I don’t understand this, she thought. I’ll never understand it. But the time I’ve spent in this town has been characterized by my always being surrounded by white people claiming that it’s impossible to understand the blacks. I no longer see whatever it is I’m looking at. My eyes are constantly enveloped by this white mist.
She left the garden and walked past the empty sofas. The only person in the room was a man trying to light a half-smoked cigar. For some reason his presence aroused her fury. She picked up a cushion and hit him in the face with it, sending the cigar stump flying.
She stared at him without saying anything, shouted for Carlos, and left. When she came out into the street she screamed loudly, as if for a moment she had been transformed into a peacock in distress. A street cleaner stopped what he was doing and looked hard at her. She got into the car, but her chauffeur made no comment of surprise or admiration when he saw what she was wearing. The street cleaner resumed his work, as if nothing had happened.
When Julietta opened the door and stared at her, Ana couldn’t resist asking her what she thought of her get-up.
“I’d love to wear those clothes myself,” said Julietta.
“You’ll never be allowed to,” said Ana.
She went upstairs to her bedroom. She threw the clothes she’d been wearing into a laundry basket. The masquerade was over.
Late that evening Picard came to hand over the prints of the photograph he’d taken. Long after he had left, she sat contemplating the picture he had chosen in the light of her paraffin lamp.
Everybody was wearing a serious expression and looking straight at the camera. Apart from Carlos, who was laughing—as if he were a human being.
The only person in the picture who seemed frightened was Ana herself.
73
The day after she had sat with the lizard on her knee, Ana was driven out to Pedro Pimenta’s farm for what she had decided would be her last visit. On the way there it occurred to her that this place, among the cages with the white sheepdogs and the ponds with the crocodiles, was where her journey had reached its fateful end. She had come this far, and now she just needed to travel back. When Isabel had been let down by her husband, Ana had finally become aware of all the deceit that surrounded her on all sides. An environment that seemed to be comprised of nothing but hypocrisy and a repulsive contempt for the people whose home this country actually was. It was as if the guests had eaten their fill of the meal to which they hadn’t even been invited. We are the uninvited guests, she thought. I no longer need to have any doubts about that, at least.
She had taken Carlos with her. It was for his sake that she returned to Pedro’s farm. Carlos would be able to live there in freedom. There were trees and open spaces, and in addition he would be surrounded by both white and black people, which is what he was used to. Moreover, beyond the crocodile pools was the extensive countryside he had originally come from—the endless wilderness covered in bushes that he could go back to if he so wished.
Ana had realized that Carlos was just as far away from home as she was herself. Perhaps there was also a river with cold, brown water running through the forests where he had been born? Even if nothing else unites us, there is no doubt a longing to go home that we have both done all in our power to resist. I’ve done so in my way, but I’ll never be able to understand how he’s managed it.
When they reached the farm Ana shuddered at the memory of what had happened there. Carlos climbed onto the car roof and looked around curiously, as if he suspected that something important was about to happen.
Ana Dolores came out onto the steps. It was the first time Ana had seen her when she was not wearing her nurse’s uniform, with the stiff nurse’s hat on her head. She was surprised: hadn’t Ana Dolores come here to nurse the sick Teresa?
The truth about the big changes that had taken place became immediately apparent. Ana Dolores bade her a low-key welcome, gave Carlos an odd look, then invited her guest to sit down on the veranda and have a cup of tea. When a maid came with a tea tray, it was obvious who ruled the roost in this household. Ana Dolores was not simply the nurse, she was also the mistress of the house. The black woman went down on one knee before Ana Dolores after having served the tea.
We have the same name, Ana thought. She is Ana Dolores and I am Ana Branca—but soon I shall return to the person I once was. When that happens, my name will revert to being Hanna. But perhaps other changes have taken place inside me. Things I can’t see, only feel or perhaps suspect? I know that what happened to me after Isabel’s death will be crucial for the rest of my life. Even if I don’t yet know how.
She asked Ana Dolores about Teresa.
“She’ll probably never become healthy again,” said Ana Dolores. “But the chances of her throwing herself into one of the crocodile pools have decreased. Her sick mind hasn’t completely eaten away what remains of her will to live.”
“What does she say?”
“Not a lot. She mutters away about things that happened when she was a little girl. Her life before Pedro Pimenta entered it.”
“What about her and Pedro’s children? What will happen to them?”
“Just now they are on a ship to Portugal. Neither of them will ever come back here. The boy was given a crocodile skin to take back home with him, the girl a piece of cloth like those that women here wrap around themselves. All I hope is that their memories of Africa fade away and eventually disappear altogether.”
“And what about you, Ana Dolores?”
“I live here.”
“Looking after a woman who’s never going to get better?”
“I also run the place. I sell dogs and harvest crocodile skins. I’ve grown tired of merely looking after people.”
Ana said nothing more, but waited for Ana Dolores to ask a few questions about Isabel’s death. Perhaps she might also be interested in knowing why Ana had made such a determined effort to help Isabel.
