There had been no challenge to our authoritarian but easygoing government for many years, and it had grown strangely lazy. In his great security the ruler had grown to feel that the details of governing were a burden, or so it appeared; and he had farmed out or leased out important governmental activities to eager, energetic and loyal people. Those people became very rich; and the richer they became the more loyal they were, and the better they did the jobs that had been farmed out to them. So there was a kind of rough logic and effectiveness in this principle of government.
Some such principle was at work now in the growth of the garrison and the development of our town. The peace was continuing. People no longer lived with the idea of danger. Yet year by year the war money came. It touched us all. We felt rewarded and virtuous. Everybody counted his gain many times. And then it came out that the new money had been touching our friend Correia more than anybody else in our group, sly Correia who for years had tried to frighten us with his vision of disaster, and had many bank accounts abroad. Correia had been brought into contact with some great man in the capital, and (while still running his estate) he had become the agent in our town or province, or perhaps even the country, for a number of foreign manufacturers of unlikely-sounding technical things. In the beginning Correia liked to boast of his closeness to the great man, who was a proper Portuguese. The great man clearly had a lot to do with Correia's agencies, and we talked among ourselves in a mocking, jealous way about the extraordinary relationship. Had Correia sought out the great man? Or had the great man, for some special reason, and through some intermediary (perhaps a merchant in the capital) chosen Correia? It didn't matter, though, how it had come about. Correia had scored. He was way above us.
He talked of trips to the capital (by air, and not by the dingy old coasting ships most of us still used); he talked of lunches and dinners with the great man, and once even of a dinner at the great man's house. But then after a while Correia talked less of the great man. He began to pretend, when he was with us, that his business ideas were his own; and we had to pretend with him. Though when he recited the foreign companies he was involved with, and the technical-sounding things he was importing, things that the army or the town might some day need, I found myself amazed at how little I knew of the modern world. And amazed at the same time at the ease with which Correia (who really knew only about estate work) was picking his way through it.
He became our big shot. When he found that the jealousy had subsided, and no one among us, his friends and neighbours, was quibbling about his new position, he became oddly modest. He said to me one Sunday, “You could do what I do, Willie. It's just a matter of courage. Let me tell you. You've spent time in England. You know the Boots shops. Over here we need the things they make, the medicines and other things. They have no agent. You could be the agent. So you write to them. You provide the references they will ask for, and you're in business. They'll be delighted.” I said, “But what am I going to do with the goods they send me? How am I going to start selling it? Where am I going to put it?” He said, “That's the trouble. To do business you have to be in business. You have to start thinking in a different way. You can't write to people like Boots and think they'll want to do business with you just for a year and a day.” And I thought, from the way he talked, that he and his principal had gone quite seriously into the Boots business, and nothing had come of it.
He said one Sunday that he had begun to think of representing a certain famous manufacturer of helicopters. That took our breath away, because we knew now that he wasn't joking, and it gave us some idea how big he had become. He seemed to know a lot about helicopters. He said the idea had come to him all at once—he made it sound like a saint's illumination—when he was driving along the road to the coast. He talked about helicopters for many weeks. And then we read in the controlled press—in an item we might have paid no attention to if we didn't know Correia—that a number of helicopters were being acquired, but of a different make from the one Correia had talked about. We heard no more from him about helicopters.
So Correia became rich—the helicopter business was only a stumble—and he and his wife spoke in their old simple-minded way about their money. Yet they still had that idea of the disaster to come. Their good fortune had made them more worried than ever, and they said they had decided not to spend their money in the colony. The only thing they did here was to buy a beach house, not far from the restaurant we used to go to, in a holiday area that was now opening up fast. They did that as an “investment.” It was one of their new words. They formed a company called Jacar Investments; and they passed around to us, as to country cousins they had left behind, cards printed with the stylish name, which combined elements of their first names, Jacinto and Carla. They travelled a lot because of their new business, but now they didn't only open bank accounts. They began to think of getting “papers” for various places—making us feel even more left behind—and on their travels they set matters in train: papers for Australia, papers for Canada, papers for the United States, papers for Argentina and Brazil. They even talked—or Carla talked one Sunday—of going to live in France. They had just been there, and they brought a bottle of a famous French wine for the Sunday lunch. There was a half glass for everybody, and everybody sipped and said what nice wine it was, though it was actually too acidic. Carla said, “The French know how to live. A flat on the Left Bank, and a little house in Provence—that would be very nice. I've been telling Jacinto.” And we who were not going to France sipped the acid wine like poison.
After some years of this—when it seemed that to the success of the Correias there could be no end, as long as the army was there, and the town was growing, and the great man was in his place in the capital—after some years there was a crisis. We knew it by the Correias' behaviour. They drove an hour and a half every morning to the mission church and heard mass. Three hours' driving, and an hour's mass, every day, and heaven knows how many prayers or novenas or whatever at home: it wasn't the kind of behaviour anyone could keep secret. Jacinto Correia grew pale and thin. Then we read in the controlled newspapers that irregularities had been uncovered on the procurement side. For some weeks the newspapers allowed the scandal to spark away, and then the great pure Portuguese man with whom Jacinto Correia was connected made a statement in the local executive council. In everything that concerned the public weal, the great man said, the government had to be ever vigilant, and he intended, without fear or favour, to get to the bottom of what had happened on the procurement side. The guilty would be brought to book; no one in the colony should doubt that.
It was the other side of the easy-going authoritarian state, and we knew that the Correias were in deep trouble, that neither bank accounts in great cities nor papers for great countries could rescue them. Darkness here was darkness.
Poor Carla said, “I never wanted this life. The nuns will tell you. I wanted to be a nun.”
And we knew then—it was something we had talked about for years among ourselves—why Correia had been chosen by the great man. It was for just such a moment, when the great man might have to throw someone into the darkness. To destroy a Portuguese like himself would have been to break caste, according to the code of the colony, and to become disreputable. There was no trouble at all in throwing a man of the second rank into the darkness, someone from the half-and-half world, educated and respectable and striving, unusually knowledgeable about money, and ready for many reasons to do whatever he might be required to do.