All I had known so far—leaving out London, which really didn't count—was what I had had with Ana. Just after we had come to Africa we had been passionate. Or I had been passionate. There would have been some genuine excitement there, some moments of sexual discovery. But a fair part of that passion of ten years before would have come not out of sensuality or true desire but out of my own nervousness and fear, like a child's fear, at being in Africa, at having thrown myself into a void. There had been nothing like that passion between us since then. Ana, even at that time of passion, had been half timorous; and when I had been admitted into more of her family history I understood her timorous-ness. So in a way we were matched. We each found comfort in the other; and we had become very close, not looking beyond the other for satisfaction, not knowing, in fact, that another kind of satisfaction was possible. And if Álvaro hadn't come along I would have continued in that way, in matters of sex and sensuality not much above my poor deprived father.
The warehouse closed down after a while; then something else came up; and something else after that. The concrete town was very small; the merchants and civil servants and others who lived there didn't want these places of pleasure too near their houses and their families. So the blue bulbs and the dark wall-high mirror shifted about from one makeshift home to another. It was worth no one's while to build something more permanent, since the army, on which the trade depended, could at any time move away.
One evening I saw, among the rouged and dressed-up girls, Júlio the carpenter's daughter—the little maid who on my first morning had laid aside her broom and sat in a worn upholstered chair and tried to have an educated conversation with me. She had told me later that her family ate the same food every day; and that when her father became too drunken or violent she tried to lull herself to sleep by walking up and down in the little room they had. The story later was that this girl had begun to drink, like her father, and was often out of the quarters. I suppose that just as Álvaro had been my guide some friend had guided her here.
I decided on the spur of the moment not to see her; and she seemed to have decided on the same thing. So that when we crossed we crossed as strangers. I told no one about her; and she, when we next met in the estate house, said nothing at all and made not even a small gesture of new recognition. She didn't widen her eyes or lift her brow or set her mouth. When I thought about it later I felt that that was when I betrayed Ana, sullied her, as it were, in her own house.
*
THE CORREIAS HAD been away for a year. And then we heard, each house in a roundabout way, and not all at the same time, that Jacinto had died. He had died in his sleep in a hotel in London. Álvaro was in a state. He didn't know what his future was. He had always dealt with Jacinto; and he had a feeling that Carla didn't care for him.
About a month later Carla reappeared among us, visiting the houses she knew, harvesting sympathy. Again and again she told of the suddenness of the death, of the shopping that had just been done in the big stores, the opened parcels left untidily that night about what was to be poor Jacinto's deathbed. She had thought of bringing back the body to the colony; but she had a “bad feeling” (given her by Mrs. Noronha) about the little cemetery in the town. So she had taken the body to Portugal, to the country town where Jacinto's full Portuguese grandfather was buried. All of this had kept her too busy for grief. That came to her afterwards. It came to her especially when she saw some beggars in Lisbon. She said, “I thought, ‘These people have nothing to live for, and yet they're living. Jacinto had so much to live for, and yet he's dead.'” The unfairness was too much for her to bear. She had burst out crying in the public street, and the beggars who had approached her had become agitated; some of them even