Half a Life (25 page)
She said, “I want you to stand by in the morning. Don't show yourself, but stand by, in case she turns violent.”
In the morning Ana was composed again. When Júlio's daughter came, Ana said, “That was a vile thing to do. You've been in this house since you were born. You are a vile person. I should have you whipped by your father. But all I want is that you should leave now. You have half an hour.”
Júlio's daughter said, with the pertness she had picked up in the places of pleasure, “I am not vile. You know who's vile.”
Ana said, “Get out and don't come back. You have half an hour.”
Júlio's daughter said, “It's not for you to tell me not to come back. I may come back one day, and sooner than you think. And I'll not be staying in the quarters then.”
I had been standing in the bathroom behind the half-opened door. I felt that Júlio's daughter knew I was there, and I thought, as I had been thinking all night, “Ana, what have I done to you?”
At our Sunday lunch that week there was a man from the local mission who had come back from the mission's outposts in the north. He said, “People here and in the capital know nothing of the war in the bush. Life here has gone on just as it has always done. But there are whole areas in the north now where the guerrillas rule. They have schools and hospitals, and they are arming and training the village people.” Gouveia said, in his joking way, “And when do you think we'll be hearing the crump of artillery in the hot tropical night?” The missionary said, “The guerrillas are probably all around you. They never attack settled areas in the way you say. They send unarmed people. They look like ordinary Africans. They spread the word of revolution. They prepare the people.” And I thought of my impressions of the very first day, of Africans walking, and the later impression of the estates and the settlements of concrete being in an African sea. Gouveia said, “You mean I can be held up on the road now?” The missionary said, “It's possible. They're all around us.” Gouveia said, only half joking now, “I think I shall try to leave before the airport closes down.”
Mrs. Noronha said in her prophesying voice, “Hoard cloth. We must hoard cloth.” Somebody said, “Why should we do that?” No one since Carla Correia had spoken like that to Mrs. Noronha. Mrs. Noronha said, “We are now like the Israelites in the desert.” Somebody said, “I've never heard of the Israelites hoarding cloth.” And poor Mrs. Noronha, all her mystical credit gone, recognising that she had confused her prophecies, pressed her head against her shoulder and closed her eyes and was wheeled out of our lives. We heard later, after the handover to the guerrillas, that she was one of the first to be repatriated to Portugal.
Well before that handover Graça's house was finished. She and Luis gave a housewarming. They had very little furniture. But Luis carried off the occasion with his style as a host, bending forward almost in a confiding way to offer a drink. Two weeks later he and his Land Rover disappeared. The colonial police, at that time still in control, said he had probably been kidnapped by the guerrillas. No official in our town had any contact with the guerrillas, so there was no means of finding out more. Graça was wild with grief. She said, “He was full of despair. I can't tell you how full of despair he was ever since we moved into the house. He should have been happy, but it worked the other way.” And then some days later some herdsmen found him and the Land Rover well off the dirt road, near a cattle pond. The door of the Land Rover was open, and there were bottles of drink. He was almost naked, but still alive. His mind had gone, or so the report suggested. All he could do was to repeat words spoken to him. “You went out on a spree?” And he said, “Spree.” “Did the guerrillas pick you up?” And he said, “Guerrillas.” They brought him back to the new, empty house. Graça was waiting for him. My mind went back years to the mission school and a poem in the third-standard reader:
Home they brought her warrior dead.
She nor swooned nor uttered cry.
All her maidens watching said,
“She must weep or she will die.”
We never made love again.
She looked after him in the new house. It was her new role, being his nurse, tending him like a nun of a service order. If there wasn't a war there might have been a doctor who would have known what to do. But people like doctors were leaving the colony or country every day; the estate was far out; the road was dangerous; and Luis with his ruined brain and liver just faded away in the empty house.
Great events in the life of the colony, the final rites, happened at a distance from her. The colonial government in the capital closed down, just like that; the guerrillas took over. The Portuguese population began to leave. The army withdrew from our town. The barracks were empty; it seemed unnatural, after the activity and the daily military rituals, like church rituals, of the past twelve years. And then after some weeks of this blankness a much smaller force of guerrillas moved in, occupying just a part of the barracks that had been extended many times during the war. People had died, but the army hadn't really wished to fight this African war, and life in the towns remained normal right up to the end. The war was like a distant game; even at the end it was hard to believe that the game was going to have great consequences. It was as though the army, with some political purpose, had colluded with the guerrillas (with their tactic of unarmed infiltration) to preserve the peace of towns; so that when the time came the guerrillas would be able to take over towns in working order.
