found it hard to make my excuses to her. It spoilt the next day. I began to work out a story. It felt like a lie. I tried to straighten it out, and it became too involved. I thought, “I am going to sound like someone from the quarters.” And then I thought, “I am going back to my London ways.” When the time came Ana hardly listened to what I had to say. She said, “I hope Carla is going to have an estate to come back to.” It was as easy as that. But I knew I had broken something, put an end to something, for almost no reason.
Alvaro was dead on time; he might have been waiting in the dark just outside the estate compound. I thought that we would be going to the town, but Alvaro didn't make for the main road. Instead, we drove slowly about the backways, all ordinary to me now, even at night. I thought that Alvaro was killing time. We drove, now past cotton fields, now through open bush, now past dark plantations of cashew trees. Every few miles we came to a village, and then we drove very slowly. Sometimes in a village there was a kind of night market, with petty stalls in low open huts, lit by a hurricane lantern, selling matches and loose cigarettes and small tins of various things, and with a few improvident people, men or women or children, finding themselves penniless that day and sitting at the roadside with candles in paper bags beside very small heaps of their own food, sticks of dried cassava, or peppers, or vegetables. Like people playing at housekeeping, and playing at buying and selling, I had always thought.
Alvaro said, “Pretty, eh?” I knew some of these villages very well. I had seen these night markets scores of times. It wasn't what I had come out to see with Alvaro. He said, “You wanted to see what the Africans did at night. I'm showing you. You've been here ten years. I don't know how much you know. In a couple of hours these roads we've been driving along will be crawling with people looking for adventure. There will be twenty or thirty parties tonight all around you. Did you know that? And they aren't going there just to dance, I can tell you.”
The headlights of the Land Rover picked out, just in time, a little girl in a shoulder-strap dress ahead of us. She stood at the side of the road and, shiny-faced in the lights, watched us pass. Alvaro said, “How old do you think that girl is?” I really hadn't thought; the girl was like so many others; I wouldn't have recognised her again. Alvaro said, “I will tell you. That girl is about eleven. She's had her first period, and that means that she's ready for sex. The Africans are very sensible about these things. No foreign nonsense about under-age sex. That girl who looks like nothing to you is screwing every night with some man. Am I telling you things you know?” I said, “You are telling me things I don't know.” He said, “It's what we think about you, you know. I hope you don't mind.” And really in ten years I had never looked in that way at the villages and the Africans walking beside the road. I suppose it was a lack of curiosity, and I suppose it was a remnant of caste feeling. But then, too, I wasn't of the country, hadn't been trained in its sexual ways (though I had observed them), and had never before had someone like Alvaro as a guide.
In the very beginning, when I hadn't even known about the pleasures of living in the wilderness, I had thought that the mixed-race overseers couldn't have had much of a life, living so close to Africans, surrendering so much of themselves. Now I saw that for some it would have been a life of constant excitement. Alvaro lived in a dingy four- roomed concrete house. It stood by itself on an exposed, treeless patch on Correia's estate. It looked a comfortless place to call home, but Alvaro lived happily there with his African wife and African family, and with any number of mistresses or concubines or pick-ups within reach in the surrounding villages. In no other part of the world would Alvaro have found a life like that. I had thought at the beginning of the evening that he was killing time, driving about the backways. He wasn't. He was trying to show where hidden treasure lay. He said, “Take that little girl we just passed. If you stopped to ask her the way she would stick up her little breasts at you, and she would know what she was doing.” And I began to understand that Alvaro was already wound up, thinking of that little girl or some other girl sticking up her little breasts at him.
At last we made for the main road. It was badly potholed after the rains. We couldn't see too far ahead, and we had to drive slowly. Every now and then we came to a rock cone. For a while before and after it seemed to hang over us in the darkness, marking off another stage to the town. The town was alive but not raucous. The street lights were scattered and not too bright. Here and there in the central area a fluorescent tube turned a shop window into a box of light, not to advertise the shoddy goods in the higgledy-piggledy display, but to keep away thieves. The weak blue light, teasing the eye, didn't travel far in the darkness of the street, where during the day loaders, or men who could wait all morning or afternoon for a loading job, sat with their legs wide apart on the steps of shops, and where now another kind of lounger waited for whatever might come his way from the new traffic of the garrison town. Alvaro said, “It's better to steer clear of those fellows. You have no control over them.”
And just as at the start of the evening he had driven around the backways of the estates so now he drove around the quieter streets of the town, sometimes getting out of the Land Rover to talk in a confidential voice to people he saw. He told me he was looking for a good dancing place; they changed all the time, he said. It was better than going to a bar. They could be brutal places, bars. In a bar you didn't deal with the girl alone; you also dealt with her protector, who might be one of the loungers in the street. And in a bar there were no facilities. When you found a girl you had to go out with her to some dark passage between houses in the town or to some house in the African city, the straw city, as it was called, at the edge of the town, and all that time you would be at the mercy of the protector. It was all right for a soldier, but it was bad for an estate-manager. If there was an unpleasantness with the protector, word would get back in no time to the estate, and there could be trouble with the workers.
At last we came to the place Alvaro had been looking for. I imagined it was a place with facilities. He said, “It's as our elders say. If you ask often enough, you can get to Rome.” We were at the edge of the town, where the asphalt roads ended and dirt began, much cut up by the rains. It was dark, with only a few scattered lights, and so quiet that the slamming of the Land Rover doors was like a disturbance.
We had stopped in front of a big warehouse-like building. High at one corner was a metal-shaded bulb misty and twinkling with flying ants (it was the season). Other cars were parked in the space in front; and we saw now that there were watchmen of a sort (or just watchers) sitting on a half-wall on one side of the warehouse lot, where the land fell away. One of these watchers spoke directions to us, and we went down a concrete passage between the warehouse and the half-wall to another warehouse-like building. We heard music inside. A small door opened, a man with a truncheon let us in, and we both gave him money. The entrance passage was narrow and dark and it made a hairpin bend before it took us to the main room. Blue light bulbs lit up a small dancing area. Two couples were dancing—Portuguese men, African women—and they were reflected, dimly, in the dark mirror or mirror-tiles that covered the wall at the end of the dancing area. The room was full of tables with low shaded lights, but it wasn't easy to see how many of them were occupied. We didn't move in far. We sat at a table on the edge of the dancing area. Across the way were the girls, like the courtesans of the previous afternoon who had been pleased to walk down the street in their pretty clothes, turning heads. When I got used to the light I saw that many of the girls on the other side of the dancing area were not village girls from the interior, but were what we called Mohammedans, people of the coast, of remote Arab ancestry. Two African waiters and a thin Portuguese man in a sports shirt—the owner, I suppose—moved between the tables. When the Portuguese man came close to us I saw that he was not young, had very quiet eyes, and seemed strangely detached from everything.
I wish I had his detachment. But I was not trained for this kind of life, and I was full of shame. The girls were all African. It had to be like that, I suppose; but I wondered whether the two African waiters didn't suffer a little. And the girls were so young, so foolish, with so little idea, as I thought, of the way they were abusing their own bodies and darkening their lives. I thought with old unhappiness of things at home. I thought of my mother and I thought of my poor father who had hardly known what sex was. I thought of you, too, Sarojini. I imagined that the girls might be you, and my heart shrank.
Alvaro himself was subdued. He had been subdued as soon as he had entered the dark warehouse. He was excited by village sex, with every month a fresh crop of innocent girls who had had their first period and were ready
