by Paul Theroux
Hansie’s eyes were cold, his lips were tight with fury, his voice quietly mocking, asking questions that were accusations, not expecting answers.
“Doesn't it seem a bit strange to be eating in here, sitting at a table rather than standing outside at the window?”
Africans just seven years before had been forbidden to enter the restaurant and had used the take-away window at the side of the building.
Nolo said, “Not really. I always thought it was strange to use the window, and so I never did it.”
Prinsloo admired Nolo's composure. Her strength gave him strength.
“What's your opinion of Dad's books?”
That threw her. It was clear from her expression that Nolo did not know Prinsloo was a writer. What had his writing to do with their love affair? Nolo simply stared at him.
“She will read them when they are translated,” Prinsloo said.
“Praat u Afrikaans?” Hansie nagged.
“Ek verstaan net ‘n bietjie Afrikaans. Ek praat Engels, ” Nolo said.
Saying that was the nearest she had ever come to expressing a political opinion.
“Into English, of course,” Prinsloo said.
Prinsloo sat in a sorry slumped posture, as Hansie looked at his father with contempt for his foolishness.
The meal was awful. Before it was over he knew he had lost his son; that Hansie saw this unique woman and thought, Kaffir.
More alone afterward, Prinsloo saw that he had only one choice. He proposed marriage. Nolo accepted. The little ceremony took place in the town hall—Nolo’s elderly father, some of her cousins, an auntie, all of them dressed in stiff, ill-fitting clothes, newly made by a man working a Singer sewing machine on a veranda in the dorp. Nolo wore a long yellow dress. And another awkward lunch in the hotel dining room, the old man smiling with worry and saying, “I have never been in here before in my whole life.”
Later that day she moved into his house, bringing one suitcase, the size she would have used for travel of a week’s duration, containing everything she owned, including a clock, a Bible, some pictures, some books—serious self-improving ones; and she submitted to him.
She became his slave, but a happy one, joyous in their lovemaking—imaginative, too, for she allowed Prinsloo to dominate her utterly, to treat her like a servant, a whore, a sex object, a stranger, living out passionate fantasies of master and slave. She allowed it, then she encouraged it, finally she demanded it. Prinsloo tied her one arm and used her body; she did not object, she said she enjoyed it. She suggested more degrading episodes of submission in which she sat handcuffed to a chair or secured to the bedposts. She willingly got onto her knees, her one arm making a tripod of her posture. She urged him to thrash her buttocks, and while he did so, she raised them so that he could enter her. Still she asked for more, begging to eat him, drink him, swallow him.
When Prinsloo ran out of ideas for abusing her, it was Nolo who supplied him with variations, acts he had not imagined in his wildest fictions. How did she know what was in his head? Where had she heard of such things? Perhaps only an African knew how to please such a man, since sex is about power, and the African story was about power. What a mind she had! She was so willing to take any form of abuse she became his partner; she invited him to enslave her.
Her submitting in this way proved to Prinsloo that she was stronger than he was, that she enjoyed these games even more than he did, that the manipulation was hers: she was using him.
So he was absolved of any sense of guilt. Sex filled his life. These were the first weeks, the first months, of a passionate marriage. He loved her seriousness, he adored her recklessness. She was wilder than he was, she was impossible to know. His life was complete, like a finished story, but the marriage was both a satisfaction and a blurring, for now he had no idea who she was.
She had kept her promise. That was worth a lot. She belonged to him. His nonwriting life was as full as his writing life had ever been, as rich, as unexpected.
But one day, drawing her arm behind her, she hesitated before he twisted it, preparing to restrain her.
“Not too rough today. I don't want to hurt the baby.”
He backed off, raising his hands, as though she had shown him a weapon, and when he tried to resume, his efforts were enfeebled by what she had told him. He could not proceed.
