Half a Life Read online

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  OUR FRIENDS—or the people we saw on weekends—had their estate houses within a two-hour drive. Most of that would have been on dirt roads, each with its own quirks and dangers (some roads twisting through African villages), and anything much beyond two hours was hard to do. The tropical day was twelve hours long, and the rule in the bush was that people on the road should try to get home by four and never later than five. Four hours' driving, with a three-hour lunch occasion in between, just about fitted into a Sunday; anything more was a test of stamina. So we saw the same people. I thought of them as Ana's friends; I never grew to think of them as my friends. And perhaps Ana had only inherited them with the estate. I suppose the friends could say that they had inherited us in the same way. We all came with the land.

  In the beginning I saw this life as rich and exciting. I liked the houses, the very wide verandahs on all sides (hung with bougainvillaea or some other vine), the cool, dark inner rooms from where the bright light and the garden became beautiful—though the light was harsh when you were in it, full of stinging insects, and the garden was sandy and coarse, burnt away in some parts and in other parts threatening to go back to bush. From within these cool and comfortable houses the climate itself seemed like a blessing, as though the wealth of the people had brought about a change in nature, and the climate had ceased to be the punishing disease-laden thing it had been for Ana's grandfather and others in the early days.

  In the beginning I wished only to be taken into this rich and safe life, so beyond anything I had imagined for myself, and I could be full of nerves when I met new people. I didn't want to see doubt in anyone's eyes. I didn't want questions I wouldn't be able to handle with Ana listening. But the questions were not asked; people kept whatever thoughts they might have had to themselves; among these estate people Ana had authority. And, very quickly, I shed my nerves. But then after a year or so I began to understand—and I was helped in this understanding by my own background—that the world I had entered was only a half-and-half world, that many of the people who were our friends considered themselves, deep down, people of the second rank. They were not fully Portuguese, and that was where their own ambition lay.

  With these half-and-half friends it was as with the town on the coast. It was always an adventure to drive to the town; but after an hour or so there everything went stale. In some such way a morning drive to an estate house for Sunday lunch could seem fresh and full of promise, but after an hour or so in the house with people who had lost their glamour, and whose stories were too well known, there was nothing more to say, and we were glad, all of us, to have the long business of eating and drinking to attend to, until, at three o'clock, when the sun was still high, we could get into our four-wheel drives and start for home.

  These estate friends and neighbours, who had come with the land, we understood only in the broadest of ways. We saw them in the way they chose to present themselves to us; and we saw the same segment of the person each time. They became like people in a play we might have been studying at school, with everyone a “character,” and every character reduced to a few points.

  The Correias, for instance, were proud of their aristocratic name. They were also obsessed with money. They talked about it all the time. They lived with the idea of a great disaster about to happen. They were not sure what this disaster was going to be, whether it was going to be local or worldwide, but they felt it was going to do away with their security both in Africa and in Portugal. So they had bank accounts in London, New York and Switzerland. The idea was that when the bad time came they would have an “envelope” of ready money in at least one of these places. The Correias spoke about these bank accounts to everybody. Sometimes they seemed simple-minded; sometimes they seemed to be boasting. But really what they wanted was to infect others with their vision of coming disaster, to start a little panic among their friends in the bush, if only to feel that in their own caution with the bank accounts they had been far-sighted, and ahead of everybody else.

  Ricardo was a big, military-looking man with his grey hair in a military-style crewcut. He liked practising his English with me; he had a heavy South African accent. The big man lived with a great personal grief. His daughter had had promise as a singer. Everyone in the colony who heard her thought that she was special and had it in her to be a star in Europe. Ricardo, who was not a rich man, sold some land and sent the girl to Lisbon to be trained. There she had begun to live with an African from Angola, the Portuguese colony on the other side of the continent. It was the end of the girl's singing, the end of her connection with her family, the end of her father's pride and hope; Ricardo destroyed all the tapes he had of his daughter singing. Some people said that he had pushed his daughter too hard, and that the girl had given up on her singing before she met the African. At one Sunday lunch our host began to play a tape of the girl singing. This was done (as Ana and I knew, having been told beforehand) not to wound Ricardo, but to honour him and his daughter, and to help him with his grief. Our host had recently found the unmarked tape in his house; it was something he had made himself and forgotten about. And now we all listened to the girl singing in Italian and then in German, in the middle of the hot day, the light very bright outside. I found it moving (though I knew nothing about singing) that this kind of talent and ambition had come to someone living here. And Ricardo didn't make a scene. He looked down at the ground, crying, smiling with old pride, while his daughter sang on the tape with the voice and hopes of many years before.

