Dona Cartagina

Dona Cartagina, the elderly cleaning woman at the Hotel Tivoli, is one of the book’s most constant presences amid Luanda’s siege, fear, and mass departure. She combines alert attention to other people with a fierce expectation of catastrophe: she waits for Holden Roberto’s army, fears that the city will be destroyed, and yet continues cleaning its emptied rooms. Her bond with the narrator is made not through grand declarations but through practical care, a bottle of mineral water, a place to hide, and a farewell neither can be sure will lead to a return.

Identity and Everyday Life

Dona Cartagina works as a cleaner at the Hotel Tivoli, where the narrator lives. The book presents her as warm and alert, moving through the hotel’s domestic spaces and keeping watch on the people around her. She notices the conduct of its residents as well as the shifting political mood: outraged whispers from her report that Arturo and Maria, a colonial official and his wife, are living together in a way she condemns as sinful. Her judgment draws on the racial and political divisions around her, equating their behavior with the lives of black people and MPLA atheists. That remark reveals how thoroughly the conflict’s racialized assumptions have entered ordinary conversation, even among those whose daily work brings them into intimate contact with others.

Cleaning is more than an occupation in her appearances. As the hotel empties, she continues to sweep vacant rooms, even when necessity has largely vanished. The repeated work gives her a place in a city where familiar routines and institutions are breaking apart. Her attention turns outward, too: she seeks news, listens for danger, and watches the narrator’s movements. The result is not a portrait of an untouched domestic world but of a woman carrying its habits into a crisis that has made even a hotel corridor feel exposed.

Political Hope and the Approaching Exodus

Dona Cartagina anticipates Holden Roberto’s arrival, although she does not know where his army is. She secretly asks the narrator for news and whether he is writing good things about the FNLA. He tells her, enthusiastically, that he is. In return, she cleans his room until it shines and brings him mineral water when there is nothing to drink in town. The exchange is small but revealing: her political hopes and her generosity coexist, and the narrator’s reassuring answer becomes part of their personal understanding, whether or not it reflects what he actually believes.

As the departures gather force, her expectation hardens into dread. When asked whether she believes that people will not survive if they remain in Luanda until November, she says that she does and draws a finger across her throat, leaving a red mark with her fingernail. The gesture makes the prediction physical: catastrophe is not an abstract rumor to her but an ending she can mime on her own body. It also stands in sharp contrast to her continued labor. Though convinced that staying means death, she remains in the city and keeps working.

Fear, Care, and the Hotel Under Siege

After the city’s police have disappeared and the hotel floor is empty, Dona Cartagina pauses while sweeping to listen for the feared approach of a crowd from the black quarters. She freezes, like a villager listening for thunder, crosses herself solemnly, and resumes cleaning. The scene places her within the atmosphere of rumor and racial panic that grips the abandoned city, without making her fear the same thing as an actual attack. Her response is both bodily and habitual: she listens, prays, and returns to the task in front of her.

When the narrator comes back to the hotel after a journey south, she is among the small group gathered over his bed with Oscar and the doorman Fernando. They are happy he has returned and keep asking, with striking insistence, whether he is alive. The encounter follows his unsettling dream of knife-wielding figures in the woods outside Warsaw, so the ordinary faces above him initially seem to belong to the same uncertain space between sleep and waking. Dona Cartagina is not the source of the dream, but her presence in the scene gives his return an immediate human measure: the people who have remained at the hotel are relieved to find him alive.

An Offer of Shelter and a Painful Farewell

During an intense attack, with artillery firing since dawn and the front line only fifteen minutes away by car, Dona Cartagina offers to hide the narrator in her nearby apartment. She proposes that he pass as her son, visiting his elderly, ailing mother. If challenged about his unusual Portuguese, he is to claim that he was born in Timor, ran away to Burma, and served in the Burmese navy. The elaborate cover story shows her converting intimate knowledge of the danger into a practical plan. The evidence establishes the offer and the details she supplies, not whether the concealment is carried out.

When the narrator leaves, Dona Cartagina breaks down crying. He says he will return, but acknowledges that he does not know whether the promise is true. Their parting is therefore both deeply personal and unresolved: shared hardship has made the separation painful, while war and distance make reunion impossible to guarantee. The narrator’s own eyes fill as he looks at her, underscoring that she is not merely one of the hotel’s remaining workers but a person with whom he has lived through the worst of the crisis.

The Uncertain Return

The book’s closing image refuses to confirm what eventually happens to Dona Cartagina. The narrator is almost afraid to consider that she may be dead, yet says he cannot imagine Luanda, Angola, or the war without her. Instead, the ending turns her survival into a hopeful imagined encounter: a grey-haired woman hurries toward the Hotel Tivoli on a morning, still facing a day’s cleaning; when asked whether she is Dona Cartagina, she answers that she is and briskly continues on her way. This is not a report of a later meeting but a deliberate, unresolved image. It gives her ordinary labor the force of continuity, allowing the possibility of her return to stand against the disappearances that war leaves behind.