A Treacherous Paradise

23

She was woken up by a screech that seemed to come from a human being in dire straits. It was much later that she discovered it was in fact the cry of a lone peacock that used to roam about in the hotel grounds. It was originally one of many based in the gardens surrounding the Portuguese governor’s palace, but one day it turned up outside the hotel and had never left. He used to screech every morning, and scared lots of residents with his angst-filled cries.

Peacocks were also associated with a legend, the origins of which were obscure. It had originated in the culture of the blacks, but had then spread to the white residents of the town. Every time a peacock displayed its magnificent tail, a human being somewhere was cured of an intolerable pain.

This peacock didn’t have a name. It moved around slowly, cautiously, as if brooding over its solitary fate.

And so Hanna woke up after her first night in Africa. What would she remember afterwards?

Perhaps the night was dream-like, a panoply of visions flitting hastily past? But at the same time there was also something very real: a nagging pain in her stomach. The heat was stifling, the brick walls in the room she had been sleeping in were dripping with damp. Lizards with shiny, almost transparent skin were clinging upside down to the ceiling above her head. There was a crackling sound from the dark floor where insects were lurking in the shadows. A mulatto woman with vigilant eyes had given her an oil lamp with a flickering flame that gave the impression of being the last breaths of a dying man.

And now: dawn. The cry of the peacock was still echoing in her ears. She walked over to the window on unsteady legs and watched the sun rising over the horizon. In her mind’s eye she relived the departure of the ship, slowly embarking on its voyage to Australia with a cargo that smelled of forests.

She washed her hands in a washbasin. She hid the pound notes she had received from Captain Svartman among her underclothes in the suitcase that Forsman had presented her with.

A filthy mirror was hanging on one of the brick walls. She recalled her father’s shaving mirror, and stood close up to it in order to see the reflection of her face.

She suddenly gave a start and turned round. The door of her room, with the figure 4 untidily written on a scrap of paper pinned to it, had been opened. The mulatto woman who had given her the oil lamp the previous evening was standing looking at her. Then she stepped inside and put a tray with some bread and a cup of tea on the only table there was in the room.

She was barefoot, and moved without a sound. She was wearing a loincloth and had naked, glistening breasts.

Hanna wanted to know immediately what the coloured lady was called. Just now she was living in a world where the only name she knew was her own. But she couldn’t bring herself to say anything. The silent woman left, and the door closed behind her.

Hanna drank the tea, which was very sweet. When she put the cup back on its saucer she felt full. She put her hand on her brow. It was hot. Was it the heat of the room? She didn’t know.

The stomach pains Hanna had felt during the night returned. She lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. The nagging pain came and went in waves. She dozed off, but woke up with a start. She put her hand on her groin. It was wet. When she looked at her hand it was covered in blood. She screamed and sat up in bed.

Death, Hanna thought, trembling. It was not only Lundmark whose time was up: the same applies to me. She was shivering with fear, but forced herself to stand up and stagger as far as the door. She found herself in a corridor that ran round an inner courtyard. She needed to cling on to the rail so as not to fall down. In the inner courtyard, paved with stone, was a black piano: someone was sitting there, polishing the keys with a linen rag.

She must have made a noise that she wasn’t aware of. The man polishing the keys of the piano stopped, turned round and looked at her. She raised her blood-covered hands, as if she were appealing to anybody who was prepared to come and help her.

I’m dying, Hanna thought. Even if he doesn’t understand what I say, he must surely recognize a cry for help.

‘I’m bleeding,’ she screamed. ‘I need help!’

She was on the point of passing out, but managed to stagger back to her room. It felt as if life was draining out of her. She was already on her way down to the same sea bottom as Lundmark.

Somebody touched Hanna’s shoulder. It was the same woman who had just served her tea. She carefully lifted up Hanna’s nightdress, looked at her lower abdomen, then let it fall again. Her face betrayed nothing of her thoughts.

Hanna longed for the coloured woman to be transformed into Elin. But Elin was not the woman standing in front of her, Elin lived in a different world. As if in a mist, Hanna thought she could see her mother standing outside the grey house, gazing at the mountain on the other side of the river.

The coloured woman turned on her heel and left the room. Hanna could see that she was in a hurry.

I shall find out what her name is, she thought, because I refuse to die.

I’m not going to sink down. Not yet.

24

Hanna was woken up by the curtain fluttering against the widow as the door opened. It wasn’t the mulatto woman returning, but a different woman altogether. She was jet black, with skin that seemed to glisten and her hair in tight plaits apparently stuck to her skull. Her lips were red, heavily made-up. All she was wearing was a thin dressing gown with a pattern of fire-breathing dragons and demons over her silken underclothes.

Her voice was husky, perhaps she was hoarse or had been indulging in too many cigarettes and an excess of alcohol. To Hanna’s surprise, as if what was taking place before her very eyes was in fact no more than an extension of her confused dreams, the half-naked woman began talking to her in a language she immediately recognized, even though she had never heard it spoken before. When Hanna arrived at the hotel the woman who gave her the room key had spoken a language she knew was English. She didn’t understand it at all, but with the help of her hands and single words she had managed to make it clear that she was looking for a room.

But now this unknown black woman was standing in front of her and bringing to life the dictionary she had once taken out of Forsman’s waste-paper basket. So this was how the language she had tried to learn a few words of actually sounded.

Much of what the woman said at first was totally incomprehensible to Hanna, but then she began to recognize an occasional word here and there, and managed to guess rather than understand what was being said.

The woman pointed at Hanna’s Swedish discharge book, which was lying on the bedside table. From what she said Hanna gathered that she had once lived with a Swedish sailor called Harry Midgård, who was a terrible man when he was drunk. Hanna suspected that he had worked on a Norwegian whaling ship.

The woman wiped sweat from her neck with the back of her hand.

‘Felicia,’ she said. ‘I’m Felicia.’

Felicia? The name meant nothing to Hanna, but nevertheless she had the feeling that her memory was starting to return.

‘How long have I been asleep?’ she asked.

‘This is the fourth day you’ve been here.’

Felicia had lit a cigarette that she’d been keeping behind her ear. She looked searchingly at Hanna.

It struck Hanna that she had seen a similarly searching look before. It was when Elin had asked Forsman to take her to the coast with him. His expression had been similar as he looked at her, as if he were searching for a truth which was not obvious.

‘Do you have the strength to get out of bed?’ Felicia asked.

Hanna tried. She was still weak and her legs were shaking when she stood on the floor in a white nightdress which somebody must have put on her while she was asleep. Felicia helped her into a dressing gown which smelled strongly of perfume, and put a pair of slippers on her feet.

They went down the stairs to the inner courtyard which was deserted. Hanna had taken the Portuguese dictionary which she’d brought with her on the voyage. Felicia held her under one arm and led her into a garden surrounded by a stone wall.

It had been raining. The ground was soaking. Hanna thought it smelled like the riverbank after haymaking. The wet soil was bubbling and fermenting.

Felicia helped Hanna to sit down by a jacaranda tree in blossom. She remained standing herself.

‘Is it what I think?’ Hanna asked.

‘How can I know what you think?’ said Felicia.

Then she told her in a few words what had happened. Hanna had suspected what the stomach pains had indicated, and now it was confirmed. She had suffered an early miscarriage. Lundmark’s child had been rejected. A child without a father that didn’t want to be born.

‘I know so little,’ said Felicia.

‘It wasn’t a child that was rejected, just a lump of bloody goo that didn’t have a soul.’

Felicia rang the little bell standing on the table. A young waiter in a white jacket appeared and stood beside her chair.

‘Tea?’ she asked, looking at Hanna, who nodded.

They didn’t speak while waiting to be served tea. White butterflies that had been called back to life by the recent rain were hovering around the tree’s blue blossoms. The sound of prayers suddenly made itself heard from a minaret somewhere in the vicinity. Hanna was reminded of the call to prayer when she and Lundmark had married in Algiers.

She leaned back so that her face was in the shade of the jacaranda tree. Felicia was standing there, staring at her hands. She had broken a fingernail. That seemed to irritate her.

But she still hadn’t sat down, despite the fact that there was plenty of room on the bench. It dawned on Hanna that she didn’t know this black woman at all, despite the fact that she had probably saved her life. In fact she was scared of her, just as she had been scared of the black men sitting round the fire on the quay. This fear somehow reminded her of how she had been scared of the dark when she was a little girl.

I can see you, Felicia, she thought. But what do you see? Who am I for you? And why don’t you sit down? The bench is big enough for both of us.

The young waiter came with the tea and broke her train of thought. Hanna looked at his hands as he served her.

Only she received a cup. Not Felicia.

‘What’s his name?’ she asked Felicia.

‘Estefano.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Fourteen at most. But he hasn’t had sex with a woman yet. So he’s just a child. His hands are still very soft.’

Hanna drank her tea in silence. Afterwards, when she had slid the cup to one side, she asked Felicia to tell her about everything that had happened during the days when all she could remember was shadows, loneliness and a pain that kept coming and going in waves.

Felicia was not to leave anything out. She should just say exactly what had happened. And speak slowly, so that Hanna understood.

25

Felicia said:

‘Laurinda, who gave you the lantern when you arrived, told me that there was a white woman staying in room number 4. I didn’t know that you had taken up residence in the hotel as I had been visiting my husband and my children in Katembe. I meet them once every month — never at a prearranged time, but when Senhor Vaz thinks it’s appropriate. I had just returned and was entertaining my first client when Laurinda came running up. I thought she must have seen a ghost or some kind of phantom, and that she wanted me to kill it. But when I came into your room you immediately became a real, living person. A bleeding woman is more alive than anything else I can think of. The blood running out of our bodies proves that we are alive, but also that we are dying. I understood what had happened even though I didn’t know who you were or where you had come from. You should really have danced for me. That’s how we get to know strangers in my village and my family. When we see them dance we discover who they are.

‘But I got to know you through your blood. I whispered to Laurinda that she should fetch warm water and towels. You seemed to be awake and looking at me, but it was as if you didn’t know what had happened even so. One should always talk to frightened people in a low voice, that’s something I learnt from my mother. Anyone who shouts in the presence of somebody who is ill can see his or her shout changing into a fatal spear.

‘Laurinda came with water and towels, and I took off your blood-soaked clothes. When I rummaged around among your underwear I found some banknotes — a large amount that made me wonder even more who you were. For one English pound you can share my bed for a whole week. You had tens of them. I couldn’t understand how a woman could have so much money, even though you are white.

‘But I must also admit to thinking that if you died, I would take the money. Assuming there wasn’t anybody waiting for you, and that it didn’t belong to somebody else. Anyway, I put the notes back among your underclothes — but I knew now where they were. You were bleeding profusely, and your forehead felt hot. There was a moment when I thought it would be impossible to save your life, and that I had been wrong after all. Perhaps it wasn’t a miscarriage, but something else that had afflicted you, some illness I knew nothing about.

