A Treacherous Paradise (21 page)

In her mind’s eye Hanna suddenly saw Pimenta grabbing hold of Isabel’s legs and flinging her into the crocodile pit. She gave a start and dropped the cup of tea she was holding in her hand. Having imagined Pimenta hurling his black wife to the crocodile, it was not far to the next image: Pimenta throwing her down as well, despite the fact that she was a white woman.

Pimenta rang the silver bell once more. A servant appeared, picked up the broken pieces of crockery and wiped the floor clean.

She suddenly recalled Berta. Jonathan Forsman had accidentally knocked a coffee cup off a table. She could see the scene in her mind’s eye: Berta picking up the bits and then wiping up the coffee. And Forsman didn’t even look in her direction.

Which direction am I looking in? Hanna thought. And why do I think what I do about Pedro Pimenta?

The cooling breezes had faded away. The heat on the veranda was motionless. A single peal of laughter rang out somewhere in the distance.

They sat there without speaking. Hanna looked at the others. The beautiful Isabel and the tight-lipped Pedro Pimenta.

I’m not a mirror, she thought. But I know that it’s him I’m beginning to look like. And I don’t want to.

SHORTLY AFTERWARDS ISABEL
had left them. Pedro Pimenta no longer had the energy to fan himself with his helmet. He moved over to a garden hammock suspended from springs and iron chains, kicked off his right shoe and inserted his big toe into a loop in a rope attached to a gauze-like fan a metre long, suspended over his head. As he swung back and forth in the hammock, the fan moved up and down. The resulting breeze reached as far as Hanna, who had moved her chair closer to the hammock as requested by Pimenta. Anybody observing the pair of them from a distance would have assumed that their conversation was extremely intimate: but in fact it was only the faint cooling breeze created by the fan that led them to sit so close together that their legs were touching.

‘We know nothing about each other,’ said Pimenta. ‘We all live here, but none of us knows anything about our respective pasts. I sometimes imagine that one dark night, on board a ship from Lisbon, without anybody seeing us, we all threw our pasts overboard, tightly packed and attached to heavy weights. For instance, I know nothing about you. One day, all of a sudden, you are staying in a room in a brothel that I frequent. A mysterious guest. And then, just as suddenly, you marry Senhor Vaz. When he dies, you become the owner of the most lucrative house of pleasure for gentlemen in this part of Africa. But I still know nothing about you. And you ask me for advice that I can’t possibly give you.’

‘It was my husband who suggested that I should speak to you. If I needed advice. And if he wasn’t around.’

He screwed up his eyes and looked hard at her.

‘That sounds odd.’

‘That he asked me to talk to you?’

‘No. That he thought it would be possible in any circumstances for somebody to give another person advice. He wasn’t that sort of man.’

‘He said exactly what I’ve just told you he said.’

‘Obviously, I don’t think for a moment that you are telling me an untruth. What good would it do you? I just find it astonishing that he surprises me like this after his death. I don’t like it when the dead surprise me.’

That was the end of the conversation. Isabel came and squatted down beside her husband. She ran her fingers over his neck and his cheek. Hanna was surprised that he allowed her to display such tenderness so openly in the presence of a stranger.

I have a chimpanzee, she thought, and I pick ticks off his skin. He has a black woman who caresses his cheek. In a way those two activities are remarkably similar.

She wondered what it would be like to have a black man squatting down by her side, running his fingers over her cheek. She shuddered at the thought. Then she remembered Lundmark’s rough but well-tended hands, and was overcome by sorrow.

Isabel stood up and left the veranda again. She smiled at Hanna as she left. Pimenta watched her go, his eyes screwed up.

‘I can buy the brothel off you,’ he said suddenly. ‘If you decide to leave here. I can pay you in Portuguese currency, or in gold, or in jewels. But I’m a businessman. I won’t give you a friendship price – I’ll try to buy it as cheaply as possible.’

