A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  He turned his face away from the company, an actor going offstage, and spoke as if he half-hoped she would not catch it: —It’s necessary for me to be seen in places like this.—

  He danced with her and stood in uproariously-laughing groups, an arm around her neck as a casual sexual claim understood in this circle, while jokes were told about copywriters, Afrikaners and Jews, who were present to laugh at themselves, and about blacks, who were not. It was usual for people to pair off after these parties, slipping away; outside she ran with him through the blows of a rain so strong it seemed to be attempting to strip off their clothes. It was so black and close around them that it was not until next morning she saw the outside of the house where they made love and slept the night together. It was the converted servants’ quarters of a larger house whose occupants, he said, were ‘all right’. She understood the inference, and also that she must not ask why it was necessary for him to have vetted them. (That was the advantage of having lived with Pauline and Joe.) It is doubtful if she was ever quite sure why. Everyone called him Rey, Andrew Rey, but he showed her, once she had moved in with him, a passport in another name with which he had entered the country. That was not his real name; ‘too long a story’ to explain why if he entered the country under a false identity he lived there under yet another persona. He worked as a free-lance journalist for several newspapers, including a black one, though his byline appeared only in one that was regarded as liberal while at the same time being a respectable part of the economic establishment. —Editorials full of fine phrases about the fight for freedom of the press, but when I bring in my copy on the Mineworkers’ Union Congress, the brave editor puts the red pencil through the fact that blacks are seventy-five per cent of the labour force, and they weren’t there—they can’t be members. And why does the bastard slash my piece? Because the consortiums with their half-dozen company aliases who own the mines, who own everything here, also own the paper, and they don’t want any ideas put into the blacks’ heads. It’s okay to ‘deplore’ the bombs, to be ‘horrified’ at the murder of white people in their holiday caravan by blacks who’ve turned to the Xhosa ruler of the spirits because the white man’s Christ hangs on his cross in a segregated church. But it’s not done to be ‘horrified’ and ‘deplore’ the fact that the only say blacks have is the choice between working on the white man’s terms or starving.—

  Under his good-time image in the kind of company in which she had met him, his sullen watchfulness from an out-of-the-way seat at the bar where journalists drank and talked sport as noisily as politics, his different, insider’s watchfulness drinking in the dens of blacks (where he would soon catch a particular eye and turn aside for murmured, monosyllabic privacy) there was a resentment like oil under the earth, welling constantly, flammable in him. Since he could not let it blow before editors and other hypocrites, it found another path, heating him sexually. He would be withdrawn and bitter, and tell her he couldn’t tell her why—another one, perhaps, who thought her too stupid to understand. But out of this mood he would make love to her with the mastery of means, single-mindedness and passionate manipulation of human responses he could not muster in another, his chosen field of endeavour. This one didn’t make love like a boy. He might not confide, but he knew how to make bodies speak. People who saw Hillela at that time might recall the nerve-alive brightness of a young face, where he took her among people and dumped her for others to talk to; at each stage in life a face in repose, neglectful of composure, sets in the current dominant experience of the individual whose face it is—her expression was, in fact, amazement. She was aware, all the time, of the orchestration of her body conducted by him. The art director whose pink shoes had annoyed her lover complimented her kindly: You look well-fucked, darling. And she laughed and at the same time burned with embarrassment—for Olga, for Pauline; and for Joe.

  She was, perhaps, happy; she would not remember. The happiness may have been partly to do with something she was not conscious of: working in an advertising agency, living with this man, she achieved a balance. A balance between leaving them all, the advantages they had offered—released by putting them in a position where they had to put her out—and rejoining without them what each had offered: Olga, after all, would approve of an artistic career in the fashionable advertising industry; the lover was someone she could have taken home to Pauline’s house. Not that the girl did; not that she wanted to. But this life, even though it was lived in an out-house like that Alpheus occupied, was not the dropout’s ramshackle of sleazy clubs and fairground jobs they believed she had left them for.

  It might have been a kindness to let them know where she was and what she was doing: A single letter was found some years later among Len’s ‘effects’—two bottles of vodka, a pot of peanut butter and several copies of The S.A. Commercial Traveller in which he appeared, as a young man, in a group photograph—when he died in a home for the chronically sick in what had since become Zimbabwe. Dear Len, You probably know I’m working now, I’ve got a fun job in advertising?! I hope to make a career. It’s great to be independent and I’m lucky not to be alone. I have a wonderful boyfriend, quite a bit older, he’s about thirty and a writer. Nothing to do with advertising—he doesn’t approve of that! We may leave the country; he is half Canadian, with—he says—some Red Indian blood from way back. But we won’t go to Canada, thank goodness, I don’t like the idea of cold countries. And he’s never lived there. Maybe we’ll pass your way. I know you’re in the North now, and it’s soon going to be a separate country from Rhodesia, they say. But maybe you’ll come back down to Salisbury?

  I don’t know whether or not to say I’m sorry about Billie, but I am. I’ll send this, with love, to the old address, in the hope someone will post it on.

  Five majuscular X kisses and the signature: Hillela

  It was not quite true that she was independent at that time: she still collected her stipend supplied by what her lover called her ‘rich aunt’, putting that aunt at a further remove by the loss of a name. It was justified, though an eighteen-year-old’s boastfulness, to make some claim for him as a writer. The yard cottage was padded with cuttings. The suitcases under the bed were so heavy with manuscript notes they could not be shifted by Hillela when she wanted to clean the floor—an immense physical gratitude moved her, she was quite housewifely, doing for him all the things—washing shirts, sewing on buttons—Olga’s males had done for them by servants, and Pauline’s males (in the case of loose buttons and holes in socks) were expected to do for themselves.

