Half a Life (16 page)

Somehow I got through the day, without Ana or anyone else guessing at my state of mind, the profound doubt that had been with me ever since we had left England. And then it was night. A generator came on. The power it provided went up and down. The bulbs all over the house and the outbuildings constantly dimmed and brightened, and the light they gave seemed to answer a pulse beat, now filling a room, now shrinking back to the walls. I waited all the time that first night for the light to steady itself. At about ten the lights dipped very low. Some minutes later they dipped again, and a while after that they went out. The generator whined down and I was aware of the noise it had been making. There was a ringing in my ears, then something like the sound of crickets in the night, then silence and the dark, the two coming together. Afterwards the pale yellow lights of oil lamps could be seen in the servants' quarters at the back of the house.

I felt very far away from everything I had known, a stranger in that white concrete house with all the strange old Portuguese colonial furniture, the unfamiliar old bathroom fittings; and when I lay down to sleep I saw again—for longer than I had seen them that day—the fantastic rock cones, the straight asphalt road, and the Africans walking.

I drew comfort from Ana, her strength and her authority. And just as now, as you may have noticed, Sarojini, I lean on you, so in those days, ever since she had agreed to my being with her in Africa, I leaned on Ana. I believed in a special way in her luck. Some of this had to do with the very fact that she was a woman who had given herself to me. I believed that she was in some essential way guided and protected, and as long as I was with her no harm could come to me. It may be because of something in our culture that, in spite of appearances, men are really looking for women to lean on. And, of course, if you are not used to governments or the law or society or even history being on your side, then you have to believe in your luck or your star or you will die. I know that you have inherited our mother's uncle's radical genes and have different ideas. I am not going to argue with you. I just want to tell you why I was able to follow someone I hardly knew to a colonial country in Africa of which I knew little except that it had difficult racial and social ideas. I loved Ana and I believed in her luck. The two ideas went together. And since I know, Sarojini, that you have your own ideas about love as well, I will explain. Ana was important to me because I depended on her for my idea of being a man. You know what I mean and I think we can call it love. So I loved Ana, for the great gift she had brought me, and to an equal degree I believed in her luck. I would have gone anywhere with her.

In the sitting room one morning, in that first or second week, I found a little African maid. She was very thin, shiny-faced, and in a flimsy cotton dress. She said, in an overfamiliar but rather stylish way, “So you are Ana's London man.” She put her broom against the high upholstered armchair, sat on the chair as on a throne, both her forearms resting flat on the worn upholstered arms of the chair, and began to engage me in polite conversation. She said, as if speaking from a textbook, “Did you have a pleasant journey?” And: “Have you had a chance to see something of the country? What do you think of the country?” I had been studying the language for some time and knew enough of it now to talk in the same stilted way to the little maid. Ana came in. She said, “I wondered who it was.” The little maid dropped her grand manner, got up from the chair and took up her broom again. Ana said, “Her father is Júlio. He is the carpenter. He drinks too much.”

I had met Júlio. He was a man of mixed race with smiling unreliable eyes, and he lived in the servants' quarters. His drinking was a joke there, and I was to learn not to be too frightened by it. He was a weekend drinker, and often late in the afternoon on a Friday or Saturday or Sunday his African wife would run out to the garden of the main house, quite alone in her terror, moving backwards or sideways step by step, her African cloth slipping off her shoulder, watching all the time for the drunken man in the quarters. This could go on until the light faded. Then the generator would come on, drowning everything with its vibration. The unsteady electric light would further alter the aspect of things; the crisis would pass; and in the quarters in the morning there would be peace again, the passions of the evening washed away.

But it couldn't have been much of a joke for Júlio's daughter. She spoke in her simple and open way of her home life, in those two rooms at the back. She said to me, “When my father gets drunk he beats my mother. Sometimes he beats me too. Sometimes it's so bad I can't sleep. Then I walk up and down the room until I get tired. Sometimes I walk all night.” And every night after that, whenever I got into bed, I thought for a second or two about the little maid in the quarters. Another time she said to me, “We eat the same food every day.” I didn't know whether she was complaining or boasting or simply speaking a fact about her African ways. In those early days, until local people made me think differently about African girls, I used to worry about Júlio's daughter, seeing myself in her, and wondering how, with all her feelings for fineness as I saw them, she was going to manage in the wilderness in which she found herself.

Of course it wasn't wilderness. It looked open and wild, but it had all been charted and parcelled out, and every thirty minutes or so on those dirt roads, if you were driving in a suitable vehicle, you came to an estate house, which was more or less like Ana's. Something in newish white concrete with a wide, bougainvillaea-hung verandah all around, and with additions at the back.

We went one Sunday, not long after we had arrived, to a lunch at one of those neighbours of Ana's. It was a big affair. There were mud-splashed Jeeps and Land Rovers and other four-wheel drives on the sandy open space in front of the house. The African servants wore white uniforms, buttoned at the neck. After drinks people separated according to their inclination, some sitting at the big table in the dining room, others sitting at the smaller tables on the verandah, where the tangled old bougainvillaea vines softened the light. I had had no idea what these people would be like and what they would think of me. Ana hadn't talked of the matter and, following her example, I hadn't talked of it to her. I found now that there was no special reaction to me. It was curiously deflating. I was expecting some recognition of my extraordinariness and there was nothing. Some of these estate-owners appeared, in fact, to have no conversation; it was as though the solitude of their lives had taken away that faculty. When eating time came they just sat and ate, husband and wife side by side, not young, not old, people in between in age, eating and not talking, not looking round, very private, as though they were in their own houses. Towards the end of the lunch two or three of these eating women beckoned the servants and talked to them, and after a while the servants came with take-away portions of the lunch in paper bags. It appeared to be a tradition of the place. It might have been that they had come from far, and wanted to have food to eat when they got back home.

