Balthazar Fortuna is angry. With people, with life, with God and with himself. Fortune, only that of the name. And above all, he is angry with women. With the three women in his life. So he returns to Xigovia – the small village in southern Mozambique where they live – with one clear goal: to kill. Yes, kill. Kill bad luck, sweep away ill fortune and make amends for the life you chose to live but no longer want to. In the process, women must be killed too. They are to blame, of that there is no doubt. He, who has always been afraid of words, wants to redeem himself in deeds….
Mia Couto and José Eduardo Agualusa reflect in this short story – adapted to the stage with dramaturgy by Mia Couto himself – on the conflict between a peri-urban Mozambique, which hesitates between a ballast of traditions and ancestral practices crystallized in the dominant male mentalities, and a new country, with galloping demography, full of young people who, every day, see less in the inherited cultural structures and in the social practices they impose.