A Treacherous Paradise (39 page)

‘You mean that he would be free to wander around and sit wherever he likes, as he’s doing now?’

‘You could give him some rules if you liked. He’s a quick learner.’

‘But you don’t want me to build a cage for him?’

‘Certainly not. Nor should you attach a chain to his neck. Obviously I’m prepared to pay you well for your trouble.’

Ana Dolores looked at her, smiling.

‘When you first came here you were in a pitiful state,’ she said. ‘But you’ve done well for yourself.’

‘I can at least pay you so that Carlos can lead the life he wants to have when I’m no longer here.’

Ana Dolores stood up.

‘Let me think it over,’ she said. ‘If I’m going to take on responsibility for an ape, I want to be sure that I really can and want to do that.’

She stood underneath the dovecote, looking up at Carlos who was still picking away at his skin, searching for ticks. Ana watched them from her seat on the veranda. Ana Dolores left the dovecote and walked to the row of kennels and pens where the sheepdogs that were already trained were jumping up excitedly at the bars. She stopped at one of the pens and seemed to pat the dog through the bars. Then she returned to the veranda.

‘Shout for the ape,’ she said. ‘Or at least get him to come down from the dovecote so that I can introduce myself to him.’

‘So Carlos can stay here?’

‘As long as he doesn’t bite.’

Ana shouted for Carlos, who clambered slowly down from the dovecote. Looking back, it seemed to Ana that he had appeared to hesitate.

WHAT CAME NEXT
happened so quickly that afterwards Ana wasn’t at all sure of the course of events. The sheepdog Ana Delores had just been stroking burst through the bars surrounding its pen and raced towards Carlos, who had just reached the ground. Ana shouted a warning, but it was too late. The dog leapt up and sunk its teeth into Carlos’s throat before he had realized the danger. Ana ran down the steps and began hitting the dog with a sweeping brush that was leaning against the veranda rail, but it didn’t release its grip on Carlos’s throat. Ana screamed and hit out with the brush as hard as she could. Ana Dolores didn’t move a muscle. Only when it was all over did she help to pull the dog away and drag it back to its pen.

Carlos lay motionless on the ground. His head was almost detached from his body. His eyes were open. He continued to look at Ana, even though he was dead.

Ana Dolores came back after locking up the sheepdog, which was still wild with fury.

‘I don’t understand how it could have happened,’ she said.

When Ana heard those words, she realized immediately what the facts were. At first she couldn’t believe it, but there was no other possible explanation.

It had not been an accident.

Ana stood up and slowly brushed the dust off her dress.

‘I don’t know how you did it,’ she said. ‘I understand that you unfastened the gate to the dog’s pen, but not how you then ordered it to attack. Perhaps the dog is trained to react not only to a spoken command, but also to a hand gesture or a movement of the head.’

Ana Dolores tried to interrupt her.

‘Let me finish,’ roared Ana. ‘If you interrupt me I shall beat you to death. You gave the dog a signal to attack Carlos. You wanted the ape to die. I don’t know why you did it. Perhaps because you are so full of hatred towards anybody who doesn’t look down on black people? Perhaps you are so full of hatred towards the ape who became my friend that it had to die? I have never met anybody as full of bitterness and hatred as you, Ana Dolores. One of these days the people in this country will have had more than enough of the likes of you.’

Ana Dolores tried once again to say something, but Ana – who was so furious that she was shaking – merely raised her hand.

‘Don’t say a word,’ she said. ‘Not a single word. I don’t want to hear a word from your mouth ever again. Just fetch me a sack so that I can take him away from here.’

Ana Dolores turned on her heel and disappeared into the house. She never reappeared. Instead, a maid came out with an empty sack. She handed it over without even looking at the dead ape. Ana put Carlos’s body into the sack, knowing that Ana Dolores was standing behind one of the windows in the house, watching her.

The chauffeur was waiting at the side of the car, and stepped forward to assist her. But she shook her head: she wanted to carry Carlos herself.

