Dr. Meandros rolled up his shirtsleeves, threw away the butt of his cigarette and stood on it, then went back into the stinking building. Hanna and Felicia went back to the brothel in a rickshaw powered by a man with enormous ears.
“Why was she naked?” Hanna asked.
“I think she wanted to show everybody who she was,” said Felicia.
Hanna tried in vain to work out what she meant by that.
“I don’t understand your answer. Explain for me why she decided to take her own life in that filthy dock, and why she undressed before doing so.”
“Nobody has found her clothes.”
“How am I supposed to interpret that? That they have just vanished into thin air? Or that somebody has stolen them?”
“All I know is that they weren’t there on the quay. Nobody saw her coming there with no clothes on. Nobody saw her jump into the water. Perhaps she was carrying large stones in each hand, to make sure that she sank.”
“But why should she do that with no clothes on?”
“Perhaps she did have clothes on when she jumped into the water. And then took them off before she died.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps she wanted to die in the same way as she had lived.”
Although she still didn’t really know what Felicia meant, Hanna suspected that she was trying to make a comment about Esmeralda’s death. Dying the way she had lived. With no clothes on, naked to the world.
Hanna asked no more questions. When Felicia had got off at the front gate of the brothel, which was being guarded by Judas, she asked the man pulling the rickshaw to go back up the steep hills to her house. He was dripping with sweat when they got there. She paid him twice as much as he had asked for, but even so it was only a few escudos, worth next to nothing.
Julietta was standing in the entrance, looking at her. Hanna could see the curiosity in her eyes, but didn’t want to talk to her. She simply gave the maid her hat and parasol and told her that Dr. Meandros should be allowed in the moment he arrived. She took it for granted that Julietta and the rest of the staff in the house already knew that Esmeralda was dead. Invisible or silent messages were passed with astonishing speed among the blacks of Lourenço Marques.
Carlos was sitting on her desk chair chewing at a carrot when she entered her study. She let him stay there, sat down on the visitor’s chair and closed her eyes.
When she woke up she realized she had been asleep for four hours, a deep and long sleep that felt as if it lasted a whole night. There was no sign of Carlos. She went over to the desk chair and sat down. She had been dreaming. Unclear fragments slowly rose up into her mind. Lundmark had been in it. He had been sitting at the brothel piano, hesitantly fingering the keys. The jacaranda tree had been cut down. Senhor Vaz had been wandering around in a dinner jacket, smoking a cigar that smelled like the fires caused by the rioters. But she couldn’t see herself in the dream. She hadn’t taken part in it, was simply an observer on the outside, looking in.
She summoned Julietta, ordered tea, then sent her brusquely on her way—as if to remind her that she still hadn’t forgotten Julietta’s outrageous request to be transferred to the brothel.
She had just finished drinking her tea when Dr. Meandros arrived at the front door. When he came up to her study she could see that his hands were still dirty. There were what could well have been dried bloodstains on his scruffy jacket.
He sat down and asked for a glass of wine. When Julietta brought a glass on a tray, he emptied it as if he had been dying of thirst. But he declined firmly the offer of a second glass.
“There’s no doubt that the woman committed suicide,” he said. “Her lungs were full of dirty water from the dock. It would be sufficient, of course, to give the cause of death as drowning, but I made a more comprehensive examination of her body. Visiting and travelling through a person’s intestines can be an adventurous journey. I was able to ascertain that she had probably given birth to a lot of children. Her obesity had resulted in deposits in her blood vessels and brain. Her body was old for a woman who was as young as I take it she was.”
Hanna interpreted that last remark as a question.
“She was about thirty-eight. Nobody knows her exact age.”
“That can probably be an advantage for black people,” said Meandros thoughtfully. “For those of us who know the date and perhaps even the time of day or night when we were born, it can be a confounded nuisance being constantly reminded of the exact moment. A rather more vague time is preferable in many ways.”
Meandros seemed to be lost in his own thoughts for a while. Then he continued.
“The most interesting and surprising thing, however, was that she had a very big and particularly flourishing tapeworm inside her stomach and intestines. I wound it around one of my walking sticks and measured it with a tape measure: it was four metres and sixty-five centimetres long.”
Hanna pulled a disgusted face. Meandros noticed her reaction and raised his hands in apology.
“I don’t need to go into any more details,” he said. “The body can be released for burial. I have signed the death certificate and given the cause of death as a clear case of suicide.”
“I shall pay for the burial.”
Meandros stood up, swayed suddenly as if he had suffered an attack of dizziness, then held out his hand for Hanna to shake. She accompanied him down to the front door.
“What do they usually die of?” she asked.
“The Africans, you mean? Diabetes is rare. Heart attacks and strokes are also quite unusual. The commonest causes are infections caused by malaria-carrying mosquitoes, dirty water, too little food, too little dietary variation, too heavy work. There is a vast chasm between our ways of living and our ways of dying. But tapeworms can affect white people as well.”
“How do we get a tapeworm inside our bodies?”
“We eat them.”
“Eat them?”
