Treacherous Paradise (9780307961235)
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Felicia was not to leave anything out. She should just say exactly what had happened. And speak slowly, so that Hanna understood.
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Felicia said:
“Laurinda, who gave you the lantern when you arrived, told me that there was a white woman staying in room number 4. I didn’t know that you had taken up residence in the hotel as I had been visiting my husband and my children in Katembe. I meet them once every month—never at a prearranged time, but when Senhor Vaz thinks it’s appropriate. I had just returned and was entertaining my first client when Laurinda came running up. I thought she must have seen a ghost or some kind of phantom, and that she wanted me to kill it. But when I came into your room you immediately became a real, living person. A bleeding woman is more alive than anything else I can think of. The blood running out of our bodies proves that we are alive, but also that we are dying. I understood what had happened even though I didn’t know who you were or where you had come from. You should really have danced for me. That’s how we get to know strangers in my village and my family. When we see them dance we discover who they are.
“But I got to know you through your blood. I whispered to Laurinda that she should fetch warm water and towels. You seemed to be awake and looking at me, but it was as if you didn’t know what had happened even so. One should always talk to frightened people in a low voice, that’s something I learnt from my mother. Anyone who shouts in the presence of somebody who is ill can see his or her shout changing into a fatal spear.
“Laurinda came with water and towels, and I took off your blood-soaked clothes. When I rummaged around among your underwear I found some banknotes—a large amount that made me wonder even more who you were. For one English pound you can share my bed for a whole week. You had tens of them. I couldn’t understand how a woman could have so much money, even though you are white.
“But I must also admit to thinking that if you died, I would take the money. Assuming there wasn’t anybody waiting for you, and that it didn’t belong to somebody else. Anyway, I put the notes back among your underclothes—but I knew now where they were. You were bleeding profusely, and your forehead felt hot. There was a moment when I thought it would be impossible to save your life, and that I had been wrong after all. Perhaps it wasn’t a miscarriage, but something else that had afflicted you, some illness I knew nothing about.
“Laurinda stayed in the background, but all the time she was on hand to help me. Then I heard Senhor Vaz coming into the room. He spends his life taking people by surprise, catching them doing something they shouldn’t. I heard him whispering, asking what had happened: Laurinda didn’t know what to say. When I heard him talking about sending a messenger to Dr. Garibaldi I got up from the side of the bed where I’d been squatting down and told him that wouldn’t be necessary: Dr. Garibaldi didn’t understand this kind of bleeding. As I did so I thought Senhor Vaz was going to hit me—he never allows one of his whores to express an opinion. But he didn’t touch me. I think he could see from my eyes that I knew Dr. Garibaldi would only make a bad situation worse. And he didn’t want that to happen. That might give his establishment a bad reputation. His clients might choose to go to other whores, even if Senhor Vaz had the reputation of running a brothel that was both spotlessly clean, and had a team of attractive black women. But if a white woman were to bleed to death in one of his rooms, that could be a bad omen. There might be an evil spirit hovering over O Paraiso. Even if all white folk despise what we believe, we have had a certain amount of influence on you. Evil spirits can also injure white people. There was a time when we thought that our African medicine had no effect on people with light-coloured skin. Nowadays we know that isn’t true. You are just as scared as we are of the evil spirits that are spread by people that wish us ill. I didn’t know who you were, nor where you were going to. But when I saw you lying there with your blood-soaked underwear, I immediately had the impression that somebody wished you ill, that somebody wanted you to die.”
Felicia suddenly fell silent, as if she felt she had said too much. There was a clattering sound made by a cart in the street outside.
It seemed to Hanna that there was still so much that she didn’t understand. Not only because she could barely grasp what Felicia had said, but because she now realized that the hotel she had checked in to the evening she had fled from Captain Svartman’s ship was more than it seemed. The hotel was a front for a brothel, something she couldn’t have avoided hearing the crew of the ship talking about. And so Felicia, who was standing in front of her next to the beautiful jacaranda tree, was in fact a prostitute.
She thought she ought to stand up, return to her room, get dressed and immediately move into a decent hotel.
But it was Felicia who had saved her, together with the woman she now knew was called Laurinda. Why should she need to flee from them? She had nothing to do with the brothel: all she had done was to take a room that she intended to pay for with her own money.
The money that Felicia hadn’t taken, despite the fact that she’d had the opportunity.
Felicia was looking at her, and seemed to read her thoughts.
“A rumour started,” she said. “And it spread like wildfire. It was alleged that Senhor Vaz had acquired his first white whore. New clients immediately started queuing up. But they soon realized that you were something as rare as a normal hotel guest. There was no end to their disappointment.”
“This Senhor Vaz,” said Hanna. “The owner. Who is he?”
“He’s a man who can’t bear the sight of blood,” said Felicia. “When we are bleeding, that’s bad for his business—apart from when we entertain those disgusting men who can only bring themselves to have sex with a woman when she’s having her period. But he hates everything else to do with blood. As long as you’re ill he’ll keep out of your way.”
