to stick up their little breasts at him. What was around us in this half-converted warehouse was different. I don't suppose a place like this, with facilities, would have existed before the army came. It would have been new to Alvaro. And I suppose that though he was casting himself as my guide, he really was a learner, a little nervous, and he needed my support.
We drank beer. The feeling of shame went. I looked at the dancers in the blue light, and their dim reflections in the mysterious space of the wall-high dark mirror. I had never seen Africans dance. With the kind of estate life I had been living there hadn't been the occasion. Immediately as these girls began to dance they were touched by a kind of grace. The gestures were not extravagant; they could be very small. When a girl danced she incorporated everything into her dance—her conversation with her partner, a word spoken over her shoulder to a friend, a laugh. This was more than pleasure; it was as though some deeper spirit was coming out in the dance. This spirit was locked up in every girl, whatever her appearance; and it was possible to feel that it was part of something much larger. Of course, with my background, I had thought a lot about Africans in a political way. In the warehouse I began to have an idea that there was something in the African heart that was shut away from the rest of us, and beyond politics.
Alvaro, with a little grimace of self-mockery which didn't fool me, began to dance with one of the girls. At first he clowned on the floor, looking at himself in the mirror. But very soon he became dead serious, and when he came back to our table he was a changed man. His eyes were hollow with longing. He frowned at his beer glass. Then he said, with an affectation of anger, as though everybody in that room was holding him back, “I don't know what thoughts you have on the subject, Willie. But now that we are in this bloody place I'm going to have a damned little something.” And, frowning hard, like a man in a rage, he went with his dancing partner to the door in the dark far part of the room.
I might have just stayed and sipped beer and waited for Alvaro. But the quiet-eyed Portuguese man knew his business, and three or four or five minutes later, at a signal from him, one of the girls came and sat at the table. Below her fussy clothes she was quite small. Below the make-up, the rouge on the high cheekbones, the white-blue paint on the eyelids, she was very young. I looked at her “Arab” face and, only a half or a quarter trying to stimulate myself, wondered what about her would have aroused Alvaro. When she got up and invited me to follow her, I did. We went to the little door in the dark corner. There were a number of cubicles off a concrete passage. The partitions did not go all the way to the ceiling, and all the cubicles were served by two naked bulbs high on the back wall. I supposed that if I listened hard enough I might have heard Alvaro. The warehouse had been converted and given its facilities in the cheapest way. The place could have closed down at any time, and the owner would not have lost.
Without her stiff clothes the girl was really very small. But she was firm and hard; she would have done much physical work as a child. Ana was not like that; Ana was bony and frail. I felt the girl's breasts; they were small and only slightly less hard than the rest of her. Alvaro would have liked those breasts; it was possible to imagine the stiff young nipples sticking up below a cheap village cotton dress. But the nipples of this little girl were broad and spongy at the tip: she had already had a child or children. I couldn't feel any longing for her. Even if I did, all the old ghosts were already with me, the ghosts of home, the ghosts of London eleven or twelve years before, the awful prostitute in Soho, the big hips of June on the mattress on the floor in the slum house in Notting Hill, all the shame and incompetence. I didn't think that anything was going to happen to me with the poor little girl below me on the cheap, army-reject mattress.
So far the girl's eyes had been blank. But then, just at the moment when I was about to fail, an extraordinary look of command and aggression and need filled those eyes, her body became all tension, and I was squeezed by her strong hands and legs. In a split-second—like the split-second of decision when I looked down a gun-sight—I thought, “This is what Alvaro lives for,” and I revived.
Alvaro and I were both subdued afterwards. Alvaro became himself again, bouncy and knowing, only when we were near the estate house. The pressure lamp had been left on for me above the semi-circular entrance steps. Ana was asleep in her grandfather's big carved bed. Two hours or so before I had thought of her in an unfair and belittling way. I needed a shower before I could lie down beside her. The antiquated fittings in the bathroom—the Portuguese-made geyser, the tricky shower-head, the minutely cracked wash-basin with decorated metal supports—still made me feel a stranger. They made me think of everyone who had slept in that big carved bed before me: Ana's grandfather, turning away from the African woman who had borne his children; Ana's mother, betrayed by her husband and then by her lover; and Ana's father, who had betrayed everybody. I didn't feel that evening that I had betrayed Ana in any important or final way. I could say with truth that what had happened had been empty, that I had felt no longing and no true satisfaction. But locked away in my mind was that split-second when the girl had looked at me with command and I had felt the tension and strength in her small body. I could think of no reason why I had done what I had done. But I began to think, almost in another part of my mind, that there must have been some reason.
And just as, after a long or strenuous or dangerous drive, the road continues to speed by in the mind of the driver as he settles down to sleep, so that split-second with the girl flashed again and again before me as I lay beside Ana. And it drew me back, within a week, to the converted warehouse on the edge of the town, to the blue bulbs and the dance floor and the little cubicles. This time I made no excuses to Ana.
I began to live with a new idea of sex, a new idea of my capacity. It was like being given a new idea of myself. We are all born with sexual impulses, but we are not all born with sexual skill, and there are no schools where we can be trained. People like me have to fumble and stumble on as best they can, and wait for accidents to take them to something like knowledge. I was thirty-three. All I had known so far—leaving out London, which really didn't count—was what I had had with Ana. Just after we had come to Africa we had been passionate. Or I had been passionate. There would have been some genuine excitement there, some moments of sexual discovery. But a fair part of that passion of ten years before would have come not out of sensuality or true desire but out of my own nervousness and fear, like a child's fear, at being in Africa, at having thrown myself into a void. There had been nothing like that passion between us since then. Ana, even at that time of passion, had been half timorous; and when I had been admitted into more of her family history I understood her timorous-ness. So in a way we were matched. We each found comfort in the other; and we had become very close, not looking beyond the other for satisfaction, not knowing, in fact, that another kind of satisfaction was possible. And if Alvaro hadn't come along I would have continued in that way, in matters of sex and sensuality not much above my poor deprived father.
The warehouse closed down after a while; then something else came up; and something else after that. The concrete town was very small; the merchants and civil servants and others who lived there didn't want these places of pleasure too near their houses and their families. So the blue bulbs and the dark wall-high mirror shifted about from one makeshift home to another. It was worth no one's while to build something more permanent, since the army, on which the trade depended, could at any time move away.
One evening I saw, among the rouged and dressed-up girls, Julio the carpenter's daughter—the little maid who on my first morning had laid aside her broom and sat in a worn upholstered chair and tried to have an educated conversation with me. She had told me later that her family ate the same food every day; and that when her father became too drunken or violent she tried to lull herself to sleep by walking up and down in the little room they had. The story later was that this girl had begun to drink, like her father, and was often out of the quarters. I suppose that just as Alvaro had been my guide some friend had guided her here.
I decided on the spur of the moment not to see her; and she seemed to have decided on the same thing. So that when we crossed we crossed as strangers. I told no one about her; and she, when we next met in the estate house, said nothing at all and made not even a small gesture of new recognition. She didn't widen her eyes or lift
