Half a Life (20 page)

One Sunday, when it was our turn to give the lunch, we went to the beach restaurant with the yellow and blue tiled floor. It was Correia's idea afterwards that we should all go to see his beach house, the investment. Ana and I and many of the others had never seen it, and he said he hadn't been there for two years. We drove from the restaurant back to the narrow asphalt coast road, a black crust on the sand, and after a while we turned off into a firm sandy road that led between brilliant green sand shrubs and tropical almond trees back to the sea. We saw an African hut, its smooth grass roof shining and almost auburn in the light. We stopped. Correia called out, “Auntie! Auntie!” An old black woman in an African cloth came out from behind the straight reed fence. Correia said to us, “Her son is half-Portuguese. He is the caretaker.” He was loud and friendly with the African woman, overdoing it a little, perhaps to show off to us, acting out the twin roles of the man who got on with Africans and the employer who treated his people well. The woman was worried. She was resisting Correia's role-playing. Correia asked for Sebastiao. Sebastiao wasn't at home. And we followed Correia, who was making a lot of noise, to the house on the beach.

We found a half ruin. Windows had been broken; in the moist salt air nails had rusted everywhere, and the rust had run, staining faded paint and bleached wood. The French doors on the ground floor had been taken off their hinges. Half in and half out of what should have been the sitting room there was a high-sided fishing boat propped up on timbers as in a dry dock.

The old African woman stood some distance behind Correia. He said nothing. He just looked. His face creased and went strange. He was beyond anger, and far away from the scene about him. He was helpless, drowning in pain. I thought, “He's mad. I wonder why I never saw it before.” And it was as if Carla, the convent girl, was used to living with what I had just seen. She went to him and, as though we were not there, talked to him as to a child, using language I had never heard her use. She said, “We'll burn the fucking place down. I'll go and get the kerosene right now and we'll come back and burn the whole damned thing, with the fucking boat.” He said nothing, and allowed her to lead him by the arm back to the car, past Auntie's hut.

When we next saw them, some weeks later, he looked drained. His thin cheeks were soft and slack. Carla said, “We're going to Europe for a while.”

Mrs. Noronha, hunched up in her chair, said in her soft voice, “A bad time.” Carla said, “We want to go and see the children.” The Correias' two children, who were in their teens, had been sent a year or so before to boarding schools in Portugal. Mrs. Noronha said, “A better time for them.” And then, without any change of tone, “What's the matter with the boy? Why is he so ill?” Carla became agitated. She said, “I didn't know he was ill. He hasn't written that.”

Mrs. Noronha paid no attention. She said, “I made a journey once at a bad time. It was not long after the war. And it was long before I took to this chair. Before I took the throne, you might say. We went to South Africa, to Durban. A pretty town, but it was a bad time. About a week after we got there the natives began to riot. Shop-burning, looting. The riots were against the Indians, but I got caught up in the trouble one day. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know the streets. In the distance I saw a white lady with fair hair and a long dress. She beckoned to me and I went to her. She led me without a word through various side streets to a big house, and there I stayed until the streets were quiet. I told my friends about the incident that evening. They said, ‘What was this lady like?' I told them. They said, ‘Describe the house.' I described the house. And somebody said, ‘But that house was pulled down twenty years ago. The lady you met lived there, and the house was pulled down after she died.'” And having told her story, which was really about her own powers, Mrs. Noronha turned her head to one side, against her shoulder, like a bird settling down to sleep. And, as often with her when she was soothsaying or storytelling, we couldn't tell at the end how we had got to where we had got. Everybody just had to look solemn and stay quiet for a while.

Bad time or not, the Correias went off to Europe, to see their children and then to do other things. They stayed away for many months.

*

I
GOT TO KNOW
their estate manager. I saw a lot of him in the town. He was a small and wiry mixed-race man in his forties with an educated way of speaking. Sometimes he could overdo it. He would say, for instance, about a Portuguese or Indian shopkeeper with whom he had been having trouble, “He isn't, by the remotest stretch of the imagination, what you would call a gentleman.” But his speech limbered up when he saw more of me. He became full of mischief, and at the same time quite trusting, and I felt I was being drawn into a series of little conspiracies against the Correias. We tried the new cafés (they opened up and closed down all the time). We got to know the bars. I got to know the new flavour of the military town, and I liked it. I liked being with the Portuguese soldiers. There was sometimes an officer with a long memory muttering about Goa and the Indians. But the Indian takeover of Goa had happened seven or eight years before. Few of the young conscripts knew about it, and the soldiers were generally very friendly. There was as yet no war in the bush. There had been stories about guerrilla training camps in the desert in Algeria and later in Jordan; but these stories had turned out to be fanciful: a few students from Lisbon and Coimbra playing at being guerrillas in the vacations. In our military town there was still peace and a great deal of civility. It was like being in Europe, and on holiday. It was for me like being in London again, but with money now. My excursions to the town took longer and longer.

