A gang of young boys who are busy polishing an old Toyota point towards the villa at the end of the street and shout: “The pirates, the pirates.”
By the beginning of October, Wilson Morais had had enough of skyrocketing costs. He had made outlays of more than EUR 10,000 a month to cover hotel rooms for the three officers of the Thunder. He had also had difficulties having the costs reimbursed by the Thunder’s owner. On a by-way near the esplanade he found a villa for rent. The house had been the property of the military. Now it had been taken over by a speculator, was guarded by a security guard and equipped with domestic help and a swimming pool. In addition to renting the house for Cataldo and his men, he provided them with a small motorcycle so they could get around on the island.
In the beginning the mood between the three convicted criminals was tense; Cataldo had tried to deflect the blame for the wreck onto the engineers. Sometimes Morais would drop by with a case of beer to alleviate the tensions between them.
Now Cataldo comes walking up to the gate. He opens it slightly and tells us that he is not allowed to speak while the appeal of his case is ongoing.
“I have pictures of Sea Shepherd that show what they really do,” he says, as if he held the trump card he never had the chance to play before somebody knocked over the table.
Neither the Spanish nor the Chilean authorities have asked to have the prisoners extradited. Now it seems as if the three officers have been left to their own devices and the luxury prison. But Cataldo is still unflinching in his loyalty to the owner.
“One day I’ll show you. Then I’ll tell the true story,” he says and returns to his luxury prison.
“It’s a paradox,” Alex the interpreter says, who always has a sharp quip to make about life in São Tomé. “While the prisoners are living a life of luxury, paid for by an unknown source, through a hidden bank account, the population is struggling to survive.”
Soon São Tomé begins behaving evasively. The telephones are silent, meetings are postponed, the director of the coast guard appears to have sunk into the ocean and the public prosecutor Kelve Nobre de Carvalho is suddenly so busy that one would think a wave of banana thefts had washed over the island. Nobody seems to know where the documents, judgments and court records of the Thunder case are found. Nobody is allowed to talk, nobody answers the phone and nobody can tell when Cataldo and his men will receive their final sentence.
On the beach by the courthouse there is a group of young people sitting with their hands around their ankles and staring out at the sea as if the incoming tide is going to bring with it a few surprises.
“They are sitting here and waiting for the saviour. And the saviour is an NGO,” the interpreter Alex says in his customary caustic manner.
The judge who found the three officers of the Thunder guilty and who oddly enough is also responsible for the appeal is standing outside the courthouse. At the sight of us he runs towards a car, jumps in and disappears. He stops a short distance up the street, close enough to be able to see us but far enough away to be able to take off if we should run towards the car.
When we call him, he says that he is not allowed to speak to us.
“The judges know their rights, but they are not as well informed about their duties,” the interpreter Alex says.
In the city centre, the ocean air has eaten away at the old colonial buildings, rendering them porous and ramshackle; on some of them the effect has been the same as a grenade. At Café Central the owner sits playing sudoku at her regular table, something she has been doing without cease since her husband recently passed away. At his office next door, the defence attorney Pascoal Daio is working on the appeal for the officers of the Thunder.
“Who owned the Thunder?”
“I don’t know. This house belongs to me, but the Thunder, no, I have no idea …”
In the evening we go to the bar Pico Mocambo, a well-maintained colonial building in a lush garden where they serve pungent, homemade rum. Suddenly a massive, frowning voodoo mask of iron falls down from the wall. A piercing shriek follows. It hits the table top and the hand of a female tourist from Portugal. Wailing, she leaves the bar with three broken fingers.
It is “The Martyr’s Day”. Ship agent Wilson Morais loads up the car with beer and mobile phones and invites us to come north on the island to take part in the commemoration.
“Cataldo and the two others declined the offer to come along,” he said. “They are simultaneously stressed and bored. All they do is talk about their families and surf the Internet. I asked if I could get them something to alleviate the stress, ha ha … But they always say no.”
Along the road the eternally green wall of the jungle recedes and is replaced by a more open landscape, like a savannah. In the village of Fernão Dias what appears is a chaos of processions, local musicians and overdressed politicians crowded together around improvised stalls offering grilled fish, corn on the cob and squid. “The Martyr’s Day” is a commemoration of the Batepa massacre of 1953, the tragedy that would change São Tomé.
It started when the colonial government formed an ambitious plan for the urbanization and modernization of São Tomé as a means of attracting more white settlers to “the province”. Soon, a rumour was spreading through the plantations that the governor wanted to use forced labour to implement his visions.
During the first, incipient protests a policeman was hacked to death with a machete, followed by a wave of violent retaliations nourished by a growing paranoia within
