By Eva Dias Costa in Lessons in the Quiet — 21 Jul 2025

Mozambique

Caravel, Catechism, Kalashnikov, Couture

There is a place
where the sea forgets its name.
It comes in filth,
goes out holy.

Fishermen throw their nets
into water already netted,
and draw up beads,
prayers,
and one boot.

It is divided by a river –
not administratively
(rivers don’t respect forms) –
metaphysically.

On one side: the idea of a nation.
On the other: the repetition of being forgotten.

The maps are wrong, of course.
The cartographers asked no one.
They named things.

The capital had changed its name,
though no one remembered when.

Things shifted slowly –
embassies,
ministries,
aid money –
like old furniture on brittle legs:
too precious to discard,
too broken to use.

You arrived on a Tuesday,
were shown the market and the supermarket.
The first unsettled you –
too many eyes, too much movement.

The second was quieter:
rows of soap, tins of Nido,
a sachet of Nescafé turned to dust.
No meat, fruit, or bread.

Outside, a scream broke the air –
then a thud.
A child lay still under a car.
The mother cried.
No crowd formed.
No one took notes.
She was helped into the back of a lorry,
with one dead child and ten live others,
wailing.
They drove away.
That was the end of it.

Later, you returned to the crowded market.
It became your favourite place.

You ate the same egg each morning.
Asked for it overcooked.
It arrived underdone.
You grew fond of the disappointment.

You kept thinning.
Felt no hunger.
You had a passport,
cash in two currencies,
and the quiet permission to leave.

At night, in the mirror, you thought –
the look of famine here
is Dior where you come from.
That collarbone, in Europe, means couture.
You never said this aloud.

The Church had all but left.
There was no protest.

Women began naming their daughters
after the Prophet’s wives.
No decree, no muezzin.
Only the quiet turning of cloth –
a gentler decibel of belief.

The silence was strained.
You felt it,
could not give it a name.
It looked like peace,
but was a pause too thin to hold.

As the creeds changed,
faces closed at dusk,
the air thickened with the knowledge
of something gathering.

Foreign again,
banked in broken ground.

Waiting –
like oil beneath the coral,
like men with rifles,
feeling for fault lines.

A devout girl asked you
where Mecca was.
She was fourteen
and not permitted
past the edge of the veranda.

The room held no books –
only plastic flowers
and a small painting of lions.
When you pointed north,
she smiled like someone offered a compass
after years of staring at a tapestry.

A man nearby made stories to order.
You gave him a plot and a price.
He returned with an anecdote and a twist,
or a death that meant something.
Another tried to sell you back a chess set
he had once stolen from you.
You admired the symmetry.

At the university,
the law now arrived on KLM.
Translated thrice,
it no longer addressed events.
Students were to debate shadows.
A pantomime
of the old quarrel –
decisions were postponed,
pending alignment
with the new flag.

There was still a courthouse.
Its judgments had been forgotten.
Papers fluttered,
ink bled in the heat,
verdicts issued
in tones too soft to settle anything.

A man died under a bus.
They had to pay his family.
It wasn’t moral, or legal.
It was gravitational –
a debt to the pull that took him so hard that day.

Children with missing limbs begged at the café.
They had better manners than the expats.
They always knew where to find you.
Watched, without hurry,
as if summoned by the same bell
that calls birds to crumb-laced tables.

Someone said the land was finally cleared.
But a whisper remained –
that a few were replanted,
to ensure the maps stayed funded.

The NGO workers came and went,
measuring the angles of poverty
by how far the tent pegs sank.

At the fair, you saw a T-shirt
from a charity run in a northern country.
It had come with aid.
Now it was priced in meticais.

The hospital had no morgue.
The dead lay beside the living.
Some covered in cloth,
some not.
It depended on whether the nurse on duty
believed in thresholds.

A theatre troupe performed a play about the illness.
An actor, dressed as a condom
Ratzinger would soon exorcise from the continent,
forgot his lines.
The audience laughed.
Even then, you thought it wasn’t comedy.
Not quite.

The shopkeepers from Gujarat
never touched the men who carried their goods.
They smiled,
but sprayed disinfectant on the boxes.

The orphanage had no priests.
The children recited verses
to no one in particular.
A girl who clung to your legs
had a cough that would not see the season through.
She slept behind a curtain.
Not metaphorically –
an actual curtain,
meant to separate disease from longing.

You fled to the seaside.

The Island dazzled –
so much so that you could forget
the sea was an open latrine.

Beauty and sanitation have never negotiated well.

The Fort still stood –
gutted by sun,
white stone blistered and peeling,
furniture of empire abandoned to salt.

Inside, an absence of purpose.
Outside, children selling necklaces,
shooed away by men
who guarded tourists with Soviet guns.

You could see the seabed from the ramparts,
where the caravels now rest –
having forgotten what they were for.

No nymphs rose from the shallows.
If a poet with one eye
washed ashore clutching an epic,
they’d ask what it was worth,
then move on –
as one does with old myths
too varnished to touch.

Instead, a man drank alcohol made with battery acid.
He lost his teeth, then his mind.
He claimed to hear music
through the sockets in his gums.
No one challenged him.

You leave the country in silence,
still somehow holding the undercooked egg.
No one checks your luggage.
No one asks what you saw.

You find it today in an old bag –
intact, improbably.

The yolk breathes,
ochre as remembered roads.
It tastes of cinchona,
of metal taps in foreign clinics,
of gin and tonic stirred with warnings.
No rot.
Just the sharp clarity
of something that once tried to keep you alive,
and failed slowly.

The mouth remembers.
The stomach hesitates.

The old guilt surfaces later,
still dressed for TAP’s executive class.
The guilt of being the unwitting heir
to what cannot be repaired –
and of having carried it, unable to shed it,
fix it, or unsee it,
as you briefly lived among the ruins.

You spend the afternoon
preserving the egg in a jar –
then return to tax codes,
a nephew’s logistics,
old sadness,
and a fevered night
dreaming of rain
that once fell sideways
over Nampula.

Writers do not leave this place untouched.

The missionaries revise.
The colonisers redact.
The volunteers touch up their memoirs.

The poets retreat into veils.