in the wilderness must have thought he would never die, or he had misread history and thought he was leaving untold wealth to his descendants. People didn't have dates for anything here; and no one knew for sure when the German Castle was built. Some people said it was built in the 1920s by a German settler from what had been German East Africa, coming after the 1914 war to friendlier Portuguese territory. Some people said it was built in the late 1930s by a German who wished to get away from Germany and the Depression and the coming war and hoped to create a self-sufficient estate here. But death had come; history had gone its own way; and long before my time—and again no one could tell me when—the Castle had been abandoned.
I drove the Land Rover as far up the garden as it could go. What had been a big front garden with concrete-edged flowerbeds was bare and burnt away to sand, with scattered tufts of a hardy grass, a few long-stalked zinnias, and a purple bougainvillaea vine that had run wild. Wide and very smooth concrete steps, still unchipped, led to the verandah. The turret on either side had loopholes, as if for defence. Tall half-open doors showed the enormous dark drawing room. The floor was gritty. Some of that grit would have blown in with the wind; the bigger pieces might have been dropped by nest-building birds. There was a strange smell of fish; I took that to be the smell of a building in decay. I had brought an army rubber sheet with me. I spread it on the verandah, and without speaking we lay down on it.
The long drive had been a strain. Graça's need matched my own. That was new to me. Everything I had known before— the furtiveness of London, the awful provincial prostitute, the paid black girls of the places of pleasure here, who had yet satisfied me for so long, and for whom for almost a year I had felt such gratitude, and poor Ana, still in my mind the trusting girl who had sat on the settee in my college room in London and allowed herself to be kissed, Ana still so gentle and generous—over the next half hour everything fell away, and I thought how terrible it would have been if, as could so easily have happened, I had died without knowing this depth of satisfaction, this other person that I had just discovered within myself. It was worth any price, any consequence.
I heard a voice calling. At first I couldn't be sure about it, but then I heard it as a man's voice calling from the garden. I put on my shirt and stood behind the verandah half-wall. It was an African, one of the eternal walkers on the ways, standing on the far edge of the garden, as though fearful of the house. When he saw me he made gestures and shouted, “There are spitting cobras in the Castle.” That explained the smell of fish that had been with us: it was the smell of snakes.
We put on our clothes, wet as we were. We went down the wide, regal steps to the burnt-out sandy remains of the garden, very nervous there of the snakes that could blind from many feet. We finished dressing in the Land Rover and drove away in silence. After a while I said to Graça, “I am smelling you on my body as I drive.” I don't know how the courage came to me; but it seemed an easy and natural thing to say. She said, “And I'm smelling you.” I loved her for that reply. I rested my right hand on her thigh for as long as I could, and I thought with sorrow—and now without personal shame—of my poor father and mother who had known nothing like this moment.
I began to arrange my life around my meetings with Graça, and I didn't care who noticed. With one part of my mind I was amazed at myself, amazed at the person I had become. A memory came to me of something that had happened at home, in the ashram, about twenty-five years before. I would have been about ten. A merchant of the town came to see my father. This merchant was rich and gave to religious charities, but people were nervous of him because he was said to be shameless in his private life. I didn't know what that