Хеннинг Манкелль - A Treacherous Paradise

Pedro Pimenta appeared on the slope. Walking just behind him was the white woman, who was no longer crying. She was holding the girl’s hand tightly. The girl was silent. Hanna couldn’t hear what the woman was saying to Pimenta. He suddenly stopped, and started gesticulating with his hands. It looked as if he wanted the woman to take the girl with her and go away. He continued towards the veranda, started running, with the woman after him. When they came up on to the veranda, she exploded: ‘I believed you,’ she screamed. ‘I’ve kept all the letters you wrote, all the protestations of the enormous love you had for me. I kept asking to come and visit you with the children. I simply couldn’t bear to keep on waiting in Coimbra any longer. But all the time you kept on telling me that Lourenço Marques was too dangerous. The same thing in letter after letter.’

She took a crumpled sheet of letter paper out of her pocket and started reading in a shrill voice.

‘“In Lourenço Marques the streets are full of cunning leopards and prides of lion prowling around at night. Every morning the remains are found of some white person or other, often a woman or a child, that has been eaten. Poisonous snakes find their way into the houses. It’s still too dangerous for you to come here.” Did you write that, or didn’t you?’

‘I wrote the truth.’

‘But there are no wild animals in the streets here. You lied.’

‘They were here in the streets some years ago.’

‘Nobody I’ve spoken to has seen a single lion in this town for the last thirty years. You lied to me in your letters because you didn’t want us to come here. The love that you described doesn’t exist.’

The furious woman had forced Pimenta up against the wall of the veranda. The girl had joined her brother in the doorway. Isabel was sitting tensely on the sofa, watching what was happening. Hanna thought that perhaps she ought to leave: but something that wasn’t merely curiosity held her back.

The woman suddenly turned to look at the far side of the long veranda. Joanna and Rogerio were standing there. They had appeared without a sound, like their mother.

‘Who are they?’ yelled the woman from Coimbra.

‘Can’t we sit down and try to talk our way through this calmly and peacefully?’ said Pimenta.

But the woman continued to force him up against the wall.

‘They are my children,’ said Isabel, standing up. ‘They are the children I have with Pedro. And now I’d like to know who you are, and why you are behaving like this towards my husband.’

‘My husband? My husband? But I’m the one who’s married to him! Am I not married to you, Pedro? For nearly twenty years? Who’s she? A black whore you’ve picked up?’

Isabel thumped the woman, and promptly received a thump in return. Pimenta separated them and urged both women to calm down. Isabel sat down, but the other woman started hitting Pedro instead.

‘Can’t you tell me the truth for a change? What’s she doing here? Who are those children?’

‘Teresa! Let’s calm down a bit to start with. Then we can talk. Everything can be explained.’

‘I am calm. I’m just fed up of all the letters in which you’ve lied to me and urged me to stay in Coimbra.’

‘All the time I was scared stiff that something might happen to you.’

‘And who’s she?’

Pimenta tried to lead her away to one side, perhaps so that he could talk to her without Isabel understanding what was said. But Isabel stood up again. She fetched her children and pushed them forward to Teresa and Pedro.

‘These are Pedro’s and my children,’ she said.

Teresa stared at them.

‘Good God!’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me their names!’

‘Why not?’

‘Is the boy called José? And the girl Anabel?’

‘They’re called Rogerio and Joanna.’

‘Well, at least he hasn’t given them the same names as the children he abandoned. At least that was a step too far.’

Hanna tried to understand. So Pimenta had a family in Portugal and another family here in Lourenço Marques.

Teresa had stopped shouting now. She was speaking in a low but firm voice, as if she had drawn a horrific conclusion which nevertheless gave her the calm that truth endows.

‘So that’s why we weren’t allowed to come here,’ she said. ‘So that’s why you wrote all those damned letters about the dangers of this place. You’d got yourself a new family here in Africa. When I was finally unable to wait any longer, I thought you would be pleased. Instead, I came here and found you out. How could you treat us like that?’

Pimenta stood leaning against the wall. He was very pale. Hanna had the impression that standing in front of her was a man who had been caught after committing a very serious crime.

Teresa suddenly turned to look at her.

‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘Does he have children with you as well? Where are they? Perhaps you are also married to him? Are your children called José or Anabel?’

Hanna stood up.

‘He’s only my friend.’

‘How can you have a man like that as your friend?’

Teresa suddenly seemed totally abandoned. She looked from one of them to the other. But it was Isabel who progressed from words to action. Lying on the table was a knife that Pimenta used to carve small wooden sculptures, which he burnt when they were finished. She grabbed the knife and thrust it deep into Pimenta’s chest, pulled it out, then stabbed him again. Hanna thought she could count up to at least ten deep wounds before Pimenta’s body slowly slithered down on to the floor of the veranda. Isabel took her children and disappeared into the house. Teresa collapsed. For the first time the boy left the doorway. He squatted down beside his mother and put his arms round her. The girl started crying again, but quietly this time, almost silently.

Many hours later, when Pimenta’s dead body had been sent to the mortuary and Isabel had been led away wearing handcuffs and with a chain round her right foot, Hanna went back home. She had also met once again Ana Dolores, the nurse who had helped her to become fit again, and tried to explain to her the difference between black and white people. Ana had taken care of Teresa and her children, but handed over Isabel’s children to the servants with instructions to take them to their mother’s sister. She lived in a slum whose name Hanna had failed to grasp. She was distressed to think that they would be taken away from the well-organized white world where they had grown up, and instead plunged into the chaos that reigned in the inaccessible black settlements.

On the way back to town Hanna asked the chauffeur to stop the car by the side of the road. They were on the bank of the river, just before the old bridge that was so narrow, it could only cope with one-way traffic. An old African stood on duty there with a red and a green flag, directing the few cars that used it. The shock of what had happened was only now beginning to register with her.

‘What will happen to Isabel?’ she asked.

‘She’ll be locked up in the fort,’ said the chauffeur. There was no trace of doubt in his voice.

‘Who will pass judgement on her?’

‘She’s already condemned.’

‘But surely the fact that Pedro double-crossed her and let her down must be taken into account? Just as he let Teresa down.’

‘If Teresa had killed him, she would just have been sent back to Portugal with the children. But Isabel is a black woman. She has killed a white man. She will be punished for that. Besides, who would get upset over the fact that a white man had let down a black woman?’

They spoke no more about the matter. Hanna noticed that the chauffeur didn’t want to reveal what he really thought.