African Library: The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo by Germano Almeida

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lastwill_almeidaThe Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo (1991)
Germano Almeida

As continental Africans we tend to “forget” the inclusion in its territorial circumference of several island states adjacent to the main land mass, the small multi-island state of Cape Verde in which the present African Library entry text is set being one of them. The author, Germano Almeida is a lawyer who practises in the city of Mindelo on the island São Vicente, which is the main setting of the text, although, like Senhor Napumoceno da Silvo Araújo, the central character of his novel, he was born on a different island – in his case, the island of Boa Vista; in Senhor Araújo’s case it was the largely rural island of São Nicolau. As the names of these places and persons indicate, here the linguistic environment is Portuguese and the text was in fact (fluently) translated into English only in 2004 by Sheila Faria Glaser when Almeida’s reputation as one of the best of Africa’s numerous Lusophone authors became more widely known.

The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo is an actual testament that is presented as it is being read out (as is legally required) to witnesses, family members and legatees of its deceased author; this term being particularly appropriate since the will comprises no fewer than 387 pages, of which the last eight pages are handwritten (these probably having been added closer to Senhor Araújo’s death) and the others typewritten – the enormous length of the document providing the clue that the lonely old man used the writing of his will as proof of his literary talent (which he fancied himself as having) and as an occasion for the confession of a few closely guarded secrets and other not so secret activities, failures, peccadilloes and obsessions. The text uses the device of the public reading to “embroider” around the will and to follow up some of the revelations and still half-hidden secrets of the late Sr Araújo – the formality of this manner of referring to the deceased being appropriate to someone so “proper” and so aware of his reputation. Senhor Araújo is, in fact (in Almeida’s masterful evocation) represented as the quintessential bourgeois – a propertied man; prosperous in business and something of a social climber – and yet also endearing in his eccentricities: in short, a complex and interesting character and no mere satirised stereotype.

The most obviously interesting and amusing revelation in the will, in the view of two of Sr Araújo’s oldest friends (who attended the reading), is the fact that he had secretly fathered a daughter, the young woman who is his principal heir, begotten when he made love to his cleaning lady on top of his sturdy antique office desk! Even though he never acknowledged his daughter during his lifetime (and in fact had suggested to his cleaning lady – who refused – that she have the foetus aborted), merely sending her mother a regularly paid generous monthly allowance, Sr Araújo in his will clearly rejoiced in the fact that he had a child. Her existence and her unorthodox begetting are not seen as shameful. The acknowledgement of error is instead applied to what he calls “the biggest blunder of his commercial life” (12) when he fell for the glamorous reputation of a local family of bigwigs, the Ramireses, manifesting a (relative) newcomer’s fascination with supposed “old money” and high social standing. In clear contrast with his own careful ways and modest demeanour, Sr Araújo refers to this family’s spending of “large sums of money gambling at the Grémio Club” and their habit of giving lavish dinners at their home – clearly, neither of these gatherings to which he has been invited but probably hankering for it as a sign of social and class acceptance. What he discovers to his cost after entering into a partnership with them is that they are, in fact, nearly penniless because of their squandering ways, and that he had allowed their manipulation of his vanity and social insecurity to blind him – not doing his usual checks beforehand. Senhor A uses the fact that he was caught in the agreement with them, with his business renamed Ramires-Araújo Ltd, to explain that he felt it most necessary to live with a sort of ostentatious frugality – buying a new suit only every second year – lest his partners try to fleece him.

In the will (fittingly dubbed “his memoirs”) Sr Araújo also explains his middle-of-the-road politics. His innate caution and common sense led him to see both those agitating for Cape Verde independence (from Portugal) and those insistent on remaining within the political ambit of the “motherland” as behaving “with the same intolerance” (14). He decided that instead of supporting either side at this time, the early 1970s (independence came in 1975), he would withdraw from public life and “compose his will in peace” – though around the same time he felt a strong compulsion to visit his birthplace, São Nicolau, for the last time. At this time of social upheaval there were many break-ins and much vandalism. All this becomes the extremely elaborate explanation why Sr Araújo at the time of his death had no proper suit in which he could be buried. For before he set off on that last journey, he had decided that the one thing he had to keep safe was his suit, in case he died, and that the only safe lock-up was his pantry with its reinforced door. When his house was flooded in a storm during his absence, the locked pantry became a toxic environment in which said suit was damaged beyond repair. He never bought a new one to replace it, as he no longer went out. This quirky mixture (in the will) of information concerning Sr Araújo’s motives, thoughts and actions manifests his non-ideological mindset, that of a man supremely practical, to the point of oddity. Still, it is clear that in his quiet way, this singular person impressed his compatriots. As the narrator informs us:

