There was no end of possible answers. But none would be able to clarify the situation for her.
54
At first Hanna couldn’t believe her eyes. Nevertheless the fact was that Esmeralda really did start to grow thinner.
Every time Hanna looked at her, she’d changed. Herr Eber also kept presenting Hanna with a constantly increasing number of bills from seamstresses who had been taking in Esmeralda’s clothes. Hanna still felt uncomfortable whenever she thought about that white worm in the little glass jar, but it was quite obviously now growing apace in Esmeralda’s stomach, eating all the food that previously produced bigger and bigger layers of fat around her body.
Hanna had put the rest of the glass jars in the wardrobe where Senhor Vaz’s suits and shirts were hanging. Despite her uneasiness, there were evenings when Hanna simply couldn’t resist taking out one of the jars and studying the white worm wriggling away inside it. How this tiny animal could grow and become as big as five metres long in a human being’s stomach and gut was beyond her comprehension. She would put the jar back in the wardrobe with a shudder.
Carlos sat on top of the high wardrobe, watching her.
‘What can you see?’ she would ask.
Carlos would reply with his usual jabbering, then just yawn and scratch away absent-mindedly at his stomach.
Two days later Esmeralda disappeared. She had gone away during the night. Late in the evening Felicia had seen her going into her room to sleep. None of the guards had seen her leaving the brothel. Hanna asked Felicia directly if there was any cause for concern: Felicia shook her head, but Hanna thought she could detect a hint of doubt, although she couldn’t be sure.
But it soon became clear that she hadn’t gone to see her family. That made everybody start worrying.
Contrary to her usual practice, Hanna stayed in the brothel during the day. She sat by herself on one of the red sofas. The only customers were some Russian sailors. A train was expected later in the day from Johannesburg, carrying some Englishmen and Boers whose only reason for the trip was to have sessions with Hanna’s black women.
Shortly after three in the afternoon there was a buzz of excited voices in the street outside. Hanna had fallen asleep in the corner of her sofa. An unknown man was talking to one of the guards in a language Hanna didn’t understand, or even recognize. Felicia came out of her room, wearing a flimsy dressing gown, and joined in the conversation.
Suddenly silence fell. Felicia came in from the street, and announced in an unsteady voice that Esmeralda was dead. Her body had been floating in the dock. The town’s bombeiros had been called to retrieve the dead woman. Together with one of the guards and Felicia, who was still wearing her pink dressing gown, Hanna went down to the harbour. As they approached they could see a small crowd gathered at the far end of the quay. When they got there the corpse was just being lifted out of the water. Esmeralda was completely naked. Despite the fact that she had lost a lot of weight during the time she had the tapeworm inside her, her body was still swollen and enveloped by large rolls of fat. Hanna felt that it was shamefully cruel for the body to be pulled up out of the water with no clothes on.
It was a sort of burial in reverse, she thought. I watched Lundmark being tipped into the sea. Now Esmeralda is being lifted out of the selfsame water.
The governor had decreed that every dead body found in Lourenço Marques that might possibly have been the result of an assault should undergo a post-mortem. Felicia and Hanna accompanied the firemen to the mortuary that was situated behind the hospital. There was an overpowering stench when the doors were opened. The doctor who was due to carry out the post-mortem was standing outside in the courtyard, smoking. Hanna noted his dirty hands and frayed shirt collar. He introduced himself as Dr Meandros, and spoke Portuguese with a strong foreign accent. He came originally from Greece. Nobody knew for certain how he had ended up in Lourenço Marques, but some suggested that he had been on a ship that ran aground off Durban. He was a skilful pathologist.
It was very rare for him not to be able to establish the
cause of death, and hence conclude whether or not it was self-inflicted.
Dr Meandros rolled up his shirtsleeves, threw away the butt of his cigarette and stood on it, then went back into the stinking building. Hanna and Felicia went back to the brothel in a rickshaw powered by a man with enormous ears.
‘Why was she naked?’ Hanna asked.
‘I think she wanted to show everybody who she was,’ said Felicia.
Hanna tried in vain to work out what she meant by that.
‘I don’t understand your answer. Explain for me why she decided to take her own life in that filthy dock, and why she undressed before doing so.’
‘Nobody has found her clothes.’
‘How am I supposed to interpret that? That they have just vanished into thin air? Or that somebody has stolen them?’
‘All I know is that they weren’t there on the quay. Nobody saw her coming there with no clothes on. Nobody saw her jump into the water. Perhaps she was carrying large stones in each hand, to make sure that she sank.’
‘But why should she do that with no clothes on?’
‘Perhaps she did have clothes on when she jumped into the water. And then took them off before she died.’
‘Why?’
‘Perhaps she wanted to die in the same way as she had lived.’
Although she still didn’t really know what Felicia meant, Hanna suspected that she was trying to make a comment about Esmeralda’s death. Dying the way she had lived. With no clothes on, naked to the world.
Hanna asked no more questions. When Felicia had got off at the front gate of the brothel, which was being guarded by Judas, she asked the man pulling the rickshaw to go back up the steep hills to her house. He was dripping with sweat when they got there. She paid him twice as much as he had asked for, but even so it was only a few escudos, worth next to nothing.
Julietta was standing in the entrance, looking at her. Hanna could see the curiosity in her eyes, but didn’t want to talk to her. She simply gave the maid her hat and parasol and told her that Dr Meandros should be allowed in the moment he arrived. She took it for granted that Julietta and the rest of the staff in the house already knew that Esmeralda was dead. Invisible or silent messages were passed with astonishing speed among the blacks of Lourenço Marques.
Carlos was sitting on her desk chair chewing at a carrot when she entered her study. She let him stay there, sat down on the visitor’s chair and closed her eyes.
When she woke up she realized she had been asleep for four hours, a deep and long sleep that felt as if it lasted a whole night. There was no sign of Carlos. She went over to the desk chair and sat down. She had been dreaming. Unclear fragments slowly rose up into her mind. Lundmark had been in it. He had been sitting at the brothel piano, hesitantly fingering the keys. The jacaranda tree had been cut down. Senhor Vaz had been wandering around in a dinner jacket, smoking a cigar that smelled like the fires caused by the rioters. But she couldn’t see herself in the dream. She hadn’t taken part in it, was simply an observer on the outside, looking in.
She summoned Julietta, ordered tea, then sent her brusquely on her way — as if to remind her that she still hadn’t forgotten Julietta’s outrageous request to be transferred to the brothel.
She had just finished drinking her tea when Dr Meandros arrived at the front door. When he came up to her study she could see that his hands were still dirty. There were what could well have been dried bloodstains on his scruffy jacket.