Loot

by Nadine Gordimer

  The next time the black car brought distinction to Tomasi’s yard the Deputy-Director of Land Affairs invited her to visit his farm the coming weekend. When she told him there were two gatherings she was obliged to attend he merely substituted: —The weekend after, then.—

  —Oh I don’t want to spoil your plans, Gladwell, please—

  —It’s the same for me. I go all the time.—

  So that is home, the family home, not the official residence (to which she has never been invited) that must be in the suburb of guard-houses manned before swimming-pool and tennis-court endowed gardens, where Government office-bearers and foreign diplomats lived. She looked forward with mild curiosity to meeting the wife and family. He must belong somewhere else outside the parliamentary suit—as he did with the old uncle and aunt, that glimpse she’d had of him in personal mufti. The black car was at the gates early, not unexpected of this stickler for all disciplines. She recognised one of the bodyguards doubling as driver; perhaps, unlike the destination of the other outing on which she’d accompanied the Deputy-Director, the area they were bound for in this vast country presented some possible threat which made the discreet, disguised-by-function presence of at least half his usual Security a precaution? So she and Gladwell were together on the back seat, very comfortable, he had no need to give any attention to the road, his man at the wheel had the air of a horse making surely for the stable.

  It was far away. They rose and descended round a mountain pass, and caused people in two country towns to stare back at the majestic car’s glossy blackness as the populace in distant times and far countries must have watched a royal carriage go by. In the third town he stopped (the other journey, he’d paused at a roadside store), this time before the town’s landmark, a supermarket, and went in attended by the driver-bodyguard, perhaps only to carry provisions. She had her own secreted in her largest straw bag. The shaming resort to charity: a dose of sugar in place of an answer to the state of beggary. The children were there, the same children. She handed out a pack of sweets. The bodyguard and his charge returned loaded with food—must have been a long list from the wife. Then his man was in attendance on a visit to a liquor store behind the battered iron-pillared-and-roofed pavement that was the style of old frontier towns—along with the shopkeeper’s Jewish name was pioneer immigrant provenance: I. SARETSKY EST. 1921. Bottles clanked in the trunk as the car moved off and the driver-bodyguard was instructed in their language to halt and rearrange his packing of provisions. Once more, refreshment had been brought for her; this time it was imported mineral water.

  They talked between comfortable intervals—unlike his imposed silences—watching the country go by. The candelabra aloes were in bloom, flaming votive offerings to the ultimate cathedral that is the late winter sky when the heat has come, as it does, before the rains, a scouring to the bone that needs a term other than the one named Spring in Europe. The Cultural Attaché of the British had remarked to her at dinner last week, August’s the cruellest month, not T. S. Eliot’s April.

  They came to the kind of terrain where activity by man has made savannah of what once was forest. Sparse scrub was nature’s attempt to return among weathered rubble, half-buried rust-encrusted unidentifiable iron parts, even a jagged section of a wall where foundations traced by weeds outlined what might have been a building. Beyond some sort of slag heaps a rise where the picked-over remains of what must have been elaborate structures—houses?—of a considerable size, in scale with the giant hulks of fallen trees too heavy to have been carted away for firewood, still made their statement as an horizon. In other parts of the country she had seen farmsteads abandoned by whites pillaged for whatever might be useful; nothing of this extent. —What was here?—

  —Used to be a mine. Long time ago. Before.—

  —Copper?—

  —Yes.—

  —But what happened? Why isn’t it still worked?—

  —I don’t know. Maybe the ore was finished—but in the war they say it was attacked and flooded, underground, the pumps were smashed. You can ask the Minister of Mines; the Buffalo Mine.—

  There was a great deal of entertaining up at the Manager’s house, weekends. On Monday morning a member of the kitchen and ground staff whose job it was set off to walk fifty miles to town with the master’s note for the liquor store. A case of Scotch whisky. The man walked back with twelve bottles in the case on his head, arriving Friday. Every Friday. The feat was a famous dinner-party story, each weekend: that’s my man—what heads they have, eh, thick as a log.

