But she had never been able to persuade Laurinda to sit down. She always remained standing, she evidently couldn’t even dream of sitting down in the presence of a white woman.
When she first arrived at O Paraiso Hanna had noticed a little tattoo that Laurinda had on her neck, next to her collarbone. A lot of the sailors on the Lovisa had tattoos. Her husband, Lundmark, had an anchor with a red rose tattooed on his left upper arm. But Hanna had never seen anybody with a tattoo next to their collarbone before, nor had she ever been able to imagine a woman with tattoos.
She hadn’t been able to work out what the tattoo represented. Was it a dog, perhaps?
Now she couldn’t wait any longer. She signalled to Laurinda that she should leave the tray on the table and pointed at the tattoo which was visible above her blouse.
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s a suckling hyena,” said Laurinda.
When she gathered that Hanna didn’t know what kind of an animal a hyena was, and possibly didn’t even know it was an animal at all, she walked over to a picture that was hanging on the wall. During the days when Hanna hadn’t been able to leave her bed she had lain there and gazed at the painting that depicted in Romantic style a number of different animals that lived in the African savannah.
Laurinda pointed at one of the animals.
“That’s a hyena,” she said. “It laughed the night I was born. My father heard the hyena out there in the darkness, and afterwards told my mother that it had bidden me welcome and provided me with my first food via its laughter.”
Then she recounted in detail what had happened the night she was born, without hesitation and as if she had merely been waiting for the right opportunity. Hanna didn’t understand some things, and several times Laurinda had to repeat bits and gesture with her hands or make various noises to make her story clear.
She also imitated the hyena’s cry, a laughing sound.
“I was my mother and father’s first child,” said Laurinda. “But before my uncle died he told me that I was born in the year when there were so many crocodiles in the river that they began to attack and eat one another. It was also the year when the flamingos lost their pink colouring and became pure white. It was a year when lots of strange things happened. My parents lived on the bank of a tributary to the great River Zambezi, in a village where everybody had their own little plantation, their own hut, their own goats, and a smile for everybody they came across during the course of the day. I grew up in a world that I thought could never change. But one day when I was big enough to start helping my mother out in the fields and already had three younger brothers and sisters, a number of white men turned up in the village. They had long beards, their clothes were stained with sweat, they seemed to hate the heat of the sun and they were in a great hurry. They carried guns, and they showed the village chief some papers covered in lots of words. A few weeks later we were driven out of our village by soldiers commanded by the white men. Our little fields were going to be joined together to make a big cotton plantation. Anybody who wanted to stay and work in the cotton fields would be allowed to do so. Everybody else was driven away. My father, whose name was Papadjana, was a man who rarely allowed himself to be bullied and was never downcast when faced with difficulties. These white men with their cotton plantation were a big difficulty, but he had no intention of allowing them to tell him what to do. He spoke to them and said he had no intention of staying and picking cotton, nor of going away. No matter what it said in those papers and irrespective of how many soldiers there were, he was going to stay where he was. He had used a very loud voice when he spoke to the white men, and all the villagers who were standing around began to pluck up courage and give vent to their pent-up feelings when they realized that one of their number wasn’t afraid. I don’t know what happened next, but some more soldiers arrived and one morning soon after, my mother came with tears rolling down her cheeks and said that my father had been found floating in the river, dead, cut to pieces with knives. It was just as dawn was breaking. She stood there, leaning over me as I lay on the woven mat in the darkness of our hut. She told me I would have to go to the big city. I couldn’t stay in the village. She would take the smaller children with her to where her parents lived further inland, but I should make my way to the coast and the big city. I didn’t want to, but she forced me to.”
Laurinda fell silent, as if the memories were too much for her to bear. Hanna sat quietly, thinking how what Laurinda had recounted was so remarkably similar to her own life. Both of them came from a world in which women were forced out of their homes and had to move to towns and to the coast in order to find work and survive.
“So I came here to this town,” said Laurinda eventually. “During all the years that have passed I’ve always thought that one day I shall go back and look for my mother and my brothers and sisters. Sometimes when I’m sleeping at night I dream that the hyena tattooed in my skin liberates herself and goes for a walk. At dawn she comes back and falls asleep again in my skin. One of these days she will have found my mother and my siblings.”
Laurinda picked up the tray and left the room. Hanna lay down on the bed again and thought about what she had heard. What animal had cried in the night when she was born?
There was a light knock on the door. When she opened it, she found Senhor Vaz standing outside. He was dressed up in a tailcoat and carried a top hat under his arm. Next to him was Carlos on his bow legs, also wearing a tailcoat.
Senhor Vaz bowed.
“I’ve come to propose to you,” he said.
At first Hanna didn’t understand what he meant. But then she realized that he was actually asking her to marry him.
“Naturally I don’t expect you to respond immediately,” he said. “But I have made my wish clear.”
He bowed again, turned on his heel and walked back towards the stairs. Carlos suddenly started shouting and jumping up and down, then grabbed hold of Senhor Vaz’s top hat and climbed up and started swinging from the ceiling light.
