It was only after we had left the lunch table that I came face to face with Graça, the new manager's wife, Carla's friend from the convent school. The first thing I noticed about her were her light-coloured eyes—disturbed eyes: they made me think again about her husband. And the second thing I noticed was that, for a second or two, no more, those eyes had looked at me in a way that no woman had looked at me before. I had the absolute certainty, in that second, that those eyes had taken me in not as Ana's husband or a man of unusual origin, but as a man who had spent many hours in the warm cubicles of the places of pleasure. Sex comes to us in different ways; it alters us; and I suppose in the end we carry the nature of our experience on our faces. The moment lasted a second. It might have been fantasy, that reading of the woman's eyes, but it was a discovery for me, something about women, something to be added to my sensual education.
I met her again two weeks later, at a patriotic occasion in the town, which began with a military parade in honour of a visiting general in the main square. It was a strange occasion, full of pomp and splendour, in which at the same time no one believed. It was an open secret that this conscript army, assembled here at such cost, no longer wanted to fight a war in Africa; it had become more concerned with conditions at home. And while at one time there was praise for the general who had devised the strategy of the wide sweep to the borders, now (when, from what we heard, it was already too late) it was said that the better strategy would have been to deploy the army on the border, in a chain of fortified areas, each fortified area with a strong mobile force that could combine with others at any given point. But on that Saturday morning all was still well with the army in the town. There were flags and speeches. The band played and the parade went on, and we all, young and old, Portuguese and Africans and people of the half-and-half world, merchants and loafers and beggar children, stood and watched and were carried away by the uniforms and the swords and the ceremonial, the music and the marching, the shouted orders and the complicated parade evolutions.
Afterwards there was the reception for the visiting general in the little governor's house in the town, opened up for the occasion. The governor's house was the oldest building in the town and one of the oldest in the colony. Some people said it was two hundred and fifty years old; but no one knew precisely. It was a stone-and-rubble building on two floors, square and plain, and from the outside it was perfectly ordinary. Perhaps in the old days governors had lived there or stayed there when they visited; but nobody lived in the governor's house now. It was a mixture of museum and historical monument, and the lower floor was open to the public one day a week. The two or three times I had been I hadn't seen anybody else, and there wasn't much to look at: a bleached but newish rowing boat that was said to be like the one Vasco da Gama had used when he came ashore here; and after that an assortment of old anchors, sometimes quite small, unexpectedly tall wooden rudders, put together from great planks and showing the skill of carpenters working with rough and heavy tools, winches, lengths of old rope: historical naval debris, like forgotten family junk, which no one wanted to throw away but which no one could identify and truly understand and honour.
It was different upstairs. I had never been there before. It was a grand dark room. The wide old floorboards, dark and rich with age, had a deep shine. The shutters, set far back in the thick walls, softened the light of sea and sky. On the faded, dark-painted ceiling there was some half-effaced decoration. All around the room were portraits of old governors, all the same size and all done in the same way—simple outlines, flat colours, with the name of each governor painted in mock old lettering at the top—suggesting a recent commission by some government cultural department; but somehow, perhaps because of the confidence and completeness of the arrangement, the idea worked; there was an effect of grandeur. The glory of the room, though, was the furniture. It was of ebony or some black wood and it was intricately carved, so intricately that each piece of wood seemed to have been hollowed out first and then carved on the front and the back. It was not furniture to sit on; it was furniture to look at, to see wood turned to lace, the furniture of the governor, a mark of his power. It was said to be as old as the house, and it all came, or so a Portuguese official standing beside me said, from Goa in Portuguese India. That was where all that pointless carving had been done.
So unexpectedly I found myself very close to home. I had been trying to take myself back two hundred and fifty years to the building of the governor's house, trying to find some footing in that unimaginable stretch of time, the sky always clear, the sea always blue and transparent except during the rains, the strange small ships appearing and then rocking at anchor some way out, the town hardly a settlement, the merest toehold on the coast, with no road inland to the rock cones, the local people there untouched—though it wouldn't have been like that: there would always have been some disturbance, something to send people to the fetish-man. I had been thinking like that, and then instead of Africa there had come India and Goa, and the cruel thought of those hands working for months or years on those extravagant chairs and settees for the governor here. It was like being given a new glimpse of our own history. Two hundred and fifty years: in certain parts of London that time would have been within reach, and romantic to re-create; in India, too, in the shadow of the great temple of our town; but here, in the governor's house, so far from everything, so far from history, it was terrible.
There would have been more than a hundred people in the room. Many of them were Portuguese, and I doubt whether any of them thought as I was thinking. The world was closing down for them in Africa; I don't think anyone there would have questioned that, in spite of all the speeches and the ceremonial; but they were all easy, enjoying the moment, filling the old room with talk and laughter, like people who didn't mind, like people who knew how to live with history. I never admired the Portuguese as much as I admired them then. I wished it was possible for me to live as easily with the past; but of course we were starting from opposite points.
And all this time I was thinking of Graça—Carla's convent-school friend, the wife of the new manager. I had been in the upstairs room for some time when I saw her. I hadn't seen her or her husband at the parade in the square, and wasn't looking for her here. It seemed to me a great piece of luck, a kind of gift, seeing her like this, when I wasn't looking for her. But I didn't want to force anything. I knew nothing about her apart from the little I had heard from Carla, and I might have misread her eyes. I thought it better, for greater security, to see whether accident wouldn't bring us together. And, slowly, accident did. We came together, she alone, I alone, in front of a Goan settee and an old Portuguese governor. I found again everything I had seen in her eyes. I was full of desire. Not the dumb, headlong, private desire of London, but a desire that came now from knowledge and experience and truly embraced the other person. At the same time I was quite shy. I could scarcely bear to look at her eyes. They promised such intimacies.
I said, “I would like to see you.” She said, “With my husband?” So he, poor man, was at once put out of the way. I said, “You know that's a foolish question.” She said, “When do you want to see me?” I said, “Tomorrow, today. Any day.” She pretended to take me literally. “Today there's a big lunch here. Tomorrow there's going to be our Sunday lunch.” I said, “I'll see you on Monday. Your husband will be going to the town to talk to government people about the price of cashew and cotton. Ask him to bring you to the house. It's on the way. We'll have a light lunch and then I'll drive you home. On the way we'll stop at the German Castle.” She said, “When we were at the convent school we were sometimes taken there on an excursion. The Africans say it's haunted by the German who built it.”