A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  Don’t worry if

  terribly for you

  because I’ll never, never

  their idea of what

  but that’s not how I want

  tongue in your ear, in your

  Go away somewhere in the house to read. The cat passes through the house sometimes like that; a secret in its mouth, avoiding all contact. The letters are in English … how could they be understood if they had been in Portuguese? They aren’t letters, no, but drafts, the page numbers changed, lines crossed out and rewritten or restored—exactly like the drafts made for weekly school essays. I wake up in the morning and I don’t open my eyes because then I’ll see where I am, that you’re not here, that it’s him lying there. The last phrase scratched over and a full-stop stabbed over the comma after ‘here’. What’s the good of living like this, always with your thoughts somewhere else. It’s a waste, a waste. I go about like a zombie, a robot (you understand what that is? A dead person walking, or a traffic light where you cross the street, you go when it’s green, you stop when it’s red). My body somewhere else, also. I can’t tell you how I long for you. I put my hands where you do and pretend it’s you.

  A rippling sensation up the back makes the shoulders hunch. The hand that wrote the words was like this one—the one that holds the paper: the same.

  When I got out of the bath this morning I saw myself in the mirror and thought of you looking at me and you won’t believe me but my nipples came out and got hard. I watched in the glass.

  The same, the same. As a deep breath taken fills the lungs, so the hands open as if to do things they did not know they could, the whole body centres on itself in a magical power. It sings in the head, the sense of the body.

  They say this or that is ‘only physical’ but when you see something ugly and horrible like L’s grandmother, can’t eat, smells, can’t see (she doesn’t recognize anybody but he drags me along to show her the baby) you know that a body is what you are left with when you get old, so why should you ignore (crossed out) take no notice of it when you are young and it is marvellous, marvellous. If only they knew how marvellous. Maravilhoso. Is that right, my darling darling, how’s my progress? I’ve bought a dictionary. I know you don’t like to hear about anything that happened to me before you—real Latin jealousy, I laugh to tease you, but really it’s so sweet to me to have a man inside me who possesses a woman completely, nothing to do with being introduced: this is my wife. And this is my child, this is my dog.

  Singing in the head, and the flush that comes before tears, but in another part of the body, and another kind of wetness.

  I look at the others—my poor sisters, the one with that circumcised ox Arthur who will soon be rich enough, that’s for sure, to climb on top of her in a bed that used to belong to the Empress Josephine or someone, and the other one with her musty ‘professional man’ she shares the serious things in life with, even if the ‘only physical’ can’t be too great with a good soul like that. And she’s such a magnificent girl—I wish you’d meet her. No I don’t! What I wish is she had a man like you to bring her to life. What’s the use of trying to change other people’s lives if you don’t get a chance to live the only one you’re going to have. We didn’t ask to be born here. Nobody’s going to give it back to you, nobody’s going to thank you. I know, through you, I can be sure of what I feel and that’s the only thing you can be sure of (written above: ‘that matters’). I’ve had a husband, I’ve given birth. So what does it mean? These things were done to me. But with you I do things. I’m all over my body, I’m there wherever you touch me, and I’m there wherever I touch you. My tongue in your ear, in your armpit fur and your sweet backside. Oh my god Vasco, Vasco, my Vasco, the taste of you!

  The same, the same. All sensations alive in the body, breasts, lips of the mouth and the vagina, thorax, thighs, charged, the antenna of every invisible hair stretching out. A thirst of the skin.

  When I come back here you are still in my mouth. Like what? I read somewhere it’s supposed to be the taste of bitter almonds. Not true, not for yours, anyway. I wish I could describe it. Like strawberries, like lemon rind. I always did eat the rind of the slice of lemon people put in drinks. I’m crazy today, don’t listen to me. It was so sad not to know all these wonderful things for 24 years. My sister was talking today about fellow man. I don’t know what she’s going on about. There’s only one other person, and if you don’t find him … nothing else. It is so sad to be alone in your body. Do you understand what I write, my love? I can’t help writing to you, anyway. I never used to write letters, even during the war, my boyfriends used to send reams and I’d hardly write back. Honestly. I didn’t know letters could be like this. When you read, do you understand enough? Enough to love me. Do I make you grow big for me. Do I

  The draft is unfinished. But there is an avowal written large and dug deep across the page: RUTH. Ruthie. Ruth; mother. Sweating and trembling with Ruthie’s desire; Ruthie has become mother.