But Ana Dolores said nothing. She sat there with a smile on her face, gazing out over the farm she now ruled over. It occurred to Ana that this was the first time she had ever seen Ana Dolores smile.
A car approached in a cloud of dust, and pulled up outside the house.
“Please excuse me,” said Ana Dolores, standing up. “I have a visitor, a man from Kimberley who’s going to buy one of my dogs. It won’t take long. Wait here for me. Just ring the bell if you want any more tea.”
The man who stepped out of the car was wearing a pith helmet and seemed to be in a hurry. It seemed to Ana that he was one of those white men who had come to Africa to live a short life. He would die like a hunted animal—hunted down by himself.
She and Carlos went to look at the crocodiles. Carlos stayed a respectable distance away from the pools containing the biggest crocodiles, which were almost four metres long. There have never been any crocodiles in my river, Ana thought. But perhaps once upon a time Carlos lived by a river where crocodiles lurked just under the surface of the water. He knows about the threat they pose.
As she stood there watching the crocodiles, Ana suddenly noticed how things had changed since her last visit to the farm. She couldn’t put her finger on it at first, but then it dawned on her that what she was looking at was becoming more and more decrepit: things had deteriorated markedly since Pedro’s death. She noted the cracks in the concrete walls of the pools, the weeds growing up through the stone paths, the troughs for food beginning to rust, broken tools, rubbish that hadn’t been collected and carried away for burning. Wherever she looked there were signs of decay. There was also a smell of death on all sides.
This was a change that had taken place in a very short time.
As she returned to the house she saw more and more signs of decay and decadence. The white sheepdogs in their kennels were not as well cared for as they had been in the past. Pedro Pimenta’s farm was wasting away. When he and Isabel died, what they had built up together had immediately started to crumble away.
Ana Dolores h
ad gone into the house with her customer. Ana sat down on the veranda and Carlos climbed up onto an abandoned dovecote. Ana suddenly had the feeling that she wasn’t alone. When she turned to look she discovered Teresa standing at the point where the veranda branched off along the side of the house. She was very pale, and so thin that she was almost unrecognizable. At first Ana wasn’t sure if it really was Teresa. She was uncertain what to do, but stood up and said hello. Teresa did not reply, but she hurried over and stood close by Ana. She smelled strongly of some oily perfume or other. Ana could see that the roots of her hair were caked in dirt and grease.
“Were you also married to my husband?” Teresa asked.
“No.”
“I’m sure you were married to my husband. You used to have red hair, but then you had it dyed.”
“I’ve never had red hair, and I’ve never been married to Pedro.”
Teresa suddenly gave Ana a powerful slap in the face. It was so unexpected that the pain in her cheek and the surprise at being hit struck her dumb.
“As you know what my husband is called you must have been married to him.”
Teresa turned round and hurried away. Then she suddenly turned round and started to come back. Ana braced herself for another smack, but Teresa turned yet again and disappeared behind the gable end of the house, and started shrieking.
Ana Dolores came running onto the veranda.
“Where is she?”
Ana pointed. Ana Dolores hurried along the veranda and followed it behind the gable end. When she came back she was holding Teresa by the arm. It was as if she were dragging along a rag doll. They both disappeared into the house.
The man in the pith helmet left with his newly purchased white sheepdog. He didn’t even seem to have noticed Teresa’s presence. Ana Dolores came back again. Ana wondered what she had done in order to calm Teresa down, but she didn’t ask.
“I’ve come here because there’s something I want you to do,” said Ana.
She pointed at Carlos, who was sitting on the abandoned dovecote, scratching his fur absent-mindedly. He didn’t seem to have noticed Teresa’s outburst either, something that surprised Ana. Carlos always tried to protect her by screeching and kicking up a row. But not this time.
“I’m about to leave Lourenço Marques,” she said, “and I can’t take Carlos with me. I thought I would ask if he could stay here on the farm. As long as he gets food and is allowed to do what he wants to do, he’s very calm and no trouble. One day he might well decide to go back to the forest again. He’d be able to do that from here.”
“You mean that he would be free to wander around and sit wherever he likes, as he’s doing now?”
“You could give him some rules if you liked. He’s a quick learner.”
“But you don’t want me to build a cage for him?”
“Certainly not. Nor should you attach a chain to his neck. Obviously I’m prepared to pay you well for your trouble.”
Ana Dolores looked at her, smiling.
“When you first came here you were in a pitiful state,” she said. “But you’ve done well for yourself.”
“I can at least pay you so that Carlos can lead the life he wants to have when I’m no longer here.”
Ana Dolores stood up.
“Let me think it over,” she said. “If I’m going to take on responsibility for an ape, I want to be sure that I really can and want to do that.”
She stood underneath the dovecote, looking up at Carlos who was still picking away at his skin, searching for ticks. Ana watched them from her seat on the veranda. Ana Dolores left the dovecote and walked to the row of kennels and pens where the sheepdogs that were already trained were jumping up excitedly at the bars. She stopped at one of the pens and seemed to pat the dog through the bars. Then she returned to the veranda.
