Borderline

by Marita van der Vyver

  ‘That is if I manage to get decent internet access somewhere.’

  ‘We sort it out here in Trinidad.’ Ruben immediately gets up from the creaking little plastic chair, clearly relieved that there’s another tiny spark of hope to light their way in the dark. ‘There are many tourists here, so there will be a cafe somewhere with internet.’

  ‘I do not have Wi-Fi myself, unfortunately,’ says Clara, taking a cellphone from her jeans pocket and tapping the screen. ‘But I can show you a recent picture of Aleja. That will make it easier to find her on Facebook.’

  She shows Theresa the screen: an older, thinner, sterner version of the woman here in front of them. Unless it is just the nurse’s uniform that makes her look so stern. But it is clearly Clara’s sister.

  ‘You don’t perhaps have a picture of Mercedes as well?’ asks Ruben, ever hopeful.

  ‘You do not know what she looks like at all?’

  ‘We only have a picture of when she was a little girl,’ Theresa says.

  ‘Well, I have nothing recent, of course.’ Clara scrolls through the older pictures on her screen. ‘But I may have … Ah! Here is a group photo that was taken at the funeral of abuelita Clara. Mercedes is the beautiful woman on the left,’ Clara points out. ‘The only one who is not wearing black or white. The rest of the family thought that this blue flower dress was un escándalo! No respect for the dead! But Mercedes said that blue had been the favourite colour of her grandmother and she was wearing the dress for abuelita Clara, not for the family.’

  Theresa takes the cellphone from Clara’s hand and looks intently at the screen. About a dozen family members are posing for the camera in front of a few palm trees, all somewhat overexposed in the blinding sunlight, aside from the slender woman with the short dark hair and the blue dress who stands a little apart from the group in the shade of a palm tree. That isn’t the only thing that differentiates her from the others either. She is the only one who is smiling, and even though it is a closed-lipped smile, more rueful than cheerful, it nevertheless stands out among all the sombre funeral expressions.

  Theresa feels a knot in her stomach, like every time she gets a little closer to the elusive Mercedes Perez Amat. She can’t stop looking; it’s as if she wants to sear the blurry little face in the picture onto her memory.

  Ruben notices how reluctant she is to return the cellphone and asks Clara to send the picture to his number. While he and Clara exchange phone numbers, Theresa takes a proper look at the other people in the picture for the first time. Until now she has only had eyes for the outsider in the blue floral dress, but now she also recognises Aleja in a black outfit and a youthful Clara in a virginal white dress to the right of the group. It’s twelve years ago, she reminds herself, by now Mercedes may look entirely different. She could have dyed her hair, put on weight, gained more wrinkles, possibly even gone grey. It’s true that she is barely forty years old, but several of the Latin American women Theresa has seen over the past few days looked as if their beauty and sensuality had started to fade at an early age.

  ‘She wasn’t quite thirty, was she?’ she asks when she returns the phone.

  ‘Yes. A little younger than I am now,’ Clara confirms, staring at the picture distractedly. ‘Now I remember something someone said that day … one of the nasty old aunties – that it was a good thing that Mercedes was going to work in the furthest corner of Cuba. Before she tears the entire family apart.’

  ‘The furthest corner?’ Ruben asks eagerly. ‘Near Guantánamo?’

  ‘No, the opposite end. Northwest. Pinar del Río? Viñales?’ Clara shakes her head, frowning as she struggles to dredge up the name from her memory. ‘I am almost certain someone mentioned Viñales. But I do not want to send you on the wrong track …’

  ‘The wrong track is still a track,’ Ruben says. ‘It is better than a dead end.’

  ‘Perhaps your sister in Havana could confirm that? That she ended up in that part of the country?’ Theresa curses the hope she can once more hear in her own voice. She is only going to end up disappointed again.