On the way back to town, she asked the chauffeur to stop on the bridge over the river. She got out of the car and stood by the rail. Some women were washing clothes in the river, not far from the bridge. They had hoisted up their skirts up over their thighs. They were chatting away as they did the washing, and Ana could hear them laughing merrily as they slapped and kneaded the piles of garments. She was very tempted to go down to the women, hoist up her own dress and help them with the washing. In those black women she could detect a trace of Elin, and perhaps also herself.

In the end she stepped back from the rail. By then she had decided where Carlos should be buried.

When she got back home, she found herself unable to cry over her dead chimpanzee, but she felt a boundless longing for Lundmark, to have him by her side to make the mourning for Carlos easier. He wouldn’t have had much to say, as he was a man of few words: but he would have been able to console her, and assure her that she wasn’t alone. She thought about the fact that in this continent she found so confusing and so full of contradictions, in the end the only thing she could rely on had been a chimpanzee.

She put the sack with Carlos’s body in the icebox. She forbade Julietta and the other servants to go anywhere near it. She knew that they were very curious, so she had a large, heavy stone brought up from the garden and placed on the lid of the icebox, telling them all that white people also had their witchcraft, and that hers was now hidden away inside the stone. Anybody who touched the stone would find that his or her fingers were transformed into small, sharp pieces of granite and that nothing – no white or black medicine – would be able to restore them. She could see that they believed her, and couldn’t help feeling a bitter-sweet pleasure in among all the misery she had experienced. Especially when Julietta turned pale and slunk away.

Once again, she slept that night with the aid of a strong dose of sleeping tablets. But she was up again as dawn broke. As the chauffeur had been instructed to be ready for an early departure, he had spent the night curled up on the back seat of the car. He helped Ana to carry the sack containing Carlos’s body from the icebox, and also packed into the car a spade and a pickaxe that Ana had taken from the garden shed the previous evening.

All was quiet as they carried the sack into the brothel, past the sleeping guards, through the sofa room where a few men lay stretched out, snoring.

The chauffeur put the sack down where she indicated, next to the jacaranda tree. Then he went back to the car.

This was where she was going to bury Carlos. He would lie there under an array of blue blossom.

There was simply no other location worthy of being Carlos’s last resting place.

ANA RAISED THE
pickaxe. That very movement meant that she had reverted to being Hanna Renström. It was how she used to raise the pickaxe when she and Elin were preparing the potato patch in the spring, and again in the autumn when they needed to harvest the potatoes before the first frosts arrived, heralding the approach of the long winter.

The ground was hard on the surface, but softer underneath and easier to penetrate. She exchanged the pickaxe for a spade and began digging. She was in a hurry, but couldn’t bring herself to work fast. Digging a grave was not something that could be rushed. A grave was not merely a hole in the ground: it was just as much a hole being made in her heart.

Once, when she was a child, she had buried a dead great northern diver that had been washed ashore by the river. It was the only grave she had ever dug in her life. But now she was about to commit a dead ape to its final resting place, and then leave it and the tree, never to return.

She rolled up the sleeves of her blouse and unbuttoned it at the neck – it was early in the morning, but already the temperature was rising. She could smell the scent of a little lemon tree that Senhor Vaz had planted in the garden.

The spade hit against something she thought at first was a stone, but when she bent down to pick it up she saw that it was a bone. A chicken bone, she thought. Somebody must have been sitting here, chewing the meat off it, and then thrown it away. She carried on digging. More bones appeared in the soil she shovelled to one side.

The spade hit against a biggish stone that sounded noticeably hollow. When she picked it up she saw that it was in fact a skull. A very small skull. She paused, wondering what it could be, and decided it must be from a dead monkey.

But then she realized that it was the remains of a human head. A child’s skull. So small that it might well have been that of a newborn baby, or even a foetus.

She was beginning to feel very uneasy, but she continued digging. Wherever she dug she was coming across bones and skulls. These were not chicken bones at all, but the remains of human skeletons. She felt queasy, but she didn’t stop digging. She wanted to bury Carlos that morning, and to have finished before the brothel came back to life.

