I got used to the road to the town. I knew the giant rock cones along the way. Each cone had its own shape and was a marker for me. Some cones rose clean out of the ground; some had a rock debris at their base where a face of the cone had flaked off; some cones were grey and bare; some had a yellowish lichen on one side; on the ledges of some which had flaked there was vegetation, sometimes even a tree. The cones were always new. It was always an adventure, after a week or two on the estate, to drive to the town. For an hour or so it always seemed new: the colonial shops, the rustic, jumbled shop windows, the African loaders sitting outside the shops waiting for a loading job; the paved streets, the cars and trucks, the garages; the mixed population, with the red-faced young Portuguese conscripts of our little garrison giving a strange air of Europe to the place. The garrison was as yet very small; and the barracks were still small and plain and unthreatening, low two-storey buildings in white or grey concrete, of a piece with the rest of the town. Sometimes there was a new cafe to go to. But cafes didn't last in our town. The conscripts didn't have money, and the townspeople preferred to live privately.
Most of the shops we used were Portuguese. One or two were Indian. I was nervous of going into them at first. I didn't want to get that look from the shop people that would remind me of home and bad things. But there was never anything like that, no flicker of racial recognition from the family inside. There, too, they accepted the new person I had become in Ana's country. They seemed not to know that I was once something else. There, too, they kept their heads down and did what they had to do. So that for me, as for the overseers, though in different ways, the place offered an extra little liberation.
Sometimes on a weekend we went to the beach beyond the town, and a rough little Portuguese weekend restaurant serving fish and shellfish plucked fresh from the sea, and red and white Portuguese wine.
I often thought back to the terror of my first day—that picture of the road and the Africans walking was always with me—and wondered that the land had been tamed in this way, that such a reasonable life could be extracted from such an unpromising landscape, that blood, in some way, had been squeezed out of stone.
It would have been different sixty or seventy years before, when Ana's grandfather had arrived to take over the immense tract of land he had been granted by a government that felt its own weakness and was anxious—in the face of the restless power and greater populations of Britain and Germany—to occupy the African colony it claimed. The town would have been the roughest little coastal settlement with a population of black Arabs, people produced by a century and more of racial mixing. The road inland would have been a dirt track. Everything would have been transported by cart at two miles an hour. The journey I did now in an hour would have taken two days. The estate house would have been very simple, not too different from the African huts, but done with timber and corrugated iron and nails and metal hinges, everything sent up by ship from the capital and then put into carts. There would have been no electric light, no wire-netting screen against mosquitoes, no water except the rain-water that ran off the roof. To live there would have been to live with the land, month after month, year after year, to live with the climate and diseases, and to depend completely on the people. It was not easy to imagine. Just as no man can truly wish to be somebody else, since no man can imagine himself without the heart and mind he has been granted, so no man of a later time can really know what it was like to live on the land in those days. We can judge only by what we know. Ana's grandfather, and all the people he knew, would have known only what they had. They would have been content to live with that.
All down the coast, the Arabs of Muscat and Oman, the previous settlers, had become fully African. They had ceased to be Arabs and were known locally only as Mohammedans. Ana's grandfather, living that hard life in that hard country, and knowing no other, had himself become half African, with an African family. But while for the African Arabs of the coast history had not moved for generations, and they had been allowed to stay what they had become, history began unexpectedly to quicken around Ana's grandfather. There was the great 1914 war in Europe. Ana's grandfather made a fortune then. More settlers came out to the country; the capital developed; there were trams, with white people (and Goans) at the front and Africans at the back, behind a canvas barrier. Ana's grandfather wished, in this period, to recover the European personality he had shed. He sent his two half-African daughters to Europe to be educated; it was no secret that he wished them to marry Portuguese. And he built his big estate house, with white concrete walls and red concrete floors. There was a big garden at the front and side, and a line of verandahed guest rooms running off the main verandah at the back. Each guest room had its own big bathroom with the fittings of the day. The servants' quarters were extensive; they were at the very back. He bought the fine colonial furniture that was still around us. We slept in his bedroom, Ana and I, on his high carved bed. If it was hard to enter the personality of the man who had become half African, it was harder to be at ease with this later personality, which should have been more approachable. I always felt a stranger in the house. I never got used to the grandeur; the furniture seemed strange and awkward right to the end.
And, with my background, always in such a situation scratching at me, I couldn't forget the Africans. Ana's grandfather, and the others, and the priests and nuns of the frightening pretty foreign mission, old-fashioned in style, that had been set down, just like that, in the open, bare land, all of these people would have thought the right thing was to bend Africans to their will, to fit them for the new way. I wondered how they had set about that, and was afraid to ask. Yet somehow the Africans had stayed themselves, with many of their traditions and much of their own religion, though the land around them had been parcelled out and planted with crops they were required to tend. Those people walking on either side of the asphalt road were much more than estate labour. They had social obligations which were as intricate as those I knew at home. They could without warning take days off estate work and walk long distances to pay a ceremonial call or take a gift to someone. When they walked they didn't stop to drink water; they appeared not to need it. In the matter of eating and drinking they still at that time followed their own old ways. They drank water at the beginning of the day and then at the end, never in between. They ate nothing at the beginning of the day, before they went out to work; and the first meal they had, in the middle of the morning, was of vegetables alone. They ate their own kind of food, and most of what they ate was grown in the mixed planting just around their huts. Dried cassava was the staple. It could be ground into flour or eaten as it was. Two or three sticks of it could keep a man going all day when he went on a journey. In the smallest village you could see people selling dried cassava from their little crop, a sack or two at a time, gambling with their own need in the weeks to come.
It was strange when you got to see it, those two different worlds side by side: the big estates and the concrete buildings, and the African world that seemed less consequential but was everywhere, like a kind of sea. It was like a version of what— in another life, as it seemed—I had known at home.
By a strange chance I was on the other side here. But I used to think, when I got to know more of the story, that Ana's grandfather wouldn't have liked it if he had been told at the end of his life that someone like me was going to live in his estate house and sit in his fine chairs and sleep with his granddaughter in his big carved bed. He had had quite another idea of the future of his family and his name. He had sent his two half-African daughters to school in Portugal, and everyone knew that he wanted them to marry proper Portuguese, to breed out the African inheritance he had given them in the hard days when he had lived very close to the land with less and less idea of another world outside.
The girls were pretty and they had money. It was no trouble for them, especially during the great Depression, to find husbands in Portugal. One girl stayed in Portugal. The other, Ana's mother, came back to Africa and the estate with her husband. There were lunches, parties, visits. Ana's grandfather couldn't show off his son-in-law enough. He gave up his bedroom, with its extravagant furniture, to the couple. So as not to be in the way, he moved to one of the guest rooms at the rear of the main building; and then, out of a greater tact, he moved to one of the overseers' houses some distance away. After some time Ana was born. And then, little by little, in that bedroom to which I woke up every morning, Ana's father became very strange. He became listless and passive. He had no duties on the estate, nothing to rouse him, and some days he never left the room, never left the bed. The story among the mixed-race overseers, and our neighbours—and, inevitably, it got to me not long after I arrived—was
