Suddenly a troop of cavalrymen on agitated, sweaty horses came galloping up. In just a few seconds the mass of people that had been crowding around her melted away. The street looked like a battlefield, filled with burnt rags and broken cudgels, and among them the gleaming cases of the soldiers’ cartridges. The street and pavements were covered in a large number of distorted black bodies, some of them almost naked. A man was howling in pain or in rage, she couldn’t make up her mind which. The white soldiers in their dark blue uniforms were standing with their rifles at the ready, as if they were afraid that the dead would rise again and attack them. White people were now beginning to assemble at a safe distance. They were making a sort of growling noise, as if the hatred they felt could not be satisfied by the sight of the dead, but needed to continue punishing them.
The howling man suddenly fell silent. Hanna began walking slowly back to Andrade’s car. The chauffeur had already returned, and was sitting with his hands round the steering wheel, staring straight ahead, right through her.
Andrade was sitting hunched up in the back seat. The urine stain on his white trousers had begun to dry. He was holding his revolver in his hands as if it were a crucifix.
Hanna looked at him, and thought that she hated him for his cowardice. But at the same time she couldn’t help but be pleased that he had survived and was uninjured. Everything is full of contradictions, she thought. Nothing is as straightforward as I wish it were.
She was surprised to find that she felt nothing at all for the dead black corpses all around her.
Swarms of flies had already begun to gather around the dead bodies. Horses and carts that had been requisitioned by the soldiers stood in the shade. Soldiers with white handkerchiefs over their faces began to gather up the corpses.
Like dead animals, Hanna thought. Just slaughtered, but not yet skinned.
She hurried away. Andrade shouted something after her but she didn’t gather what it was he wanted.
She didn’t stop until she was inside the brothel.
The black women were sitting on the sofas, looking at her. She thought she ought to say something.
But she had no idea what.
53
Their silence unnerved her, as did the fact that they were looking her in the eye. All she had experienced that morning was so frightening and so overwhelming that she was now the one who averted her eyes. She went back out into the street where an officer she recognized was handing out ammunition to the soldiers standing guard on the street corner. He visited the brothel regularly and promised to drive her back home in his army car as soon as he had finished. She sat down in his car and waited. As there was no roof, she raised her parasol to protect herself from the scorching sun. Swarms of flies were buzzing excitedly around her head as if she were dead as well. She flapped her hand at them, and had the feeling that everything that was happening was a dream she had not yet managed to wake up from.
The young officer sat down at the wheel himself. Next to him was a soldier with a gun at the ready. When they pulled up outside the stone house the officer asked if she would like to have an armed guard outside her front door, but she felt safe in her own home. In addition, she knew full well that the officer was trying to do a deal — he would provide a guard if she allowed him access to one of the women for free. That annoyed her.
And so she declined his offer and went in through the door that Julietta was holding open for her. She took her mistress’s hat, gloves and parasol.
Hanna asked her to come upstairs to the veranda. The smell from the fires in the town below was still noticeable. Anaka brought her a carafe of water. Julietta was waiting a few metres away from the sofa where Hanna was sitting. Hanna pointed to a chair, and Julietta sat down very gingerly, on the extreme edge of the seat.
‘What happened?’ Hanna asked. ‘Don’t make anything up. Just tell me what you know for sure.’
Julietta spoke slowly as she knew Hanna found it difficult to understand what she was saying. Hanna frequently had to ask her to repeat a sentence or two, but out there on the veranda that morning, Julietta spoke more clearly than she had ever done before. Perhaps that was because she knew that what she had to say was very important for her.
A young woman by the name of Nausica had gone to fetch water from a well on the outskirts of Xhipamanhine, one of the town’s biggest settlements for blacks. Like all other women, she was balancing the water pitcher on her head. The pitcher was large, it contained twenty litres: but Nausica was proceeding gracefully along the path as she had done so many times before. Then according to Julietta, something happened just as the woman was coming back to the settlement. Nausica had been confronted by three white men, all of them young, carrying shotguns to shoot the seagulls that were gathered at the site of the large rubbish dumps by the shore. It was a swampy area where nobody and nothing lived, apart from the malaria-carrying mosquitoes that had one of their biggest incubation sites just there. Nausica tried to make way for the three men without losing control of the heavy water pitcher. But just as they were passing one of the young men hit the pitcher with the butt of his shotgun and smashed it, so that the water poured down over Nausica. She sank down in a heap on to the ground, hugging her knees hard. Behind her she could hear the men laughing. Some women working on their tiny machambor had seen what happened. Only when the three men had disappeared along the path did they dare to venture forward to see if Nausica was badly injured.
But there was somebody else who had seen what had happened. It was Nausica’s father, Akatapande, who now came running along the path. He was an engine driver on trains travelling between Lourenço Marques and the South African border at Ressano Garcia. This incident happened to coincide with the two days off he had every month. Having established that Nausica was not seriously injured, his first instinct was to chase after the three men who had attacked her. Nausica and the other women tried to restrain him — he was risking being beaten to death or shot by the white men who were hardly likely to worry about a father who was protesting about his daughter having been humiliated. But they couldn’t hold Akatapande back. He raced along the path until he caught up with the three men who were still laughing about the woman who had been soaked through.
Akatapande started by cursing the three men. At first they seemed to pay no attention to him at all, but continued walking down to the beach. However, Akatapande stood in their way and started punching one of the men on the chest. One of the others clubbed him down with the butt of his shotgun. When Akatapande managed to get to his feet, he was immediately clubbed down again. Then the first man aimed his gun at Akatapande’s head and shot him. Then they had continued on their way, quite calmly, as if nothing had happened.
News of Akatapande’s death spread with the speed that only extremely brutal attacks could bring about. When an officer summoned from the fort decided not to instigate an investigation because one of the men concerned was the son of one of the governor’s closest associates, the subdued muttering in Xhipamanhine began to grow into a furious outcry, and by the early morning had developed into the riot.
Hanna had no doubt that what Julietta had told her was the truth.