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.
“I’ll leave my papers here,” he said. “If you have any points to raise, please contact me about them within the next fourteen days. But I think I can assure you that everything is in the best of order, correctly calculated and recorded.”
He bowed once again, then left the room. Hanna remained seated on her chair for a long time. When she finally stood up she had made up her mind to return to her house on the hill and think seriously about what all this wealth meant for her future.
When she came out into the big sitting room she saw one of the women disappearing into her room with an early customer.
She only saw the man briefly, from behind, as the door closed.
Nevertheless she was certain. It was Captain Svartman who had gone into the room.
50
The peacock screeched. It was standing in the middle of the empty street, bathed in sunshine streaming in through the gap between two houses while Indian traders slowly, almost casually opened up their stalls down at street level. All around the peacock was shadow. It seemed to be standing on a stage, illuminated by a single spotlight.
It screeched once again, then started pecking calmly at the invisible seeds that only a peacock’s eye could see.
Hanna had stopped dead. The fact that Captain Svartman was in her brothel confused her. She didn’t know if what she was feeling was joy at seeing somebody from her earlier existence, or if she was scared of actually meeting him.
But most of all she was astonished. For her, Captain Svartman had never been anything other than the resolute captain whose only passion had been the potted plants in his cabin that nobody except him was allowed to tend. She could never have imagined that he would visit whores in an African port. Perhaps he had come so early in the morning so that there was a minimal risk of his meeting anybody from the ship of which he was in command?
The thought of the ship moved her to act. She left the hotel, took with her one of the black watchmen who had been squatting down asleep in the shade outside the front door, and hurried down to the harbour. The Indian traders who were busy rolling up the blinds in front of their stalls eyed her inquisitively, but were careful not to make it obvious. Hanna had realized a long time ago that many of them knew who she was. She sometimes felt embarrassingly pleased at no longer being a nobody. That was why she was careful to dress smartly for her daily walks between her house and the brothel.
Even during the short time she was married to Senhor Vaz she had had two seamstresses who made her clothes for her. Now she had employed another one who, somewhat mysteriously, had ended up in Africa after a long life in the most renowned circles of Parisian fashion. There were rumours of embezzlement, and perhaps something even worse, but she was still a skilled dressmaker, and Hanna didn’t hesitate to pay her whatever she asked for.
Hanna was out of breath by the time she got to the harbour. Berthed at one of the quays furthest out was the ship she knew so well. She stopped in the shadow of one of the enormous cranes that had recently been installed in the harbour. Black labourers in ragged trousers and bare feet were standing in a circle around a white foreman who was assigning work. Hanna had the feeling that he was some kind of priest, preaching the religion of slavery to the black workers.
But her attention was concentrated on the ship. She was filled with contradictory thoughts and feelings. As they were unloading all their cargo of timber in Lourenço Marques, Hanna assumed that must mean the ship was now on its way back to Sweden. She would be able to go back home as a paying passenger, leave everything behind her, sell the brothel that very day. She would obviously lose money on such a deal, but she would still be a very rich woman.
The sight of the ship also put her possible flight in a different perspective. What did she have to return to? Surely her life had turned out to be something she could never have dreamt of?
She returned to the brothel, more unsure than ever about what she wanted. When she entered through the front door she still wasn’t sure whether she would reveal her presence to Captain Svartman. She headed for the bench under the jacaranda tree, but before she could get there the door to Felicia’s room opened, Captain Svartman came out, and suddenly they were face to face.
At first he didn’t seem to recognize her. He paused for a second. Then he knew.
“Are you here?” he said.
“I could say the same about you,” she said. “Is Captain Svartman here?”
They looked each other up and down. Hanna felt that she had the upper hand, because he couldn’t possibly know what she was doing there in the brothel. He would probably jump to the obvious conclusion—that she was there to give pleasure to men in return for money. But surely he would find that difficult to believe?
Hanna felt she ought to make it clear that any such suspicion was unfounded. She shook her head.
“Things are not what you probably think,” she said.
