A Treacherous Paradise (17 page)

She waited for what was going to come next. She spread herself out, prepared herself. But Senhor Vaz – or Attimilio to use his first name – didn’t manage to penetrate her. He tried over and over again, but he wasn’t up to it: what should have been a lance was a broken twig.

In the end he turned away from her and curled up, as if he were ashamed.

Hanna wondered if she had done something wrong. But the next day, when she plucked up courage and asked Felicia about it, she was told that what had happened was not unusual as far as men were concerned. All in good time Senhor Vaz would no doubt be able to prove that he had the strength on which the whole of his commercial enterprises depended. But the fact was that there was always a threat hanging over a brothel: all men could suddenly become impotent.

Hanna didn’t understand everything that Felicia said, but she did realize that what had happened wasn’t her fault.

A few days later they moved into the stone house that had by now been filled with furniture. There was a handsome, shiny piano in one room that smelled of mimosa and other plants that Hanna had never come across before.

One evening, a few weeks after her wedding, when Hanna was alone with the maid, she played a note on the piano and made it linger on by treading on one of the pedals.

It was as if the room’s shadows were suddenly populated by all those people she had left behind. Jonathan Forsman, Berta, Elin, her siblings and the third mate whose burial at sea she had attended six months earlier.

But her reaction was neither sadness nor regret. A cold wind of dismay blew past her. It came from nowhere as the sound of the piano faded away. What had she done? By attaching herself to a man she barely knew?

She didn’t know. But she forced herself to think: there is no turning back. I am where I am.

Nowhere else but just here.

EVERY MORNING SHE
went out on to the balcony that ran along the whole of the house’s upper floor. From there she could see the town climbing up and down the slopes beyond the harbour with its many cranes gleaming in the heat haze, and furthest away the sea where ships were waiting for high tide. She had bought a better pair of binoculars than the ones she had before, and Senhor Vaz had paid a black carpenter to make a stand on which the binoculars could rest.

She continued to keep an eye on the ships, but now she no longer hoped to discover one in the roadstead flying a Swedish flag. On the contrary. Every morning she was scared she might see a ship lying there which could take her home. She was afraid that in that case she would begin to think that the ship had come too late.

Attimilio, as she still found it difficult to call him, left the house every morning at eight o’clock. He clambered into one of the horse-drawn coaches that took him down to the harbour district. At about noon he would come back home and they would eat lunch together, after which he took an afternoon nap before going back down to the women again.

Hanna very soon discovered that her new marriage was very different in one particular way from the time she had spent with Lundmark. Now she was almost always alone. Lundmark had always been close at hand when they were aboard Captain Svartman’s ship. Her new husband treated her with the greatest respect and was always friendly towards her, but he was rarely at home. He ate and slept, and at night he continued to make his failed attempts to do what Hanna now, to her great surprise, had begun to long for. But apart from that they did next to nothing together. She continued to ask him questions about his earlier life, but he answered evasively or not at all. He didn’t lose his temper and didn’t seem to be put out by her questions: but he quite simply didn’t want to say anything. Hanna thought it seemed as if she had married a man without a past at all.

Looking back, Hanna would regard this time as one of almost total inactivity. There was virtually nothing for her to do, no jobs that needed to be done. The garden was looked after by an old black man who was stone deaf. His name was Rumigo, and he had one of his innumerable sons to help him. Hanna would sometimes stand and watch how gently he handled the flowers, trees and shrubs. Inside the house was Anaka, who had also looked after Attimilio’s parents. She was beginning to grow old, but still worked just as hard, and hardly ever seemed to sleep. She lived alone in a little shack behind the house. Hanna sometimes saw her sitting there, smoking her pipe before going to bed. Anaka would be up again at four o’clock, and served breakfast at six.

Whenever Hanna spoke to Anaka, the maid immediately went down on one knee before her. Attimilio had explained to Hanna that this was not primarily a gesture of submission and subservience, but more of a tradition – a way of showing respect. Hanna found it difficult to cope with these continual genuflections, and tried to persuade Anaka to stop it. But without success. When Attimilio explained that Anaka would do the same to a black man of superior rank, she gave up. The genuflections continued.

