‘I want to know,’ said Ana. ‘Is there anybody who has noticed a significant fall in earnings?’
Still nobody spoke – but then, as if in response to an invisible sign, all of them raised their hands.
Ana stood up. She felt she couldn’t bear this any longer.
‘I shall personally pay each of you however much you think you have lost as a result of my helping Isabel,’ she shouted. ‘Come to me every month with bills for what you would have earned from customers who haven’t shown up. I shall pay them. I shall become your new customer!’
Ana stormed out of the brothel without looking back, and was driven straight back to her house. She sat for ages in front of her open diary without actually writing anything. She didn’t yet know how to deal with her big disappointment.
After a while, she went over to a window and looked out over the sea. Small fishing boats with triangular sails were scudding along over the waves, making the most of a fresh following wind. Carlos had climbed up on to the roof and was sitting on the edge of the chimney with an orange in his hands.
Ana was just about to leave the window when she noticed a black man standing in the street down below, looking up at her. She had never seen him before. He was strongly built, and wearing what looked like overalls. When he noticed that she had seen him, he turned round and walked away. She shouted for Julietta.
‘Have you seen a black man standing in the street, looking up at my house?’
‘No,’ said Julietta.
‘I’ve just seen one down below, looking up.’
‘I don’t know who it could have been. But I can ask.’
By the time Ana got into the car that afternoon to be driven down to the fort, Julietta had still not managed to find out the identity of the man in the street. Nobody seemed to have seen him. Ana began to wonder if she’d imagined it.
Sullivan was standing on the steps waiting for her when she arrived.
‘The prisoner was injured last night,’ he said, off-handedly as if it didn’t concern him.
At first Ana didn’t understand what he meant.
‘The woman for whom you bring food was injured during the night.’
‘What happened?’
‘Somebody tried to kill her. But failed. It’s also possible that it was only somebody trying to disfigure her, to make a mess of her face.’
‘How could that happen?’
‘We are investigating the circumstances.’
Ana didn’t wait to hear what else Sullivan had to say. She ran across the open courtyard with the grassy patch where goats were grazing. A soldier had already raised the grating when he saw her come in through the front gate. Ana raced along the dark corridor. The door to Isabel’s cell was standing open. For once she wasn’t sitting on the bunk, but lying down. Ana sat down on the stone floor next to the bunk. Blood was running from one of Isabel’s cheeks and her mouth. It was obvious that she had been slashed with a knife.
Sullivan had followed her down to the cell.
‘Maybe you should fetch that Indian doctor,’ he said.
Ana had the distinct impression that Sullivan knew Pandre was not at all what he had pretended to be, but just now was not the time to start wondering about what Sullivan knew or didn’t know. He could think whatever he liked.
‘He’s already left,’ she said. ‘Why can’t the fort summon a doctor?’
‘He’s on his way,’ said Sullivan. ‘But he had to deliver a baby first. Life always takes precedence over death.’
‘Not always,’ said Ana. ‘I think that life and death are equally important. Isabel might die if she doesn’t get medical treatment.’
The doctor who eventually arrived turned out to be an extremely deaf old Portuguese man who had lived in Africa for over fifty years. He surprised Ana by stitching up the gaping wound with admirable skill, and covering it with cotton wool.
‘Will she survive?’ Ana asked.
‘Of course she’ll survive,’ said the doctor. ‘She’ll have a scar. But that’s all.’
‘Did whoever attacked her want to kill her, or just to injure her?’
She had to shout loudly into the doctor’s ear in order for him to understand.
‘Both intentions are possible,’ he said, ‘but the probability is that he wasn’t trying to kill her. To do that all he’d have needed to do was to slash her a bit lower down, over her throat, and a bit deeper. A sharp knife across a victim’s throat can kill in less than a minute.’
Ana stayed with Isabel. She couldn’t be sure how much pain the patient was in. They shared the silence and listened to each other’s breathing. Ana watched an insect creeping incredibly slowly over one of the cell walls.
‘Who could have got access to her?’ Ana asked.
‘To be absolutely honest,’ said Sullivan, ‘I just don’t know. But I can promise you that we shall get to the bottom of this. I don’t want a prisoner for whom I’m responsible to be killed.’
‘Is that true?’
‘Yes,’ said Sullivan. ‘It certainly is true. I don’t care about her – I think she ought to be hanged or shot. But nobody is going to sneak into one of my cells and kill her, and get away with it.’
That evening, when Ana returned to her house and was about to draw the curtains in her bedroom, she once again saw the black man in overalls standing in the street below.
Not long afterwards, she peered out through a gap in the curtains.
The man was still there.
He’s waiting for me, she thought. There’s something he wants from me.
She went down the stairs, carefully opened the front door and passed by the guards. She was possessed by an overwhelming desire to push them into the fire for falling asleep instead of standing guard over the entrance to her house, but instead she opened the gate leading into the street. The man was still there, on the other side. She was carrying a candle, and walked over to him.
