straighten it out, and it became too involved. I thought, “I am going to sound like someone from the quarters.” And then I thought, “I am going back to my London ways.” When the time came Ana hardly listened to what I had to say. She said, “I hope Carla is going to have an estate to come back to.” It was as easy as that. But I knew I had broken something, put an end to something, for almost no reason.
Álvaro was dead on time; he might have been waiting in the dark just outside the estate compound. I thought that we would be going to the town, but Álvaro didn't make for the main road. Instead, we drove slowly about the backways, all ordinary to me now, even at night. I thought that Álvaro was killing time. We drove, now past cotton fields, now through open bush, now past dark plantations of cashew trees. Every few miles we came to a village, and then we drove very slowly. Sometimes in a village there was a kind of night market, with petty stalls in low open huts, lit by a hurricane lantern, selling matches and loose cigarettes and small tins of various things, and with a few improvident people, men or women or children, finding themselves penniless that day and sitting at the roadside with candles in paper bags beside very small heaps of their own food, sticks of dried cassava, or peppers, or vegetables. Like people playing at housekeeping, and playing at buying and selling, I had always thought.
Álvaro said, “Pretty, eh?” I knew some of these villages very well. I had seen these night markets scores of times. It wasn't what I had come out to see with Álvaro. He said, “You wanted to see what the Africans did at night. I'm showing you. You've been here ten years. I don't know how much you know. In a couple of hours these roads we've been driving along will be crawling with people looking for adventure. There will be twenty or thirty parties tonight all around you. Did you know that? And they aren't going there just to dance, I can tell you.”
The headlights of the Land Rover picked out, just in time, a little girl in a shoulder-strap dress ahead of us. She stood at the side of the road and, shiny-faced in the lights, watched us pass. Álvaro said, “How old do you think that girl is?” I really hadn't thought; the girl was like so many others; I wouldn't have recognised her again. Álvaro said, “I will tell you. That girl is about eleven. She's had her first period, and that means that she's ready for sex. The Africans are very sensible about these things. No foreign nonsense about under-age sex. That girl who looks like nothing to you is screwing every night with some man. Am I telling you things you know?” I said, “You are telling me things I don't know.” He said, “It's what we think about you, you know. I hope you don't mind.” And really in ten years I had never looked in that way at the villages and the Africans walking beside the road. I suppose it was a lack of curiosity, and I suppose it was a remnant of caste feeling. But then, too, I wasn't of the country, hadn't been trained in its sexual ways (though I had observed them), and had never before had someone like Álvaro as a guide.
In the very beginning, when I hadn't even known about the pleasures of living in the wilderness, I had thought that the mixed-race overseers couldn't have had much of a life, living so close to Africans, surrendering so much of themselves. Now I saw that for some it would have been a life of constant excitement. Álvaro lived in a dingy four-roomed concrete house. It stood by itself on an exposed, treeless patch on Correia's estate. It looked a comfortless place to call home, but Álvaro lived happily there with his African wife and African family, and with any number of mistresses or concubines or pick-ups within reach in the surrounding villages. In no other part of the world would Álvaro have found a life like that. I had thought at the beginning of the evening that he was killing time, driving about the backways. He wasn't. He was trying to show where hidden treasure lay. He said, “Take that little girl we just passed. If you