“By accident, of course. But once they get into your body, they stay there. Until they eventually decide it’s time to leave. They say it has happened that tapeworms have left bodies through the corner of an eye—but the usual route is of course the natural way.”
Hanna didn’t want to hear any more. She also doubted if what he said about the corner of an eye was true. She opened her purse to pay the doctor for his visit, but he refused point-blank to accept any payment. He raised his hat and set off on the walk down the hills to the hospital where he had as much responsibility for the dead as he had for the living.
The next day Felicia went to visit Esmeralda’s family. Hanna had decided to close down the brothel during the afternoon when the burial was to take place. This had never happened before, despite the fact that several of the women had died during Senhor Vaz’s time. Hanna also made sure that all of the women had decent black clothes. When they eventually gathered as a group, all dressed in black with dark hats and veils, it seemed to her that it was a ghostly collection she had standing there before her. They all seemed to be dead already.
A funeral procession of the dead. Dead people mourning a dead person. And in parallel with all this, the thought of the almost-five-metre-long tapeworm. Her desire to throw up came and went in waves.
Hanna had hired a horse-drawn hearse with benches at the sides. Felicia was waiting in the cemetery, with Esmeralda’s husband and children. Felicia whispered to Hanna that Esmeralda’s ancient father was also present. They gathered around the open grave where the coffin was resting on two rough wooden trestles.
The cemetery was split in exactly the same way as the town: on the right, just after the entrance, were the resting places for the whites—marble sarcophagi or impressive mausoleums. Then an area of less imposing graves, and beyond that the field where the blacks were buried. Their graves were marked by rickety wooden crosses, or nothing at all. Hanna decided on the spot that Esmeralda would have a decent gravestone with her name on it.
The black priest, dressed in a white cowl, spoke one of the
languages Hanna didn’t understand. She occasionally registered the name Esmeralda, but understood nothing else of what he said. She thought that was quite appropriate: she had no idea about Esmeralda’s life, and so it was right that she should continue to be unknown to Hanna in death.
We are the ones who have brought about this situation, Hanna thought, somewhat remorseful. We have turned their lives into something that suits us, rather than them.
Hanna stood there watching Esmeralda’s children, and her husband, who was staring at the priest with his teeth clenched. When it was all over, she summoned Felicia and asked her to tell Esmeralda’s husband that the family would receive a regular payment. The man came over to thank Hanna. His hand was wet with sweat, his grip slack like that of a man scared to grasp the hand of another person too firmly.
Hanna returned home. Herr Eber, who had attended the funeral, was instructed to make sure that the brothel was opened for business again, and that the black mourning clothes were taken care of.
As she left the cemetery she noticed that Julietta was communicating in whispers with Felicia next to a mausoleum for an old Portuguese ship’s captain. Her first instinct was to box Julietta on the ear, but she resisted the temptation, turned away and left the grave—which was already being filled in.
When she got home she went to lie down on her bed. She slept like a log for several hours. Afterwards she ate some of the food she had been served, but the thought of the tapeworm came back to haunt her, and she slid the plate to one side.
With the paraffin lantern in her hand, she went into her study to write about Esmeralda’s death and burial in her diary. But when she entered the room and the lamp banished the shadows, she saw that Carlos was sitting on her desk chair. He was holding in his hand one of the glass jars he had taken from the big wardrobe, and had unscrewed the lid. Only now did Hanna realize that the jar was empty. Then she saw the tapeworm wriggling away in the side of Carlos’s mouth. She screamed and tried to take hold of the worm, but Carlos swallowed it. Her first impulse was to hit him, but instead she prised apart his jaws and thrust her fingers down into his throat to make him sick. Carlos screamed and resisted. He was strong, and she couldn’t hold on to him. Anaka and Julietta heard the noise and came running to assist. Hanna couldn’t manage to explain what Carlos had swallowed, just that it was important that he should vomit it up. They grabbed hold of Carlos and this time it was Anaka who managed to force her hand so far down into his throat that he started to vomit. Yellow carrot juice spurted out all over the desk.
Hanna didn’t know the Portuguese word for tapeworm. She fetched one of the glass jars that were left in the wardrobe, showed them the tapeworm, and then the jar on the desk that was empty. They all poked around in the contents of Carlos’s stomach, but didn’t find it. Hanna was furious, sent Julietta to fetch more lamps, and told Anaka to thrust her fingers down into Carlos’s throat once again. But all that came up was nasty-smelling stomach juices.
They never succeeded in finding the tapeworm.
Carlos jumped up onto the ceiling light and refused to come down even when Hanna tried to console him and offered him the drink he liked more than anything else: milk. But he didn’t come down. Carlos was a wounded animal that hid himself away in his impregnable fortress—a lampshade.
Julietta and Anaka cleaned up the desk. Hanna went out onto the veranda. The town down below was shrouded in darkness. One or two fires in the far distance. Perhaps also the sound of drums.
From somewhere came the sound of laughter. It reminded her of the night when she had made up her mind to leave Captain Svartman’s ship.
Perhaps it’s the same man laughing, she thought. But I am quite a different person now: how can I be sure that I’ve heard his laughter before? And besides, on that occasion I didn’t need to worry about a chimpanzee that has eaten a tapeworm.