  The letter is being torn into small pieces, torn again through the syllables when an intact word stares up. On the way to bury the fragments in the yard bin outside the kitchen: there stands, in the path, the girl Alpheus has living with him in the garage. The girl’s stomach lifts her dress as the babyish potbelly of the child did in the photograph. The girl is pregnant; tries to efface herself from the notice of the white people in the house, and so, cornered, murmurs to the white girl her own age, Good afternoon, madam. The bits of paper cannot be put into the bin under anyone’s eyes. The fragments are taken to school and buried in the communal trash there, with the banana-skins and half-eaten sandwiches of tea-break.

  It must have done some good. To bring the past into the open—in particular the past she didn’t have in memory, only heard obliquely referred to by others—would draw the girl herself more into the open? At least, Pauline thought it might have done. She had suggested to Joe that through Portuguese legal colleagues in Mozambique they might try again to make contact with Ruthie; middle-aged, like the rest of them by now, though who could imagine Ruthie fortyish!

  Joe could. —A woman alone, no profession, drifting. It’s downhill.—

  —But she’s not alone.—

  —A woman who had a lover years ago. D’you think that type of thing lasts? Fourteen years hanging around nightclubs and bars. Poor Ruth. What was it he was supposed to be? Disc jockey? Professional dancing partner?—

  But Joe had things to think of other than writing to ask colleagues to investigate a family matter, the whereabouts of a woman last known to have been cohabiting with a Portuguese citizen of no fixed employment. If Ruthie came to mind it was incongruously as one of the sentimental Latin love songs to which she once danced all night would have sounded against the singing of political prisoners caged in the Black Maria between prison and court.

  The adolescent children continued to live a normal life—if, Pauline objected, one could regard as normal any life in the context of what was happening. Joe did not agree wholly with Pauline, in practice—though of course he did in principle—that they were old enough to pitch the tenor of their young lives entirely to the defiant cries and dirges of the time and place in which they were growing up. The atmosphere at home was enough to counteract that of the school where—yes, he knew, he knew—at prayers every morning Hillela and Carole had to offer thanks for the infinite mercy of a God in whose name other children were given an inferior education, were banished with their mothers to barren reserves, and deprived of fathers forced to become migratory labourers in order that the children might not starve. That was what was happening in the Transkei, where the family had had such wonderful camping holidays, where they had bought delicious oysters for nothing—in the new currency, the equivalent of twenty-five cents a dozen!—from the Mpondo women who gathered them off the rocks. Carole, although only ten at the time of a great bus boycott, had been old enough to understand the issue through the cloud of sunset dust in which thousands of black people tramped at the roadsi
de; for many weeks, when her mother had fetched her from school in the afternoons, they had not driven home to milk and biscuits but taken the road to Alexandra Township and picked up as many of those people as the car would hold. Carole sat on the knees of washerwomen and office cleaners, to make room; there was a rotting-cheese smell of dirty socks; she had been afraid when the police made her mother stop, asked for the passes of the black people, and told her she would be fined for overloading her car. Hillela was not living with the family then. She had been taken in later. The year before Sharpeville; so this epoch in Hillela’s history was dated, in Pauline’s house, by the public one, as at school human history was dated by the advent of Christianity, B.C. or A.D. By the time Hillela was living there, Pauline used to come home from regular visits to someone in prison (could it have been the red-haired woman?) and tell of the cockiness and courage of this person who must have been a friend—Carole knew her, Carole iced a cake Bettie baked for her, but the prison matron wouldn’t allow the prisoner to receive it; Pauline brought it home again and the girls ate it.

