and the dirge of the mosquitoes. Sweat trickles down your face and your mouth is bitter from nicotine, dry and