A Treacherous Paradise Read online

  They turned away from the sea, and the car climbed up the hills to the more elevated part of the town. A number of stone houses were being built along two long, wide esplanades. There were rails for horse-drawn trams.

  The car stopped outside a house that seemed to have just been finished. It had a white-plastered facade, and a garden with rhododendrons and acacias. Senhor Vaz opened the car door and helped Hanna out. She looked questioningly at him. Why had they stopped outside this house?

  The door was opened by a maid. They went in. There was no furniture in the rooms. Hanna could smell paint that hadn’t yet dried, and wooden floors that had only recently been oiled.

  ‘I want to give you this house,’ said Senhor Vaz without further ado.

  His voice was soft, almost husky, as if it were a woman speaking. She had the impression that he was very proud of what he was offering her.

  ‘I want us to live here,’ he said. ‘The day you agree to marry me, we shall leave our rooms in the hotel and move here.’

  Hanna said nothing. She explored the empty house in silence with Senhor Vaz a few cautious paces behind her.

  He asked her no questions. He didn’t invite the answer he must have been longing to hear.

  When they returned to the hotel, Hanna thought yet again that she would never be able to explain to anybody about what had happened to her during the time she had lived in Africa. Least of all how a man who barely reached up to her shoulders and owned a brothel had proposed to her and wanted to present her with a large stone house with a garden and a sea view.

  Nobody would believe her. Everybody would take it for granted that it was either a lie, or a wild dream.

  Hanna decided to talk to Felicia. Perhaps she would be able to give her some advice.

  A few evenings later, when Felicia had said goodbye to one of her regular clients, a banker from Pretoria who always wanted her to be brutal and torture him during their sessions, Hanna went to visit her in her room. Hanna told her the truth – that Senhor Vaz had proposed marriage to her.

  ‘I know,’ said Felicia. ‘Everybody knows. I think even Carlos gathers what is going on. He may only be a chimpanzee, but he’s clever. He understands more than you would think.’

  Her reply surprised Hanna. She had thought that Senhor Vaz’s proposal had been made most discreetly.

  ‘Has he spoken about it? To whom?’

  ‘He never says anything. But he doesn’t need to. We understand even so. But he doesn’t realize that, of course.’

  Hanna suddenly became unsure about what to say next. Their conversation was turning out to be quite different from what she had expected.

  ‘Senhor Vaz is a friendly man,’ said Felicia. ‘He can be brutal, but he always regrets it afterwards. And he lets us keep nearly half of what we earn. There are brothels in this town where the women hardly get a tenth.’

  ‘How come he isn’t married?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Has he ever been married?’

  ‘I don’t know that either. He came here from Lisbon over twenty years ago, with his brother and his parents. His father was a businessman and worked far too hard in the heat we have here. He died not long after he arrived. His wife went back to Portugal, but the two brothers stayed on. A few years later Senhor Vaz started this brothel, using money he’d got when he sold his father’s business. That’s all I know.’

  ‘So there’s never been a woman in his life?’

  Felicia smiled.

  ‘Sometimes I simply don’t understand the questions white people ask,’ she said. ‘Of course there have been women in his life. I don’t really know how many, or who they are. But he does the same as other brothel owners do in this town – he never touches his own girls, but goes to his colleagues’ establishments.’

  ‘Why does he want to marry me?’

  ‘Because you are white. I think he’s also impressed by the fact that you can afford to live here and pay for your room. And I suppose he’s stricken by the loneliness that affects all white people in this country.’

  ‘My money will soon run out.’

  Felicia looked thoughtfully at her.

  ‘You’re not ill any more,’ she said in the end. ‘You’re strong enough now to continue your journey to wherever you were or are going to. But you choose to stay here. Something is making you stay here. I don’t know if it’s because you don’t have anywhere to go to or to return to, or whether there is some other reason. Anyway, now Senhor Vaz has proposed to you. You could marry a worse man than he is. He’ll treat you with respect. He’ll give you a large house. That’s something my husband would never be able to give me. He’s a fisherman, his name’s Ateme. We have two children and I’m happy to see him every time we meet.’

  ‘Who looks after your children when you’re here?’

  ‘Their mother does.’

  Hanna shook her head. She didn’t understand.

  ‘Their mother? I thought you said you were their mother.’

  ‘My sister. She’s also their mother. Just as I’m her children’s mother as well. Or my other sisters’ children’s mother.’

  ‘How many sisters do you have?’

  ‘Four.’

  Hanna thought that over. There was of course another question she felt bound to ask.

  ‘What does your husband say about you working here?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Felicia quite simply. ‘He knows that I’m faithful to him.’

  ‘Faithful? Here?’

  ‘I only go with white men. For money. He doesn’t bother about that.’

  Hanna tried to understand what she’d just heard. All the time the gap seemed to grow wider rather than narrower. She didn’t comprehend the world she was living in.

  She thought about Carlos again. Perhaps he no longer wanted to be an ape, but he couldn’t be a human being.

