43
By full moon Lourenço Marques had been battered by storms for a few days. Carlos had run away again but come back, just as mysteriously as before, this time with a red band round his neck. Senhor Vaz decided he had better keep Carlos chained up, but the women were outraged by the very thought and he let it drop. Carlos resumed his role as a waiter, and would light clients’ cigars in exchange for a banana or an apple. Felicia maintained that Carlos had a different glint in his eye now: something was happening to him.
The full moon arrived, the winds had moved on, and Senhor Vaz came home after a long day at the brothel. Hanna had prepared the mango and sat beside him at the dining table as he chewed away at it, deep in thought. She then duly applied the drops of lemon in the bathroom before going to bed and lying down beside her husband. He seemed to be on his way to sleep, so she gently stroked his arm. After a few moments he turned to face her. He went on to make frantic efforts to penetrate her, just as he had done on previous occasions, but still without success—although Hanna could feel that his attempts were more powerful and longer lasting than ever before.
When he gave up they were both sweating. Hanna decided that the very next day she would tell Felicia that stronger medicines were needed to help Attimilio to overcome his difficulties.
She could hear that he had fallen asleep, taking the usual quick, short breaths as if he didn’t really have time to sleep.
When she woke up next morning he was dead. He was lying beside her, white and already cold. The moment she opened her eyes, just before Anaka was due to come in with their breakfast tray, she knew that something had happened. He was rarely, if ever, still in bed when she woke up. He would usually be in the bathroom, getting shaved.
He was lying in the same position as he’d been in when he fell asleep. Hanna slid out of bed, her legs shaking. She had become a widow for the second time. When Anaka came in she was sitting in a chair and pointed to the man in the bed.
“Morto,” was all she said. “Senhor Vaz e morto.”
Anaka put down the tray, went down on her knees, chanted something that might have been a prayer, then hurried away. It struck Hanna that Attimilio had died in complete silence. He hadn’t screamed like Lundmark did.
It was as if he had died in shame, having failed once again, one last time, to make love to his wife.
Two days after the chaotic burial in the town’s new cemetery, at which Carlos was also present wearing a dark suit and a new black top hat, Hanna was visited by Attimilio’s solicitor, Senhor Andrade. He bowed, expressed his condolences once again, and sat down opposite her in the group of sofa and armchairs in red plush that Senhor Vaz had had made in distant Cape Town. Unlike on previous occasions, he now spoke loudly and clearly: Hanna was no longer merely an appendage of Senhor Vaz.
Andrade explained the situation:
“There is a will. It’s signed, and witnessed by me and my colleague Petrus Sabodini. The will is simple and crystal clear. There isn’t the slightest doubt about its intentions.”
Hanna listened, but it never occurred to her that what was being said had anything to do with her.
“So, there is a will,” said Andrade again. “It makes it clear that all Attimilio’s estate and goods and chattels are inherited by you. In addition to the hotel and the other activities associated with it, you now own all his businesses, including a warehouse full of fabrics and nine donkeys grazing in various pastures just outside the town. There are also significant assets in Pretoria and Johannesburg.”
Andrade placed a number of documents on the table and stood up. He bowed again.
“It will be a great pleasure to me if in future I can continue to offer you my services as your solicitor, Senhora Vaz.”
It was only after he had gone that Hanna grasped what had happened. She sat there motionless, holding her breath. She had become the owner of a brothel. And also of a number of donkeys and a chimpanzee that occasionally ran away when it wasn’t lighting cigars for the customers who visited her house of pleasure.
She stood up and went out onto the balcony. Through the binoculars she could see the building where the brothel was situated. She could also make out the contours of the window of the room that had been hers, when she was sick in bed.
A number of ships were bobbing slowly up and down in the roadstead, but she didn’t pay any attention to them just now. However, that same day she took Carlos home with her from the brothel, because she didn’t want to live alone. She also took the big ceiling light because Carlos always liked to sleep in it.
Carlos would now share the big stone house with Hanna. For as long as she remained in the town spread out there before her, white and steaming in the heat, on the shore of the bay known as the Lagoon of Good Death.
44
Every morning when Hanna woke up Carlos was sitting in her bed with his hairy back towards her. She didn’t like him being there: she was afraid he would introduce stinging and blood-sucking insects into her bed. She chased him away and closed the bedroom door before going back to bed and extinguishing the paraffin lamp. But Carlos always either opened the door, or climbed back in through the window she kept open. He was there every morning. She was the one living in a cage, not Carlos.
In the end Hanna realized that he was longing for company, just as she was. He was missing the companionship characteristic of the life of chimpanzees—allowing another member of the troop to examine his fur and pick it clean. She felt sad once this had become clear to her. She could see her own loneliness mirrored in his, sat down close to him and began searching his skin for dead insects. It was obvious how much he enjoyed that. When Carlos wanted to repay the compliment by searching through her own hair, she allowed him to do so.
