The Green Beetle
a few months ago, I published a piece in Brazil’s Globo newspaper about a young Togolese man, Thomas Agbessi, who had disappeared mysteriously from inside a police van in Málaga, having been arrested for producing fake credit cards. Unable to comprehend what had happened, the Spanish police questioned the other detainees, also African, who were still inside the vehicle. These lads told a story that didn’t convince the Spaniards: at a given point in the journey, Thomas had stripped naked, whereupon he’d hugged his friends, invoked his ancestors, and “disappeared mystically,” like an agile and imponderable African Houdini.
Some days later, I got a Facebook message from an Angolan who claimed to have witnessed the miracle. He too, he assured me, had been in that Spanish police van. Released owing to a lack of evidence, he’d traded Málaga for Lisbon. We arranged to meet at Camões Square, by the statue of the poet. I arrived early. I sat on a bench to watch the tourists. Twenty minutes went by. Then a young man sat down beside me. He was very thin, with little spiky braids, and a fragile look about him, yet simultaneously very determined, almost fierce.
“You do seem younger like this, in flesh,” he said in a soft voice, with a lovely Benguela accent.
“In the flesh,” I corrected him.
“Right, in the flesh. In the photos you were angrier.”
We sat at one of the tables of a small street kiosk, drinking mazagran and savoring their delicate dough pasties. We talked about Angola, the political changes underway, and the feeling how none of those changes were improving the lives of those who were least protected. Finally, I asked him about Agbessi:
“And what about Thomas, where did he get to?”
The young man shrugged:
“Ah, but you should be asking: Thomas, all of us, those of us who were in that police car, where had we come from? That’s the right question to ask.”
I looked at him, in stunned silence. “From suffering,” the young man said, answering his own question. “Disappearing’s easy. We disappear a lot, us Africans. We’ve always been well-trained at disappearing. Appearing inside that van, that was the hard part. Some of them crossed the desert to get here. Days in the sun. Nights in the cold. Nothing to eat, almost nothing to drink. And then the sea, on speedboats, if you fall in the water you die – can you imagine? That’s how they lived, afraid, always afraid, very, very afraid, till they landed in Spain.”
He fell silent. He finished his mazagran. When he got excited, the little braids jumped and stood up on his head as if they had a life of their own. And what about him, how had he gotten to Spain? The young man smiled:
“By train, from Lisbon. And Lisbon I came to by plane. My family all pitched in to pay for my flight. I wanted to study, but I couldn’t get into the university. A friend told me in Málaga there’d be some great work. So I went. All I found was slave labor. Well, so be it, a slave is what I was. One evening I was in a square, chatting to my friends, and the police came and took us away.”
As we were talking, five lads arrived carrying drums, guitars and other musical instruments. They set up two microphones and started to sing.
“I know this one“ said the young man. “My dad used to sing it to me, when I was a boy.”
I smiled. Any Angolan my age knew that song.
“And Thomas?” I insisted. “How’d he get out of the van?”
“He didn’t get out. He just disappeared.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like I said. Disappearing’s easy. Those Portuguese, they look and don’t see us.”
“So Thomas was in the van when the police opened the doors?”
“Of course. The police opened the doors, we got out, and Thomas got out with us. He walked right past the police, completely naked, and took off. He left.”
“Invisible?”
“Invisible.”
“He looked at me, quite serious, while I digested this information. Then he took a matchbox out of his pants pocket and put it on the table:
“He left me this.”
I took the box and opened it. Inside there gleamed the carcass of a green beetle.
“How beautiful! A beetle?”
“His childhood!”
I didn’t answer. If you’ve never hidden a river in your pants pocket it’s because you’ve never been a little boy. A river, a rare feather, a sunset, the brilliance of a firefly, a plastic cowboy with a hole in his chest, a green beetle. The band was now playing Mbirin-Mbirin. Two girls, very tall and very blonde, were holding each other and dancing, in slow abandon.
“So Thomas just went off onto the street invisible?”
“Invisible!” the young Benguelan confirmed, impassive, calming his rebellious braids with his right hand. “He’d had a lot of practice.”
“And what are you going to do with his childhood?”
“I’m going to keep it. I’m the safety deposit box. Perhaps one day he’ll come back.”