  ‘I do not know,’ Clara says with a helpless shrug. Romero has meanwhile started nagging to attract his mother’s attention. Clara picks up the little boy and rocks him on her hip while they say goodbye. When they have turned away to walk back to the street, she says: ‘Listen, if you manage to find Mercedes, please tell her many of us still believe her father was a hero. All the Cubans who died in that war were heroes. Even though today some of us wonder what it really was they had to die for.’

  The same can probably be said of all the South African soldiers, Theresa thinks when she gets into the Plymouth parked in the street outside Clara’s little pink house. And yet. What about men like Lynette’s brother who was so eager to go ‘kill kaffirs’? Can you forgive someone like Waldie Raubenheimer for having been just another brainwashed youth? Only more thoroughly brainwashed than Theo van Velden and thousands of others? Would you then have to forgive all soldiers in all wars their atrocities? Because war cannot but lead to atrocities?

  Her head is so filled with disturbing questions that she barely notices the woman on the veranda with the child on her hip waving to them as they drive off. Ruben waves on her behalf, a wide and grateful gesture.

  ‘Now we are going to find a cafe or hotel with Wi-Fi so we can contact this Aleja,’ he suggests with exaggerated gaiety.

  ‘And then?’ Her voice is weak.

  ‘If she agrees, we will go see her in Havana tomorrow. If she refuses or does not react to the message, we are still going to Havana tomorrow – it’s on the way to Viñales anyway – and stay there the night. And if we can find no other trail in Havana, we will drive to Viñales the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘But don’t you have to work? I mean, it’s very kind of you, Ruben, but how long can you keep carting me around to every corner of Cuba?’

  ‘My boss gave me a few days’ leave, as you know. And today is only the second day.’

  ‘So it is,’ Theresa says, amazed. ‘It feels so much longer.’

  ‘It’s like I said. Who knows what could still happen in the next few days?’

  ‘Ruben.’ She turns in her seat so she can observe his face and body language closely. He’s staring straight ahead as he drives through the wide, dusty streets of Trinidad. ‘Be completely honest with me, please. Do you really think there’s a chance I may find this Mercedes before I fly home?’

  He only hesitates for a moment – but it is a moment too long, Theresa decides – before he answers. ‘Why else do I try so hard to help you?’

  Because you’re man with a good heart, she wants to say, but then she notices the smile he is trying to hide in his beard.

  ‘You are a beautiful woman and you are good company, but I am not yet quite such a lonely man that I would drive to all the corners of Cuba just to keep a beautiful woman company.’

  She smiles, grateful for the compliment.

  ‘Listen, Theresa.’ He glances at her briefly, but she cannot read the expression in his eyes under the brim of his hat. ‘If you get on that plane without delivering the letter in your handbag, you must be able to tell yourself that you tried everything in your power to do so. You agree, yes?’

  18. A RUBY-RED DRESS

  Once before in her life she had tried to convince herself that she would do everything in her power to fulfil a desire that kept slipping further from her reach. ‘If we are really going to have to accept that we will remain childless,’ Theresa had said to Theo on the evening of their third anniversary, ‘then at least I want to be able to tell myself that I did everything I could to have a child.’

  Her voice was soft, entreating, perhaps even a little desperate. Out of place in the elegant restaurant where they’d gone to celebrate the occasion, amid the tinkling of crystal glasses being raised in toasts and the scraping sounds of silverware on porcelain plates and the cheerful company at the tables around them.

  In the romantic light cast by flickering candl
es and discreetly placed little lamps, she couldn’t read the expression in her husband’s eyes. He shook his head and took another sip of wine and seemed to stare past her at the enormous abstract painting on the wall behind her.

  ‘We’ve done enough, Theresa. We can’t keep screwing ourselves like this.’

  ‘Screwing is exactly what we have to keep doing.’ Feeble little joke, she knew right away, but it was too late to stop. ‘I don’t know of any other way to get pregnant.’

  ‘Well, there was the Virgin in the Bible …’ He said this with the hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth which raised her spirits, because as long as they could still make jokes she still hadn’t lost him completely. ‘But I guess that won’t work for us, right?’