  The Noronhas were our blue-bloods, pure Portuguese. He was small and thin, and said to be a man of birth, but I don't know how true that was. She was deformed or disabled in some way—I never heard how, and never wanted to ask—and when she came among us she came in a wheelchair, which her husband pushed. They came into our half-and-half world with the gentlest air of condescension. They knew the country, and they knew where they stood and where we stood. It was possible to feel that they were breaking the rules only because the lady was disabled and had to be humoured. But the fact was that they came among us because of Mrs. Noronha's special gifts. She was a “mystic.” Her husband, the man of birth, was proud of this side of his wife. When they made their entry at an estate-house Sunday lunch he pushed her big wheelchair with a noticeable arrogance in his thin, peevish face. No one, not even Ana, ever told me directly that Mrs. Noronha had this mystic gift. The gift was simply allowed to make itself felt, and it did so in such quiet ways that for the first few times I noticed nothing. To spot the gift at work, you had to know about it. Someone might say, for instance, “I want to go to Lisbon next March.” Mrs. Noronha, hunched up in her chair, would say softly, to no one in particular, “It's not a good time. September would be better.” She would say no more, offer no explanation; and we wouldn't hear any more about a trip to Lisbon in March. And if—just for the sake of the illustration—if I, ignorant at that time of the lady's gifts, had said, “But March in Lisbon would be lovely,” Mr. Noronha would say, with distaste for the contradiction showing in his watery eyes, “There are reasons why it's not a good time,” and his wife would look away, with no expression on her pale face. I felt that her mysticism, together with her disablement and her husband's birth, made her a tyrant. She could say anything; she could be as harsh and disdainful as she pleased; and for three or four or five good reasons no one could question her. I could see that from time to time she had spasms of pain, yet I couldn't help feeling that as soon as she and her husband got back home she might get out of her chair and be perfectly all right. She gave full mystical consultations. They were exclusive and not cheap; and these visitations among the half-and-half estate people, who were susceptible in more than one way, helped beat up custom.

  Ana and I would also have had our characters. And, since no one can really see himself, I am sure that we would have been surprised and perhaps even wounded—just as the Correias and Ricardo and the Noronhas would have been surprised and wounded—by what the others saw.


  This style of estate life would have begun in the 1920s, after the wartime boom. It would have become well established during the Second World War. So it was comparatively new; it could have been contained within the lifetime or even adulthood of a man. It didn't have much longer to go now; and I wonder whether in our circle we hadn't all (and not only the theatrical Correias) been granted some unsettling intimation, which we might have brushed aside, that our bluff in Africa would one day be called. Though I don't think anyone could have guessed that the world of concrete was going to be so completely overwhelmed by the frail old world of straw.

  Sometimes we went for Sunday lunch to the rough weekend restaurant on the coast. It offered fresh seafood simply done, and it began to do well. It became less rough. When we went one Sunday we found the floor being tiled, in a pretty blue and yellow arabesque pattern that made us exclaim. The tiler was a big light-eyed mulatto man. For some reason—perhaps for not finishing the job on time—he was being abused and shouted at by the Portuguese owner. With us, and his other customers, the owner was as civil as always; but then, switching character and mood, he went back to abusing the tiler. At every shout the big light-eyed man lowered his head, as though he had received a blow. He was sweating; it seemed to be with more than heat. He went on with his delicate work, laying out the thin, fast-drying mortar, and then pressing and lightly tapping each pretty Portuguese tile into place. The sweat rolled down his pale-brown forehead and from time to time he shook it like tears from his eyes. He was in shorts; they were tight over his muscular thighs as he squatted. Little springs and twists of coarse hair were on his thighs and on his face, where close shaving had pock-marked the skin. He never replied to the shouts of the owner, whom he could so easily have knocked down. He just kept on working.

  Ana and I talked afterwards about what we had seen. Ana said, “The tiler is illegitimate. His mother would be African. His father was almost certainly a big Portuguese landowner. The restaurant man would know that. The rich Portuguese put their illegitimate mulatto children to learning certain trades. Electrician, mechanic, metal-worker, carpenter, tiler. Though most of the tilers here come from the north of Portugal.”

  I said nothing more to Ana. But whenever I remembered the big sweating man with the abused light eyes, carrying the shame of his birth on his face like a brand, I would think, “Who will rescue that man? Who will avenge him?”

  In time the emotion became mixed with other things. But the picture stayed. It was my own intimation of what was to come. And when, in my third year, the news began to leak into our controlled newspapers of big happenings on the other side of the continent, I was half ready for it.

  The news was too big to suppress. The authorities might have wanted in the beginning to keep it quiet; but then they went the other way, and began to play up the horror. There had been an uprising in one region, and a mass killing of Portuguese in the countryside. Two hundred, three hundred, perhaps even four hundred, had died, and they had been done to death with machetes. I imagined a landscape like ours (though I knew this to be wrong), and Africans like ours, their huts and villages and cassava-and-corn plantings in the spaces between the big estates: the repeating neat acres of cashew and sisal, the great treeless cattle ranches looking like just-cleared wilderness, with the black trunks of big trees that had been felled or burnt to deny shelter to the poisonous flies that preyed on cattle. Order and logic; the land being made softer; but the picture I had had on my first day, of small-boned people always walking beside the road, had seemed dream-like and threatening, telling me that the place I had come to was very far away. Now it seemed prophetic.

