Borderline

by Marita van der Vyver

  ‘Just like that from the bottle?’ Theresa asks.

  ‘I have brought some disposable glasses,’ Miles says. ‘In case you did not want to drink from the same bottle as us.’

  ‘No, it’s not that, it’s just …’ She was a student the last time she drank from a bottle on the street. But perhaps the Malecón doesn’t really count as ‘on the street’; perhaps it is ‘by the sea’, like a beach picnic?

  Ruben shoots her a sideways glance, as if he can guess what she’s thinking, and she feels her cheeks grow hot.

  As they walk, music fragments follow them like butterflies, from one performer to the next: a teenager strumming his guitar rather amateurishly to impress his girlfriend, two men with Rasta locks playing drums, a group of older men dressed in white making pulsating Latin-American music. A young Cuban is dancing in an exceptionally sensual way with a giggling older American woman. Next to this odd couple, a beautiful woman shaking her impressive buttocks in a tight-fitting red dress dances with her head flung back and her mouth wide open.

  Lazaro sighs deeply from his wheelchair, and they walk on.

  It is hard to tell how many of the strollers and wall-sitters around them are tourists. Theresa hears American accents, snatches of French and German, one or two other languages she doesn’t recognise. And not all the Spanish speakers are necessarily Cuban. According to Oreste, there’s a clear-sounding difference between Cuban Spanish and Spanish Spanish, although of course she cannot hear it.

  Probably the way South African English sounds different from any other kind of English.

  Theo once told her that was how foreign journalists discovered there were South African soldiers in Angola long before P W Botha was forced to make an official admission. The soldiers’ uniforms and vehicles and weapons and other paraphernalia could be disguised, but their accents betrayed them.

  ‘Tell me about Angola.’ She looks at the sea, smooth as a mirror and gleaming in the moonlight, the gentle lapping of small waves on the rocks below the wall barely audible above the music and human voices. ‘Not necessarily about the war,’ she adds hurriedly. ‘I’m really just curious about your impressions of the country.’

  ‘What are your impressions?’ Miles wants to know.

  ‘I have never been there. That probably sounds strange to you, because it’s sort of a neighbouring country, but South Africans couldn’t really travel in Africa when I was younger. Except to go to war.’ She shrugs apologetically. ‘Or maybe we just weren’t all that interested. For me Europe has always been more alluring than my own continent.’

  She braces herself for a rebuke, or at least an accusing look, but no one reacts to her unexpected confession.

  ‘And the war in Angola continued well into my adult life. In recent years a few of my male friends have travelled there, adventurous guys who like camping and fishing, but I’m not a big fan of the outdoor life. I prefer … places with electricity and hot running water.’

  She’d almost said ‘civilised’ places.

  ‘Neither Lazaro nor I ever went back there,’ Miles says, ‘so it is almost impossible for us to think of Angola without thinking of war.’

  ‘When I arrived there near the end of 1975, Luanda was in chaos,’ Lazaro says, ruminating as if he has to dig deep to remember. ‘Most of the filthy rich Portuguese and other coloniales were already gone, abandoned their shops and business, just like that, loaded everything they had onto ships and flew out. Many poor whites were still there, many of them more frightened of communists than of the devil himself, but they did not have the money to get away. By then they were desesperados. That was when I learned that desesperación was something you could smell. It did not smell like ordinary poverty, or like normal fear. It was … impossible to forget.’

  Theresa watches him while he speaks, so much more serious than she has seen him until now, and wonders if she hasn’t perhaps ruined the entire evening for everyone by bringing up Angola. They are still walking on the esplanade between the sea wall and the street. The other two men listen to Lazaro in silence.

  ‘I remember the long convoys that were moving towards the south. To South Africa, the only tierra prometida … promised land that was left for white people in Africa. Some of them probably started again from nothing, after they lost everything in Angola. Others just gave up on Africa. They were desilusionados. So they fucked off to Portugal or Brazil or wherever.’ He looks up from his wheelchair at Theresa as he continues: ‘But I do not have many memories of Luanda – as soon as we arrived we were sent into the bush. To stop the enemy that was coming from the south. Your people.’ Again, his smile softens his words.

