Хеннинг Манкелль - A Treacherous Paradise

Her thoughts were still unclear, but she had an idea of what she ought to do. The very next day she should summon Andrade and instruct him to find somebody willing to purchase the brothel. There was bound to be any number of willing would-be buyers prepared to pay for the brothel’s good name and reputation. Then she would get out of here as quickly as possible. Her future was secure, thanks to the money she already had plus what she would earn from the sale of the brothel. It would be a rich woman leaving Africa behind her. Hers had been a brief visit. Two short-lived marriages, two unexpected deaths, and then nothing else.

I have just one problem, she thought. What will happen to Carlos? I can’t take him with me to the cold country where he would freeze to death. But who will be able to look after him, now that he has no desire at all to return to the forests he originally came from? When he doesn’t even want to be an ape any longer?

She had no answer to that. When the car arrived and she shouted for Carlos, he immediately climbed down from the tree.

But just as he touched the ground after climbing out of the tree, he had given a start, as if he had burnt himself on the hard, flat soil. He sniffed around, then hurried away.

Hanna stared at him in surprise. Why had he been afraid of the ground underneath the tree? But Carlos gave no indication of why. He simply sat down beside her in the car, grinning as the sea air caressed his face.

Shortly before his death, totally unexpectedly — as if he had had a premonition of his imminent demise — Senhor Vaz had told Hanna that if she ever needed advice and he was not at hand to give it, she should turn first to Senhor Pedro Pimenta.

‘Why him?’ she had asked. ‘I barely know who he is.’

‘I don’t know anybody who is more honest than he is,’ he said. ‘He’s the only person in this country who I’ve never caught out telling lies. Talk to Pedro Pimenta if you need advice. And rest assured that you can trust Herr Eber to look after our money — he’d never steal a single escudo of our assets. He believes that God goes out of His way to look after him. You couldn’t ask to find a better cashier than Herr Eber. God has erected steel bars between Herr Eber and any thievish inclinations he might have, deep down inside him.’

Pedro Pimenta was an immigrant from Coimbra who carved out for himself an astonishing career when he came to the African colony. He had first been an assistant to a tailor who had decided to seek his fortune in the African colonies. Pimenta’s real intention had been to emigrate to Angola, and more specifically to the city of Luanda, because rumour had it that the white colonial population was badly in need of tailors. But fate had dictated that the master tailor who paid for Pimenta’s ticket had decided to settle in the country that at that time was still called Portuguese East Africa. For the first three months after his arrival, Pimenta, who was only seventeen at the time, had been scared to death by everything the alien continent threw at him. He was terrified of the dark nights, of the whispering voices of the blacks, of the snakes he never saw and the spiders that hid away in the darkness. Even though it was many years since beasts of prey had wandered into the town at night, he was always afraid that a lion would force its way in through his half-open window and rip out his throat. For the first three months Pimenta spent all his time hiding behind barricades. As he was unable to sleep at night, he didn’t have the strength to work during the day. The master tailor sacked him, and kicked him out of the little house down by the harbour where he had established his tailoring business.

The fact that Pimenta was out of work did not mean that he was ruined: instead he was forced to overcome his fears and take responsibility for his life. Thanks to a number of forged references, he was given a job by an Indian businessman, learnt the basics of commerce, and before long started up his own business with prices undercutting anything his rivals had to offer. After less than ten years he had become a rich man. He built a house on a hill outside the town, was one of the first people in Lourenço Marques to own a car and a chauffeur, and was considered to be one of the most prominent of the colonial immigrants.

Nobody knew that Pedro Pimenta was illiterate. He managed to keep in his head all the figures he needed to master in his business dealings. When he became more successful he called up a younger brother from Portugal who could both read and write. That brother took care of all the necessary correspondence, and nobody had the slightest idea that all the letters of the alphabet jumped around inside Pimenta’s head in total confusion.

Pimenta’s big breakthrough came with the dogs. He had the idea one evening when he was visiting the brothel run by his good friend Senhor Vaz. It was shortly after Felicia had started to work there: Pimenta soon became a regular customer of hers, visiting her once every week, always on Tuesday evenings.

On one of his visits there was a man of about his own age sitting waiting for the woman he had just booked, hoping she would soon finish her session with her current client. He and Pimenta started talking. The man, who came from South Africa, ran a business selling guard dogs.

‘Fear is an excellent employer,’ he said. ‘Especially in South Africa where the whites shut themselves away in compounds surrounded by high fences, and their need for guard dogs is never-ending. They would really prefer to have bloodthirsty, starving wolves, but I provide them with German shepherd dogs trained in Belgium and some kennels in the south of Germany. When they are fully trained to attack black people, they are sent on boats to Durban or Port Elizabeth. My customers queue up and are prepared to pay a small fortune for the strongest and most aggressive dogs.’

The man tipped the ash off his cigar and burst out laughing.

‘The only drawback with the dogs is that they are not white,’ he said. ‘If they were, they would be worth twice as much.’

Pimenta didn’t understand at first what he meant.

‘White sheepdogs?’

‘Yes, it would be perfect if one could breed white sheepdogs — albinos, for instance. White dogs, just as white as their owners. They would scare the blacks even more. And hence make their owners feel more secure.’

Pimenta nodded and said that was a fascinating idea, of course. But what he didn’t say was that he knew a man, a Portuguese veterinary surgeon, who had a few white sheepdogs in his garden.

The following day Pimenta went to see the vet, who was in his sixties and had begun to think about moving back to Portugal before he became too old. He had lived in Africa for over forty years, and on several occasions had suffered serious bouts of malaria that had almost killed him. He was convinced that his inner organs were vulnerable to attacks by bacteria, worms and amoebae. No doctor had been able to solve the problem and they didn’t even think it was worth trying to cure him. Pimenta proposed that he should take over the pair of sheepdogs and their recent litter of puppies, all of them as white as snow, in return for a sum of money that would greatly assist the old vet to undertake the journey back home to Portugal. They reached an agreement, and a few months later Pimenta waved goodbye to him from the quay in Lourenço Marques harbour as a regular passenger liner set sail for Durban, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town and Lisbon.

By that time Pimenta had already bought some land outside the town with the utmost secrecy, and he had a large complex of kennels built on it. His brother Louis, the one who could read and write, took over responsibility for it. After two more years, he had a collection of over thirty white sheepdogs. By then Louis had grown tired of the African heat and returned home. And so Pimenta took over control of everything himself. With the help of a retired Portuguese cavalry officer the dogs had been trained to go on the attack the moment a black person approached. Pimenta had paid the commander of the fort to allow his dogs to practise on a group of black miscreants who were being held in the military jail. In order not to appear excessively brutal, Pimenta had supplied the black prisoners with thick fur coats that the sheepdogs were unable to bite through.