The burial of Sr Napumoceno [as he is usually referred to in the novel] was grand – due not only to the presence of an official delegation that had arrived specially from Praia [the national capital] for the ceremony, but also to the quantity of private cars and taxis in the funeral cortège. Coincidentally the large hearse belonging to the Mindelo Funerary Agency had just returned from Lisbon following repairs so extensive that it looked as good as new, one might even say that Sr Napumoceno was the first to take it for a spin. Painted dark blue and completely renovated inside, with its engine tuned and its original carburettor, the enormous vehicle lent the ceremony a dignity that allowed for the unimpeded expression of the enormous reel-to-reel tape player, which Carlos [the at this stage only known living relative and presumed heir of the dead man] had decided, finally, to have transported on the backs of men placed judiciously behind him. (19)

This citation can serve as a cameo to illustrate the mixture of affection, amusement, respect and slight condescension at so “old-fashioned” a person that is manifest throughout the narrative. Sr Araújo’s nephew Carlos had had great trouble sourcing Beethoven’s funeral march on tape and with a player that would broadcast this particular piece sufficiently loudly to comply with the expressed demand of the deceased. Poor Carlos, for all his efforts – including an eloquent graveside speech about his uncle that he had got written for him to read out as if it were his own composition – will be the heir only of one somewhat dilapidated house that Sr Napumoceno had owned (according to the testator it will in time be worth a great deal), and not as he and everyone else had expected, to the bulk of his fortune.

Sr Araújo’s careful bookkeeping attitude to money and possessions – another of his indelibly bourgeois inclinations – perhaps has roots in the severe poverty of his origins. He had arrived in the city as a poor, barefoot boy who had arrived to find his only local relative, an elderly aunt, and with a gift from an uncle for a wealthy local man who became his mentor. Sr Araújo had in his turn sent his orphaned nephew Carlos to school (to little avail, as he was not studiously inclined) and later on to Lisbon for treatment for the tuberculosis he had contracted in adolescence, afterwards finding him a job as a messenger. In the will, whose full value the deceased had calculated as amounting to precisely 67 380 547 escudos and 70 centavos, Sr Araújo proceeds to justify why his nephew Carlos would be replaced as his principal heir by his out-of-wedlock and hitherto unacknowledged daughter Maria da Graça. The cautious, self-righteous and exculpatory to-and-froing in Sr Araújo’s references to his nephew in the following passage allows the reader to see how much the notions of investment and due return permeated the old man’s mind, and to begin to suspect the probable unfairness of his (so to speak) “disinheriting” Carlos (in the sense that he seems here to be “protesting too much”):

… notwithstanding the fact that I am the progenitor of a beautiful girl who has already turned 15, nothing would stop me from leaving him a large slice of the pie. He’s already rubbing his hands together thinking it’s all his, ignorant as he’s always been of everything that goes on outside of the firm and has to do with the flesh-and-blood man at the helm of Araújo, Ltd [the firm he had founded and of which he remained the nominal head, though for years it had been Carlos who very efficiently ran and modernised the business]. But Carlos has turned out to be an ungrateful relation and as the good man I am and always have been, I have the moral obligation never to forgive him. But on the other hand, compelled by the rigorous fulfilment of a duty that in more straitened circumstances would be not only painful but to a degree legally impossible, I have today what to me is the great advantage of a bastard child, so long as one agrees to the condition of loving that child in secret, because such children have the particular advantage of not causing us any unpleasantness that might trouble our dignity, with them we run no risk of seeing our feelings of personal pride trampled on, as we are the only ones to enjoy the sweet wave of pleasure in loving that child, itself a stranger to and unaware of sentiment it can never deepen. Now, my reasons for complaining of my nephew, which drove me against him, are not only grave but also affect the whole internal family structure put in question by an act of which he is fully aware and that even the least serious person would call unreflective, and that I must call evil. Because my nephew is obliged to admit that if today he is a somebody it’s thanks to me, given that I took the trouble to endow him for life with the tools of my hard-earned experience. (23–4)

The melodramatic references to Carlos’s supposedly utterly reprehensible behaviour would lead few readers to suspect the actual nature of the young man’s “evil” act that so deeply offended his uncle that he labelled him an “ingrate” in his will.

