Хеннинг Манкелль - A Treacherous Paradise

As the moon was on the wane, Hanna had to wait for quite some time. Meanwhile Attimilio made several more attempts to consummate the marriage, without success. Afterwards, when he had given up and was lying on his side, Hanna gently stroked his black hair, which left a new greasy stain of pomade on the pillowcase every morning. I don’t really love him, she thought: but I feel tenderness towards him. He wants to do the best he can for me. He’ll never be another Lundmark in bed, but with a bit of help from Felicia perhaps one day he’ll be able to become a real man again.

By full moon Lourenço Marques had been battered by storms for a few days. Carlos had run away again but come back, just as mysteriously as before, this time with a red band round his neck. Senhor Vaz decided he had better keep Carlos chained up, but the women were outraged by the very thought and he let it drop. Carlos resumed his role as a waiter, and would light clients’ cigars in exchange for a banana or an apple. Felicia maintained that Carlos had a different glint in his eye now: something was happening to him.

The full moon arrived, the winds had moved on, and Senhor Vaz came home after a long day at the brothel. Hanna had prepared the mango and sat beside him at the dining table as he chewed away at it, deep in thought. She then duly applied the drops of lemon in the bathroom before going to bed and lying down beside her husband. He seemed to be on his way to sleep, so she gently stroked his arm. After a few moments he turned to face her. He went on to make frantic efforts to penetrate her, just as he had done on previous occasions, but still without success — although Hanna could feel that his attempts were more powerful and longer lasting than ever before.

When he gave up they were both sweating. Hanna decided that the very next day she would tell Felicia that stronger medicines were needed to help Attimilio to overcome his difficulties.

She could hear that he had fallen asleep, taking the usual quick, short breaths as if he didn’t really have time to sleep.

When she woke up next morning he was dead. He was lying beside her, white and already cold. The moment she opened her eyes, just before Anaka was due to come in with their breakfast tray, she knew that something had happened. He was rarely, if ever, still in bed when she woke up. He would usually be in the bathroom, getting shaved.

He was lying in the same position as he’d been in when he fell asleep. Hanna slid out of bed, her legs shaking. She had become a widow for the second time. When Anaka came in she was sitting in a chair and pointed to the man in the bed.

‘ Morto ,’ was all she said. ‘ Senhor Vaz e morto .’

Anaka put down the tray, went down on her knees, chanted something that might have been a prayer, then hurried away. It struck Hanna that Attimilio had died in complete silence. He hadn’t screamed like Lundmark did.

It was as if he had died in shame, having failed once again, one last time, to make love to his wife.

Two days after the chaotic burial in the town’s new cemetery, at which Carlos was also present wearing a dark suit and a new black top hat, Hanna was visited by Attimilio’s solicitor, Senhor Andrade. He bowed, expressed his condolences once again, and sat down opposite her in the group of sofa and armchairs in red plush that Senhor Vaz had had made in distant Cape Town. Unlike on previous occasions, he now spoke loudly and clearly: Hanna was no longer merely an appendage of Senhor Vaz.

Andrade explained the situation:

‘There is a will. It’s signed, and witnessed by me and my colleague Petrus Sabodini. The will is simple and crystal clear. There isn’t the slightest doubt about its intentions.’

Hanna listened, but it never occurred to her that what was being said had anything to do with her.

‘So, there is a will,’ said Andrade again. ‘It makes it clear that all Attimilio’s estate and goods and chattels are inherited by you. In addition to the hotel and the other activities associated with it, you now own all his businesses, including a warehouse full of fabrics and nine donkeys grazing in various pastures just outside the town. There are also significant assets in Pretoria and Johannesburg.’

Andrade placed a number of documents on the table and stood up. He bowed again.

‘It will be a great pleasure to me if in future I can continue to offer you my services as your solicitor, Senhora Vaz.’

It was only after he had gone that Hanna grasped what had happened. She sat there motionless, holding her breath. She had become the owner of a brothel. And also of a number of donkeys and a chimpanzee that occasionally ran away when it wasn’t lighting cigars for the customers who visited her house of pleasure.

She stood up and went out on to the balcony. Through the binoculars she could see the building where the brothel was situated. She could also make out the contours of the window of the room that had been hers, when she was sick in bed.

A number of ships were bobbing slowly up and down in the roadstead, but she didn’t pay any attention to them just now. However, that same day she took Carlos home with her from the brothel, because she didn’t want to live alone. She also took the big ceiling light because Carlos always liked to sleep in it.

Carlos would now share the big stone house with Hanna. For as long as she remained in the town spread out there before her, white and steaming in the heat, on the shore of the bay known as the Lagoon of Good Death.

Every morning when Hanna woke up Carlos was sitting in her bed with his hairy back towards her. She didn’t like him being there: she was afraid he would introduce stinging and blood-sucking insects into her bed. She chased him away and closed the bedroom door before going back to bed and extinguishing the paraffin lamp. But Carlos always either opened the door, or climbed back in through the window she kept open. He was there every morning. She was the one living in a cage, not Carlos.

In the end Hanna realized that he was longing for company, just as she was. He was missing the companionship characteristic of the life of chimpanzees — allowing another member of the troop to examine his fur and pick it clean. She felt sad once this had become clear to her. She could see her own loneliness mirrored in his, sat down close to him and began searching his skin for dead insects. It was obvious how much he enjoyed that. When Carlos wanted to repay the compliment by searching through her own hair, she allowed him to do so.

She started to see the pair of them as an odd couple, their mutual respect growing all the time even though they didn’t really have anything more in common than this morning ritual, which could go on for hours.

In the early days of this new stage in her life as a widow, she kept thinking about how she had changed her name for the second time in her short life. In the course of a brief ceremony in the distant city of Algiers, she had stopped being Renström and become Lundmark. Then that second name had been replaced by Vaz. In all the documents that her solicitor Senhor Andrade brought for her to read and sign, it said that her name was Hanna Vaz, and that her title was now viuva , widow.

But the thought of her being suddenly subjected once again to widowhood didn’t affect her nearly so much as the realization that she had become a very rich woman. Andrade produced accounts for her to read and sign, and she was astounded when she laboriously worked out the equivalents of English pounds, Portuguese escudos or American dollars into Swedish kronor. She was staggered to think that she now probably had more liquid capital than Jonathan Forsman’s total possessions. She sometimes woke up in the middle of the night under the impression that money — shiny new coins and pristine banknotes — was raining down on to her bed. Even after a few months, this wealth seemed totally unreal to her. And money continued to come rolling in. Every morning the short, slim cashier Eber, who was descended from a German family that had emigrated to southern Africa, would come up to her house from the brothel with a leather briefcase crammed full of cash. She would sign for the briefcase, give Eber the empty briefcase from the previous day, and then shut herself up in the study she had taken over from her former husband. In one of the walls was a safe that needed two different keys to open it: she wore them on a ribbon tied round her neck. She would enter the amounts in a cash book, then place the notes and coins inside the safe and lock it again. Not even Carlos was allowed to be in the room when she was counting out the money from the brothel.