6
The news of a baby surprised and preoccupied him in a way he had never known. He had hardly been aware of the births of his two other children. This was different. He monitored the progress of Nolo's pregnancy. He had the time. He was not writing. Anyway, this was better than writing and yet similar—something new every day, a discovery, growth, wonder, he was humbled. She was the pen, bringing forth something new. Nolo became inward, compact, budlike, concentrating on her body. She swelled, she lost her girl’s body, she became fruit-shaped; he studied her tightened flesh, he pondered the loss of her sexuality.
When the day came and she signaled that she was ready, the doctor arrived and Nolo gave birth in their own bedroom, a wonderful thing, a celebration, a boy, a gift.
The infant was gray at birth, then pink, darkening, with thick hair. He was not black or white, but maculate, pinkish patched gray, more a reflection of Prinsloo than either of his other children, intelligent, responsive, alert.
Nolo called him Nelson. Prinsloo called him Zulu, to represent his people: and “Zulu Prinsloo” had the right sound, a haughty assonance.
Children in Africa seldom cry, seldom fuss, don’t clamor for attention, don’t have to, since a cloth binds them to the mother’s back, a bundle she carries everywhere, and suckles whenever the child is hungry. Nolo kept the boy close, took him to bed with them, suckled him there, Prinsloo looking on, the child always lying between them.
Nolo was a new woman, fulfilled and fattish, beautiful in her bulk. The skinny young woman had become rounder, with pale clear skin and serene eyes and great heavy breasts.
“No,” she said when Prinsloo reached as though to weigh one in his lifting hand.
She would not allow his fingers the slightest touch, and she shrank when he approached.
The African custom stipulated that a woman could not engage in sex while she was breastfeeding. Nolo, who had never shown any curiosity for her culture, reverted to her traditional customs.
Months passed. Prinsloo played with the baby and, though rebuffed by the mother, was consoled by the child’s response—a bright child, golden-skinned, his own, more him than his others. He endured the no-sex stricture, and eight months later the child was still seeking his mother’s nipples.
Prinsloo, though indulgent and proud of the child, was eager to change places with him, to nestle between those breasts, where he had once spent whole nights.
Sometimes he took his small son to town, binding him into the baby seat in his Land Rover, the child contentedly gurgling. On such occasions, the entire day devoted to one trip to the dorp—no writing, no reading, only hours of proximity to the child—Prinsloo reflected that for over a year now he had not written a word; he had been silent. Had anyone noticed?
That day of writing would come, he was sure, though this was the longest he had gone without writing, for his creative life had been spent writing stories end to end, finishing one, starting another, linking them in his head; and this was a break, an emptiness.
What made him confident was the knowledge that this too was a story, his love affair, the marriage, the child. Not that any of this compensated for setting words down on a page, yet he was living an African story.
The most African of African stories, for he was a farmer, descended from Boers who had trekked to the Transvaal two hundred years before; he was a white man who had made a whole life and abandoned it upon falling in love at a feed store with a black woman who had one arm; he had embarked on a new life, a new family, with a mixed-race child—an amazing story, and living it was almost as satisfying as writing it.
He wanted more. The fullest expression o
f her fantasies was fresh in his mind, the slave business, the submission, the play with silken ropes and restraints, the leather mask, the gag.
The child was asleep in the next room one hot afternoon. Prinsloo approached Nolo from behind. They were alone in the dark humid shadows of the house, he was impatient and eager, wishing to hold her and subdue her and use her as she had allowed him a little over a year ago. Not just allowed; she had encouraged him, pleaded to be dominated, begged him to tie her to the bedposts, her eyes glistening with anticipation as he knotted the ropes, and when she was immobilized and he was sitting astride her, her sighs of satisfaction. The ritual had been central to their love affair and had been a marriage rite, too.
Prinsloo snatched her arm, held her, and before she had time to struggle or shout encouragement he gagged her with a scarf and drag-shuffled her to the bedroom. Now she fought him—that feeble pretense, wagging the stump of her arm, had always been part of the ritual—but her opposition only excited him the more. He turned her over, his hand jamming her head down, her face into the pillow, and he mounted her from behind. He took her muffled howling for the eagerness she had shown before, and he covered her with his body, one hand holding her skull, using his other hand as though thrusting hard with a dagger until he was done.