One has to read a great deal further in the text to discover that what Carlos had done, though a cruel kind of practical joke was hardly an evil deed and in all likelihood sprang from years of suppressed irritation at the old man’s hypocrisies in combination with his constant cajoling of Carlos to be more like himself – cautious and calculating – and his frequent blocking of his nephew’s innovative ideas and flair for business. What had occurred was that Sr Araújo had returned from a visit to the USA besotted with gadgetry and had inter alia installed a voicemail service on his telephone. The full story is revealed not in the will, but in some private notes that the deceased left for Graça, his daughter. In these papers, Sr Araújo explains “as if he stood before a jury” and in a way that Graça finds “almost pathetic … justif[ying] each step of his conduct at the same time as he investigated in great detail Carlos’s every word and gesture to lend support to his verdict” (111). Clearly sensitive to the fact of his own increasing age and the fact that Carlos was the de facto manager of his firm and an efficient and trustworthy businessman, Sr Araújo began to suspect his nephew of condescending to him and of wishing him dead and out of the way, because he, the uncle and also titular head of the firm, would not give up the final control of the power to sign off on deals done. Reading between the lines one can recognise how an old man’s piqued vanity (Carlos actually doing so much better than he had expected and outdoing his uncle in his business successes) and hyper-sensitivity began to see and suspect insults and hatred where there was only an understandable and probably progressively increasing impatience with the restrictive effects of Sr Araújo’s insistence on being seen as still the efficient businessman and leader he no longer was. Part of the uncle’s claim was his own supposedly unimpeachable reputation for probity. What Carlos did one day when his uncle failed to show up was to record an anonymous message (in a disguised but eventually recognisable voice) taunting his uncle with the widely known story that he had founded his own fortune on stealing from his original employer in order to set up his own business. Caught red-handed (so to speak) Carlos had confessed and apologised to his uncle, but Sr Araújo had denounced him as an ingrate and dismissed him from the firm and family.

The much resented message on the answering machine ending with the words “you quickly forgot you’d been a nobody but someday someone will come along with the courage to take you down a peg and make you remember a few things” (114) might have been the subconscious trigger to get Sr Araújo to explain and seek to justify (in his will) all the major experiences, choices and decisions of his life – though there is a (perhaps revealing?) studious absence of references to his early prosperity as having been based on his fleecing his first employer. What it also leads to, one learns (along with Graça), is that it was in fact the combination of his rash decision to expel the sensible Carlos from his firm and his life and yet to remain in comfortable semi-retirement without responsibility for the day-to-day running of his business that led to the decision to go into the business partnership with the spendthrift Ramireses based on a contract that gave Sr A and that family each a 50% claim on the firm’s profits.

In the private notes left for her to read, Graça also discovers an account of her deceased father’s meetings with her. These started only when she was a 12-year-old schoolgirl, when (propelled by an irresistible impulse) he introduced himself to her, not as her parent, but as her mother’s former employer, the source of the monthly “pension” cheques and as a kindly friend who had asked to be made the girl’s godfather. He starts showing up occasionally to give her lifts in his car and small gifts, especially on her birthday. Eventually the predictable (perhaps inevitable) happens when Graça misunderstands Sr Araújo’s offer of an envelope with cash as an erotic proposition and chases him away as a dirty old man – this event being one that she recalls with some embarrassment and compunction, but one not mentioned in the notes.

In the will there are some further references to the period of political upheaval in Cape Verde just before independence (1975). Sr Araújo indicates how bewildered he was when staunch members of the dominant party, all of whom had been enthusiastic supporters of a larger Portuguese union of states, suddenly became vociferous campaigners for the revolutionary PAIGC – the at that stage still clandestine African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde. (This party became especially active in Cape Verde after the 1974 revolution in Portugal.) Around the same time a group of local businessmen wanted him to join them in forming a party in opposition to “those who were coming in from Guinea” (35), manifesting “disrespect for property” and taunting businessmen and the wealthy as “catchor dos pé, running dog, just because they weren’t cheering for PAIGC” (36). Once again Sr Araújo preferred to sit on the fence and refused to join this group, but he is probably sincere when he explains that, even though he understood that these men “wanted to defend their businesses” as well as “their property and their families”,

he thought of the others, those who had never had anything, those who might have lunch but don’t know if they’ll have dinner, those who’d never gone to school because there are no schools, those who fall ill and for whom there is no medicine. He wanted to say that it was those people who died just as easily from rain as from the lack of it who were shouting through the streets in hope, and if they had now discovered a leader to liberate them, he, Napumoceno, didn’t feel he had the right to go against them. But he knew he would not be understood and so he decided to say that he felt old and sick, he wanted to concern himself solely with spiritual matters, and the only thing he desired was peace in our land. (36)

