Half a Life (23 page)

After the Monday lunch I made no excuses to Ana. I had worked out none, and was ready for the worst if she objected. I simply said, “I'll drive Graça home.” Ana said to Graça, “I'm glad you're settling in.”

The German Castle was an abandoned estate house. I had gathered years before from various pieces of estate-house gossip that it was used for assignations. That was really all I was going by. It was an hour's fast drive, in a plain beyond the rock cones, which began at a certain stage to show in the distance as a joined-up range, low and blue. The plain was sandy and semi-fertile, and it looked empty, with villages hidden in the natural camouflage of sand and green. The Castle was on a slope in this apparent emptiness, and you could see it from far away. It was an enormous, extravagant estate house, wide and high, with a round concrete turret on either side of the front verandah. It was because of these turrets that the house was known as the Castle. The man who had built on such a scale in the wilderness must have thought he would never die, or he had misread history and thought he was leaving untold wealth to his descendants. People didn't have dates for anything here; and no one knew for sure when the German Castle was built. Some people said it was built in the 1920s by a German settler from what had been German East Africa, coming after the 1914 war to friendlier Portuguese territory. Some people said it was built in the late 1930s by a German who wished to get away from Germany and the Depression and the coming war and hoped to create a self-sufficient estate here. But death had come; history had gone its own way; and long before my time—and again no one could tell me when—the Castle had been abandoned.

I drove the Land Rover as far up the garden as it could go. What had been a big front garden with concrete-edged flowerbeds was bare and burnt away to sand, with scattered tufts of a hardy grass, a few long-stalked zinnias, and a purple bougainvillaea vine that had run wild. Wide and very smooth concrete steps, still unchipped, led to the verandah. The turret on either side had loopholes, as if for defence. Tall half-open doors showed the enormous dark drawing room. The floor was gritty. Some of that grit would have blown in with the wind; the bigger pieces might have been dropped by nest-building birds. There was a strange smell of fish; I took that to be the smell of a building in decay. I had brought an army rubber sheet with me. I spread it on the verandah, and without speaking we lay down on it.

The long drive had been a strain. Graça's need matched my own. That was new to me. Everything I had known before— the furtiveness of London, the awful provincial prostitute, the paid black girls of the places of pleasure here, who had yet satisfied me for so long, and for whom for almost a year I had felt such gratitude, and poor Ana, still in my mind the trusting girl who had sat on the settee in my college room in London and allowed herself to be kissed, Ana still so gentle and generous—over the next half hour everything fell away, and I thought how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence.

I heard a voice calling. At first I couldn't be sure about it, but then I heard it as a man's voice calling from the garden. I put on my shirt and stood behind the verandah half-wall. It was an African, one of the eternal walkers on the ways, standing on the far edge of the garden, as though fearful of the house. When he saw me he made gestures and shouted, “There are spitting cobras in the Castle.” That explained the smell of fish that had been with us: it was the smell of snakes.

We put on our clothes, wet as we were. We went down the wide, regal steps to the burnt-out sandy remains of the garden, very nervous there of the snakes that could blind from many feet. We finished dressing in the Land Rover and drove away in silence. After a while I said to Graça, “I am smelling you on my body as I drive.” I don't know how the courage came to me; but it seemed an easy and natural thing to say. She said, “And I'm smelling you.” I loved her for that reply. I rested my right hand on her thigh for as long as I could, and I thought with sorrow—and now without personal shame—of my poor father and mother who had known nothing like this moment.

I began to arrange my life around my meetings with Graça, and I didn't care who noticed. With one part of my mind I was amazed at myself, amazed at the person I had become. A memory came to me of something that had happened at home, in the ashram, about twenty-five years before. I would have been about ten. A merchant of the town came to see my father. This merchant was rich and gave to religious charities, but people were nervous of him because he was said to be shameless in his private life. I didn't know what that meant but—together with the revolutionary teaching of my mother's uncle—it tainted the man and his riches for me. The merchant must have reached some crisis in his life; and, as a devout man, he had come to my father for advice and comfort. After the usual salutations and small talk, the merchant said, “Master, I find myself in a difficult situation.” The merchant paused; my father waited. The merchant said, “Master, I am like King Dasaratha.” Dasaratha was a sacred name; he was the ruler of the ancient kingdom of Kosala, and the father of the hero-divinity Rama. The merchant smiled, pleased at what he had said, pleased at easing himself with piety into his story; but my father was not pleased at all. He said in his severe way, “How are you like King Dasaratha?” The merchant should have been warned by my father's tone, but he continued to smile, and said, “Perhaps I am not quite like Dasaratha. He had three wives. I have two. And that, Master, is at the root of my troubles—” He was not allowed to say any more. My father said, “How dare you compare yourself to gods? Dasaratha was a man of honour. His reign was of unparalleled righteousness. His later life was a life of sacrifice. How dare you compare yourself and your squalid bazaar lusts with such a man? If I were not a man of peace I would have you whipped out of my ashram.” The episode added to my father's reputation, and when, as now happened, we children found out about the shamelessness of the merchant's life, we were as appalled as my father. To have two wives and two families was to violate nature. To duplicate arrangements and affections was to be perpetually false. It was to dishonour everyone; it was to leave everyone standing in quicksand.

That was how it had looked to me when I was ten. Yet now every day I faced Ana without shame, and whenever I saw Luis, Graça's husband, I dealt with him with a friendship that was quite genuine, since it was offered out of gratitude for Graça's love.

