All conversation had ceased, everybody was looking at the two men and the girl, who hardly knew what was happening around her.
‘Is there a problem?’ Ana asked.
‘Not really,’ said Pandre. ‘It’s just that this man is standing in our way. We were just about to withdraw.’
‘He has stolen the woman I have picked for this evening,’ said Rocha.
He spoke Portuguese to Ana. When he started to translate, Pandre raised his hand to stop him. He had understood everything that was said.
Rocha pulled A Magrinha roughly to his side, as if to underline what he had said. In a flash Pandre took her back again — but before either Rocha or Ana had time to react, A Magrinha had snapped out of her trance-like state. She pushed Pandre to one side and stood next to Rocha.
‘He is going to be with me tonight,’ she said. ‘Not that brown man.’
Pandre’s smile vanished. It was as if a flame had been blown out. He turned to Ana. She could see that he was furious.
‘I insist that I have made my choice,’ he almost snarled.
‘That’s my impression too,’ said Ana, turning to A Magrinha and gesturing that she should go back to Pandre.
‘I don’t want to,’ she said. ‘He’s brown.’
‘And you are black,’ said Ana. ‘I’m white. And I’m the one who decides what you’re going to do.’
‘No,’ said A Magrinha. ‘I’m not going to get undressed for him.’
Rocha smiled. O’Neill had moved closer as it looked as if blows were about to be exchanged. But Pandre gave up. Ana knew that he was not accepting defeat, he was still furious: but he could see that things could become very nasty, and he wanted to avoid that.
‘I’m going back to my hotel,’ he said. ‘I assume that the payment for my services will have arrived before I leave Lourenço Marques around noon tomorrow.’
He bowed, then hastily left the establishment, followed by O’Neill. The men clustered round the bar applauded approvingly. Rocha pushed A Magrinha away contemptuously, and she flopped down on to a sofa. Ana could see that right now she hated the place she found herself in — more than ever before.
When Ana heard the car’s engine start, she went out into the street. O’Neill was standing there, smoking.
‘That man should never have come here,’ he said. ‘It’s none of my business, of course. But if you let the likes of him come in, you’ll soon find that all the other customers disappear.’
Ana didn’t respond. She knew that she ought to go in and order Rocha to leave the premises, but instead she crossed over the street and went into a little bar run by two Portuguese brothers. One was small and fat, the other a hunchback. The bar was cramped. It contained a wooden counter, a few tables in the dark corners, and a number of street walkers who divided their time between parading up and down outside and having drinks bought for them in the dark interior of the bar. Ana asked the hunchbacked brother for a glass of cognac, emptied it rapidly and ordered another. She recognized one of the women lurking in the shadows. She had frequently asked to joined Ana’s brothel, but been rejected by the other women because she had a reputation for stealing. She was also in the habit of punishing customers who didn’t treat her well by poisoning them with magic potions. The poison didn’t kill them, but rendered the men impotent for a considerable length of time.
When Ana saw that the woman was coming towards her, she gestured with her hand that she should keep her distance, put money on the counter to pay for her drinks, and went back out into the street.
The night sky was clear. She thought about her father and the evenings when he used to show her the constellations he was so familiar with. She waited there in the street until the car returned from Pandre’s hotel, and just before clambering in she turned to O’Neill.
‘Tell the women I want to see them all at seven o’clock tomorrow morning.’
‘They’ll be asleep then.’
‘No, they won’t,’ said Ana. ‘They will be awake, washed and dressed. At seven o’clock tomorrow morning I want to see them gathered around the jacaranda tree.’
‘I shall be there.’
‘I want to talk to the women, not to you. You will not be there.’
She closed the car door. She could see through the rear window that O’Neill was standing with an unlit cigarette in his hand, watching the car leave.
Carlos spent that night lying asleep, looking like a hairy ball, in the bed beside Ana. He touched her arms now and then in his sleep, as if he were climbing. As he didn’t whimper at all she assumed that meant he wasn’t having nightmares. If indeed apes had dreams like humans did. She wasn’t sure, but perhaps by now Carlos had moved sufficiently far away from his life as an ape. She had the impression that more and more often he was having dreams that scared him. Ana herself lay awake, dozing off briefly now and again, but most of the time rehearsing for the meeting tomorrow morning. She needed to prepare them for the difficulties which were going to get worse for as long as she continued trying to secure the release of Isabel. She would tell them that she had no intention of giving up, no matter what problems that might cause. But at the same time she wanted to know what they thought about it all. Did they understand Isabel’s situation? Was there any desire to help her?
During the night Ana got out of bed now and then — quietly in order not to wake Carlos up, even if she was never sure if he was only pretending to be asleep. She leafed through her well-thumbed and shabby Portuguese dictionary in an attempt to find the right words to express what she wanted to say the next morning. She went out on to the veranda in the warm night air. The guards were asleep beside their fires, a solitary dog trotted past without a sound in the street below. From the sea she could see the twinkling lights of ships waiting for high tide so that at dawn they could progress into the harbour and berth.
One of these days I’ll go down to the quayside as well, she thought. With a life newly shattered, in an attempt to mend it. That’s what brought me here. Soon it must also lead me on to the next stage, even if I don’t yet know where my destination will be.
64
Everybody was already there when Ana arrived at the brothel the next morning. On the way, she had stopped at Pandre’s hotel and handed over an envelope sealed with sealing wax to the half-awake manager. It contained the money Pandre had asked for. As she left the hotel, she wondered if she would ever see him again. She didn’t really know anything about him, apart from the fact that his father was a confidence trickster who used to glue false tail feathers on to pigeons.
There was no sign of O’Neill when Ana entered the brothel for the early-morning meeting. A chair had been placed under the jacaranda tree for her. To her surprise it was Felicia who started talking the moment she sat down. It became obvious to Ana that the women had prepared for the meeting in advance, perhaps just as thoroughly as she had.
Felicia spoke on behalf of them all.
‘We know that Senhora Ana is trying to help Isabel. That is something that surprises us, and we respect you for it. No white man would do that. Probably no other white woman either. But we are also aware that your doing so is causing difficulties for us. We are getting fewer customers, and the ones that do come are not as generous as they were before. We’ve also noticed that they sometimes treat us more roughly than they used to. The word in town is that men are choosing to go to different establishments with different women, as a protest against what you are doing to help Isabel. That means that we are earning less — if it goes on like this we shall soon have no customers at all. In other words, this place would lose altogether the good reputation it used to have.’