Хеннинг Манкелль - A Treacherous Paradise

Hanna still couldn’t believe it was true, neither what she had seen nor what she had just heard. But Felicia was convincing, she meant what she said.

The sound of music suddenly became audible. Hanna listened and realized that it was coming from the piano, but it wasn’t really music, there were no tunes. Single notes were repeated over and over again, as if a child was sitting at the piano, hitting the keys.

Hanna had the feeling that this was something familiar, something she’d heard before. The man she’d seen earlier dusting the keys was now tuning the piano. There had been a piano in Jonathan Forsman’s house. Nobody played it, nobody was allowed to touch it. Forsman had the key to the locked lid on his watch chain. But twice a year a blind man came to tune the piano. There had to be silence in the house while that was happening. The piano tuner always came just after Forsman had returned from one of his many business trips with the sleigh or the coach. While the blind man leaned over the keyboard with his tuning key in his hand, Forsman would sit on a chair listening intently to what he heard. For him, perfect harmony was not the music, it was the well-tuned piano.

The piano tuner in the brothel resumed his work. Hanna could hear that he was tuning the keys at the bottom end of the bass register. The fact that he was carrying out the tuning gave her hope, unexpected strength. Nobody tunes a piano when somebody is dying, she thought. In those circumstances either everything is silent, or somebody plays something that soothes or consoles and then moves over into funeral music.

She remembered vaguely something that had happened in Forsman’s house when the piano tuner was there and Forsman was sitting back in an armchair enjoying the sound of harmony being restored, and she had suddenly thought: what can he see? What can the blind man see that I can’t? She couldn’t believe that all he could see before him was blackness.

Hanna could feel that she was tired. Felicia accompanied her back to her room. Somebody had changed the sheets while she’d been away. Her blood-stained underclothes had now been returned, washed clean.

Felicia turned to her in the doorway.

‘What shall I tell Senhor Vaz?’ she asked.

‘That the white woman is still bleeding, not so much now, though. But she needs to be left alone for a few more days.’

Felicia nodded.

‘I promise not to send Carlos to you with cups of tea. Laurinda will look after you.’

When Felicia had left the room, Hanna burst into tears. She did so in silence. Not because she didn’t want anybody to hear her, but because she didn’t want to scare her body so much that it started bleeding again.

The whores told lies. Just like all other black people.

When Attimilio Vaz had introduced himself to Hanna, a week after she had taken up residence in his hotel and become sufficiently restored after her miscarriage to be able to leave her room without assistance and walk down to the ground floor for her meals, the first three sentences he spoke to her were:

‘Don’t believe what they say. It’s best to believe nothing at all. The only thing black people here know how to do is to tell lies.’

Hanna found this perplexing. Felicia had explained what had happened to her and gone on to look after her — Hanna quite simply couldn’t understand the suggestion that she had been lying. To be sure, she had sometimes found it difficult to understand Felicia’s peculiar language — but not so much that she could possibly have totally misunderstood or misinterpreted what she’d said and accepted it as the truth when in fact it was all lies.

The day Attimilio Vaz had decided to introduce himself to his hotel guest, he had spoken slowly and been careful not to use any unnecessarily difficult words.

Senhor Vaz was born in Portugal, but at some point long ago in his life he had spent time in Sweden, after a short stay in a Danish town that might have been called Odense, he wasn’t sure. He had been selling Portuguese anchovies, but she got the impression that it hadn’t been quite straightforward. It hadn’t been his fault, of course. Attimilio Vaz considered himself to be an honest and upright person who unfortunately was often misunderstood. Even though he had been forced to leave Sweden in great haste after being accused of fraudulent dealing, he had memories of a delightful country and equally delightful people — and he was now pleased to welcome a Swedish guest into his simple but completely clean and above-board establishment.

A few days later, when Hanna felt strong enough to go out for the first time since she had arrived, he invited her to dinner at a restaurant in the same street as O Paraiso.

When she emerged into the street accompanied by her host, she suddenly felt the ground swaying under her feet. It was as if she were standing on the deck of the ship again. She stopped and leaned against the wall. Senhor Vaz was worried and asked if she wanted to go back to her room, but she shook her head. When he took hold of her arm she let him do so. No man had touched her since Lundmark’s death. Now she was walking around an African town and a strange man, a Portuguese brothel proprietor, was escorting her to a restaurant.

It wasn’t a dream, but she found herself in a world where she didn’t belong.

Lundmark had been taller than she was. Senhor Vaz barely came up to her shoulders.

Hanna gathered from a sign on the side of a building that the street they were walking along was called rua Bagamoio. There were bars everywhere, some of them garishly lit up by hissing gas lamps, others dark, with wax candles flickering secretively behind curtains that swayed whenever anybody stepped quickly inside. But it was only this street that was illuminated. The narrow alleys leading off the rua Bagamoio were dark, silent, empty.

It reminded her of the forests that surrounded the river valley back home. There she could stand in a glade, enjoying the light of the sun. But if she took a couple of steps in among the tall tree trunks she entered a different world, deep in the darkness.

Apart from a few black beggars dressed in rags, everybody in the street was white. It was a while before Hanna realized that there were no other women. She was the only one. All around her were white men, some of them sailors, some soldiers, some drunk and noisy, others silent as they slunk furtively close to the walls, as if they didn’t really want to be noticed. Inside the bars, however, were a lot of black women sitting on bar stools or sofas, smoking in silence.

She thought that if this was a town, she no longer knew what to call the place where Forsman lived. Did these two places have any similarities at all? The streets where she and Berta had walked around together, and this murky town with its mysterious alleys?

A man was sitting on a street corner in front of a fire, tapping away at a drum that was so small he could hold it in the palm of his hand. His face was dripping with sweat, and in front of him he had laid out a little piece of cloth on which a few metal coins were gleaming. His fingers were pecking away at the drum skin like the beaks of eager birds. Hanna had never heard such a frantic rhythm before. She stopped. Vaz seemed impatient, but dug out a coin that he threw on to the piece of cloth before dragging her along with him again.

‘He was barefoot,’ said Vaz. ‘If the police appear, they’ll whisk him away.’

Hanna didn’t understand what he meant at first. But she noticed that the man with the little drum hadn’t been wearing shoes.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘No negroes are allowed in the centre of town without shoes,’ said Vaz. ‘That’s the law. After nine o’clock they have no right to be on our streets at all. Unless they are working, and can produce the appropriate documents. “No black man or woman has the right of access to the streets of this town unless they are wearing shoes.” That’s what the municipal law says. The first sign that a person is civilized is that he or she is wearing shoes.’