Racially they were varied, from what looked like pure white to a deep brown. A number of them were of my father's complexion, and this might have been one reason why they seemed to accept me. Ana said later, “They don't know what to make of you.” There were Indians in the country; I wasn't an absolute exotic. There were quite a few Indian traders. They ran cheap shops and socially never stepped outside their families. There was an old and large Goan community, people originally of India, from the very old Portuguese colony there, who had come to this place in Africa to work as clerks and accountants in the civil service. They spoke Portuguese with a special accent. I couldn't be mistaken for a Goan. My Portuguese was poor and for some reason I spoke it with an English accent. So people couldn't place me and they let me be. I was Ana's London man, as the little housemaid had said.

About the people at the lunch Ana told me afterwards, “They are the second-rank Portuguese. That is how they are considered officially, and that is how they consider themselves. They are second rank because most of them have an African grandparent, like me.” In those days to be even a second-rank Portuguese was to have a kind of high status, and just as at the lunch they kept their heads down and ate, so in the colonial state they kept their heads down and made what money they could. That was to change in a couple of years, but at the moment that regulated colonial world seemed rock solid to everybody. And that was the world in which, for the first time, I found a complete acceptance.

Those were the days of my intensest love-making with Ana. I loved her—in that room that had been her grandfather's and her mother's, with a view of the nervous branching and the fine leaves of the rain tree—for the luck and liberation she had brought me, the undoing of fear, the granting to me of full manhood. I loved, as always, the seriousness of her face at those moments. There was a little curl to her hair just as it sprang out of her temples. In that curl I saw her African ancestry, and loved her for that too. And one day I realised that for all of the past week I had not thought about my fear of losing language and expression, the fear almost of losing the gift of speech.

The estate grew cotton and cashews and sisal. I knew nothing about these crops. But there was a manager and there were overseers. They lived about ten minutes away from the main house, down their own little dirt road, in a cluster of similar little white concrete bungalows with corrugated-iron roofs and small verandahs. Ana had said that the estate needed a man, and I knew, without being told, that my only function was to reinforce Ana's authority with these men. I never tried to do more than that, and the overseers accepted me. I knew that in accepting me they were really respecting Ana's authority. So we all got on. I began to learn. I took pleasure in a way of life that was far from anything I had known or envisaged for myself.

I used to worry in the beginning about the overseers. They didn't seem to have much of a life. They were mixed-race people, born in the country most of them, and they lived in that row of small concrete houses. Only the concrete of their houses separated the overseers from the Africans all around. African thatch and wattle was ordinary; concrete stood for dignity. But concrete wasn't a true barrier. These overseers lived, really, with the Africans. No other way was open to them. I used to think, trying to put myself in their place, that with their mixed background they might have felt the need of something more. There was the town on the coast. It offered a different kind of life, but it was more than an hour away in daylight and a good deal more after dark. It was a place only for quick excursions. To work on the estate was to live on the estate, and it was known that many of the overseers had African families. Whatever face these men showed us, the life waiting for them at home, in their concrete houses, was an African life at which I could only guess.

One day, when I was driving with one of the overseers to a new cotton field, I began to talk to the man about his life. We were in a Land Rover, and we had left the dirt road and were driving through bush, avoiding the bigger boggy dips and the dead branches of felled trees. I was expecting to hear some story of unfulfilled ambition from the overseer, some story of things going wrong, expecting to catch some little resentment of people better off and in the world outside. But there was no resentment. The overseer thought himself blessed. He had tried living in Portugal; he had even tried living in a South African town; he had come back. He hit the steering wheel of the Land Rover with the heel of his palm and said, “I can't live anywhere else.” When I asked why, he said, “This. What we are doing now. You can't do this in Portugal.” Land Rovers and four-wheel drives were new to me; I was still excited myself to drive off a road and pick a way through hummocky wet bush. But I felt that the overseer had a larger appreciation of the life of the place; his surrender was more than the simple sexual thing it seemed. And when I next saw the mildewed white staff bungalows I looked at them with a new respect. So bit by bit I learned. Not only about cotton and sisal and cashew, but also about the people.

I got used to the road to the town. I knew the giant rock cones along the way. Each cone had its own shape and was a marker for me. Some cones rose clean out of the ground; some had a rock debris at their base where a face of the cone had flaked off; some cones were grey and bare; some had a yellowish lichen on one side; on the ledges of some which had flaked there was vegetation, sometimes even a tree. The cones were always new. It was always an adventure, after a week or two on the estate, to drive to the town. For an hour or so it always seemed new: the colonial shops, the rustic, jumbled shop windows, the African loaders sitting outside the shops waiting for a loading job; the paved streets, the cars and trucks, the garages; the mixed population, with the red-faced young Portuguese conscripts of our little garrison giving a strange air of Europe to the place. The garrison was as yet very small; and the barracks were still small and plain and unthreatening, low two-storey buildings in white or grey concrete, of a piece with the rest of the town. Sometimes there was a new café to go to. But cafés didn't last in our town. The conscripts didn't have money, and the townspeople preferred to live privately.

Most of the shops we used were Portuguese. One or two were Indian. I was nervous of going into them at first. I didn't want to get that look from the shop people that would remind me of home and bad things. But there was never anything like that, no flicker of racial recognition from the family inside. There, too, they accepted the new person I had become in Ana's country. They seemed not to know that I was once something else. There, too, they kept their heads down and did what they had to do. So that for me, as for the overseers, though in different ways, the place offered an extra little liberation.

Sometimes on a weekend we went to the beach beyond the town, and a rough little Portuguese weekend restaurant serving fish and shellfish plucked fresh from the sea, and red and white Portuguese wine.