I soon discovered that he was a drinking man, that the impression he had given at our first meeting of being a violent man who was holding himself in check had to do with his affliction. He drank right through the day, Graça told me, as though he had always to top up the energy that kept him going. He drank in small, undetectable quantities, a quick shot or two of rum or whisky, never more; and he never looked drunk or out of control. In fact, in company his drinking style made him seem almost abstemious. All Graça's married life had been dictated by this drinking of her husband's. They had moved from town to town, house to house, job to job.

She blamed the nuns for her marriage. At a certain stage in the convent school they had begun to talk to her about becoming a nun. They did that with girls who were poor; and Graça's family was poor. Her mother was a mixed-race person of no fortune; her father was second-rank Portuguese, born in the colony, who did a small job in the civil service. A religious charity had paid to send Graça to the convent, and it seemed to Graça that the nuns were now looking for some return. She was shy with them; she had always been an obedient child, at home and at school. She didn't say no; she didn't want to appear ungrateful. For months they tried to break her down. They praised her. They said, “Graça, you are not a common person. You have special qualities. We need people like you to help lift the order up.” They frightened her, and when she went home for the holidays she was unhappier than she had ever been.

Her family had a small plot of land, perhaps two acres, with fruit trees and flowers and chickens and animals. Graça loved all of these things. They were things she had known since childhood. She loved seeing the hens sitting patiently on their eggs, seeing the fluffy little yellow chicks hatching out, cheeping, all of the brood being able to find shelter below the spread-out wings of the fierce, clucking mother hen, following the mother hen everywhere, and gradually, over a few weeks, growing up, each with its own colour and character. She loved having her cats follow her about in the field, and seeing them run very fast out of joy and not fear. The thought of cooping up these little creatures, cats or chickens, gave her great pain. The thought now of giving them all up for ever and being locked away herself was too much for her. She became frightened that the nuns would go behind her back to her mother, and her mother, religious and obedient, would give her away to them. That was when she decided to marry Luis, a neighbour's son. Her mother recognised her panic and agreed.

He had been after her for some time, and he was handsome. She was sixteen, he was twenty-one. Socially they were matched. She was more at ease with him than with the convent girls, most of whom were well-to-do. He worked as a mechanic for a local firm that dealt in cars and trucks and agricultural machinery, and he talked of setting up on his own. He was already a drinker; but at this stage it seemed only stylish, part of his go-ahead ways.

They moved after their marriage to the capital. He felt he was getting nowhere in the local town; he would never be able to start up on his own; the local rich people controlled everything and didn't allow the poor man to live. For a while in the capital they stayed with a relation of Luis's. Luis got a job as a mechanic in the railways, and then they were allocated a railway house that matched Luis's official grade. It was a small three-roomed house, one of a line, and built only to fit into that line. It was not built for the climate. It faced west; it baked every afternoon and cooled down only at about nine or ten in the evening. It was a wretched place to be in, day after day; it stretched everyone's nerves. Graça had her two children there. Just after the birth of her second child something happened in her head, and she found herself walking in a part of the capital she didn't know. At about the same time Luis was sacked for his drinking. That was when they started on their wandering life. Luis's skill as a mechanic kept them afloat, and there were times when they did very well. He still could charm people. He took up estate work and quickly became a manager. He was like that, always starting well and picking things up fast. But always, in every job, his resolve wore thin; some darkness covered his mind; there was a crisis, and a crash.

As much as by the life she had had with Luis, she was fatigued by the lies she had had to tell about him, almost from the beginning, to cover up his drinking. It had made her another kind of person. One afternoon she came back with the children from some excursion and they found him drinking home-made banana spirit with the African gardener, a terrible old drunk. The children were frightened; Graça had given them a horror of drinking. Now she had to think fast and say something different. She told them that what their father was doing was all right; times were changing, and it was socially just in Africa for an estate manager to drink with his African gardener. Then she found that the children were beginning to lie too. They had caught the habit from her. That was why, in spite of her own unhappiness at the convent, she had sent them to a boarding school.

For years she had dreamt of coming back to the countryside she knew as a child, where on her family's two-acre plot simple things, chickens and animals and flowers and fruit trees, had made her so happy in the school holidays. She had come back now; she was living as the manager's wife in an estate house with antique colonial furniture. It was a sham grandeur; things were as uncertain as they had ever been. It was as though the moods and stresses of the past would always be with her, as though her life had been decided long before.

This was what Graça told me about herself over many months. She had had a few lovers on the way. She didn't make them part of the main story. They occurred outside of that, so to speak, as though in her memory her sexual life was separate from her other life. And in this oblique way I learned that there had been people before me, usually friends of them both, and once even an employer of Luis's, who had read her eyes as I had read them, and spotted her need. I was jealous of all of these lovers. I had never known jealousy before. And thinking of all these people who had seen her weakness and pressed home their attack, I remembered some words of Percy Cato's in London, and for the first time had my own sense of the brutality of the sexual life.

I was deep in that brutality now with Graça. Sexual pictures of her played in my head when I was not with her. With her guidance, since she was the more experienced, our love-making had taken forms that had astonished, worried and then delighted me. Graça would say, “The nuns wouldn't approve of this.” Or she would say, “I suppose if I went to confession tomorrow I would have to say, ‘Father, I've been immodest.'” And it was hard to forget what she had taught, to unlearn the opening up of new senses; it was hard to go back to the sexual simplicities of earlier days. And I thought, as I often did on such occasions, of the puerility of my father's desires.

The months passed. Even after two years I felt myself helpless in this life of sensation. At the same time now some half-feeling of the inanity of my life grew within me, and with it there came the beginning of respect for the religious outlawing of sexual extremes.

Ana said to me one day, “People are talking about you and Graça. You know that, don't you?”

I said, “It's true.”

She said, “You can't talk to me like this, Willie.”

I said, “I wish you could be in the room when we make love. Then you would understand.”