It was dawn before she went to bed.
By then Carlos had also gone to sleep, curled up like a frightened child in the ceiling light.
55
Hanna turned to Felicia once again. She told her about the tapeworm that Carlos had swallowed, but the only advice Felicia had to offer was to wait until it left the chimpanzee’s body of its own accord. Hanna asked whether there was a cure, anything the woman with the knowledge of medicine could give Carlos to kill the worm while it was still inside him, but Felicia said that the mysterious female magician who had sold her the tapeworms refused to have anything to do with apes or any other animal. She refused to treat elephants or mice, her knowledge was restricted to human suffering and the remedies she could offer them.
Hanna became so desperate that she borrowed Andrade’s car and was driven to the cathedral to talk to one of the Catholic priests. She assumed that the priests there could give advice on everything to do with human life. Even if it was the health of a chimpanzee that she was worried about, it was her own worries that she wanted to be free of.
The heat was like a solid wall in front of her as she travelled to the cathedral. Even though it was early in the morning the heat was so intense that her eyes ached as she hurried towards the darkness behind the open doors. Once inside, Hanna stood still for a while and allowed her eyes to become used to the darkness. The cathedral was empty, apart from a few nuns dressed in white, kneeling before a picture of the Madonna, and a solitary man in a white suit sitting in a pew with his eyes closed, as if he were asleep. There was a smell from the newly painted doors. Some black women in bare feet were gliding over the stone floor, carrying dusters and long poles with feathers on the end, with which they carefully caressed the highest-hanging pictures of the saints.
A priest dressed in black came out of a room in the chancel. He paused in front of the high altar and polished his spectacles. Hanna stood up and walked towards him. He put his glasses back on and eyed her up and down. He was young, barely more than thirty. That made her feel hesitant—a priest ought to be an old man.
“The senhora looks as if she wants to confess,” he said in a friendly tone.
“What do people look like then?” she responded. “Guilty? Full of sin?”
The claim that she looked as if she wanted to make a confession touched a sore point in her. She could not deny that she was the owner of the town’s biggest brothel, and earned money from the organized sin that was for sale there. But the priest didn’t seem to react against her negative tone of voice.
“Most of all people who want to confess express a longing. They want to liberate themselves.”
“I don’t want to confess. I’ve come here to ask for advice.”
The young priest pulled up two chairs and placed them facing each other. The cleaners had vanished, but the sleeping man was still there in a pew not far away.
“I’m Father Leopoldo,” said the young priest. “I’ve recently come here from Portugal.”
“My name’s Hanna. My Portuguese is not good. I need to speak slowly in order to find the words I need, and I often place them in the wrong order.”
Father Leopoldo smiled. Hanna thought that his face was handsome even if he was very pale and almost gave the impression of being undernourished. Perhaps the priest also had a hungry worm in his intestines?
“Where do you come from, Senhora Hanna?”
She recounted her background in brief, but chose not to mention the brothel: she merely said that she had married a Portuguese man called Senhor Vaz, who had died suddenly shortly after the marriage.
“You said you needed some advice,” said Father Leopoldo, who had listened intently to her story. “But you still haven’t asked me a question that I can react to.”
I can’t possibly start talking about a chimpanzee that has swallowed a tapeworm, she thought dejectedly. The priest will either think I’m crazy, or that I’ve come here to the cathedral to poke fun at him and all that’s holy.
Nevertheless, she explained the situation. She told him about the chimpanzee that meant so much to her, about the contents of the glass jar and the tap
eworm that was now living inside its body. The priest was not at all annoyed by what she said: he believed both what had happened and her worries about Carlos’s fate.
“I don’t think you have told me everything,” he said when she had finished, still just as patient and friendly as before. “It’s difficult to give advice to somebody who doesn’t tell the whole story.”
Hanna realized that he had seen through her. Even if Vaz was not an unusual name in Lourenço Marques, Father Leopoldo evidently knew about the Senhor Vaz who had run the biggest brothel in town. Perhaps he had even heard about his marriage to the Swedish woman, and his death that had taken place so soon afterwards?
There was no longer any reason to hold anything back. She told him about Esmeralda, and that she herself was now the owner and proprietor of the brothel.
“I’m afraid for my chimpanzee’s life,” she said in the end. “And I simply don’t know what I’m going to do with what I now own and am responsible for.”
Father Leopoldo observed her from behind his rimless spectacles. She didn’t find his look censorious. She thought it likely that even a young priest was used to hearing the oddest of tales, whether or not they were told to him during confession.
“There is a veterinary surgeon here in Lourenço Marques called Paulo Miranda,” said Father Leopoldo. “His clinic is right next to the big market. Perhaps he can give you some advice on how to cure your ape?”
“What can he do that the local women who know about medicines can’t do?”
“I don’t know. You asked me for advice. Besides, I think that traditional native medicine is based mainly on magic and should be opposed.”
Hanna would have liked him to see those white tapeworms, and to explain to him how much weight Esmeralda had lost by showing him the clothes she had worn when she was at her fattest. But she said nothing.
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