Pimenta was wearing a white linen suit and a pith helmet with a protective cloth covering the back of his neck. The shape of his body was peculiar: the whole of his body was thin apart from his stomach, which stuck out like a tumour over his belt. His skin was covered in scars caused by insect bites and pimples, one of his eyelids was sagging as if half of his being was devoted to struggling with overpowering exhaustion. Although he was still young, he had aged prematurely — as was often the case with white people who migrated to the tropics and spent their time there working far too hard.
For several years Pedro Pimenta had been living with a black woman called Isabel, and had two children with her: a son and a daughter. Both of them had been baptized in the cathedral and were called Joanna and Rogerio.
Hardly any of the whites in Lourenço Marques worried about the fact that he had a black lover; but the fact that he lived openly with her, as if they were married, and that he looked after her children as if they were his own — which of course they were — with the help of a private tutor, was condemned by everybody. In some circles he was regarded with contempt, while others looked upon him with a sort of vague worry.
Pimenta shook Hanna’s hand when she emerged from the car, and invited her to accompany him to the veranda where there was at least a suggestion of cool breezes from the river valley blowing along the house walls. Isabel came out to greet her. She was dressed just like a white woman and her black hair was gathered in a tight bun at the back of her head. It struck Hanna that this was the first black woman she’d met who had looked her in the eye when they shook hands. The expression in Isabel’s eyes gave Hanna the feeling that this was what native Africans had looked like before the whites had arrived in their ships in search of slaves, diamonds and ivory.
Isabel fetched the children so that they could greet her as well. Hanna thought she was looking at two unusually handsome children.
‘My children,’ said Pimenta. ‘My greatest joy. Often my only joy, come to that.’
Hanna wondered why he suddenly sounded so downcast. A cold breeze that didn’t come from the river but from inside herself wafted past. She didn’t understand how he could talk about joy in a way that actually indicated depression.
Something worried her, although she couldn’t put her finger on it.
He took her to the dog kennels.
‘Demand is growing all the time,’ he said. ‘I thought I would have a monopoly of these white dogs for four years at most, then other breeders would start producing similar dogs to satisfy the market demands: but I now realize that I had underestimated the human need of originals. And these here are the originals, they exist nowhere else.’
‘How much do the dogs cost?’ Hanna asked.
‘Anybody who asks about the price can hardly be able to afford one of them.’
‘I’m not asking because I want one for myself.’
‘I know. You would be able to afford one.’
Hanna gathered that he didn’t want to reveal his asking price. Or perhaps he didn’t have a set price, but asked individual customers to pay what he thought they would be able to afford.
They continued to the various pools that comprised the crocodile farm. Pedro explained to her that the slowly growing crocodiles needed to be separated from the rest so that they didn’t become food for those that had grown somewhat larger.
In a pond with dark green water, all on its own, was an enormous crocodile lying motionless on a flat rock. It was almost five metres long. Nobody knew how old it was. Pimenta wouldn’t allow anybody else to feed it. Once a week he would throw food down into the pond. And in fact it was this very day that he was due to feed Noah, as he called it. He asked Hanna if she would like to watch. She really wanted to say no, but nodded her head. He shouted for one of the black workers who looked after the crocodiles. A woolly sheep, a very powerfully built ram, was dragged out of a pen. The black man handed the rope to which the sheep was attached to Pimenta, then hurried off. The ram seemed to suspect what was going to happen — like an animal that can smell the blood of those that have just been slaughtered.
Pimenta hung his jacket on a coat rack next to the pond that was evidently there for this very purpose. He unbuttoned the waistcoat that was stretched over his enormous stomach, folded up his shirt sleeves and untied the rope at the same time as he took a firm grip of the ram’s neck. The ram bellowed. The crocodile lay there motionless. Pimenta suddenly grabbed the ram’s feet and turned it over on its back, then threw it down into the water where the crocodile was waiting. With a sudden movement that was so quick that Hanna barely saw it, the crocodile left the rock and sank down into the water. It clamped its jaws round the ram, threw it into the air to turn it over, dragged it down under the surface, then reappeared with just the ram’s head.
Hanna didn’t want to see any more. She turned away and hurried back to the veranda.
‘I’ll come when the party’s over,’ she heard Pimenta saying behind her.
It’s almost as if he were taking part in the feast himself, she thought agitatedly. How is this man going to be able to advise me on what to do with my life?
Her first impulse was to get into the car and drive back to town. But despite everything she stayed on the veranda, and had settled down in a shady corner by the time Pimenta returned from the crocodile’s feast. There was not a trace on his face of the scenes that had been enacted in the crocodile pool. He smiled at Hanna, rang a small silver bell, ordered some tea from a servant, and asked why she had come to his house — she had never visited him before.
‘I can’t sleep at night,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I should stay here in Africa, but nor do I know why I should leave. Nor where I should go to.’
What she said didn’t seem to surprise him. He fanned his face slowly with his pith helmet.
‘Those are thoughts that nag away at all of us,’ he said. ‘There’s no avoiding them. To stay or not to stay. Even if we were born here, we are still on foreign soil. Or perhaps I should say that we are in enemy territory.’
‘Is that what I’m feeling? All the hatred directed at us because we are white?’
‘That’s hardly something that we need to worry about. What could the blacks do to us? Nothing.’
‘There’s something they have that we don’t have.’
For the first time he looked at her in surprise.
‘And what could that be?’
‘Their numbers.’
He seemed disappointed by her answer, as if he had hoped she would astound him, say something he’d never thought of before.
‘The idea that they could be a threat to us because there are a lot of them is nothing more than a figment of the imagination for nervous people,’ he said impatiently. ‘Nightmares that can never become reality. The more of them there are, the more confused they become.’
‘I don’t regard myself as a nervous type. But I see what I see. And I hear what I hear.’
‘What do you hear?’
‘A silence. Which isn’t natural.’
Before Pimenta could respond, Isabel came out on to the veranda and sat down on one of the basket chairs. She smiled.