Half a Life (19 page)

The news was too big to suppress. The authorities might have wanted in the beginning to keep it quiet; but then they went the other way, and began to play up the horror. There had been an uprising in one region, and a mass killing of Portuguese in the countryside. Two hundred, three hundred, perhaps even four hundred, had died, and they had been done to death with machetes. I imagined a landscape like ours (though I knew this to be wrong), and Africans like ours, their huts and villages and cassava-and-corn plantings in the spaces between the big estates: the repeating neat acres of cashew and sisal, the great treeless cattle ranches looking like just-cleared wilderness, with the black trunks of big trees that had been felled or burnt to deny shelter to the poisonous flies that preyed on cattle. Order and logic; the land being made softer; but the picture I had had on my first day, of small-boned people always walking beside the road, had seemed dream-like and threatening, telling me that the place I had come to was very far away. Now it seemed prophetic.

But the Africans around us seemed not to have heard anything. There was no change in their manner. Not that day or the next, not the next week or the next month. Correia, the man with the bank accounts, said that the ordinariness was ominous; some terrible
jacquerie
was preparing here as well. But the ordinariness stayed with us for the rest of the year, and seemed likely to endure. And all the precautions we had been taking—having guns and clubs to hand in the bedroom: futile if there had been anything like a general insurrection, or even a revolt in the quarters—began to seem excessive.

That was when I learned to use a gun. Word came to us and our neighbours, discreetly, that we could get instruction at the police shooting range in the town. The little garrison didn't have that facility, so unready was it for a war. Our neighbours were eager, but I didn't particularly want to go to the police range. I had never wanted to handle guns. There hadn't been anything like a cadet corps at the mission school; and my worry—greater than my worry about Africans—was that I was going to make a fool of myself before important people. But then, to my great surprise, I was entranced the first time I looked down a gun-sight with a finger on the trigger. It seemed to me the most private, the most intense moment of conversation with oneself, so to speak, with that split-second of right decision coming and going all the time, almost answering the movements of one's mind. It wasn't at all what I was expecting. I feel that the religious excitement that is supposed to come to people who meditate on the flame of a single candle in an otherwise dark room was no greater than the pleasure I felt when I looked down a gun-sight and became very close to my own mind and consciousness. In a second the scale of things could alter and I could be lost in something like a private universe. It was strange, being on the shooting range in Africa and thinking in a new way of my father and his brahmin ancestors, starveling servants of the great temple. I bought a gun. I set up targets in the grounds of Ana's grandfather's house and practised whenever I could. Our neighbours began to look at me with a new regard.

The government took its time, but then things began to move. The garrison was increased. There were new barracks, three storeys high, in bright white concrete. The cantonment or military area spread, plain concrete on bare sand. A board with various military emblems said that we had become the headquarters of a new military command. The life of the town altered.

*

T
HE
G
OVERNMENT
was authoritarian. But most of the time we didn't think of it like that. We felt the government to be far away, something in the capital, something in Lisbon. It sat lightly on us here. I worried about it only at sisal-cutting time, when we made our requisitions from the prisons, and they, for a consideration, sent convicts (properly guarded) to cut sisal. Cutting sisal was dangerous work. Village Africans didn't want to do it. Sisal is like a bigger aloe or pineapple plant, or like a giant spiky green rose, four or five feet high, with thick pulpy blades instead of petals. The blades have cutting serrated edges, frightful to run your hand down the wrong way, and are very thick at the base. They are awkward and dangerous to handle and hard to hack away. The long black point at the end of a sisal blade is needle-sharp and poisonous. Rats are plentiful in a sisal plantation; they like the shade and feed on sisal pulp; and venomous snakes come to feed on the rats, swallowing them whole, and very slowly. It is frightening to see half a rat, head or tail, sticking out of a snake's distended mouth and still apparently living. A sisal plantation is a terrible place, and it was a rule (or just our practice) that a medical nurse should be standing by with medicines and snake-bite serum when sisal was being cut. Such dangerous work; and only five per cent of sisal pulp became sisal fibre; and that fibre was cheap and was used in ordinary things like rope and baskets and sandal soles. Without the convicts it would have been hard to harvest our sisal. Even at that time synthetic fibre was beginning to replace it. I didn't mind at all.

