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By Root 217 0

The man sat down in a low armchair. He used his feet to pull a stool towards him and he rested his feet on the stool, with his knees wide apart; his ragged shorts fell back almost to his crotch. All the time people in the yard, in the kitchen and the quarters, were looking at us; but he still didn't look at Ana or me. I saw now that, dark though he was, his eyes were light. He stroked the inside of his thighs slowly, as though he was caressing himself. Ana had prepared me for this kind of aggression; it would have been hard for me otherwise. And quite late I saw that, apart from his wife and the cabinet of ornaments, he had another treasure on the verandah: a big green-tinted bottle with a living snake, on an oilcloth-covered table just beside his chair.

The snake was greenish. When the man tormented it or teased it the snake, tightly imprisoned though it was, lashed out with frightening abrupt wide-mouthed rage against the side of the bottle, which was already discoloured with some kind of mucus from the snake's mouth. The man was pleased with the effect the snake had on me. He began to talk to me in Portuguese. For the first time he looked at me. He said, “It's a spitting cobra. They can blind you from fifteen feet. They aim for shiny things. They will aim for your watch or your glasses or your eyes. If you don't wash it off fast with sugar and water you are in trouble.”

On the way back I said to Ana, “It was terrible. I was glad you told me about the showing off. I didn't mind that. But the snake—I wanted to break that bottle.”

She said, “My own flesh and blood. To think of him there all the time. That's what I've had to live with. I wanted you to see him. It is what you might leave behind.”

*

I LET IT PASS. I had no wish to quarrel with her. She had been very good and delicate with her half-brother, very good in a bad situation; and old love and regard for her had welled up in me. Old love: it was still there, it could even be added to at moments like this, but it belonged now to another life, or a part of my life that had run its course. I no longer slept in her grandfather's big carved bed; but we lived easily in the same house, often ate together, and had many things to talk about. She no longer sought to rebuke me. Sometimes when we were talking she would pull herself up and say, “But I shouldn't be talking to you like this.” And a little while later she would start again. On estate matters and the doings of estate people I continued to trust her.

And I wasn't surprised when news came that Carla Correia was selling her estate. Ana had always said that this was what Carla was going to do; that in spite of the talk of charity to a school friend, Luis and Graça had been put in the estate house only to keep it in good order until it could be sold. Carla had sold to a big property company in Portugal, and she had sold at the top. Estate prices, which had been falling because of the guerrilla war in the north and west, had risen again, in an irrational way, because certain influential people in Lisbon had begun to say that the government and the guerrillas were about to come to an agreement.

So Luis and Graça were going to be on the move again. The property company wanted the estate house for their own directors when they came out “on tour” (the company apparently believed that the colonial order, and colonial style, were going to continue after the war). But things were not all bad for Luis and Graça. The company wanted Luis to stay on as estate manager. They were going to build a new house for him on a two-acre plot; and after a few years Luis would be able to buy the house on easy terms. Until the house was built Luis and Graça would continue to live in the estate house. It was part of the deal Carla had made with the company. So Ana was both right and wrong. Carla had (in a small way) used Luis and Graça to add to her fortune, but she had not forgotten her school friend. Graça was very happy. Since she had left home she had never had a house of her own. It was what she had dreamt about for years, the house and