Álvaro, the Correias' manager, said to me one day, “Would you like to see what
they
do?” We were in a café in the capital, having a coffee before driving home, and he lifted his chin at a group of brightly dressed African women, brilliant in the mid-afternoon light, who were passing in front of the café window. Normally the afternoon view was of torpid begging children, very dusty, who leaned on walls or shop windows or posts, opened and closed their mouths in slow motion all the time, and seemed not to see anything. Even when you gave them money they seemed not to know; and they never went away, however much you gave them; you had to learn to ignore them. The women were not like that. They were quite regal. I supposed they were camp-followers, and I said to Álvaro that I would like to see what they did. He said, “I'll come for you tomorrow evening. It's much better in the evenings, and it's much better at the weekends. You'll have to find some way of making your excuses to Madame Ana.”

Álvaro made it sound easy, but I found it hard. In ten years I hadn't lied to Ana; there hadn't been the occasion. In the beginning, in London, when I couldn't see my way ahead, I had fabricated things, mainly about my family background. I don't know how much of that Ana believed, or whether it meant much to her. In Africa I had after a while let those London lies drop; in our half-and-half group they seemed to have no point. Over the years Ana had picked up the truth about me. It wasn't too different from what she had always believed; and she had never made me feel small by reminding me of the stories I had told her. In Africa we were very close, and that closeness seemed natural. She had given me my African life; she was my protector; I had no other anchor. So I found it hard to make my excuses to her. It spoilt the next day. I began to work out a story. It felt like a lie. I tried to straighten it out, and it became too involved. I thought, “I am going to sound like someone from the quarters.” And then I thought, “I am going back to my London ways.” When the time came Ana hardly listened to what I had to say. She said, “I hope Carla is going to have an estate to come back to.” It was as easy as that. But I knew I had broken something, put an end to something, for almost no reason.

Álvaro was dead on time; he might have been waiting in the dark just outside the estate compound. I thought that we would be going to the town, but Álvaro didn't make for the main road. Instead, we drove slowly about the backways, all ordinary to me now, even at night. I thought that Álvaro was killing time. We drove, now past cotton fields, now through open bush, now past dark plantations of cashew trees. Every few miles we came to a village, and then we drove very slowly. Sometimes in a village there was a kind of night market, with petty stalls in low open huts, lit by a hurricane lantern, selling matches and loose cigarettes and small tins of various things, and with a few improvident people, men or women or children, finding themselves penniless that day and sitting at the roadside with candles in paper bags beside very small heaps of their own food, sticks of dried cassava, or peppers, or vegetables. Like people playing at housekeeping, and playing at buying and selling, I had always thought.

Álvaro said, “Pretty, eh?” I knew some of these villages very well. I had seen these night markets scores of times. It wasn't what I had come out to see with Álvaro. He said, “You wanted to see what the Africans did at night. I'm showing you. You've been here ten years. I don't know how much you know. In a couple of hours these roads we've been driving along will be crawling with people looking for adventure. There will be twenty or thirty parties tonight all around you. Did you know that? And they aren't going there just to dance, I can tell you.”

The headlights of the Land Rover picked out, just in time, a little girl in a shoulder-strap dress ahead of us. She stood at the side of the road and, shiny-faced in the lights, watched us pass. Álvaro said, “How old do you think that girl is?” I really hadn't thought; the girl was like so many others; I wouldn't have recognised her again. Álvaro said, “I will tell you. That girl is about eleven. She's had her first period, and that means that she's ready for sex. The Africans are very sensible about these things. No foreign nonsense about under-age sex. That girl who looks like nothing to you is screwing every night with some man. Am I telling you things you know?” I said, “You are telling me things I don't know.” He said, “It's what we think about you, you know. I hope you don't mind.” And really in ten years I had never looked in that way at the villages and the Africans walking beside the road. I suppose it was a lack of curiosity, and I suppose it was a remnant of caste feeling. But then, too, I wasn't of the country, hadn't been trained in its sexual ways (though I had observed them), and had never before had someone like Álvaro as a guide.