  A stop at the last town to buy supplies the driver-bodyguard loaded. I. SARETSKY EST. 1921. A case of Scotch whisky. Twelve bottles on the head. That’s my man. Thick as a log. That’s my man.

  Buffalo Mine.

  The name is a hook, the anecdote comes up with it. (The driver-bodyguard has reduced speed in response to her movement, upright in her seat looking back at the site.)

  First time in Africa? First time yes India Bangladesh Afghanistan not here.

  Not only a dinner-party story of the long dead. What an old rogue, but such style! They don’t make them like that anymore. Tax evasion’s about the only territory of adventurers now. A child half-listening, an adolescent bored with the tradition of family fables recounted to later generations, around other tables, about that extraordinary character, the grandfather.

  Been here before.

  Not in her person. But in her blood-line. The history to which she belongs. There it was—is—Buffalo Mine. One of the houses that were up there on the rise she’s looking at was where the dinner parties heard the famous story, drank the whisky arrived every Friday. Every Friday head thick as a log.

  —You know the Minister? I’ll introduce you.—Gladwell is in the position to obtain any privilege a curious visitor might wish.

  —Enos can tell you all about these old places.—

  She sank back in her seat as if dismissing a passing interest.

  Nearby was her destination, their destination, the Deputy-Director’s farm. She had had in prospect a solid Colonialverandahed farmstead taken over: there, looking on wattle-fenced cattle kraals, mud huts, a troop of sheep and goats, chickens taking a dust-bath under roses gone wild, a scatter of children bowling old tyres, was a house set down out of the sky complete from California. The expanse of glass behind the patio preened in reflected splendour of the sun, a satellite dish held its great ear to the world. Close by was a structure she recognised as a powerful electricity generator. Men and women came out of the back of the house to the double garage whose fine wooden doors rolled away as the driver-bodyguard touched the electronic gadget in his hand. The people were servants or perhaps relatives (she had observed how poorer members of an official’s family often served in both capacities), some hastened to unload the car, a woman in a flounced floral overall that needn’t necessarily mean she was cooking or cleaning, but a mark of status, hugged the master of the house and brought her palms together in greeting to his guest. She was ready to meet the wife in the house and perhaps some of the couple’s grown children—of course the wife would speak English—anyway the social capabilities of her own training were automatically at hand for all such encounters.

  There is an unmistakable atmosphere of absence in rooms where only servants have come and gone in the course of their daily tasks; no-one to fill these rooms has left presence there. Perhaps the arrival is unexpected, his wife is in some other wing of this house. He was following his guest’s usual hostly procedure when he visited her, pouring whisky taken from a cabinet where glasses hung upside down from their stems as in a smart bar; he had not gone to summon anyone.

  —I’d like to meet your wife, first.—The protocol smile as she accepted her drink.

  —She prefers town.—

  —Oh that’s a disappointment.—

  —The children come sometimes.—

  —Well I’ll have to meet her in town, then.—It was a tentative claim to friendship of the kind she was used to, the
bachelor woman taken into a family context.

  They were served a four o’clock meal—the woman in the flowered outfit must have been forewarned, after all, to have ready. The whisky bottle came to the skating-rink shiny table they sat at in a room that led off the livingroom peopled only by framed photographs of weddings, sports teams and official occasions in which he was among the assembly. Lively voices out of sight indicated that the driver-bodyguard must be sociably at home in the kitchen just as he was in Tomasi’s.

  She tucked in to stew and wild spinach, helped herself, under the permissive wave of the host’s hand, to the mound of stiff maize meal smoking vapour like a dormant volcano. There were wheels of sliced tomato arranged as a still life on a glass plate. He was controlledly annoyed to find there was to be no coffee (apparently forgotten when the purchases were made at the supermarket); she noticed then what must have been there all along in him, the attractive tilt of his eyebrows drawn upward at the inner corners enquiringly even when he was not—as now—irritated. A hieroglyph of vulnerability to be deciphered, if one were to be interested enough, in the closed self-possession of this functionary.

