Half a Life Page 13

  The letter, awkwardly addressed, passed from hand to hand in Africa, and then awkwardly stamped, came one day in a small red mail-cart to its destination in Charlottenburg. And six weeks later Willie himself was there. Old snow lay on the pavements, with paths of yellow sand and salt in the middle, and scatterings of dog dirt on the snow. Sarojini lived in a big, dark flat up two flights of stairs. Wolf wasn't there. Willie hadn't met him and wasn't looking forward to meeting him. Sarojini said simply, “He's with his other family.” And Willie was happy to leave it like that, to probe no further.

  The flat seemed to have been neglected for years, and it made Willie think, with a sinking heart, of the estate house he had just left. Sarojini said, “It hasn't been decorated since before the war.” The paint was old and smoky, many layers thick, one pale colour upon another, with decorative details on plaster and wood clogged up, and in many places the old paint layers had chipped through to dark old wood. But while Ana's house was full of her family's heavy furniture, Sarojini's big flat was half empty. The few pieces of furniture were basic and second-hand and seemed to have been chosen with no particular care. The plates and cups and knives and spoons were all cheap. Everything had a makeshift air. It was no pleasure at all to Willie to eat the food Sarojini cooked in the small stale-smelling kitchen at the back.

  She had given up the style of sari and cardigan and socks. She was in jeans and a heavy sweater and her manner was brisker and even more authoritative than Willie remembered. Willie thought, “All of this was buried in the girl I had left behind at home. None of this would have come out if the German hadn't come and taken her away. If he hadn't come, would she and all her soul have just rotted to nothing?” She was attractive now—something impossible to think of in the ashram days—and gradually from things she said or let drop Willie understood that she had had many lovers since he had last seen her.

  Within days of coming to Berlin he had begun to lean on this strength of his sister. After Africa, he liked the idea of the great cold, and she took him out walking, treacherous though the pavements were, and shaky though he still was. Sometimes when they were in restaurants Tamil boys came in selling long-stalked roses. They were unsmiling, boys with a mission, raising funds for the great Tamil war far away, and they hardly looked at Willie or his sister. They were of another generation, but Willie saw himself in them. He thought, “That was how I appeared in London. That is how I appear now. I am not as alone as I thought.” Then he thought, “But I am wrong. I am not like them. I am forty-one, in middle life. They are fifteen or twenty years younger, and the world has changed. They have proclaimed who they are and they are risking everything for it. I have been hiding from myself. I have risked nothing. And now the best part of my life is over.”

  Sometimes in the evenings they saw Africans in the blue light of telephone kiosks pretending to talk, but really just occupying space, taking a kind of shelter. Sarojini said, “The East Germans fly them into East Berlin, and then they come here.” Willie thought, “How many of us there now are! How many like me! Can there be room for us all?”

  He asked Sarojini, “What happened to my friend Percy Cato? You wrote about him a long time ago.”

  Sarojini said, “He was doing well with Che and the others. Then some kind of rage possessed him. He had left Panama as a child and he had a child's idea of the continent. When he went back he began to see the place differently. He became full of hatred for the Spaniards. You could say he reached the Pol Pot position.”

  Willie said, “What is the Pol Pot position?”

  “He thought the Spaniards had raped and looted the continent in the most savage way, and no good could come out of the place until all the Spaniards or part-Spaniards were killed. Until that happened revolution itself was a waste of time. It is a difficult idea, but actually it's interesting, and liberation movements will have to take it on board some day. Latin America can break your heart. But Percy didn't know how to present his ideas, and he could forget he was working with Spaniards. He could have been more tactful. I don't think he cared to explain himself too much. They eased him out. Behind his back they began calling him the negrito. In the end he went back to Jamaica. The word was that he was working for the revolution there, but then we found out that he was running a night-club for tourists on the north coast.”

  Willie said, “He wasn't a drinking man, but his heart was always in that work. Being smooth with the smooth and rough with the rough.”

