Julietta and Anaka cleaned up the desk. Hanna went out on to the veranda. The town down below was shrouded in darkness. One or two fires in the far distance. Perhaps also the sound of drums.
From somewhere came the sound of laughter. It reminded her of the night when she had made up her mind to leave Captain Svartman’s ship.
Perhaps it’s the same man laughing, she thought. But I am quite a different person now: how can I be sure that I’ve heard his laughter before? And besides, on that occasion I didn’t need to worry about a chimpanzee that has eaten a tapeworm.
It was dawn before she went to bed.
By then Carlos had also gone to sleep, curled up like a frightened child in the ceiling light.
55
Hanna turned to Felicia once again. She told her about the tapeworm that Carlos had swallowed, but the only advice Felicia had to offer was to wait until it left the chimpanzee’s body of its own accord. Hanna asked whether there was a cure, anything the woman with the knowledge of medicine could give Carlos to kill the worm while it was still inside him, but Felicia said that the mysterious female magician who had sold her the tapeworms refused to have anything to do with apes or any other animal. She refused to treat elephants or mice, her knowledge was restricted to human suffering and the remedies she could offer them.
Hanna became so desperate that she borrowed Andrade’s car and was driven to the cathedral to talk to one of the Catholic priests. She assumed that the priests there could give advice on everything to do with human life. Even if it was the health of a chimpanzee that she was worried about, it was her own worries that she wanted to be free of.
The heat was like a solid wall in front of her as she travelled to the cathedral. Even though it was early in the morning the heat was so intense that her eyes ached as she hurried towards the darkness behind the open doors. Once inside, Hanna stood still for a while and allowed her eyes to become used to the darkness. The cathedral was empty, apart from a few nuns dressed in white, kneeling before a picture of the Madonna, and a solitary man in a white suit sitting in a pew with his eyes closed, as if he were asleep. There was a smell from the newly painted doors. Some black women in bare feet were gliding over the stone floor, carrying dusters and long poles with feathers on the end, with which they carefully caressed the highest-hanging pictures of the saints.
A priest dressed in black came out of a room in the chancel. He paused in front of the high altar and polished his spectacles. Hanna stood up and walked towards him. He put his glasses back on and eyed her up and down. He was young, barely more than thirty. That made her feel hesitant — a priest ought to be an old man.
‘The senhora looks as if she wants to confess,’ he said in a friendly tone.
‘What do people look like then?’ she responded. ‘Guilty? Full of sin?’
The claim that she looked as if she wanted to make a confession touched a sore point in her. She could not deny that she was the owner of the town’s biggest brothel, and earned money from the organized sin that was for sale there. But the priest didn’t seem to react against her negative tone of voice.
‘Most of all people who want to confess express a longing. They want to liberate themselves.’
‘I don’t want to confess. I’ve come here to ask for advice.’
The young priest pulled up two chairs and placed them facing each other. The cleaners had vanished, but the sleeping man was still there in a pew not far away.
‘I’m Father Leopoldo,’ said the young priest. ‘I’ve recently come here from Portugal.’
‘My name’s Hanna. My Portuguese is not good. I need to speak slowly in order to find the words I need, and I often place them in the wrong order.’
Father Leopoldo smiled. Hanna thought that his face was handsome even if he was very pale and almost gave the impression of being undernourished. Perhaps the priest also had a hungry worm in his intestines?
‘Where do you come from, Senhora Hanna?’
She recounted her background in brief, but chose not to mention the brotheclass="underline" she merely said that she had married a Portuguese man called Senhor Vaz, who had died suddenly shortly after the marriage.
‘You said you needed some advice,’ said Father Leopoldo, who had listened intently to her story. ‘But you still haven’t asked me a question that I can react to.’
I can’t possibly start talking about a chimpanzee that has swallowed a tapeworm, she thought dejectedly. The priest will either think I’m crazy, or that I’ve come here to the cathedral to poke fun at him and all that’s holy.
Nevertheless, she explained the situation. She told him about the chimpanzee that meant so much to her, about the contents of the glass jar and the tapeworm that was now living inside its body. The priest was not at all annoyed by what she said: he believed both what had happened and her worries about Carlos’s fate.
‘I don’t think you have told me everything,’ he said when she had finished, still just as patient and friendly as before. ‘It’s difficult to give advice to somebody who doesn’t tell the whole story.’
Hanna realized that he had seen through her. Even if Vaz was not an unusual name in Lourenço Marques, Father Leopoldo evidently knew about the Senhor Vaz who had run the biggest brothel in town. Perhaps he had even heard about his marriage to the Swedish woman, and his death that had taken place so soon afterwards?
There was no longer any reason to hold anything back. She told him about Esmeralda, and that she herself was now the owner and proprietor of the brothel.
‘I’m afraid for my chimpanzee’s life,’ she said in the end. ‘And I simply don’t know what I’m going to do with what I now own and am responsible for.’
Father Leopoldo observed her from behind his rimless spectacles. She didn’t find his look censorious. She thought it likely that even a young priest was used to hearing the oddest of tales, whether or not they were told to him during confession.
‘There is a veterinary surgeon here in Lourenço Marques called Paulo Miranda,’ said Father Leopoldo. ‘His clinic is right next to the big market. Perhaps he can give you some advice on how to cure your ape?’
‘What can he do that the local women who know about medicines can’t do?’
‘I don’t know. You asked me for advice. Besides, I think that traditional native medicine is based mainly on magic and should be opposed.’
Hanna would have liked him to see those white tapeworms, and to explain to him how much weight Esmeralda had lost by showing him the clothes she had worn when she was at her fattest. But she said nothing.
The priest continued to look at her, and pushed his chair closer to her.
‘In everything you say I detect a searching for something else,’ he said. ‘Something different from the ape and your worries about what it has in its stomach. As I understand it, the advice you are seeking has more to do with your own life. As the owner and hostess of the biggest brothel in Lourenço Marques, I don’t need to tell you what the Church thinks about the type of life of sin that takes place in that establishment. All I know about your homeland of Sweden is that it can be very cold there, and that large numbers of poor people have left it and travelled over the sea in search of a better life in America. But not even there would the life you are now leading be regarded as decent or honourable.’
His words affected her deeply.
‘What should I do?’ she asked. ‘I was left the brothel in my husband’s will.’