:13:02
And now, the scene moves to Cassaque:
the seventeenth of February, 1980.
:13:05
But to understand it properly one must move forward in time.
:13:08
In a year Luis Cabral the president will be in prison,
:13:11
and the weeping man he has just decorated,
major Nino, will have taken power.
:13:16
The party will have split, Guineans and Cape Verdeans separated one from the other
will be fighting over Amilcar's legacy.
:13:22
We will learn that behind this ceremony of promotions
which in the eyes of visitors perpetuated the brotherhood of the struggle,
:13:28
there lay a pit of post-victory bitterness,
and that Nino's tears did not express an ex-warrior's emotion,
:13:35
but the wounded pride of a hero who felt
he had not been raised high enough above the others.
:13:42
And beneath each of these faces a memory.
:13:44
And in place of what we were told had been forged
into a collective memory,
:13:48
a thousand memories of men who parade their personal laceration
in the great wound of history.
:13:55
In Portugal—raised up in its turn by the breaking wave of Bissau—
:13:58
Miguel Torga, who had struggled all his life
against the dictatorship wrote:
:14:02
"Every protagonist represents only himself;
:14:06
in place of a change in the social setting
he seeks simply in the revolutionary act the sublimation of his own image."
:14:17
That's the way the breakers recede.
:14:19
And so predictably that one has to believe
in a kind of amnesia of the future that history distributes
:14:25
through mercy
or calculation to those whom it recruits:
:14:28
Amilcar murdered by members of his own party,
:14:32
the liberated areas fallen under the yoke of bloody petty tyrants
:14:36
liquidated in their turn by a central power
to whose stability everyone paid homage until the military coup.
:14:41
That's how history advances,
plugging its memory as one plugs one's ears.
:14:47
Luis exiled to Cuba,
Nino discovering in his turn plots woven against him,
:14:52
can be cited reciprocally to appear before the bar of history.
:14:55
She doesn't care, she understands nothing,
:14:59
she has only one friend,
the one Brando spoke of in Apocalypse: horror.