Behind this possibly implausible-sounding explanation lies an event in Sr Araújo’s personal history that plagued him with a sense of guilt throughout his life. He had, years earlier, before he owned a car, been unable to buy a parasol to shield him against the boiling hot sun anywhere on São Vicente, because it “never” rained and so no shopkeeper bothered to stock the item. A travelling salesman promised to deliver plenty of parasols and Sr Araújo (intending to sign for a thousand) ordered ten thousand items from this man. Dismayed at the huge number and convinced that the salesman had cheated him by adding another nought to the number of items ordered, Sr A had written a furious letter to this man, convinced that he was going to go bankrupt because he would be unable to sell the parasols. However, the very next day, rain began to fall and everyone started buying parasols from him, so that within a few days he had cleared all the stock and made an enormous profit. But the rain did not cease; it intensified and the poor of the island suffered terribly when homes were flooded and destroyed and as many as fifty people were presumed to have drowned in the raging floods. “For the rest of his life” Sr Araújo “was unable to convince himself that he hadn’t been responsible for that tragedy” (50). This horror, that his own sudden profit and success had been at the expense of devastating loss of life and property, especially among the poor, probably lies behind the reference in the passage quoted above to “those people who died just as easily from rain as from the lack of it” (36). It also led Sr Araújo to urge the mayor and the wealthy businessmen of the city to set up a fund to help those most severely afflicted by the devastation and motivated him to buy quicklime from another island at his own expense and to supply it free of charge to the Mindelo municipality to use in reconstructions.

The will casts light not only on Sr Araújo’s business activities, but also on his love life, such as it was. As a young man he had liked a young woman as a friend and was just beginning to think how to turn the friendship into a romantic association when the mother of this woman intervened by demanding that he declare his intentions. Offended by what he saw as manipulation in what should have been his own independent decision, he withdrew from associating with this girl. In later life he satisfied occasional erotic urges by frequenting the city’s brothels – following an encounter with a visiting sex goddess who taught him a trick or two and left him with a serious STD infection. On the journey to a neighbouring island to acquire the quicklime after the floods, much later in his life, Sr Araújo hovered on the brink of an engagement to a woman of high social standing, the sister of the impressive and wealthy businessman on the neighbouring island with whom he had dealings at the time. But (typical of his bourgeois timidities and susceptibilities) he could think only of the fact that he was unbecomingly dressed in knee-length drawers when she on a pretext came to his bedroom on the last night of his visit and kissed him in the doorway, so he never invited her into his bed and after his return to Mindelo lost contact with her.

The great love of Sr Araújo’s life hit him like a bolt from the blue when he was already of advanced middle age and she a slim young woman of scarcely twenty: Adélia, a young, gazelle-like, vulnerable and innocent-looking young woman who happened to come to his business one day. Later on we learn that Adélia already had a man in her life, who was away at the time. She made no secret of this, but the older man continued to pursue and pay court to her, caught in an obsession with what was really an image of Adélia rather than her true self.

According to the notebooks, at first Sr Napumoceno didn’t treat her like a woman. For example, it never occurred to him to kiss her, much less to take her to bed. He felt, and of this he was sure, from the first and throughout the many years that remained to him, that he loved her. But it was a love that he knew was not innocent and that at the same time had nothing carnal in it and he liked nothing better than to be next to her in the car and to sit there quietly parked without saying a word, just looking at her, and he made her into a saint, an immaculate virgin, and when she smiled and asked, What are you looking at?, he could only reply, I’m looking at you! (87)

Flattered by his unstinting adoration, the young woman eventually got Sr Araújo to take her as his secret sexual partner and so he discovered the intensity of Adélia’s erotic appetites. Yet “this love that by day tortured and enslaved him with the desire to see her, … at night wearied him at her side” (91). Eventually, her younger lover being about to return to the island, Adélia told Sr Araújo that their relationship had to come to an end. Even though “when he was away from her, he never knew whether her lips were thin or full, if her hair was long or short” (87), except for the fact that she obsessed him, Sr Araújo begged Adélia to marry him, but she refused and left him devastated and consumed with jealousy.