He had possessed her, she was his captive, as in the oldest days of the colony.
But when he was exhausted and lay beside her, loosening the scarves, she swiped at him with her good arm, and dragged off her gag, and accused him of abusing her. In the past she had flattened herself against him in gratitude and obedience, like a cat warming herself against her owner.
Drowsing, stuporous after sex, he was rattled by what she was saying.
“You're joking.”
“You raped me.”
“You want me to. It's a game.”
“Your game.”
“Our game. You're my wife.”
“I’m afraid of you,” she said, and she touched herself where he had held her roughly, smoothing the pinch marks on her skin.
“No,” he said, and looked closely at her, expecting her to laugh.
“I want a divorce,” she said.
Prinsloo had no reply. What she had just said knocked the wind out of him, and all he could think of was his first wife’s anguish, a suffering he understood now, how she was shattered when he said he wanted to leave her, looking at him with horrified eyes, hoping it was not true.
Nolo, never much of a talker, said there was nothing to discuss. She regarded him as an intruder—kept away from him, did not argue, watched him coldly.
“I want you to leave.”
Minutes after sex, this rejection.
Prinsloo was smiling at her schoolteacher’s tone, the shrill authority.
“This is my house,” he said.
“How can you force me to leave with a small child?”
7
Prinsloo’s estate had been vast, not just fruit trees and lucerne, tobacco and seed maize, but animals—sheep, cattle, poultry, an experimental ostrich farm, a game ranch with herds of eland and waterbuck, zebra and buffalo; crocs and hippos in his river. A settlement of workers, too, that amounted to an African village. Underneath it all, below a ridge that ran like a protective berm at the southern limit of his land, were seams of platinum. A mining company’s survey promised a great haul of ore, and though what was under the ground was the government’s, not Prinsloo’s, the mining company would have to lease many hectares for buildings and equipment.
Half of this Prinsloo lost in his first divorce; half of what remained he lost in the second, the sudden split from a woman he hardly knew. What appalled him was that he had been looking at people just like her his whole life and believed he knew them, and how could Nolo be any different? Some of them, Africans like her, had appeared in many of his stories. He wrote about the intimacies of their lives, he approximated the way they spoke, he described their heartaches and tribulations.
He knew nothing, this proved it: he was a man of sixty-one, rendered imbecilic by his rashness. “I'm stupid,” he said to people, startling old friends and perfect strangers, shoeshine boys and parking lot attendants and the men in skullcaps who pumped gas for him. “I'm stupid. Look at me. I’m not joking—I'm an idiot.”
Like a man making a mockery of himself after losing a large wager, seeing his money swept off the table, and laughing horribly, a fool who seems dangerous because he has nothing more to lose.
“Stupid!” And, saying so, cranking his finger at his ear to mean “out of my mind.”
He had lost the dairy, the game ranch, the cattle, the sheep, the orchards, the farm, the ridge of ore, even the workers' settlement. The lovely farmhouse, roomy and white-plastered, from which he had sent his first wife, was now Nolo's. He kept the chicken operation and hired a colored man, Petrus, as a farm manager, and he moved away.
The day he left, giving his last instructions to Petrus, he caught a glimpse of Petrus's wife, Myra, who looked patient and winsome, with a small child, and thought: Why didn’t I marry her or someone like her? I would still be here, in my study, at my desk, writing my story, a good story, about the farmer who marries a submissive black woman with one arm.
He did not say, “They're all the same.” He said, “I made the worst possible choice, not an informed decision but a reckless throw of the dice, and I lost.”
You would have done, he thought whenever he saw an attractive woman, white or black, usually black, and he reproached himself for having been such a fool. I’m stupid!
He did not mind that he was a laughingstock—he deserved to be hooted at. He minded that he had no life—that he had forfeited all his effort, his inherited property, the work he had done. He kept a few things, the clock, his grandfather’s saddle, the photographs, his manuscripts, a rotting collection of assegais and knobkerries, baskets, neck rests, spears.
