A Treacherous Paradise (11 page)

The day Attimilio Vaz had decided to introduce himself to his hotel guest, he had spoken slowly and been careful not to use any unnecessarily difficult words.

Senhor Vaz was born in Portugal, but at some point long ago in his life he had spent time in Sweden, after a short stay in a Danish town that might have been called Odense, he wasn’t sure. He had been selling Portuguese anchovies, but she got the impression that it hadn’t been quite straightforward. It hadn’t been his fault, of course. Attimilio Vaz considered himself to be an honest and upright person who unfortunately was often misunderstood. Even though he had been forced to leave Sweden in great haste after being accused of fraudulent dealing, he had memories of a delightful country and equally delightful people – and he was now pleased to welcome a Swedish guest into his simple but completely clean and above-board establishment.

A few days later, when Hanna felt strong enough to go out for the first time since she had arrived, he invited her to dinner at a restaurant in the same street as O Paraiso.

When she emerged into the street accompanied by her host, she suddenly felt the ground swaying under her feet. It was as if she were standing on the deck of the ship again. She stopped and leaned against the wall. Senhor Vaz was worried and asked if she wanted to go back to her room, but she shook her head. When he took hold of her arm she let him do so. No man had touched her since Lundmark’s death. Now she was walking around an African town and a strange man, a Portuguese brothel proprietor, was escorting her to a restaurant.

It wasn’t a dream, but she found herself in a world where she didn’t belong.

Lundmark had been taller than she was. Senhor Vaz barely came up to her shoulders.

Hanna gathered from a sign on the side of a building that the street they were walking along was called rua Bagamoio. There were bars everywhere, some of them garishly lit up by hissing gas lamps, others dark, with wax candles flickering secretively behind curtains that swayed whenever anybody stepped quickly inside. But it was only this street that was illuminated. The narrow alleys leading off the rua Bagamoio were dark, silent, empty.

It reminded her of the forests that surrounded the river valley back home. There she could stand in a glade, enjoying the light of the sun. But if she took a couple of steps in among the tall tree trunks she entered a different world, deep in the darkness.

Apart from a few black beggars dressed in rags, everybody in the street was white. It was a while before Hanna realized that there were no other women. She was the only one. All around her were white men, some of them sailors, some soldiers, some drunk and noisy, others silent as they slunk furtively close to the walls, as if they didn’t really want to be noticed. Inside the bars, however, were a lot of black women sitting on bar stools or sofas, smoking in silence.

She thought that if this was a town, she no longer knew what to call the place where Forsman lived. Did these two places have any similarities at all? The streets where she and Berta had walked around together, and this murky town with its mysterious alleys?

A man was sitting on a street corner in front of a fire, tapping away at a drum that was so small he could hold it in the palm of his hand. His face was dripping with sweat, and in front of him he had laid out a little piece of cloth on which a few metal coins were gleaming. His fingers were pecking away at the drum skin like the beaks of eager birds. Hanna had never heard such a frantic rhythm before. She stopped. Vaz seemed impatient, but dug out a coin that he threw on to the piece of cloth before dragging her along with him again.

‘He was barefoot,’ said Vaz. ‘If the police appear, they’ll whisk him away.’

Hanna didn’t understand what he meant at first. But she noticed that the man with the little drum hadn’t been wearing shoes.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘No negroes are allowed in the centre of town without shoes,’ said Vaz. ‘That’s the law. After nine o’clock they have no right to be on our streets at all. Unless they are working, and can produce the appropriate documents. “No black man or woman has the right of access to the streets of this town unless they are wearing shoes.” That’s what the municipal law says. The first sign that a person is civilized is that he or she is wearing shoes.’

Once again Hanna was unsure if she had understood properly what he had said. ‘Our streets?’ Whose streets were they not, then?

Senhor Vaz stopped outside a restaurant that seemed to be wallowing in darkness. Hanna thought she could see the word
morte
on the sign board, but that surely couldn’t be right. A restaurant in a red-light district could hardly have a name that included the concept of death.