‘Laurinda stayed in the background, but all the time she was on hand to help me. Then I heard Senhor Vaz coming into the room. He spends his life taking people by surprise, catching them doing something they shouldn’t. I heard him whispering, asking what had happened: Laurinda didn’t know what to say. When I heard him talking about sending a messenger to Dr Garibaldi I got up from the side of the bed where I’d been squatting down and told him that wouldn’t be necessary: Dr Garibaldi didn’t understand this kind of bleeding. As I did so I thought Senhor Vaz was going to hit me — he never allows one of his whores to express an opinion. But he didn’t touch me. I think he could see from my eyes that I knew Dr Garibaldi would only make a bad situation worse. And he didn’t want that to happen. That might give his establishment a bad reputation. His clients might choose to go to other whores, even if Senhor Vaz had the reputation of running a brothel that was both spotlessly clean, and had a team of attractive black women. But if a white woman were to bleed to death in one of his rooms, that could be a bad omen. There might be an evil spirit hovering over O Paraiso. Even if all white folk despise what we believe, we have had a certain amount of influence on you. Evil spirits can also injure white people. There was a time when we thought that our African medicine had no effect on people with light-coloured skin. Nowadays we know that isn’t true. You are just as scared as we are of the evil spirits that are spread by people that wish us ill. I didn’t know who you were, nor where you were going to. But when I saw you lying there with your blood-soaked underwear, I immediately had the impression that somebody wished you ill, that somebody wanted you to die.’

Felicia suddenly fell silent, as if she felt she had said too much. There was a clattering sound made by a cart in the street outside.

It seemed to Hanna that there was still so much that she didn’t understand. Not only because she could barely grasp what Felicia had said, but because she now realized that the hotel she had checked into the evening she had fled from Captain Svartman’s ship was more than it seemed. The hotel was a front for a brothel, something she couldn’t have avoided hearing the crew of the ship talking about. And so Felicia, who was standing in front of her next to the beautiful jacaranda tree, was in fact a prostitute.

She thought she ought to stand up, return to her room, get dressed and immediately move into a decent hotel.

But it was Felicia who had saved her, together with the woman she now knew was called Laurinda. Why should she need to flee from them? She had nothing to do with the brothel: all she had done was to take a room that she intended to pay for with her own money.

The money that Felicia hadn’t taken, despite the fact that she’d had the opportunity.

Felicia was looking at her, and seemed to read her thoughts.

‘A rumour started,’ she said. ‘And it spread like wildfire. It was alleged that Senhor Vaz had acquired his first white whore. New clients immediately started queuing up. But they soon realized that you were something as rare as a normal hotel guest. There was no end to their disappointment.’

‘This Senhor Vaz,’ said Hanna. ‘The owner. Who is he?’

‘He’s a man who can’t bear the sight of blood,’ said Felicia. ‘When we are bleeding, that’s bad for his business — apart from when we entertain those disgusting men who can only bring themselves to have sex with a woman when she’s having her period. But he hates everything else to do with blood. As long as you’re ill he’ll keep out of your way.’

‘And then what will happen?’

‘I assume that as long as you pay for your room, you can stay on.’

Hanna suddenly had the feeling that somebody was standing behind her. When she turned round she gave a start and felt scared stiff. At first she didn’t grasp what she was looking at. Then it dawned on her that it was a chimpanzee standing there wearing a waiter’s white waistcoat, and staring at her.

26

Hanna thought she had gone mad. What she saw couldn’t be true. But the ape was standing there on its bow legs. In one hand it was holding a tray with pastries and biscuits. Felicia said something to it. It put the tray down on the table, pulled a few faces, ground its teeth, then went away.

‘It’s called Carlos,’ said Felicia. ‘After some Portuguese king or other. It came here with its owner five years ago, a man who hunted lion trophies on the great inland plains. He brought the chimpanzee with him. In those days it used to wear a topee. But when the owner couldn’t pay his bill after over a week with the ladies, Senhor Vaz took the chimp as payment. It sulked for a couple of weeks. But after that it was quite easy to get it used to the white jacket and its name, and for it to realize that it had a better home now than it used to have. It usually sits up on the roof at night and gazes at the forests on the other side of the town. But it never runs away. This is Carlos’s home now.’

Hanna still couldn’t believe it was true, neither what she had seen nor what she had just heard. But Felicia was convincing, she meant what she said.

The sound of music suddenly became audible. Hanna listened and realized that it was coming from the piano, but it wasn’t really music, there were no tunes. Single notes were repeated over and over again, as if a child was sitting at the piano, hitting the keys.

Hanna had the feeling that this was something familiar, something she’d heard before. The man she’d seen earlier dusting the keys was now tuning the piano. There had been a piano in Jonathan Forsman’s house. Nobody played it, nobody was allowed to touch it. Forsman had the key to the locked lid on his watch chain. But twice a year a blind man came to tune the piano. There had to be silence in the house while that was happening. The piano tuner always came just after Forsman had returned from one of his many business trips with the sleigh or the coach. While the blind man leaned over the keyboard with his tuning key in his hand, Forsman would sit on a chair listening intently to what he heard. For him, perfect harmony was not the music, it was the well-tuned piano.

The piano tuner in the brothel resumed his work. Hanna could hear that he was tuning the keys at the bottom end of the bass register. The fact that he was carrying out the tuning gave her hope, unexpected strength. Nobody tunes a piano when somebody is dying, she thought. In those circumstances either everything is silent, or somebody plays something that soothes or consoles and then moves over into funeral music.

She remembered vaguely something that had happened in Forsman’s house when the piano tuner was there and Forsman was sitting back in an armchair enjoying the sound of harmony being restored, and she had suddenly thought: what can he see? What can the blind man see that I can’t? She couldn’t believe that all he could see before him was blackness.

Hanna could feel that she was tired. Felicia accompanied her back to her room. Somebody had changed the sheets while she’d been away. Her blood-stained underclothes had now been returned, washed clean.

Felicia turned to her in the doorway.

‘What shall I tell Senhor Vaz?’ she asked.

‘That the white woman is still bleeding, not so much now, though. But she needs to be left alone for a few more days.’

Felicia nodded.

‘I promise not to send Carlos to you with cups of tea. Laurinda will look after you.’

When Felicia had left the room, Hanna burst into tears. She did so in silence. Not because she didn’t want anybody to hear her, but because she didn’t want to scare her body so much that it started bleeding again.

27

The whores told lies. Just like all other black people.

When Attimilio Vaz had introduced himself to Hanna, a week after she had taken up residence in his hotel and become sufficiently restored after her miscarriage to be able to leave her room without assistance and walk down to the ground floor for her meals, the first three sentences he spoke to her were:

‘Don’t believe what they say. It’s best to believe nothing at all. The only thing black people here know how to do is to tell lies.’

Hanna found this perplexing. Felicia had explained what had happened to her and gone on to look after her — Hanna quite simply couldn’t understand the suggestion that she had been lying. To be sure, she had sometimes found it difficult to understand Felicia’s peculiar language — but not so much that she could possibly have totally misunderstood or misinterpreted what she’d said and accepted it as the truth when in fact it was all lies.

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.

28

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.

Laurinda understood.

‘Dona Ana Dolores,’ she said.

Hanna thought she could detect a trace of fear in Laurinda’s voice when she pronounced the nurse’s name.

But she couldn’t be sure, of course. Not about that or anything else.

29

Hanna was inflicted by some sort of infection that caused her a prolonged fever. She was cared for by Ana Dolores for two months. Her first feelings of being restored to health were followed by a period of extreme exhaustion which almost paralysed her. It was during this time that Ana taught Hanna how to speak Portuguese fluently. Whenever Hanna wasn’t feeling too tired, they practised speaking.

But this was also when Hanna learnt how white people ought to treat the black people who worked at the hotel — the hotel which was first and foremost a brothel for white men who happened to be visiting the port. At first Hanna thought it was uncomfortable, having to witness the unconcealed contempt, the harsh condescension that characterized everything Ana did with regard to the black women who entered the sickroom. But as time passed, despite herself Hanna began to react less to what Ana said.

When Hanna had become well enough to leave her sickbed and go for increasingly long walks through town, always accompanied by Ana, she realized that the latter’s behaviour was always the same: in the street, in the park, on one of the long beaches or in a shop — not just within the four walls of O Paraiso.

Ana Dolores took it for granted that black people were a lower order of beings. It reminded Hanna of the situation in Forsman’s house. Even though he treated his servants better than most — Berta had explained that to her — he also had nothing but contempt for those near the bottom of the social ladder. Not only inside his own house, but in society in general. When Hanna had tried to protest and used herself as an example of Forsman’s kindness, Berta had insisted that he didn’t treat everyone like that. And Hanna had also noticed occasionally that Forsman could be condescending to the poor people he came across.

Ana explained it to her:

‘The blacks are merely shadows of us. They have no colour. God made them black so that we didn’t have to see them in the dark. And we should never forget where they came from.’

Even though Hanna got used to it, she still regarded Ana’s behaviour with unease. When she hit out at black women who didn’t move out of her way, or didn’t hesitate to smack children who tried to sell her bananas in the streets, Hanna simply wanted to run away. All the time, as if it were an obvious part of the job of caring for Hanna, Ana talked about their inferiority, their deceitfulness, their filthiness in both body and soul. Hanna’s resistance decreased. She took on board what she heard, as if it were true after all. She realized that there was a crucial difference compared with the life she had lived in Forsman’s house. There she had been one of the poor workers and servants. Here, because of the colour of her skin, she was on a quite different level, superior to the blacks. Here she was the one who made the decisions, who had the right to give orders and punish black people with divine blessing. Here she was the equivalent of Jonathan Forsman. Despite the fact that she was merely a cook who had deserted her ship.

One day, towards the end of the long time Ana was looking after Hanna, they went for a walk in the little botanical gardens a few streets away from the rua Bagamoio, next to the hill where the new, shiny white cathedral was being built. Both of them were carrying open parasols to protect them from the sun. It was very hot, and they sought out the shady areas of the park where it was a bit cooler. Notices on the iron entrance gates to the park informed visitors that benches were for whites only. The text was worded so threateningly that although they had a right to be in the park, blacks preferred not to go walking along the sandy paths. The only ones in the park on this occasion were half-naked gardeners weeding the flowerbeds, constantly on the lookout for poisonous snakes that might emerge from the fallen leaves.

Many of the benches were occupied that afternoon. Relaxing in the park were civil servants from the various colonial offices, mothers with daughters playing hopscotch and sons running after their hoops.

Ana suddenly stopped dead. Sitting fast asleep on a bench in front of her was an elderly black man. Hanna could see the anger in her face even before she hit the man on the shoulder. He woke up slowly, looked enquiringly at the two women, then prepared to go back to sleep.

Once before in her life Hanna had seen an old man open his eyes in that same slow way. It was when she and Jukka had entered the room where the old man who had been a lodger in her relatives’ house was lying in his filthy bed. Just like him, this old black man barely knew where he was. He seemed hungry, thin and on the brink of dehydration. His skin was stretched tightly over his cheekbones.

Before Hanna had chance to react Ana had grabbed hold of him, lifted him up like a floppy doll and thumped him so hard that he went flying into a clump of rhododendron bushes. He remained lying there on the ground while Ana wiped the bench with a handkerchief, then beckoned Hanna to sit down.

For a brief moment everything in the park came to a stop. The hoops stopped rolling, the ladies on the benches fell silent, the half-naked gardeners with their sweaty bodies crouching down in the flowerbeds remained stock-still. Afterwards, when normality had been restored, Hanna wondered if the stillness was due to what had already happened, or to what was going to happen.

Would anything at all happen, in fact?

Hanna glanced furtively at Ana, who was holding her parasol in one hand and slowly waving the other one in front of her face. Hanna looked behind her. The old man was still lying among the blossoming bushes. He wasn’t moving at all.

