‘I’m Moses,’ he said. ‘Isabel’s brother. I’ve come from the mines to set her free and take her away with me.’
His eyes were completely calm. In some strange way he reminded her of her father.
65
Two fires were already burning where the guards were curled up asleep. But Moses lit a third one at the back of the house where Ana had arranged for a vegetable garden to be created, and planted some orange and lime trees. For the first time since she arrived in Lourenço Marques she found herself with an African who treated her as an equal. There was no trace in him of the false subservience the blacks felt obliged to assume. Moses looked her in the eye when he spoke to her. And this was the first time a black man had sat down on a chair in her presence. The norm was always for her to sit down while the black man she was speaking to remained standing. Ana Dolores had made that clear to her from the very start.
She put it to him straight out: why was he so different from all the others?
‘Why shouldn’t I look you in the eye?’ Moses replied. ‘You can’t hate or despise blacks or you wouldn’t be trying to help my sister. And so you are an unusual person as far as I am concerned.’
‘What do you do down the mines? Do you dig for coal?’
‘Diamonds. But of course, there is also coal there. It’s the same stuff, after all.’
Ana didn’t know about the connection between diamonds and coal, and so she didn’t understand his comment.
‘You make fires with coal. You wear diamonds on your fingers. How can they be the same thing?’
‘Really old coal develops into diamonds,’ said Moses. ‘One day perhaps I can explain it to you properly — all about the stuff we take out of the ground in the Rand.’
Ana said that she knew who he was and where he worked — but wondered how he knew who she was. Has Isabel told him about her?
‘I know what I know,’ was all he said in response. He gave her no further explanation, but instead embarked on a description of life in the mines, without her having asked about it.
‘The whites who’ve landed on our coasts have always turned most of their attention to looking for what is hidden under the soil,’ said Moses. ‘That’s why we Africans find it so hard to understand you. How can anybody travel so far and be prepared to risk dying of fever or snake bites, simply in order to look for things that are hidden under the ground? Of course, a lot of hunters come here as well. Others are running away from harassment they suffer in their homelands — what we don’t understand is why they come here and choose to live a life harassing us. White people are basically incomprehensible — but for that reason we find it easy to understand them because we know what they are after. But they don’t even do the digging themselves: they force us to do it. The whites have transformed us blacks into servants in the underworld. One day it will all come to an end, just as the sources of gold and diamonds will wither away.’
‘What will you do when your sister is free again?’ Ana asked.
‘I’m thinking of using those underground tunnels I know so well to protect my sister and her children. That’s where I shall take them to once she has escaped. Moving into another country, passing over a border that the whites have established, that doesn’t mean a thing. All the borders you have made are nothing more than lines in our red soil — they could have been drawn by children using sticks.’
He stopped, and watched the fire dying out. It seemed to Ana that he had made a fire that would only burn for as long as he had something to say to her. Once the embers were no longer glowing, he stood up and left. His last words were that they would meet at the fort the following day.
Ana went back to her bedroom. Carlos woke up when she lay down in bed, and stretched his hand out towards her. But just now she didn’t want an ape in bed beside her. Not just after having met and talked to the man known as Moses. She smacked Carlos — not hard, but enough to signal to him that he should move to the ceiling light. With a sigh and an irritated grunt, Carlos leapt up and lay down in the dish-shaped lampshade, one arm hanging down towards the bed.
She got up early next morning, sat for a long time in front of the mirror contemplating her face and thinking how she could barely contain herself until she met Moses again. To her surprise she found herself thinking an unheard-of thought: Moses was a man she could imagine herself becoming close to. She put her hand over her mouth, as if she had cried out in horror.
The person I can see in the mirror is somebody else, she thought. Or somebody I have become without realizing it.
A few hours later, when she had forced herself to go through Herr Eber’s accounts in order to try and understand the claims about reduced income, Julietta announced that Father Leopoldo had come to visit her. Ana was immediately worried that something might have happened to Isabel. She ran down the stairs to meet him. But Father Leopoldo was able to calm her down. The old doctor had stitched up the wound very well, and the cotton wool was protecting her skin and preventing dirt from entering it.
‘I’ve only come to say that I’m continuing with my attempts to talk to her,’ he said when they had sat down in the shade on the veranda and Julietta had served tea.
‘But she’s still silent, is she?’
‘She doesn’t say a word. But she listens.’
‘Can you be sure of that?’
‘I can see that she’s listening.’
‘I know it’s none of my business, but what are you trying to talk to her about?’
‘I’m trying to persuade her to confess to her terrible sin, and submit her soul to God. He will pass judgement on her, but His judgement will be mild if she confesses and submits to His will.’
Ana looked at Father Leopoldo in surprise. He really believes what he says, she thought. For him, God is someone who hands out punishment — the same God that my grandmother in Funäsdalen used to talk about. He believes in the same hell that she did. He’s not like me. I don’t believe in hell, but I’m frightened of it all the same. If there is a hell, it is here on earth.
God is white, Ana thought. I suppose I’ve always thought that, but never so clearly as I do now.
She wanted to conclude the conversation.
‘This is the first time you’ve been to visit me,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe that you have only come to inform me that Isabel still isn’t saying anything. I know that already, because I visit her every day.’
‘I’ve also come to tell you that the plaster and rendering in one corner of the cathedral is falling off and needs repairing.’
‘I’m not a plasterer.’
‘We are going to need voluntary donations so that we can carry out repairs as soon as possible, before the damage gets any worse. We can’t wait for the Church authorities in Lisbon to pass resolutions to assist us.’
Ana nodded. She promised to make a donation despite the fact that it felt humiliating to discover that this was the real reason for Father Leopoldo’s visit. She no longer regarded him as a priest, but as a beggar pestering her.
He stood up, as if he were in a hurry to leave. Ana rang her bell and instructed Julietta to escort him out. She thought about her father’s words, to the effect that priests should be kicked out into the snow in bare feet. He wouldn’t have liked Father Leopoldo, she thought — but I would still have been a mucky little angel as far as he was concerned.
Ana avoided visiting the brothel that day. She sent Julietta there with a message to O’Neill saying that he would be responsible for what happened there until her next visit, but at the end she implied that she might well turn up before the end of the day despite everything. Senhor Vaz had taught her that everybody in the brothel needed to be kept on tenterhooks, suspecting that checks might be made at any time of day or night.