  And just as once his father had told Willie about his life, so now, over many days of the Berlin winter, in cafés and restaurants and the half-empty flat, Willie began slowly to tell Sarojini of his life in Africa.

  *

  THE FIRST DAY at Ana's estate house (Willie said) was as long as you can imagine. Everything in the house—the colours, the wood, the furniture, the smells—was new to me. Everything in the bathroom was new to me—all the slightly antiquated fittings, and the old geyser for heating water. Other people had designed that room, had had those fittings installed, had chosen those white wall tiles—some of them cracked now, the crack-lines and the grouting black with mould or dirt, the walls themselves a little uneven. Other people had become familiar with all those things, had considered them part of the comfort of the house. In that room especially I felt a stranger.

  Somehow I got through the day, without Ana or anyone else guessing at my state of mind, the profound doubt that had been with me ever since we had left England. And then it was night. A generator came on. The power it provided went up and down. The bulbs all over the house and the outbuildings constantly dimmed and brightened, and the light they gave seemed to answer a pulse beat, now filling a room, now shrinking back to the walls. I waited all the time that first night for the light to steady itself. At about ten the lights dipped very low. Some minutes later they dipped again, and a while after that they went out. The generator whined down and I was aware of the noise it had been making. There was a ringing in my ears, then something like the sound of crickets in the night, then silence and the dark, the two coming together. Afterwards the pale yellow lights of oil lamps could be seen in the servants' quarters at the back of the house.

  I felt very far away from everything I had known, a stranger in that white concrete house with all the strange old Portuguese colonial furniture, the unfamiliar old bathroom fittings; and when I lay down to sleep I saw again—for longer than I had seen them that day—the fantastic rock cones, the straight asphalt road, and the Africans walking.

  I drew comfort from Ana, her strength and her authority. And just as now, as you may have noticed, Sarojini, I lean on you, so in those days, ever since she had agreed to my being with her in Africa, I leaned on Ana. I believed in a special way in her luck. Some of this had to do with the very fact that she was a woman who had given herself to me. I believed that she was in some essential way guided and protected, and as long as I was with her no harm could come to me. It may be because of something in our culture that, in spite of appearances, men are really looking for women to lean on. And, of course, if you are not used to governments or the law or society or even history being on your side, then you have to believe in your luck or your star or you will die. I know that you have inherited our mother's uncle's radical genes and have different ideas. I am not going to argue with you. I just want to tell you why I was able to follow someone I hardly knew to a colonial country in Africa of which I knew little except that it had difficult racial and social ideas. I loved Ana and I believed in her luck. The two ideas went together. And since I know, Sarojini, that you have your own ideas about love as well, I will explain. Ana was important to me because I depended on her for my idea of being a man. You know what I mean and I think we can call it love. So I loved Ana, for the great gift she had brought me, and to an equal degree I believed in her luck. I would have gone anywhere with her.

  In the sitting room one morning, in that first or second week, I found a little African maid. She was very thin, shiny-faced, and in a flimsy
cotton dress. She said, in an overfamiliar but rather stylish way, “So you are Ana's London man.” She put her broom against the high upholstered armchair, sat on the chair as on a throne, both her forearms resting flat on the worn upholstered arms of the chair, and began to engage me in polite conversation. She said, as if speaking from a textbook, “Did you have a pleasant journey?” And: “Have you had a chance to see something of the country? What do you think of the country?” I had been studying the language for some time and knew enough of it now to talk in the same stilted way to the little maid. Ana came in. She said, “I wondered who it was.” The little maid dropped her grand manner, got up from the chair and took up her broom again. Ana said, “Her father is Júlio. He is the carpenter. He drinks too much.”