For a while, as after the application of herbicide, nothing showed, and it was possible to think that nothing had changed, that goods would continue to come to the shops, and gasoline to the pumps. But then, all at once, as with herbicide, the change showed. Certain shops became empty and then didn't reopen; their owners had gone away, to South Africa or Portugal. Some houses in the central square were abandoned. Very quickly light globes on gate posts or in verandahs were broken; a short while later glass panes, which had remained intact for years, mysteriously dropped away; then windows were taken off their hinges; and here and there rafters began to rot and tile roofs sagged. We had thought that the municipal services of our little town were rudimentary. Now we felt their absence. Street drains became blocked, and glaciers of sand (with patches of wild grass on the high parts, and rippled or plaited patterns of fine sand in the miniature watercourses that ran after rain) inched their way out of drives into choked gutters. Gardens became overgrown and then as burnt-out as the formal gardens of the German Castle, which had been abandoned for three decades; in the climate everything speeded up and became what it had to be. In the countryside the main asphalt road was dreadfully potholed. Some estate houses lost their owners, and African families, shy at first of people like Ana, began to move into the wide verandahs behind the bougainvillaea vines.
There were hard months. Mrs. Noronha, in the last days of order, had asked us to hoard cloth for the bad times to come. We hoarded gasoline. The estate had its own pump; we filled jerricans and hid them; without our Land Rovers we would have been lost. We stopped running our generators. So our nights became silent; and we discovered the charm of the big shadows cast by an oil lamp. It didn't take long for things to break down, to become again as they had been in the days of Ana's grandfather, who had had to live close to the ground, close to the climate and insects and illnesses, and close to his African neighbours and workers, before comfort had been squeezed out of the hard land, like blood out of stone.
In her house Graça managed quite well. In a way it was what she had always wanted: a house and two acres, and hens and fruit trees. She was readier than Ana was to welcome the new régime.
She said, “They want us to live in a sharing way. It is the better life. You see, the nuns were right after all. The time has come for us all to be poor. We have to share everything we have. They are right. We have to be as everybody else. We have to serve and be useful. I will give them all that I have. I will not let them ask. I will give them this house.” Her two children had gone with many of her relatives to Portugal. “I was angry with them. In Portugal they will have to prepare papers to say who they are. How can anyone do that? How can anyone say who he is? They will prepare papers to say they are Portuguese. I don't have to do that here. My grandfather is buried here. He died young. He is among the ancestors. I go to his grave every year to talk to him. I talk about the family. I tell him everything. I feel good when I do that. Of course, I don't tell people. They think I'm going to the market.”
I looked at her suffering eyes and thought, “I was making love to a deranged woman. Can it be true, what I felt I had with her?”
Ana said, when I told her, “She is not giving them anything. Even in her grief she is fooling herself. They are taking it from her. They say they are going to take it all away from me, too. But I'm not running away. Half of what my grandfather gave me was stolen by my father. I will stay here and protect the other half. I do not want people squatting in my house or sleeping in my bed.”
In time the new government put together a kind of administration. Everything took three or four times as long as it did before, but we learned how to get things done. There were services of a sort again. The great hardship was over. But just at this time there were rumours of a new, tribal war. Just as the anti-Portuguese guerrillas had begun in the bush, so now the people hostile to the victors were beginning in the bush. The guerrillas had had the support of the black governments over the border. The new insurgents had the support of the white government to the west, and they were far more deadly. It was their policy to “blood” new recruits, to get a recruit to kill someone. They raided the outskirts of towns and killed people and burnt houses and spread terror.
I didn't think I could live through another war. I could see that it would have a point for Ana. I didn't see that it had a point for me. For some weeks I was perplexed. I didn't know what to do. I suppose I didn't have the courage to tell Ana. It was the rainy season. I had cause to remember it. The heavy pollen from the shade tree in front of the estate house made the semicircular marble steps slippery. I slipped and fell heavily. When I awoke, in the run-down military hospital in the barracks in the town, the physical pain of my damaged body was like the other pain that had been with me for months, and perhaps for years.
When Ana came to the hospital courage came to me, and I told her I wanted to divorce her.
When she came back later I said to her, “I am forty-one. I am tired of living your life.”
“You wanted it, Willie. You asked. I had to think about it.”
“I know. You did everything for me. You made it easy for me here. I couldn't have lived here without you. When I asked you in London I was frightened. I had nowhere to go. They were going to throw me out of the college at the end of the term and I didn't know what I could do to keep afloat. But now the best part of my life has gone, and I've done nothing.”
“You are frightened of the new war.”
“And even if we go to Portugal, even if they let me in there, it would still be your life. I have been hiding for too long.”
Ana said, “Perhaps it wasn't really my life either.”
Copyright © 2001 by V. S. Naipaul
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