  The lonely chimpanzee had changed into a vacuum inside a white waiter’s coat.

  What was she turning into?

  40

  THAT EVENING HANNA decided to accept Senhor Vaz’s proposal of marriage. The most important reason for her decision was that she had come to accept that she could no longer cope with living as a widow. And perhaps one day she would be able to feel the same for Vaz as she had done for Lundmark.

  The following day she gave him her answer. Senhor Vaz didn’t seem to be surprised, but evidently regarded her ‘yes’ as a formality that he had taken for granted.

  Three weeks later they were married at a simple ceremony in the Catholic priest’s residence next to the cathedral. The marriage witnesses were people Hanna didn’t know. Senhor Vaz had also taken Carlos along, dressed in his tailcoat, but the priest had refused to allow the chimpanzee to be present. He was quite shocked, and regarded the proposed presence of Carlos to be blasphemy. Senhor Vaz had no choice but to accept the priest’s ban. Carlos waited outside while the ceremony took place, and climbed up into the bell tower. Afterwards they had dinner in the best hotel in town, which was situated on a hill with views over the sea. Carlos was with them, because they had a private room.

  They spent their wedding night in a suite in the hotel. There was a smell of lavender when Hanna entered the bedroom.

  When they had switched the light off she could feel the warm breath of her new husband on her face. For a short, confused moment it was as if Lundmark had come back to her; but then she smelled the pomade in his black hair and knew that this was a different man lying by her side.

  She waited for what was going to come next. She spread herself out, prepared herself. But Senhor Vaz – or Attimilio to use his first name – didn’t manage to penetrate her. He tried over and over again, but he wasn’t up to it: what should have been a lance was a broken twig.

  In the end he turned away from her and curled up, as if he were ashamed.

  Hanna wondered if she had done something wrong. But the next day, when she plucked up courage and asked Felicia about it, she was told that what had happened was not unus
ual as far as men were concerned. All in good time Senhor Vaz would no doubt be able to prove that he had the strength on which the whole of his commercial enterprises depended. But the fact was that there was always a threat hanging over a brothel: all men could suddenly become impotent.

  Hanna didn’t understand everything that Felicia said, but she did realize that what had happened wasn’t her fault.

  A few days later they moved into the stone house that had by now been filled with furniture. There was a handsome, shiny piano in one room that smelled of mimosa and other plants that Hanna had never come across before.

  One evening, a few weeks after her wedding, when Hanna was alone with the maid, she played a note on the piano and made it linger on by treading on one of the pedals.

  It was as if the room’s shadows were suddenly populated by all those people she had left behind. Jonathan Forsman, Berta, Elin, her siblings and the third mate whose burial at sea she had attended six months earlier.

  But her reaction was neither sadness nor regret. A cold wind of dismay blew past her. It came from nowhere as the sound of the piano faded away. What had she done? By attaching herself to a man she barely knew?

  She didn’t know. But she forced herself to think: there is no turning back. I am where I am.

  Nowhere else but just here.

  41

  EVERY MORNING SHE went out on to the balcony that ran along the whole of the house’s upper floor. From there she could see the town climbing up and down the slopes beyond the harbour with its many cranes gleaming in the heat haze, and furthest away the sea where ships were waiting for high tide. She had bought a better pair of binoculars than the ones she had before, and Senhor Vaz had paid a black carpenter to make a stand on which the binoculars could rest.

  She continued to keep an eye on the ships, but now she no longer hoped to discover one in the roadstead flying a Swedish flag. On the contrary. Every morning she was scared she might see a ship lying there which could take her home. She was afraid that in that case she would begin to think that the ship had come too late.

  Attimilio, as she still found it difficult to call him, left the house every morning at eight o’clock. He clambered into one of the horse-drawn coaches that took him down to the harbour district. At about noon he would come back home and they would eat lunch together, after which he took an afternoon nap before going back down to the women again.

  Hanna very soon discovered that her new marriage was very different in one particular way from the time she had spent with Lundmark. Now she was almost always alone. Lundmark had always been close at hand when they were aboard Captain Svartman’s ship. Her new husband treated her with the greatest respect and was always friendly towards her, but he was rarely at home. He ate and slept, and at night he continued to make his failed attempts to do what Hanna now, to her great surprise, had begun to long for. But apart from that they did next to nothing together. She continued to ask him questions about his earlier life, but he answered evasively or not at all. He didn’t lose his temper and didn’t seem to be put out by her questions: but he quite simply didn’t want to say anything. Hanna thought it seemed as if she had married a man without a past at all.

  Looking back, Hanna would regard this time as one of almost total inactivity. There was virtually nothing for her to do, no jobs that needed to be done. The garden was looked after by an old black man who was stone deaf. His name was Rumigo, and he had one of his innumerable sons to help him. Hanna would sometimes stand and watch how gently he handled the flowers, trees and shrubs. Inside the house was Anaka, who had also looked after Attimilio’s parents. She was beginning to grow old, but still worked just as hard, and hardly ever seemed to sleep. She lived alone in a little shack behind the house. Hanna sometimes saw her sitting there, smoking her pipe before going to bed. Anaka would be up again at four o’clock, and served breakfast at six.