The thought of a potential deal had made him so excited that he tugged too hard with his big toe in the rope loop, and the loop broke. He shouted at the top of his voice for a servant by the name of Harri. He came running up and retied the rope. Hanna could see that this wasn’t the first time the link had broken when Pimenta had got carried away.

‘Why is he called Harri?’ she asked when they were alone again. ‘That’s surely not a Portuguese name, is it?’

‘He comes from Matabeleland, the English colony. He claims that he once saw Cecil Rhodes in evening dress when he was about to have dinner in the middle of the bush. A large number of pack horses had carried dining tables, silver cutlery and a Persian rug that was laid out in the depths of lion and elephant country. I doubt whether he saw all this with his own eyes, but there is no doubt that Cecil Rhodes treated every campsite as if it were the Savoy hotel in London. That man really was crazy. But I’ve taken a liking to Harri. He’s now more faithful than any of my dogs. And as my dogs play such an important role in my life, blacks who behave like that have all the sympathy I can muster.’

‘What would happen if I sold the brothel to you?’

‘I would maintain its good name and reputation. And take good care of our clients.’

‘And what about the women?’

He seemed puzzled by her question. The women? His foot started pulling harder at the fan rope.

‘You mean the whores?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about them?’

‘They grow older. Fall ill. Nobody wants to pay for them any more.’

‘Then we kick them out, of course.’

‘Give them some money so that they can buy a stall in the market. Or build them a house if they need one. Those are conditions I shall impose on any buyer. That’s what we do for them now, and it must continue that way.’

He shook his head almost imperceptibly, and thought carefully before continuing. His foot operating the fan rope was still.

‘Naturally I shall continue with the routines that apply now. Why should I want to change them?’

‘I’m sure you know that many brothel owners in this town treat their girls very brutally. We have always been an exception.’

She realized that the ‘we’ was an exaggeration. It was Senhor Vaz she was speaking about. Her only contribution was not to have changed any of the routines that had always applied before her husband died.

‘It will be as I say,’ he said. ‘I shan’t change anything. Why should I?’

They spoke no more about it. Hanna was invited to a meal consisting of cold soup and a dish of peeled and mashed fruits. She drank two glasses of wine despite the fact that she knew it would give her a headache. Isabel ate as well, but she didn’t say anything. Pimenta talked at length, without any attempt to conceal his satisfaction, about the prominent families in South Africa who had bought his white sheepdogs. He recounted with pride how at least two of his white sheepdogs had bitten to death black men who had tried to burgle the palace-like mansions the dogs were guarding. Isabel didn’t seem to react when he told this story. She had a frozen smile on her face which never seemed to change at all.

Hanna returned to town later in the afternoon. The sun had disappeared behind thunderclouds that were building up over the mountains near the border with Swaziland.

The conversation with Pedro Pimenta had increased her confusion. She was more unsure than ever about what she ought to do. She couldn’t believe that what he had said about not changing anything was true. There was no reason to believe that he would treat the women any differently from the way he treated his white dogs and the crocodiles waiting in his ponds to be killed and skinned. Pimenta was a man who enjoyed throwing living sheep to hungry crocodiles.

She sat in the car with the window open. The wind was pounding the shawl she had over her mouth to avoid having to breathe in the red dust that was swirling around along the road.

For a brief moment she was sorely tempted to instruct the chauffeur to drive her to the South African border: but she didn’t, she merely closed her eyes and dreamt about the clear, brown water of the river.

When she got out of the car in front of her house, Julietta immediately opened the front door and took her hat. Hanna realized that her meeting with Pimenta had given her a sort of answer after all. She was responsible for the women her dead husband had bequeathed to her.

She could only live up to that if at the same time she accepted responsibility for herself.

AFTER A NIGHT
of heavy rain that once again flooded the streets of Lourenço Marques, a man stood shivering at the front door of the brothel, asking to speak to the woman who owned it. The fact that he knew there was now a woman owner and was evidently not a customer made Hanna uneasy. She was becoming more worried about the unknown, not least people wanting to see her without her knowing why.

