of the stuff. I've never seen anything like it. It's a wonder you were able to lift your jaw.” He went at the tartar with relish, scraping and chipping and grinding, and when he was finished Willie's mouth felt sore and his teeth felt exposed and shaky and sensitive even to the air. He said to Ana, “I've been hearing funny things from the boys at the college about Australian dentists in London. I hope we've done the right thing.”
He encouraged Ana to talk about her country. He tried to visualise the country on the eastern coast of Africa, with the great emptiness at its back. Soon, from the stories she told, he began to understand that she had a special way of looking at people: they were African or not African. Willie thought, “Does she just see me then as someone who's not an African?” But he pushed that idea to one side.
She told a story about a school friend. “She always wanted to be a nun. She ended up in an order somewhere here, and I went to see her some months ago. They live a kind of jail life. And, like people in jail, they keep in touch in their own way with the world outside. At mealtimes somebody reads selected items from the newspaper to them, and they giggle like schoolgirls at the simplest jokes. I could have cried. That beautiful girl, that wasted life. I couldn't help myself, I asked her why she had done it. It was wrong of me, adding to her sorrows. She said, ‘What else was there for me to do? We had no money. No man was going to come and take me away. I didn't want to rot in that country' As though she wasn't rotting now.”
Willie said, “I understand your friend. I wanted to be a priest at one time. And a missionary. I wanted to be like the fathers. They were so much better off than the people around us. There seemed to be no other way out.” And the thought came to him that Ana's situation in her country might be something like his at home.
At another time on the little sofa Ana said, “Here's a story for your next book. If you think you can do anything with it. My mother had a friend called Luisa. Nobody knew anything about Luisa's parentage. She had been adopted by a rich estate-owning family and she inherited a part of the estate. Luisa went to Portugal and Europe. She lived extravagantly for many years and then she announced she had found a wonderful man. She brought him back. They gave a very big party in the capital, and the wonderful man told everybody about all the famous people who were his close friends in Europe. After that he and Luisa went out to the bush, to live on Luisa's estate. People were expecting the great friends to come out, the big house to be opened up. But nothing happened. Luisa and her wonderful man just grew fat, telling the same stories they had told at the time of their party. Fewer and fewer people went to see them. After a time the man began to sleep with African women, but even that became too much for him, and he gave up. So Luisa the adopted child and her wonderful man lived happily or unhappily and then died, and Luisa's family fortune vanished, and nobody knew who Luisa was or who the wonderful man was. That's how my mother used to tell the story And here's another story. There was this dowdy and unhappy girl at the boarding school. She was living in the bush somewhere with her father and stepmother. Then the girl's real mother marries again, and the girl goes to live with her. The girl changes in a remarkable way. She becomes stylish, happy, a glamour girl. Her happiness doesn't last long. Her stepfather becomes interested in her, too interested. He goes into the girl's bedroom one night. There is a scene, and then a divorce and a great scandal.”
And Willie knew that the girl in that second story, the unhappy girl in the frightening, destructive bush of her African country, was Ana. He thought it explained her thinness, her nervousness. It increased his feeling for her.
A letter came from Sarojini in Cuba, with a photograph.
This man says he knows you. He is a Latin American from Panama and his name is Cato, because his family