There was another woman in the house, a young girl who Attimilio explained was the daughter of his mother’s seamstress. She had a Portuguese name, Julietta, and helped Anaka with all the things the latter didn’t have the time or strength to do herself. Hanna guessed that Julietta must be fourteen or fifteen years old.

Hanna experienced days in which she felt she was wandering around in an almost trance-like state. The heat was oppressive, occasionally interrupted by short tropical downpours. She spent most of the time sitting fanning herself in one of the rooms in which sea breezes wafted in through the open windows. She had the feeling that she was waiting for something, but didn’t know what. She was sometimes afflicted by a nagging annoyance at being superfluous – everything that happened in this large house was done by the black servants. Her own role was simply to do nothing.

Attimilio had explained that she shouldn’t hesitate to say if she was dissatisfied with the work carried out by the servants. Now and then she should put on a pair of white gloves and go around the house, running her fingers along picture frames and door frames to make sure that everything had been properly cleaned.

‘If you don’t keep chasing them up, they’ll start skimping,’ said Attimilio.

‘But everything is always beautifully clean.’

‘That’s because you check up on them. The moment you stop they’ll cease to be as careful.’

Hanna could neither understand nor reconcile herself to Attimilio’s constant denigration of black people. She still suspected that she could detect traces of fear behind his harsh words. But her presence in the house did not change his attitudes.

One evening he came home after a shocking incident in the brothel. A customer had fired a revolver and one of the women had received a superficial flesh wound on one arm. He burst out into a vehement tirade attacking the country he lived in.

‘This would be a good continent to live in,’ he roared, ‘if only there weren’t all these black people everywhere.’

‘But wasn’t it a white man who fired the revolver?’ asked Hanna tentatively.

Senhor Vaz didn’t respond. Instead he made his excuses and retired to his study. She could hear through the closed door that he was playing Portuguese military marches on his primitive gramophone. When she bent down and peered in through the keyhole she could see him marching angrily around the room, swinging his sabre. She started giggling. The man who was now her husband seemed to be more like a tin soldier than anything else. One of the tin soldiers she had seen Jonathan Forsman’s sons playing with.

Then she started feeling uneasy again. She had become like other white women in this town: inactive, apathetic and constantly fanning herself.

AFTER SEVERAL MORE
weeks during which Attimilio had still failed to make love to his wife night after night, Hanna began to realize that Attimilio was close to unbounded desperation. She turned to Felicia once again, but in secret, one day when Senhor Vaz had gone to Pretoria where he invested quite a lot of the money he earned from the brothel. Once a month a lawyer came to visit him. They would shut themselves away in his study, and nobody else had a clue what they discussed. The lawyer, whose name was Andrade and had a limp, spoke so softly that Hanna could never understand a word of what he said.

Felicia advised Hanna to seek help from a
feticheiro
.

‘There are plants you can eat, teas you can drink,’ said Felicia. ‘They enable men to do what they want to do more than anything else in the world.’

‘I don’t know a
feticheiro
,’ said Hanna. ‘I don’t know any medicine men who can give me what I need.’

Felicia held out her hand.

‘It costs money,’ she said. ‘If you give me some, I can get you what you need. Then all you have to do is to mix it into his food or into something he drinks. I don’t know all the rules that apply, but I do know that you have to administer it when a west wind is blowing.’

Hanna thought that over.

‘We hardly ever have a west wind,’ she said.

Felicia pondered what Hanna had said.

‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It will be better for you to make use of the full moon. That is also the right time to give him it. I always forget that we never get winds blowing here from the interior of the country – only from the sea or from the ice in the far south. We who live here in the Baia da Boa Morte know nothing about the winds from the vast savannah.’

Hanna had never heard the name of the lagoon before. She knew that the town was called Lourenço Marques. One evening Attimilio had explained that it was named after a famous Portuguese general who was a match for Bonaparte when it came to cunning and courage. Hanna had no idea who this Bonaparte was, just as she had no idea that the lagoon had such a remarkable name.