‘I’m Moses,’ he said. ‘Isabel’s brother. I’ve come from the mines to set her free and take her away with me.’
His eyes were completely calm. In some strange way he reminded her of her father.
65
TWO FIRES WERE already burning where the guards were curled up asleep. But Moses lit a third one at the back of the house where Ana had arranged for a vegetable garden to be created, and planted some orange and lime trees. For the first time since she arrived in Lourenço Marques she found herself with an African who treated her as an equal. There was no trace in him of the false subservience the blacks felt obliged to assume. Moses looked her in the eye when he spoke to her. And this was the first time a black man had sat down on a chair in her presence. The norm was always for her to sit down while the black man she was speaking to remained standing. Ana Dolores had made that clear to her from the very start.
She put it to him straight out: why was he so different from all the others?
‘Why shouldn’t I look you in the eye?’ Moses replied. ‘You can’t hate or despise blacks or you wouldn’t be trying to help my sister. And so you are an unusual person as far as I am concerned.’
‘What do you do down the mines? Do you dig for coal?’
‘Diamonds. But of course, there is also coal there. It’s the same stuff, after all.’
Ana didn’t know about the connection between diamonds and coal, and so she didn’t understand his comment.
‘You make fires with coal. You wear diamonds on your fingers. How can they be the same thing?’
‘Really old coal develops into diamonds,’ said Moses. ‘One day perhaps I can explain it to you properly – all about the stuff we take out of the ground in the Rand.’
Ana said that she knew who he was and where he worked – but wondered how he knew who she was. Has Isabel told him about her?
‘I know what I know,’ was all he said in response. He gave her no further explanation, but instead embarked on a description of life in the mines, without her having asked about it.
‘The white
s who’ve landed on our coasts have always turned most of their attention to looking for what is hidden under the soil,’ said Moses. ‘That’s why we Africans find it so hard to understand you. How can anybody travel so far and be prepared to risk dying of fever or snake bites, simply in order to look for things that are hidden under the ground? Of course, a lot of hunters come here as well. Others are running away from harassment they suffer in their homelands – what we don’t understand is why they come here and choose to live a life harassing us. White people are basically incomprehensible – but for that reason we find it easy to understand them because we know what they are after. But they don’t even do the digging themselves: they force us to do it. The whites have transformed us blacks into servants in the underworld. One day it will all come to an end, just as the sources of gold and diamonds will wither away.’
‘What will you do when your sister is free again?’ Ana asked.
‘I’m thinking of using those underground tunnels I know so well to protect my sister and her children. That’s where I shall take them to once she has escaped. Moving into another country, passing over a border that the whites have established, that doesn’t mean a thing. All the borders you have made are nothing more than lines in our red soil – they could have been drawn by children using sticks.’
He stopped, and watched the fire dying out. It seemed to Ana that he had made a fire that would only burn for as long as he had something to say to her. Once the embers were no longer glowing, he stood up and left. His last words were that they would meet at the fort the following day.
Ana went back to her bedroom. Carlos woke up when she lay down in bed, and stretched his hand out towards her. But just now she didn’t want an ape in bed beside her. Not just after having met and talked to the man known as Moses. She smacked Carlos – not hard, but enough to signal to him that he should move to the ceiling light. With a sigh and an irritated grunt, Carlos leapt up and lay down in the dish-shaped lampshade, one arm hanging down towards the bed.
She got up early next morning, sat for a long time in front of the mirror contemplating her face and thinking how she could barely contain herself until she met Moses again. To her surprise she found herself thinking an unheard-of thought: Moses was a man she could imagine herself becoming close to. She put her hand over her mouth, as if she had cried out in horror.
The person I can see in the mirror is somebody else, she thought. Or somebody I have become without realizing it.
A few hours later, when she had forced herself to go through Herr Eber’s accounts in order to try and understand the claims about reduced income, Julietta announced that Father Leopoldo had come to visit her. Ana was immediately worried that something might have happened to Isabel. She ran down the stairs to meet him. But Father Leopoldo was able to calm her down. The old doctor had stitched up the wound very well, and the cotton wool was protecting her skin and preventing dirt from entering it.
‘I’ve only come to say that I’m continuing with my attempts to talk to her,’ he said when they had sat down in the shade on the veranda and Julietta had served tea.
‘But she’s still silent, is she?’
‘She doesn’t say a word. But she listens.’
‘Can you be sure of that?’
‘I can see that she’s listening.’
‘I know it’s none of my business, but what are you trying to talk to her about?’
‘I’m trying to persuade her to confess to her terrible sin, and submit her soul to God. He will pass judgement on her, but His judgement will be mild if she confesses and submits to His will.’
Ana looked at Father Leopoldo in surprise. He really believes what he says, she thought. For him, God is someone who hands out punishment – the same God that my grandmother in Funäsdalen used to talk about. He believes in the same hell that she did. He’s not like me. I don’t believe in hell, but I’m frightened of it all the same. If there is a hell, it is here on earth.