Nevertheless, she was sure. That was the word she had seen, and it meant ‘dead’ – it was one of the very first words she had learnt from Forsman’s dictionary.

They ate fish grilled over an open fire. Senhor Vaz offered her wine, but she shook her head and he didn’t insist. He was very friendly, only asked her a few questions about how she was feeling, and seemed to be keen to ensure that she was in good shape.

But there was something about his manner that made her cautious, possibly even suspicious. She answered his questions as fully as she could, but nevertheless had the feeling that she had closed all the doors to her innermost rooms, and locked them.

At the end of the meal he informed her that a nurse would be coming to the hotel the following day, and would stay on for as long as Hanna needed her help. Hanna tried to protest. She already had all the help she needed, from Laurinda and Felicia. But Senhor Vaz was very insistent.

‘You need a white nurse,’ he said. ‘You can’t rely on the blacks. Even if they seem to be looking after your best interests, the reality might be that they are poisoning you.’

Hanna was struck dumb. Had she heard right? She didn’t believe what he had said. But at the same time, she had the feeling that a white woman might be able to give her a different kind of company.

They walked home slowly through the night. Senhor Vaz linked arms with her. She didn’t back off.

When they arrived back at the hotel, he bowed to her at the foot of the stairs and withdrew. Although it was late most of the prostitutes were sitting idle on their chairs, smoking or talking to one another in low voices. She gathered that it was not a good evening, and thought with disgust about what usually went on behind the closed doors.

Hanna looked for Felicia, but failed to see her. But when she was halfway up the stairs Felicia emerged from her room together with a white man with a bushy beard and an enormous pot belly. The sight made Hanna’s stomach turn. She hurried to her room and closed the door – but just before she closed it her eyes met Felicia’s. Very briefly, but despite everything they seemed to be exchanging an important message.

At that same moment she also saw Carlos, the chimpanzee dressed as a waiter, standing next to the piano with a cigar in his hand. He was looking round curiously. At that moment he seemed to be the most alive of all those occupying what was known as a house of pleasure.

THE FOLLOWING DAY
a white woman with a stern-looking face appeared outside Hanna’s door. Her name was Ana Dolores, and she spoke only Portuguese plus a few words of the local language Shangana. But as she spoke slowly and clearly, Hanna found it easier to understand her than both Felicia and Senhor Vaz.

After the arrival of Ana Dolores, Hanna was better able to understand what Senhor Vaz had said about black people telling lies. Ana was of the same opinion – indeed, if possible she was even more convinced of it than Senhor Vaz. She became Hanna’s guide in a world that seemed to consist exclusively of lies.

Ana had been summoned because Senhor Vaz had been convinced that neither Dr Garibaldi nor the black servant girls would be able to help Hanna to fully recover. The very next day after his conversation with Felicia he had called a rickshaw and made the journey up the hills to the Pombal hospital. He had spoken to Senhor Vasconselous who was in charge of all the extensive hospital administration despite the fact that he was stone deaf and could only see out of his left eye. For many years Vasconselous had been a faithful client at O Paraiso every three weeks. He told his wife about the long and extremely complicated games of chess he played with his old friend Vaz. She didn’t need to know that in fact he scarcely knew how to move the various pieces across the board. The only lady he wished to be served by when he visited the establishment was the beautiful Belinda Bonita, who was getting on in years but in view of her maturity attracted certain clients who couldn’t stomach the thought of bedding any of the younger women.

Senhor Vaz told Senhor Vasconselous the facts: a white woman had come to stay at O Paraiso out of the blue. To make sure the deaf man on the other side of the desk understood, he wrote down what he was saying in large letters on the notepad with lined yellow paper that always lay in front of the old man.

What he wanted was straightforward. Senhor Vaz needed a trustworthy nurse to work for him in the hotel for as long as the white woman needed medical care. He stressed that it should be a mature woman who always wore her nurse’s uniform whenever she visited the hotel. He didn’t want to risk any of his clients getting the idea that the first white whore had arrived in Lourenço Marques. A woman who could also assume various playful and erotically arousing identities, such as that of a nurse for instance.

