She put down the binoculars and tried to work out what was happening. Then she pulled the bell cord — hard, so that there should be no doubt about her wanting a servant to come to her room without delay, despite the fact that all of them except Anaka were bound to be still asleep.
In fact it was Julietta who came, half-dressed and unkempt, but Hanna could see immediately that she was wide awake. Presumably the others in the house had also realized what was happening down below in the town, and told the youngest of them to answer the bell.
Hanna took Julietta out on to the veranda with her.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked.
‘People are angry.’
‘Who’s angry?’
‘We are angry.’
As Julietta said those last words, she also did something out of the ordinary. She looked Hanna in the eye. It was as if she had been stung, Hanna thought. What’s going on in the street down below evidently concerns me as well.
‘Why are you angry?’ Hanna asked. ‘Please tell me without me having to drag it out of you.’
‘A white man broke a woman’s water pitcher.’
Hanna was irritated by the answer, which didn’t give her any understandable context. She angrily told Julietta to go and fetch Anaka. When Anaka arrived, she was if anything even more laconic than Julietta.
Hanna got dressed and thought it was lucky that she was expecting a visit from Andrade that morning, with some papers for her to sign. Nobody knew more than he did about what went on in town, whether it happened openly or on the sly. As she was having breakfast, waiting for his arrival, she occasionally went out on to the veranda and took another look through her binoculars. The fire was still burning, and it seemed as if new ones had been started, although they were hidden behind buildings and out of range of the binoculars. She could hear distant shouting and the rattle of gunfire. Carlos was sitting motionless on the roof, following the action.
When Andrade arrived he was red in the face and more agitated than she had ever seen him before. She noted that he had been impolite to her servants, and that he slammed a revolver on to the coffee table before sitting down. Before she had time to ask him any questions, he started to explain what had happened that morning. The sudden uprising had begun a few hours earlier when a group of black men had come marching in from the slums. They had carefully avoided the streets that were usually patrolled by Portuguese soldiers ensuring that the night curfew was observed. Once they had reached the centre of town they had run to a police station and set it on fire by throwing bottles full of paraffin through the windows. The half-asleep soldiers had started shooting the rioters, and then bloody chaos had taken hold.
‘So it’s an uprising,’ said Hanna. ‘There must be a reason for it.’
‘Must there?’ asked Andrade ironically. ‘These black savages need no reason other than their inherited bloodthirstiness to start a riot that can only lead to their own destruction.’
Hanna found it difficult to believe him. It surely couldn’t be as simple as he suggested. As early as the day when Captain Svartman’s ship had docked in Lourenço Marques, she had thought she could detect hostility and sadness in the eyes of the blacks. She was living in a sad continent where the only ones who laughed — often far too loudly — were the white people. But she was well aware that the laughter was usually no more than a way of disguising apprehension that could easily grow into fear. A fear of darkness, of the people who lived in darkness but couldn’t be seen.
Hanna insisted. Something must have triggered the fury of the blacks. Andrade shrugged impatiently.
‘No doubt somebody thought he had been treated unfairly and thought it was necessary to die if needs be in order to avenge the perceived injustice. But it will soon pass. If there’s one thing I know about these black people, it’s that they are cowards. They run away like terrified dogs when things get serious.’
He picked up the revolver from the table.
‘To be honest I would prefer our meeting to be postponed until tomorrow morning. Calm will have been restored by then, the worst of the troublemakers will be dead and the others will be locked up in the fort. What I feel I must do now is go down to where the fires are burning. I belong to the town’s civil militia who have been trained to stand shoulder to shoulder with the soldiers whenever there is a threat to our safety. I can certainly be of some use with the aid of this revolver.’
There was something jubilant in Andrade’s voice that scared Hanna. But at the same time she wanted to find out what was actually happening close to her brothel.
‘I’ll come with you,’ she said, standing up. ‘This is naturally more important than the papers I’m supposed to sign.’
‘From the point of view of safety it might be better for you to stay here,’ said Andrade. ‘Niggers running amok are dangerous.’
‘I have the brothel to look after,’ said Hanna. ‘I’m responsible for my employees.’
She wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, put on the hat with the peacock feather and picked up her umbrella. Andrade could see that there was no chance of her changing her mind.
They drove through the town, which was unusually quiet. The few blacks in the streets were walking as closely as possible to the house walls. Soldiers from the town’s garrison were everywhere. Even the town’s firemen were carrying weapons, as were many civilians who had formed small groups to protect their neighbourhood if the riot were to spread. During the whole of the drive down to the fires and the centre of the revolt, Andrade talked about what he was going to do. Hanna was disgusted by the way in which he seemed to be looking forward to the opportunity to fire his gun at some of the black rioters.
But nothing turned out as Andrade had hoped. When they came down to the town and the chauffeur turned into a side street leading to the brothel, they found themselves in the midst of a violent confrontation between soldiers and a raging mass of black men. It was bayonets and rifles against cudgels and billhooks, fear versus limitless fury. The car was surrounded by furious Africans who started rocking it from side to side in an attempt to overturn it. There was a smell of burning paraffin everywhere. Hanna was horrified by the thought of being trapped inside a burning car. She tried in vain to force the passenger door open. The sound of rifle shots suddenly rang out. A black face that shortly before had been pressed up against the glass was suddenly transformed into a mess of blood and shattered splinters of bone. Hanna shouted to Andrade to use his revolver, but when she turned to look at him she saw that he was white with terror, and a pool of urine was expanding over his white linen trousers. The chauffeur managed to open the driver’s door, get out of the car, and was then immediately swallowed up by the crowd of people. Hanna was now so scared, she was afraid of losing consciousness. But the fear of being burnt to death was even stronger. She forced herself to clamber over into the front seat and get out of the car just as the chauffeur had done.
She was surrounded by black people, their faces, eyes, smells, cudgels and knives. Hanna remembered something Senhor Vaz had told her. If you were confronted by a lion, the worst thing you could do was to run away. That would only result in the lion taking up the hunt and felling the fugitive with a bite at the back of his head.
Hanna also knew that she shouldn’t look the lion in the eye. So she lowered her gaze and forced herself to begin making her way through the crowd of people. At any moment she expected to be stabbed, or to be hit on the head by a cudgel. But a path opened up for her. She suppressed the urge to start running, and continued walking slowly, her heart pounding inside her blouse. There was still a clatter of rifle shots on all sides. She gave a start after each one. She stumbled over a man lying dead on the street with his chest torn apart, and paused. But then she forced herself to continue.