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the time I walked out into the square. Empty houses, no lights, windows broken, smashed shops. Some dogs near the well. Nobody’s cow, with its nose in the grass.
    The front.
    The dark wall of bush on all sides, and in the bush perhaps those FNLA soldiers who won’t hold out long without water and will give up tomorrow if they don’t die of thirst.
    A dead little town, overwhelming emptiness and night. There are voices, conversations, and even laughter in only one place, at the other end of the square. Over there, where there is a small wall surrounded by a concrete balustrade, with a clump of trees in the middle. I walked toward the yard, stumbling over stones, artillery shells, an abandoned bicycle.
    The FNLA prisoners, the 120 captured this morning during the battle for Caxito, stood along the inside of the balustrade. Along the outside, in the street and the square, stood MPLA sentries. There were a dozen or so of them.
    Prisoners and guards were carrying on a lively conversation, arguing over the result of yesterday’s soccer match. Yesterday, Sunday, Benfica defeated Ferroviário 2–1 at the stadium in Luanda. Ferroviário, which had not lost in two years, left the field to the boos of its own fans. The team lost because its premier striker and league-leading scorer, Chico Gordo, had left his club to play for Sporting de Braga in Portugal.
    They could have won.
    No way.
    Chico Gordo—so what! Norberto’s just as good! But they lost anyway.
    Norberto? Norberto isn’t fit to carry Chico’s shoes.
    Divided into two camps, ready to leap at each other ’s throats, the boys wrangle and debate. Except that the dividing line doesn’t run along the concrete balustrade. Ferroviário has fans among both prisoners and guards. And in the other camp, the camp of the Benfica fans celebrating their splendid triumph, there are also both prisoners and guards. It is a fervent argument, full of youthful passion, like the ones you can see anywhere in the world among boys leaving the stadium after a big game. In this kind of discussion you forget about everything.
    And it’s good that you can forget about everything. That you can forget about that battle, after which there were fewer of us on both sides of the balustrade. About the roundups that Mobutu’s soldiers carry out. And about how we have to grow up to war, so that there will be less and less blind shooting and more and more death.
    For a long time now, I’ve been making expeditions to the general staff to secure a pass for the southern front. Moving around the country without a pass is impossible because checkpoints for the inspection of travel documents stand guard along the roads. There is usually a checkpoint on the way into each town and another one on the way out, but as you drive through villages you may also run across checkpoints thrown up by wary and vigilant peasants; at times a checkpoint spontaneously established by nomads grazing their herds nearby will appear in the middle of an open field or in the most untenanted bush.
    On important routes where major checkpoints are found, the road is blocked by colorful barriers that can be seen from a distance. But since materials are scarce and improvisation is the rule, others do the best they can. Some stretch a cable at the height of a car ’s windshield, and if they don’t have cable they use a length of sisal rope. They stand empty gasoline drums in the road or erect obstacles of stones and volcanic boulders. They scatter glass and nails on the macadam. They lay down dry thorn branches. They barricade the way with wreaths of stapelia or with cycad trunks. The most inventive people, it turns out, are the ones from the checkpoint at Mulando. From a roadside inn abandoned by a Portuguese, they dragged into the middle of the road a ceiling-high wardrobe built in the form of a huge triptych with a movable crystal-glass mirror mounted on the central section. By manipulating this mirror so that it reflected the rays