As João Vêncio, mulatto hustler, awaits sentence in an Angolan jail for attempted murder, he recounts the loves and friendships of his life. There is Maristrela, the night-black wife of a white-trash doctor, who teaches him how to make the whydah birds sing more sweetly. Sissy, the boy with long blond curls, who shares with him the sensuousness of the ocean; and his sweetheart, his mocha-chocolate Bailundo girl, who brings him Moamba stew from the Benguela-Catumbela lands even though he tried to strangle her. A book breathtaking in both its violence and its tenderness.