  I had met Júlio. He was a man of mixed race with smiling unreliable eyes, and he lived in the servants' quarters. His drinking was a joke there, and I was to learn not to be too frightened by it. He was a weekend drinker, and often late in the afternoon on a Friday or Saturday or Sunday his African wife would run out to the garden of the main house, quite alone in her terror, moving backwards or sideways step by step, her African cloth slipping off her shoulder, watching all the time for the drunken man in the quarters. This could go on until the light faded. Then the generator would come on, drowning everything with its vibration. The unsteady electric light would further alter the aspect of things; the crisis would pass; and in the quarters in the morning there would be peace again, the passions of the evening washed away.

  But it couldn't have been much of a joke for Júlio's daughter. She spoke in her simple and open way of her home life, in those two rooms at the back. She said to me, “When my father gets drunk he beats my mother. Sometimes he beats me too. Sometimes it's so bad I can't sleep. Then I walk up and down the room until I get tired. Sometimes I walk all night.” And every night after that, whenever I got into bed, I thought for a second or two about the little maid in the quarters. Another time she said to me, “We eat the same food every day.” I didn't know whether she was complaining or boasting or simply speaking a fact about her African ways. In those early days, until local people made me think differently about African girls, I used to worry about Júlio's daughter, seeing myself in her, and wondering how, with all her feelings for fineness as I saw them, she was going to manage in the wilderness in which she found herself.

  Of course it wasn't wilderness. It looked open and wild, but it had all been charted and parcelled out, and every thirty minutes or so on those dirt roads, if you were driving in a suitable vehicle, you came to an estate house, which was more or less like Ana's. Something in newish white concrete with a wide, bougainvillaea-hung verandah all around, and with additions at the back.

  We went one Sunday, not long after we had arrived, to a lunch at one of those neighbours of Ana's. It was a big affair. There were mud-splashed Jeeps and Land Rovers and other four-wheel drives on the sandy open space in front of the house. The African servants wore white uniforms, buttoned at the neck. After drinks people separated according to their inclination, some sitting at the big table in the dining room, others sitting at the smaller tables on the verandah, where the tangled old bougainvillaea vines softened the light. I had had no idea what these people would be like and what they would think of me. Ana hadn't talked of the matter and, following her example, I hadn't talked of it to her. I found now that there was no special reaction to me. It was curiously deflating. I was expecting some recognition of my extraordinariness and there was nothing. Some of these estate-owners appeared, in fact, to have no conversation; it was as though the solitude of their lives had taken away that faculty. When eating time came they just sat and ate, husband and wife side by side, not young, not old, people in between in age, eating and not talking, not looking round, very private, as though they were in their own houses. Towards the end of the lunch two or three of these eating women beckoned the servants and talked to them, and after a while the servants came with take-away portions of the lunch in paper bags. It appeared to be a tradition of the place. It might have been that they had come from far, and wanted to have food to eat when they got back home.

  Racially they were varied, from what looked like pure white to a deep brown. A number of them were of my father's complexion, and this might have been one reason why they seemed to accept me. Ana said later, “They don't know what to make of you.” There were Indians in the country; I wasn't an absolute exotic. There were quite a few Indian traders. They ran cheap shops and socially never stepped outside their families. There was an old and large Goan community, people originally of India, from the very old Portuguese colony there, who had come to this place in Africa to work as clerks and accountants in the civil service. They spoke Portuguese with a special accent. I couldn't be mistaken for a Goan. My Portuguese was poor and for some reason I spoke it with an English accent. So people couldn't place me and they let me be. I was Ana's London man, as the little housemaid had said.

  About the people at the lunch Ana told me afterwards, “They are the second-rank Portuguese. That is how they are considered officially, and that is how they consider themselves. They are second rank because most of them have an African grandparent, like me.” In those days to be even a second-rank Portuguese was to have a kind of high status, and just as at the lunch they kept their heads down and ate, so in the colonial state they kept their heads down and made what money they could. That was to change in a couple of years, but at the moment that regulated colonial world seemed rock solid to everybody. And that was the world in which, for the first time, I found a complete acceptance.

