Half a Life_ A Novel - V. S. Naipaul [72]
When we next saw them, some weeks later, he looked drained. His thin cheeks were soft and slack. Carla said, “We're going to Europe for a while.”
Mrs. Noronha, hunched up in her chair, said in her soft voice, “A bad time.” Carla said, “We want to go and see the children.” The Correias' two children, who were in their teens, had been sent a year or so before to boarding schools in Portugal. Mrs. Noronha said, “A better time for them.” And then, without any change of tone, “What's the matter with the boy? Why is he so ill?” Carla became agitated. She said, “I didn't know he was ill. He hasn't written that.”
Mrs. Noronha paid no attention. She said, “I made a journey once at a bad time. It was not long after the war. And it was long before I took to this chair. Before I took the throne, you might say. We went to South Africa, to Durban. A pretty town, but it was a bad time. About a week after we got there the natives began to riot. Shop-burning, looting. The riots were against the Indians, but I got caught up in the trouble one day. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know the streets. In the distance I saw a white lady with fair hair and a long dress. She beckoned to me and I went to her. She led me without a word through various side streets to a big house, and there I stayed until the streets were quiet. I told my friends about the incident that evening. They said, ‘What was this lady like?' I told them. They said, ‘Describe the house.' I described the house. And somebody said, ‘But that house was pulled down twenty years ago. The lady you met lived there, and the house was pulled down after she died.'” And having told her story, which was really about her own powers, Mrs. Noronha turned her head to one side, against her shoulder, like a bird settling down to sleep. And, as often with her when she was soothsaying or storytelling, we couldn't tell at the end how we had got to where we had got. Everybody just had to look solemn and stay quiet for a while.
Bad time or not, the Correias went off to Europe, to see their children and then to do other things. They stayed away for many months.
*
I GOT TO KNOW their estate manager. I saw a lot of him in the town. He was a small and wiry mixed-race man in his forties with an educated way of speaking. Sometimes he could overdo it. He would say, for instance, about a Portuguese or Indian shopkeeper with whom he had been having trouble, “He isn't, by the remotest stretch of the imagination, what you would call a gentleman.” But his speech limbered up when he saw more of me. He became full of mischief, and at the same time quite trusting, and I felt I was being drawn into a series of little conspiracies against the Correias. We tried the new cafés (they opened up and closed down all the time). We got to know the bars. I got to know the new flavour of the military town, and I liked it. I liked being with the Portuguese soldiers. There was sometimes an officer with a long memory muttering about Goa and the Indians. But the Indian takeover of Goa had happened seven or eight years before. Few of the young conscripts knew about it, and the soldiers were generally very friendly. There was as yet no war in the bush. There had been stories about guerrilla training camps in the desert in Algeria and later in Jordan; but these stories had turned out to be fanciful: a few students from Lisbon and Coimbra playing at being guerrillas in the vacations. In our military town there was still peace and a great deal of civility. It was like being in Europe, and on holiday. It was for me like being in London again, but with money now. My excursions to the town took longer and longer.
Álvaro, the Correias' manager, said to me one day, “Would