But had she really heard correctly what she had said? ‘The lagoon of good death?’ Could that really be what Felicia had called the bay that sparkled every day in the sunshine?

‘Why is the lagoon called that?’

‘Maybe because it’s such a beautiful name. I always think of the blue water where dolphins swim as a cemetery for people who have a good death. The sort we all hope to have.’

‘What is a good death?’

Felicia looked at her in astonishment. It seemed to Hanna that Felicia had a special facial expression for occasions when she was having to think about questions that could only possibly have come from a white person.

‘Everybody thinks about how they are going to die,’ said Felicia. ‘Didn’t you tell me about the man you lived with, the man who was a third mate on board a ship and had a name I can’t pronounce, who had a grave in the sea?’

‘His death was anything but good,’ said Hanna. ‘He didn’t want to die.’

‘When my death comes, I don’t intend to resist it. Unless somebody is trying to murder me. I want to die peacefully. A good death is never agitated.’

Hanna didn’t know what to say about Lundmark’s death or her own uneasy thoughts about her final moments. She gave Felicia the money she had asked for. A few days later Felicia turned up when Attimilio had left the house in the morning. Wrapped up in a piece of cloth she handled with both respect and perhaps also fear was a green, almost sparkling powder. It smelled strongly of the tar Hanna remembered from the ships in the harbour at Sundsvall.

‘You must dissolve the powder into whatever Senhor Vaz drinks in the evening before going to bed.’

‘He doesn’t drink anything in the evenings. He doesn’t want to be woken up by his bladder during the night.’

‘Doesn’t he eat anything either?’

‘A mango.’

‘Then you must carefully open the fruit, press the powder into it, and close the skin again.’

Hanna shouted for Anaka and asked her to bring a mango. They then helped each other to carry out the operation and saw that it was possible to leave no traces of the powder or what they’d done.

‘Is that all?’ asked Hanna.

‘You should put a few drops of lemon into your pussy. Then you’ll be ready to receive him.’

Hanna’s face turned red when Felicia talked about the lemon. Felicia’s ability to talk quite normally about something that was still unmentionable as far as Hanna was concerned made her blush.

‘That’s all there is to it,’ said Felicia. ‘The
feticheiro
I spoke to has cured lots of impotent men. Some of them come from a very long way off. Some of them have come from as far away as India in order to become real men again. But he also said that if it doesn’t work – which does happen sometimes – he has other, stronger medicines to make your husband’s sexual urges start working again.’

As the moon was on the wane, Hanna had to wait for quite some time. Meanwhile Attimilio made several more attempts to consummate the marriage, without success. Afterwards, when he had given up and was lying on his side, Hanna gently stroked his black hair, which left a new greasy stain of pomade on the pillowcase every morning. I don’t really love him, she thought: but I feel tenderness towards him. He wants to do the best he can for me. He’ll never be another Lundmark in bed, but with a bit of help from Felicia perhaps one day he’ll be able to become a real man again.

BY FULL MOON
Lourenço Marques had been battered by storms for a few days. Carlos had run away again but come back, just as mysteriously as before, this time with a red band round his neck. Senhor Vaz decided he had better keep Carlos chained up, but the women were outraged by the very thought and he let it drop. Carlos resumed his role as a waiter, and would light clients’ cigars in exchange for a banana or an apple. Felicia maintained that Carlos had a different glint in his eye now: something was happening to him.

The full moon arrived, the winds had moved on, and Senhor Vaz came home after a long day at the brothel. Hanna had prepared the mango and sat beside him at the dining table as he chewed away at it, deep in thought. She then duly applied the drops of lemon in the bathroom before going to bed and lying down beside her husband. He seemed to be on his way to sleep, so she gently stroked his arm. After a few moments he turned to face her. He went on to make frantic efforts to penetrate her, just as he had done on previous occasions, but still without success – although Hanna could feel that his attempts were more powerful and longer lasting than ever before.