There had been no challenge to our authoritarian but easygoing government for many years, and it had grown strangely lazy. In his great security the ruler had grown to feel that the details of governing were a burden, or so it appeared; and he had farmed out or leased out important governmental activities to eager, energetic and loyal people. Those people became very rich; and the richer they became the more loyal they were, and the better they did the jobs that had been farmed out to them. So there was a kind of rough logic and effectiveness in this principle of government.

Some such principle was at work now in the growth of the garrison and the development of our town. The peace was continuing. People no longer lived with the idea of danger. Yet year by year the war money came. It touched us all. We felt rewarded and virtuous. Everybody counted his gain many times. And then it came out that the new money had been touching our friend Correia more than anybody else in our group, sly Correia who for years had tried to frighten us with his vision of disaster, and had many bank accounts abroad. Correia had been brought into contact with some great man in the capital, and (while still running his estate) he had become the agent in our town or province, or perhaps even the country, for a number of foreign manufacturers of unlikely-sounding technical things. In the beginning Correia liked to boast of his closeness to the great man, who was a proper Portuguese. The great man clearly had a lot to do with Correia's agencies, and we talked among ourselves in a mocking, jealous way about the extraordinary relationship. Had Correia sought out the great man? Or had the great man, for some special reason, and through some intermediary (perhaps a merchant in the capital) chosen Correia? It didn't matter, though, how it had come about. Correia had scored. He was way above us.

He talked of trips to the capital (by air, and not by the dingy old coasting ships most of us still used); he talked of lunches and dinners with the great man, and once even of a dinner at the great man's house. But then after a while Correia talked less of the great man. He began to pretend, when he was with us, that his business ideas were his own; and we had to pretend with him. Though when he recited the foreign companies he was involved with, and the technical-sounding things he was importing, things that the army or the town might some day need, I found myself amazed at how little I knew of the modern world. And amazed at the same time at the ease with which Correia (who really knew only about estate work) was picking his way through it.

He became our big shot. When he found that the jealousy had subsided, and no one among us, his friends and neighbours, was quibbling about his new position, he became oddly modest. He said to me one Sunday, “You could do what I do, Willie. It's just a matter of courage. Let me tell you. You've spent time in England. You know the Boots shops. Over here we need the things they make, the medicines and other things. They have no agent. You could be the agent. So you write to them. You provide the references they will ask for, and you're in business. They'll be delighted.” I said, “But what am I going to do with the goods they send me? How am I going to start selling it? Where am I going to put it?” He said, “That's the trouble. To do business you have to be in business. You have to start thinking in a different way. You can't write to people like Boots and think they'll want to do business with you just for a year and a day.” And I thought, from the way he talked, that he and his principal had gone quite seriously into the Boots business, and nothing had come of it.

He said one Sunday that he had begun to think of representing a certain famous manufacturer of helicopters. That took our breath away, because we knew now that he wasn't joking, and it gave us some idea how big he had become. He seemed to know a lot about helicopters. He said the idea had come to him all at once—he made it sound like a saint's illumination—when he was driving along the road to the coast. He talked about helicopters for many weeks. And then we read in the controlled press—in an item we might have paid no attention to if we didn't know Correia—that a number of helicopters were being acquired, but of a different make from the one Correia had talked about. We heard no more from him about helicopters.

