begged her pardon. (Ana told me later, “I always used to think that Jacinto believed that if you became rich enough you weren't going to die. Or he wasn't going to die, if he became rich enough. But I used to think of that as a joke. I didn't know it was true.”)
Jacinto had always been particular about the distinction that money brought to people, Carla said; that was why he had worked so hard. He had told his children, who were studying in Lisbon, that they were on no account to use public transport in Lisbon. They were always to use taxis. People must never think of them as colonial nobodies. He had repeated that to them only a few days before he had died. And telling this story about Jacinto's concern for his children, and other related stories about the goodness of the family man, Carla wept and wept from estate house to estate house.
With Álvaro she was brutal. Three weeks after she came back she sacked him, giving him and his African family a month to clear out of their concrete house; and, to make it harder for him to find work, she did what she could to blacken his character with estate people. He was a man of loose life, she said, with a string of African concubines he couldn't possibly keep on his manager's salary. Even when Jacinto was having his trouble with the people in the capital, he used to tell her that she had to watch Álvaro. The rogue had trembled when she called for the books. She didn't have Jacinto's mind, and she didn't know much about accounts, but it didn't take her long to see the kind of trickery Jacinto had told her to look out for. Bogus invoices (with Álvaro machinery had broken down all the time, even the reliable old German sisal-crusher, the simplest of machines, like a very big mangle); inflated real invoices; and, of course, bogus workers. And the longer the Correias had stayed away in Europe the more brazen Álvaro had become.
Carla was telling us what we all half knew. In his foolish, showing-off way Álvaro had liked to hint that he was milking the estate. He had done that with me and he would have done it with others. He thought it made him grand, almost like an estate-owner. Estate life was all that Álvaro knew; the estate house was his idea of style. His father, a mulatto, had started as a mechanic on the estate owned by his Portuguese father, and had ended there as a low-grade overseer living in one of a line of two-roomed concrete houses. Álvaro decided when he was quite young that he would rise in the world. He was good with machines; he learned about cattle and crops; he knew how to get on with Africans. He rose; he became flashy. As the Correias' estate manager, with a proper concrete house and a Land Rover, he liked to make big gestures. When I got to know him (and before I knew his reputation) he used to give me presents; afterwards he would tell me that what he had given me was really plunder from the Correias.
Still, I felt sorry for Álvaro that he should be so exposed and pulled down in the estate houses where (leaving his African family at home) he wanted to be accepted. I wondered how that family were going to make out. They had got their marching orders and would soon have to leave their concrete house; it would be some time before they got accommodation like that again. Ana said, “He might take the opportunity to forget about them.” I didn't want to think about that too much, but it was probably true. Álvaro had never spoken of his family to me, had never given his children names or characters. I had seen them only from the road: African-looking children, some like village children, staring from the small verandah of the concrete house or running out from the grass-roofed kitchen hut at the back. I suppose if a new job came up Álvaro wouldn't have minded moving on and starting afresh with a new woman and new outside women in a new place. He might have considered an outcome like that a blessing; it would have reconciled him to everything.
I hadn't seen him for some weeks. We had long ago stopped making excursions together to places like the warehouse. And when one day we