His house was better than most in the African city. It had no fence; it was built right up against the lane. It was low, of concrete, and it was carefully painted in yellow and green oil paint. The entrance was at the side. A very old black man, perhaps a servant, perhaps a distant relative, let us in. A wide verandah ran along the main rooms, which were on two sides of the yard. On the other two sides were separate buildings, servants' or visitors' quarters, perhaps, and the kitchen. All the buildings were linked by concrete walkways that were six inches or so above the thick dust (which would also turn into mud with rain). People were looking at us from the kitchen and the quarters, but the man himself came out to the verandah of the main house only when we were led there by the servant.
He was a dark man of medium height. He didn't look at Ana or at me. He was barefoot. He wore a singlet and very short and ragged shorts. Without looking at Ana he talked to her in a kind of mixed local language which was not easy for me to follow. She replied in the same language. Casually, dragging his soles on the concrete, he led us inside, into the formal room for visitors. A radio was going full blast; the radio was an important part of the furniture of this formal room. The windows were closed and the room was dark and very warm. I believe he offered to turn the air-conditioning on. Ana, as courteous as he was, told him he was not to bother. The room was stuffed with the formal furniture a room for visitors had to have: a set of upholstered chairs (these were covered in a shiny synthetic fabric), and a dining table with a full set of dining chairs (they were unpolished, raw-looking, and might have been made in one of the furniture workshops in the lane). There wasn't really room for everything; everything was jammed together. All the time he talked, showing Ana what he had, without looking at her, and all the time Ana was complimenting him. He invited us to sit on the upholstered chairs. Ana, matching his courtesy, said we would prefer to sit outside; and so, turning off the radio, he went back with us to the wide verandah, where there were everyday chairs and tables.
He shouted, and a very small white woman came from one of the rooms. She had a blank, full face; she was not young. He introduced this woman, his wife, as I now understood, to Ana; and Ana was gracious. The small white woman—and she was very small indeed, not much taller than the glass-walled cabinet (with ornaments) against which she leaned—asked us to drink something. Immediately there was shouting in the kitchen. The man sat down in a low armchair. He used his feet to pull a stool towards him and he rested his feet on the stool, with his knees wide apart; his ragged shorts fell back almost to his crotch. All the time people in the yard, in the kitchen and the quarters, were looking at us; but he still didn't look at Ana or me. I saw now that, dark though he was, his eyes were light. He stroked the inside of his thighs slowly, as though he was caressing himself. Ana had prepared me for this kind of aggression; it would have been hard for me otherwise. And quite late I saw that, apart from his wife and the cabinet of ornaments, he had another treasure on the verandah: a big green-tinted bottle with a living snake, on an oilcloth-covered table just beside his chair.
The snake was greenish. When the man tormented it or teased it the snake, tightly imprisoned though it was, lashed out with frightening abrupt wide-mouthed rage against the side of the bottle, which was already discoloured with some kind of mucus from the snake's mouth. The man was pleased with the effect the snake had on me. He began to talk to me in Portuguese. For the first time he looked at me. He said, “It's a spitting cobra. They can blind you from fifteen feet. They aim for shiny things. They will aim for your watch or your glasses or your eyes. If you don't wash it off fast with sugar and water you are in trouble.”
On the way back I said to Ana, “It was terrible. I was glad you told me about the showing off. I didn't mind that. But the snake—I wanted to break that bottle.”
She said, “My own flesh and blood. To think of him there all the time. That's what I've had to live with. I wanted you to see him. It is what you might leave behind.”
*
I LET IT PASS. I had no wish to quarrel with her. She had been very good and delicate with her half-brother, very good in a bad situation; and old love and regard for her had welled up in me. Old love: it was still there, it could even be added to at moments like this, but it belonged now to another life, or a part of my life that had run its course. I no longer slept in her grandfather's big carved bed; but we lived easily in the same house, often ate together, and had many things to talk about. She no longer sought to rebuke me. Sometimes when we were talking she would pull herself up and say, “But I shouldn't be talking to you like this.” And a little while later she would start again. On estate matters and the doings of estate people I continued to trust her.
And I wasn't surprised when news came that Carla Correia was selling her estate. Ana had always said that this was what Carla was going to do; that in spite of the talk of charity to a school friend, Luis and Graça had been put in the estate house only to keep it in good order until it could be sold. Carla had sold to a big property company in Portugal, and she had sold at the top. Estate prices, which had been falling because of the guerrilla war in the north and west, had risen again, in an irrational way, because certain influential people in Lisbon had begun to say that the government and the guerrillas were about to come to an agreement.
So Luis and Graça were going to be on the move again. The property company wanted the estate house for their own directors when they came out “on tour” (the company apparently believed that the colonial order, and colonial style, were going to continue after the war). But things were not all bad for Luis and Graça. The company wanted Luis to stay on as estate manager. They were going to build a new house for him on a two-acre plot; and after a few years Luis would be able to buy the house on easy terms. Until the house was built Luis and Graça would continue to live in the estate house. It was part of the deal Carla had made with the company. So Ana was both right and wrong. Carla had (in a small way) used Luis and Graça to add to her fortune, but she had not forgotten her school friend. Graça was very happy. Since she had left home she had never had a house of her own. It was what she had dreamt about for years, the house and the garden and the fruit trees and the animals. She had begun to think it would never come, but now in a roundabout way it had.
Very soon after the sale the property company, doing things in its grand way, sent out an architect from the capital to build Graça's house. She could scarcely believe her luck. An architect, and from Portugal! He stayed in one of the guest rooms in the estate house. His name was Gouveia. He was informal and metropolitan and stylish, and he made everyone in our area seem old-fashioned. He wore very tight jeans that made him look a little heavy and soft; but we didn't think of criticising. He was in his thirties, and everybody in the estate-house circle fawned on him. He began to come to our Sunday lunches. We assumed that because he came from Portugal and was working for the property company, which was buying up old estates, gambling on the past continuing, we assumed that he would speak against the guerrillas. But he did the other thing. He spoke with relish of the blood to come, almost in the way Jacinto Correia used to talk in the old days. We decided he was a white man pretending to be a black man. It was a type we were just beginning to get in the colony, playboy figures, well-to-do, full Portuguese, people like Gouveia, in fact, who could cut and run or look after themselves if there was any real trouble.