Or to be more accurate, perhaps: the second white prostitute in Lourenço Marques. Nobody, least of all Senhor Vaz, knew if it was a myth or something that had really happened, but it was claimed that there was a white woman who seduced clients into joining her in one of the dark alleys of the illuminated rua Bagamoio. Nobody knew where she had come from, nobody was really sure if she actually existed. But occasionally half-naked men used to stagger out of the dark alleys with stories to tell about a beautiful white woman who could perform tricks that none of the black women seemed to be capable of.

Senhor Vaz had never believed these stories. He was convinced that in the world that black people lived in, lies carried more weight than the truth. Embedded in falsehoods were also superstition and fear, deceit and obsequiousness. From the very first day he had set foot on the quay in Lourenço Marques he had been convinced that one could never trust black people. Without their white overlords they would still be living the kind of life that Europeans left behind hundreds of years ago.

Senhor Vaz was a firm believer in the civilizing mission of the white race on the African continent. But that did not mean that he treated the women in his brothel badly. It’s true that he occasionally smacked the girls if he was annoyed by them, but he never allowed that to develop into serious ill treatment.

Senhor Vasconcelous thought over what his friend had to say, then rang a bell. His secretary, a grossly overweight woman who Senhor Vaz recognized from the cathedral where he always attended Mass every Sunday, came into the room and was instructed to fetch nurse Ana Dolores, who was working on a ward for the mentally ill.

Senhor Vaz was a little worried when he heard this and wondered if his friend Vasconselous had misunderstood him. He didn’t need help looking after a white woman who was out of her mind. She had booked into his hotel, paid for several nights in advance, and then suddenly started to bleed. The bleeding had stopped now, but she was still weak and in need of care.

He wrote this latter point down in childishly large capital letters. Senhor Vasconselous read what was written with his short-sighted good eye, then wrote simply
si
,
entendo
, and lit a stump of a cigar.

Ana Dolores was very thin with a hatchet face characterized by some kind of rancour. Senhor Vaz was doubtful the moment she entered the room and had her task explained to her. As far as he was concerned it was just as important that she didn’t scare off his clients as that she took care of the white woman confined to bed in room number 4. But he decided he had to rely on the judgement of his friend.

They agreed on a fee, shook hands, and decided that she should start work that very same evening. Senhor Vaz couldn’t tell from the expression on Ana’s face whether or not she knew about O Paraiso, but she could hardly have failed to be aware of the fact that rua Bagamoio was the most notorious red-light street in the whole of southern Africa. Vaz had a fair idea of the wages normally paid to an experienced nurse, and had immediately doubled that amount to prevent her from hesitating for financial reasons. He also promised her accommodation in room number 2, which was the biggest one in the hotel – more of a modest suite in fact, a large corner room with a bed recess and a picture window with views over the rooftops down to the harbour and the Katembe peninsular.

And so Hanna got to know Ana Dolores. When she woke up the following morning it was no longer Felicia sitting in the basket chair by the window, nor Laurinda on her silent feet carrying in a tray with a cup of tea and nibbles. Now it was a nurse dressed in white, standing in front of her and staring at her. Without a word she took her hand and measured her pulse. Then, with no indication as to whether she was satisfied or not, she leaned over Hanna’s face, pulled her eyelid up and studied her pupils. Hanna noticed that this unknown nurse smelled of some fruit or flower she didn’t recognize. Having examined Hanna’s eyes, Ana then whipped down the thin duvet and exposed her lower abdomen. It happened so quickly that Hanna didn’t have time to hide her modesty. She raised a hand, but Ana brushed it aside, almost as if it had been an insect, and opened her patient’s legs wide. Without a word she contemplated Hanna’s pudenda, lengthily, thoughtfully. Then she folded back the duvet and left the room.

Laurinda came in with the tea tray. She was wearing a thin white cotton blouse and a colourful
capulana
wrapped around her hips.

Hanna raised her hand and pointed to the door, trying to reproduce an outline of the woman who had just left the room.