I don’t understand this, she thought. Lying behind the bench I’m sitting on is an old man who has been beaten and flung on to the ground, and nobody is doing anything to help him. Not even I.

She didn’t know how long they remained seated on the bench, but when Ana decided it was time to go back to O Paraiso, the old man had vanished. Perhaps he had crawled deeper into the clump of rhododendron bushes, and hidden himself alongside the poisonous snakes that everybody was scared of.

A few days later something took place that shook her deeply, and made her wonder what was happening to her. Laurinda dropped a dish when she was serving Hanna’s morning tea. The dish shattered when it hit the stone floor. Hanna was standing in front of the mirror, combing her hair: she turned round quickly and slapped Laurinda on the side of the head. Then she pointed at the shards and told her to pick them up.

Laurinda crawled around on her hands and knees, picking up the bits of porcelain. Meanwhile Hanna sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for the tea to cool down sufficiently for her to be able to drink it.

Laurinda stood up. That annoyed Hanna.

‘Who said you were allowed to stand up?’ she asked. ‘There are still bits of china on the floor.’

Laurinda got down on her knees again. Hanna was still annoyed because she could never read Laurinda’s thoughts from her facial expression. Was she afraid that Hanna was going to punish her? Or merely indifferent, or even filled with contempt for this white woman whose life she had once helped to save?

Laurinda’s eyes were very bright, gleaming with a sort of mysterious inner radiance that Hanna could never recall having seen in the eyes of a white person.

‘You can go now,’ she said. ‘But I want to know when you are coming and going. I want you always to wear shoes when you wait on me.’

Laurinda stood up and disappeared into the darkness. She somehow managed to make her bare heels sound like shoe heels. Hanna assumed she was on her way to the kitchen to partake of some of Mandrillo the chef’s stew.

Hanna remained seated in the darkness. Shadows were dancing around the gas lamp. She tried to envisage the house by the river in her mind’s eye. Elin, her brother and sisters, the brown and clear water flowing down from the mountains.

But she could see nothing. It was as if everything was hidden behind a film her eyes couldn’t penetrate.

She regretted the way she had treated Laurinda. It frightened her — the ease with which she had humiliated this friendly woman. She felt ashamed.

Hanna slept badly that night. The next day the chimpanzee came up to her room. He was carrying a silver tray with a flower from the jacaranda tree, sent to her by Senhor Vaz. There was no message, only his name.

30

The blue flower from the jacaranda tree was still alive, floating in a little shallow dish of water, when something happened that changed Hanna’s life, yet again.

It was early morning when she went downstairs, feeling fit again at last, even if she was still grieving over the loss of Lundmark.

A white man with his shirt unbuttoned, barefoot, but still with his hat on his head, was lying on a sofa, fast asleep. There was no sign of the women who worked in the brothel: they were still asleep in their rooms — alone or together with clients who had paid for a whole night’s indulgence. The only other being awake at this time in the morning was Carlos the chimpanzee. He was curled up on the ceiling light, swinging slowly backwards and forwards as he observed her movements.

There was no sign of Senhor Vaz either. Hanna was enveloped in a musty smell of cigars and strong drink, despite the fact that the venetian blinds were up and the windows open. The black man in charge of the entrance door was asleep in the shadows outside it.

Hanna stood in the open doorway, careful not to wake up the watchman. A group of black men pulling a cart full of buckets of night soil stopped and stared at her. She went back inside. Once the cart had clattered off on its way, she went back to the doorway. Something similar happened again, only this time it was two white men wearing straw hats and carrying leather briefcases who stopped dead and stared at her. Once again she went back inside.

Was there something wrong with her clothes? Hanna stood in front of one of the many mirrors hanging on the walls. She was dressed in white, with a brown shawl over her shoulders, and as usual she had gathered her hair into a bun at the back of her head. She could see that she had lost weight, and was very pale. For the first time in her life her skin was now the same milky white as her mother’s. But Hanna’s face was her father’s. She could see him in the mirror. He seemed to be coming closer to her, and eventually was standing right next to her face.

That thought saddened her. If a door behind her back hadn’t opened at precisely the same time, she might well have burst out crying. When she turned round she saw a hunchbacked man, short in stature, almost dwarf-like, enter the room. He limped, and his head jerked every time he took a step. She recognized the piano tuner she had hitherto only seen sitting on the piano stool. He made his way cautiously between all the chairs and sofas. He paused for a moment when he bumped into one of the sleeping man’s naked feet, but eventually arrived at the piano. He sat down, opened the lid, and stroked his hands over the keys as if he were caressing the skin of a woman or a child. Hanna stood there motionless, observing him: she was reminded of Forsman’s piano, and the thought struck her that she wanted to go back home as soon as possible. She didn’t belong here, and would never do so.

The man at the piano suddenly turned to look at her.

He said something she didn’t understand. When she didn’t respond, he repeated what he had said.

Then Hanna started speaking Swedish. Silence was not a language. She said who she was, her name, and explained about the ship she had come here on and then abandoned.

She spoke without pausing, as if she were afraid that somebody might interrupt her. The man at the piano didn’t move a muscle.

When Hanna finished talking, he nodded slowly. It was as if he had understood what she said.

He turned back to the piano, took a tuning key out of his pocket and started caressing the keys. Hanna had the impression that he was trying to do it as quietly as possible, so as not to disturb those who were still asleep.

The man lying on the sofa sat up drowsily. When he saw Hanna he gave a start and stared at her as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Then he tried to talk to her. She just shook her head and went back up the stairs to her room. She sat down on her bed, took the pound notes from among her underclothes and counted them. It was clear that she definitely had enough to enable her to head back home to Sweden. She might not even need to work her passage, but could perhaps be a paying passenger on a ship sailing to her homeland.

There was a knock on the door. Hanna quickly gathered up the money and hid it under the pillow. When there came a second knock, she stood up and opened the door. She thought it would be Laurinda who was already serving up her breakfast tray, but in fact it was the man who had been sleeping on the sofa. He still had his hat on his head and was barefoot. His shirt was unbuttoned and his pot belly hung down over his waistband. He was holding a bottle of cognac in one hand. He smiled, and spoke in a low voice as if he were encouraging a doubtful dog. She was about to shut the door when he put one of his bare feet in the way. Then he pushed her over so that she fell down on the bed. He closed the door, put the bottle on the table and produced a few notes from his trouser pocket. She was just about to get up off the bed when he gave a roar and pushed her back down again. He put the notes on the table, ripped her blouse open and started pulling up her skirt. When she resisted he slapped her hard. She still didn’t understand what he was saying, but she understood what was happening. She managed to wriggle out of his grasp, picked up the bottle he had put on the table and hit him so hard on the arm with it that it broke. At the same time, she shouted for help — as loudly as she could.

The blow and the subsequent shriek made the man hesitate. He let go of Hanna, and stared at her. She heard footsteps and then the door opened.

It was Senhor Vaz standing there, wearing a red silk dressing gown. Carlos was perched on his shoulders, then he launched into an attack on the unknown man. Carlos bit the man’s hand so savagely that he submitted.

31

Senhor Vaz was dishevelled. He must have been woken up by Hanna’s scream. But even if he was half asleep, he realized immediately what had been happening. The man, a Boer by the name of Fredrik Prinsloo, standing there half naked with uncut toenails like the claws on a cat, had been causing trouble for several years whenever he visited O Paraiso. Now he found himself fighting a desperate but losing battle against the ape that was biting him and ripping off his clothes.

Senhor Vaz shouted out a command. Carlos immediately stopped fighting and jumped up on to Hanna’s bed. In one hand he was holding a handkerchief he had managed to snatch from Prinsloo, who was bleeding quite badly.

Fredrik Prinsloo belonged to one of the earliest families to emigrate to Cape Town from Europe. Now he was a major landowner in the province of Transvaal, and had set up a business organizing safaris for rich hunters from America. One of his customers was the then President Theodore Roosevelt, who was a hopeless shot but nevertheless, with the discreet assistance of Prinsloo, succeeded in bagging vast numbers of buffalo, lion, leopard and giraffe.

Senhor Vaz had heard the story about the American president ad nauseam during the many conversations he had been compelled to have with Prinsloo. But despite the Boer’s boasts, he had to be handled with respect. Prinsloo was not just a regular customer, but he also recommended Vaz’s brothel to his friends whenever they felt the need to engage in erotic antics with black women. As Senhor Vaz had realized that the Boer never failed to start quarrelling with other customers, he introduced a special routine whenever Prinsloo indicated that he was on his way. Vaz dug out a notice that he hung on to the front door announcing that a ‘private party’ was taking place. All this meant in practice was that Senhor Vaz himself kept a close check on the number of clients allowed in that evening.

On these occasions wild rumours circulated around the town of abandoned orgies involving activities that no decent person could possibly imagine even in their wildest dreams. Senhor Vaz was well aware of these rumours, and also knew that they created a sort of magic aura around O Paraiso, which increased its appeal and also his income.

But he had also established that Prinsloo often treated black women extremely brutally. For a man like Prinsloo black skin was merely a shell that concealed stupidity, ignorance and idleness. But to do what Prinsloo did and combine this contempt with what seemed at times to be an irrational hatred was something that Vaz couldn’t understand. Why this hatred? Nobody hates animals, apart from snakes, cockroaches and rats. Let’s face it, black people don’t have poisonous fangs. Extremely cautiously, he had often raised the matter with Prinsloo; but he had beaten a hasty retreat when Prinsloo became hot under the collar and refused to answer.

Prinsloo was also an unpredictable person. He could be generous and friendly, but he sometimes reached a tipping point. When that happened, he would start treating the prostitutes and servants with a degree of cruelty that terrified everybody he came into contact with. Senhor Vaz had instructed his most trusted servants to inform him immediately when Prinsloo had one of his attacks. On several occasions, apparently without provocation, the Boer had suddenly started hitting or whipping the black whore he had been bedding at the time. Senhor Vaz would then intervene with the assistance of the burly security officer who for some reason was called Judas. Their combined efforts would be enough to rescue the naked, bleeding woman from Prinsloo’s attacks. The Boer never offered any resistance, but nor did he ever express any regret. What he had done simply didn’t seem to bother him. Prinsloo never gave any extra money to the women he had attacked, nor did he hesitate to ask for their services again the next time he visited the brothel.

But Senhor Vaz had drawn a line there. Nobody who had been subjected to Prinsloo’s brutality need ever go to bed with him again. He simply explained that she was busy with other clients, and would be otherwise occupied all the time Prinsloo stayed at O Paraiso, which was usually three or four days. He wasn’t sure whether or not Prinsloo had seen through him, but the Boer was allowed to choose from all the other women and precautions were taken to act immediately if ever he started mistreating the woman he had selected to satisfy his desires on any given occasion.

Senhor Vaz worried about the hatred that Prinsloo had manifested. He didn’t understand it, and it scared him. It was as if it was warning him about a danger. Something he wasn’t aware of himself.

As he stood there in the doorway, half asleep, and observed the semi-naked Prinsloo squaring up to the white woman with her blouse ripped away, he recognized that things had now gone too far. Prinsloo hadn’t hesitated to attack one of the hotel residents, and a white woman at that. Senhor Vaz could no longer overlook his behaviour. And he felt he had been insulted personally.

As far as he was concerned, there could be nothing worse. Being insulted meant that death was testing his powers of resistance.

