About the people at the lunch Ana told me afterwards, “They are the second-rank Portuguese. That is how they are considered officially, and that is how they consider themselves. They are second rank because most of them have an African grandparent, like me.” In those days to be even a second-rank Portuguese was to have a kind of high status, and just as at the lunch they kept their heads down and ate, so in the colonial state they kept their heads down and made what money they could. That was to change in a couple of years, but at the moment that regulated colonial world seemed rock solid to everybody. And that was the world in which, for the first time, I found a complete acceptance.
Those were the days of my intensest love-making with Ana. I loved her—in that room that had been her grandfather's and her mother's, with a view of the nervous branching and the fine leaves of the rain tree—for the luck and liberation she had brought me, the undoing of fear, the granting to me of full manhood. I loved, as always, the seriousness of her face at those moments. There was a little curl to her hair just as it sprang out of her temples. In that curl I saw her African ancestry, and loved her for that too. And one day I realised that for all of the past week I had not thought about my fear of losing language and expression, the fear almost of losing the gift of speech.
The estate grew cotton and cashews and sisal. I knew nothing about these crops. But there was a manager and there were overseers. They lived about ten minutes away from the main house, down their own little dirt road, in a cluster of similar little white concrete bungalows with corrugated-iron roofs and small verandahs. Ana had said that the estate needed a man, and I knew, without being told, that my only function was to reinforce Ana's authority with these men. I never tried to do more than that, and the overseers accepted me. I knew that in accepting me they were really respecting Ana's authority. So we all got on. I began to learn. I took pleasure in a way of life that was far from anything I had known or envisaged for myself.
I used to worry in the beginning about the overseers. They didn't seem to have much of a life. They were mixed-race people, born in the country most of them, and they lived in that row of small concrete houses. Only the concrete of their houses separated the overseers from the Africans all around. African thatch and wattle was ordinary; concrete stood for dignity. But concrete wasn't a true barrier. These overseers lived, really, with the Africans. No other way was open to them. I used to think, trying to put myself in their place, that with their mixed background they might have felt the need of something more. There was the town on the coast. It offered a different kind of life, but it was more than an hour away in daylight and a good deal more after dark. It was a place only for quick excursions. To work on the estate was to live on the estate, and it was known that many of the overseers had African families. Whatever face these men showed us, the life waiting for them at home, in their concrete houses, was an African life at which I could only guess.
One day, when I was driving with one of the overseers to a new cotton field, I began to talk to the man about his life. We were in a Land Rover, and we had left the dirt road and were driving through bush, avoiding the bigger boggy dips and the dead branches of felled trees. I was expecting to hear some story of unfulfilled ambition from the overseer, some story of things going wrong, expecting to catch some little resentment of people better off and in the world outside. But there was no resentment. The overseer thought himself blessed. He had tried living in Portugal; he had even tried living in a South African town; he had come back. He hit the steering wheel of the Land Rover with the heel of his palm and said, “I can't live anywhere else.” When I asked why, he said, “This. What we are doing now. You can't do this in Portugal.” Land Rovers and four-wheel drives were new to me; I was still excited myself to drive off a road and pick a way through hummocky wet bush. But I felt that the overseer had a larger appreciation of the life of the place; his surrender was more than the simple sexual thing it seemed. And when I next saw the mildewed white staff bungalows I looked at them with a new respect. So bit by bit I learned. Not only about cotton and sisal and cashew, but also about the people.
I got used to the road to the town. I knew the giant rock cones along the way. Each cone had its own shape and was a marker for me. Some cones rose clean out of the ground; some had a rock debris at their base where a face of the cone had flaked off; some cones were grey and bare; some had a yellowish lichen on one side; on the ledges of some which had flaked there was vegetation, sometimes even a tree. The cones were always new. It was always an adventure, after a week or two on the estate, to drive to the town. For an hour or so it always seemed new: the colonial shops, the rustic, jumbled shop windows, the African loaders sitting outside the shops waiting for a loading job; the paved streets, the cars and trucks, the garages; the mixed population, with the red-faced young Portuguese conscripts of our little garrison giving a strange air of Europe to the place. The garrison was as yet very small; and the barracks were still small and plain and unthreatening, low two-storey buildings in white or grey concrete, of a piece with the rest of the town. Sometimes there was a new café to go to. But cafés didn't last in our town. The conscripts didn't have money, and the townspeople preferred to live privately.
Most of the shops we used were Portuguese. One or two were Indian. I was nervous of going into them at first. I didn't want to get that look from the shop people that would remind me of home and bad things. But there was never anything like that, no flicker of racial recognition from the family inside. There, too, they accepted the new person I had become in Ana's country. They seemed not to know that I was once something else. There, too, they kept their heads down and did what they had to do. So that for me, as for the overseers, though in different ways, the place offered an extra little liberation.
Sometimes on a weekend we went to the beach beyond the town, and a rough little Portuguese weekend restaurant serving fish and shellfish plucked fresh from the sea, and red and white Portuguese wine.
I often thought back to the terror of my first day—that picture of the road and the Africans walking was always with me—and wondered that the land had been tamed in this way, that such a reasonable life could be extracted from such an unpromising landscape, that blood, in some way, had been squeezed out of stone.
It would have been different sixty or seventy years before, when Ana's grandfather had arrived to take over the immense tract of land he had been granted by a government that felt its own weakness and was anxious—in the face of the restless power and greater populations of Britain and Germany—to occupy the African colony it claimed. The town would have been the roughest little coastal settlement with a population of black Arabs, people produced by a century and more of racial mixing. The road inland would have been a dirt track. Everything would have been transported by cart at two miles an hour. The journey I did now in an hour would have taken two days. The estate house would have been very simple, not too different from the African huts, but done with timber and corrugated iron and nails and metal hinges, everything sent up by ship from the capital and then put into carts. There would have been no electric light, no wire-netting screen against mosquitoes, no water except the rain-water that ran off the roof. To live there would have been to live with the land, month after month, year after year, to live with the climate and diseases, and to depend completely on the people. It was not easy to imagine. Just as no man can truly wish to be somebody else, since no man can imagine himself without the heart and mind he has been granted, so no man of a later time can really know what it was like to live on the land in those days. We can judge only by what we know. Ana's grandfather, and all the people he knew, would have known only what they had. They would have been content to live with that.