  ‘My people,’ Theresa nods.

  ‘After that, I remember only flashes. Thick bush. Impossible mud roads. The rain never stopped. Mosquitos and flies and other insects that I never saw before and hope I never see again. Spiders and snakes. Dios mío, do you know how scared I am of spiders?’ He roars with laughter, his mouth wide open, his eyes squeezed shut, before he carries on talking about ruins, deserted settlements and destroyed villages, the constant fear of landmines that had been planted everywhere.

  ‘After a few weeks I was more scared of landmines than of spiders.’ But he says nothing about any of the battles he was involved in, offers no details about the dead or wounded; he talks about the fauna and flora rather than about the war.

  ‘So you were there during Operation Savannah?’ she asks, still hopeful that he may say something that could bring her closer to Theo’s war experience. Just a scrap of information that could help her connect a few dots, form a vague picture of a war that to her still seems like an empty page.

  ‘That is what the South Africans called it. Cubans called it Operation Carlota. Me, I called it war. I was soldado de infantería … foot soldier, I followed orders, I had no fucking clue what the “big picture” looked like.’

  It was probably still too difficult to talk about the battlefield, especially to a woman. Especially a woman whose male relatives and friends had fought on the side of the enemy.

  ‘I was there in 1988,’ Miles says softly. ‘Then we knew that we were fighting in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale.’

  ‘Ah!’ Theresa says.

  Even she, who knows far too little about this war, remembers that Cuito Cuanavale was considered a turning point. A triumph for the Cubans – or a tactical victory for the South Africans. It all depended on where you stood when you considered the facts. Like Theo always said about everything. By then she was living with him, a supporter of the End Conscription Campaign, while he was still sitting on the fence. Or so she thought.

  ‘It all depends on where the fence is that I’m sitting on,’ Theo would tease her.

  ‘I was in an armoured unit,’ Miles says. ‘Tanks. And I had a rank. So I was probably “safer” than old Lazaro here who was only a foot soldier. But the responsibility – of sending people under your command into a situation that you knew not everyone could survive – that was the thing I could not handle. I was constantly telling myself that I was only obeying orders from higher up. The excuse of every soldier in every war, right?’

  They have turned around and are walking back in the direction of the hotel. The sparkling sea is now on their right, the round moon above the city diagonally behind them. This section of the Malecón is less busy, aside from a few scantily clad women who have draped their bodies over the sea wall so suggestively that Theresa assumes they must be prostitutes.

  She can even hear the sea sigh, a soft lapping of water that to her ears sounds like rhythmic breathing.

  ‘And you?’ she asks Ruben, who is still pushing the wheelchair. ‘How did you manage not to go to Angola?’

  ‘Is that an accusation?’ he asks with the shadow of a smile.

  ‘No, admiration, rather. I mean …’ She glances at the other two. ‘Sorry, now it sounds as if I am criticising you for going to fight. It’s not at all what I mean.’

  ‘No sé.’ Ruben seems to think it over. �
�I don’t know. Coincidence. I am some years younger than Lazaro—’

  ‘Although you would never guess so if you saw my desirable body,’ Lazaro jokes.

  Ruben grins at his friend. ‘I began my military service in 1978, when it was quieter over there. And I had asthma. Still do, but these days the attacks are not so bad any more, because I have learned how to keep them away. Always have my pump with me.’ He taps the pocket of his white cotton shirt. ‘And now I think the asthma was a blessing. It kept me out of Angola. Also I could never take up smoking like all the other guys.’

  ‘He is not a real Cuban,’ Lazaro says. ‘He never smoked and now he never drinks.’

  ‘And he cooks and keeps house,’ Miles adds. ‘Real Cubans always have wives who do those things for them.’

  ‘And you?’ Theresa joins in the banter. ‘Are you “real Cubans”?’

  ‘I have no wife,’ Lazaro says, ‘but I am guilty of all the other sins.’