  ‘Theo, can’t we try the IVF thing just one more time? Please?’

  ‘Jeez, Theresa, isn’t it bad enough that our sex life has already gone to hell? Do you have any idea how much I hate being instructed to have “intercourse” on a specific day at an appointed hour? There’s fuck-all pleasure in it. It has become a duty, it feels as if I am doing it with a gun against my head and a ticking time bomb under the bed. And afterwards you lie there like a bloody cadaver with your legs in the air to keep my seed inside your body for as long as possible!’ His voice kept growing louder until the couple at the next table were staring at them with interest.

  Theresa smiled apologetically and took her husband’s hand to calm him. He pulled his hand away and drained his glass of wine in a single gulp, his eyes closed as if he could no longer bear to look at her. Perhaps he kept seeing her with her legs in the air.

  Like a bloody cadaver.

  ‘And then on top of that you forced me to take part in the IVF circus.’

  ‘I didn’t force you to—’

  ‘It was worse than all our pathetic attempts to procreate in the privacy of our own home. Jerking off in a clinical cubicle so my seed can be harvested in a test tube—’

  ‘Shh. You’re talking too—’

  ‘And there is no guarantee that it will ever work, no matter how many more times we try. All that has happened so far is that you’ve put on weight, you no longer fit into your clothes, you hate your own body, you’re bad-tempered all the time because your hormones have gone haywire – and you’re still not even close to being pregnant.’

  ‘I was pregnant three times,’ she whispered, afraid her voice might break if she spoke any louder, flushed with shame because more and more heads were turning towards them.

  ‘And each time it was over before it had properly begun. Before anyone else noticed you were expecting. I don’t even know if such early miscarriages can be called pregnancies.’

  She flinched, and wished she could disappear, become invisible to all the eyes around them.

  He seemed to realise that he had gone too far. His voice dropped and he reached his hand out to her across the snow-white linen table cloth. ‘Maybe it will happen again one day. By itself. If we just stop trying. Maybe you will get pregnant one day and we will have a child. Who knows? But I can’t go for in-vitro fertilisation again. Please don’t ever ask me again.’

  She stared at his helpless hand on the table, her own hands clamped between her knees, among the soft folds of the ruby-red silk dress she had bought specially for this evening. Because she had wanted to look her best. Because she had wanted to seduce him into agreeing to tackle the frustrating process of test-tube fertilisation just one more time.

  But also because all her other favourite dresses were unflatteringly tight on her body. Because she had put on weight like her husband rightfully observed, becoming fat and ugly and moody and desperate. All for the sake of this unattainable desire. Which she now would have to relinquish.

  With a mumbled apology, she jumped up from her chair and fled to the cloakroom.

  Until this turning point in the autumn of 1993, Theresa and Theo had lived through three years of intense and exhausting hope. Personal hope because they were a recently married couple, and political hope because everything in the country was changing overnight. They were married in 1990, in the first euphoric weeks after Nelson Mandela was unexpectedly released and Namibia became independent and the protracted border war finally became irrelevant, while the New South Africa was being born day after day right in front of their astonished eyes. Like all births, this one wouldn’t be without pain or blood loss, but in those first three years their newfound hope carried them through everything.

  Hope is like a liquid stored in a fragile jar, and their jar was shattered every time Theresa thought she was pregnant and then started bleeding again, every time bloodthirsty violence erupted in the country again. And yet their jar was miraculously repaired each time, and refilled with personal and political hope, as was the case for most of their fellow citizens. All the pieces were glued back together each time with more cracks than before, the jar becoming less lovely. But apparently indestructible.

  Until that autumn evening of their third anniversary.

  Chris Hani, one of the heroes of the freedom struggle, had been murdered by far-right conspirators just days earlier, once more taking the country to the edge of a precipice. Behind them, the cautious hope and joy and the will to work together; ahead of them, the dark chasm of chaos and violence and even more bloodshed.

  And childlessness, Theresa realised behind the toilet door in the fancy restaurant, that was her own destiny.