  Hillela, too, had driven with Pauline on an issue that could be understood through participation. Pauline canvassed in a campaign for a ‘No’ vote in the referendum for white people to decide whether the country should leave the British Commonwealth and declare itself a republic with a whites-only government. Hillela had not been frightened when men or women who came to the door were rude to Pauline: and she and Pauline laughed and didn’t care, drove on comradely to the next street.

  This seventeenth year—Hillela’s—Joe was sometimes away in country districts defending chiefs who were deposed by the government for resisting laws which forced their people to reduce their herds and give up grazing rights, huddle out of the way of whites. When he was home she or Carole would be sent to carry a cup of tea into his small study where he once looked up—a smile for Hillela—and told her he was ‘trying to find a legal needle in a haystack of bad laws—grounds to defend people who have no rights to defend, anymore’. At Olga’s Friday night seder there was in the background a radio report of the hut-burnings and murders between chiefs who, Joe told in the other house, opposed the government and those who were bribed to support it. Arthur did not submit to Olga’s objection that the temporal babble of the radio had no place in the timeless state of grace invoked at a Friday night ceremonial dinner. —A bunch of savages. What do they understand about culling, over-grazing. What’s the point of throwing out money trying to teach them something. Let them go ahead and kill each other, that’s all they know.—

  There were no challenges over such statements in this house; Olga’s George IV table was a peat-coloured pool reflecting the flowers of the centre piece, the tiny silver nest of sugared almonds before each place, the agreeable controlled faces of Olga’s kind of people. Olga always took the option of compassionate distress, never choosing sides; her fears for herself were the basis of her abhorrence of violence. —My cook’s afraid to go home there. It’s too awful.—

  Pauline and Carole were often out at protest meetings when Hillela came home from wherever it was she had been ‘with her friends’—the explanation Pauline accepted, so long as Hillela phoned to say if she wanted to spend the night with one of the friends, and left the telephone number where she could be reached; a reasonable enough rule. Hillela helped Carole paint banners, NO TO A RACIST REPUBLIC; at school the headmistress announced a special church service and election of a student committee to plan a celebration for the public holiday on which the republic was to be declared. Once Hillela was going into a coffee bar when she saw a straggle of people coming down the centre of the city street, white people gathering flanks of accompanying black bystanders as they hampered traffic, NO TO A RACIST REPUBLIC: she handed her guitar to one of her friends and watched the group as if it were a wedding procession. Suddenly she ran forward, waving wildly, grasped Carole’s hand; smiling, half-hopped-and-skipped, keeping up with her cousin and aunt for a few paces. Then she fell back. Pauline’s grand head, made out among many, was disappearing round the corner.

  In the coffee bar Hillela was greeted: Are you nuts? Where’d you go off to like that? She and her friends took turns to play the guitar and they sang ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and a new hit from America, ‘We Shall Overcome’. The Greek proprietor did not mind these gatherings in Nick’s Café, renamed, to keep up with somebody’s times, somewhere, Arrivederci Roma; the impromptu music attracted custom. But when the kids started sharing round among themselves a home-rolled cigarette he recognized the scent of the stuff and lost his temper, chasing them out. At the same time—it must have been—a street or two away the police were breaking up an illegal procession. Pauline and Carole (she was under age, she would have had to appear in camera) were lucky not to have been among those arrested and charged under the Riotous Assemblies Act. Of which Pauline was perfectly aware, Joe warned.