Much later, it is suggested that Sr Araújo had had to flee the island when Adélia’s lover found out that the older man had had a relationship with her during his absence, but this rather ignominious light on his reason for visiting his birthplace around this time is not acknowledged by Sr Araújo either in his notebooks or in his will. He does write that after she left him to return to her other lover, he “felt as if he’d go crazy” and “began to see Adélia in all the women he passed”, lamenting (in his mind) “Adélia, Adélia, where are you that you don’t come, don’t you see that without you I don’t have any peace, don’t you miss me as I miss you, Adélia my life and my dream, have you already forgotten?” (95). After just a month away, Sr Araújo returned to Mindelo, believing himself “cured” of Adélia – only to find that his home was permeated with his memories of her presence. What follows is written as if it actually occurred, but is more than likely the fantasy of a jilted lover. He heard a knock on his door that he thought an illusion, but when he investigated, it was Adélia, asking to be let in, “smiling, abashed”. Sr Araújo, holding the crying Adélia, “felt liberated and victorious and smiled and thought sic transit Gloria mundi, I can lose her without pain” while he thought: “Nothing binds me to her anymore!” (98). Even though he went through the motions of lovemaking, Sr Araújo writes, he afterwards told Adélia (who informed him that she had returned to him “if you still want me”) that “now it is too late”, for “all that remained was the dream of Adélia” (99). Clearly it is she who was now imagined as cherishing tender memories of the man who had adored her, while he had become cold and cynical towards her. In his will, Sr Araújo left Adélia only one small legacy: a book of sad, nostalgic poems with the title Alone [ – published 1892] by the Portuguese poet António Nobre; however, her whereabouts could never be discovered (despite the staunch efforts of the will’s executor and the demands of Graça, who longed to learn more about her deceased father), and the book was never handed over to Adélia. The reader is left momentarily wondering whether the entire account of this great passion might have been a fantasy, but Carlos confirms that “everyone” in Mindelo knew about the affair which the old man thought was a well-kept secret.

In attentively and meticulously reading through the scattered notes and notebooks left by Sr Araújo, Maria da Graça discovers more about her father’s personality and daily life. She is impressed by his very carefully kept hygiene regimen and the regularity of his habits, his disdain for the group of high flyers who constitute the membership of the Grémio club (to which Sr Araújo was never admitted, hence one suspects more than a touch of sour grapes in his denunciations of the members’ characters) and his recourse to reading (and meditating) for much of the day, as he withdrew from the hurly-burly of the business world.

For days, Maria da Graça marvelled at the portrait of her father’s personality that was being revealed and even Sr Américo Fonseca ended up appreciating this picture, confessing his ignorance of someone whose best and most intimate friend he’d always considered himself to be. In fact, preoccupied as he was with getting a piece of that pie [a small house he wants to buy from the estate of the deceased], he had been very busy proclaiming himself the trustee of the deceased, the loyal repository of his last wishes, the executor, to the letter, of all his provisos … (133)

But Maria da Graça, true to her name, wants to soften the blow struck by her father’s harsh words about, and his relatively meagre legacy to, Carlos, and makes friends with the man she claims as her cousin, even enjoying Carlos’s occasional disrespectful references to her father as “that old goat” and suchlike, understanding the irritation that is their source. She offers Carlos the better house [which Fonseca desires to buy] in exchange for the one left to him, but Carlos politely declines her offer, explaining that he is doing so because he knows this was not his uncle’s wish. Graça previously discovered that despite her father’s unforgiving bitterness towards his nephew, Carlos had not stopped loving this uncle who had brought him up so strictly, when Carlos’s voice “fad[ed] in anguish … just for a second” as he spoke of Sr Araújo dying “alone in that big house” (139) and of how he had arrived to find him already cold after he had died during the night. Asked about his uncle’s true nature, in his view, Carlos tells Graça that in his view, the reason that Sr Araújo was “so anxious, and a little wary, and took offence so easily” was that despite his success, luck in business and his wealth, “he was always afraid of becoming the [poor little boy] Napumoceno of S Nicolau again” (145–6). The novel ends with the affecting account by his loyal old housekeeper of Sr Araújo’s sad decline and weakness in his old age, but the melancholy can be offset by the wonderful image of the old man sailing grandly through the streets of Mindelo in the cars he never learned how to reverse. In this complex tragicomic account of a lonely man who was as loving as he was capable of resentful fierceness, Almeida has produced a wonderful, memorable portrait.

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