“He’ll get through all right. Gordon always says Loulou can do anything.”
He drove a day and a night with only a short nap two or three times with the car come to rest at the roadside. It was dangerous for anyone to drive so long and fast without rest but she knew nothing would happen. She found it was not that you don’t care if you live or die but just that you know when you can’t die. You have been left alive. He had brought with him only one of the girls, and there was plenty of room to stretch out and sleep. She and the girl had no common language, so their communication consisted of an occasional smile and a wordless accord about the times they needed to go off into the bushes together to pee. The heat was very great and with the speed produced a daze: forest, savannah, scrub, a change in motion winding down a pass. Loulou got on well with the officials at the border post and “forgot” two bottles of whisky left standing beside the air — conditioner that sweated water in the humidity. On the other side of the frontier was night, sudden bursts of cackling music as he tried to pick up some station on the car radio, confused sleep, the fuzzy bulk of him there in the sweater, the headlight beams cloudy with insects, dawn coming in as a smell of freshness before the light. They were in a near-desert, hard yellow earth funnelled into antheaps fifteen feet high, dowdy thornbush draped in tattered webs, huge baobab trees. They drove over wooden bridges above dry riverbeds. Towards midday all growing things ceased to exist and there was nothing but hard yellow cliffs, drifts of pollen-coloured dunes, more cliffs runnelled and sheered away by exposure, and then behind the yellow, a blue as bright and hard — the sea. Through the filthy villages, the escort of bicycles and chickens and overburdened buses and lorries that are the first sign of every colonial town, they came to factories with Portuguese names, cliffs clothed completely with the pink and white walls and tiled roofs, the dark trees and brilliant trails of bougainvillea of white men’s houses, and below, the pale cubes and rectangles of the commercial centre behind a curved corniche and a harbour-jumble of ships and cranes. Loulou took her to the Lisboa Hotel (“You like it — two bar for cocktail”) and gave her the equivalent of fifty pounds, partly in dollars, partly in sterling, in addition to the price in escudos of a ticket for Europe. On one of their trips to the bushes the girl had shown Rebecca packets of notes in a calico bag on either hip under her pagne—she seemed to have been brought along more as a piggybank than une petite folie. Loulou himself did not book into the hotel; he had his good friend in the harbour customs to go and see, and then he had promised to buy the girl a wig — she put her fingers on her shoulders and smiled demandingly to show that it must be long hair, really long — before they set off again to drive down south to the other seaport.
When they had gone she sat on one of the beds in the room she had been given, swaying slightly, still, from the motion of the car, and telephoned the airways office. She was told she would have to wait two days for a connection to Zurich; there was a seat for her on the plane. They took her name and she said she would come to pay for the ticket later.
It was a double room with two beds separated by a little night-table holding the telephone, an ashtray, and a booklet entitled, in English, French, and Portuguese, What to See and Where to Go. There was a bathroom and behind thick curtains she found a little slice of balcony. She went out for a moment. A half-moon of flat bay, the palms moving away at regular spaces along the curve, and just opposite the hotel, a new block going up behind screens of matting. In a gap, workmen sat on the tightrope of steel girders eating their lunch. Down below, a tiny square that must have been the plaza when the town was a garrison outpost was divided by sand paths and ornamental plants, like the quarterings of a heraldic crest. A workman with a paper forage cap on his head waved at her. She came inside, pulled the curtains again, and stood looking at the two beds. She turned down the cover of the one she had sat on while telephoning, and lay on her back. Six fake candles of the chandelier had made six shaded brown circles on the ceiling. The glass drops giddied slowly in some current of air that she did not feel. There was nothing familiar in the room but the picnic basket and the briefcase. And herself. It was on this day, exactly one week ago, that they had been on the road from Gala.
One of the men at the reception desk of the Hotel Lisboa was short, with a large head of crimped hair, a tiny mouth blue-shaded all round no matter how closely shaven, and young brown eyes ringed like a marmoset’s. This large head was not very high above the counter and was always inclined in one kind of service or another — he was either changing travellers’ cheques, getting a number on the telephone for someone, or clicking the lead out of his little gilt pencil to draw a street-map. He spoke English fluently and it was he who told her how to get to the airline office. He would step out to prod at the button when the lift was slow to come; with a smile like the smile from a hospital bed he would take up the room-key dropped at the desk by a guest going out into the sun.
She could recall at will every detail about this man’s face, it was a rubber stamp tried out on a blank page, whereas in Bray’s face there were gaps that could not be filled in. Between the cheekbone and the angle of the jaw, on the left side. From the nose to the upper lip. She could not put him together. She caught certain expressions and certain angles but she could not find the steady image.
The promenade under the palm trees was much longer than it looked. It took more than half an hour, walking slowly, to reach the entrance to the docks. She would walk one way along the promenade and the other way on the opposite side of the wide boulevard, along the shops and buildings. Just before the docks there was a smelly place where the promenade was slippery with bits of fish and African women wholesalers bargained for catches and took them away, in the boots of the local taxis. On the town side was a new complex of banks and insurance companies, all mosaics and metal collage and the sort of monumental sculpture of black goddesses that white architects tend to commission in colonies where the local population is particularly malnourished. There were shops crammed with transistor radios, tape-recorders, and electric grills with well-browned plaster chickens stuck on their spits. There were older buildings, storerooms and warehouses shuttered blind, and others with peeling pastel façades, trompe-l’oeil pillars and garlands painted faintly round the doors and windows. At the pavement cafés men read newspapers; the white ones lowered them a moment when a woman passed. She sat in the street at one or other of the little tables for long stretches, drinking her black coffee well sweetened and watching the big birds that stood all day in the shallow water of the bay, looking stranded on the mud when the tide was out, and locked to their mirror-image, upside down in the calm pale surface, when the tide was in. Once she walked down to the edge of the sloppy mud but the birds did not move. There were concrete benches on the promenade. She sat for a while pestered by child beggars selling lottery tickets, and young Portuguese soldiers; perhaps the benches were the traditional place for picking up girls, although prostitutes in that town were hardly likely to be white. The young soldiers came from an ancient fort on one of the yellow hills above the bay; if she turned left instead of right, along the promenade, when she came out of the Hotel Lisboa, she passed beneath it. It was solid and worn as the crown of an old molar; the Portuguese had built it five hundred years ago and were there still — army jeeps went up and down the steep road to the battlements and sentries’ huts stood among the very old fig trees, rooted in the walls, that had never let go, either. At night it was floodlit; one of the sights mentioned in the trilingual guide beside the bed.