  Pauline’s eyes were searching her invisible audience, her judges. —You must take some risks.—

  —Not this particular one. With a child who’s a minor. It isn’t worth it.—

  Mandy von Herz’s removal to another school and the parental ban on her association with her friend Hillela made no difference, for a few months: they continued to spend most of their time together. The friendship ended of itself. Hillela’s friend left school and took courses in beauty culture and modelling; she was a very pretty girl, her parents approved of her planning a future through the marketable assets of her face and body, so long as this was done in good taste. She went to country club dances with young men in velvet butterfly ties and white dinner jackets, instead of roaming away from the white suburbs. Hillela had moved on with friends-of-friends out of the group Mandy von Herz abandoned; she played her guitar on Sunday nights in a disused warehouse taken over by young people in the decaying end of town and, crammed into the cars of people she didn’t know, went to parties that came about in Fordsburg and Pageview, areas Pauline had never taken her to because the people who lived there were not white and had no vote to canvass. She brought to Pauline and Joe’s house one day someone introduced as Gert. Joe asked for the surname and Hillela turned to its owner. Prinslop, he said. Not coloured, but an Afrikaans boy: he seemed unable to put a sentence together—whether in his own language or English—in the company of Pauline, Joe, Carole, and Sasha back for the holidays, but he was offered supper. Pauline and Joe encouraged the young people to bring home their friends; the only way to know with whom they were mixing. Perhaps the boy was overwhelmed by the fluency of this highly articulate and talkative family. He looked like any bullet-headed blue-eyed son of a railway worker from Brixton or miner from a Reef dorp, the half-educated whites who were also the master race.

  Hillela took Sasha along to the warehouse with Gert Prinsloo an evening soon after.

  Indians and coloureds among the white boys and girls there are no shock to him; he doesn’t go to a segregated school as his sister and cousin do. But Gert Prinsloo; the black boys at school call that kind ‘the Boere’: in a year or two he’ll be a foreman yelling at black workers or a security policeman interrogating political prisoners.

  Hillela has come to look for Sasha, missing in the herd-laughter of young males with newly-broken uncontrolled voices. —D’you want to go home?— She picks up her guitar; she is going to stay, anyway.

  —What does that chap do? He looks like a cop.—

  She gestures: he’s just one of the people who turn up here. —I think works in a shop that sells tape-recorders and things. Radios. Or repairs them. But what he really does is play weird instruments—the homemade ones Africans play. It’s fantastic, wait till you hear.—

  She sits down on the floor beside Sasha, cross-legged, the guitar on her lap. She slips her hand over his forearm and opens her palm against his; their fingers interlace and close. As she has gestured: here, he and Hillela are just people who have turned up among others, known only by first names, there is no familial identity.

  After a lot of noi
sy confusion, records set playing and taken off, girls shrilling and boys braying, this Gert Prinsloo settles himself in a space with two oxhide drums, a wooden xylophone and the little instrument of which out-of-tune reproductions are sold in every tourist shop. (Sasha has an mbira on the wall of his cubicle in Swaziland.) The son of the Boere has begun to drum. The girls and boys begin to clap and sway and stamp. They, crowd round him so that, from the sitting level, the player cannot be seen any more. But Hillela has pressed Sasha’s hand down on the boards to show he and she will not get up. She is smiling, with her body swaying from the waist (like a snake rising from the charmer’s basket, he was to remember, or like one of those nature films shown at school, where the expansion of a flower from its calyx is speeded up). This happens to the sound of Gert Prinsloo’s drumming that makes of the walls of that place one huge distended eardrum, and to the flying notes, hollow and gentle, that he hammers out all over from the anvil of the wooden xylophone; but the rain-drop music of the mbira is lost in the beat of the crowd’s blood, they overwhelm it with their own noise.

  He comes over sniffing gutturally and making awkward genteel gestures to wipe the sweat off the back of his neck. His mouth is pegged down in bashful happiness.

  —Where’d you learn?—

  He laughs and hunches. —No, well, I just picked it up. First from listening, you know, watching. Then having a go myself. I’d always played guitar and that.—

  But where? Someone must have taught you the music—it’s not written down, is it? It’s traditional African stuff.—

  He moves his hands about, begins to speak and stops; he is embarrassed by and will only embarrass by what he has to tell. —We had a fish and chips shop. My mother, after my pa passed away. One of the boys that worked in the kitchen, he used to play these things. I got my guitar when I was about fourteen, and we both used to play it. He first taught me guitar.—