  ‘I’ve already had two wives,’ Miles admits. ‘Married twice, divorced twice, the second time quite recently. So I have not yet had time to learn how to cook and keep house. But I have two daughters, one with each wife, and soon they will be old enough to help their poor helpless papá in the house.’

  ‘I have no children,’ says Lazaro, making a comically sad face.

  ‘The way you slept around in your younger days, you probably have several children you do not know about,’ says Miles.

  ‘I hope not. I am old enough now to know I would have been a terrible father. For a long time I blamed the war, thought the wheelchair was the reason I never had a wife or children, but now I think that some men are just not fit for matrimonio. It wakes up their demons.’

  Theresa wonders what demons could be sleeping behind that magnificent smile, the thundering laugh and the good-humoured teasing. But she doesn’t ask. She, after all, once loved a man who hid his demons so expertly that she married him, not suspecting a thing.

  ‘I also thought the war was the reason my first marriage did not work out,’ says Miles. ‘My head was far too messed up. But when the second one fell apart as well … I don’t know … I suppose you cannot blame the war for everything.’

  ‘Your husband, did he die in the war?’ Ruben suddenly asks beside her.

  She takes a deep breath before she answers. ‘No, long afterwards. Long after he was no longer my husband. But something inside him did die there in Angola. Or got left behind.’

  ‘Do you think that is the reason you split up?’ Miles asks.

  It’s the first time he sounds like a psychologist.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She listens to the sighing of the sea, keeps her eyes fixed on her walking feet. ‘The war messed up his head, like you said. Far more messed-up than your head probably ever was. He spent the last part of his life in a mental health institution. An asylum.’ She can’t hold back the sigh that rises up inside her like a wave. This is why she is so afraid of talking about Theo. She’s afraid of melodrama, sentimentality. Bathos. ‘But if it hadn’t been for his experiences in the war, he probably would have had a different personality when I met him. More light-hearted, less dark. And then I might not have fallen in love with him. His dark side was precisely what drew me.’ She shakes her head, still looking at her feet. ‘Stupid, I know, but I always found complex characters with hidden depths more attractive than decent but boring men.’

  ‘I am a complex character with many hidden depths.’ Lazaro makes everyone laugh again.

  Funny how you can have such honest conversations with strangers you encounter when you travel. This isn’t the first time it has happened to her, and she hopes it won’t be the last. Could it be because you know you will never have to look them in the eye again that you are prepared to reveal more of yourself than when you’re talking to your own family?

  They walk past a young couple who are locked in each other’s arms, in an embrace so inappropriately intimate that she looks the other way.

  ‘It is said that the Malecón is the world’s longest couch,’ Ruben observes. ‘People do not have enough room at home, so they come and sit here and do what they would do on a couch at home if they had the space.’

  She watches him in silence for a while before she asks: ‘Did you still love your wife when she died? After you had been apart for so long?’

  ‘I never stopped loving her. I knew I would never find someone like her again. She was too good for me.’ He looks up at the handful of stars that are visible above the city lights despite the bright moon. ‘Much smarter than me. Much better educated.’

  ‘Education doesn’t necessarily make people smarter,’ she tries to reassure him.

  ‘I know. But she was a really clever woman. Lecturer in English. It’s thanks to her I can speak decent English. She gave me English books to read. Forced me to speak to her in English. With Amado she spoke almost only in English, right from since he was small. She dreamed of the three of us going to live in the US someday. After she died I felt very guilty because I never really shared her dream.’ He scratches his beard, rubs his neck, embarrassed by his unusual garrulousness. ‘And you?’

  ‘It was different for me. By the time my ex-husband died, I had lived without him for much longer than with him. There was no question of love any longer, hadn’t been for ages. But his death stirred up all kinds of unwelcome feelings. Guilt was just one of them.’

  ‘Is that why it is so important to deliver that letter?’

  She involuntarily tightens her grip on her handbag with the precious letter inside it. ‘That is one of the reasons.’

  They have at last arrived back at the Rampa, where there are now fewer people than before. A single guitarist is still entertaining a small group of bystanders with flamenco beats. They find a place to sit on the wall and Miles takes the bottle of rum from his rucksack. When he wants to pour her a shot in a plastic glass, she stops him. He passes the bottle to her and watches her raise it to her mouth and take a quick sip. It’s only a tiny mouthful, which almost makes her choke, but Miles and Lazaro applaud as if she has passed an impossibly difficult test.

  ‘I can take you to Cienfuegos tomorrow,’ Ruben says, while the other two take their turns with the bottle. ‘If you like.’

  ‘Don’t you have other work?’ she asks, confused.

  ‘I have already asked my boss if I can have a few more days off.’

  Lazaro’s bright white smile stretches from ear to ear. ‘It was the boss who said he must take you to Cienfuegos. And to any other place where you want to go from there.’

  ‘And I seconded the suggestion with much enthusiasm.’ Miles bursts out laughing when he sees her bewildered expression.

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Some time last night.’

  ‘Before you met me?’ She takes the bottle from Miles and takes another gulp without thinking. ‘Why would you want to help someone you didn’t know at all?’

  ‘Because we know that when it comes to women, Ruben has far better judgement than we do.’

  ‘And I could never resist a damsel in distress,’ Lazaro grins, proud of his idiomatic English.

  ‘I’m way past being a damsel.’ Now she’s blushing like a bloody damsel. And the realisation that she is blushing only makes her cheeks glow even more. She looks back at Ruben. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It would be wonderful if you could also interpret for me a bit. I will pay you, of course,’ she hastens to assure him, in case he regrets his offer.

  ‘Interpreter, guide, driver, bodyguard, just tell me what you need. But I cannot talk as much as Oreste,’ he warns her with mock gravity.

  ‘I’ll be glad if you talk less. I mean … please don’t tell him I think he talks too much …’

  Ruben appears to be enjoying her discomfort.

  ‘We all think he talks too much,’ says Miles before taking another swig of rum and passing the bottle to her. ‘Your secret is safe with us.’

  She doesn’t
really want more rum, but the entire evening has taken such an unexpected turn that she offers no resistance. Miles has lit a cigar and passes that to her, too. She puffs on it without demur, coughs a bit, takes another puff. The smoke and the rum are making her head spin, in a pleasant way, like many years ago when she smoked dagga. She lets out a deep sigh and looks up at the night sky.

  ‘Can you see the Southern Cross from here?’ she asks dreamily, of no one in particular.

  ‘Only at a certain time of the year,’ is Lazaro’s prompt reply. ‘At a certain time of the night, just before the day breaks, for a very short time. If the weather is right.’ He looks up too, with apparent yearning, at the full moon that makes the stars look even fainter and more distant than usual. ‘I only discovered this after I came back from Angola. Before Angola, I was more interested in the city lights than in the stars, but over there I had a lot of time to look at the stars in the night.’

  That evening in Stilbaai when she wondered if some poor soldier somewhere in Angola might be looking at those same stars at that same moment? Could Lazaro have been that soldier? It is a strange, comforting thought.

  14. ‘WE SHALL OVERCOME’

  Not long after that rare moment of empathy in Stilbaai beneath the Southern Cross, Theresa gradually forgot all about Angola again.

  While she wished away her final school years in her platteland town, she was of course still aware of the border war, but in the way she would be vaguely aware of chronic backache later in her life. It was there, nothing you could do about it, but it wasn’t bad enough to disrupt your life. You got used to it.

  She never had a boyfriend ‘somewhere on the border’ she could send letters and food parcels in the mail. Not even a close relative, because thanks to the lucky star her brother had apparently been born under, he was never sent to the border. Her mother tried hard to convince her blue-eyed boy to study medicine. He was smart enough to be selected, and Hannie didn’t shy away from emotional blackmail. (‘It would make everything I have done for my children worthwhile if my son was addressed as “doctor” someday,’ she would yearn out loud.) Although Theresa had a hunch that Hannie was driven by fear more than pride, that she cared more about protecting her only son than about bragging about him. Medical students could defer their military service until after they’d qualified and then work in the army as doctors – much safer than being a foot soldier in the bush.