  Perhaps it was just as well not to bring children into the world in such uncertain times, she consoled herself. She had never really been the sort of woman who believed that motherhood ought to be a calling. In the past she had been able to envisage a satisfying childless life, a life dedicated to work and books, to friendship and travel, and all sorts of selfish pleasures that would have been curtailed drastically by having to raise children. She wouldn’t even have applied the word ‘selfish’ to all the things she still wanted to do. On the contrary, motherhood might have been the selfish choice if you were unsure about the future you could offer your child.

  But once she discovered that motherhood wasn’t necessarily a choice, at least not for her, that she was probably doomed to childlessness, her vague desire to have children became a consuming obsession.

  An obsession that was driving her husband away from her, she had to admit to herself in front of the flatteringly lit mirror in the elegant cloakroom, while she washed her hands under the cold running water as if nothing could ever get them clean again. If she wanted to save her relationship with Theo, she would have to let go of this senseless obsession.

  She dried her tears and wiped away the black mascara smudges under her eyes and repainted her lips ruby-red – to go with the new dress – and went back to join her husband at the table to finish the bottle of wine.

  But their relationship was irrevocably altered. Years later, she could look back at that scene in the restaurant cloakroom, and put her finger on that picture of the woman in the red dress pulling herself together so resolutely. That was the moment when hope had really started to leak out for them. There were too many cracks in the jar; they couldn’t repair it again.

  Perhaps, in the end, it had little to do with their childlessness. Perhaps it had been merely a convergence of circumstances, the atmosphere in a country, their ages, coincidences. Theo’s long-suppressed depression erupted like a wild animal from a cage. Not the notorious black dog everyone always talked about, but rather a wounded black bear, demented with pain, and prepared to destroy himself and everyone around him to make the pain go away. Theo’s more frequent nightmares may have been the trigger for his depression, the axe that split the lock on the bear’s cage. Whereas before he’d been plagued by his war dreams only sporadically, it was now happening weekly. Sometimes even several nights in succession.

  ‘War dreams’ was how Theresa thought of them, a vague, nebulous concept, because he never shared the details with her. She lay powerless, listening to him curse and moan and heave in his sleep, felt his body start to twitch
until he woke up drenched with fear, his eyes rigid in his head. When she wanted to comfort him, fold her arms around him like a mother her child, he rolled away to the edge of the bed and turned his back towards her. They sometimes lay like that for hours, without touching each other, both of them breathing with exaggerated evenness to convince each other that they had drifted off again. The night no longer brought them rest. In the morning they woke up exhausted.

  ‘Is it because conscription is finally being ended?’ she whispered to his back one night in 1993. ‘Could that not be like a lid being lifted to allow all sorts of monsters to crawl out of your subconscious?’

  He didn’t answer, but from the slight change in the rhythm of his breathing she could tell that he was listening.

  ‘After all, it is almost an official admission that all those years of fighting had been pointless all along? Now a new defence force is being formed in which the old white soldiers and the black “terrorists” will be fighting side by side. Against what, I wonder?’

  ‘Another imaginary enemy is bound to turn up.’ His words were almost inaudible, as if he had pressed his mouth into the pillow on purpose. ‘And I don’t need an official admission to know that the border war was a senseless farce.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘And what do you know about the “monsters” in my subconscious anyway?’

  The sudden aggression always caught her off-guard. She had to take a few deep breaths before she could reply: ‘I know nothing, because there are so many things you still refuse to share with me. I can only guess, from what you say in your sleep and the way you struggle and sweat, that you are not yet done with that war.’

  ‘I cannot share it, so please stop trying to analyse me like a first-year psychology student.’

  ‘I didn’t even do psychology,’ she protested feebly. ‘But I do know that it’s always better to talk about trauma than to suppress it. Some or other time it is going to erupt and then—’

  ‘Jeez, Theresa, there are things you can’t talk about. You simply have to live with them, that’s all. I don’t know if you’ll ever understand that.’