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You have a good memory.

Yes, there is nothing wrong with my memory. My body is another story. I have arthritis of the hips, that is why I use a stick. The dancer's curse, they call it. And the pain – you will not believe the pain! But I remember South Africa very well. I remember the flat where we lived in Wynberg, where Mr Coetzee came to drink tea. I remember the mountain,Table Mountain. The flat was right under the mountain, so it got no sun in the afternoons. I hated Wynberg. I hated the whole time we spent there, first when my husband was in hospital and then after he died. It was very lonely for me, I cannot tell you how lonely. Worse than Luanda, because of the loneliness. If your Mr Coetzee had offered us his friendship I would not have been so hard on him, so cold. But I was not interested in love, I was still too close to my husband, still grieving for him. And he was just a boy, this Mr Coetzee. I was a woman and he was a boy. He was a boy as a priest is always a boy until suddenly one day he is an old man. The sublimation of love! He was offering to teach me about love, yet what could a boy like him teach me, a boy who knew nothing about life? I could have taught him, perhaps, but I was not interested in him. I just wanted him to keep his hands off Maria Regina.

You say, if he had offered you friendship it would have been different. What kind of friendship did you have in mind?

What kind of friendship? I will tell you. For a long time after the disaster that came over us, the disaster I told you about, I had to struggle with the bureaucracy, first over compensation, then over Joana's papers – Joana was born before we were married, so legally she was not my husband's daughter, she was not even his step-daughter, I will not bore you with the details. I know, in every country the bureaucracy is a labyrinth, I am not saying South Africa was the worst in the world, but whole days I would spend waiting in a line to get a rubber stamp – a rubber stamp for this, a rubber stamp for that – and always, always it would be the wrong office or the wrong department or the wrong line.

If we had been Portuguese it would have been different. There were many Portuguese who came to South Africa in those days, from Moçambique and Angola and even Madeira, there were organizations to help the Portuguese. But we were from Brazil, and there were no regulations for Brazilians, no precedents, to the bureaucrats it was as if we arrived in their country from Mars.

And there was the problem of my husband. You cannot sign for this, your husband must come and sign, they would say to me. My husband cannot sign, he is in hospital, I would say. Then take it to him in the hospital and get him to sign it and bring it back, they would say. My husband cannot sign anything, I would say, he is in Stikland, don't you know Stikland? Then let him make his mark, they would say. He cannot make his mark, sometimes he cannot even breathe, I would say. Then I cannot help you, they would say: go to such-and-such an office and tell them your story – perhaps they can help you there.

And all of this pleading and petitioning I had to do alone, unaided, with my bad English that I had learned in school out of books. In Brazil it would have been easy, in Brazil we have these people, we call them despachantes, facilitators: they have contacts in the government offices, they know how to steer your papers through the maze, you pay them a fee and they do all the unpleasant business for you one-two-three. That was what I needed in Cape Town: a facilitator, someone to make things easier for me. Mr Coetzee could have offered to be my facilitator. A facilitator for me and a protector for my girls. Then, just for a minute, just for a day, I could have allowed myself to be weak, an ordinary, weak woman. But no, I dared not relax, or what would have become of us, my daughters and me?

Sometimes, you know, I would be trudging the streets of that ugly, windy city from one government office to another and