Hanna suspected she had been listening to their conversation. But why had she come out on to the veranda at just that moment? Because she wanted the conversation to come to an end? Or was there some other reason?
In her mind’s eye Hanna suddenly saw Pimenta grabbing hold of Isabel’s legs and flinging her into the crocodile pit. She gave a start and dropped the cup of tea she was holding in her hand. Having imagined Pimenta hurling his black wife to the crocodile, it was not far to the next image: Pimenta throwing her down as well, despite the fact that she was a white woman.
Pimenta rang the silver bell once more. A servant appeared, picked up the broken pieces of crockery and wiped the floor clean.
She suddenly recalled Berta. Jonathan Forsman had accidentally knocked a coffee cup off a table. She could see the scene in her mind’s eye: Berta picking up the bits and then wiping up the coffee. And Forsman didn’t even look in her direction.
Which direction am I looking in? Hanna thought. And why do I think what I do about Pedro Pimenta?
The cooling breezes had faded away. The heat on the veranda was motionless. A single peal of laughter rang out somewhere in the distance.
They sat there without speaking. Hanna looked at the others. The beautiful Isabel and the tight-lipped Pedro Pimenta.
I’m not a mirror, she thought. But I know that it’s him I’m beginning to look like. And I don’t want to.
48
Shortly afterwards Isabel had left them. Pedro Pimenta no longer had the energy to fan himself with his helmet. He moved over to a garden hammock suspended from springs and iron chains, kicked off his right shoe and inserted his big toe into a loop in a rope attached to a gauze-like fan a metre long, suspended over his head. As he swung back and forth in the hammock, the fan moved up and down. The resulting breeze reached as far as Hanna, who had moved her chair closer to the hammock as requested by Pimenta. Anybody observing the pair of them from a distance would have assumed that their conversation was extremely intimate: but in fact it was only the faint cooling breeze created by the fan that led them to sit so close together that their legs were touching.
‘We know nothing about each other,’ said Pimenta. ‘We all live here, but none of us knows anything about our respective pasts. I sometimes imagine that one dark night, on board a ship from Lisbon, without anybody seeing us, we all threw our pasts overboard, tightly packed and attached to heavy weights. For instance, I know nothing about you. One day, all of a sudden, you are staying in a room in a brothel that I frequent. A mysterious guest. And then, just as suddenly, you marry Senhor Vaz. When he dies, you become the owner of the most lucrative house of pleasure for gentlemen in this part of Africa. But I still know nothing about you. And you ask me for advice that I can’t possibly give you.’
‘It was my husband who suggested that I should speak to you. If I needed advice. And if he wasn’t around.’
He screwed up his eyes and looked hard at her.
‘That sounds odd.’
‘That he asked me to talk to you?’
‘No. That he thought it would be possible in any circumstances for somebody to give another person advice. He wasn’t that sort of man.’
‘He said exactly what I’ve just told you he said.’
‘Obviously, I don’t think for a moment that you are telling me an untruth. What good would it do you? I just find it astonishing that he surprises me like this after his death. I don’t like it when the dead surprise me.’
That was the end of the conversation. Isabel came and squatted down beside her husband. She ran her fingers over his neck and his cheek. Hanna was surprised that he allowed her to display such tenderness so openly in the presence of a stranger.
I have a chimpanzee, she thought, and I pick ticks off his skin. He has a black woman who caresses his cheek. In a way those two activities are remarkably similar.
She wondered what it would be like to have a black man squatting down by her side, running his fingers over her cheek. She shuddered at the thought. Then she remembered Lundmark’s rough but well-tended hands, and was overcome by sorrow.
Isabel stood up and left the veranda again. She smiled at Hanna as she left. Pimenta watched her go, his eyes screwed up.
‘I can buy the brothel off you,’ he said suddenly. ‘If you decide to leave here. I can pay you in Portuguese currency, or in gold, or in jewels. But I’m a businessman. I won’t give you a friendship price — I’ll try to buy it as cheaply as possible.’
The thought of a potential deal had made him so excited that he tugged too hard with his big toe in the rope loop, and the loop broke. He shouted at the top of his voice for a servant by the name of Harri. He came running up and retied the rope. Hanna could see that this wasn’t the first time the link had broken when Pimenta had got carried away.
‘Why is he called Harri?’ she asked when they were alone again. ‘That’s surely not a Portuguese name, is it?’
‘He comes from Matabeleland, the English colony. He claims that he once saw Cecil Rhodes in evening dress when he was about to have dinner in the middle of the bush. A large number of pack horses had carried dining tables, silver cutlery and a Persian rug that was laid out in the depths of lion and elephant country. I doubt whether he saw all this with his own eyes, but there is no doubt that Cecil Rhodes treated every campsite as if it were the Savoy hotel in London. That man really was crazy. But I’ve taken a liking to Harri. He’s now more faithful than any of my dogs. And as my dogs play such an important role in my life, blacks who behave like that have all the sympathy I can muster.’
‘What would happen if I sold the brothel to you?’
‘I would maintain its good name and reputation. And take good care of our clients.’
‘And what about the women?’
He seemed puzzled by her question. The women? His foot started pulling harder at the fan rope.
‘You mean the whores?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about them?’
‘They grow older. Fall ill. Nobody wants to pay for them any more.’
‘Then we kick them out, of course.’
‘Give them some money so that they can buy a stall in the market. Or build them a house if they need one. Those are conditions I shall impose on any buyer. That’s what we do for them now, and it must continue that way.’
He shook his head almost imperceptibly, and thought carefully before continuing. His foot operating the fan rope was still.
‘Naturally I shall continue with the routines that apply now. Why should I want to change them?’
‘I’m sure you know that many brothel owners in this town treat their girls very brutally. We have always been an exception.’
She realized that the ‘we’ was an exaggeration. It was Senhor Vaz she was speaking about. Her only contribution was not to have changed any of the routines that had always applied before her husband died.
‘It will be as I say,’ he said. ‘I shan’t change anything. Why should I?’
They spoke no more about it. Hanna was invited to a meal consisting of cold soup and a dish of peeled and mashed fruits. She drank two glasses of wine despite the fact that she knew it would give her a headache. Isabel ate as well, but she didn’t say anything. Pimenta talked at length, without any attempt to conceal his satisfaction, about the prominent families in South Africa who had bought his white sheepdogs. He recounted with pride how at least two of his white sheepdogs had bitten to death black men who had tried to burgle the palace-like mansions the dogs were guarding. Isabel didn’t seem to react when he told this story. She had a frozen smile on her face which never seemed to change at all.