Her family had a small plot of land, perhaps two acres, with fruit trees and flowers and chickens and animals. Graça loved all of these things. They were things she had known since childhood. She loved seeing the hens sitting patiently on their eggs, seeing the fluffy little yellow chicks hatching out, cheeping, all of the brood being able to find shelter below the spread-out wings of the fierce, clucking mother hen, following the mother hen everywhere, and gradually, over a few weeks, growing up, each with its own colour and character. She loved having her cats follow her about in the field, and seeing them run very fast out of joy and not fear. The thought of cooping up these little creatures, cats or chickens, gave her great pain. The thought now of giving them all up for ever and being locked away herself was too much for her. She became frightened that the nuns would go behind her back to her mother, and her mother, religious and obedient, would give her away to them. That was when she decided to marry Luis, a neighbour's son. Her mother recognised her panic and agreed.
He had been after her for some time, and he was handsome. She was sixteen, he was twenty-one. Socially they were matched. She was more at ease with him than with the convent girls, most of whom were well-to-do. He worked as a mechanic for a local firm that dealt in cars and trucks and agricultural machinery, and he talked of setting up on his own. He was already a drinker; but at this stage it seemed only stylish, part of his go-ahead ways.
They moved after their marriage to the capital. He felt he was getting nowhere in the local town; he would never be able to start up on his own; the local rich people controlled everything and didn't allow the poor man to live. For a while in the capital they stayed with a relation of Luis's. Luis got a job as a mechanic in the railways, and then they were allocated a railway house that matched Luis's official grade. It was a small three-roomed house, one of a line, and built only to fit into that line. It was not built for the climate. It faced west; it baked every afternoon and cooled down only at about nine or ten in the evening. It was a wretched place to be in, day after day; it stretched everyone's nerves. Graça had her two children there. Just after the birth of her second child something happened in her head, and she found herself walking in a part of the capital she didn't know. At about the same time Luis was sacked for his drinking. That was when they started on their wandering life. Luis's skill as a mechanic kept them afloat, and there were times when they did very well. He still could charm people. He took up estate work and quickly became a manager. He was like that, always starting well and picking things up fast. But always, in every job, his resolve wore thin; some darkness covered his mind; there was a crisis, and a crash.
As much as by the life she had had with Luis, she was fatigued by the lies she had had to tell about him, almost from the beginning, to cover up his drinking. It had made her another kind of person. One afternoon she came back with the children from some excursion and they found him drinking home-made banana spirit with the African gardener, a terrible old drunk. The children were frightened; Graça had given them a horror of drinking. Now she had to think fast and say something different. She told them that what their father was doing was all right; times were changing, and it was socially just in Africa for an estate manager to drink with his African gardener. Then she found that the children were beginning to lie too. They had caught the habit from her. That was why, in spite of her own unhappiness at the convent, she had sent them to a boarding school.
For years she had dreamt of coming back to the countryside she knew as a child, where on her family's two-acre plot simple things, chickens and animals and flowers and fruit trees, had made her so happy in the school holidays. She had come back now; she was living as the manager's wife in an estate house with antique colonial furniture. It was a sham grandeur; things were as uncertain as they had ever been. It was as though the moods and stresses of the past would always be with her, as though her life had been decided long before.
This was what Graça told me about herself over many months. She had had a few lovers on the way. She didn't make them part of the main story. They occurred outside of that, so to speak, as though in her memory her sexual life was separate from her other life. And in this oblique way I learned that there had been people before me, usually friends of them both, and once even an employer of Luis's, who had read her eyes as I had read them, and spotted her need. I was jealous of all of these lovers. I had never known jealousy before. And thinking of all these people who had seen her weakness and pressed home their attack, I remembered some words of Percy Cato's in London, and for the first time had my own sense of the brutality of the sexual life.
I was deep in that brutality now with Graça. Sexual pictures of her played in my head when I was not with her. With her guidance, since she was the more experienced, our love-making had taken forms that had astonished, worried and then delighted me. Graça would say, “The nuns wouldn't approve of this.” Or she would say, “I suppose if I went to confession tomorrow I would have to say, ‘Father, I've been immodest.'” And it was hard to forget what she had taught, to unlearn the opening up of new senses; it was hard to go back to the sexual simplicities of earlier days. And I thought, as I often did on such occasions, of the puerility of my father's desires.
The months passed. Even after two years I felt myself helpless in this life of sensation. At the same time now some half-feeling of the inanity of my life grew within me, and with it there came the beginning of respect for the religious outlawing of sexual extremes.
Ana said to me one day, “People are talking about you and Graça. You know that, don't you?”
I said, “It's true.”
She said, “You can't talk to me like this, Willie.”
I said, “I wish you could be in the room when we make love. Then you would understand.”
“You shouldn't do this, Willie. I thought you at least had manners.”
I said, “I'm talking to you like a friend, Ana. I have no one else to tell.”
She said, “I think you've gone mad.”
And later I thought that perhaps she was right. I had talked out of a moment of sexual madness.
The next day she said, “You know that Graça is a very simple person, don't you?”
I didn't know what she meant. Did she mean that Graça was poor, of no social standing, or did she mean that Graça was simple-minded?
She said, “She's simple. You know what I mean.”
A little later she came back to me and said, “I have a half-brother. Did you know that?”
“You never told me.”
“I would like to take you to see him. If you agree, I'll arrange it. I would like you to have some idea of what I've had to live with here, and why when I met you I thought I had met someone from another world.”
I felt a great pity for her, and also some worry about being punished for what I had done. I agreed to go and see her half-brother.
He lived in the African city on the edge of the town proper.
Ana said, “You must remember he is a very angry man. He wouldn't express this by shouting at you. He will show off. He will try to let you know that he doesn't care for you at all, that he's done well on his own.”
The African city had grown a lot with the coming of the army. It was now like a series of joined-up villages, with corrugated iron and concrete or concrete blocks taking the place of grass and cane. From a distance it looked wide and low and unnaturally level. Clumps of trees at the very edge marked the original shanty settlement, the city of cane, as people said. It was in that older African city that Ana's half-brother lived. Driving was not easy. The narrow lane we entered twisted all the time, and there was always a child carrying a tin of water on his head. In this dry season the dirt lane had been scuffed to red dust inches thick; and that dust billowed behind us and then around us like smoke. Runnels of dark waste from some yards were evaporating in the dust, and here and there were pools or dips of stagnant water. Some yards were fenced in with corrugated iron or cane. Everywhere there was green, shooting out of the dust, big, branching mango trees and slender paw-paw trees, with small plantings of maize and cassava and sugar cane in many yards, almost as in a village. Some yards were workshops, making concrete blocks or furniture, patching up old tyres or repairing cars and trucks. Ana's half-brother was a mechanic, and he lived next to his big mechanic's yard. It looked busy, with many old cars and minibuses, and three or four men in very greasy shorts and singlets. The ground was black with old engine oil.