After the Monday lunch I made no excuses to Ana. I had worked out none, and was ready for the worst if she objected. I simply said, “I'll drive Graça home.” Ana said to Graça, “I'm glad you're settling in.”
The German Castle was an abandoned estate house. I had gathered years before from various pieces of estate-house gossip that it was used for assignations. That was really all I was going by. It was an hour's fast drive, in a plain beyond the rock cones, which began at a certain stage to show in the distance as a joined-up range, low and blue. The plain was sandy and semi-fertile, and it looked empty, with villages hidden in the natural camouflage of sand and green. The Castle was on a slope in this apparent emptiness, and you could see it from far away. It was an enormous, extravagant estate house, wide and high, with a round concrete turret on either side of the front verandah. It was because of these turrets that the house was known as the Castle. The man who had built on such a scale in the wilderness must have thought he would never die, or he had misread history and thought he was leaving untold wealth to his descendants. People didn't have dates for anything here; and no one knew for sure when the German Castle was built. Some people said it was built in the 1920s by a German settler from what had been German East Africa, coming after the 1914 war to friendlier Portuguese territory. Some people said it was built in the late 1930s by a German who wished to get away from Germany and the Depression and the coming war and hoped to create a self-sufficient estate here. But death had come; history had gone its own way; and long before my time—and again no one could tell me when—the Castle had been abandoned.
I drove the Land Rover as far up the garden as it could go. What had been a big front garden with concrete-edged flowerbeds was bare and burnt away to sand, with scattered tufts of a hardy grass, a few long-stalked zinnias, and a purple bougainvillaea vine that had run wild. Wide and very smooth concrete steps, still unchipped, led to the verandah. The turret on either side had loopholes, as if for defence. Tall half-open doors showed the enormous dark drawing room. The floor was gritty. Some of that grit would have blown in with the wind; the bigger pieces might have been dropped by nest-building birds. There was a strange smell of fish; I took that to be the smell of a building in decay. I had brought an army rubber sheet with me. I spread it on the verandah, and without speaking we lay down on it.
The long drive had been a strain. Graça's need matched my own. That was new to me. Everything I had known before— the furtiveness of London, the awful provincial prostitute, the paid black girls of the places of pleasure here, who had yet satisfied me for so long, and for whom for almost a year I had felt such gratitude, and poor Ana, still in my mind the trusting girl who had sat on the settee in my college room in London and allowed herself to be kissed, Ana still so gentle and generous—over the next half hour everything fell away, and I thought how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence.
I heard a voice calling. At first I couldn't be sure about it, but then I heard it as a man's voice calling from the garden. I put on my shirt and stood behind the verandah half-wall. It was an African, one of the eternal walkers on the ways, standing on the far edge of the garden, as though fearful of the house. When he saw me he made gestures and shouted, “There are spitting cobras in the Castle.” That explained the smell of fish that had been with us: it was the smell of snakes.
We put on our clothes, wet as we were. We went down the wide, regal steps to the burnt-out sandy remains of the garden, very nervous there of the snakes that could blind from many feet. We finished dressing in the Land Rover and drove away in silence. After a while I said to Graça, “I am smelling you on my body as I drive.” I don't know how the courage came to me; but it seemed an easy and natural thing to say. She said, “And I'm smelling you.” I loved her for that reply. I rested my right hand on her thigh for as long as I could, and I thought with sorrow—and now without personal shame—of my poor father and mother who had known nothing like this moment.
I began to arrange my life around my meetings with Graça, and I didn't care who noticed. With one part of my mind I was amazed at myself, amazed at the person I had become. A memory came to me of something that had happened at home, in the ashram, about twenty-five years before. I would have been about ten. A merchant of the town came to see my father. This merchant was rich and gave to religious charities, but people were nervous of him because he was said to be shameless in his private life. I didn't know what that meant but—together with the revolutionary teaching of my mother's uncle—it tainted the man and his riches for me. The merchant must have reached some crisis in his life; and, as a devout man, he had come to my father for advice and comfort. After the usual salutations and small talk, the merchant said, “Master, I find myself in a difficult situation.” The merchant paused; my father waited. The merchant said, “Master, I am like King Dasaratha.” Dasaratha was a sacred name; he was the ruler of the ancient kingdom of Kosala, and the father of the hero-divinity Rama. The merchant smiled, pleased at what he had said, pleased at easing himself with piety into his story; but my father was not pleased at all. He said in his severe way, “How are you like King Dasaratha?” The merchant should have been warned by my father's tone, but he continued to smile, and said, “Perhaps I am not quite like Dasaratha. He had three wives. I have two. And that, Master, is at the root of my troubles—” He was not allowed to say any more. My father said, “How dare you compare yourself to gods? Dasaratha was a man of honour. His reign was of unparalleled righteousness. His later life was a life of sacrifice. How dare you compare yourself and your squalid bazaar lusts with such a man? If I were not a man of peace I would have you whipped out of my ashram.” The episode added to my father's reputation, and when, as now happened, we children found out about the shamelessness of the merchant's life, we were as appalled as my father. To have two wives and two families was to violate nature. To duplicate arrangements and affections was to be perpetually false. It was to dishonour everyone; it was to leave everyone standing in quicksand.
That was how it had looked to me when I was ten. Yet now every day I faced Ana without shame, and whenever I saw Luis, Graça's husband, I dealt with him with a friendship that was quite genuine, since it was offered out of gratitude for Graça's love.
I soon discovered that he was a drinking man, that the impression he had given at our first meeting of being a violent man who was holding himself in check had to do with his affliction. He drank right through the day, Graça told me, as though he had always to top up the energy that kept him going. He drank in small, undetectable quantities, a quick shot or two of rum or whisky, never more; and he never looked drunk or out of control. In fact, in company his drinking style made him seem almost abstemious. All Graça's married life had been dictated by this drinking of her husband's. They had moved from town to town, house to house, job to job.
She blamed the nuns for her marriage. At a certain stage in the convent school they had begun to talk to her about becoming a nun. They did that with girls who were poor; and Graça's family was poor. Her mother was a mixed-race person of no fortune; her father was second-rank Portuguese, born in the colony, who did a small job in the civil service. A religious charity had paid to send Graça to the convent, and it seemed to Graça that the nuns were now looking for some return. She was shy with them; she had always been an obedient child, at home and at school. She didn't say no; she didn't want to appear ungrateful. For months they tried to break her down. They praised her. They said, “Graça, you are not a common person. You have special qualities. We need people like you to help lift the order up.” They frightened her, and when she went home for the holidays she was unhappier than she had ever been.