previous afternoon who had been pleased to walk down the street in their pretty clothes, turning heads. When I got used to the light I saw that many of the girls on the other side of the dancing area were not village girls from the interior, but were what we called Mohammedans, people of the coast, of remote Arab ancestry. Two African waiters and a thin Portuguese man in a sports shirt—the owner, I suppose—moved between the tables. When the Portuguese man came close to us I saw that he was not young, had very quiet eyes, and seemed strangely detached from everything.
I wish I had his detachment. But I was not trained for this kind of life, and I was full of shame. The girls were all African. It had to be like that, I suppose; but I wondered whether the two African waiters didn't suffer a little. And the girls were so young, so foolish, with so little idea, as I thought, of the way they were abusing their own bodies and darkening their lives. I thought with old unhappiness of things at home. I thought of my mother and I thought of my poor father who had hardly known what sex was. I thought of you, too, Sarojini. I imagined that the girls might be you, and my heart shrank.
Álvaro himself was subdued. He had been subdued as soon as he had entered the dark warehouse. He was excited by village sex, with every month a fresh crop of innocent girls who had had their first period and were ready to stick up their little breasts at him. What was around us in this half-converted warehouse was different. I don't suppose a place like this, with facilities, would have existed before the army came. It would have been new to Álvaro. And I suppose that though he was casting himself as my guide, he really was a learner, a little nervous, and he needed my support.
We drank beer. The feeling of shame went. I looked at the dancers in the blue light, and their dim reflections in the mysterious space of the wall-high dark mirror. I had never seen Africans dance. With the kind of estate life I had been living there hadn't been the occasion. Immediately as these girls began to dance they were touched by a kind of grace. The gestures were not extravagant; they could be very small. When a girl danced she incorporated everything into her dance—her conversation with her partner, a word spoken over her shoulder to a friend, a laugh. This was more than pleasure; it was as though some deeper spirit was coming out in the dance. This spirit was locked up in every girl, whatever her appearance; and it was possible to feel that it was part of something much larger. Of course, with my background, I had thought a lot about Africans in a political way. In the warehouse I began to have an idea that there was something in the African heart that was shut away from the rest of us, and beyond politics.
Álvaro, with a little grimace of self-mockery which didn't fool me, began to dance with one of the girls. At first he clowned on the floor, looking at himself in the mirror. But very soon he became dead serious, and when he came back to our table he was a changed man. His eyes were hollow with longing. He frowned at his beer glass. Then he said, with an affectation of anger, as though everybody in that room was holding him back, “I don't know what thoughts you have on the subject, Willie. But now that we are in this bloody place I'm going to have a damned little something.” And, frowning hard, like a man in a rage, he went with his dancing partner to the door in the dark far part of the room.
I might have just stayed and sipped beer and waited for Álvaro. But the quiet-eyed Portuguese man knew his business, and three or four or five minutes later, at a signal from him, one of the girls came and sat at the table. Below her fussy clothes she was quite small. Below the make-up, the rouge on the high cheekbones, the white-blue paint on the eyelids, she was very young. I looked at her “Arab” face and, only a half or a quarter trying to stimulate myself, wondered what about her would have aroused Álvaro. When she got up