“And then what will happen?”
“I assume that as long as you pay for your room, you can stay on.”
Hanna suddenly had the feeling that somebody was standing behind her. When she turned round she gave a start and felt scared stiff. At first she didn’t grasp what she was looking at. Then it dawned on her that it was a chimpanzee standing there wearing a waiter’s white waistcoat, and staring at her.
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Hanna thought she had gone mad. What she saw couldn’t be true. But the ape was standing there on its bow legs. In one hand it was holding a tray with pastries and biscuits. Felicia said something to it. It put the tray down on the table, pulled a few faces, ground its teeth, then went away.
“It’s called Carlos,” said Felicia. “After some Portuguese king or other. It came here with its owner five years ago, a man who hunted lion trophies on the great inland plains. He brought the chimpanzee with him. In those days it used to wear a topee. But when the owner couldn’t pay his bill after over a week with the ladies, Senhor Vaz took the chimp as payment. It sulked for a couple of weeks. But after that it was quite easy to get it used to the white jacket and its name, and for it to realize that it had a better home now than it used to have. It usually sits up on the roof at night and gazes at the forests on the other side of the town. But it never runs away. This is Carlos’s home now.”
Hanna still couldn’t believe it was true, neither what she had seen nor what she had just heard. But Felicia was convincing, she meant what she said.
The sound of music suddenly became audible. Hanna listened and realized that it was coming from the piano, but it wasn’t really music, there were no tunes. Single notes were repeated over and over again, as if a child was sitting at the piano, hitting the keys.
Hanna had the feeling that this was something familiar, something she’d heard before. The man she’d seen earlier dusting the keys was now tuning the piano. There had been a piano in Jonathan Forsman’s house. Nobody played it, nobody was allowed to touch it. Forsman had the key to the locked lid on his watch chain. But twice a year a blind man came to tune the piano. There had to be silence in the house while that was ha
ppening. The piano tuner always came just after Forsman had returned from one of his many business trips with the sleigh or the coach. While the blind man leaned over the keyboard with his tuning key in his hand, Forsman would sit on a chair listening intently to what he heard. For him, perfect harmony was not the music, it was the well-tuned piano.
The piano tuner in the brothel resumed his work. Hanna could hear that he was tuning the keys at the bottom end of the bass register. The fact that he was carrying out the tuning gave her hope, unexpected strength. Nobody tunes a piano when somebody is dying, she thought. In those circumstances either everything is silent, or somebody plays something that soothes or consoles and then moves over into funeral music.
She remembered vaguely something that had happened in Forsman’s house when the piano tuner was there and Forsman was sitting back in an armchair enjoying the sound of harmony being restored, and she had suddenly thought: what can he see? What can the blind man see that I can’t? She couldn’t believe that all he could see before him was blackness.
Hanna could feel that she was tired. Felicia accompanied her back to her room. Somebody had changed the sheets while she’d been away. Her blood-stained underclothes had now been returned, washed clean.
Felicia turned to her in the doorway.
“What shall I tell Senhor Vaz?” she asked.
“That the white woman is still bleeding, not so much now, though. But she needs to be left alone for a few more days.”
Felicia nodded.
“I promise not to send Carlos to you with cups of tea. Laurinda will look after you.”
When Felicia had left the room, Hanna burst into tears. She did so in silence. Not because she didn’t want anybody to hear her, but because she didn’t want to scare her body so much that it started bleeding again.
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The whores told lies. Just like all other black people.
When Attimilio Vaz had introduced himself to Hanna, a week after she had taken up residence in his hotel and become sufficiently restored after her miscarriage to be able to leave her room without assistance and walk down to the ground floor for her meals, the first three sentences he spoke to her were:
“Don’t believe what they say. It’s best to believe nothing at all. The only thing black people here know how to do is to tell lies.”
Hanna found this perplexing. Felicia had explained what had happened to her and gone on to look after her—Hanna quite simply couldn’t understand the suggestion that she had been lying. To be sure, she had sometimes found it difficult to understand Felicia’s peculiar language—but not so much that she could possibly have totally misunderstood or misinterpreted what she’d said and accepted it as the truth when in fact it was all lies.
The day Attimilio Vaz had decided to introduce himself to his hotel guest, he had spoken slowly and been careful not to use any unnecessarily difficult words.
Senhor Vaz was born in Portugal, but at some point long ago in his life he had spent time in Sweden, after a short stay in a Danish town that might have been called Odense, he wasn’t sure. He had been selling Portuguese anchovies, but she got the impression that it hadn’t been quite straightforward. It hadn’t been his fault, of course. Attimilio Vaz considered himself to be an honest and upright person who unfortunately was often misunderstood. Even though he had been forced to leave Sweden in great haste after being accused of fraudulent dealing, he had memories of a delightful country and equally delightful people—and he was now pleased to welcome a Swedish guest into his simple but completely clean and above-board establishment.