  —Can I walk round your farm?—She caught herself out in time and did not add the assumption: No mines? This was something not for flippancy brought about by a full stomach and whisky at an unaccustomed time of day.

  —You don’t want some tea?—To compensate for the missing coffee.—I’ll take you. You know I have horses—of course, you come from England, all the English like horses.—

  So together they passed the cattle sheds and the old stonewalled sheep pen (there must once have been another kind of farmer on this land, with his memories of the Cotswolds, and a white-verandahed farmstead she had had in mind). Neat pyramids of cow dung dried and cut in squares for fuel were milestones where small dogs of their own unnamed breed lifted jaunty legs as they panted along. He pointed to the field of chili peppers ready for harvesting; she was intrigued:—They’re red earrings hanging!—A flung arm showed his cattle grazing far off; there was maize stretching away as a head-high forest. —Three thousand bags this year, that’s not bad … but this was many hectares planted, you have to have the land to get a commercial crop like that … This place was nothing. Weeds and rubbish. Like the other.—

  This was the moment for her anecdote. My grandfather owned that mine he lived there—the present moment would grow over the past safely, organically, as the maize and blood-bright peppers and the russet and white pattern of the distant cattle repossessed the land that was colonial booty. But the moment had passed; they’d come to a paddock where three horses seemed, as horses do when they are approached, to be waiting. She said (of course) —They’re beautiful.—And added—Specially the bay.—

  He sucked his lips in round his tongue, used to making decisions for others.—Would you like to ride. She’s a nice animal. The quiet one.—

  —Oh I’d love to! Even one that isn’t too quiet! I used to ride a lot, no chance now.—

  —You see. I know the English.—

  —You ride?—

  He called out and a young boy appeared, was given an instruction.

  —I also used to, when I was a kid, on the back of the old horse that pulled my father’s cart. But now, no, I bought these for my son. He’s in the States. His saddle’s here.—

  The boy saddled the bay and her host gave her a leg up to mount the tall horse. The forgotten sensation of co-operative power with the creature carrying her came immediately she set off, the old pleasure in the air swiftly parting against her face. Unexpectedly, he did not give any directions or instructions of where she might ride; she galloped, free, alongside the maize fields disturbing minute birds like clouds of insects, she rode over the open ground towards the cattle, waved at the herdboy squatting with them, she turned back towards the city-slicker house and swerved away to where she made out what must be him, although something about the figure was different, not only from the parliamentary-suited one but also from the one in mufti of sports shirt and pants. There was another man with him and as she neared she found they were bent over some sort of pump installation. Now, up on the horse, she was beside them. He was different; he had stripped off his shirt, hands stained with grease and dirt he rose bare-breasted. Nothing significant in a man naked to the waist, as there is when every magazine cover uses the evident evocation of bare-breasted females. But perhaps because this man was always so fully dressed in the abstract as well as the material sense, what was revealed couldn’t have been guessed at. This torso seemed to belong to someone other in the gleaming beauty, sweat-painted, of perfectly formed muscle, the double path below pectorals, left and right, of smooth ribbing beneath lithe skin. Black. Simply black. No mark, no hairy pelt. Who is this man?

  —Every time I’m here, it’s some problem. Pump packed up.—

  She laughed. (The problems of the maison secondaire.) She was sweating, too, her forehead gleamed hot and rosy.

  —The ride was good?—

  Wonderful, wonderful.

  He took a shower. She was directed to what must be the wife’s bathroom; a pink comb and an empty bath-oil bottle on the shelf, a gown hanging in folds like a crestfallen face.

  They were having a farewell whisky on the patio—in the itinerary of her day’s treat—about to leave for the long drive back when the woman in charge of the house burst out flustered. A rising tempo of exchange began between her and the host; he followed her into the house with a gesture of exasperation. But when he came back to the patio he was his composed self, distanced from whatever this problem was.

