I was unwilling for us to have Indar in common, as Indar and she seemed to have had Raymond in common. I said, “I can’t tell you how much I liked being in your house that evening. I’ve never forgotten the blouse you wore. I’ve always been hoping to see you in it again. Black silk, beautifully cut and embroidered.”
I couldn’t have touched a better subject. She said, “There hasn’t been the occasion. But I assure you it’s still there.”
“I don’t think it was Indian. The cut and the work were European.”
“It’s from Copenhagen. Margit Brandt. Raymond went there for a conference.”
And at the door of the Tivoli, before we went out again into the heat and the light, during that moment of pause which in the tropics is like the pause we make before we finally go out into the rain, she said to me, as though it were an afterthought, “Would you like to come to lunch at the house tomorrow? We have to have one of the lecturers, and Raymond finds that kind of occasion very trying these days.”
The steamer would have been about fifteen miles downriver. It would have been travelling through bush; it would have passed the first bush settlement. There, though the town was so close, they would have been waiting for the steamer since morning, and there would have been the atmosphere of a fair until the steamer passed. Boys would have dived off dugouts and swum towards the moving steamer and barge, trying to get the attention of passengers. Trading dugouts, poling out from their stations on the bank with their little cargoes of pineapples and roughly made chairs and stools (disposable furniture for the river journey, a specialty of the area), would have been attached in clusters to the sides of the steamer; and these dugouts would be taken—were being taken—miles downriver, to paddle back for hours, after that brief excitement, through the fading afternoon, dusk and night, in silence.
Yvette had cancelled the lunch. But she hadn’t let me know. The white-jacketed servant led me to a room which obviously awaited no visitors and was not at all like the room I remembered. The African mats were on the floor, but some of the upholstered chairs that had been taken away for that evening (and, as I remembered Yvette saying, stored in a bedroom) had been brought out again—fringed imitation velvet, in the “old bronze” colour that was everywhere in the Domain.
The buildings of the Domain had been run up fast, and the flaws that lamplight had hidden were noticeable in the midday brightness. The plaster on the walls had cracked in many places, and in one place the crack followed the stepped pattern of the hollow clay bricks below. The windows and doorways, without architraves or wooden facings, were like holes unevenly cut out of the masonry. The ceiling panels, compressed cardboard of some sort, bellied here and there. One of the two air conditioners in the room had leaked down the wall; they were not on. The windows were open; and with no projecting roof, no trees outside, just the levelled land, the room was full of light and glare and there was no feeling of shelter. What fantasies I had built around this room, around the music that had come out of the record player—there, against the wall next to the bookcase, with its smoked Perspex cover showing dust in the bright light!
To see the room like this, as Yvette lived in it every day, to add my knowledge of Raymond’s position in the country, was to catch her unawares and get some idea of her housewifely ordinariness, some idea of the tensions and dissatisfactions of her life at the Domain, which had until then seemed so glamorous to me. It was to fear to be entangled with her and this life of hers; and it was to be surprised and relieved at the disappearance of my fantasies. But relief and fear lasted only until she came in. The surprise then, as always for me, was herself.
She was more amused than apologetic. She had forgotten, but she knew there was something she had had to remember about that lunch. There had been so many changes of plan about the lunch—which was in fact taking place in the staff room of the polytechnic. She went away to make us some scrambled South African eggs. The servant came in to clear some receipts from the oval table, which was dark and highly polished, and to lay the table. “You live your life. A stranger appears. He is an encumbrance.”
On the upper shelf of the bookcase I saw the book Indar had shown me that evening in which there was a mention of Raymond and Yvette as generous hosts at one time in the capital—a mention which had mattered to Yvette. The bright light and the altered room seemed to make it a different book. Colour had faded from the backs of books. One book I took out carried Raymond’s signature and the date 1937—a note of ownership, but also perhaps at that date a statement of intent, Raymond’s expression of faith in his own future. That book felt very tarnished now, with the paper brown at the edges, the red letters on the paper spine almost bleached away—something dead, a relic. Another, newer book carried Yvette’s signature with her unmarried name: very stylish, that Continental handwriting, with a fancy y, and speaking in much the same way as Raymond’s signature of twenty-three years before.