  But the Africans around us seemed not to have heard anything. There was no change in their manner. Not that day or the next, not the next week or the next month. Correia, the man with the bank accounts, said that the ordinariness was ominous; some terrible jacquerie was preparing here as well. But the ordinariness stayed with us for the rest of the year, and seemed likely to endure. And all the precautions we had been taking—having guns and clubs to hand in the bedroom: futile if there had been anything like a general insurrection, or even a revolt in the quarters—began to seem excessive.

  That was when I learned to use a gun. Word came to us and our neighbours, discreetly, that we could get instruction at the police shooting range in the town. The little garrison didn't have that facility, so unready was it for a war. Our neighbours were eager, but I didn't particularly want to go to the police range. I had never wanted to handle guns. There hadn't been anything like a cadet corps at the mission school; and my worry—greater than my worry about Africans—was that I was going to make a fool of myself before important people. But then, to my great surprise, I was entranced the first time I looked down a gun-sight with a finger on the trigger. It seemed to me the most private, the most intense moment of conversation with oneself, so to speak, with that split-second of right decision coming and going all the time, almost answering the movements of one's mind. It wasn't at all what I was expecting. I feel that the religious excitement that is supposed to come to people who meditate on the flame of a single candle in an otherwise dark room was no greater than the pleasure I felt when I looked down a gun-sight and became very close to my own mind and consciousness. In a second the scale of things could alter and I could be lost in something like a private universe. It was strange, being on the shooting range in Africa and thinking in a new way of my father and his brahmin ancestors, starveling servants of the great temple. I bought a gun. I set up targets in the grounds of Ana's grandfather's house and practised whenever I could. Our neighbours began to look at me with a new regard.

  The government took its time, but then things began to move. The garrison was increased. There were new barracks, three storeys high, in bright white concrete. The cantonment or military area spread, plain concrete on bare sand. A board with various military emblems said that we had become the headquarters of a new military command. The life of the town altered.

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  THE GOVERNMENT was authoritarian. But most of the time we didn't think of it like that. We felt the government to be far away, something in the capital, something in Lisbon. It sat lightly on us here. I worried about it only at sisal-cutting time, when we made our requisitions from the prisons, and they, for a consideration, sent convicts (properly guarded) to cut sisal. Cutting sisal was dangerous work. Village Africans didn't want to do it. Sisal is like a bigger aloe or pineapple plant, or like a giant spiky green rose, four or five feet high, with thick pulpy blades instead of petals. The blades have cutting serrated edges, frightful to run your hand down the wrong way, and are very thick at the base. They are awkward and dangerous to handle and hard to hack away. The long black point at the end of a sisal blade is needle-sharp and poisonous. Rats are plentiful in a sisal plantation; they like the shade and feed on sisal pulp; and venomous snakes come to feed on the rats, swallowing them whole, and very slowly. It is frightening to see half a rat, head or tail, sticking out of a snake's distended mouth and still apparently living. A sisal plantation is a terrible place, and it was a rule (or just our practice) that a medical nurse should be standing by with medicines and snake-bite serum when sisal was being cut. Such dangerous work; and only five per cent of sisal pulp became sisal fibre; and that fibre was cheap and was used in ordinary things like rope and baskets and sandal soles. Without the convicts it would have been hard to harvest our sisal. Even at that time synthetic fibre was beginning to replace it. I didn't mind at all.

  There had been no challenge to our authoritarian but easygoing government for many years, and it had grown strangely lazy. In his great security the ruler had grown to feel that the details of governing were a burden, or so it appeared; and he had farmed out or leased out important governmental activities to eager, energetic and loyal people. Those people became very rich; and the richer they became the more loyal they were, and the better they did the jobs that had been farmed out to them. So there was a kind of rough logic and effectiveness
in this principle of government.

  Some such principle was at work now in the growth of the garrison and the development of our town. The peace was continuing. People no longer lived with the idea of danger. Yet year by year the war money came. It touched us all. We felt rewarded and virtuous. Everybody counted his gain many times. And then it came out that the new money had been touching our friend Correia more than anybody else in our group, sly Correia who for years had tried to frighten us with his vision of disaster, and had many bank accounts abroad. Correia had been brought into contact with some great man in the capital, and (while still running his estate) he had become the agent in our town or province, or perhaps even the country, for a number of foreign manufacturers of unlikely-sounding technical things. In the beginning Correia liked to boast of his closeness to the great man, who was a proper Portuguese. The great man clearly had a lot to do with Correia's agencies, and we talked among ourselves in a mocking, jealous way about the extraordinary relationship. Had Correia sought out the great man? Or had the great man, for some special reason, and through some intermediary (perhaps a merchant in the capital) chosen Correia? It didn't matter, though, how it had come about. Correia had scored. He was way above us.

  He talked of trips to the capital (by air, and not by the dingy old coasting ships most of us still used); he talked of lunches and dinners with the great man, and once even of a dinner at the great man's house. But then after a while Correia talked less of the great man. He began to pretend, when he was with us, that his business ideas were his own; and we had to pretend with him. Though when he recited the foreign companies he was involved with, and the technical-sounding things he was importing, things that the army or the town might some day need, I found myself amazed at how little I knew of the modern world. And amazed at the same time at the ease with which Correia (who really knew only about estate work) was picking his way through it.