That same morning she had sat with her bookkeeper and cashier Herr Eber and discussed the costs of repairs that were necessary after two Finnish sailors had run amok. They had smashed most of the furniture in the sofa room where the whores received their customers. Soldiers summoned from the Portuguese garrison had finally managed to handcuff them. Nobody knew what had triggered their furious outburst, least of all the drunken sailors themselves, who couldn’t speak a word of any language other than their odd-sounding Finnish – but on a previous occasion when clients had turned violent, Felicia had said that the cause was almost always the fact that the men had been stricken with impotence and could find no way of expressing their frustration other than trashing the brothel’s furniture and fittings, as if that was the cause of their impotence and therefore needed to be punished.

The captain of the Finnish ship had paid for his two crew members to be released, then hastily set sail for Goa, which was his final destination. The money he had paid barely covered the cost of the repairs, and Hanna had decided to draw up a manual listing the precise cost of every kind of damage that might be done to the brothel on some future occasion.

Judas came in, bowed, and mumbled something about a visitor at the front door. Hanna had never heard his name before: Emanuel Roberto. Judas was told to ask the man to wait until Hanna had concluded her session with Herr Eber, who was very precise but slow. There were times when his pedantic, almost somnambulistic writing with his rasping pen drove her to distraction. But she always managed to control herself. She depended on him for information about how all her businesses were going.

When Herr Eber had finally left her room with a deep bow, she summoned Emanuel Roberto. He seemed to stagger rather than walk normally, and his face was distorted by strange tics. Hanna wondered if he was drunk, and her first impulse was to send him packing without even bothering to discover what he wanted. But when he handed over his business card, his hand shaking, and she saw that he was the deputy director of the Portuguese tax authorities in Lourenço Marques, she realized that she had to treat him with respect. She asked him to take a seat, and ordered coffee and a bowl of fruit. His body secreted an odour that suggested his flesh was in a state of fermentation, and Hanna felt obliged to begin breathing discreetly through her mouth.

Roberto made no attempt to pick up his coffee cup, but instead bent forward and drank in a manner reminiscent of an animal at a waterhole.

Unlike his fidgety body, his voice was steady and distinct.

‘I had the honour of dealing with Senhor Vaz’s tax affairs during all the years he was the owner of this whorehouse,’ he began.

Hanna objected to his use of the word ‘whorehouse’: it seemed out of place in his mouth.

‘According to information I have received from Senhor Andrade,’ he went on, ‘Senhora Vaz is now the owner of this house and the activities which take place here. If I have understood the situation correctly, Senhor Andrade will continue to look after all legal aspects, just as he did in the time of the former owner.’

He paused and looked at her, as if he was expecting a response. Hanna found it difficult not to burst out laughing. The tics all over his face were much too strong a contrast to his solemn tone of voice. The man standing in front of her seemed quite simply to have been wrongly put together.

When she said nothing he opened his briefcase and took out some elegantly written-out documents on stiff paper, adorned with seals and stamps.

‘This is your final tax statement from the last financial year. As your husband was the owner and responsible for all activities for the main part of the financial year, we shall naturally simply present you with our calculations for you to check. But I can tell you that in the current financial year this whorehouse is still the biggest taxpayer in the Portuguese colony. Needless to say it can feel painful for a civil servant to acknowledge that a brothel is the most flourishing and profitable business in the country. Some officials in Lisbon are most upset. Therefore we usually describe your establishment as a hotel. But the outcome is the same, of course: your tax payments exceed those of any other business in the country. All I can say is: congratulations!’

He handed over the documents for her to read. The bureaucratic Portuguese and the ornate handwriting meant that she guessed rather than understood what was written: but the columns of figures were absolutely clear. She reckoned out quickly in her head that she was paying a gigantic sum of Swedish kronor in tax.

The very thought made her feel dizzy. For the first time she understood fully that she had not merely become well off by marrying Senhor Vaz: she was rolling in money. And it was not only in this distant outpost that she was filthy rich: even if she returned to Sweden she would still be extremely wealthy.

Emanuel Roberto stood up and bowed.