God is white, Ana thought. I suppose I’ve always thought that, but never so clearly as I do now.
She wanted to conclude the conversation.
‘This is the first time you’ve been to visit me,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe that you have only come to inform me that Isabel still isn’t saying anything. I know that already, because I visit her every day.’
‘I’ve also come to tell you that the plaster and rendering in one corner of the cathedral is falling off and needs repairing.’
‘I’m not a plasterer.’
‘We are going to need voluntary donations so that we can carry out repairs as soon as possible, before the damage gets any worse. We can’t wait for the Church authorities in Lisbon to pass resolutions to assist us.’
Ana nodded. She promised to make a donation despite the fact that it felt humiliating to discover that this was the real reason for Father Leopoldo’s visit. She no longer regarded him as a priest, but as a beggar pestering her.
He stood up, as if he were in a hurry to leave. Ana rang her bell and instructed Julietta to escort him out. She thought about her father’s words, to the effect that priests should be kicked out into the snow in bare feet. He wouldn’t have liked Father Leopoldo, she thought – but I would still have been a mucky little angel as far as he was concerned.
Ana avoided visiting the brothel that day. She sent Julietta there with a message to O’Neill saying that he would be responsible for what happened there until her next visit, but at the end she implied that she might well turn up before the end of the day despite everything. Senhor Vaz had taught her that everybody in the brothel needed to be kept on tenterhooks, suspecting that checks might be made at any time of day or night.
After the meeting with Father Leopoldo, Ana sacked one of the night security guards who had been asleep on duty. He pleaded in vain to keep his job. He had been ill, he said; he’d had a fever, his mother had had an accident, several of his children were in difficulties – that was why he had fallen asleep. Ana knew full well that nothing he said was true, it was a ritual from start to finish. But she allowed him to fetch his brother and appointed him as a night security guard instead, warning him that she would check up every night to make sure that he was awake.
After her afternoon siesta, when she had lain in bed unable to sleep, fanning herself, she was driven down to the fort. Carlos was sitting on the chimney when she left. She had realized that he was changing in some way, although it was not clear how. Perhaps I see Carlos as a reflection of myself, she thought. Something is happening, something with vital implications for my life. And hence also for Carlos’s future.
66
MOSES WAS WAITING in the shade of the wall surrounding the fort. Ana got out of the car and walked over to him. Moses selected a place where they could stand without being seen, and gave her a small leather pouch.
‘What’s this?’
‘The crushed shell of a special snail that lives off the Inhambane coast. Plus dried blossom from a tree that only blossoms once every nineteen years.’
‘Surely there aren’t any such trees?’
He looked offended, and she regretted what she had said.
‘What do you want me to do with this?’
‘Give it to Isabel. Say it’s from me. She should eat it.’
‘Why should she eat flowers?’
‘They’ll give her wings, like a butterfly’s. She’ll then be able to fly out of the prison. I’ll meet her and take her and her children to the tunnels in my mine. All that will be left in the cell is the leather pouch, and it will slowly rot away with a whispering noise.’
‘What? Can a leather pouch whisper?’
‘This one can: it will tell the story of Isabel and her new life for anybody who wants to listen.’
‘It sounds like a fairy tale you tell to small children.’
‘But what I’m telling you is the truth.’
Ana could see that Moses was serious. The person standing in front of her was no small child, and as far as he was co
ncerned what he said was the truth, and nothing but the truth. Ana thought he looked very much like Isabel, you could see they were brother and sister, especially in his eyes and the high forehead.
‘I’ll give it to her,’ said Ana, putting the pouch into the basket with the food. ‘Does she know what to do with it?’
‘Yes, she knows.’
‘And you really believe that she will grow wings?’
Moses took a step backwards, as if he no longer wanted to be too close to her. Then he turned on his heel without answering, and left. Ana remained where she was, hesitating. She put down the basket, took out the leather pouch and opened it. It was half full of a bluish-white powder that glittered when the sun’s rays fell on it.
I’m taking part in a strange game, she thought. How can wings suddenly grow on a human being’s back? If my father had given me these ground snail shells and flowers, would he then have been able to watch me flying off over the river and up into the mountains?
She tied the pouch again. There’s a lot I don’t understand, she thought. The wings are something that only Moses and Isabel can relate to. For me they are both laughable and deeply serious at one and the same time.
She went into the fort through the entrance doors. Sullivan was waiting for her on the steps as usual. Today, he was wearing his white dress uniform. He was holding his pipe in one hand. It had gone out. She asked if he had managed to throw any light on who was responsible for the attack on Isabel.
‘No,’ he said. ‘But I can’t believe that we won’t be able to work out who did it.’
‘One of the soldiers?’
‘Who would take the risk? I would send the guilty man back home, and doing one’s military service in a penal settlement in Portugal is something every sensible soldier is scared stiff of.’
‘But who could get past the guards?’
‘That’s precisely what we are looking into. This is a small town. It will be difficult to hide away the truth about what happened.’
A Treacherous Paradise Page 26