Attimilio, as she still found it difficult to call him, left the house every morning at eight o’clock. He clambered into one of the horse-drawn coaches that took him down to the harbour district. At about noon he would come back home and they would eat lunch together, after which he took an afternoon nap before going back down to the women again.
Hanna very soon discovered that her new marriage was very different in one particular way from the time she had spent with Lundmark. Now she was almost always alone. Lundmark had always been close at hand when they were aboard Captain Svartman’s ship. Her new husband treated her with the greatest respect and was always friendly towards her, but he was rarely at home. He ate and slept, and at night he continued to make his failed attempts to do what Hanna now, to her great surprise, had begun to long for. But apart from that they did next to nothing together. She continued to ask him questions about his earlier life, but he answered evasively or not at all. He didn’t lose his temper and didn’t seem to be put out by her questions: but he quite simply didn’t want to say anything. Hanna thought it seemed as if she had married a man without a past at all.
Looking back, Hanna would regard this time as one of almost total inactivity. There was virtually nothing for her to do, no jobs that needed to be done. The garden was looked after by an old black man who was stone deaf. His name was Rumigo, and he had one of his innumerable sons to help him. Hanna would sometimes stand and watch how gently he handled the flowers, trees and shrubs. Inside the house was Anaka, who had also looked after Attimilio’s parents. She was beginning to grow old, but still worked just as hard, and hardly ever seemed to sleep. She lived alone in a little shack behind the house. Hanna sometimes saw her sitting there, smoking her pipe before going to bed. Anaka would be up again at four o’clock, and served breakfast at six.
Whenever Hanna spoke to Anaka, the maid immediately went down on one knee before her. Attimilio had explained to Hanna that this was not primarily a gesture of submission and subservience, but more of a tradition — a way of showing respect. Hanna found it difficult to cope with these continual genuflections, and tried to persuade Anaka to stop it. But without success. When Attimilio explained that Anaka would do the same to a black man of superior rank, she gave up. The genuflections continued.
There was another woman in the house, a young girl who Attimilio explained was the daughter of his mother’s seamstress. She had a Portuguese name, Julietta, and helped Anaka with all the things the latter didn’t have the time or strength to do herself. Hanna guessed that Julietta must be fourteen or fifteen years old.
Hanna experienced days in which she felt she was wandering around in an almost trance-like state. The heat was oppressive, occasionally interrupted by short tropical downpours. She spent most of the time sitting fanning herself in one of the rooms in which sea breezes wafted in through the open windows. She had the feeling that she was waiting for something, but didn’t know what. She was sometimes afflicted by a nagging annoyance at being superfluous — everything that happened in this large house was done by the black servants. Her own role was simply to do nothing.
Attimilio had explained that she shouldn’t hesitate to say if she was dissatisfied with the work carried out by the servants. Now and then she should put on a pair of white gloves and go around the house, running her fingers along picture frames and door frames to make sure that everything had been properly cleaned.
‘If you don’t keep chasing them up, they’ll start skimping,’ said Attimilio.
‘But everything is always beautifully clean.’
‘That’s because you check up on them. The moment you stop they’ll cease to be as careful.’
Hanna could neither understand nor reconcile herself to Attimilio’s constant denigration of black people. She still suspected that she could detect traces of fear behind his harsh words. But her presence in the house did not change his attitudes.
One evening he came home after a shocking incident in the brothel. A customer had fired a revolver and one of the women had received a superficial flesh wound on one arm. He burst out into a vehement tirade attacking the country he lived in.
‘This would be a good continent to live in,’ he roared, ‘if only there weren’t all these black people everywhere.’
‘But wasn’t it a white man who fired the revolver?’ asked Hanna tentatively.
Senhor Vaz didn’t respond. Instead he made his excuses and retired to his study. She could hear through the closed door that he was playing Portuguese military marches on his primitive gramophone. When she bent down and peered in through the keyhole she could see him marching angrily around the room, swinging his sabre. She started giggling. The man who was now her husband seemed to be more like a tin soldier than anything else. One of the tin soldiers she had seen Jonathan Forsman’s sons playing with.
Then she started feeling uneasy again. She had become like other white women in this town: inactive, apathetic and constantly fanning herself.
42
After several more weeks during which Attimilio had still failed to make love to his wife night after night, Hanna began to realize that Attimilio was close to unbounded desperation. She turned to Felicia once again, but in secret, one day when Senhor Vaz had gone to Pretoria where he invested quite a lot of the money he earned from the brothel. Once a month a lawyer came to visit him. They would shut themselves away in his study, and nobody else had a clue what they discussed. The lawyer, whose name was Andrade and had a limp, spoke so softly that Hanna could never understand a word of what he said.
Felicia advised Hanna to seek help from a feticheiro.
‘There are plants you can eat, teas you can drink,’ said Felicia. ‘They enable men to do what they want to do more than anything else in the world.’
‘I don’t know a feticheiro,’ said Hanna. ‘I don’t know any medicine men who can give me what I need.’
Felicia held out her hand.
‘It costs money,’ she said. ‘If you give me some, I can get you what you need. Then all you have to do is to mix it into his food or into something he drinks. I don’t know all the rules that apply, but I do know that you have to administer it when a west wind is blowing.’
Hanna thought that over.
‘We hardly ever have a west wind,’ she said.
Felicia pondered what Hanna had said.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It will be better for you to make use of the full moon. That is also the right time to give him it. I always forget that we never get winds blowing here from the interior of the country — only from the sea or from the ice in the far south. We who live here in the Baia da Boa Morte know nothing about the winds from the vast savannah.’
Hanna had never heard the name of the lagoon before. She knew that the town was called Lourenço Marques. One evening Attimilio had explained that it was named after a famous Portuguese general who was a match for Bonaparte when it came to cunning and courage. Hanna had no idea who this Bonaparte was, just as she had no idea that the lagoon had such a remarkable name.
But had she really heard correctly what she had said? ‘The lagoon of good death?’ Could that really be what Felicia had called the bay that sparkled every day in the sunshine?
‘Why is the lagoon called that?’
‘Maybe because it’s such a beautiful name. I always think of the blue water where dolphins swim as a cemetery for people who have a good death. The sort we all hope to have.’