Hanna closed the door and heard the chaos that always ensued when Carlos had one of his high-spirited outbursts slowly fading away. His punishment on such occasions was to be locked in a cage for a few days. As he hated the cage more than anything else in the world, he was always compliant after he had been released.
She lay down on the bed and thought about what Senhor Vaz had said.
She felt as if she were being caught in a trap. But she still had the possibility of escaping and leaving the scene.
The following day she decided she would go down to the harbour shortly after dawn in order to see what ships were moored by the quays or waiting in the roadstead. As she came out into the street she noticed that the battered top hat was now on the watchman’s head; he was asleep as usual.
Time was short now. She was in a hurry.
38
A few days after Senhor Vaz’s proposal, a rumour spread across the town that an enormous iceberg had been seen off the coast to the north, and that ocean currents were now driving it southwards. Hanna heard about it from Felicia, who was so excited that she changed out of her skimpy working clothes and put on a respectable dress suitable for walking in town. She had been entertaining a client, an engine driver from distant Salisbury, who visited the brothel twice a year. He had been just as excited as Felicia and all the others by the rumours about the iceberg. Senhor Vaz had already set off for the harbour when Hanna came downstairs, but Judas—who was now wearing the battered top hat—was waiting for her.
The streets were full of people making their way to the shore or climbing up the hills with good vantage points, all of them hoping to see the iceberg before anybody else.
But no iceberg appeared on the horizon. The weather was hot and oppressive. People were standing around under their parasols with sweat running down their expectant faces. Some concluded in disappointment that the iceberg must have already melted in the extreme heat. Older and more cynical observers were in no doubt t
hat it was all a hoax, just as on all similar previous occasions. Nobody had ever seen an iceberg. But every ten years or so a rumour was spread, and the whole town started running to see it.
On the way to the harbour Hanna had noticed something she had never seen before. Blacks and whites were walking side by side on the pavements. Nobody seemed to be worried by that. Now, however, when the possibility of seeing the iceberg was no longer a shared hope, things were back to normal. The whites took control of the pavements, and pushed aside every black man or woman who threatened to come too close.
It was as if, for a few brief moments, Hanna had witnessed the birth of a new social order, as a sort of trial, only to see it disappear again just as quickly.
That same evening, when the mysterious iceberg had become a frustrated memory that would soon fade away, it started raining. It started as drizzle, but became heavier and heavier. At three in the morning Hanna was woken up by the booming sound of rain thudding onto the roof tiles.
She got out of bed and went to look out of the window. The rain seemed to be a grey wall between her and the darkness. But it was just as hot as during the day. When she stretched her hand out of the window and allowed the rain to lash down onto her skin, it felt very warm—as if it had started boiling on its way down to the ground.
She eventually managed to get back to sleep. When she woke up at dawn, the rain was just as heavy. She could see that the street was already flooded.
It continued raining for four days and nights. When it finally stopped, water was trickling in onto the brothel’s stone floors, despite the fact that everybody had been required to assist in sewing sacks and filling them with topsoil and gravel in order to keep out the floods surging along the streets. As all links with the interior were broken, the only customers coming to the brothel now were sailors. Senhor Vaz turned them away. There was a state of emergency, the brothel was in distress and was closed. One young man, dripping wet and dressed in a French naval uniform, commented that he was also in distress and his plight was a state of emergency. Senhor Vaz and Esmeralda felt sorry for him and allowed him in.
When the rain had stopped and it was replaced by clouds of steamy damp mist, the air was full of insects fluttering everywhere. All windows and open areas were closed, and gaps and chinks were sealed. When the gatekeeper came in to fetch something, Carlos flung himself at him immediately and started gobbling up the insects that had settled on his body. White insects were sitting round his black head like a wreath of flowers. Carlos ate them all. Hanna could see that they were a great delicacy for the chimpanzee.
Everything gradually returned to normal. People came drowsily in from out of the dampness with steam rising in clouds from their bodies, as if their insides had also been filled with water. During the commotion caused by the alleged iceberg and then the days of heavy rain, Senhor Vaz had not pestered Hanna with questions about her response to his proposal. She had had time to think about it while the rain was pouring down. She had no doubt that Senhor Vaz’s intentions were honourable—but who exactly was he, this little man who kept his hair and his moustache and his fingernails impeccably clean, his clothes immaculately creased, and was liable to fly into a fit of fury if he so much as spilled a drop of coffee onto his clothes or his body? He’s a friendly man, Hanna thought, at least twice as old as I am. I don’t feel anything of the vibrations that existed between me and Lundmark. He makes me feel safe in this world that is so foreign to me, but the thought of loving him, of allowing him to come to bed with me, is impossible.
So she had decided to turn him down when the rain had stopped, the insects had gone away and the brothel had opened again.
Then Carlos vanished. One morning there was no sign of him.
It had happened before that he had run off for a few hours to visit a secret world that nobody knew anything about. There were no other chimpanzees in Lourenço Marques, but sometimes baboons appeared in the town’s parks, looking for food. Perhaps Carlos had gone to see them?