She started to see the pair of them as an odd couple, their mutual respect growing all the time even though they didn’t really have anything more in common than this morning ritual, which could go on for hours.
In the early days of this new stage in her life as a widow, she kept thinking about how she had changed her name for the second time in her short life. In the course of a brief ceremony in the distant city of Algiers, she had stopped being Renström and become Lundmark. Then that second name had been replaced by Vaz. In all the documents that her solicitor Senhor Andrade brought for her to read and sign, it said that her name was Hanna Vaz, and that her title was now viuva, widow.
But the thought of her being suddenly subjected once again to widowhood didn’t affect her nearly so much as the realization that she had become a very rich woman. Andrade produced accounts for her to read and sign, and she was astounded when she laboriously worked out the equivalents of English pounds, Portuguese escudos or American dollars into Swedish kronor. She was staggered to think that she now probably had more liquid capital than Jonathan Forsman’s total possessions. She sometimes woke up in the middle of the night under the impression that money—shiny new coins and pristine banknotes—was raining down onto her bed. Even after a few months, this wealth seemed totally unreal to her. And money continued to come rolling in. Every morning the short, slim cashier Eber, who was descended from a German family that had emigrated to southern Africa, would come up to her house from the brothel with a leather briefcase crammed full of cash. She would sign for the briefcase, give Eber the empty briefcase from the previous day, and then shut herself up in the study she had taken over from her former husband. In one of the walls was a safe that needed two different keys to open it: she wore them on a ribbon tied round her neck. She would enter the amounts in a cash book, then place the notes and coins inside the safe and lock it again. Not even Carlos was allowed to be in the room when she was counting out the money from the brothel.
Once a month, in accordance with the cashier’s instructions, she would prepare the payments that needed to be made. On that day Eber was always accompanied by several Portuguese soldiers who escorted him back to the brothel with the bulging briefcase.
Nobody stayed in the hotel as a payi
ng guest now. Once Hanna had moved out the rooms had either remained empty, or been used by the whores when their own rooms were being repaired after being trashed by some overexuberant client. She even wondered if there had ever been any normal paying guests before her, or whether the hotel business was no more than a front to give the brothel an appearance of decency.
One day when she was putting more money into the safe, she noticed a little notebook lying on the bottom shelf, covered in dust that had somehow, mysteriously, managed to filter in despite the tightly fitting steel door. When she examined it more closely while sitting at the desk, she discovered that it was empty. There wasn’t a single word written in it. It was a gift from a Japanese shipping line with Yokohama as its main port. Japanese sailors sometimes visited the brothel. They were clean and polite, but not especially liked by the women because the intensity of their sexual activity could be painfully tiring. Hanna had heard rumours of a Japanese mate who had paid for a whole night, and was alleged to have had nineteen sexual encounters. Whether or not that was true, the Japanese were certainly persistent, and on some occasion or other Senhor Vaz must have received the empty notebook as a present, or perhaps as a souvenir—or possibly even as an apology for an excessively savage erotic outburst.
The leather smelled of calfskin, but it had turned black over the years. The white pages were made of thick paper, but were nevertheless soft and pliable. When Hanna wrote her name on one, she could see how the paper sucked up the dark blue ink. No blotting paper was needed.
She wrote the current date: 26 March 1905. Carefully, as if every single word could have dangerous consequences, she wrote a sentence: “Dreamt last night about what no longer is.”
“Dreamt last night about what no longer is.” That was all. But it seemed to her that she had sparked off a new habit that she was determined to stick to. She would no longer simply write down new figures in her account books, but she would also keep a diary that nobody but she would have access to.
From then on she would write down a few sentences after Eber had been with his bag full of money and she had locked away the previous night’s income in the safe. As the days passed she dared to stray from the usual paths where the words she wrote simply referred to something she had dreamt, or what Carlos had done, or what the weather had been like. She started to write about the women who worked for her, both in the brothel and in the house where she was sitting and writing.
After just over a month she made a note about Senhor Vaz and his hopeless attempts to satisfy both her and himself. Her tone became increasingly sharp, the judgements she passed on people increasingly less considerate. No unauthorized readers were going to have access to her diary.
But what she wrote in her diary had no effect on the daily conversations she had with the people she was in charge of. In those situations she was just as friendly and considerate as she had been before. But in her diary she wrote what she really thought. That was where the truth was; but she kept it hidden.
Only one other person knew of the existence of the diary. That was young Julietta, who helped out in the house whenever and wherever necessary. One day she had stood in the half-open doorway and seen Hanna leaning over her diary at her desk. Hanna had called the girl in and shown her what she was writing, well aware that Julietta was illiterate and had no idea about writing nor languages. Julietta had asked what Hanna was writing.
“Words,” Hanna had said. “Words about the country I come from.”
That was all she had said, despite the fact that Julietta continued to ask questions. Afterwards Hanna had asked herself why she had lied to Julietta. There was nothing in the diary about her life in the mountains and by the cold river. But on the other hand she had often made disparaging comments about Julietta.