She beckoned him to follow her out to the jacaranda tree and the wooden bench. Zé had materialized from nowhere and sat down at the piano. He said nothing but was obviously longing for Carlos, who was probably his only friend now that Senhor Vaz’s heart had stopped beating. Hanna thought he probably regarded her as an evil person who had robbed him of his brother and also the chimpanzee he could always turn to.
Hanna and Captain Svartman drank tea under the jacaranda tree.
“I wonder who is most surprised,” she said. “You at seeing me, or me at seeing you?”
“I obviously wond
ered what happened,” said Svartman. “We spent a whole day looking for you. But then we were forced to continue our voyage.”
“I had the constant feeling that Lundmark was still there on board the ship,” she said. “I couldn’t cope with that. There was no other way out for me.”
Svartman nodded thoughtfully. Then he started to smile.
“I’m very pleased, of course. Very glad to see that you are still alive.”
“A friend of mine was married to the owner of this brothel,” she said. “He died. She is very ill. I look after the money that’s made here—but I hate the whole business, of course, and only do it for the sake of my friend.”
Did he believe her? She couldn’t be sure. The ring she had on her left hand could be a leftover from her marriage to Lundmark.
“What exactly happened?” Captain Svartman asked when he had thought about what she said. It still seemed as if he couldn’t really grasp the fact that he had met again the third mate’s widow, who had jumped ship.
“I booked into a hotel to start with. I had enough money to do that. Then I ended up looking after a house for an elderly man. But all the time I’ve been looking forward to the moment when I can go back home.”
“What prevents you from doing that?”
“My sorrow at having lost Lundmark. And my fear of the sea.”
“I think I can understand,” said Svartman doubtfully.
As nothing she had said was true, Hanna tried to change the subject. She returned to the moment when she had left the ship under cover of night.
“What did you think had happened?” she asked.
“I thought you might have drowned.”
“Drowned by accident, or drowned myself?”
“I suppose I considered both possibilities. But needless to say there were others on board who made wilder guesses. That you had fallen into the hands of white slave traders, for instance. Or been killed by a bite from a poisonous snake that had managed to slither on board, and that you had fallen overboard as the poison began to work.”
“But nobody suspected that I had left the ship of my own free will?”
Svartman sounded depressed when he replied.
“I have to admit that not even I could envisage that possibility. And after all, during my many years as captain I’ve seen lots of sailors disappear in ports all over the world.”
She asked about the voyage, and the return route: had they called at Lourenço Marques on the way home as well? Svartman told her they had gone straight to Port Elizabeth to pick up some mixed cargo bound for the French port of Rouen.
She started asking about Halvorsen and the other sailors. And about Forsman and Berta. He answered briefly and suddenly seemed to be in a hurry. Hanna gathered that he didn’t want to stay at the brothel any longer than necessary. His visit to Felicia had been a secret, and nobody in the crew must get to know about it.
Hanna was disappointed to discover that Captain Svartman was just like all other men. They concealed the truth about themselves, the things they did in secret, under cover of darkness.
But was she any better herself? Didn’t she also go sneaking around? They were simply sitting there under the jacaranda tree exchanging half-truths.
“How long are you staying here?” she asked.
“Until tomorrow.”
“I’d like to visit the ship. And naturally, I won’t mention the fact that I met you here.”
She thought she could detect a doubtful look in his eye as he tried to decide whether or not to believe her. But she looked him straight in the eye. She was his equal now, no longer the scared cook who had curtseyed deeply to him almost a year ago.
She stood up and brought the conversation to a close. She was setting him free.
They said goodbye outside in the street.
“This afternoon will be okay,” said Svartman. “I have business to see to this morning, and I must keep an eye on the bunkering.”
The peacock was nowhere to be seen. The street was completely deserted in the blazing sunshine. She stretched out her hand.
“I’ll come this afternoon, then,” she said. “If that’s all right with you.”
“I’ll be there.”
He bowed, then seemed to hesitate.
“Peltonen is dead,” he said. “He fell overboard one night off the Egyptian coast. Nobody noticed he was missing until the next morning.”
“It was Peltonen who measured the depth of Lundmark’s grave,” said Hanna. “Nineteen hundred thirty-five metres.”
