They brought him back to the new, empty house. Graça was waiting for him. My mind went back years to the mission school and a poem in the third-standard reader:
Home they brought her warrior dead.
She nor swooned nor uttered cry.
All her maidens watching said,
“She must weep or she will die.”
We never made love again.
She looked after him in the new house. It was her new role, being his nurse, tending him like a nun of a service order. If there wasn't a war there might have been a doctor who would have known what to do. But people like doctors were leaving the colony or country every day; the estate was far out; the road was dangerous; and Luis with his ruined brain and liver just faded away in the empty house.
Great events in the life of the colony, the final rites, happened at a distance from her. The colonial government in the capital closed down, just like that; the guerrillas took over. The Portuguese population began to leave. The army withdrew from our town. The barracks were empty; it seemed unnatural, after the activity and the daily military rituals, like church rituals, of the past twelve years. And then after some weeks of this blankness a much smaller force of guerrillas moved in, occupying just a part of the barracks that had been extended many times during the war. People had died, but the army hadn't really wished to fight this African war, and life in the towns remained normal right up to the end. The war was like a distant game; even at the end it was hard to believe that the game was going to have great consequences. It was as though the army, with some political purpose, had colluded with the guerrillas (with their tactic of unarmed infiltration) to preserve the peace of towns; so that when the time came the guerrillas would be able to take over towns in working order.
For a while, as after the application of herbicide, nothing showed, and it was possible to think that nothing had changed, that goods would continue to come to the shops, and gasoline to the pumps. But then, all at once, as with herbicide, the change showed. Certain shops became empty and then didn't reopen; their owners had gone away, to South Africa or Portugal. Some houses in the central square were abandoned. Very quickly light globes on gate posts or in verandahs were broken; a short while later glass panes, which had remained intact for years, mysteriously dropped away; then windows were taken off their hinges; and here and there rafters began to rot and tile roofs sagged. We had thought that the municipal services of our little town were rudimentary. Now we felt their absence. Street drains became blocked, and glaciers of sand (with patches of wild grass on the high parts, and rippled or plaited patterns of fine sand in the miniature watercourses that ran after rain) inched their way out of drives into choked gutters. Gardens became overgrown and then as burnt-out as the formal gardens of the German Castle, which had been abandoned for three decades; in the climate everything speeded up and became what it had to be. In the countryside the main asphalt road was dreadfully potholed. Some estate houses lost their owners, and African families, shy at first of people like Ana, began to move into the wide verandahs behind the bougainvillaea vines.
There were hard months. Mrs. Noronha, in the last days of order, had asked us to hoard cloth for the bad times to come. We hoarded gasoline. The estate had its own pump; we filled jerricans and hid them; without our Land Rovers we would have been lost. We stopped running our generators. So our nights became silent; and we discovered the charm of the big shadows cast by an oil lamp. It didn't take long for things to break down, to become again as they had been in the days of Ana's grandfather, who had had to live close to the ground, close to the climate and insects and illnesses, and close to his African neighbours and workers, before comfort had been squeezed out of the hard land, like blood out of stone.
In her house Graça managed quite well. In a way it was what she had always wanted: a house and two acres, and hens and fruit trees. She was readier than Ana was to welcome the new régime.