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By Root 217 0

his English with me; he had a heavy South African accent. The big man lived with a great personal grief. His daughter had had promise as a singer. Everyone in the colony who heard her thought that she was special and had it in her to be a star in Europe. Ricardo, who was not a rich man, sold some land and sent the girl to Lisbon to be trained. There she had begun to live with an African from Angola, the Portuguese colony on the other side of the continent. It was the end of the girl's singing, the end of her connection with her family, the end of her father's pride and hope; Ricardo destroyed all the tapes he had of his daughter singing. Some people said that he had pushed his daughter too hard, and that the girl had given up on her singing before she met the African. At one Sunday lunch our host began to play a tape of the girl singing. This was done (as Ana and I knew, having been told beforehand) not to wound Ricardo, but to honour him and his daughter, and to help him with his grief. Our host had recently found the unmarked tape in his house; it was something he had made himself and forgotten about. And now we all listened to the girl singing in Italian and then in German, in the middle of the hot day, the light very bright outside. I found it moving (though I knew nothing about singing) that this kind of talent and ambition had come to someone living here. And Ricardo didn't make a scene. He looked down at the ground, crying, smiling with old pride, while his daughter sang on the tape with the voice and hopes of many years before.

The Noronhas were our blue-bloods, pure Portuguese. He was small and thin, and said to be a man of birth, but I don't know how true that was. She was deformed or disabled in some way—I never heard how, and never wanted to ask—and when she came among us she came in a wheelchair, which her husband pushed. They came into our half-and-half world with the gentlest air of condescension. They knew the country, and they knew where they stood and where we stood. It was possible to feel that they were breaking the rules only because the lady was disabled and had to be humoured. But the fact was that they came among us because of Mrs. Noronha's special gifts. She was a “mystic.” Her husband, the man of birth, was proud of this side of his wife. When they made their entry at an estate-house Sunday lunch he pushed her big wheelchair with a noticeable arrogance in his thin, peevish face. No one, not even Ana, ever told me directly that Mrs. Noronha had this mystic gift. The gift was simply allowed to make itself felt, and it did so in such quiet ways that for the first few times I noticed nothing. To spot the gift at work, you had to know about it. Someone might say, for instance, “I want to go to Lisbon next March.” Mrs. Noronha, hunched up in her chair, would say softly, to no one in particular, “It's not a good time. September would be better.” She would say no more, offer no explanation; and we wouldn't hear any more about a trip to Lisbon in March. And if—just for the sake of the illustration—if I, ignorant at that time of the lady's gifts, had said, “But March in Lisbon would be lovely,” Mr. Noronha would say, with distaste for the contradiction showing in his watery eyes, “There are reasons why it's not a good time,” and his wife would look away, with no expression on her pale face. I felt that her mysticism, together with her disablement and her husband's birth, made her a tyrant. She could say anything; she could be as harsh and disdainful as she pleased; and for three or four or five good reasons no one could question her. I could see that from time to time she had spasms of pain, yet I couldn't help feeling that as soon as she and her husband got back home she might get out of her chair and be perfectly all right. She gave full mystical consultations. They were exclusive and not cheap; and these visitations among the half-and-half estate people, who were susceptible in more than one way, helped beat up custom.

Ana and I would also have had our characters. And, since no one can really see himself,