to move. The more I thought about it, the more unprotected I felt. For some days I could think of nothing else. It began to be like my torment, on the way out, all down the coast of Africa, about losing the gift of language.
Ana said one morning, “I've been talking to the cook. She thinks we should go to a fetish-man. There is a very famous one twenty or thirty miles from here. He is known in all the villages. I've asked the cook to call him.”
I said, “Who do you think would want to steal a passport and old letters?”
Ana said, “We mustn't spoil it now. We mustn't take any names. Please be ruled by me. We mustn't even think of anyone. We must leave it to the fetish-man. He's a very serious and self-respecting man.”
She said the next day, “The fetish-man is coming in seven days.”
That day Júlio the carpenter found the brown envelope and one of Roger's letters in his workshop. Ana called the cook and said, “That's good. But there are other things. The fetish-man still has to come.” Day after day it went on like this, with new discoveries—Roger's letters, my school exercise books—in various places. But the passport and the five-pound notes were still missing, and everyone knew that the fetish-man was still coming. In the end he never came. The day before he was due the passport and the money were found in one of the small drawers of the bureau. Ana sent the fetish-man money by the cook. He sent it back, because he hadn't come.
Ana said, “It is something you must remember. Africans may not be afraid of you and me, but they are afraid of one another. Every man has access to the fetish-man, and this means that even the humblest man has power. In that way they are better off than the rest of us.”
I had got the passport back. I felt safe again. Ana and I, as if by agreement, talked no more about the matter. We never mentioned the fetish-man. But the ground had moved below me.
*
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