32

Senhor Vaz was short in stature and not especially strong. But his anger was such that he didn’t hesitate to grab hold of Prinsloo’s shirt collar, drag him out of the room and then push him down the stairs. The scream from the upper floor had woken up the sleeping whores. Many of the women were not particularly fond of some of their colleagues, but they seldom came to blows, although it did happen now and then. But if the danger came from outside their circle, they were all united against it.

Now they were standing by the staircase as Prinsloo came tumbling down. Vaz followed behind him, followed in turn by Judas, and behind him Carlos, who was chewing Prinsloo’s white handkerchief.

Senhor Vaz stopped on the bottom step and looked sternly at Prinsloo, who had hit his head and was bleeding from one eyebrow and the hand where Carlos had bitten him.

‘Get out of here,’ he said. ‘And never come back again.’

Prinsloo pressed his hand against his eyebrow and seemed at first not to have understood what Senhor Vaz had said. Then he stood up on unsteady legs, made a threatening gesture at the prostitutes who were standing round him, then took a step forward towards Senhor Vaz.

‘You know that I usually bring my friends here with me,’ he said. ‘If you throw me out, you throw them all out as well.’

‘I’ll be only too pleased to explain to them why I don’t want you here.’

Prinsloo didn’t reply. He was still bleeding. He suddenly roared loudly and bent over forwards, as if he was in great pain.

‘Water,’ he yelled. ‘Warm water. I must wipe away the blood.’

Senhor Vaz nodded to one of the women, indicating that she should bring some water. He shooed the others away. They returned quietly to their rooms. Prinsloo sat down on the edge of a sofa. When the girl brought him an enamel washbasin he carefully washed away the blood from his forehead and his hand.

‘Ice,’ he said then.

Senhor Vaz himself went out into the kitchen and chopped a couple of large lumps of ice from the blocks in the icebox, then wrapped them up in towels. Prinsloo pressed them against his wounds. When the bleeding had stopped he stood up, buttoned up his shirt, put on his socks and shoes and left through the door.

He left the lumps of ice in the towels lying on the floor next to the sofa. Senhor Vaz carried them into the kitchen, then went back up the stairs and knocked on the door of room number 4. When he heard Hanna’s voice he opened the door and entered the room. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, and had replaced the torn blouse with a different one.

Senhor Vaz looked for signs that she had been crying, but found none. He sat down on the only chair in the room.

Not a word was spoken, but Hanna had the feeling nevertheless that he was apologizing for what had happened.

When he eventually stood up, bowed and left the room, she was more convinced than ever that she ought to leave this town as soon as possible.

Africa scared the living daylights out of her. It was full of people she couldn’t understand, and who didn’t understand her.

She must get away. But even so, she didn’t regret having abandoned Captain Svartman’s ship. That had been the right thing to do in the circumstances. But what was the right thing to do now?

She didn’t know. There was no answer to that question.

She thought: that dark river is still flowing inside me. The ice hasn’t formed on it yet.

33

That very same day she went down to the harbour. Senhor Vaz didn’t want her to wander around town on her own, and sent Judas as a sort of bodyguard. He walked a few paces behind her. Every time she turned round he stopped and looked down at the ground. He didn’t dare to look her in the eye.

How can he possibly protect me? she thought. When he doesn’t even dare to look me in the eye.

There were a lot of ships berthed by the various quays. Still more were riding at anchor in the roadstead. It was low tide, and large parts of the lagoon that formed the outer harbour were silted up, with old wrecks sticking out of the black mud. She searched for a ship flying the Swedish flag in the inner harbour, but in vain. Nor could she see a Danish one, the only other flag she had learnt to recognize. The ships in the roadstead were all flying flags she couldn’t identify.

It was very busy on the quays, with ships being frantically loaded and unloaded. She watched a net full of elephants’ tusks being hoisted up on a crane and lowered into a hold. Gleaming pianos and motor cars were lifted out of another ship, and in one of the nets deposited on the quays were several elegant sofas and armchairs.

The half-naked workers were dripping with sweat as they carried their burdens along swaying gangplanks. And wherever she looked there were white men in topees keeping watch over their slaves like hungry beasts of prey. She soon decided she could no longer bear to watch all these tortured and torturing people. She left the harbour.

Just as she was leaving the waterfront she decided she would take an indirect route back to the hotel. With the sturdily built Judas behind her, she had no need to feel afraid.

He’s my fifth attendant, she thought: Elin was first, then Forsman, and then Berta, Lundmark, and now this gigantic black man who doesn’t dare to look me in the eye.

She spent a long time wandering around the town that afternoon. For the first time she had the feeling that she was seeing everything clearly. Before, everything seemed to have been shrouded by the strong sunlight. Now at last she was able to become acquainted with this town to which she was originally scheduled to pay merely a fleeting visit in order to take on board fresh water and food supplies before Captain Svartman set off for the long voyage to Australia in his Lovisa.

But she had jumped ship here, and was still here. All the darkness she had experienced was now at last beginning to disperse. She was beginning to see properly the foreign world which now surrounded her.

It suddenly dawned on her that it was Sunday. One of the first days in October. But the seasons had changed places. Now it wasn’t winter and the cold that was in store. On the contrary, the increasing heat indicated that summer had arrived early this year. She had heard Senhor Vaz discussing this with his brothel clients. The sun can burn you just as the cold can burn you, she thought. But perhaps my skin is hardened to the heat, thanks to the fact that I’m used to the cold?

She had come to the end of a street that opened out on to a hill, on the top of which the town’s as yet unfinished cathedral towered up towards the heavens. The bright sunlight was reflected off the white stone walls. She had to screw up her eyes so that what surrounded her was not transformed into a mirage by the heat haze. Wherever she looked, everything seemed to be deserted. There were no other people about. Only the big black man behind her, always motionless whenever she turned round.

She walked up the hill. The cathedral doors were standing open. She stopped in the shadow of the tall tower. It’s like a meringue, she thought as she looked at the white stone. Or a cake that I saw in Forsman’s house when one of his children was having a birthday party.

She stood in the shadows, wiping her face with a handkerchief. Judas was standing in full sunlight. She tried beckoning to him, indicating that he too should come and stand in the shade. But he stayed where he was, with sweat pouring down his face.

She suddenly heard singing coming from the dark interior of the cathedral. Children, she thought — children singing in a choir. The singing was interrupted by an echoing voice, but then it began again, a repetition of the same tune. This was evidently a choir practice. She stepped cautiously into the darkness, unsure as to whether she was allowed to enter this church. Were prayers said to the same God here as in the churches she had previously been to, in the mountains and in Sundsvall? She paused, hesitant, while her eyes slowly got used to the darkness that was in such sharp contrast with the sunlight outside.

Then she saw them. The choir. Children in white robes with a red belt round their waist, boys and girls, all of them black. In front of them a small white man with bushy hair and hands moving like soft wings. Nobody had noticed her yet. She stood there and listened. There were a few more repetitions before the choirmaster was satisfied.

And now the children dressed in white sang a hymn. It was so beautiful that it was almost painful. She stood there listening, with tears in her eyes, thinking that she had never heard anything so indescribably beautiful. The children sang in exquisite harmony, the hymn was powerful and rhythmic. All of them kept their eyes fixed on the little man’s gentle hand movements. None of the children seemed to be frightened of him.

It seemed to her that here and now, in the darkness, for the first time, she was seeing people who were not afraid. There was nothing here of what usually scared her to death. Here, inside the dark cathedral, she thought, there was nobody telling lies. There was nothing here apart from the truth in the hymn and the white hands moving like wings full of energy.

Then she suddenly noticed that one of the children, a girl, had seen her and had lost contact with the choirmaster, even though she continued singing in tune.

Hanna thought that she could recognize herself, it was as if she had been transformed into that girl, with her dark skin and big brown eyes.

She and the girl kept on looking at each other until the hymn was finished. Then the choirmaster noticed her. She gave a start and thought once again that she didn’t really have the right to be there. But he smiled and nodded, and said something she didn’t understand before resuming his choir practice.

Hanna was tempted to join the children. To be a part of the singing. But she stayed where she was in the shadows, transported by the children’s voices.

She wished she had dared to join them. But she didn’t have the necessary courage.

It was only when the practice was over, the children had left and the choirmaster had packed away his battered old briefcase that she went back out into the bright sunlight.

34

Judas was still standing on the same spot.

‘Why don’t you stand in the shade?’ she asked, making no attempt to disguise the fact that she was annoyed. His behaviour had spoilt her experience in the cathedral.

He didn’t answer as he hadn’t understood what she said. He simply wiped the sweat from his brow, then let his arm hang loosely by his side again.

She returned to O Paraiso where Senhor Vaz was pacing up and down in the street outside, looking worried. He was carrying an umbrella as a substitute for a parasol to protect him from the sun. Carlos had climbed up on to the hotel sign and was throwing chips gathered from the stone roof at a dog down below. When Hanna arrived back, Senhor Vaz immediately started berating the black man. She didn’t understand what he was saying as he was speaking so quickly, but she gathered he had been worried that something had happened to her.

The black man still said nothing, but she had the impression that he was unmoved by the fit of rage aimed at him. And as she watched Senhor Vaz growing more and more furious, she noticed something that hadn’t occurred to her before.

Even if Judas was afraid of his white master, Senhor Vaz was just as afraid. The gigantic black man was not the only one on the defensive. Naturally, he couldn’t allow himself to react to the white man standing in front of him and shouting at him. That would be a punishable offence, and could lead to imprisonment or a beating. But now Hanna could see that Senhor Vaz was also afraid — a different sort of fear, but just as strong. And didn’t the same apply to Ana Dolores as well? She would boss the black servant girls and prostitutes about, give them orders, and was never satisfied with what they did, nor did she ever thank them. But wasn’t she also possessed by a never-ceasing flood of unease and fear?

The outburst came to an end just as quickly as it had begun. Senhor Vaz dismissed Judas with a wave of the hand, and offered Hanna his arm to take her with him into the coolest of the rooms, overlooking the sea. Judas squatted down next to the house.

Senhor Vaz flopped down on to a chair, placed his hands over his heart as if he had just been indulging in something extremely strenuous, and warned her at great length about the dangers of going for long walks in the extreme heat. He told her about friends of his who had suffered from heatstroke, especially after spending time in places where the sun was reflected by white stone, or by the sand on the town’s beaches. But above all he warned her against relying too much on the support offered by blacks.

She didn’t understand what he was trying to say.

‘Is it dangerous for black people to look at you?’ she asked.

Senhor Vaz shook his head in annoyance, as if the strain he had just undergone had used up all his patience.

‘A white woman shouldn’t walk around too much on her own,’ he said. ‘That’s just the way it is.’

‘I went to the cathedral and listened to the black children singing.’

‘They sing very beautifully. They have a remarkable ability to harmonize without needing to practise all that much. But white ladies should only go for short walks. And preferably not at all when it’s very hot.’

She wanted to ask more about the unlikely danger she had evidently exposed herself to. But Senhor Vaz raised his hand, he didn’t have the strength to answer any more questions. He remained seated on the chair, his white hat on his knee, his black walking stick made from a wood known as pau preto leaning against one of his legs, and seemed to be lost in thought.

After a while Hanna stood up and left the room. Senhor Vaz had fallen asleep, his mouth half open, his eyebrows twitching, snoring softly.

When she looked out of the front door, she found that Judas was no longer there. She wondered where he lived, if he was married, if he had any children.

But most of all she wondered what he was thinking.