Svartman nodded. Then turned and walked away. He turned off into the first side street.
So he’s not taking the shortest route to the harbour, she thought. He turned off as soon as possible so that I wouldn’t be able to see him.
She suddenly wondered if they had seen any icebergs.
Then she was driven back home to her house on the hill, and sat down to write the letters that couldn’t wait.
51
It was a shock to her when she read through the letter she had written to Elin. Instead of writing about the voyage, she had written something more like a saga. The only link with reality was her description of how she had met Lundmark, married him, and then been forced to watch as he was buried at sea. But she had left out completely most of what had happened afterwards—her jumping ship and meeting the brothel owner Senhor Vaz. She merely wrote that she was in Africa, in good health, and on her way home. As an explanation of why she hadn’t completed the voyage to Australia and hadn’t come back to Sweden on the Lovisa, she wrote rather vaguely that she had been afflicted with a serious but short-lived illness, and had been perfectly healthy again for ages.
She put the letter down in disgust. It was only now that she realized the full consequences of what Captain Svartman had said. What Forsman had been told when the ship docked in Sundsvall after returning from Australia. And what Elin must eventually have been told in her house in the remote mountains.
Her daughter was dead. For a long time Elin had been forced to live with the sad news that Hanna had died in a foreign country. Nobody knew what had happened to her, or where her grave was. Always assuming that there was a grave.
The thought made Hanna cry. She suddenly realized that Julietta was standing in the half-open doorway, watching her. In a flash of rage Hanna grabbed Senhor Vaz’s old bronze paperweight and hurled it at her. Julietta dodged it, and hastily closed the door.
Hanna wanted to cry in peace. But it seemed that there was no time even for that. She tore the letter up and wrote a new one, her hand shaking.
“I’m alive,” she wrote. That was the most important thing. “I’m alive.” She repeated those words on almost every other line. The whole letter was a sort of long request to be taken at her word. She was alive, she wasn’t dead as Captain Svartman had thought. She had gone ashore because she was devastated by grief, and then stayed there when the ship continued its voyage to Australia. But she would soon be coming home. And she was alive. That was the most important thing of all: she was still alive.
That was the letter she wanted to write to Elin. And she repeated the same words, albeit in less emotional style, in the other two letters she wrote that day. One was to Forsman, the other to Berta. She was alive, and she would soon be coming home again.
Eventually the three letters lay on the desk in front of her, meticulously fitted into envelopes that she carefully sealed with the names of the recipients written as neatly as she could possibly manage. She and Berta had taught themselves to read and write—with difficulty, but even so it was an important step away from poverty: she still found it difficult to write, and was unsure about spelling and word order. But she didn’t bother about that. The letter to Elin would be the most important message she had ever received in her life. One of her daughters had returned from the dead.
In the afternoon she summoned Andrade’s car and was driven to the harbour. She had put on her best clothes, and spent an age in front of the big mirror in the hall next
to the front door. On the way to the harbour she suddenly had an idea, and asked the chauffeur to make a detour and stop outside Picard’s photographic studio. Picard was a Frenchman who had established himself in Lourenço Marques as early as the beginning of the 1890s. His studio was used by the town’s wealthy inhabitants. His face had been disfigured by a shell splinter that had hit him during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Although his face was repugnant, his friendliness and his photographic skills endeared him to everybody. But he refused to take pictures of black people, unless they were in the role of servants or bearers, or simply made up the background behind the white people who were being portrayed.
Picard bowed and informed her that he could take her photograph immediately—a couple had just cancelled their slot because their engagement had been broken off. Hanna wanted to be photographed standing up, wearing her big hat, her long gloves, and with her furled parasol by her side.
Picard asked respectfully who the picture was for. He knew exactly who she was, and about her short marriage to Senhor Vaz. Hanna also knew that for some unknown reason Picard had always patronized a rival establishment when he made his regular brothel visits.
“The photograph is for my mother,” she said.
“I see,” said Picard. “So we want a dignified picture. One showing that all is well on the African continent, and that you are leading a life that has brought you success and riches.”