Still, I felt sorry for Álvaro that he should be so exposed and pulled down in the estate houses where (leaving his African family at home) he wanted to be accepted. I wondered how that family were going to make out. They had got their marching orders and would soon have to leave their concrete house; it would be some time before they got accommodation like that again. Ana said, “He might take the opportunity to forget about them.” I didn't want to think about that too much, but it was probably true. Álvaro had never spoken of his family to me, had never given his children names or characters. I had seen them only from the road: African-looking children, some like village children, staring from the small verandah of the concrete house or running out from the grass-roofed kitchen hut at the back. I suppose if a new job came up Álvaro wouldn't have minded moving on and starting afresh with a new woman and new outside women in a new place. He might have considered an outcome like that a blessing; it would have reconciled him to everything.
I hadn't seen him for some weeks. We had long ago stopped making excursions together to places like the warehouse. And when one day we met on the asphalt road to the town he was subdued; the humiliation of his sacking and the worry showed on his face. He was defiant, though. He said, “I don't know who the hell these people think they are, Willie. It's all going up in smoke. They are going to Lisbon and Paris and London and talking about their children's education. They are living in a fool's paradise.” I thought he was copying the apocalyptic tone of his late master. But he had real news. He said, “The guerrillas are in camps just over the border. The government there is on their side. They are real guerrillas now, and they aren't playing. When they decide to move I don't see what's going to stop them.”
For some weeks there had been fewer soldiers in the town, and there had been talk about army manoeuvres deep in the bush to the north and the west. There was little in the newspapers. It was only later, some time after Álvaro had given me the news, that announcements were made of the successful army “sweep” to the north and west, right up to the border. The army began then to come back to the town; and things were as before. The places of pleasure were busy again. But by this time I had lost touch with Álvaro.
I had found less and less pleasure in the places of pleasure. Some of this would have had to do with my worry about seeing Júlio's daughter again. But the main reason was that the act of sex there, which used to excite me with its directness and brutality, had grown mechanical. For the first year I used to keep a tally, in my head, of the times I had been; again and again I would do the sums, associating outside events, lunches, visits, with these darker, brighter moments in the warm cubicles, creating as it were a special calendar of that year for myself. Gradually, then, it happened that I went not out of need but in order to add to the tally. At an even later stage I went just to test my capacity. Sometimes on those occasions I had to drive myself; I wished then not to extend the moment but to finish as soon as possible. The girls were always willing, always ready to demonstrate the tricks of strength and suppleness that had sent me away the first time with new sensations, a new idea of myself, and tenderness for everyone and everything. Now the sensation was of exhaustion and waste, of my lower stomach scraped dry; I needed a day or two to recover. It was in this enervated mood that I began to make love to Ana again, hoping to recover the closeness that had once seemed so natural. It couldn't be. That old closeness was not based on love-making, and now, not even rebuking me for my long absence, she was as timorous as I remembered. I gave her little pleasure; I gave myself none at all. So I was more restless and dissatisfied than I had been before Álvaro said to me in the café in the town, “Would you like to see what they do?” Before I had been introduced to a kind of sensual life I didn't know I was missing.
*
CARLA ANNOUNCED that she was going to move to Portugal for good as soon as she found a new manager. The news cast a gloom over us, people of Carla's estate-house group, and we tried over the next few weeks to get her to change her mind, not because we were thinking of her, but because—as often after a death—we were thinking of ourselves. We were jealous and worried. Carla's going away, the disappearance of the Correias, felt like the beginning of the breakdown of our special world. It touched new fears we didn't want to think about; it lessened our idea of the life we were leading. Even Ana, never envious of anyone, said with something like spite, “Carla says she's leaving because she can't bear to be alone in the house, but I happen to know that she's only doing what Jacinto told her to do.”
Soon enough the new manager was found. He was the husband of a convent-school friend of Carla's; and the story spread by Carla to win sympathy for the couple, was that life had not treated them well. They were not going to live in the manager's house; Álvaro and his family had left that (and the huts they had added on) in a great mess. They were going to live in the estate house. Ana said, “Carla talks about charity to a friend who has fallen on hard times. But that friend is going to have to keep the house in good order. Carla came back from Europe to a house that had begun to fall apart. I feel it in my bones that Carla is going to sell in a couple of years, when the market rises.”
There was a special Sunday lunch at the house, to say goodbye to Carla, and to meet the new manager. Even if I didn't know about his circumstances I would have noticed him. There was about him a quality of suppressed violence; he was like a man holding himself in check. He was in his forties, of mixed ancestry, more Portuguese than African, broad but soft-looking. He was polite to everybody, even formal, anxious in one way to make a good impression, yet different in manner and style from everyone, a man apart. His eyes were distant; they seemed a little bit removed from what he was doing. The bumps on his top lip were pronounced; the lower lip was full and smooth, with a shine; it was the mouth of a sensual man.
Mrs. Noronha, hunched up in her chair, head to one side, said in her way, “A bad time. A bad decision. Much sorrow awaits you in Portugal. Your children will bring you much sorrow there.” But Carla, who two years before would have jumped with fright at such a message from the spirits, paid no attention; and she paid no attention when Mrs. Noronha said it all a second time. The rest of us took our cue from Carla. We didn't interfere; we thought that what had happened or was happening between Carla and Mrs. Noronha was a private matter. Mrs. Noronha seemed to understand that she had overplayed her hand. She pressed her head into her neck, and in the beginning it looked as though anger and shame were going to send her away in a huff, as though at any moment she might make a gesture to her thin, sour-faced husband, the man of birth, and be wheeled out in disdainful style from the company of the half-and-half people. It didn't work out like that. Rather, over the hour and a half that remained of the lunch, Mrs. Noronha sought to play herself back into the general conversation, making neutral or encouraging comments about many things, and in the end even appearing to take an interest in Carla's arrangements in Portugal. It was the beginning of the end for her as a soothsayer—though she continued to appear among us for a few more years. And it had been so easy to puncture her. It might have been that, with the half-news and rumours that kept on coming from the besieged frontiers, the racial and social heights that the Noronhas represented no longer mattered as much as they had.