I said to Yvette while we were eating the scrambled eggs, “I would like to read something by Raymond. Indar says he knows more about the country than any man living. Has he published any books?”
“He’s working on this book, and has been for some years now. The government were going to publish it, but now apparently there are difficulties.”
“So there are no books.”
“There’s his thesis. That’s been published as a book. But I can’t recommend it. I couldn’t bear to read it. When I told Raymond that, he said he could scarcely bear to write it. There are a few articles in various journals. He hasn’t had time for many of those. He’s spent all his time on that big book about the history of the country.”
“Is it true that the President has read parts of that book?”
“That used to be said.”
But she couldn’t tell me what the difficulties now were. All I learned was that Raymond had temporarily put aside his history to work on a selection of the President’s speeches. Our lunch began to feel sad. Understanding Yvette’s position in the Domain now, knowing that the stories I had heard about Raymond would have been heard by others, I began to feel that the house must have been like a prison to her. And that evening when she gave a party and wore her Margit Brandt blouse began to appear like an aberration.
I said, as I was getting ready to leave, “You must come with me to the Hellenic Club one afternoon. You must come tomorrow. The people there are people who have been here a long time. They’ve seen it all. The last thing they want to talk about is the situation of the country.”
She agreed. But then she said, “You mustn’t forget them.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. She left the room, going through the door that Raymond had gone through after he had made his exit speech that evening; and she came back with a number of magazines, Cahiers of this and that, some of them printed by the government printery in the capital. They were magazines with articles by Raymond. Already, then, we had Raymond in common; it was like a beginning.
The rough-bladed grass of the lawns or open areas of this part of the Domain was high; it almost buried the low-level lights housed in mushroom-like aluminum structures that lined the asphalted avenues. A number of those lights had been smashed, some a long time ago; but there seemed to be no one to mend them. On the other side of the Domain the land for the model farm had become overgrown; all that remained of the project was the Chinese gateway that the now absent Taiwanese or Chinese had built, and the six tractors standing in a line and rotting. But the area where the public walked on Sundays, following a fixed one-way route—watched now by the Youth Guard and not the army—was maintained. New statues were still added from time to time to this public walk. The most recent, at the end of the main avenue, was a bulky sculpture in stone, unfinished-looking, of a mother and child.
Nazruddin’s old words came to me. “This is nothing. This is just bush.” But my alarm wasn’t like Nazruddin’s. It had nothing to do with my business prospects. I saw the empty spaces of the Domain, and the squatters from the
villages camping just outside; and my thoughts were of Yvette and her life on the Domain. Not Europe in Africa, as it had seemed to me when Indar was there. Only a life in the bush. And my fear was at once the fear of failing with her, being left with nothing, and the fear of the consequences of success.
But that alarm vanished the next afternoon when she came to the flat. She had been there before with Indar; in that setting, my own, she had for me a good deal of her old glamour. She had seen the Ping-Pong table with my household junk and with one corner left clear for Metty’s ironing. She had seen the paintings of European ports that the Belgian lady had bequeathed me with the white studio-sitting room.
It was against this white wall that, after some talk about the paintings and the Hellenic Club, both of us standing, she showed me her profile, turning away when I drew close, not rejecting me or encouraging me, just seeming weary, accepting a new encumbrance. That moment—as I read it—was the key to all that followed. The challenge that I saw then was what I always saw; it was the challenge to which I never failed to respond.
