After a week or so word got around that Gouveia had a liaison with an African woman in the capital. As always when new people came it was as though somebody was doing research, and in the next few days we began to hear stories about this woman. One story was that she had gone with Gouveia to Portugal, but had refused to do any housework because she didn't want people in Portugal to think she was a servant. Other stories were about her servants in the capital. In one story the servants were always quarrelling with her because she was an African and they had no regard for her. In another story somebody asked her why she was so hard on her servants, and she said she was an African and knew how to deal with Africans. The stories sounded made-up; they looked back to the past, and no one really believed them or found comfort in them; but they did the rounds. And then the woman came from the capital to be with Gouveia for a few days, and he brought her to the Sunday lunch. She was perfectly ordinary, blank-faced, assessing, self-contained and silent, a village woman transported to the town. After a while we saw that she was pregnant, and then we were all ourselves like mice. Afterwards somebody said, “You know why he is doing that, don't you? He wants to curry favour with the guerrillas. He feels that if he has an African woman with him when they come they won't kill him.”
We made love in the house, Graça and I, as it was being built. She said, “We must christen all the rooms.” And we did. We carried away the smell of planed wood and sawdust and new concrete. But other people were also attracted to the new house. One day, hearing talk, we looked out of a half-made wall and saw some children, innocent, experienced, frightened to see us. Graça said, “Now we have no secrets.”
One day we found Gouveia. I could see in his dark shining eyes that he had read our purpose. He explained in a showing-off way what he was aiming to do with Graça's house. Then he said, “But I want to live in the German Castle. Houses have their destiny, and the destiny of the Castle is that it shall belong to me. I'll do it up in the most fabulous way, and when the revolution comes I'll move there.” I thought of the house and the view and the German and the snakes and he said, “Don't look so frightened, Willie. I'm only quoting Zhivago.”
Early one night, when the lights were still jumping, Ana came to my room. She was distressed. She was in her short nightdress that emphasised her smallness and the fineness of her bones.
She said, “Willie, this is so terrible I don't know how I can talk about it. There's excrement on my bed. I discovered it just now. It's Júlio's daughter. Come and help with the sheets. Come and let's burn everything.”
We went to the big carved bed and stripped it fast. The lights blinked; and Ana became more and more distressed. She said, “I feel so dirty. I feel I have to bathe and bathe.”
I said, “Go and have a shower. I'll burn the sheets.”
I took the great bundle down to the dead part of the garden. I poured gasoline on it and threw a match at it from a distance. The flame roared up, and I watched it burn down, while the generator hummed and the lights in the house dipped and rose.
It was a bad night. She came to my room, wet and shivering from the shower, and I held her. She allowed herself to be held, and I thought again of the way she had allowed herself to be kissed in my college room in London. I also thought of Júlio's daughter, who as a young girl had tried to make polite conversation with me; who had stolen my passport and papers; and whom I had seen but not acknowledged in one of the places of pleasure.
Ana said, “I don't know whether she put it there. Or whether she squatted on the bed.”
I said, “Don't think like that. Just think that you're getting rid of her in the morning.”
She said, “I want you to stand by in the morning. Don't show yourself, but stand by, in case she turns violent.”
In the morning Ana was composed again. When Júlio's daughter came, Ana said, “That was a vile thing to do. You've been in this house since you were born. You are a vile person. I should have you whipped by your father. But all I want is that you should leave now. You have half an hour.”
Júlio's daughter said, with the pertness she had picked up in the places of pleasure, “I am not vile. You know who's vile.”
Ana said, “Get out and don't come back. You have half an hour.”
Júlio's daughter said, “It's not for you to tell me not to come back. I may come back one day, and sooner than you think. And I'll not be staying in the quarters then.”
I had been standing in the bathroom behind the half-opened door. I felt that Júlio's daughter knew I was there, and I thought, as I had been thinking all night, “Ana, what have I done to you?”
At our Sunday lunch that week there was a man from the local mission who had come back from the mission's outposts in the north. He said, “People here and in the capital know nothing of the war in the bush. Life here has gone on just as it has always done. But there are whole areas in the north now where the guerrillas rule. They have schools and hospitals, and they are arming and training the village people.” Gouveia said, in his joking way, “And when do you think we'll be hearing the crump of artillery in the hot tropical night?” The missionary said, “The guerrillas are probably all around you. They never attack settled areas in the way you say. They send unarmed people. They look like ordinary Africans. They spread the word of revolution. They prepare the people.” And I thought of my impressions of the very first day, of Africans walking, and the later impression of the estates and the settlements of concrete being in an African sea. Gouveia said, “You mean I can be held up on the road now?” The missionary said, “It's possible. They're all around us.” Gouveia said, only half joking now, “I think I shall try to leave before the airport closes down.”
Mrs. Noronha said in her prophesying voice, “Hoard cloth. We must hoard cloth.” Somebody said, “Why should we do that?” No one since Carla Correia had spoken like that to Mrs. Noronha. Mrs. Noronha said, “We are now like the Israelites in the desert.” Somebody said, “I've never heard of the Israelites hoarding cloth.” And poor Mrs. Noronha, all her mystical credit gone, recognising that she had confused her prophecies, pressed her head against her shoulder and closed her eyes and was wheeled out of our lives. We heard later, after the handover to the guerrillas, that she was one of the first to be repatriated to Portugal.
Well before that handover Graça's house was finished. She and Luis gave a housewarming. They had very little furniture. But Luis carried off the occasion with his style as a host, bending forward almost in a confiding way to offer a drink. Two weeks later he and his Land Rover disappeared. The colonial police, at that time still in control, said he had probably been kidnapped by the guerrillas. No official in our town had any contact with the guerrillas, so there was no means of finding out more. Graça was wild with grief. She said, “He was full of despair. I can't tell you how full of despair he was ever since we moved into the house. He should have been happy, but it worked the other way.” And then some days later some herdsmen found him and the Land Rover well off the dirt road, near a cattle pond. The door of the Land Rover was open, and there were bottles of drink. He was almost naked, but still alive. His mind had gone, or so the report suggested. All he could do was to repeat words spoken to him. “You went out on a spree?” And he said, “Spree.” “Did the guerrillas pick you up?” And he said, “Guerrillas.” They brought him back to the new, empty house. Graça was waiting for him. My mind went back years to the mission school and a poem in the third-standard reader: