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thirty-fourth anniversary of the Mueda Massacre. 2
    Mery’s negotiations outlasted our interviews. As we waited for him, I felt unusually tired. My body ached more acutely thanit normally did after a day spent perched precariously on a sagging igoli. I considered intruding upon Mery’s negotiations and paying the asking price for the pig myself, but decided better of it. Finally, a price was agreed upon, and we headed for Mueda with a squealing pig in the back of our pickup and my head pounding.
     
    I turned in before the evening meal as Mery busied himself clearing out his chicken coop to house the agitated pig. Despite the noise, I fell fast asleep before the sun had set. Around ten o’clock at night, I awoke with a jolt, my body seized with chills. I trembled uncontrollably beneath the covers. Realizing that something was gravely wrong, I sat up to call for Marcos, who lay sleeping a few meters away. As the night air rushed in beneath the covers, I convulsed violently. Frightened by the apparent vulnerability of my body to the world around me, I recoiled, gathering the covers close. I knew that I could not sleep—that I urgently needed something other than sleep. I convinced myself that I could, with a little courage, tolerate the air and, again, rose to call for Marcos, but the cold was more intolerable than I imagined possible. Overpowered completely by the elements in which I was suspended, I retreated, shivering, into fetal position. I felt as though I would shake myself to pieces. I feared, somehow, that I would dissolve into the world that surrounded me. For more than half an hour, I called to Marcos, my summonses muffled by my own shivering and by the blankets I desperately clenched.
    Finally, Marcos awoke. Before I knew what was happening, I felt my bare feet touching the damp ground. On the path to the pit latrine, something broke loose deep inside me, erupting through my chest and out of my mouth. I collapsed. Marcos wrapped his arms around me from behind and, once again, I found myself moving. My legs dangled numbly. I felt another eruption from within, this time flowing beneath me. I was unable to differentiate myself from that which burst out from within me. I became uncontrollable flows of lava. Then, for a moment, my body was solid once more. I rediscovered my arms and legs,and the back of my neck. A surge of heat passed through me. The cool night air soothed me, and I wanted to sleep. Marcos helped clean me up and lay me down in his bed (closer to the latrine). He sat by my side as I rested. My respite, however, soon expired. I was overwhelmed, again, by a sense of urgency, a sense of disintegration, a sense of doom. Again and again, throughout the night, my body met with overpowering forces from within and opened itself to flow into a hostile world, leaving me more exhausted, each time, than I had ever felt before.
     
    By night’s end, I had found sleep, but I was reawakened by the first rays of sunlight. My eyes ached deeply. I heard voices and scuffling, smelled dust in my nostrils, and then heard the screams of Mery’s pig, at first full-throated but, in time, gurgling with blood. It seemed to me that the animal was forever suspended in the throes of death—that it could escape neither the butcher’s hands nor life itself.
    When I next awoke, the sun was high in the sky. It burned me as if from within my body. Sitting beside me, Marcos looked at me with grave concern. I shared his anxiety. For the first time in hours, I was alive enough to fear that I might die. As Marcos could not drive a stick shift, he placed me in the driver’s seat of the pickup. We drove to the United Nations command post, where government troops were then quartered, awaiting demobilization. 3 I requested passage on one of the daily UN helicopter flights between Mueda and Pemba but was denied. An Italian logistics officer at the camp—whom everyone called “Orso” (“bear” in Portuguese)—took pity on me, lending