But this time the ape didn’t return. Carlos was still missing after three days. The women who worked in the brothel went out looking for him. Senhor Vaz sent out everybody he could to search for Carlos. He promised to pay a reward, but nobody had seen the ape, nobody saw it when it disappeared, nobody had seen it since.
Hanna could tell that Senhor Vaz was grieving over the disappearance of Carlos. For the first time his austere mask had slipped, and he was displaying both regret and worry. Hanna was touched by what she saw, and it dawned on her that the man who had proposed to her was also very lonely. Surrounded by girls, but most of all attached to a confused ape that had come into his possession when a client had been unable to pay his bill.
Perhaps that is why Carlos ran away, she thought. So that I would be able to see Senhor Vaz as he really is?
She thought that he reminded her of her father. Elin had always kept him clean, just as Senhor Vaz was careful to look after his body and his appearance. Hanna knew that in one of the rooms at the back of the house where she had never yet ventured, Senhor Vaz had a bathroom: but he never allowed anybody to see him bathing in his enamel tub.
Lundmark had not always been clean. Hanna had sometimes been upset when he came to lie down beside her without having washed himself properly.
During the days when Carlos was missing, Hanna began to see Senhor Vaz in a new light. Perhaps he was not the person she had first thought he was.
One day Carlos came back. Hanna was woken up at dawn by somebody downstairs crying out in joy. When she had dressed rapidly and gone out to investigate, she found Carlos sitting with his arms round Senhor Vaz, who was hugging the ape tightly.
When Carlos came back he had a blue ribbon tied round his neck. Nobody knew where Carlos had got the ribbon from, or who had tied it round his neck.
The chimpanzee’s sudden disappearance and equally sudden return remained his secret. But Carlos seemed to be most surprised by all the fuss, and started yelling and hitting out and pulling down curtains when everybody wanted to stroke him or slap him on the back.
Only when nobody bothered about him any more did he finally settle down.
39
Hanna thought: what happens to an ape when it doesn’t want to be an ape any longer? Could that also happen to a human being? That he or she no longer wanted to be the person they were?
She wrote down her thoughts in her room on a loose sheet of paper. But of course, she didn’t mention anything about it to anybody—not even to Elin, in her thoughts.
After the return of Carlos, Senhor Vaz began courting her again. She had intended to tell him the facts: that she had recently become a widow and that her period of mourning would last for quite a long time to come. But Senhor Vaz didn’t make her any new proposals. He simply continued to court her, quietly, sometimes even distantly. One day he took her for a ride in one of the few motor cars in Lourenço Marques, owned by an artillery colonel in the Portuguese regiment stationed in the town. They drove along the narrow road that followed the shoreline. A large-scale promenade was being built alongside the harbour. Hanna saw the black labourers struggling with the heavy blocks of stone in the oppressive heat—but Senhor Vaz, who was sitting beside her, didn’t seem to notice them. He was enjoying the sea views, and pointed out a little sailing boat bobbing up and down on the waves.
They turned away from the sea, and the car climbed up the hills to the more elevated part of the town. A number of stone houses were being built along two long, wide esplanades. There were rails for horse-drawn trams.
The car stopped outside a house that seemed to have just been finished. It had a white-plastered facade, and a garden with rhododendrons and acacias. Senhor Vaz opened the car door and helped Hanna out. She looked questioningly at him. Why had they stopped outside this house?
The door was opened by a maid. They went in. There was no furniture in the rooms. Hanna could smell paint that hadn’t yet dried, and wooden floors that had only recently been oiled.
&
nbsp; “I want to give you this house,” said Senhor Vaz without further ado.
His voice was soft, almost husky, as if it were a woman speaking. She had the impression that he was very proud of what he was offering her.
“I want us to live here,” he said. “The day you agree to marry me, we shall leave our rooms in the hotel and move here.”
Hanna said nothing. She explored the empty house in silence with Senhor Vaz a few cautious paces behind her.
He asked her no questions. He didn’t invite the answer he must have been longing to hear.
When they returned to the hotel, Hanna thought yet again that she would never be able to explain to anybody about what had happened to her during the time she had lived in Africa. Least of all how a man who barely reached up to her shoulders and owned a brothel had proposed to her and wanted to present her with a large stone house with a garden and a sea view.
Nobody would believe her. Everybody would take it for granted that it was either a lie, or a wild dream.
Hanna decided to talk to Felicia. Perhaps she would be able to give her some advice.
A few evenings later, when Felicia had said goodbye to one of her regular clients, a banker from Pretoria who always wanted her to be brutal and torture him during their sessions, Hanna went to visit her in her room. Hanna told her the truth—that Senhor Vaz had proposed marriage to her.
“I know,” said Felicia. “Everybody knows. I think even Carlos gathers what is going on. He may only be a chimpanzee, but he’s clever. He understands more than you would think.”
Her reply surprised Hanna. She had thought that Senhor Vaz’s proposal had been made most discreetly.
Treacherous Paradise (9780307961235) Page 12