Why hadn’t she told her the truth? Had she begun to be like all the others in this town, who never seemed to tell the truth? At first she had believed that Senhor Vaz had been right when he claimed that all black people told lies. But then she had discovered that the same applied to all the whites, and to those of Indian or Arabic origins. Everybody lied, even if they did so in different ways. She was living in a country which seemed to be founded on lies and hypocrisy.
She signalled that Julietta should leave the room. Then she wrote down what she had just been thinking: “Black people lie in order to avoid unnecessary suffering. White people lie to preserve the superiority they wish to uphold. And the others, the Arabs and Indians, lie because there is no longer room for the truth in this town we live in.”
She also thought, although she didn’t write it down, that she regretted having shown Julietta her notebook. Perhaps that was a careless move that would come back to haunt her at some time in the future.
She locked the diary away in the safe and stood by the window looking out over the sea. She took her binoculars and viewed the island called Inhaca which she had once visited, during her “time of inactivity,” with Senhor Vas and the solicitor, Senhor Andrade.
She redirected the binoculars at the town, at the harbour district where the brothel was located. If she stood on tiptoe she could see the lookout outside the gate, and possibly also one or two of the girls hanging around in the shadows, waiting for a client.
A thought occurred to her that she had had many times before: I can see them. But the question is, can they see me? And if they can: what do I mean to them?
She replaced the binoculars and stand on the marble shelf in front of the window, and closed her eyes. Despite the heat she could conjure up how she had sat in the sleigh, wrapped up in Jonathan Forsman’s furs that smelled of lard and dogs.
When she opened her eyes again, she thought that she really must soon make up her mind. Should she stay where she was, or should she return home?
But on that day of all days, the day when she had shown Julietta her notebook, Hanna was possessed by another emotion.
She was frightened. She had the feeling that danger was approaching. There was something in the vicinity that she hadn’t yet discovered.
A growing threat. That she couldn’t see. But she knew that it was approaching rapidly, like a sleigh gliding along at speed over tightly packed snow.
45
Not long after she had begun to write about Senhor Vaz in her diary, Hanna called a meeting of the women and everybody else who worked in the brothel. She held it early in the morning when the brothel was nearly always empty. Most of them generally slept when the last of the clients had left. Many of them travelled in horse-drawn carriages, but some in motor cars, all of which were cleaned and polished during the night by the black workers who disobeyed the law that said blacks were not allowed in the town at night. The police turned a blind eye because they always had right of access to the women in the various brothels concentrated along rua Bagamoio provided they left the nocturnal workers in peace.
It seemed to Hanna that the newly polished cars heading for the South African border in the early hours of the morning were a sign that the men who used the services of her brothel wanted to remove all trace of what they had been up to. It was as if the cars and carriages were also soiled by what went on inside the brothel. But now the men were travelling back in their sparklingly clean vehicles to the country where it was morally reprehensible and perilously close to being a jailable offence for white men to associate with black women.
Hanna gathered the women and the security guards around the jacaranda tree in the garden. She had asked Andrade to be present, and had taken Carlos with her, dressed in his white waiter’s jacket. She now allowed him to be what he really was—a chimpanzee stolen from his troop somewhere inland. Carlos seemed worried at first about returning to the brothel, but after slapping the lid of the piano hard several times he calmed down and sat on Zé’s knee, just as in the old days.
Zé seemed to be barely aware of the fact that his brother had passed away unexpectedly. He had attended the funeral, but had shown no sign of sorrow or pain. He sat at the piano and continued to tun
e the strings which never seemed to attain the harmony he was striving for.
Hanna started by saying that essentially, nothing would change. Everything would continue more or less as it always had done. As the widow of Senhor Vaz she intended to retain all the rules, duties and benefits that her husband had introduced to give their workplace the best possible reputation that it had always enjoyed. She would continue to be generous with regard to granting time off, and would be no less strict than Senhor Vaz had been when it came to clients who were violent or behaved in any other unacceptable fashion.
But of course, not everything could be the same as before, she said as she approached the end of her little speech that she had learnt off by heart in Portuguese, to ensure that she didn’t lose control of her words and thoughts. She was a woman. She didn’t have the same bodily strength as her husband had had—she wouldn’t be able to intervene if there was some kind of disturbance—and so she was going to appoint a couple more sturdy security guards who would protect the women and guarantee their safety.
But there was another thing which would inevitably be different because she wasn’t a man. The women would find it easier to talk to her about some things that would have been difficult to discuss with her husband. She envisaged a situation in which they could all talk more intimately with one another. That had to be an improvement for everybody, she asserted at the end of her brief address.
Afterwards, she was enveloped by a long-drawn-out silence. A single jacaranda flower floated slowly, as light as a feather, down to the ground. She hadn’t expected anybody to make any comments, but the silence scared her. It was not the usual silence between whites and blacks: it seemed to have a significance that she was unable to put her finger on.
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