A few days later, when Hanna felt strong enough to go out for the first time since she had arrived, he invited her to dinner at a restaurant in the same street as O Paraiso.
When she emerged into the street accompanied by her host, she suddenly felt the ground swaying under her feet. It was as if she were standing on the deck of the ship again. She stopped and leaned against the wall. Senhor Vaz was worried and asked if she wanted to go back to her room, but she shook her head. When he took hold of her arm she let him do so. No man had touched her since Lundmark’s death. Now she was walking around an African town and a strange man, a Portuguese brothel proprietor, was escorting her to a restaurant.
It wasn’t a dream, but she found herself in a world where she didn’t belong.
Lundmark had been taller than she was. Senhor Vaz barely came up to her shoulders.
Hanna gathered from a sign on the side of a building that the street they were walking along was called rua Bagamoio. There were bars everywhere, some of them garishly lit up by hissing gas lamps, others dark, with wax candles flickering secretively behind curtains that swayed whenever anybody stepped quickly inside. But it was only this street that was illuminated. The narrow alleys leading off the rua Bagamoio were dark, silent, empty.
It reminded her of the forests that surrounded the river valley back home. There she could stand in a glade, enjoying the light of the sun. But if she took a couple of steps in among the tall tree trunks she entered a different world, deep in the darkness.
Apart from a few black beggars dressed in rags, everybody in the street was white. It was a while before Hanna realized that there were no other women. She was the only one. All around her were white men, some of them sailors, some soldiers, some drunk and noisy, others silent as they slunk furtively close to the walls, as if they didn’t really want to be noticed. Inside the bars, however, were a lot of black women sitting on bar stools or sofas, smoking in silence.
She thought that if this was a town, she no longer knew what to call the place where Forsman lived. Did these two places have any similarities at all? The streets where she and Berta had walked around together, and this murky town with its mysterious alleys?
A man was sitting on a street corner in front of a fire, tapping away at a drum that was so small he could hold it in the palm of his hand. His face was dripping with sweat, and in front of him he had laid out a little piece of cloth on which a few metal coins were gleaming. His fingers were pecking away at the drum skin like the beaks of eager birds. Hanna had never heard such a frantic rhythm before. She stopped. Vaz seemed impatient, but dug out a coin that he threw onto the piece of cloth before dragging her along with him again.
“He was barefoot,” said Vaz. “If the police appear, they’ll whisk him away.”
Hanna didn’t understand what he meant at first. But she noticed that the man with the little drum hadn’t been wearing shoes.
“Why?” she asked.
“No negroes are allowed in the centre of town without shoes,” said Vaz. “That’s the law. After nine o’clock they have no right to be on our streets at all. Unless they are working, and can produce the appropriate documents. ‘No black man or woman has the right of access to the streets of this town unless they are wearing shoes.’ That’s what the municipal law says. The first sign that a person is civilized is that he or she is wearing shoes.”
Once again Hanna was unsure if she had understood properly what he had said. “Our streets?” Whose streets were they not, then?
Senhor Vaz stopped outside a restaurant that seemed to be wallowing in darkness. Hanna thought she could see the word morte on the sign board, but that surely couldn’t be right. A restaurant in a red-light district could hardly have a name that included the concept of death.
Nevertheless, she was sure. That was the word she had seen, and it meant “dead”—it was one of the very first words she had learnt from Forsman’s dictionary.
They ate fish grilled over an open fire. Senhor Vaz offered her wine, but she shook her head and he didn’t insist. He was very friendly, only asked her a few questions about how she was feeling, and seemed to be keen to ensure that she was in good shape.
But there was something about his manner that made her cautious, possibly even suspicious. She answered his questions as fully as she could, but nevertheless had the feeling that she had closed all the doors to her innermost rooms, and locked them.
“You need a white nurse,” he said. “You can’t rely on the blacks. Even if they seem to be looking after your best interests, the reality might be that they are poisoning you.”
Hanna was struck dumb. Had she heard right? She didn’t believe what he had said. But at the same time, she had the feeling that a white woman might be able to give her a different kind of company.
They walked home slowly through the night. Senhor Vaz linked arms with her. She didn’t back off.
When they arrived back at the hotel, he bowed to her at the foot of the stairs and withdrew. Although it was late most of the prostitutes were sitting idle on their chairs, smoking or talking to one another in low voices. She gathered that it was not a good evening, and thought with disgust about what usually went on behind the closed doors.
Hanna looked for Felicia, but failed to see her. But when she was halfway up the stairs Felicia emerged from her room together with a white man with a bushy beard and an enormous pot belly. The sight made Hanna’s stomach turn. She hurried to her room and closed the door—but just before she closed it her eyes met Felicia’s. Very briefly, but despite everything, they seemed to be exchanging an important message.
At that same moment she also saw Carlos, the chimpanzee dressed as a waiter, standing next to the piano with a cigar in his hand. He was looking round curiously. At that moment he seemed to be the most alive of all those occupying what was known as a house of pleasure.