  Those were the days of my intensest love-making with Ana. I loved her—in that room that had been her grandfather's and her mother's, with a view of the nervous branching and the fine leaves of the rain tree—for the luck and liberation she had brought me, the undoing of fear, the granting to me of full manhood. I loved, as always, the seriousness of her face at those moments. There was a little curl to her hair just as it sprang out of her temples. In that curl I saw her African ancestry, and loved her for that too. And one day I realised that for all of the past week I had not thought about my fear of losing language and expression, the fear almost of losing the gift of speech.

  The estate grew cotton and cashews and sisal. I knew nothing about these crops. But there was a manager and there were overseers. They lived about ten minutes away from the main house, down their own little dirt road, in a cluster of similar little white concrete bungalows with corrugated-iron roofs and small verandahs. Ana had said that the estate needed a man, and I knew, without being told, that my only function was to reinforce Ana's authority with these men. I never tried to do more than that, and the overseers accepted me. I knew that in accepting me they were really respecting Ana's authority. So we all got on. I began to learn. I took pleasure in a way of life that was far from anything I had known or envisaged for myself.

  I used to worry in the beginning about the overseers. They didn't seem to have much of a life. They were mixed-race people, born in the country most of them, and they lived in that row of small concrete houses. Only the concrete of their houses separated the overseers from the Africans all around. African thatch and wattle was ordinary; concrete stood for dignity. But concrete wasn't a true barrier. These overseers lived, really, with the Africans. No other way was open to them. I used to think, trying to put myself in their place, that with their mixed background they might have felt the need of something more. There was the town on the coast. It offered a different kind of life, but it was more than an hour away in daylight and a good deal more after dark. It was a place only for quick excursions. To work on the estate was to live on the estate, and it was known that many of the overseers had African families. Whatever face these men showed us, the life waiting for them at home, in their concrete houses, was an African life at which I could only guess.

  One day, when I was driving with one of the overseers to a new cotton field, I began to talk to the man about his life. We we
re in a Land Rover, and we had left the dirt road and were driving through bush, avoiding the bigger boggy dips and the dead branches of felled trees. I was expecting to hear some story of unfulfilled ambition from the overseer, some story of things going wrong, expecting to catch some little resentment of people better off and in the world outside. But there was no resentment. The overseer thought himself blessed. He had tried living in Portugal; he had even tried living in a South African town; he had come back. He hit the steering wheel of the Land Rover with the heel of his palm and said, “I can't live anywhere else.” When I asked why, he said, “This. What we are doing now. You can't do this in Portugal.” Land Rovers and four-wheel drives were new to me; I was still excited myself to drive off a road and pick a way through hummocky wet bush. But I felt that the overseer had a larger appreciation of the life of the place; his surrender was more than the simple sexual thing it seemed. And when I next saw the mildewed white staff bungalows I looked at them with a new respect. So bit by bit I learned. Not only about cotton and sisal and cashew, but also about the people.

  I got used to the road to the town. I knew the giant rock cones along the way. Each cone had its own shape and was a marker for me. Some cones rose clean out of the ground; some had a rock debris at their base where a face of the cone had flaked off; some cones were grey and bare; some had a yellowish lichen on one side; on the ledges of some which had flaked there was vegetation, sometimes even a tree. The cones were always new. It was always an adventure, after a week or two on the estate, to drive to the town. For an hour or so it always seemed new: the colonial shops, the rustic, jumbled shop windows, the African loaders sitting outside the shops waiting for a loading job; the paved streets, the cars and trucks, the garages; the mixed population, with the red-faced young Portuguese conscripts of our little garrison giving a strange air of Europe to the place. The garrison was as yet very small; and the barracks were still small and plain and unthreatening, low two-storey buildings in white or grey concrete, of a piece with the rest of the town. Sometimes there was a new café to go to. But cafés didn't last in our town. The conscripts didn't have money, and the townspeople preferred to live privately.