That evening she had dinner in her room once again. One of the black servant girls whose name she didn’t know brought her food. She also moved without making a sound, just like Laurinda. She wondered if these silent movements also had to do with fear — the fear she was beginning to see more and more of.

She ate the food: rice, boiled vegetables whose taste she didn’t recognize, and a grilled chicken leg. There were many spices, completely new to her. But she ate her fill. She drank tea with her food. What was left over she drank later on when it had grown cold, as a substitute for water in the evening and during the night.

That was one of the last pieces of advice Lundmark had given her before he suddenly fell ill and died. Never drink unboiled water.

She had followed his advice. Now that she wasn’t bleeding any more and was no longer carrying what would have been their child, her stomach wasn’t causing her any problems.

What she was now carrying was merely emptiness.

35

She put the tray on the floor outside her room and locked the door. She took off all her clothes and lay naked on her bed. The curtain in front of the window was hanging motionless. There was something sinful about lying naked on a bed, she thought. Sinful because there is no man here who desires me, nobody I would allow to take advantage of me. She reached for the blanket in order to cover up her body, but then changed her mind. There was nobody who could see her hiding away here. If there was a God who was invisible but all-seeing, He would surely allow a person to lie down naked when the heat was so suffocating.

That evening she lay there for a long time, thinking about the fear she thought she had detected in Senhor Vaz’s eyes. She had never seen fear like that in her mother or father. There was an upper class in Sweden, of course, but it didn’t need to be frightening if you co-operated with it. But here, things were different. Here, everybody was afraid, even if the whites tried to hide their fear behind a front of either calmness and self-control, or well-planned outbursts of rage.

She thought: where is my fear? Am I not afraid because I don’t have anybody to be afraid of? Am I completely alone?

The solitary world. She would never be able to cope with that. She had grown up as a human being in the company of others. She would never be able to survive in a world without that communion.

That evening she regretted having jumped ship. If she had continued the voyage to Australia, perhaps the feeling of being unable to cope with the loss of Lundmark would have faded away? Despite everything, there was a feeling of community on board that she was a part of. She felt like an insect, flapping its wings frantically, trapped inside a glass that had been turned upside down.

But that feeling also faded away. She knew she had done what she was forced to do. If she had stayed on board the ship, she might well eventually have jumped overboard. Lundmark’s constant shadow-like presence would have driven her mad.

She was about to fall asleep, still naked on top of the bedcover, when she heard the sound of raindrops on the tin roof. The sound gradually grew louder, and before long it was the booming of tropical rain. She got up and pulled the curtain to one side. The mosquitoes had fled the heavy rain, so she could allow the cooling air to flow freely into the room.

It was pitch-dark outside. There were no fires burning. The rain drowned all other noises. There was no sound of voices or the gramophone from the ground floor.

She held out her hand and let the rain patter on to her skin.

I must go home, she thought again. I can’t cope with living here, surrounded by all this fear and a loneliness that is threatening to suffocate me.

She remained standing by the window until the heavy but short-lived rain had stopped. She closed the curtain and went back to bed, still without covering herself with the blanket.

The following day, and for many days to come, she went down to the harbour to see if a ship flying the Swedish flag had berthed by a quay or was waiting in the roadstead. Judas always accompanied her, keeping watch in silence a few paces behind her.

It is October, 1904. She is waiting.

36

The piano Tuner’s name was José, but he was never called anything but Zé, and he was Senhor Vaz’s brother. That was a discovery she made after having lived for quite a long time in the brothel. No matter how much she studied the two men, she couldn’t see any similarities. But Zé assured her there was no doubt at all that they had the same parents. Even though she soon gathered that Zé was somewhat mentally challenged, she had no reason to doubt him on this point. And why would Senhor Vaz allow him to sit there tuning the piano day after day unless there was some special reason? Senhor Vaz was looking after his brother because their parents had passed away.

In a word, Senhor Vaz loved him. Hanna noted the touching solicitude with which he treated his brother. If any of the clients complained about the constant tuning of the piano, she witnessed with her own eyes how Senhor Vaz would order the man out of the building and would never allow him back in. Zé had permission to tune the piano or polish the keys as often and for as long as he wanted.

But there were exceptions, of course. When the brothel was visited by prominent men from South Africa, leading figures in the government or the church, Vaz would lead his brother gently to the room behind the kitchen where Zé had his bed. The beautiful Belinda Bonita, who was always well informed about everything that went on in the brothel, told Hanna that there was also an old piano in that room. The keys were still there, but all the instrument’s strings had been cut and removed.

So Zé would sit in his room, tuning a silent piano.

Zé lived in a world of his own. He was a few years older than his brother, seldom spoke unless he was spoken to, tuned his strings or merely sat quietly hunched over the piano as if he were waiting for something that was never going to happen. He was like a ticking clock, Hanna thought, with nothing happening to interrupt the regular rhythm.

But that wasn’t completely true, she realized one day when she had been living in the brothel for nearly four months. As usual she had strolled down to the harbour together with her gigantic bodyguard, and looked to see if she could find a ship flying the Swedish flag: but there was none to be seen on this occasion either. She had bought a pair of binoculars from an Indian businessman who also sold cameras and spectacles. Thanks to the magnified images she was able to establish that none of the ships waiting in the roadstead was displaying a Swedish flag. Every time she returned to the hotel she did so with mixed feelings of disappointment and relief. Disappointment because she really did want to return home, relief because she dreaded ever having to board a ship again.

The moment she entered O Paraiso she could see that Zé wasn’t in his usual place at the piano. But she didn’t have time to ask where he was before he made his grand entry. The women who had been lounging around on the sofas or leaning over the billiard table patting balls back and forth with rather silly flourishes of the hand burst out laughing but also applauded him when he appeared. He had changed out of his usual crumpled dark suit into a white one. Instead of the usual dirty beret pulled down over the back of his head, Zé was now wearing a panama hat similar to the one his brother usually wore. In addition he had a white shirt with a high collar and a black cravat, elaborately tied. In one hand he was carrying a bunch of white paper flowers. He stood in front of the woman whose name was Deolinda, but who was never called anything other than A Magrinha, since she was so thin, flat-breasted and totally lacking in the usual female characteristics.

Hanna had sometimes looked at her and wondered how on earth she could attract a man. She preferred not to think that thought through to its logical conclusion, but she couldn’t avoid it: Deolinda was ugly. It seemed to Hanna that the whole of her emaciated person radiated sorrow and suffering. But she did have clients, Hanna knew that: she had seen them going with Deolinda. She found it totally repulsive to imagine A Magrinha in bed with one of the white men who patronized the brothel; but she evidently had something that enticed them and aroused their desires.

Zé bowed and handed over his paper flowers. Deolinda stood up, took him by the arm and led him to her room in the corridor where clients were entertained. They were sent on their way by merry laughter and renewed applause before the room was once again characterized by apathetic idleness.

There were always a few hours in the late afternoon when nothing really happened in the brothel. Clients rarely if ever appeared. The women dozed off, painted their nails, or possibly exchanged a few whispered confidences.

None of the black women apart from Felicia ever spoke to Hanna unless she asked them a question or requested something. Senhor Vaz had made it clear to her that the women in his establishment were there not only to satisfy their clients, but that they were also supposed to serve the hotel guests. She still didn’t know how they regarded her: they greeted her, smiled at her, but never attempted to be friendly with her. And she didn’t know what was meant by their being ‘supposed to serve the hotel guests’. After all, she was the only person renting a room.

She sat down at the end of a sofa next to Esmeralda, who was one of the oldest of the women, with a bird-like face and the longest fingers Hanna had ever seen.

Silence descended on the room. Hanna realized that this was the first time she had ever sat down next to one of the black women.

She pointed at the corridor into which Deolinda and Zé had just disappeared.

‘A pair of lovers?’ she asked.

Esmeralda nodded.

‘Yes, they are a pair of lovers,’ she said. ‘He sometimes gets that feeling. Then he forgets his piano. It happens every other month or so. He changes his clothes, and it is always Deolinda he chooses.’

Hanna wanted to ask more questions, not least to make sure that she had understood properly: but Esmeralda stood up in an impressively dignified fashion. As far as she was concerned the conversation was at an end. She glided away to her room, her hips swaying attractively.

Hanna also rose to her feet and went up the stairs. She didn’t need to turn round to know that all the nine women left down below were watching her attentively. They look at us when we turn our backs on them, she thought. They are not afraid to look each other in the eye; but they are afraid of our eyes just as we are afraid of theirs.

She closed the door behind her, bolted it, and undressed from the waist up. She washed herself in cold water, using a linen cloth. She licked one of her lower arms and could taste all the salt from the perspiration that had been pouring off her. Then she lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. But she sat up again almost immediately. She had remembered something she hadn’t thought about since she left Sweden on the ship which must have long since docked in Australia with its cargo of timber.

She dug out the hymn book with the golden embossing in which she had hidden the gold coins she had once been given by Forsman. Between the pages was also a black and white photograph. It was of Berta and herself, taken in Bernard Dunn’s photo-studio in Sundsvall.

37

It had been Berta’s idea. She was always the one who came out with the boldest and most unexpected suggestions.

‘We must have a photograph,’ she had said. ‘Before you go away. I’m frightened of forgetting what you look like. Frightened of forgetting what we both look like together.’

Hanna started worrying immediately. She had never been to a photographer before, didn’t know what to do. But Berta dismissed all her objections. Besides, both she and Hanna had received a little gift from Forsman, like all the others who worked for him. Forsman’s business had just celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday, and he wanted to mark the occasion by being generous to his employees. The money would pay for the photograph.

They managed to arrange for a couple of hours off one day in the spring when the days were getting longer. Dunn, the photographer, had a studio on the main square. They had put on their best clothes, polished their shoes, and been placed by a table with a chair. Behind them was a white plaster statue of a dragon-slayer with a raised sword. The photographer, who was Danish and spoke a variation of Swedish that was difficult to understand, instructed Berta to sit down on the chair, with Hanna standing behind her, next to her shoulder. To balance the photograph and give it artistic form, he placed a vase of paper flowers on the table.

It was the flowers in Zé’s hand when he bowed in front of Deolinda, so similar to the ones in the photograph, that had jogged Hanna’s memory.

She lay on the bed and looked at the picture. They had received two copies, and kept one each. Berta was smiling at the camera, while Hanna looked more serious. She tried to imagine what Berta would have done if she had been the one lying here in bed on the upper floor of an African brothel, disguised as a hotel. But the photograph provided no answer, Berta said nothing.

She laid the photograph on her naked chest, which had started to dry now. I never expected anything like this, she thought. When Elin stood in front of me and said that I must travel to the coast in order to earn a living, I was totally incapable of imagining what would happen. Perhaps what Hanna was thinking now was confirmation of the fact that she had grown up and was an adult now? Perhaps the big secret was the realization that you never knew what was in store for you? If you made the break and left behind everything that was known and familiar?

Elin can’t see me now, she thought. Berta can’t see me, nor can my brother and sisters. I live in a world that we only share in the sense that it’s incomprehensible, not only for them but also for me, and I’m living in the middle of it.

She unbolted the door and fell asleep. Soon Laurinda would come up with her evening meal on a tray — they had agreed that whenever Hanna didn’t turn up at the separate table allocated to her by Senhor Vaz, Laurinda would take a tray up to her room. That evening the main course was oily deep-fried fish, something Hanna had somehow managed to get down her on a previous occasion. She tried again, but soon pushed the plate aside and ate the dessert, which was half a coconut with slices of pineapple.