So Correia became rich—the helicopter business was only a stumble—and he and his wife spoke in their old simple-minded way about their money. Yet they still had that idea of the disaster to come. Their good fortune had made them more worried than ever, and they said they had decided not to spend their money in the colony. The only thing they did here was to buy a beach house, not far from the restaurant we used to go to, in a holiday area that was now opening up fast. They did that as an “investment.” It was one of their new words. They formed a company called Jacar Investments; and they passed around to us, as to country cousins they had left behind, cards printed with the stylish name, which combined elements of their first names, Jacinto and Carla. They travelled a lot because of their new business, but now they didn't only open bank accounts. They began to think of getting “papers” for various places—making us feel even more left behind—and on their travels they set matters in train: papers for Australia, papers for Canada, papers for the United States, papers for Argentina and Brazil. They even talked—or Carla talked one Sunday—of going to live in France. They had just been there, and they brought a bottle of a famous French wine for the Sunday lunch. There was a half glass for everybody, and everybody sipped and said what nice wine it was, though it was actually too acidic. Carla said, “The French know how to live. A flat on the Left Bank, and a little house in Provence—that would be very nice. I've been telling Jacinto.” And we who were not going to France sipped the acid wine like poison.

After some years of this—when it seemed that to the success of the Correias there could be no end, as long as the army was there, and the town was growing, and the great man was in his place in the capital—after some years there was a crisis. We knew it by the Correias' behaviour. They drove an hour and a half every morning to the mission church and heard mass. Three hours' driving, and an hour's mass, every day, and heaven knows how many prayers or novenas or whatever at home: it wasn't the kind of behaviour anyone could keep secret. Jacinto Correia grew pale and thin. Then we read in the controlled newspapers that irregularities had been uncovered on the procurement side. For some weeks the newspapers allowed the scandal to spark away, and then the great pure Portuguese man with whom Jacinto Correia was connected made a statement in the local executive council. In everything that concerned the public weal, the great man said, the government had to be ever vigilant, and he intended, without fear or favour, to get to the bottom of what had happened on the procurement side. The guilty would be brought to book; no one in the colony should doubt that.

It was the other side of the easy-going authoritarian state, and we knew that the Correias were in deep trouble, that neither bank accounts in great cities nor papers for great countries could rescue them. Darkness here was darkness.

Poor Carla said, “I never wanted this life. The nuns will tell you. I wanted to be a nun.”

And we knew then—it was something we had talked about for years among ourselves—why Correia had been chosen by the great man. It was for just such a moment, when the great man might have to throw someone into the darkness. To destroy a Portuguese like himself would have been to break caste, according to the code of the colony, and to become disreputable. There was no trouble at all in throwing a man of the second rank into the darkness, someone from the half-and-half world, educated and respectable and striving, unusually knowledgeable about money, and ready for many reasons to do whatever he might be required to do.

For three or four months the Correias lived with this torment. They dreamed all the time of simpler days, before the agencies, and all the time they rebuked themselves. Our hearts went out to them; but their wretchedness also made them tedious. Jacinto became like an invalid, living with his disease as with an enemy and thinking of little else. And then, abruptly, the crisis was over. Jacinto's great man in the capital had found some way of putting down the rival who had started all the mischief. The newspapers then stopped writing their poisonous paragraphs, and the procurement scandal (which had existed only in the newspapers) simply ceased to be.

But it wasn't the end of Jacinto's anxiety. He had been given an idea of the uncertain ways of power. He knew now that he might not always have the protection of a great man, and then, for any number of reasons, someone might wish to reopen the case against him. So he suffered. And in one way that was strange, since for years we had heard Jacinto talk (and sometimes with zest) of a calamity to come, something that would sweep away the life of the colony, sweep away all his world. A man who lived easily with that idea (and liked to frighten people with it) shouldn't have worried for a moment about the schemings of a few vengeful people in the capital— all doomed, anyway. But Jacinto's big event, which was going to take away everybody and everything, was a philosophical sham. As soon as you looked at it you saw that it was very vague. It really was a moral idea and a way of self-absolution, a way of living in the colony and at the same time standing outside it. It was an abstraction. The disgrace he was worried about was not abstract. It was very real, easy to work out in many of its details; and it was personal. It was going to fall on him alone and leave the rest of the whole sweet world untouched.