  —The man’s been drinking. My driver. They’re having a big party there, all the time.—

  —Drunk?—

  —He can’t drive.—

  Not a tragedy. She spread her hands and cocked her head cheerfully. She was used to all sorts of necessary changes of arrangements, in the course of working journeys with her Administrator. —We can drive—you and I.—

  —In the dark, at night. It’s not safe.—

  —Oh I don’t mind, we’ll be all right, sharing, I’ve often driven in rural areas at night.—

  —Not the driving. It’s not safe.—

  Not safe. Ah yes, the drunk’s not just a driver, he’s a bodyguard.

  —He’ll be back in his head in the morning. We can go very early. Is that okay for you? Sunday tomorrow—you don’t have some appointment? I’m sorry.—

  —Well I suppose … nothing else for it. I mean if there’s risk, for you. No, I don’t have anything particular planned … Nobody expects me. Nobody sits up for me.—She smiled to assuage his concern.—That’s freedom.—

  —I appreciate your attitude. Many women …—

  The woman in charge of the house produced a tray with cold meats and bread and they drank whisky, talking ‘development shop’ in an indiscreet way, criticising, analysing this individual and that as they had never done (he would never allow himself to?) without the whisky, anywhere but hidden safe in the house that must have been a lit-up fantasy in ancient total darkness surrounding them. Not only the driver-bodyguard had made his escape, that night, from the restraints of official duty.

  When both began to yawn uncontrollably he found it appropriate (every situation has its protocol) to rise from the sofa’s fake leopard-skin velvet and decide—I’ll show you where you can sleep.—

  In the rhythm of their progress along a passage she told him—What a lovely day, and the ride—and he put an arm up around her shoulder, rather the gesture of a man towards a male friend.

  There was no sign of whose room it was she was left in: the character of the misplaced Californian house that there were rooms for purposes that did not match needs where it had been set down. It seemed to have been intended as some sort of spacious dressing-room, adjunct to other quarters behind a second door which was blocked by a bed. There were blankets and pillows, no sheets. But she had no provision of pyjamas, nightthings, either; she was sitting on the bed a moment, contemplating
this, the door to the passage still open, when he looked in to see if she wanted anything. She stood up to reassure, no, no, I’m fine, moving a few steps towards him to demonstrate self-sufficiency. He met her and whether she presented herself first or his arms went around her first wasn’t clear; the embrace became long, as if occupying one of his silences. His mouth moved from hers over her face and neck and his hands took her breasts. When they were naked he left her briefly without a word from either and came back into the room with the condom concealed in his hand as he might carry a ballot paper in a parliamentary process. On the bed that seemed to belong to nobody the torso revealed beside the faulty irrigation pump came down on her fulfilling all its promise. Sometime between the pleasuring, this man of few words, in his new guise, spoke her name as a lover does.—Roberta … Like a boy’s name, why did they call you …——Because they’d wanted a boy.—And after a moment, a breathy half-laugh against his neck:—Why’d they call you Gladwell. Same thing? Wanted you to be something else. Make you a white Englishman.—

  At six in the morning the driver-bodyguard had already brought the car round to the terrace, ready to go. He showed no sign of his night’s debauch. She was to wonder some time afterwards if he really had been drunk. Or had been given instruction that he was; but then who could measure the unexpressed will, hers as well as her host’s, that was ready for the pretext.

  People in official positions, men and women with a public persona know how to accommodate officially unsuitable private circumstances for some sort of decorum within these positions and personae. Even someone with as low a level of official and public persona as Administrator’s Assistant in an international aid agency knows this; along with computer competency and the protocols of tact and diplomacy in relations with the recipient country; another unspoken code. Aid personnel are not permitted to make personal attachments to local individuals on the premise that these might influence aid decisions; if they do indulge in such attachments—and they did—they are trusted to honour the Agency’s objective integrity by following the rules of discretion on both sides—the individual’s in exchange for the Agency’s blind eye. For members of Government of course the circumstance is taken for granted—a man or woman in high office would be expected to have along with a luxury car and security guards, some woman, some man, for relaxation; faces outside the official portraits at home with the family.