When Laurinda came back to collect the tray, Hanna tried to get her to stay by talking to her. Every time she saw Laurinda she had a bad conscience on account of that slap she had given her some time ago. She thought she could go some way towards making up for that by being friendly and talking to Laurinda. After a lot of patience-testing attempts she had finally managed to make Laurinda reply to her questions with more than monosyllables. Sometimes she could even persuade her to tell brief little tales.

But she had never been able to persuade Laurinda to sit down. She always remained standing, she evidently couldn’t even dream of sitting down in the presence of a white woman.

When she first arrived at O Paraiso Hanna had noticed a little tattoo that Laurinda had on her neck, next to her collarbone. A lot of the sailors on the Lovisa had tattoos. Her husband, Lundmark, had an anchor with a red rose tattooed on his left upper arm. But Hanna had never seen anybody with a tattoo next to their collarbone before, nor had she ever been able to imagine a woman with tattoos.

She hadn’t been able to work out what the tattoo represented. Was it a dog, perhaps?

Now she couldn’t wait any longer. She signalled to Laurinda that she should leave the tray on the table and pointed at the tattoo which was visible above her blouse.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘It’s a suckling hyena,’ said Laurinda.

When she gathered that Hanna didn’t know what kind of an animal a hyena was, and possibly didn’t even know it was an animal at all, she walked over to a picture that was hanging on the wall. During the days when Hanna hadn’t been able to leave her bed she had lain there and gazed at the painting that depicted in Romantic style a number of different animals that lived in the African savannah.

Laurinda pointed at one of the animals.

‘That’s a hyena,’ she said. ‘It laughed the night I was born. My father heard the hyena out there in the darkness, and afterwards told my mother that it had bidden me welcome and provided me with my first food via its laughter.’

Then she recounted in detail what had happened the night she was born, without hesitation and as if she had merely been waiting for the right opportunity. Hanna didn’t understand some things, and several times Laurinda had to repeat bits and gesture with her hands or make various noises to make her story clear.

She also imitated the hyena’s cry, a laughing sound.

‘I was my mother and father’s first child,’ said Laurinda. ‘But before my uncle died he told me that I was born in the year when there were so many crocodiles in the river that they began to attack and eat one another. It was also the year when the flamingos lost their pink colouring and became pure white. It was a year when lots of strange things happened. My parents lived on the bank of a tributary to the great River Zambezi, in a village where everybody had their own little plantation, their own hut, their own goats, and a smile for everybody they came across during the course of the day. I grew up in a world that I thought could never change. But one day when I was big enough to start helping my mother out in the fields and already had three younger brothers and sisters, a number of white men turned up in the village. They had long beards, their clothes were stained with sweat, they seemed to hate the heat of the sun and they were in a great hurry. They carried guns, and they showed the village chief some papers covered in lots of words. A few weeks later we were driven out of our village by soldiers commanded by the white men. Our little fields were going to be joined together to make a big cotton plantation. Anybody who wanted to stay and work in the cotton fields would be allowed to do so. Everybody else was driven away. My father, whose name was Papadjana, was a man who rarely allowed himself to be bullied and was never downcast when faced with difficulties. These white men with their cotton plantation were a big difficulty, but he had no intention of allowing them to tell him what to do. He spoke to them and said he had no intention of staying and picking cotton, nor of going away. No matter what it said in those papers and irrespective of how many soldiers there were, he was going to stay where he was. He had used a very loud voice when he spoke to the white men, and all the villagers who were standing around began to pluck up courage and give vent to their pent-up feelings when they realized that one of their number wasn’t afraid. I don’t know what happened next, but some more soldiers arrived and one morning soon after, my mother came with tears rolling down her cheeks and said that my father had been found floating in the river, dead, cut to pieces with knives. It was just as dawn was breaking. She stood there, leaning over me as I lay on the woven mat in the darkness of our hut. She told me I would have to go to the big city. I couldn’t stay in the village. She would take the smaller children with her to where her parents lived further inland, but I should make my way to the coast and the big city. I didn’t want to, but she forced me to.’

Laurinda fell silent, as if the memories were too much for her to bear. Hanna sat quietly, thinking how what Laurinda had recounted was so remarkably similar to her own life. Both of them came from a world in which women were forced out of their homes and had to move to towns and to the coast in order to find work and survive.

‘So I came here to this town,’ said Laurinda eventually. ‘During all the years that have passed I’ve always thought that one day I shall go back and look for my mother and my brothers and sisters. Sometimes when I’m sleeping at night I dream that the hyena tattooed in my skin liberates herself and goes for a walk. At dawn she comes back and falls asleep again in my skin. One of these days she will have found my mother and my siblings.’

Laurinda picked up the tray and left the room. Hanna lay down on the bed again and thought about what she had heard. What animal had cried in the night when she was born?

There was a light knock on the door. When she opened it, she found Senhor Vaz standing outside. He was dressed up in a tailcoat and carried a top hat under his arm. Next to him was Carlos on his bow legs, also wearing a tailcoat.

Senhor Vaz bowed.

‘I’ve come to propose to you,’ he said.

At first Hanna didn’t understand what he meant. But then she realized that he was actually asking her to marry him.

‘Naturally I don’t expect you to respond immediately,’ he said. ‘But I have made my wish clear.’

He bowed again, turned on his heel and walked back towards the stairs. Carlos suddenly started shouting and jumping up and down, then grabbed hold of Senhor Vaz’s top hat and climbed up and started swinging from the ceiling light.

Hanna closed the door and heard the chaos that always ensued when Carlos had one of his high-spirited outbursts slowly fading away. His punishment on such occasions was to be locked in a cage for a few days. As he hated the cage more than anything else in the world, he was always compliant after he had been released.

She lay down on the bed and thought about what Senhor Vaz had said.

She felt as if she were being caught in a trap. But she still had the possibility of escaping and leaving the scene.

The following day she decided she would go down to the harbour shortly after dawn in order to see what ships were moored by the quays or waiting in the roadstead. As she came out into the street she noticed that the battered top hat was now on the watchman’s head; he was asleep as usual.

Time was short now. She was in a hurry.

38

Afew days after Senhor Vaz’s proposal, a rumour spread across the town that an enormous iceberg had been seen off the coast to the north, and that ocean currents were now driving it southwards. Hanna heard about it from Felicia, who was so excited that she changed out of her skimpy working clothes and put on a respectable dress suitable for walking in town. She had been entertaining a client, an engine driver from distant Salisbury, who visited the brothel twice a year. He had been just as excited as Felicia and all the others by the rumours about the iceberg. Senhor Vaz had already set off for the harbour when Hanna came downstairs, but Judas — who was now wearing the battered top hat — was waiting for her.

The streets were full of people making their way to the shore or climbing up the hills with good vantage points, all of them hoping to see the iceberg before anybody else.

But no iceberg appeared on the horizon. The weather was hot and oppressive. People were standing around under their parasols with sweat running down their expectant faces. Some concluded in disappointment that the iceberg must have already melted in the extreme heat. Older and more cynical observers were in no doubt that it was all a hoax, just as on all similar previous occasions. Nobody had ever seen an iceberg. But every ten years or so a rumour was spread, and the whole town started running to see it.

On the way to the harbour Hanna had noticed something she had never seen before. Blacks and whites were walking side by side on the pavements. Nobody seemed to be worried by that. Now, however, when the possibility of seeing the iceberg was no longer a shared hope, things were back to normal. The whites took control of the pavements, and pushed aside every black man or woman who threatened to come too close.

It was as if, for a few brief moments, Hanna had witnessed the birth of a new social order, as a sort of trial, only to see it disappear again just as quickly.

That same evening, when the mysterious iceberg had become a frustrated memory that would soon fade away, it started raining. It started as drizzle, but became heavier and heavier. At three in the morning Hanna was woken up by the booming sound of rain thudding on to the roof tiles.

She got out of bed and went to look out of the window. The rain seemed to be a grey wall between her and the darkness. But it was just as hot as during the day. When she stretched her hand out of the window and allowed the rain to lash down on to her skin, it felt very warm — as if it had started boiling on its way down to the ground.

She eventually managed to get back to sleep. When she woke up at dawn, the rain was just as heavy. She could see that the street was already flooded.

It continued raining for four days and nights. When it finally stopped, water was trickling in on to the brothel’s stone floors, despite the fact that everybody had been required to assist in sewing sacks and filling them with topsoil and gravel in order to keep out the floods surging along the streets. As all links with the interior were broken, the only customers coming to the brothel now were sailors. Senhor Vaz turned them away. There was a state of emergency, the brothel was in distress and was closed. One young man, dripping wet and dressed in a French naval uniform, commented that he was also in distress and his plight was a state of emergency. Senhor Vaz and Esmeralda felt sorry for him and allowed him in.

When the rain had stopped and it was replaced by clouds of steamy damp mist, the air was full of insects fluttering everywhere. All windows and open areas were closed, and gaps and chinks were sealed. When the gatekeeper came in to fetch something, Carlos flung himself at him immediately and started gobbling up the insects that had settled on his body. White insects were sitting round his black head like a wreath of flowers. Carlos ate them all. Hanna could see that they were a great delicacy for the chimpanzee.

Everything gradually returned to normal. People came drowsily in from out of the dampness with steam rising in clouds from their bodies, as if their insides had also been filled with water. During the commotion caused by the alleged iceberg and then the days of heavy rain, Senhor Vaz had not pestered Hanna with questions about her response to his proposal. She had had time to think about it while the rain was pouring down. She had no doubt that Senhor Vaz’s intentions were honourable — but who exactly was he, this little man who kept his hair and his moustache and his fingernails impeccably clean, his clothes immaculately creased, and was liable to fly into a fit of fury if he so much as spilled a drop of coffee on to his clothes or his body? He’s a friendly man, Hanna thought, at least twice as old as I am. I don’t feel anything of the vibrations that existed between me and Lundmark. He makes me feel safe in this world that is so foreign to me, but the thought of loving him, of allowing him to come to bed with me, is impossible.

So she had decided to turn him down when the rain had stopped, the insects had gone away and the brothel had opened again.

Then Carlos vanished. One morning there was no sign of him.

It had happened before that he had run off for a few hours to visit a secret world that nobody knew anything about. There were no other chimpanzees in Lourenço Marques, but sometimes baboons appeared in the town’s parks, looking for food. Perhaps Carlos had gone to see them?

But this time the ape didn’t return. Carlos was still missing after three days. The women who worked in the brothel went out looking for him. Senhor Vaz sent out everybody he could to search for Carlos. He promised to pay a reward, but nobody had seen the ape, nobody saw it when it disappeared, nobody had seen it since.

Hanna could tell that Senhor Vaz was grieving over the disappearance of Carlos. For the first time his austere mask had slipped, and he was displaying both regret and worry. Hanna was touched by what she saw, and it dawned on her that the man who had proposed to her was also very lonely. Surrounded by girls, but most of all attached to a confused ape that had come into his possession when a client had been unable to pay his bill.

Perhaps that is why Carlos ran away, she thought. So that I would be able to see Senhor Vaz as he really is?

She thought that he reminded her of her father. Elin had always kept him clean, just as Senhor Vaz was careful to look after his body and his appearance. Hanna knew that in one of the rooms at the back of the house where she had never yet ventured, Senhor Vaz had a bathroom: but he never allowed anybody to see him bathing in his enamel tub.

