her brow or set her mouth. When I thought about it later I felt that that was when I betrayed Ana, sullied her, as it were, in her own house.

*

THE CORREIAS HAD been away for a year. And then we heard, each house in a roundabout way, and not all at the same time, that Jacinto had died. He had died in his sleep in a hotel in London. Alvaro was in a state. He didn't know what his future was. He had always dealt with Jacinto; and he had a feeling that Carla didn't care for him.

About a month later Carla reappeared among us, visiting the houses she knew, harvesting sympathy. Again and again she told of the suddenness of the death, of the shopping that had just been done in the big stores, the opened parcels left untidily that night about what was to be poor Jacinto's deathbed. She had thought of bringing back the body to the colony; but she had a “bad feeling” (given her by Mrs. Noronha) about the little cemetery in the town. So she had taken the body to Portugal, to the country town where Jacinto's full Portuguese grandfather was buried. All of this had kept her too busy for grief. That came to her afterwards. It came to her especially when she saw some beggars in Lisbon. She said, “I thought, ‘These people have nothing to live for, and yet they're living. Jacinto had so much to live for, and yet he's dead.'” The unfairness was too much for her to bear. She had burst out crying in the public street, and the beggars who had approached her had become agitated; some of them even begged her pardon. (Ana told me later, “I always used to think that Jacinto believed that if you became rich enough you weren't going to die. Or he wasn't going to die, if he became rich enough. But I used to think of that as a joke. I didn't know it was true.”)

Jacinto had always been particular about the distinction that money brought to people, Carla said; that was why he had worked so hard. He had told his children, who were studying in Lisbon, that they were on no account to use public transport in Lisbon. They were always to use taxis. People must never think of them as colonial nobodies. He had repeated that to them only a few days before he had died. And telling this story about Jacinto's concern for his children, and other related stories about the goodness of the family man, Carla wept and wept from estate house to estate house.

With Alvaro she was brutal. Three weeks after she came back she sacked him, giving him and his African family a month to clear out of their concrete house; and, to make it harder for him to find work, she did what she could to blacken his character with estate people. He was a man of loose life, she said, with a string of African concubines he couldn't possibly keep on his manager's salary. Even when Jacinto was having his trouble with the people in the capital, he used to tell her that she had to watch Alvaro. The rogue had trembled when she called for the books. She didn't have Jacinto's mind, and she didn't know much about accounts, but it didn't take her long to see the kind of trickery Jacinto had told her to look out for. Bogus invoices (with Alvaro machinery had broken down all the time, even the reliable old German sisal-crusher, the simplest of machines, like a very big mangle); inflated real invoices; and, of course, bogus workers. And the longer the Correias had stayed away in Europe the more brazen Alvaro had become.

Carla was telling us what we all half knew. In his foolish, showing-off way Alvaro had liked to hint that he was milking the estate. He had done that with me and he would have done it with others. He thought it made him grand, almost like an estate-owner. Estate life was all that Alvaro knew; the estate house was his idea of style. His father, a mulatto, had started as a mechanic on the estate owned by his Portuguese father, and had ended there as a low-grade overseer living in one of a line of two-roomed concrete houses. Alvaro decided when he was quite young that he would rise in the world. He was good with machines; he learned about cattle and crops; he knew how to get on with Africans. He rose; he became flashy. As the Correias' estate manager, with a proper concrete house and a Land Rover, he liked to make big gestures. When I got to know him (and before I knew his reputation) he used to give me presents; afterwards he would tell me that what he had given me was really plunder from the Correias.

Still, I felt sorry for Alvaro that he should be so exposed and pulled down in the estate houses where (leaving his African family at home) he wanted to be accepted. I wondered how that family were going to make out. They had got their marching orders and would soon have to leave their concrete house; it would be some time before they got accommodation like that again. Ana said, “He might take the opportunity to forget about them.” I didn't want to think about that too much, but it was probably true. Alvaro had never spoken of his family to me, had never given his children names or characters. I had seen them only from the road: African-looking children, some like village children, staring from the small verandah of the concrete house or running out from the grass-roofed kitchen hut at the back. I suppose if a new job came up Alvaro wouldn't have minded moving on and starting afresh with a new woman and new outside women in a new place. He might have considered an outcome like that a blessing; it would have reconciled him to everything.

I hadn't seen him for some weeks. We had long ago stopped making excursions together to places like the warehouse. And when one day we met on the asphalt road to the town he was subdued; the humiliation of his sacking and the worry showed on his face. He was defiant, though. He said, “I don't know who the hell these people think they are, Willie. It's all going up in smoke. They are going to Lisbon and Paris and London and talking about their children's education. They are living in a fool's paradise.” I thought he was copying the apocalyptic tone of his late master. But he had real news. He said, “The guerrillas are in camps just over the border. The government there is on their side. They are real guerrillas now, and they aren't playing. When they decide to move I don't see what's going to stop them.”

For some weeks there had been fewer soldiers in the town, and there had been talk about army manoeuvres deep in the bush to the north and the west. There was little in the newspapers. It was only later, some time after Alvaro had given me the news, that announcements were made of the successful army “sweep” to the north and west, right up to the border. The army began then to come back to the town; and things were as before. The places of pleasure were busy again. But by this time I had lost touch with Alvaro.

I had found less and less pleasure in the places of pleasure. Some of this would have had to do with my worry about seeing Julio's daughter again. But the main reason was that the act of sex there, which used to excite me with its directness and brutality, had grown mechanical. For the first year I used to keep a tally, in my head, of the times I had been; again and again I would do the sums, associating outside events, lunches, visits, with these darker, brighter moments in the warm cubicles, creating as it were a special calendar of that year for myself. Gradually, then, it happened that I went not out of need but in order to add to the tally. At an even later stage I went just to test my capacity. Sometimes on those occasions I had to drive myself; I wished then not to extend the moment but to finish as soon as possible. The girls were always willing, always ready to demonstrate the tricks of strength and suppleness that had sent me away the first time with new sensations, a new idea of myself, and tenderness for everyone and everything. Now the sensation was of exhaustion and waste, of my lower stomach scraped dry; I needed a day or two to recover. It was in this enervated mood that I began to make love to Ana again, hoping to recover the closeness that had once seemed so natural. It couldn't be. That old closeness was not based on love-making, and now, not even rebuking me for my long absence, she was as timorous as I remembered. I gave her little pleasure; I gave myself none at all. So I was more restless and dissatisfied than I had been before Alvaro said to me in the cafe in the town, “Would you like to see what they do?” Before I had been introduced to a kind of sensual life I didn't know I was missing.

*

CARLA ANNOUNCED that she was going to move to Portugal for good as soon as she found a new manager. The news cast a gloom over us, people of Carla's estate-house group, and we tried over the next few weeks to get

Вы читаете Half a Life
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату