At last we came to the place Álvaro had been looking for. I imagined it was a place with facilities. He said, “It's as our elders say. If you ask often enough, you can get to Rome.” We were at the edge of the town, where the asphalt roads ended and dirt began, much cut up by the rains. It was dark, with only a few scattered lights, and so quiet that the slamming of the Land Rover doors was like a disturbance.
We had stopped in front of a big warehouse-like building. High at one corner was a metal-shaded bulb misty and twinkling with flying ants (it was the season). Other cars were parked in the space in front; and we saw now that there were watchmen of a sort (or just watchers) sitting on a half-wall on one side of the warehouse lot, where the land fell away. One of these watchers spoke directions to us, and we went down a concrete passage between the warehouse and the half-wall to another warehouse-like building. We heard music inside. A small door opened, a man with a truncheon let us in, and we both gave him money. The entrance passage was narrow and dark and it made a hairpin bend before it took us to the main room. Blue light bulbs lit up a small dancing area. Two couples were dancing—Portuguese men, African women—and they were reflected, dimly, in the dark mirror or mirror-tiles that covered the wall at the end of the dancing area. The room was full of tables with low shaded lights, but it wasn't easy to see how many of them were occupied. We didn't move in far. We sat at a table on the edge of the dancing area. Across the way were the girls, like the courtesans of the previous afternoon who had been pleased to walk down the street in their pretty clothes, turning heads. When I got used to the light I saw that many of the girls on the other side of the dancing area were not village girls from the interior, but were what we called Mohammedans, people of the coast, of remote Arab ancestry. Two African waiters and a thin Portuguese man in a sports shirt—the owner, I suppose—moved between the tables. When the Portuguese man came close to us I saw that he was not young, had very quiet eyes, and seemed strangely detached from everything.
I wish I had his detachment. But I was not trained for this kind of life, and I was full of shame. The girls were all African. It had to be like that, I suppose; but I wondered whether the two African waiters didn't suffer a little. And the girls were so young, so foolish, with so little idea, as I thought, of the way they were abusing their own bodies and darkening their lives. I thought with old unhappiness of things at home. I thought of my mother and I thought of my poor father who had hardly known what sex was. I thought of you, too, Sarojini. I imagined that the girls might be you, and my heart shrank.
Álvaro himself was subdued. He had been subdued as soon as he had entered the dark warehouse. He was excited by village sex, with every month a fresh crop of innocent girls who had had their first period and were ready to stick up their little breasts at him. What was around us in this half-converted warehouse was different. I don't suppose a place like this, with facilities, would have existed before the army came. It would have been new to Álvaro. And I suppose that though he was casting himself as my guide, he really was a learner, a little nervous, and he needed my support.
We drank beer. The feeling of shame went. I looked at the dancers in the blue light, and their dim reflections in the mysterious space of the wall-high dark mirror. I had never seen Africans dance. With the kind of estate life I had been living there hadn't been the occasion. Immediately as these girls began to dance they were touched by a kind of grace. The gestures were not extravagant; they could be very small. When a girl danced she incorporated everything into her dance—her conversation with her partner, a word spoken over her shoulder to a friend, a laugh. This was more than pleasure; it was as though some deeper spirit was coming out in the dance. This spirit was locked up in every girl, whatever her appearance; and it was possible to feel that it was part of something much larger. Of course, with my background, I had thought a lot about Africans in a political way. In the warehouse I began to have an idea that there was something in the African heart that was shut away from the rest of us, and beyond politics.
Álvaro, with a little grimace of self-mockery which didn't fool me, began to dance with one of the girls. At first he clowned on the floor, looking at himself in the mirror. But very soon he became dead serious, and when he came back to our table he was a changed man. His eyes were hollow with longing. He frowned at his beer glass. Then he said, with an affectation of anger, as though everybody in that room was holding him back, “I don't know what thoughts you have on the subject, Willie. But now that we are in this bloody place I'm going to have a damned little something.” And, frowning hard, like a man in a rage, he went with his dancing partner to the door in the dark far part of the room.
I might have just stayed and sipped beer and waited for Álvaro. But the quiet-eyed Portuguese man knew his business, and three or four or five minutes later, at a signal from him, one of the girls came and sat at the table. Below her fussy clothes she was quite small. Below the make-up, the rouge on the high cheekbones, the white-blue paint on the eyelids, she was very young. I looked at her “Arab” face and, only a half or a quarter trying to stimulate myself, wondered what about her would have aroused Álvaro. When she got up and invited me to follow her, I did. We went to the little door in the dark corner. There were a number of cubicles off a concrete passage. The partitions did not go all the way to the ceiling, and all the cubicles were served by two naked bulbs high on the back wall. I supposed that if I listened hard enough I might have heard Álvaro. The warehouse had been converted and given its facilities in the cheapest way. The place could have closed down at any time, and the owner would not have lost.
Without her stiff clothes the girl was really very small. But she was firm and hard; she would have done much physical work as a child. Ana was not like that; Ana was bony and frail. I felt the girl's breasts; they were small and only slightly less hard than the rest of her. Álvaro would have liked those breasts; it was possible to imagine the stiff young nipples sticking up below a cheap village cotton dress. But the nipples of this little girl were broad and spongy at the tip: she had already had a child or children. I couldn't feel any longing for her. Even if I did, all the old ghosts were already with me, the ghosts of home, the ghosts of London eleven or twelve years before, the awful prostitute in Soho, the big hips of June on the mattress on the floor in the slum house in Notting Hill, all the shame and incompetence. I didn't think that anything was going to happen to me with the poor little girl below me on the cheap, army-reject mattress.
So far the girl's eyes had been blank. But then, just at the moment when I was about to fail, an extraordinary look of command and aggression and need filled those eyes, her body became all tension, and I was squeezed by her strong hands and legs. In a split-second—like the split-second of decision when I looked down a gun-sight—I thought, “This is what Álvaro lives for,” and I revived.
Álvaro and I were both subdued afterwards. Álvaro became himself again, bouncy and knowing, only when we were near the estate house. The pressure lamp had been left on for me above the semi-circular entrance steps. Ana was asleep in her grandfather's big carved bed. Two hours or so before I had thought of her in an unfair and belittling way. I needed a shower before I could lie down beside her. The antiquated fittings in the bathroom—the Portuguese-made geyser, the tricky shower-head, the minutely cracked wash-basin with decorated metal supports—still made me feel a stranger. They made me think of everyone who had slept in that big carved bed before me: Ana's grandfather, turning away from the African woman who had borne his children; Ana's mother, betrayed by her husband and then by her lover; and Ana's father, who had betrayed everybody. I didn't feel that evening that I had betrayed Ana in any important or final way. I could say with truth that what had happened had been empty, that I had felt no longing and no true satisfaction. But locked away in my mind was that split-second when the girl had looked at me with command and I had felt the tension and strength in her small body. I could think of no reason why I had done what I had done. But I began to think, almost in another part of my mind, that there must have been some reason.