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got himself locked up. He had been imprisoned in Campo de São Nicolau, a little over a hundred kilometers from Moçâmedes, for four months when the Carnation Revolution broke out in Portugal. He reappeared in Luanda as a hero. Old Dulcineia believed her grandson would be made a minister, but Little Chief had more enthusiasm than real talent for the intrigues of politics, and just a few months after Independence, bywhich time he was a law student, he was locked up again. His grandmother could not bear the grief. She died, from a heart attack, days later.
    Little Chief managed to escape from prison, hiding inside a coffin, a burlesque episode that deserves a lengthier account at a later point. Once out he disappeared into anonymity. And yet, instead of taking refuge in a dark room somewhere, or even inside a wardrobe in the house of an elderly aunt, like some of his friends did, he chose the opposite solution. It’s easiest to hide in plain sight, he thought. And so he would wander the streets, ragged, his hair in long tangled locks, covered in mud and tar. To make himself disappear still further, escaping the raids of the soldiers who moved about the city day and night, rounding up cannon fodder, he pretended to be crazy. A person can only pass for insane, they can only make people believe this, if they really do go a bit crazy in the process.
    “Imagine falling half asleep,” explains Little Chief. “Part of you is alert, the other rambles. The part that rambles is the public part.”
    It was in this state of social near-invisibility and semidementia, his lucidity traveling like a stowaway, that Little Chief saw the pigeon:
    “Days of hunger. I could barely stand, the slightest breeze would have carried me off. I constructed a slingshot, with a stick, a few strips of rubber, and I was trying to hunt down some rat over in Catambor when a pigeon came down, all aglow, its whiteness lightening everything around it. I thought, ‘It’s the Holy Ghost.’ I looked for a stone, fixed my eye on the pigeon, and fired. A perfect shot. It was dead before it hit the ground. I immediately noticed the small plastic cylinder attached to a ring. I opened it, took out the little slip of paper, and read:
    “Tomorrow. Six o’clock, usual place. Be very careful. I love you
.
    “It was when I gutted the pigeon to grill it that I found the diamonds.”
    Little Chief didn’t understand right away what had happened:
    “In my failure to understand, I thought it was God giving me the stones. I even thought it was God who’d written me the message. My usual place was in front of the Lello Bookshop. The next day, at six o’clock, there I was, waiting for God to show himself.”
    God showed himself, in mysterious ways, via a hugely fat woman, with a smooth, shining face and an expression of permanent delight. The woman got out of a small van, an old Citroën 2CV, and approached Little Chief, who watched her, half hidden behind a Dumpster.
    “Hey, handsome!” cried Madalena. “I need your help.”
    Little Chief walked over to her, alarmed. The woman said she’d often watched him. It annoyed her to see a man in perfect condition, actually in
truly
perfect condition, spending his day sprawled out on the street playing the madman. The ex-con straightened himself up, unable to hold back his indignation:
    “But I am extremely crazy, actually!”
    “Not crazy enough,” the nurse cut him short. “A real crazy person would try to appear a bit more circumspect.”
    Madalena had inherited a small farm close to Viana that produced fruit and vegetables, which were so hard to find in the capital, and she was looking for someone who could keep an eye on the property. Little Chief accepted. Not for the obvious reasons, that he was broken with hunger and on a farm he’d get to eat every day. Besides, he’d be safe from the soldiers, the police, and other predators. He accepted, because he believed it was the will of God.
    Five months later, well