That was how it had looked to me when I was ten. Yet now every day I faced Ana without shame, and whenever I saw Luis, Graca's husband, I dealt with him with a friendship that was quite genuine, since it was offered out of gratitude for Graca's love.
I soon discovered that he was a drinking man, that the impression he had given at our first meeting of being a violent man who was holding himself in check had to do with his affliction. He drank right through the day, Graca told me, as though he had always to top up the energy that kept him going. He drank in small, undetectable quantities, a quick shot or two of rum or whisky, never more; and he never looked drunk or out of control. In fact, in company his drinking style made him seem almost abstemious. All Graca's married life had been dictated by this drinking of her husband's. They had moved from town to town, house to house, job to job.
She blamed the nuns for her marriage. At a certain stage in the convent school they had begun to talk to her about becoming a nun. They did that with girls who were poor; and Graca's family was poor. Her mother was a mixed-race person of no fortune; her father was second-rank Portuguese, born in the colony, who did a small job in the civil service. A religious charity had paid to send Graca to the convent, and it seemed to Graca that the nuns were now looking for some return. She was shy with them; she had always been an obedient child, at home and at school. She didn't say no; she didn't want to appear ungrateful. For months they tried to break her down. They praised her. They said, “Graca, you are not a common person. You have special qualities. We need people like you to help lift the order up.” They frightened her, and when she went home for the holidays she was unhappier than she had ever been.
Her family had a small plot of land, perhaps two acres, with fruit trees and flowers and chickens and animals. Graca loved all of these things. They were things she had known since childhood. She loved seeing the hens sitting patiently on their eggs, seeing the fluffy little yellow chicks hatching out, cheeping, all of the brood being able to find shelter below the spread-out wings of the fierce, clucking mother hen, following the mother hen everywhere, and gradually, over a few weeks, growing up, each with its own colour and character. She loved having her cats follow her about in the field, and seeing them run very fast out of joy and not fear. The thought of cooping up these little creatures, cats or chickens, gave her great pain. The thought now of giving them all up for ever and being locked away herself was too much for her. She became frightened that the nuns would go behind her back to her mother, and her mother, religious and obedient, would give her away to them. That was when she decided to marry Luis, a neighbour's son. Her mother recognised her panic and agreed.
He had been after her for some time, and he was handsome. She was sixteen, he was twenty-one. Socially they were matched. She was more at ease with him than with the convent girls, most of whom were well-to-do. He worked as a mechanic for a local firm that dealt in cars and trucks and agricultural machinery, and he talked of setting up on his own. He was already a drinker; but at this stage it seemed only stylish, part of his go-ahead ways.
They moved after their marriage to the capital. He felt he was getting nowhere in the local town; he would never be able to start up on his own; the local rich people controlled everything and didn't allow the poor man to live. For a while in the capital they stayed with a relation of Luis's. Luis got a job as a mechanic in the railways, and then they were allocated a railway house that matched Luis's official grade. It was a small three-roomed house, one of a line, and built only to fit into that line. It was not built for the climate. It faced west; it baked every afternoon and cooled down only at about nine or ten in the evening. It was a wretched place to be in, day after day; it stretched everyone's nerves. Graca had her two children there. Just after the birth of her second child something happened in her head, and she found herself walking in a part of the capital she didn't know. At about the same time Luis was sacked for his drinking. That was when they started on their wandering life. Luis's skill as a mechanic kept them afloat, and there were times when they did very well. He still could charm people. He took up estate work and quickly became a manager. He was like that, always starting well and picking things up fast. But always, in every job, his resolve wore thin; some darkness covered his mind; there was a crisis, and a crash.
As much as by the life she had had with Luis, she was fatigued by the lies she had had to tell about him, almost from the beginning, to cover up his drinking. It had made her another kind of person. One afternoon she came back with the children from some excursion and they found him drinking home-made banana spirit with the African gardener, a terrible old drunk. The children were frightened; Graca had given them a horror of drinking. Now she had to think fast and say something different. She told them that what their father was doing was all right; times were changing, and it was socially just in Africa for an estate manager to drink with his African gardener. Then she found that the children were beginning to lie too. They had caught the habit from her. That was why, in spite of her own unhappiness at the convent, she had sent them to a boarding school.
For years she had dreamt of coming back to the countryside she knew as a child, where on her family's two- acre plot simple things, chickens and animals and flowers and fruit trees, had made her so happy in the school holidays. She had come back now; she was living as the manager's wife in an estate house with antique colonial furniture. It was a sham grandeur; things were as uncertain as they had ever been. It was as though the moods and stresses of the past would always be with her, as though her life had been decided long before.
This was what Graca told me about herself over many months. She had had a few lovers on the way. She didn't make them part of the main story. They occurred outside of that, so to speak, as though in her memory her sexual life was separate from her other life. And in this oblique way I learned that there had been people before me, usually friends of them both, and once even an employer of Luis's, who had read her eyes as I had read them, and spotted her need. I was jealous of all of these lovers. I had never known jealousy before. And thinking of all these people who had seen her weakness and pressed home their attack, I remembered some words of Percy Cato's in London, and for the first time had my own sense of the brutality of the sexual life.
I was deep in that brutality now with Graca. Sexual pictures of her played in my head when I was not with her. With her guidance, since she was the more experienced, our love-making had taken forms that had astonished, worried and then delighted me. Graca would say, “The nuns wouldn't approve of this.” Or she would say, “I suppose if I went to confession tomorrow I would have to say, ‘Father, I've been immodest.'” And it was hard to forget what she had taught, to unlearn the opening up of new senses; it was hard to go back to the sexual simplicities of earlier days. And I thought, as I often did on such occasions, of the puerility of my father's desires.
The months passed. Even after two years I felt myself helpless in this life of sensation. At the same time now some half-feeling of the inanity of my life grew within me, and with it there came the beginning of respect for the religious outlawing of sexual extremes.
Ana said to me one day, “People are talking about you and Graca. You know that, don't you?”
I said, “It's true.”
She said, “You can't talk to me like this, Willie.”
I said, “I wish you could be in the room when we make love. Then you would understand.”
“You shouldn't do this, Willie. I thought you at least had manners.”
I said, “I'm talking to you like a friend, Ana. I have no one else to tell.”
She said, “I think you've gone mad.”
