There was between Uguém and Tamboxém a half worm-eaten footbridge, painted black and spanning a tireless river that leapt huge basalt rocks and foamed in the rapids. We crossed it, plunging into the undergrowth that stretched out before us towards Foquir-Pattô.
The weather on that hot, hazy afternoon, the sea wind searing our skin and making us pour with sweat, urged me to rip off my uniform and hurl myself into the water, to lie in the shade of the cashews and flake out. I’d been up for two nights now, playing cards with the lads at the barracks, and could hardly keep my eyes open. The heavy leather case I carried made my arm ache and the thought that Mariana might spend Christmas Eve alone gnawed away inside me.
But Agent Faria was in a hurry to get to Faquir-Pattô. He wanted to speak to Lieutenant Concha, who was camped out thereabouts with his men, and then reach our destination before night cut off our route. He had been given a secret mission, which I now knew was to eliminate Vassanta, a dangerous outlaw, who crossed the border each night to stir up the peasants of that region and alarm citizens loyal to the government. The sinister bandit had already murdered half-a-dozen innocents and was responsible for the blinding of a child, who had lost her eyes when she stepped on an explosive device. Faria’s mission was to dynamite the pontoon the rebel sneaked across into Goa and let the devil take him off to hell.
For that reason, we pressed on to the lieutenant’s outpost, with me cursing this whole bloody adventure and the day I was chosen for it.
But the fumes stifling my enthusiasm quickly evaporated. The lieutenant’s soldiers told me jokes that would make a corpse roar with laughter and filled my pockets with cigarettes. Concha was a fine individual. He offered me thick slices of bread and meat and a bottle of port that would last the rest of the journey, which now passed by small mud huts reflected in a calm river, where the odd girl knelt washing clothes.
Some of the landscape was marvellous, the trunks of the palms etched black and the peaks of the mountains tinted red by the sun. Shadows rippled, danced, and dispersed in the silky folds of the water. A scent drifted down from the hills that revived me and dispelled my fatigue.
‘See that lass washing clothes and singing? Who’s she?’ I asked old man Janum, an informant on the regime’s payroll who served as a guide.
Janum whispered that she was Vassanta’s girl. He kept her well paid, fed and clothed, as I could see. Her name was Jila. Tomorrow she would sing no more.
Jila looked young and pretty as she sat by the river’s edge, water dripping from her like dew from wildflowers on a cold morning. I felt sorry for the girl, in love with a man whose time was up. But what could anyone do? Vassanta was an enemy of state and had to be dealt with.
I stood for a few minutes admiring her from behind some bushes, before following after Agent Faria, my strength redoubled by the excellent wine.
When we reached our destination, a deserted spot where Janum had his shack, Faria told me I could sleep easy, that he would take care of the rest. He alone would have the glory of eliminating that dreaded foe of order and sovereignty. All I had to do was sign his report to the minister, which should earn me promotion.
I was exultant. I’d make corporal! What joy! An extra few dozen rupees a month and two new stripes. My friends would be green with envy. I could buy Mariana some jewellery, the dresses she coveted, and what’s more, we could get married. It all seemed like a dream. But it was real. Despite my fatigue I was wide-awake. I was going to make corporal! I leapt for joy, unable to control my emotions.
I removed my clothes and lay down on the warm dung floor of Janum’s shanty. I slept the sleep of the just.
Hours later, I was started awake by a deafening blast. By my side, Faria lay flat, telling me to stay calm. There was nothing to fear. Absolutely nothing. The mission had been a success. There was no way Vassanta could have escaped. He must have been blown to pieces. Now the local people could live at ease and sleep in peace. I would be promoted as soon as the minister received our report. He, Faria, had his name made. The next day his bravery would be all over the papers. Perhaps there would even be a reception in his honour at the City Chambers. Surely, he would be proclaimed a national hero and receive the government’s highest award for valour.
I didn’t give a damn if he was a national hero or if bigwigs lauded his selfless defence of the common good. Our mission complete, I just wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible, to head home and put my plans into action. I felt a wild craving to speak to Mariana, to hug Mariana, to devour her with kisses and tell her I’d been made corporal! What a great Christmas we had in store! That was why, after two days enjoying that Capua at Janum’s insistence, I set off for home happier than a bulbul splashing about in a muddy puddle. The sun had begun to rise behind the trees. Seawards, the fog was lifting rapidly. Birds left their roosts, flying in circles over our heads, and the foliage tickled me as I passed and picked wild fruits which I slipped into my mouth. The rising sun tinged the hills red again and lit the stretch of river where Jila was washing clothes and singing a film song. Her clear, pleasant voice reached my ears in a soft murmur. She raised her eyes towards us, smiled and, amidst tufts of foam, beat her washing rhythmically against the eroded rocks of the bank. I waved to her and, in a rash, childish impulse, yelled some gallantries I’d picked up at the barracks. I wanted to shout out that I was going to be made corporal. As we took a short cut up the hill, I could still hear her faint song as the flashing sunlight lit up everything around me in gold.
*
Translators Note
‘Contrabandistas’ by Epitácio Pais was published in Goa in 1968, in the newspaper O Heraldo, then still a Portuguese-language publication. Seven years had passed since the territory’s absorption by the Indian Union. The story’s plot, however, revisits a pre-1961 moment in which Goa’s political future still hung in the balance. The unnamed protagonist, seemingly a locally born private in the colonial army, has been tasked to accompany a certain Agent Faria to eliminate Vassanta, ‘a dangerous outlaw’, ‘a sinister bandit’ in the eyes of the Portuguese authorities, who has been raiding the Estado da Índia from across the border in Maharashtra.
The one-sided construction these epithets might represent is suggested by Faria’s rank. Agent suggests a member not of the army, but the PIDE. The initialism refers to Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar’s feared Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado. Officially charged with border control, the PIDE was in essence Salazar’s secret police and operated in Goa by the time in which the story was set, the Indian Blockade era between 1955 and 1961. No contemporary Goan reader could see the rank Agent and not think of Agent Casimiro Monteiro, a notorious member of the PIDE who terrorised Goa at that time.
And yet the story resists any simple reading as anti-colonial irony. Vassanta’s actions, after all, have alarmed ordinary people, killed innocents, and blinded a child. The story offers no indication these accusations are slander. There is also the question of the title. Who are the ‘contrabandistas’ or smugglers? A signature technique of Pais’s stories is ellipsis, such a telling tactic in the short form. In the text itself there are no bootleggers. No contraband is mentioned. Rather we as readers can only intuit that, instead of a bloodthirsty rebel and a flinty guardian of the established order, Vassanta and Faria are really in cahoots and implicitly as bad as each other. Under cover of a staged assassination, have they made a profitable exchange? Did the incongruous leather case the protagonist holds carry the object of their transaction? Certainly the running of drugs, gold and luxury watches between the lax customs zone of Goa and the austerity of Nehru’s India was common at the time. Any of these goods would fit snugly and unostentatiously in such an item of luggage.
There is an extra resonance to the title. The term giving the story its title – ‘contrabandista’ – was pejorative shorthand in 1960s Goa. It described people seen as bogus freedom fighters, those whose Tamrapatra – an official citation for having participated in India’s fight for independence – was fraudulently claimed. Malicious gossip held them to have merely run afoul of Portuguese customs officials. Their incarceration under the former administration was for ordinary crime, not the highest of ideals. In an extended sense, it named those who took unfair benefit from the great changes in Goa in the immediate post-1961 period and indicates perhaps a rather jaundiced political outlook on the part of the author.
Author Bio
Epitácio Pais (1924-2009) was a Goan author. He began publishing his short stories in the Portuguese-language press in the 1950s. After 1961 he was an occasionally contributor the newspaper O Heraldo and the Portuguese-language magazine programme Renascença, broadcast by All-India Radio’s Panjim station. The bulk of his work survives today for having been published in Lisbon in 1973, through the offices of Portuguese critic Manuel de Seabra, in a collection entitled Os Javalis de Codval (The Boars of Codval). A posthumous novel named Preia-Mar (High Tide) was published in 2016 by Goa, 1556, edited by Paul Melo e Castro and Hélder Garmes. Both the stories and the novel are particularly attentive to the economic, political and social shifts occurring in Goa between the 1950s and the 1970s.
Paul Melo e Castro lectures in Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has a long-standing interest in the Portuguese-language literature of Goa and is an occasional translator. His translations of Goan literature have appeared in The Bombay Review, Out of Print, Indian Literature, Muse India and Govapuri, amongst others. He is the translator of Augusto do Rosário Rodrigues’s Regional Tales, Under The Peepal Tree, 2023, Maria Elsa da Rocha’s Life Stories, Goa 1556, 2023 and Vimala Devi’s Monsoon, Seagull, 2019. A translation of Epitácio Pais’s collected stories, entitled Weeds in the Red Dust, is forthcoming from Under the Peepal Tree Press.