Until then my fantasies were brothel fantasies of conquest and degradation, with the woman as the willing victim, the accomplice in her own degradation. It was all that I knew. It was all that I had learned from the brothels and nightclubs of our town. It had been no hardship to me to give these places up while Indar was around. I had grown to find those occasions of vice enervating. For some time, in fact, though it still excited me to see these women in groups in a bar or a brothel front room, I had shrunk from true sex with bought women, and restricted myself to subsidiary sexual satisfactions. Familiarity of this kind with so many women had bred something like contempt for what they offered; and at the same time, like many men who use brothels alone, I had grown to think of myself as feeble, critically disadvantaged. My obsession with Yvette had taken me by surprise; and the adventure with her (unbought but willing) that began in the white sitting room was for me quite new.
What I have called my brothel fantasies hurried me through the initial awkwardness. But in the bedroom with the very large bed with the foam mattress—at last serving the purpose for which I was certain the Belgian painter had intended it—in the bedroom those fantasies altered. The self-regard of those fantasies dropped away.
Women make up half the world; and I thought I had reached the stage where there was nothing in a woman’s nakedness to surprise me. But I felt now as if I was experiencing anew, and seeing a woman for the first time. I was amazed that, obsessed with Yvette as I had been, I had taken so much for granted. The body on the bed was to me like the revelation of woman’s form. I wondered that clothes, even the apparently revealing tropical clothes I had seen on Yvette, should have concealed so much, should have broken the body up, as it were, into separate parts and not really hinted at the splendour of the whole.
To write about the occasion in the manner of my pornographic magazines would be more than false. It would be like trying to take photographs of myself, to be the voyeur of my own actions, to reconvert the occasion into the brothel fantasy that, in the bedroom, it ceased to be.
I was overwhelmed, but alert. I did not wish to lose myself in the self-regard and self-absorption of that fantasy, the blindness of that fantasy. The wish that came to me—consuming the anxiety about letting myself down—was the wish to win the possessor of that body, the body which, because I wished to win its possessor, I saw as perfect, and wanted continuously, during the act itself, to see, holding myself in ways that enabled me to do so, avoiding crushing the body with my own, avoiding that obliteration of sight and touch. All my energy and mind were devoted to that new end of winning the person. All my satisfactions lay in that direction; and the sexual act became for me an extraordinary novelty, a new kind of fulfilment, continuously new.
How often before, at such moments, moments allegedly of triumph, boredom had fallen on me! But as a means of winning, rather than the triumph in itself, the present act required constant alertness, a constant looking outward from myself. It wasn’t tender, though it expressed a great need for tenderness. It became a brute physical act, an act almost of labour; and as it developed it became full of deliberate brutality. This surprised me. But I was altogether surprised by my new self, which was as far from the brothel man I had taken myself to be, with all his impulses to feebleness, as this act was from the brothel act of surrender, which was all I had so far known.
Yvette said, “This hasn’t happened to me for years.” That statement, if it was true, would have been a sufficient reward; my own climax was not important to me. If what she said was true! But I had no means of gauging her response. She was the experienced one, I was the beginner.
And there was a further surprise. No fatigue, no drowsiness overcame me at the end. On the contrary. In that room with the window panes painted white, a white that now glowed with the late afternoon light, in that heated room, at the end of one of our heavy, hot days, sweating as I was, with a body slippery with sweat, I was full of energy. I could have gone and played squash at the Hellenic Club. I felt refreshed, revitalized; my skin felt new. I was full of the wonder of what had befallen me. And awakening from minute to minute to the depth of my satisfactions, I began to be aware of my immense previous deprivation. It was like discovering a great, unappeasable hunger in myself.
Yvette, naked, wet, unembarrassed, her hair lank, but already herself again, her flush gone, her eyes calm, sat with crossed legs on the edge of the bed and telephoned. She spoke in patois. It was to her house servant: she was coming home right away: he was to tell Raymond. She dressed and made up the bed. This housewifely attention reminded me—painfully, already—of attentions like this that she gave elsewhere.