The fact of the child Zulu—he could not bear to think of him as Nelson—was the worst of all. The mixed-race child he loved belonged to a devious black woman he now hated. But was devious the word? He told himself yes, but in his heart he knew the choice to leave his wife and marry her was his alone. He could have said no, even as Nolo made noises about her Christian vows.
I wanted to write, I had no subject, I was stuck, I thought this would help, I loved her.
He could barely recall the sequence of events that had led to his being almost homeless. He winced, remembering sex with Nolo, how she had pretended to be his slave, how her being his slave had made him stupid.
Writing this African story might redeem him. The story might be perfect, but even if it was not, it was true, and the truth was always prophetic. He imagined all being well if he wrote his story unembellished, a narrative of a white farmer and his submissive black lover, keeping all the details: the sjambok, the slave chapel, the barred windows, and the fields of lucerne glowing in the moonlight. The story was about sexual desire—how it was mute and ignorant magic that cast a spell, making the lovers dumb.
But he did not write it. He missed his son and he devised ways of seeing him.
Nolo seemed to welcome his visits. She encouraged his taking the boy out, but she could be unsentimental and rigid—her schoolteacher’s severity adding to her enigma—and one day Prinsloo showed up without warning, aching to see his son, and she called the police, who arrested him for trespassing. His own house! Black police.
Prinsloo appeared in court, sitting in a dock that was a steel cage, packed with farm invaders, all of them Venda, who badgered him for cigarettes.
The country was upside down, the government black now, though the judge was white. Prinsloo got off with a warning and a fine, just like the farm invaders. And the day after he paid the fine Nolo sent him a letter through her lawyers saying she wanted more money.
8
The harsh syllable ach gargled at his back teeth and made his jaw sore with incredulity. Ach! The woman he saw as simple and submissive had become his tormentor—ingenious,
wicked, venal. She allowed him to see the child but at the same time demanded more money. When he delayed paying she found ways of obstructing his access to the boy, and so he paid up, hating the unfair tax on him for seeing his own child. He told himself that a woman of his own race would never have subjected him to this humiliation.
He drove to the house in the morning, early. The child was already in the road, the servant holding him by the hand. Prinsloo drove the child to school—not the school where Nolo had taught but a private preschool outside the dorp. Prinsloo waited, killing time in the dorp, then fetched him in the afternoon, hoping the boy would be hungry, so that he would have the pleasure of feeding him.
He loved him, it was agony, he sorrowed for the child and himself, saw his own frailty in the small frail figure walking away from him later on, up the path toward the house—the old white-plastered Prinsloo farmhouse, the model for so many of the farmhouses in Prinsloo’s stories. What pathos in that little head and those narrow shoulders, the skinny legs and small trotting feet.
The child was like a little old man, like Prinsloo himself, and Prinsloo feared for them both and hated the one-armed woman who was the cause of this whole horrible affair. But how could Prinsloo blame her when he himself was the cause, first as an intruder, then a terror, finally a weakling. Nolo was looking old, too—as old as he felt. She had aged quickly, as African women do, losing their looks in their thirties, in their forties becoming crones.
Once, he saw Marianne. She did not recognize him. Had he grown so ugly and so different? She was first startled by him and then, recovering, hardened against him. She spoke of emigrating to Australia with Hansie. Wimpie was in Cape Town.
He forgave Marianne for her coldness. Nolo was crueler than she was, and with what reason? Was she demented? Was she simply ambitious and material-minded? He reflected that a woman who had married so late had to have something wrong with her. The missing arm did not explain much. She seemed to take pleasure in his suffering. She bled him. Her money demands were like whippings. Was she a sadist? Africans could be cruel, and some were jubilant in their cruelty, finding power in violence and feeling joy. Used to pain, their most merciful judgment was Let him die, not because they lacked a common bond of humanity but because they felt it and despised it. Revenge made them happy. He was amazed to see that they were just like everyone else on earth.
