She signalled that Julietta should leave the room. Then she wrote down what she had just been thinking: ‘Black people lie in order to avoid unnecessary suffering. White people lie to preserve the superiority they wish to uphold. And the others, the Arabs and Indians, lie because there is no longer room for the truth in this town we live in.’
She also thought, although she didn’t write it down, that she regretted having shown Julietta her notebook. Perhaps that was a careless move that would come back to haunt her at some time in the future.
She locked the diary away in the safe and stood by the window looking out over the sea. She took her binoculars and viewed the island called Inhaca which she had once visited, during her ‘time of inactivity’, with Senhor Vas and the solicitor, Senhor Andrade.
She redirected the binoculars at the town, at the harbour district where the brothel was located. If she stood on tiptoe she could see the lookout outside the gate, and possibly also one or two of the girls hanging around in the shadows, waiting for a client.
A thought occurred to her that she had had many times before: I can see them. But the question is, can they see me? And if they can: what do I mean to them?
She replaced the binoculars and stand on the marble shelf in front of the window, and closed her eyes. Despite the heat she could conjure up how she had sat in the sleigh, wrapped up in Jonathan Forsman’s furs that smelled of lard and dogs.
When she opened her eyes again, she thought that she really must soon make up her mind. Should she stay where she was, or should she return home?
But on that day of all days, the day when she had shown Julietta her notebook, Hanna was possessed by another emotion.
She was frightened. She had the feeling that danger was approaching. There was something in the vicinity that she hadn’t yet discovered.
A growing threat. That she couldn’t see. But she knew that it was approaching rapidly, like a sleigh gliding along at speed over tightly packed snow.
45
Not long after she had begun to write about Senhor Vaz in her diary, Hanna called a meeting of the women and everybody else who worked in the brothel. She held it early in the morning when the brothel was nearly always empty. Most of them generally slept when the last of the clients had left. Many of them travelled in horse-drawn carriages, but some in motor cars, all of which were cleaned and polished during the night by the black workers who disobeyed the law that said blacks were not allowed in the town at night. The police turned a blind eye because they always had right of access to the women in the various brothels concentrated along rua Bagamoio provided they left the nocturnal workers in peace.
It seemed to Hanna that the newly polished cars heading for the South African border in the early hours of the morning were a sign that the men who used the services of her brothel wanted to remove all trace of what they had been up to. It was as if the cars and carriages were also soiled by what went on inside the brothel. But now the men were travelling back in their sparklingly clean vehicles to the country where it was morally reprehensible and perilously close to being a jailable offence for white men to associate with black women.
Hanna gathered the women and the security guards around the jacaranda tree in the garden. She had asked Andrade to be present, and had taken Carlos with her, dressed in his white waiter’s jacket. She now allowed him to be what he really was — a chimpanzee stolen from his troop somewhere inland. Carlos seemed worried at first about returning to the brothel, but after slapping the lid of the piano hard several times he calmed down and sat on Zé’s knee, just as in the old days.
Zé seemed to be barely aware of the fact that his brother had passed away unexpectedly. He had attended the funeral, but had shown no sign of sorrow or pain. He sat at the piano and continued to tune the strings which never seemed to attain the harmony he was striving for.
Hanna started by saying that essentially, nothing would change. Everything would continue more or less as it always had done. As the widow of Senhor Vaz she intended to retain all the rules, duties and benefits that her husband had introduced to give their workplace the best possible reputation that it had always enjoyed. She would continue to be generous with regard to granting time off, and would be no less strict than Senhor Vaz had been when it came to clients who were violent or behaved in any other unacceptable fashion.
But of course, not everything could be the same as before, she said as she approached the end of her little speech that she had learnt off by heart in Portuguese, to ensure that she didn’t lose control of her words and thoughts. She was a woman. She didn’t have the same bodily strength as her husband had had — she wouldn’t be able to intervene if there was some kind of disturbance — and so she was going to appoint a couple more sturdy security guards who would protect the women and guarantee their safety.
But there was another thing which would inevitably be different because she wasn’t a man. The women would find it easier to talk to her about some things that would have been difficult to discuss with her husband. She envisaged a situation in which they could all talk more intimately with one another. That had to be an improvement for everybody, she asserted at the end of her brief address.
Afterwards, she was enveloped by a long-drawn-out silence. A single jacaranda flower floated slowly, as light as a feather, down to the ground. She hadn’t expected anybody to make any comments, but the silence scared her. It was not the usual silence between whites and blacks: it seemed to have a significance that she was unable to put her finger on.
She flung her hands out wide to indicate that the meeting was over. Nobody needed to stay any longer. The women picked up their chairs and went indoors, and Judas started sweeping the courtyard — but she waved him away as well. Zé returned to the piano with Carlos half asleep on his lap.
It dawned on Hanna what the silence had indicated. Nobody had wanted the closer relationship she had offered them. The silence had been heavy with an invisible reluctance, she realized that now. But she didn’t understand it. Couldn’t they see that as she was a woman, she really was closer to them? That everything she had said was true, unusually so in this world of hypocrisy and lies?
She had taken her notebook with her, and now she wrote in it — hesitantly, as if she couldn’t rely on her ability to interpret her own thoughts: ‘Anybody who robs somebody of their freedom can never expect to form a close relationship with them.’
She read what she had written. She put the notebook back in the woven basket which also contained a shawl and a tin flask that she always carried with her. It contained drinking water that had boiled for many hours before being left to cool down.
The women had returned to their rooms. Nobody was sitting on the sofas yet, ready to receive their clients once again. It was clear to Hanna that they were keeping out of her way so that they didn’t need to risk her speaking to them and offering them the closer relationship she had spoken about.
A close relationship, she thought. As far as they are concerned, all that means is a threat to which they don’t want to expose themselves.
She stood there with the basket in her hand, unsure about whether the reaction she had been confronted with aroused her anger or disappointment. Or was she in fact grateful and relieved that she didn’t need to try to carry out in practice what she had so wrongly envisaged in theory?