live in a sharing way. It is the better life. You see, the nuns were right after all. The time has come for us all to be poor. We have to share everything we have. They are right. We have to be as everybody else. We have to serve and be useful. I will give them all that I have. I will not let them ask. I will give them this house.” Her two children had gone with many of her relatives to Portugal. “I was angry with them. In Portugal they will have to prepare papers to say who they are. How can anyone do that? How can anyone say who he is? They will prepare papers to say they are Portuguese. I don't have to do that here. My grandfather is buried here. He died young. He is among the ancestors. I go to his grave every year to talk to him. I talk about the family. I tell him everything. I feel good when I do that. Of course, I don't tell people. They think I'm going to the market.”
I looked at her suffering eyes and thought, “I was making love to a deranged woman. Can it be true, what I felt I had with her?”
Ana said, when I told her, “She is not giving them anything. Even in her grief she is fooling herself. They are taking it from her. They say they are going to take it all away from me, too. But I'm not running away. Half of what my grandfather gave me was stolen by my father. I will stay here and protect the other half. I do not want people squatting in my house or sleeping in my bed.”
In time the new government put together a kind of administration. Everything took three or four times as long as it did before, but we learned how to get things done. There were services of a sort again. The great hardship was over. But just at this time there were rumours of a new, tribal war. Just as the anti-Portuguese guerrillas had begun in the bush, so now the people hostile to the victors were beginning in the bush. The guerrillas had had the support of the black governments over the border. The new insurgents had the support of the white government to the west, and they were far more deadly. It was their policy to “blood” new recruits, to get a recruit to kill someone. They raided the outskirts of towns and killed people and burnt houses and spread terror.
I didn't think I could live through another war. I could see that it would have a point for Ana. I didn't see that it had a point for me. For some weeks I was perplexed. I didn't know what to do. I suppose I didn't have the courage to tell Ana. It was the rainy season. I had cause to remember it. The heavy pollen from the shade tree in front of the estate house made the semicircular marble steps slippery. I slipped and fell heavily. When I awoke, in the run-down military hospital in the barracks in the town, the physical pain of my damaged body was like the other pain that had been with me for months, and perhaps for years.
When Ana came to the hospital courage came to me, and I told her I wanted to divorce her.
When she came back later I said to her, “I am forty-one. I am tired of living your life.”
“You wanted it, Willie. You asked. I had to think about it.”
“I know. You did everything for me. You made it easy for me here. I couldn't have lived here without you. When I asked you in London I was frightened. I had nowhere to go. They were going to throw me out of the college at the end of the term and I didn't know what I could do to keep afloat. But now the best part of my life has gone, and I've done nothing.”
“You are frightened of the new war.”
“And even if we go to Portugal, even if they let me in there, it would still be your life. I have been hiding for too long.”
Ana said, “Perhaps it wasn't really my life either.”