Lundmark had not always been clean. Hanna had sometimes been upset when he came to lie down beside her without having washed himself properly.

During the days when Carlos was missing, Hanna began to see Senhor Vaz in a new light. Perhaps he was not the person she had first thought he was.

One day Carlos came back. Hanna was woken up at dawn by somebody downstairs crying out in joy. When she had dressed rapidly and gone out to investigate, she found Carlos sitting with his arms round Senhor Vaz, who was hugging the ape tightly.

When Carlos came back he had a blue ribbon tied round his neck. Nobody knew where Carlos had got the ribbon from, or who had tied it round his neck.

The chimpanzee’s sudden disappearance and equally sudden return remained his secret. But Carlos seemed to be most surprised by all the fuss, and started yelling and hitting out and pulling down curtains when everybody wanted to stroke him or slap him on the back.

Only when nobody bothered about him any more did he finally settle down.

39

Hanna thought: what happens to an ape when it doesn’t want to be an ape any longer? Could that also happen to a human being? That he or she no longer wanted to be the person they were?

She wrote down her thoughts in her room on a loose sheet of paper. But of course, she didn’t mention anything about it to anybody — not even to Elin, in her thoughts.

After the return of Carlos, Senhor Vaz began courting her again. She had intended to tell him the facts: that she had recently become a widow and that her period of mourning would last for quite a long time to come. But Senhor Vaz didn’t make her any new proposals. He simply continued to court her, quietly, sometimes even distantly. One day he took her for a ride in one of the few motor cars in Lourenço Marques, owned by an artillery colonel in the Portuguese regiment stationed in the town. They drove along the narrow road that followed the shoreline. A large-scale promenade was being built alongside the harbour. Hanna saw the black labourers struggling with the heavy blocks of stone in the oppressive heat — but Senhor Vaz, who was sitting beside her, didn’t seem to notice them. He was enjoying the sea views, and pointed out a little sailing boat bobbing up and down on the waves.

They turned away from the sea, and the car climbed up the hills to the more elevated part of the town. A number of stone houses were being built along two long, wide esplanades. There were rails for horse-drawn trams.

The car stopped outside a house that seemed to have just been finished. It had a white-plastered facade, and a garden with rhododendrons and acacias. Senhor Vaz opened the car door and helped Hanna out. She looked questioningly at him. Why had they stopped outside this house?

The door was opened by a maid. They went in. There was no furniture in the rooms. Hanna could smell paint that hadn’t yet dried, and wooden floors that had only recently been oiled.

‘I want to give you this house,’ said Senhor Vaz without further ado.

His voice was soft, almost husky, as if it were a woman speaking. She had the impression that he was very proud of what he was offering her.

‘I want us to live here,’ he said. ‘The day you agree to marry me, we shall leave our rooms in the hotel and move here.’

Hanna said nothing. She explored the empty house in silence with Senhor Vaz a few cautious paces behind her.

He asked her no questions. He didn’t invite the answer he must have been longing to hear.

When they returned to the hotel, Hanna thought yet again that she would never be able to explain to anybody about what had happened to her during the time she had lived in Africa. Least of all how a man who barely reached up to her shoulders and owned a brothel had proposed to her and wanted to present her with a large stone house with a garden and a sea view.

Nobody would believe her. Everybody would take it for granted that it was either a lie, or a wild dream.

Hanna decided to talk to Felicia. Perhaps she would be able to give her some advice.

A few evenings later, when Felicia had said goodbye to one of her regular clients, a banker from Pretoria who always wanted her to be brutal and torture him during their sessions, Hanna went to visit her in her room. Hanna told her the truth — that Senhor Vaz had proposed marriage to her.

‘I know,’ said Felicia. ‘Everybody knows. I think even Carlos gathers what is going on. He may only be a chimpanzee, but he’s clever. He understands more than you would think.’

Her reply surprised Hanna. She had thought that Senhor Vaz’s proposal had been made most discreetly.

‘Has he spoken about it? To whom?’

‘He never says anything. But he doesn’t need to. We understand even so. But he doesn’t realize that, of course.’

Hanna suddenly became unsure about what to say next. Their conversation was turning out to be quite different from what she had expected.

‘Senhor Vaz is a friendly man,’ said Felicia. ‘He can be brutal, but he always regrets it afterwards. And he lets us keep nearly half of what we earn. There are brothels in this town where the women hardly get a tenth.’

‘How come he isn’t married?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Has he ever been married?’

‘I don’t know that either. He came here from Lisbon over twenty years ago, with his brother and his parents. His father was a businessman and worked far too hard in the heat we have here. He died not long after he arrived. His wife went back to Portugal, but the two brothers stayed on. A few years later Senhor Vaz started this brothel, using money he’d got when he sold his father’s business. That’s all I know.’

‘So there’s never been a woman in his life?’

Felicia smiled.

‘Sometimes I simply don’t understand the questions white people ask,’ she said. ‘Of course there have been women in his life. I don’t really know how many, or who they are. But he does the same as other brothel owners do in this town — he never touches his own girls, but goes to his colleagues’ establishments.’

‘Why does he want to marry me?’

‘Because you are white. I think he’s also impressed by the fact that you can afford to live here and pay for your room. And I suppose he’s stricken by the loneliness that affects all white people in this country.’

‘My money will soon run out.’

Felicia looked thoughtfully at her.

‘You’re not ill any more,’ she said in the end. ‘You’re strong enough now to continue your journey to wherever you were or are going to. But you choose to stay here. Something is making you stay here. I don’t know if it’s because you don’t have anywhere to go to or to return to, or whether there is some other reason. Anyway, now Senhor Vaz has proposed to you. You could marry a worse man than he is. He’ll treat you with respect. He’ll give you a large house. That’s something my husband would never be able to give me. He’s a fisherman, his name’s Ateme. We have two children and I’m happy to see him every time we meet.’

‘Who looks after your children when you’re here?’

‘Their mother does.’

Hanna shook her head. She didn’t understand.

‘Their mother? I thought you said you were their mother.’

‘My sister. She’s also their mother. Just as I’m her children’s mother as well. Or my other sisters’ children’s mother.’

‘How many sisters do you have?’

‘Four.’

Hanna thought that over. There was of course another question she felt bound to ask.

‘What does your husband say about you working here?’

‘Nothing,’ said Felicia quite simply. ‘He knows that I’m faithful to him.’

‘Faithful? Here?’

‘I only go with white men. For money. He doesn’t bother about that.’

Hanna tried to understand what she’d just heard. All the time the gap seemed to grow wider rather than narrower. She didn’t comprehend the world she was living in.

She thought about Carlos again. Perhaps he no longer wanted to be an ape, but he couldn’t be a human being.

The lonely chimpanzee had changed into a vacuum inside a white waiter’s coat.

What was she turning into?

40

That evening Hanna decided to accept Senhor Vaz’s proposal of marriage. The most important reason for her decision was that she had come to accept that she could no longer cope with living as a widow. And perhaps one day she would be able to feel the same for Vaz as she had done for Lundmark.

The following day she gave him her answer. Senhor Vaz didn’t seem to be surprised, but evidently regarded her ‘yes’ as a formality that he had taken for granted.

Three weeks later they were married at a simple ceremony in the Catholic priest’s residence next to the cathedral. The marriage witnesses were people Hanna didn’t know. Senhor Vaz had also taken Carlos along, dressed in his tailcoat, but the priest had refused to allow the chimpanzee to be present. He was quite shocked, and regarded the proposed presence of Carlos to be blasphemy. Senhor Vaz had no choice but to accept the priest’s ban. Carlos waited outside while the ceremony took place, and climbed up into the bell tower. Afterwards they had dinner in the best hotel in town, which was situated on a hill with views over the sea. Carlos was with them, because they had a private room.

They spent their wedding night in a suite in the hotel. There was a smell of lavender when Hanna entered the bedroom.

When they had switched the light off she could feel the warm breath of her new husband on her face. For a short, confused moment it was as if Lundmark had come back to her; but then she smelled the pomade in his black hair and knew that this was a different man lying by her side.

She waited for what was going to come next. She spread herself out, prepared herself. But Senhor Vaz — or Attimilio to use his first name — didn’t manage to penetrate her. He tried over and over again, but he wasn’t up to it: what should have been a lance was a broken twig.

In the end he turned away from her and curled up, as if he were ashamed.

Hanna wondered if she had done something wrong. But the next day, when she plucked up courage and asked Felicia about it, she was told that what had happened was not unusual as far as men were concerned. All in good time Senhor Vaz would no doubt be able to prove that he had the strength on which the whole of his commercial enterprises depended. But the fact was that there was always a threat hanging over a brothel: all men could suddenly become impotent.

Hanna didn’t understand everything that Felicia said, but she did realize that what had happened wasn’t her fault.

A few days later they moved into the stone house that had by now been filled with furniture. There was a handsome, shiny piano in one room that smelled of mimosa and other plants that Hanna had never come across before.

One evening, a few weeks after her wedding, when Hanna was alone with the maid, she played a note on the piano and made it linger on by treading on one of the pedals.

It was as if the room’s shadows were suddenly populated by all those people she had left behind. Jonathan Forsman, Berta, Elin, her siblings and the third mate whose burial at sea she had attended six months earlier.

But her reaction was neither sadness nor regret. A cold wind of dismay blew past her. It came from nowhere as the sound of the piano faded away. What had she done? By attaching herself to a man she barely knew?

She didn’t know. But she forced herself to think: there is no turning back. I am where I am.

Nowhere else but just here.

41

Every morning she went out on to the balcony that ran along the whole of the house’s upper floor. From there she could see the town climbing up and down the slopes beyond the harbour with its many cranes gleaming in the heat haze, and furthest away the sea where ships were waiting for high tide. She had bought a better pair of binoculars than the ones she had before, and Senhor Vaz had paid a black carpenter to make a stand on which the binoculars could rest.

She continued to keep an eye on the ships, but now she no longer hoped to discover one in the roadstead flying a Swedish flag. On the contrary. Every morning she was scared she might see a ship lying there which could take her home. She was afraid that in that case she would begin to think that the ship had come too late.

Attimilio, as she still found it difficult to call him, left the house every morning at eight o’clock. He clambered into one of the horse-drawn coaches that took him down to the harbour district. At about noon he would come back home and they would eat lunch together, after which he took an afternoon nap before going back down to the women again.

Hanna very soon discovered that her new marriage was very different in one particular way from the time she had spent with Lundmark. Now she was almost always alone. Lundmark had always been close at hand when they were aboard Captain Svartman’s ship. Her new husband treated her with the greatest respect and was always friendly towards her, but he was rarely at home. He ate and slept, and at night he continued to make his failed attempts to do what Hanna now, to her great surprise, had begun to long for. But apart from that they did next to nothing together. She continued to ask him questions about his earlier life, but he answered evasively or not at all. He didn’t lose his temper and didn’t seem to be put out by her questions: but he quite simply didn’t want to say anything. Hanna thought it seemed as if she had married a man without a past at all.

Looking back, Hanna would regard this time as one of almost total inactivity. There was virtually nothing for her to do, no jobs that needed to be done. The garden was looked after by an old black man who was stone deaf. His name was Rumigo, and he had one of his innumerable sons to help him. Hanna would sometimes stand and watch how gently he handled the flowers, trees and shrubs. Inside the house was Anaka, who had also looked after Attimilio’s parents. She was beginning to grow old, but still worked just as hard, and hardly ever seemed to sleep. She lived alone in a little shack behind the house. Hanna sometimes saw her sitting there, smoking her pipe before going to bed. Anaka would be up again at four o’clock, and served breakfast at six.