“Shout for the ape,” she said. “Or at least get him to come down from the dovecote so that I can introduce myself to him.”
“So Carlos can stay here?”
“As long as he doesn’t bite.”
Ana shouted for Carlos, who clambered slowly down from the dovecote. Looking back, it seemed to Ana that he had appeared to hesitate.
74
What came next happened so quickly that afterwards Ana wasn’t at all sure of the course of events. The sheepdog Ana Dolores had just been stroking burst through the bars surrounding its pen and raced towards Carlos, who had just reached the ground. Ana shouted a warning, but it was too late. The dog leapt up and sunk its teeth into Carlos’s throat before he had realized the danger. Ana ran down the steps and began hitting the dog with a sweeping brush that was leaning against the veranda rail, but it didn’t release its grip on Carlos’s throat. Ana screamed and hit out with the brush as hard as she could. Ana Dolores didn’t move a muscle. Only when it was all over did she help to pull the dog away and drag it back to its pen.
Carlos lay motionless on the ground. His head was almost detached from his body. His eyes were open. He continued to look at Ana, even though he was dead.
Ana Dolores came back after locking up the sheepdog, which was still wild with fury.
“I don’t understand how it could have happened,” she said.
When Ana heard those words, she realized immediately what the facts were. At first she couldn’t believe it, but there was no other possible explanation.
It had not been an accident.
Ana stood up and slowly brushed the dust off her dress.
“I don’t know how you did it,” she said. “I understand that you unfastened the gate to the dog’s pen, but not how you then ordered it to attack. Perhaps the dog is trained to react not only to a spoken command, but also to a hand gesture or a movement of the head.”
Ana Dolores tried to interrupt her.
“Let me finish,” roared Ana. “If you interrupt me I shall beat you to death. You gave the dog a signal to attack Carlos. You wanted the ape to die. I don’t know why you did it. Perhaps because you are so full of hatred towards anybody who doesn’t look down on black people? Perhaps you are so full of hatred towards the ape who became my friend that it had to die? I have never met anybody as full of bitterness and hatred as you, Ana Dolores. One of these days the people in this country will have had more than enough of the likes of you.”
Ana Dolores tried once again to say something, but Ana—who was so furious that she was shaking—merely raised her hand.
“Don’t say a word,” she said. “Not a single word. I don’t want to hear a word from your mouth ever again. Just fetch me a sack so that I can take him away from here.”
Ana Dolores turned on her heel and disappeared into the house. She never reappeared. Instead, a maid came out with an empty sack. She handed it over without even looking at the dead ape. Ana put Carlos’s body into the sack, knowing that Ana Dolores was standing behind one of the windows in the house, watching her.
The chauffeur was waiting at the side of the car, and stepped forward to assist her. But she shook her head: she wanted to carry Carlos herself.
On the way back to town, she asked the chauffeur to stop on the bridge over the river. She got out of the car and stood by the rail. Some women were washing clothes in the river, not far from the bridge. They had hoisted their skirts up over their thighs. They were chatting away as they did the washing, and Ana could hear them laughing merrily as they slapped and kneaded the piles of garments. She was very tempted to go down to the women, hoist up her own dress and help them with the washing. In those black women she could detect a trace of Elin, and perhaps also herself.
In the end she stepped back from the rail. By then she had decided where Carlos should be buried.
When she got back home, she found herself unable to cry over her dead chimpanzee, but she felt a boundless longing for Lundmark, to have him by her side to make the mourning for Carlos easier. He wouldn’t have had much to say, as he was a man of few words: but he would have been able to console her, and assure her that she wasn’t alone. She tho
ught about the fact that in this continent she found so confusing and so full of contradictions, in the end the only thing she could rely on had been a chimpanzee.
She put the sack with Carlos’s body in the icebox. She forbade Julietta and the other servants to go anywhere near it. She knew that they were very curious, so she had a large, heavy stone brought up from the garden and placed on the lid of the icebox, telling them all that white people also had their witchcraft, and that hers was now hidden away inside the stone. Anybody who touched the stone would find that his or her fingers were transformed into small, sharp pieces of granite and that nothing—no white or black medicine—would be able to restore them. She could see that they believed her, and couldn’t help feeling a bitter-sweet pleasure in among all the misery she had experienced. Especially when Julietta turned pale and slunk away.
Once again, she slept that night with the aid of a strong dose of sleeping tablets. But she was up again as dawn broke. As the chauffeur had been instructed to be ready for an early departure, he had spent the night curled up on the back seat of the car. He helped Ana to carry the sack containing Carlos’s body from the icebox, and also packed into the car a spade and a pickaxe that Ana had taken from the garden shed the previous evening.
All was quiet as they carried the sack into the brothel, past the sleeping guards, through the sofa room where a few men lay stretched out, snoring.
The chauffeur put the sack down where she indicated, next to the jacaranda tree. Then he went back to the car.
This was where she was going to bury Carlos. He would lie there under an array of blue blossom.
There was simply no other location worthy of being Carlos’s last resting place.
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