It eventually dawned on her that she was exposing a mass grave, the remains of babies and foetuses that had been buried under this jacaranda tree to be hidden and forgotten about. She was faced with a children’s cemetery, the results of unwanted pregnancies after all the thousands of nocturnal encounters that had taken place in this brothel. The bones were all white or grey, but all the foetuses and newborn babies that had been strangled or killed in some other way had been a mixture of white and black.

In the end she put down the spade and sat on the bench. She was in torment. The ground in front of her was covered in bones from dead children. It seemed as if this morning, once and for all, she had discovered what kind of a world she had been living in. Her queasiness had turned into a feeling of dismay, perhaps even horror.

Without Ana’s noticing, Felicia had come out into the courtyard. She was wearing one of her many attractive silk dressing gowns. She looked at the dug-up soil and all the pieces of bone with a blank expression on her face.

‘Why are you digging all this up?’ she asked.

Instead of answering Ana opened the sack and showed her Carlos’s stiff and shrivelled corpse.

‘Didn’t you know that this was a cemetery?’ asked Felicia in surprise.

‘No. I knew nothing about it. I just wanted Carlos to have a pretty resting place here under the jacaranda tree.’

‘Why have you killed Carlos?’

Ana was not surprised by Felicia’s question. If she had learnt one thing during her time in this town, it was that black people thought whites were capable of all kinds of actions, even the most inexplicable or cruel.

‘It wasn’t me who killed him.’

She explained what had happened at Pedro Pimenta’s farm. When Ana mentioned Ana Dolores’s name, she realized that Felicia understood that what she was saying was true.

‘Ana Dolores is a dangerous person,’ said Felicia. ‘She is surrounded by all kinds of evil spirits that can kill. I have never understood how she could be a nurse.’

It struck Ana that Felicia didn’t seem in the least disturbed by all the bones that had been dug up. That only increased Ana’s unease.

‘Bury him here,’ said Felicia. ‘It’s a good place for him to be.’

Felicia turned to leave, but Ana stretched out her hand and took hold of her dressing gown.

‘I must ask you a question,’ she said. ‘I realize that all these aborted foetuses or newborn babies that have been killed are the result of what happened here in the brothel. But there’s something else I want to know, and I want you to give me an honest answer.’

‘I’m always honest,’ said Felicia.

Ana shook her head.

‘Oh no you’re not,’ she said. ‘Neither am I. I haven’t met a single person in this town who tells the truth. But the truth is what I want from you now. Is my dead foetus buried here as well?’

‘Yes. It was Laurinda who buried it. She dug a hole and emptied the bucket into it.’

Ana nodded in silence. This seemed to be the moment when she discovered and understood everything about her time here in Lourenço Marques, from the moment she stepped ashore until now, as she sat here with all these human remains in front of her.

She stood up.

‘That was all I wanted to know,’ she said. ‘Now I’ll lay my ape to rest and replace all the soil as it was before. I understand that this is a cemetery. Right at the heart of the brothel is a secret burial place.’

‘And it tells a truth,’ said Felicia.

‘Yes,’ said Ana. ‘The cemetery also tells a truth. One we’d rather not know about.’

Felicia went back inside. But it dawned on Ana that she couldn’t bury Carlos here as she had planned. She couldn’t allow him to lie here among all these lost souls of foetuses and dead babies. She put Carlos back into the sack, and replaced the soil so that no bones could be seen. She went to fetch the chauffeur, who carried the sack back to the car. He didn’t ask any questions. He’s an old man who’s seen and heard it all, she thought. Is there any basic difference between all the crazy things white people do, and me being driven back and forth with an ape in a sack?

She asked him to take her to the part of the harbour where small fishing boats were moored. It was next to the high wooden frames where the fishermen hung their nets and the baskets that were used to carry their catches up to the market stalls.

Ana got out of the car. Most of the fishing boats were already out at sea, and would return later in the day with their catches. But at one of the jetties there were a few boats still moored there, with their sails furled round the masts. She asked the chauffeur to accompany her there.

‘I need to hire a boat,’ she said. ‘I want to take my ape out to sea and bury him there.’