Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [58]
But it couldn't have been much of a joke for Júlio's daughter. She spoke in her simple and open way of her home life, in those two rooms at the back. She said to me, “When my father gets drunk he beats my mother. Sometimes he beats me too. Sometimes it's so bad I can't sleep. Then I walk up and down the room until I get tired. Sometimes I walk all night.” And every night after that, whenever I got into bed, I thought for a second or two about the little maid in the quarters. Another time she said to me, “We eat the same food every day.” I didn't know whether she was complaining or boasting or simply speaking a fact about her African ways. In those early days, until local people made me think differently about African girls, I used to worry about Júlio's daughter, seeing myself in her, and wondering how, with all her feelings for fineness as I saw them, she was going to manage in the wilderness in which she found herself.
Of course it wasn't wilderness. It looked open and wild, but it had all been charted and parcelled out, and every thirty minutes or so on those dirt roads, if you were driving in a suitable vehicle, you came to an estate house, which was more or less like Ana's. Something in newish white concrete with a wide, bougainvillaea-hung verandah all around, and with additions at the back.
We went one Sunday, not long after we had arrived, to a lunch at one of those neighbours of Ana's. It was a big affair. There were mud-splashed Jeeps and Land Rovers and other four-wheel drives on the sandy open space in front of the house. The African servants wore white uniforms, buttoned at the neck. After drinks people separated according to their inclination, some sitting at the big table in the dining room, others sitting at the smaller tables on the verandah, where the tangled old bougainvillaea vines softened the light. I had had no idea what these people would be like and what they would think of me. Ana hadn't talked of the matter and, following her example, I hadn't talked of it to her. I found now that there was no special reaction to me. It was curiously deflating. I was expecting some recognition of my extraordinariness and there was nothing. Some of these estate-owners appeared, in fact, to have no conversation; it was as though the solitude of their lives had taken away that faculty. When eating time came they just sat and ate, husband and wife side by side, not young, not old, people in between in age, eating and not talking, not looking round, very private, as though they were in their own houses. Towards the end of the lunch two or three of these eating women beckoned the servants and talked to them, and after a while the servants came with take-away portions of the lunch in paper bags. It appeared to be a tradition of the place. It might have been that they had come from far, and wanted to have food to eat when they got back home.
Racially they were varied, from what looked like pure white to a deep brown. A number of them were of my father's complexion, and this might have been one reason why they seemed to accept me. Ana said later, “They don't know what to make of you.” There were Indians in the country; I wasn't an absolute exotic. There were quite a few Indian traders. They ran cheap shops and socially never stepped outside their families. There was an old and large Goan community, people originally of India, from the very old Portuguese colony there, who had come to this place in Africa to work as clerks and accountants in the civil service. They spoke Portuguese with a special accent. I couldn't be mistaken for a Goan. My Portuguese was poor and for some reason I spoke it with an English accent. So people couldn't place me and they let me be. I was Ana's London man, as the little housemaid had said.
About the people at the lunch Ana told me afterwards, “They are the second-rank Portuguese. That is how they are considered officially, and that is how they consider themselves. They are second rank because most of them have an African grandparent,