Whenever Hanna spoke to Anaka, the maid immediately went down on one knee before her. Attimilio had explained to Hanna that this was not primarily a gesture of submission and subservience, but more of a tradition — a way of showing respect. Hanna found it difficult to cope with these continual genuflections, and tried to persuade Anaka to stop it. But without success. When Attimilio explained that Anaka would do the same to a black man of superior rank, she gave up. The genuflections continued.

There was another woman in the house, a young girl who Attimilio explained was the daughter of his mother’s seamstress. She had a Portuguese name, Julietta, and helped Anaka with all the things the latter didn’t have the time or strength to do herself. Hanna guessed that Julietta must be fourteen or fifteen years old.

Hanna experienced days in which she felt she was wandering around in an almost trance-like state. The heat was oppressive, occasionally interrupted by short tropical downpours. She spent most of the time sitting fanning herself in one of the rooms in which sea breezes wafted in through the open windows. She had the feeling that she was waiting for something, but didn’t know what. She was sometimes afflicted by a nagging annoyance at being superfluous — everything that happened in this large house was done by the black servants. Her own role was simply to do nothing.

Attimilio had explained that she shouldn’t hesitate to say if she was dissatisfied with the work carried out by the servants. Now and then she should put on a pair of white gloves and go around the house, running her fingers along picture frames and door frames to make sure that everything had been properly cleaned.

‘If you don’t keep chasing them up, they’ll start skimping,’ said Attimilio.

‘But everything is always beautifully clean.’

‘That’s because you check up on them. The moment you stop they’ll cease to be as careful.’

Hanna could neither understand nor reconcile herself to Attimilio’s constant denigration of black people. She still suspected that she could detect traces of fear behind his harsh words. But her presence in the house did not change his attitudes.

One evening he came home after a shocking incident in the brothel. A customer had fired a revolver and one of the women had received a superficial flesh wound on one arm. He burst out into a vehement tirade attacking the country he lived in.

‘This would be a good continent to live in,’ he roared, ‘if only there weren’t all these black people everywhere.’

‘But wasn’t it a white man who fired the revolver?’ asked Hanna tentatively.

Senhor Vaz didn’t respond. Instead he made his excuses and retired to his study. She could hear through the closed door that he was playing Portuguese military marches on his primitive gramophone. When she bent down and peered in through the keyhole she could see him marching angrily around the room, swinging his sabre. She started giggling. The man who was now her husband seemed to be more like a tin soldier than anything else. One of the tin soldiers she had seen Jonathan Forsman’s sons playing with.

Then she started feeling uneasy again. She had become like other white women in this town: inactive, apathetic and constantly fanning herself.

42

After several more weeks during which Attimilio had still failed to make love to his wife night after night, Hanna began to realize that Attimilio was close to unbounded desperation. She turned to Felicia once again, but in secret, one day when Senhor Vaz had gone to Pretoria where he invested quite a lot of the money he earned from the brothel. Once a month a lawyer came to visit him. They would shut themselves away in his study, and nobody else had a clue what they discussed. The lawyer, whose name was Andrade and had a limp, spoke so softly that Hanna could never understand a word of what he said.

Felicia advised Hanna to seek help from a feticheiro.

‘There are plants you can eat, teas you can drink,’ said Felicia. ‘They enable men to do what they want to do more than anything else in the world.’

‘I don’t know a feticheiro,’ said Hanna. ‘I don’t know any medicine men who can give me what I need.’

Felicia held out her hand.

‘It costs money,’ she said. ‘If you give me some, I can get you what you need. Then all you have to do is to mix it into his food or into something he drinks. I don’t know all the rules that apply, but I do know that you have to administer it when a west wind is blowing.’

Hanna thought that over.

‘We hardly ever have a west wind,’ she said.

Felicia pondered what Hanna had said.

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It will be better for you to make use of the full moon. That is also the right time to give him it. I always forget that we never get winds blowing here from the interior of the country — only from the sea or from the ice in the far south. We who live here in the Baia da Boa Morte know nothing about the winds from the vast savannah.’

Hanna had never heard the name of the lagoon before. She knew that the town was called Lourenço Marques. One evening Attimilio had explained that it was named after a famous Portuguese general who was a match for Bonaparte when it came to cunning and courage. Hanna had no idea who this Bonaparte was, just as she had no idea that the lagoon had such a remarkable name.

But had she really heard correctly what she had said? ‘The lagoon of good death?’ Could that really be what Felicia had called the bay that sparkled every day in the sunshine?

‘Why is the lagoon called that?’

‘Maybe because it’s such a beautiful name. I always think of the blue water where dolphins swim as a cemetery for people who have a good death. The sort we all hope to have.’

‘What is a good death?’

Felicia looked at her in astonishment. It seemed to Hanna that Felicia had a special facial expression for occasions when she was having to think about questions that could only possibly have come from a white person.

‘Everybody thinks about how they are going to die,’ said Felicia. ‘Didn’t you tell me about the man you lived with, the man who was a third mate on board a ship and had a name I can’t pronounce, who had a grave in the sea?’

‘His death was anything but good,’ said Hanna. ‘He didn’t want to die.’

‘When my death comes, I don’t intend to resist it. Unless somebody is trying to murder me. I want to die peacefully. A good death is never agitated.’

Hanna didn’t know what to say about Lundmark’s death or her own uneasy thoughts about her final moments. She gave Felicia the money she had asked for. A few days later Felicia turned up when Attimilio had left the house in the morning. Wrapped up in a piece of cloth she handled with both respect and perhaps also fear was a green, almost sparkling powder. It smelled strongly of the tar Hanna remembered from the ships in the harbour at Sundsvall.

‘You must dissolve the powder into whatever Senhor Vaz drinks in the evening before going to bed.’

‘He doesn’t drink anything in the evenings. He doesn’t want to be woken up by his bladder during the night.’

‘Doesn’t he eat anything either?’

‘A mango.’

‘Then you must carefully open the fruit, press the powder into it, and close the skin again.’

Hanna shouted for Anaka and asked her to bring a mango. They then helped each other to carry out the operation and saw that it was possible to leave no traces of the powder or what they’d done.

‘Is that all?’ asked Hanna.

‘You should put a few drops of lemon into your pussy. Then you’ll be ready to receive him.’

Hanna’s face turned red when Felicia talked about the lemon. Felicia’s ability to talk quite normally about something that was still unmentionable as far as Hanna was concerned made her blush.

‘That’s all there is to it,’ said Felicia. ‘The feticheiro I spoke to has cured lots of impotent men. Some of them come from a very long way off. Some of them have come from as far away as India in order to become real men again. But he also said that if it doesn’t work — which does happen sometimes — he has other, stronger medicines to make your husband’s sexual urges start working again.’

As the moon was on the wane, Hanna had to wait for quite some time. Meanwhile Attimilio made several more attempts to consummate the marriage, without success. Afterwards, when he had given up and was lying on his side, Hanna gently stroked his black hair, which left a new greasy stain of pomade on the pillowcase every morning. I don’t really love him, she thought: but I feel tenderness towards him. He wants to do the best he can for me. He’ll never be another Lundmark in bed, but with a bit of help from Felicia perhaps one day he’ll be able to become a real man again.

43

By full moon Lourenço Marques had been battered by storms for a few days. Carlos had run away again but come back, just as mysteriously as before, this time with a red band round his neck. Senhor Vaz decided he had better keep Carlos chained up, but the women were outraged by the very thought and he let it drop. Carlos resumed his role as a waiter, and would light clients’ cigars in exchange for a banana or an apple. Felicia maintained that Carlos had a different glint in his eye now: something was happening to him.

The full moon arrived, the winds had moved on, and Senhor Vaz came home after a long day at the brothel. Hanna had prepared the mango and sat beside him at the dining table as he chewed away at it, deep in thought. She then duly applied the drops of lemon in the bathroom before going to bed and lying down beside her husband. He seemed to be on his way to sleep, so she gently stroked his arm. After a few moments he turned to face her. He went on to make frantic efforts to penetrate her, just as he had done on previous occasions, but still without success — although Hanna could feel that his attempts were more powerful and longer lasting than ever before.

When he gave up they were both sweating. Hanna decided that the very next day she would tell Felicia that stronger medicines were needed to help Attimilio to overcome his difficulties.

She could hear that he had fallen asleep, taking the usual quick, short breaths as if he didn’t really have time to sleep.

When she woke up next morning he was dead. He was lying beside her, white and already cold. The moment she opened her eyes, just before Anaka was due to come in with their breakfast tray, she knew that something had happened. He was rarely, if ever, still in bed when she woke up. He would usually be in the bathroom, getting shaved.

He was lying in the same position as he’d been in when he fell asleep. Hanna slid out of bed, her legs shaking. She had become a widow for the second time. When Anaka came in she was sitting in a chair and pointed to the man in the bed.

‘Morto,’ was all she said. ‘Senhor Vaz e morto.’

Anaka put down the tray, went down on her knees, chanted something that might have been a prayer, then hurried away. It struck Hanna that Attimilio had died in complete silence. He hadn’t screamed like Lundmark did.

It was as if he had died in shame, having failed once again, one last time, to make love to his wife.

Two days after the chaotic burial in the town’s new cemetery, at which Carlos was also present wearing a dark suit and a new black top hat, Hanna was visited by Attimilio’s solicitor, Senhor Andrade. He bowed, expressed his condolences once again, and sat down opposite her in the group of sofa and armchairs in red plush that Senhor Vaz had had made in distant Cape Town. Unlike on previous occasions, he now spoke loudly and clearly: Hanna was no longer merely an appendage of Senhor Vaz.

Andrade explained the situation:

‘There is a will. It’s signed, and witnessed by me and my colleague Petrus Sabodini. The will is simple and crystal clear. There isn’t the slightest doubt about its intentions.’

Hanna listened, but it never occurred to her that what was being said had anything to do with her.

‘So, there is a will,’ said Andrade again. ‘It makes it clear that all Attimilio’s estate and goods and chattels are inherited by you. In addition to the hotel and the other activities associated with it, you now own all his businesses, including a warehouse full of fabrics and nine donkeys grazing in various pastures just outside the town. There are also significant assets in Pretoria and Johannesburg.’

Andrade placed a number of documents on the table and stood up. He bowed again.

‘It will be a great pleasure to me if in future I can continue to offer you my services as your solicitor, Senhora Vaz.’

It was only after he had gone that Hanna grasped what had happened. She sat there motionless, holding her breath. She had become the owner of a brothel. And also of a number of donkeys and a chimpanzee that occasionally ran away when it wasn’t lighting cigars for the customers who visited her house of pleasure.

She stood up and went out on to the balcony. Through the binoculars she could see the building where the brothel was situated. She could also make out the contours of the window of the room that had been hers, when she was sick in bed.

A number of ships were bobbing slowly up and down in the roadstead, but she didn’t pay any attention to them just now. However, that same day she took Carlos home with her from the brothel, because she didn’t want to live alone. She also took the big ceiling light because Carlos always liked to sleep in it.

Carlos would now share the big stone house with Hanna. For as long as she remained in the town spread out there before her, white and steaming in the heat, on the shore of the bay known as the Lagoon of Good Death.