Free The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto Page A

fought on the wrong side. It had always been like that in his family: his grandfather had fought against Ngungunyane, his father had enlisted in the colonial police, and he himself had fought for the Portuguese during the war of national liberation.
    For our visiting relative, Uncle Aproximado, this amnesia was worthy of nothing save scorn. A soldier without a memory of war is like a prostitute who claims to be a virgin. That’s what Aproximado, without mincing his words, told Zachary to his face. The soldier, however, turned a deaf ear and never answered back. With an angelic smile, he steered the conversation out into the vacuousness of a subject in which he felt at ease:
    â€” Sometimes I ask myself: how many bullets might there be in the world?
    â€” Zaca, no one’s interested in knowing about that . . .
    â€” Could it be that during the war, there were more bullets than there were people?
    â€” I couldn’t tell you — Ntunzi replied. — Nowadays, you can be sure there are: six bullets are enough to exterminate mankind. Have you got six bullets?
    With a smile, Zachary pointed to the boxes. They were full of ammunition. There was more than enough to exterminate various mankinds. Everyone laughed except for me. For the emotion of living between the memories and forgetfulness of wars weighed heavily upon me. Gunpowder was part of our Nature, as the forgetful soldier assured us:
    â€” One day I’m going to sow my bullets. Plant them out there . . .
    â€” Why did you leave the city, Zaca? Why did you come with us?
    â€” What was I doing there? Digging holes in emptiness.
    And as he spoke, he spat. He apologised for his manners. He was a man of correct breeding. He merely spat in order to rid himself of his own taste.
    â€” I’m my own poison.
    At night, his tongue would unfold like a snake’s. He would wake up with the taste of venom in his mouth, as if he’d been kissed by the devil. All because a soldier’s slumber is a slow parade of the dead. He awoke just as he lived: so lonely that he talked to himself merely so that he wouldn’t forget human speech.
    â€” But Zachary: don’t you miss the city?
    â€” Not at all.
    â€” Don’t you even miss someone?
    â€” My whole life has been lived in war. Here is where I’ve found peace for the first time . . .
    He wouldn’t go back to the city. As he said, he didn’t want to depend on instructions for his income. We should watch and see how he survived in Jezoosalem: he slept like a guinea-fowl. On the branch of a tree for fear of the ground. But on the lowest branch, in case he fell.

    Zachary Kalash didn’t remember the war. But the war remembered him. And it tortured him with the renewal of old traumas. When there was thunder, he would rush out into the open in a frenzy, yelling:
    â€” Bastards, you bastards!
    All around him, the animals protested and even Jezebel whinnied in despair. They weren’t complaining about the storm. It was Zachary’s fury that upset them.
    â€” He gets like that because of the thunderclaps —Silvestre explained. That’s what frightened him: the memory of explosions. The clash of clouds wasn’t a noise: it was the reopening of old wounds. We forget the bullets, but we never forget the wars.

    Our father had sent us to live at the ammunition store and, for me, the real reason behind this had to do with Ntunzi and the need for him to be distracted. The natural hierarchy allotted Ntunzi a rifle and me a simple catapult. Zachary showed me how to improvise some elastic out of the truck’s old tires, and to construct a weapon with a deadly reach. The stone was projected with a sudden hiss, and the bird plummeted to the ground, hit by its own weight. It was my stone of prey.
    â€” You kill, you eat.
    That was Zaca’s command. But I wondered: can such a colourful little bird, so full of song, really be put on our dinner plate.
    â€” The