Hanna had heard that story from Felicia, and had no doubt that it was true. She couldn’t just dismiss it as yet another of the thousands of yarns told by the men sitting in the brothel, chatting to their whores.
Pedro Pimenta was religious. Felicia had shown her the memorial stone he had erected in the municipal cemetery in memory of the man who had been eaten by the crocodiles. There had been no body to bury. The dead man’s clothes had been placed in a beautifully carved wooden coffin. The only word on the memorial stone was the name Walibamgu: Pimenta didn’t know the man’s surname. He had simply turned up one day at the crocodile pools, looking for work, and Pimenta had recruited him without further ado. As far as Pimenta was concerned it didn’t matter that the man had no surname and no past. He was just one of the vagrants from the interior of Africa who only existed for one moment, a Walibamgu with no date of birth – but a date of death.
Pimenta believed in God and attended the cathedral regularly. He donated money for the purchase of new candlesticks, and had also paid for the repair of some pews that had been damaged by termites.
Now he was sitting in the shade on his large veranda with views of the river and beyond that the mountains that seemed to melt away into a permanent mist. Hanna knew that Pimenta very rarely left his home. The only excursions he made were to the brothel and to the cathedral. He turned down all the invitations he received. Not even the Portuguese governor was able to tempt him to attend any of the dinners the rest of the white colonial elite fought among themselves in order to be present at. Pimenta preferred to sit on his veranda, keeping watch on his crocodiles as they grew bigger and fatter in their ponds, and on the white sheepdogs whose aggression was being built up in the extensive kennels. In a pond next to his veranda he kept a few baby crocodiles and fed them himself with small fish and frogs.
Pimenta was wearing a white linen suit and a pith helmet with a protective cloth covering the back of his neck. The shape of his body was peculiar: the whole of his body was thin apart from his stomach, which stuck out like a tumour over his belt. His skin was covered in scars caused by insect bites and pimples, one of his eyelids was sagging as if half of his being was devoted to struggling with overpowering exhaustion. Although he was still young, he had aged prematurely – as was often the case with white people who migrated to the tropics and spent their time there working far too hard.
For several years Pedro Pimenta had been living with a black woman called Isabel, and had two children with her: a son and a daughter. Both of them had been baptized in the cathedral and were called Joanna and Rogerio.
Hardly any of the whites in Lourenço Marques worried about the fact that he had a black lover; but the fact that he lived openly with her, as if they were married, and that he looked after her children as if they were his own – which of course they were – with the help of a private tutor, was condemned by everybody. In some circles he was regarded with contempt, while others looked upon him with a sort of vague worry.
Pimenta shook Hanna’s hand when she emerged from the car, and invited her to accompany him to the veranda where there was at least a suggestion of cool breezes from the river valley blowing along the house walls. Isabel came out to greet her. She was dressed just like a white woman and her black hair was gathered in a tight bun at the back of her head. It struck Hanna that this was the first black woman she’d met who had looked her in the eye when they shook hands. The expression in Isabel’s eyes gave Hanna the feeling that this was what native Africans had looked like before the whites had arrived in their ships in search of slaves, diamonds and ivory.
Isabel fetched the children so that they could greet her as well. Hanna thought she was looking at two unusually handsome children.
‘My children,’ said Pimenta. ‘My greatest joy. Often my only joy, come to that.’
Hanna wondered why he suddenly sounded so downcast. A cold breeze that didn’t come from the river but from inside herself wafted past. She didn’t understand how he could talk about joy in a way that actually indicated depression.
Something worried her, although she couldn’t put her finger on it.
He took her to the dog kennels.
‘Demand is growing all the time,’ he said. ‘I thought I would have a monopoly of these white dogs for four years at most, then other breeders would start producing similar dogs to satisfy the market demands: but I now realize that I had underestimated the human need of originals. And these here are the originals, they exist nowhere else.’
‘How much do the dogs cost?’ Hanna asked.
