Clarence clicked her tongue. It did not make sense. Their relationship had endured the passage of time, so it could not have been that serious. What had happened?
She looked at her watch. There were still two hours to go before dinner. She decided to stroll down Avenida Libertad. It had been difficult for her to choose hotels because of the very limited selection available in the city. She had ruled out the well-known districts of Los Angeles and Ela Nguema so as not to have to depend on buses. The historic four-star Hotel Bahía, in the middle of the new port, was the one she liked most, but she had finally picked the Hotel Bantú, as it was near all the must-see places in the city and because the reviews were fairly positive.
She walked toward the city’s old quarter, which, although not well looked after in comparison to the European places she was used to, she found in better condition than the dirty outskirts that she had seen in the taxi from the airport to the hotel. Apart from the children who flocked to her, two things caught her eye and brought a faint smile to her face. The first was the electricity cables that, tangled and loose like artificial lianas, had the run of the place, forming a complex aerial maze that connected one street to another. And the other was the strange combination of vehicles that drove on the irregularly paved streets. Her father had passed his love of cars down to her, so she was able to identify run-down Lada Samaras, Volkswagen Passats, Ford Sierras, Opel Mantas, Renault 21s, BMW C30s, and several Jeep Laredos, beside new Mercedes and Toyota pickups.
Malabo looked like an Antillean or Andalusian city. It was full of colonial buildings from the English and Spanish periods. It was evident that the successive presence of Portuguese, British, Spanish, and businesspeople who traded with the Antilles had left a very particular mark on the architecture. Among the low-rise dilapidated buildings would suddenly appear an old house with a balcony that reminded her of a Spanish hacienda with wrought-iron balconies.
And palm trees, loads of palm trees.
After some time, she stopped, worn out and thirsty. She heard music coming from a small blue building with a corrugated roof. She peeked in and saw it was a bar, a simple bar like those in the villages of her valley. There were three or four tables covered with oilcloths, Formica chairs, and a small counter behind which hung various calendars whose pages were intermittently fluttered by a small fan. The music did not succeed in drowning the noise of a generator situated beside the bar.
When she stepped inside, the four or five patrons fell silent and looked at her in surprise. Clarence blushed and hesitated before asking for a small bottle of water. She was served by a burly middle-aged woman with a high-pitched voice who immediately tried to wheedle information from the foreigner. Clarence preferred not to go into too many details about the reasons for her trip. Beside the door, two young men with sweaty shirts did not take their eyes off her. She decided to drink the water slowly and steadily and leave the bar casually, acting as if she knew exactly where she was.
She looked outside, and her heart missed a beat. But how . . .
She gave a friendly if quick good-bye and went out onto the street where, to her surprise, night had fallen.
She shook her head, sure she had been in the bar for only a few minutes!
She began to walk the lonely street, trying to make out the route home. Where had everyone disappeared to? Why did only some of the streetlights work?
A few drops of sweat began to bead on her forehead and neck.
Was it her imagination, or did she hear steps behind her? She quickened her pace. Maybe she was being a little paranoid, but she could swear that someone was following her. The men from the bar? She quickly turned her head without reducing her pace and made out two police uniforms. She cursed out loud. She had left all her papers in the hotel!
A voice called to her, but she ignored it and continued walking quickly, trying to hold back the urge to run, until the next corner, where she bumped into a group of teenagers who surrounded her, amused. Clarence used these few seconds of confusion to turn right, where she began to run and take different streets to lose the police. When it felt as if her heart were going to burst in her chest, she stopped, panting and completely soaked in sweat. She leaned against a wall with her eyes closed.
A babbling sound indicated that the river was nearby. She opened her eyes and realized that she had walked northeast instead of south. A huge green wall stretched out before her eyes. But what had happened? The city had looked easy to her from the plane! As if the straight and parallel streets were drawn with a steady hand from the very shore of the sea toward the interior.
She blamed the books she had read on the plane. She felt a shiver. If she was afraid at that moment, how would she have been able to withstand a five-month journey on a ship subject to storms, knowing that the destination was an island where if you did not die at the hands of the ferocious and hostile natives who poisoned the waters and slit throats and beheaded the seafarers, you would succumb to fever? To calm herself, Clarence tried to put herself in the place of the hundreds of people who, over the centuries, had made the expeditions to take possession of these lands, long before Antón, Jacobo, and Kilian enjoyed the golden colonial period, and she felt another shiver.
She had read that they used to sleep fully clothed and with guns in their hands, gripped with fear; that sometimes the crew was not told the destination to prevent mutiny; that many were political prisoners who were promised freedom if they managed to survive two years on Fernando Po . . . She imagined the pioneers who were given grants of land, the prisoners dreaming of freedom, the missionaries—first Jesuits and then Claretians—convinced of their divine mandate, the various intrepid explorers accompanied by their foolish wives . . . How many died and how many begged to return home even if it meant losing their liberty! They may have had reason to be afraid, but she did not! But had she not also read a novel about the kidnapping of a young white woman and the terrible police conduct in Guinea?
She did not know whether to laugh or cry.
Clarence reviewed her surroundings and felt a prick of uneasiness when moving away from the river. She tried to picture the map of the city that she had studied umpteen times on the plane as she set off to go west, to the busy Avenida de la Independencia . . .
She had barely gone a couple of meters when a car’s horn made her jump.
“Would you like me to take you somewhere?”
She located a young man with glasses in a blue 1980s Volga.
Just what she needed!
Without answering, she quickened her step.