In the very beginning, when I hadn't even known about the pleasures of living in the wilderness, I had thought that the mixed-race overseers couldn't have had much of a life, living so close to Africans, surrendering so much of themselves. Now I saw that for some it would have been a life of constant excitement. Álvaro lived in a dingy four-roomed concrete house. It stood by itself on an exposed, treeless patch on Correia's estate. It looked a comfortless place to call home, but Álvaro lived happily there with his African wife and African family, and with any number of mistresses or concubines or pick-ups within reach in the surrounding villages. In no other part of the world would Álvaro have found a life like that. I had thought at the beginning of the evening that he was killing time, driving about the backways. He wasn't. He was trying to show where hidden treasure lay. He said, “Take that little girl we just passed. If you stopped to ask her the way she would stick up her little breasts at you, and she would know what she was doing.” And I began to understand that Álvaro was already wound up, thinking of that little girl or some other girl sticking up her little breasts at him.

At last we made for the main road. It was badly potholed after the rains. We couldn't see too far ahead, and we had to drive slowly. Every now and then we came to a rock cone. For a while before and after it seemed to hang over us in the darkness, marking off another stage to the town. The town was alive but not raucous. The street lights were scattered and not too bright. Here and there in the central area a fluorescent tube turned a shop window into a box of light, not to advertise the shoddy goods in the higgledy-piggledy display, but to keep away thieves. The weak blue light, teasing the eye, didn't travel far in the darkness of the street, where during the day loaders, or men who could wait all morning or afternoon for a loading job, sat with their legs wide apart on the steps of shops, and where now another kind of lounger waited for whatever might come his way from the new traffic of the garrison town. Álvaro said, “It's better to steer clear of those fellows. You have no control over them.”

And just as at the start of the evening he had driven around the backways of the estates so now he drove around the quieter streets of the town, sometimes getting out of the Land Rover to talk in a confidential voice to people he saw. He told me he was looking for a good dancing place; they changed all the time, he said. It was better than going to a bar. They could be brutal places, bars. In a bar you didn't deal with the girl alone; you also dealt with her protector, who might be one of the loungers in the street. And in a bar there were no facilities. When you found a girl you had to go out with her to some dark passage between houses in the town or to some house in the African city, the straw city, as it was called, at the edge of the town, and all that time you would be at the mercy of the protector. It was all right for a soldier, but it was bad for an estate-manager. If there was an unpleasantness with the protector, word would get back in no time to the estate, and there could be trouble with the workers.

At last we came to the place Álvaro had been looking for. I imagined it was a place with facilities. He said, “It's as our elders say. If you ask often enough, you can get to Rome.” We were at the edge of the town, where the asphalt roads ended and dirt began, much cut up by the rains. It was dark, with only a few scattered lights, and so quiet that the slamming of the Land Rover doors was like a disturbance.

We had stopped in front of a big warehouse-like building. High at one corner was a metal-shaded bulb misty and twinkling with flying ants (it was the season). Other cars were parked in the space in front; and we saw now that there were watchmen of a sort (or just watchers) sitting on a half-wall on one side of the warehouse lot, where the land fell away. One of these watchers spoke directions to us, and we went down a concrete passage between the warehouse and the half-wall to another warehouse-like building. We heard music inside. A small door opened, a man with a truncheon let us in, and we both gave him money. The entrance passage was narrow and dark and it made a hairpin bend before it took us to the main room. Blue light bulbs lit up a small dancing area. Two couples were dancing—Portuguese men, African women—and they were reflected, dimly, in the dark mirror or mirror-tiles that covered the wall at the end of the dancing area. The room was full of tables with low shaded lights, but it wasn't easy to see how many of them were occupied. We didn't move in far. We sat at a table on the edge of the dancing area. Across the way were the girls, like the courtesans of the previous afternoon who had been pleased to walk down the street in their pretty clothes, turning heads. When I got used to the light I saw that many of the girls on the other side of the dancing area were not village girls from the interior, but were what we called Mohammedans, people of the coast, of remote Arab ancestry. Two African waiters and a thin Portuguese man in a sports shirt—the owner, I suppose—moved between the tables. When the Portuguese man came close to us I saw that he was not young, had very quiet eyes, and seemed strangely detached from everything.