Just before she left the bedroom she stopped and kissed me briefly on the front of my trousers. And then it was over—the corridor, Metty’s dreadful kitchen, the landing, the yellowing afternoon light, the trees of back yards, the dust in the air, the cooking smoke, the active world, and the sound of Yvette’s feet pattering down the external staircase. That gesture, of kissing my trousers, which elsewhere I would have dismissed as a brothel courtesy, the gesture of an overtipped whore, now moved me to sadness and doubt. Was it meant? Was it true?
I thought of going to the Hellenic Club, to use up the energy that had come to me, and to sweat a little more. But I didn’t go. I wandered about the flat, letting the time pass. The light began to fade; and a stillness fell over me. I felt blessed and remade; I wanted to be alone for a while with that sensation.
Later, thinking of dinner, I drove out to the nightclub near the dam. It was doing better than ever now, with the boom and the expatriates. But the structure hadn’t been added to and still had a temporary look, the look of a place that could be surrendered without too much loss—just four brick walls, more or less, around a cleared space in the bush.
I sat outside at one of the tables under the trees on the cliff and looked at the floodlit dam; and until someone noticed me and turned on the coloured bulbs strung about the trees, I sat in the darkness, feeling the newness of my skin. Cars came and parked. There were the French accents of Europe and Africa. African women, in twos and threes, came up in taxis from the town. Turbanned, lazy, erect, talking loudly, they dragged their slippers over the bare ground. It was the other side of the expatriate family scene that had offended Yvette at the Tivoli. To me it all felt far away—the nightclub, the town, the squatters, the expatriates, “the situation of the country”; everything had just become background.
The town, when I drove back, had settled down to its own night life. At night now, in the increasingly crowded main streets, there was the atmosphere of the village, with unsteady groups around the little drinking stalls in the shanty areas, the cooking fires on the pavements, the barring off of sleeping places, the lunatic or drunken old men in rags, ready to snarl like dogs, taking their food to dark corners, to eat out of the sight of others. The windows of some shops—especially clothing shops, with their expensive imported goods�
�were brightly lit, as a precaution against theft.
In the square not far from the flat a young woman was bawling—a real African bawl. She was being hustled along the pavement by two men, each one twisting an arm. But no one in the square did anything. The men were of our Youth Guard. The officers got a small stipend from the Big Man, and they had been given a couple of government jeeps. But, like the officials at the docks, they really had to look for things to do. This was their new “Morals Patrol.” It was the opposite of what it said. The girl would have been picked up from some bar; she had probably answered back or refused to pay.
In the flat I saw that Metty’s light was on. I said, “Metty?” He said through the door, “Patron.” He had stopped calling me Salim; we had seen little of one another outside the shop for some time. I thought there was sadness in his voice; and going on to my own room, considering my own luck, I thought: Poor Metty. How will it end for him? So friendly, and yet in the end always without friends. He should have stayed on the coast. He had his place there. He had people like himself. Here he is lost.
Yvette telephoned me at the shop late the next morning. It was our first telephone call, but she didn’t speak my name or give her own. She said, “Will you be at the flat for lunch?” I seldom had lunch at the flat during the week, but I said, “Yes.” She said, “I’ll see you there.” And that was all.
She had allowed no pause, no silence, had given me no time for surprise. And indeed, waiting for her in the white sitting room just after twelve, standing at the Ping-Pong table, turning over a magazine, I felt no surprise. I felt the occasion—for all its unusualness, the oddity of the hour, the killing brightness of the light—to be only a continuation of something I had long been living with.
I heard her hurry up the steps she had pattered down the previous afternoon. Out of every kind of nervousness I didn’t move. The landing door was open, the sitting room door was open—her steps were brisk and didn’t falter. I was utterly delighted to see her; that was an immense relief. There was still briskness in her manner; but though her face seemed set for it, she wore no smile. Her eyes were serious, with a disturbing, challenging hint of greed.
A Bend in the River Page 20
