And just as, after a long or strenuous or dangerous drive, the road continues to speed by in the mind of the driver as he settles down to sleep, so that split-second with the girl flashed again and again before me as I lay beside Ana. And it drew me back, within a week, to the converted warehouse on the edge of the town, to the blue bulbs and the dance floor and the little cubicles. This time I made no excuses to Ana.
I began to live with a new idea of sex, a new idea of my capacity. It was like being given a new idea of myself. We are all born with sexual impulses, but we are not all born with sexual skill, and there are no schools where we can be trained. People like me have to fumble and stumble on as best they can, and wait for accidents to take them to something like knowledge. I was thirty-three. All I had known so far—leaving out London, which really didn't count—was what I had had with Ana. Just after we had come to Africa we had been passionate. Or I had been passionate. There would have been some genuine excitement there, some moments of sexual discovery. But a fair part of that passion of ten years before would have come not out of sensuality or true desire but out of my own nervousness and fear, like a child's fear, at being in Africa, at having thrown myself into a void. There had been nothing like that passion between us since then. Ana, even at that time of passion, had been half timorous; and when I had been admitted into more of her family history I understood her timorous-ness. So in a way we were matched. We each found comfort in the other; and we had become very close, not looking beyond the other for satisfaction, not knowing, in fact, that another kind of satisfaction was possible. And if Álvaro hadn't come along I would have continued in that way, in matters of sex and sensuality not much above my poor deprived father.
The warehouse closed down after a while; then something else came up; and something else after that. The concrete town was very small; the merchants and civil servants and others who lived there didn't want these places of pleasure too near their houses and their families. So the blue bulbs and the dark wall-high mirror shifted about from one makeshift home to another. It was worth no one's while to build something more permanent, since the army, on which the trade depended, could at any time move away.
One evening I saw, among the rouged and dressed-up girls, Júlio the carpenter's daughter—the little maid who on my first morning had laid aside her broom and sat in a worn upholstered chair and tried to have an educated conversation with me. She had told me later that her family ate the same food every day; and that when her father became too drunken or violent she tried to lull herself to sleep by walking up and down in the little room they had. The story later was that this girl had begun to drink, like her father, and was often out of the quarters. I suppose that just as Álvaro had been my guide some friend had guided her here.
I decided on the spur of the moment not to see her; and she seemed to have decided on the same thing. So that when we crossed we crossed as strangers. I told no one about her; and she, when we next met in the estate house, said nothing at all and made not even a small gesture of new recognition. She didn't widen her eyes or lift her brow or set her mouth. When I thought about it later I felt that that was when I betrayed Ana, sullied her, as it were, in her own house.
*
THE CORREIAS HAD been away for a year. And then we heard, each house in a roundabout way, and not all at the same time, that Jacinto had died. He had died in his sleep in a hotel in London. Álvaro was in a state. He didn't know what his future was. He had always dealt with Jacinto; and he had a feeling that Carla didn't care for him.
About a month later Carla reappeared among us, visiting the houses she knew, harvesting sympathy. Again and again she told of the suddenness of the death, of the shopping that had just been done in the big stores, the opened parcels left untidily that night about what was to be poor Jacinto's deathbed. She had thought of bringing back the body to the colony; but she had a “bad feeling” (given her by Mrs. Noronha) about the little cemetery in the town. So she had taken the body to Portugal, to the country town where Jacinto's full Portuguese grandfather was buried. All of this had kept her too busy for grief. That came to her afterwards. It came to her especially when she saw some beggars in Lisbon. She said, “I thought, ‘These people have nothing to live for, and yet they're living. Jacinto had so much to live for, and yet he's dead.'” The unfairness was too much for her to bear. She had burst out crying in the public street, and the beggars who had approached her had become agitated; some of them even begged her pardon. (Ana told me later, “I always used to think that Jacinto believed that if you became rich enough you weren't going to die. Or he wasn't going to die, if he became rich enough. But I used to think of that as a joke. I didn't know it was true.”)
Jacinto had always been particular about the distinction that money brought to people, Carla said; that was why he had worked so hard. He had told his children, who were studying in Lisbon, that they were on no account to use public transport in Lisbon. They were always to use taxis. People must never think of them as colonial nobodies. He had repeated that to them only a few days before he had died. And telling this story about Jacinto's concern for his children, and other related stories about the goodness of the family man, Carla wept and wept from estate house to estate house.
With Álvaro she was brutal. Three weeks after she came back she sacked him, giving him and his African family a month to clear out of their concrete house; and, to make it harder for him to find work, she did what she could to blacken his character with estate people. He was a man of loose life, she said, with a string of African concubines he couldn't possibly keep on his manager's salary. Even when Jacinto was having his trouble with the people in the capital, he used to tell her that she had to watch Álvaro. The rogue had trembled when she called for the books. She didn't have Jacinto's mind, and she didn't know much about accounts, but it didn't take her long to see the kind of trickery Jacinto had told her to look out for. Bogus invoices (with Álvaro machinery had broken down all the time, even the reliable old German sisal-crusher, the simplest of machines, like a very big mangle); inflated real invoices; and, of course, bogus workers. And the longer the Correias had stayed away in Europe the more brazen Álvaro had become.
Carla was telling us what we all half knew. In his foolish, showing-off way Álvaro had liked to hint that he was milking the estate. He had done that with me and he would have done it with others. He thought it made him grand, almost like an estate-owner. Estate life was all that Álvaro knew; the estate house was his idea of style. His father, a mulatto, had started as a mechanic on the estate owned by his Portuguese father, and had ended there as a low-grade overseer living in one of a line of two-roomed concrete houses. Álvaro decided when he was quite young that he would rise in the world. He was good with machines; he learned about cattle and crops; he knew how to get on with Africans. He rose; he became flashy. As the Correias' estate manager, with a proper concrete house and a Land Rover, he liked to make big gestures. When I got to know him (and before I knew his reputation) he used to give me presents; afterwards he would tell me that what he had given me was really plunder from the Correias.