‘Anybody who asks about the price can hardly be able to afford one of them.’
‘I’m not asking because I want one for myself.’
‘I know. You would be able to afford one.’
Hanna gathered that he didn’t want to reveal his asking price. Or perhaps he didn’t have a set price, but asked individual customers to pay what he thought they would be able to afford.
They continued to the various pools that comprised the crocodile farm. Pedro explained to her that the slowly growing crocodiles needed to be separated from the rest so that they didn’t become food for those that had grown somewhat larger.
In a pond with dark green water, all on its own, was an enormous crocodile lying motionless on a flat rock. It was almost five metres long. Nobody knew how old it was. Pimenta wouldn’t allow anybody else to feed it. Once a week he would throw food down into the pond. And in fact it was this very day that he was due to feed Noah, as he called it. He asked Hanna if she would like to watch. She really wanted to say no, but nodded her head. He shouted for one of the black workers who looked after the crocodiles. A woolly sheep, a very powerfully built ram, was dragged out of a pen. The black man handed the rope to which the sheep was attached to Pimenta, then hurried off. The ram seemed to suspect what was going to happen – like an animal that can smell the blood of those that have just been slaughtered.
Pimenta hung his jacket on a coat rack next to the pond that was evidently there for this very purpose. He unbuttoned the waistcoat that was stretched over his enormous stomach, folded up his shirt sleeves and untied the rope at the same time as he took a firm grip of the ram’s neck. The ram bellowed. The crocodile lay there motionless. Pimenta suddenly grabbed the ram’s feet and turned it over on its back, then threw it down into the water where the crocodile was waiting. With a sudden movement that was so quick that Hanna barely saw it, the crocodile left the rock and sank down into the water. It clamped its jaws round the ram, threw it into the air to turn it over, dragged it down under the surface, then reappeared with just the ram’s head.
Hanna didn’t want to see any more. She turned away and hurried back to the veranda.
‘I’ll come when the party’s over,’ she heard Pimenta saying behind her.
It’s almost as if he were taking part in the feast himself, she thought agitatedly. How is this man going to be able to advise me on what to do with my life?
Her first impulse was to get into the car and drive back to town. But despite everything she stayed on the veranda, and had settled down in a shady corner by the time Pimenta returned from the crocodile’s feast. There was not a trace on his face of the scenes that had been enacted in the crocodile pool. He smiled at Hanna, rang a small silver bell, ordered some tea from a servant, and asked why she had come to his house – she had never visited him before.
‘I can’t sleep at night,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I should stay here in Africa, but nor do I know why I should leave. Nor where I should go to.’
What she said didn’t seem to surprise him. He fanned his face slowly with his pith helmet.
‘Those are thoughts that nag away at all of us,’ he said. ‘There’s no avoiding them. To stay or not to stay. Even if we were born here, we are still on foreign soil. Or perhaps I should say that we are in enemy territory.’
‘Is that what I’m feeling? All the hatred directed at us because we are white?’
‘That’s ha
rdly something that we need to worry about. What could the blacks do to us? Nothing.’
‘There’s something they have that we don’t have.’
For the first time he looked at her in surprise.
‘And what could that be?’
‘Their numbers.’
He seemed disappointed by her answer, as if he had hoped she would astound him, say something he’d never thought of before.
‘The idea that they could be a threat to us because there are a lot of them is nothing more than a figment of the imagination for nervous people,’ he said impatiently. ‘Nightmares that can never become reality. The more of them there are, the more confused they become.’
‘I don’t regard myself as a nervous type. But I see what I see. And I hear what I hear.’
‘What do you hear?’
‘A silence. Which isn’t natural.’
Before Pimenta could respond, Isabel came out on to the veranda and sat down on one of the basket chairs. She smiled.
Hanna suspected she had been listening to their conversation. But why had she come out on to the veranda at just that moment? Because she wanted the conversation to come to an end? Or was there some other reason?
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.
48
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.