  Whenever Hanna spoke to Anaka, the maid immediately went down on one knee before her. Attimilio had explained to Hanna that this was not primarily a gesture of submission and subservience, but more of a tradition – a way of showing respect. Hanna found it difficult to cope with these continual genuflections, and tried to persuade Anaka to stop it. But without success. When Attimilio explained that Anaka would do the same to a black man of superior rank, she gave up. The genuflections continued.

  There was another woman in the house, a young girl who Attimilio explained was the daughter of his mother’s seamstress. She had a Portuguese name, Julietta, and helped Anaka with all the things the latter didn’t have the time or strength to do herself. Hanna guessed that Julietta must be fourteen or fifteen years old.

  Hanna experienced days in which she felt she was wandering around in an almost trance-like state. The heat was oppressive, occasionally interrupted by short tropical downpours. She spent most of the time sitting fanning herself in one of the rooms in which sea breezes wafted in through the open windows. She had the feeling that she was waiting for something, but didn’t know what. She was sometimes afflicted by a nagging annoyance at being superfluous – everything that happened in this large house was done by the black servants. Her own role was simply to do nothing.

  Attimilio had explained that she shouldn’t hesitate to say if she was dissatisfied with the work carried out by the servants. Now and then she should put on a pair of white gloves and go around the house, running her fingers along picture frames and door frames to make sure that everything had been properly cleaned.

  ‘If you don’t keep chasing them up, they’ll start skimping,’ said Attimilio.

  ‘But everything is always beautifully clean.’

  ‘That’s because you check up on them. The moment you stop they’ll cease to be as careful.’

  Hanna could neither understand nor reconcile herself to Attimilio’s constant denigration of black people. She still suspected that she could detect traces of fear behind his harsh words. But her presence in the house did not change his attitudes.

  One evening he came home after a shocking incident in the brothel. A customer had fired a revolver and one of the women had received a superficial flesh wound on one arm. He burst out into a vehement tirade attacking the country he lived in.

  ‘This would be a good continent to live in,’ he roared, ‘if only there weren’t all these black people everywhere.’

  ‘But wasn’t it a white man who fired the revolver?’ asked Hanna tentatively.

  Senhor Vaz didn’t respond. Instead he made his excuses and retired to his study. She could hear through the closed door that he was playing Portuguese military marches on his primitive gramophone. When she bent down and peered in through the keyhole she could see him marching angrily around the room, swinging his sabre. She started giggling. The man who was now her husband seemed to be more like a tin soldier than anything else. One of the tin soldiers she had seen Jonathan Forsman’s sons playing with.

  Then she started feeling uneasy again. She had become like other white women in this town: inactive, apathetic and constantly fanning herself.

  42

  AFTER SEVERAL MORE weeks during which Attimilio had still failed to make love to his wife night after night, Hanna began to realize that Attimilio was close to unbounded desperation. She turned to Felicia once again, but in secret, one day when Senhor Vaz had gone to Pretoria where he invested quite a lot of the money he earned from the brothel. Once a month a lawyer came to visit him. They would shut themselves away in his study, and nobody else had a clue what they discussed. The lawyer, whose name was Andrade and had a limp, spoke so softly that Hanna could never understand a word of what he said.

  Felicia advised Hanna to seek help from a feticheiro.

  ‘There are plants you can eat, teas you can drink,’ said Felicia. ‘They enable men to do what they want to do more than anything else in the world.’

  ‘I don’t know a feticheiro,’ said Hanna. ‘I don’t know any medicine men who can give me what I need.’

  Felicia held out her ha
nd.

  ‘It costs money,’ she said. ‘If you give me some, I can get you what you need. Then all you have to do is to mix it into his food or into something he drinks. I don’t know all the rules that apply, but I do know that you have to administer it when a west wind is blowing.’

  Hanna thought that over.

  ‘We hardly ever have a west wind,’ she said.

  Felicia pondered what Hanna had said.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It will be better for you to make use of the full moon. That is also the right time to give him it. I always forget that we never get winds blowing here from the interior of the country – only from the sea or from the ice in the far south. We who live here in the Baia da Boa Morte know nothing about the winds from the vast savannah.’

  Hanna had never heard the name of the lagoon before. She knew that the town was called Lourenço Marques. One evening Attimilio had explained that it was named after a famous Portuguese general who was a match for Bonaparte when it came to cunning and courage. Hanna had no idea who this Bonaparte was, just as she had no idea that the lagoon had such a remarkable name.

  But had she really heard correctly what she had said? ‘The lagoon of good death?’ Could that really be what Felicia had called the bay that sparkled every day in the sunshine?

  ‘Why is the lagoon called that?’