‘The Eight Husbands of Dona Luiza Michaela da Cruz” hit the stands this month

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‘The Eight Husbands of Dona Luiza Michaela da Cruz” hit the stands this month

3:33 CAT | 15 Feb 2017

'Os Oito Maridos De Dona Luíza Michaela da Cruz' ('The Eight Husbands Of Dona Luiza Michaela Da Cruz') is the writer's first historical novel

Imagine a woman with eight husbands. How many treats would she have to give and receive on this February 14th? In reality, none, but in fiction, anything can happen.

Let Adelino Timóteo say it then, an author who, as if trying to question the very existence of couples, ventures a book that at first sight worries: ‘The Eight Husbands of Dona Luiza Michaela da Cruz’.

Timóteo’s new work tells a story that takes place at the beginning of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when the English missionary Livingstone proposed to evangelize and combat the slave trade in the lands of the Zambezi River.

“At that time, Livingstone landed in the Goengue ‘Prazo’, where he met the voluptuous mulatta with a lively eye, who is called, no more, Dona Luiza Michaela Rita da Cruz. The unexpected encounter drags the missionary to the extreme of anxiety, according to the writer, like one who peels the fruit to get to the pulp of the woman. And while at that he will satisfy his curiosity about her nature and her life, even as far as how to deal with her eight husbands.”

The incidents of the narrative consecrate the foreign personage as Dona Luiza’s biographer and that of the “sacred” Cruz family of the State of Massangano, one that hinders Portuguese colonization.

The title of Timóteo’s new work recalls Jorge Amado’s ‘Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands’, but the inspiration of the Mozambican author did not come from there. Timóteo says that, before beginning to write, when he was in a bookstore near the ‘Brasileira’ in Lisbon, a book called ‘History of the Wars of Zambezi, Chicoa and Massangano’ (1954), by Filipe Gastão de Almeida Eça came to his hands. In this, a chapter caught his attention, where the author referred to Dona Luiza as being, in his perception, a figure worthy of romance, in a theme ‘Dona Luiza da Cruz and her Four Husbands’.

I remembered then the 1966 ‘Dona Flor and her Two Husbands’ by Jorge Amado. I said to myself, this title is very Mozambican. Maybe that was Jorge Amado’s source of inspiration. So I wrote my novel well aware that at the level of fiction there is a vast lode that the Zambézia of that time offers, without having to borrow anything from Jorge Amado. I could have chosen another title, but to know that the title is as very Mozambican as is the story gave me a certain pleasure,” Timóteo says.

‘The Eight Husbands of Dona Luiza Michaela da Cruz’ covers the mystical and mysterious aureate of the owners of the Zambézia ‘Prazos’. And to write it, the writer had himself to investigate. He went to the Mozambican Historical Archive in Maputo, reading pages of Tempo magazine and maturing his ideas.

Timóteo began to conceive of the novel in Lisbon (Portugal), taking it with him to San Sebastian (Spain), later Beira (Mozambique), Linz (Austria), Amsterdam (Holland) and Cologne (Germany). “As is normal in my books, they grow in one place and then in others. But this work, in particular, has travelled a lot.” Nevertheless, the womb chosen for its delivery was the Mozambican seal of Alcance Editores.

Timóteo says this is his first experience of writing a historical novel. “I absorbed a great about a Zambezi until now little referenced, from Quelimane. I think I discovered in this book a mysterious aura that will compel me to write one or two more books about the place. I think of Jorge Amado who wrote five books on cocoa. And about the owners of the ‘Prazos’, one can write even more.”

Timóteo felt like Dona Luiza was resurrected in this book. “Her passions, her anger, her summary justice. In the end I watched her suffer, die slowly. I followed her long agony. I was among the Quimanans on the sidewalks who attended her procession. I cried some time, not only over her death, but because it disillusioned me that a character of such mettle could die. She deserved eternal life.” But, even in fiction, there are desires hard to satisfy.

‘The Eight Husbands of Dona Luiza Michaela da Cruz’ can be purchased at bookstores in two weeks’ time.

Source: O País