I had got the passport back. I felt safe again. Ana and I, as if by agreement, talked no more about the matter. We never mentioned the fetish-man. But the ground had moved below me.
*
OUR FRIENDS—or the people we saw on weekends—had their estate houses within a two-hour drive. Most of that would have been on dirt roads, each with its own quirks and dangers (some roads twisting through African villages), and anything much beyond two hours was hard to do. The tropical day was twelve hours long, and the rule in the bush was that people on the road should try to get home by four and never later than five. Four hours' driving, with a three-hour lunch occasion in between, just about fitted into a Sunday; anything more was a test of stamina. So we saw the same people. I thought of them as Ana's friends; I never grew to think of them as my friends. And perhaps Ana had only inherited them with the estate. I suppose the friends could say that they had inherited us in the same way. We all came with the land.
In the beginning I saw this life as rich and exciting. I liked the houses, the very wide verandahs on all sides (hung with bougainvillaea or some other vine), the cool, dark inner rooms from where the bright light and the garden became beautiful—though the light was harsh when you were in it, full of stinging insects, and the garden was sandy and coarse, burnt away in some parts and in other parts threatening to go back to bush. From within these cool and comfortable houses the climate itself seemed like a blessing, as though the wealth of the people had brought about a change in nature, and the climate had ceased to be the punishing disease-laden thing it had been for Ana's grandfather and others in the early days.
In the beginning I wished only to be taken into this rich and safe life, so beyond anything I had imagined for myself, and I could be full of nerves when I met new people. I didn't want to see doubt in anyone's eyes. I didn't want questions I wouldn't be able to handle with Ana listening. But the questions were not asked; people kept whatever thoughts they might have had to themselves; among these estate people Ana had authority. And, very quickly, I shed my nerves. But then after a year or so I began to understand—and I was helped in this understanding by my own background—that the world I had entered was only a half-and-half world, that many of the people who were our friends considered themselves, deep down, people of the second rank. They were not fully Portuguese, and that was where their own ambition lay.
With these half-and-half friends it was as with the town on the coast. It was always an adventure to drive to the town; but after an hour or so there everything went stale. In some such way a morning drive to an estate house for Sunday lunch could seem fresh and full of promise, but after an hour or so in the house with people who had lost their glamour, and whose stories were too well known, there was nothing more to say, and we were glad, all of us, to have the long business of eating and drinking to attend to, until, at three o'clock, when the sun was still high, we could get into our four-wheel drives and start for home.
These estate friends and neighbours, who had come with the land, we understood only in the broadest of ways. We saw them in the way they chose to present themselves to us; and we saw the same segment of the person each time. They became like people in a play we might have been studying at school, with everyone a “character,” and every character reduced to a few points.
The Correias, for instance, were proud of their aristocratic name. They were also obsessed with money. They talked about it all the time. They lived with the idea of a great disaster about to happen. They were not sure what this disaster was going to be, whether it was going to be local or worldwide, but they felt it was going to do away with their security both in Africa and in Portugal. So they had bank accounts in London, New York and Switzerland. The idea was that when the bad time came they would have an “envelope” of ready money in at least one of these places. The Correias spoke about these bank accounts to everybody. Sometimes they seemed simple-minded; sometimes they seemed to be boasting. But really what they wanted was to infect others with their vision of coming disaster, to start a little panic among their friends in the bush, if only to feel that in their own caution with the bank accounts they had been far-sighted, and ahead of everybody else.
Ricardo was a big, military-looking man with his grey hair in a military-style crewcut. He liked practising his English with me; he had a heavy South African accent. The big man lived with a great personal grief. His daughter had had promise as a singer. Everyone in the colony who heard her thought that she was special and had it in her to be a star in Europe. Ricardo, who was not a rich man, sold some land and sent the girl to Lisbon to be trained. There she had begun to live with an African from Angola, the Portuguese colony on the other side of the continent. It was the end of the girl's singing, the end of her connection with her family, the end of her father's pride and hope; Ricardo destroyed all the tapes he had of his daughter singing. Some people said that he had pushed his daughter too hard, and that the girl had given up on her singing before she met the African. At one Sunday lunch our host began to play a tape of the girl singing. This was done (as Ana and I knew, having been told beforehand) not to wound Ricardo, but to honour him and his daughter, and to help him with his grief. Our host had recently found the unmarked tape in his house; it was something he had made himself and forgotten about. And now we all listened to the girl singing in Italian and then in German, in the middle of the hot day, the light very bright outside. I found it moving (though I knew nothing about singing) that this kind of talent and ambition had come to someone living here. And Ricardo didn't make a scene. He looked down at the ground, crying, smiling with old pride, while his daughter sang on the tape with the voice and hopes of many years before.
The Noronhas were our blue-bloods, pure Portuguese. He was small and thin, and said to be a man of birth, but I don't know how true that was. She was deformed or disabled in some way—I never heard how, and never wanted to ask—and when she came among us she came in a wheelchair, which her husband pushed. They came into our half-and-half world with the gentlest air of condescension. They knew the country, and they knew where they stood and where we stood. It was possible to feel that they were breaking the rules only because the lady was disabled and had to be humoured. But the fact was that they came among us because of Mrs. Noronha's special gifts. She was a “mystic.” Her husband, the man of birth, was proud of this side of his wife. When they made their entry at an estate-house Sunday lunch he pushed her big wheelchair with a noticeable arrogance in his thin, peevish face. No one, not even Ana, ever told me directly that Mrs. Noronha had this mystic gift. The gift was simply allowed to make itself felt, and it did so in such quiet ways that for the first few times I noticed nothing. To spot the gift at work, you had to know about it. Someone might say, for instance, “I want to go to Lisbon next March.” Mrs. Noronha, hunched up in her chair, would say softly, to no one in particular, “It's not a good time. September would be better.” She would say no more, offer no explanation; and we wouldn't hear any more about a trip to Lisbon in March. And if—just for the sake of the illustration—if I, ignorant at that time of the lady's gifts, had said, “But March in Lisbon would be lovely,” Mr. Noronha would say, with distaste for the contradiction showing in his watery eyes, “There are reasons why it's not a good time,” and his wife would look away, with no expression on her pale face. I felt that her mysticism, together with her disablement and her husband's birth, made her a tyrant. She could say anything; she could be as harsh and disdainful as she pleased; and for three or four or five good reasons no one could question her. I could see that from time to time she had spasms of pain, yet I couldn't help feeling that as soon as she and her husband got back home she might get out of her chair and be perfectly all right. She gave full mystical consultations. They were exclusive and not cheap; and these visitations among the half-and-half estate people, who were susceptible in more than one way, helped beat up custom.