  He talked about ‘his book’ as a companion and a leg-iron by which he had been shackled a long time, dragging it around the world with him. It depended before whom its existence was confirmed or denied; sometimes he said five years’ work was already virtually completed, at others he said dismissingly he was going to scrap all that, events had overtaken him (in Marxist company, the version was History had done this), corrected perspective, and at other times he would lug out a suitcase and spend a whole night rewriting a sheaf of its contents, while she slept. Next morning the result would be pitched into the suitcase along with older papers flattened under their own weight. He never discussed ‘his book’ with her and she did not expect him to, assuming its political nature gave it the status of classified: after an enjoyable day in the white-wine camaraderie where a shampoo was being transformed by lyrical images into an elixir of youth, or smoking a particular brand of cigarette was in the process of becoming a ritual of success and distinction, she came home to someone who was almost certainly doing the kind of things most admired and seldom successfully aspired to, in the Pauline home. There, they would have regarded ‘his book’ as something more important than himself, than his girl, than the lovers together; for her, it was present as someone he had known before her, before she was even grown up, with claims she must walk round on the quiet rubber soles of respect.

  Of course—correcting perspective—hadn’t she always lived in the eye of the storm? That eye th
at meteorologists say is safe, a ball of security rolled up in fury, that eye that was whiteness. Pauline, given away by wild-blown hair, put her head out into the cyclone briefly. Others went out and did not come back. But fixedly, the white eye was on itself; Mandela came up from Underground that year with the gales of August that sandpapered the city with mine dust, while white children were waiting for the segregated swimming pools to be opened on September 1st. He went on trial in October for inciting the strike of the previous year and for leaving the country illegally; by then Olga was already planning ahead for December holidays at Plettenberg Bay, phoning friends who, like her, had houses there, to make sure there would be enough young company to keep her sons amused. Fire-bombs continued to explode, according to the news. There had been that ghastly murder of whites in their caravan at Bashee Bridge; but the numerous well-organized caravan camps throughout the official recreation areas of the country were whites-only and perfectly safe. As for the murders of headmen in the Transkei who collaborated with government officials—who knew a headman? All that was ignored as tribal unrest among black peasants. It was satisfactorily reassuring that the last communist front organization, the Congress of Democrats, had been banned in September. And the Sabotage Act was passed, defined widely to include strikes as acts of sabotage—restoring confidence to industrialists while Pauline and Carole had eggs thrown at them from a city balcony when taking part in the last public protest march before the Act put an end to such demonstrations for the duration—of what? The regime was then already in its fifteenth year.

  That year when Hillela was living in the city with some man was the same year when torture began to be used by the police. Political suspects—mostly black—who, defended by lawyers like Joe, made such allegations when and if they could get to the courts, were dismissed from any concern of most white people, put out of mind as isolated agitators, left-overs of communist influence who had to be dealt with somehow; liars by ideology, who either invented injury or—looking at the issue paradoxically but righteously—deserved it anyway. And even those who were humanely and morally opposed, on principle, to beatings, applications of electric shocks, disorientation by extended denial of sleep, generally took their stand from under the centre of the white eye’s hypnotic gaze. A doctor who had given vital testimony of torture that won the case Joe’s team brought on behalf of a black man in a provincial town, described over a drink in the Pauline house his appalling findings on the man’s body, and concluded: —By the way, Joe … while you were appearing in Durban, were you ever invited to the Club? I was given a surprisingly good lunch there … a charming place, lovely old colonial style … I really enjoyed it.—

  Pauline stared into her glass. —How did you reconcile the two?—

  He smiled and quizzed, not following.

  She read the dregs of wine as if they were tea-leaves. —Your morning in court. Your evidence. What you’d seen. And the Club.—

  He smiled again, broadening the understanding to encompass Joe, anyone. —But they had nothing to do with each other!—

  Easy then, with hindsight, to sneer at what was only a young girl excited by the exhibitionism she was too naive to distinguish from concomitant courage; the ex go-go dancer nested amid testimony of horror, happy in the midst of torture. By day she chilled the white wine, at night she was in the alternating current of the man’s frustration and resolve, the thrilling tension into which, in his command of her body, he converted the dreadful happenings around her. He raged through a thinned line of mouth at the poor press coverage of revolutionary actions. He disappeared from the yard cottage for days. She was to tell no-one he had gone away; if anyone phoned or called in, he was simply out for a while. This was an important task she had. His reports of what he had seen of the scale of resistance coming from blacks pushed back to starve in the Bantustans, of the violence used by the police against rural people, of the sour and lethal misery this caused between government-paid headmen and desperate villagers—she watched him tear up these reports (rejected by his editors) in a tantrum and throw them into the big bin that served the main house as well as the cottage. She had once cast certain papers in other people’s dirt, like that. But, these bits of paper she helped pick out again from under eggshells and vegetable peelings. They taped facts together; he sat down and wrote an article using the same material, but in the context of an accusation—press collusion with white domination. This, like the articles he wrote on concealed evidence of torture, she took in her elegant souvenir sling bag to the advertising agency; although the piece would be published under an alias abroad, its author might be traced by the identification of his typewriter with the typescript—it had happened to other journalists, before: envelopes addressed to newspapers, or even to cover addresses, were opened at the post office before despatch and photocopied for the secret police. It was another important task for her: the sipping and banter of copywriters and models going on around her, she made her fair copy of subversive documents on one of the agency typewriters. —Time off for a love-letter? I don’t blame you, love, they work us to extinction in this loony bin, can’t call a thought your own.— It was with this (genuinely female) art director whose yellow-veined blue eyes stood out like an octopus’s from a mound of forehead that the girl fell to the childish, vain temptation one day to hint that she was ‘sometimes scared’ on behalf of Rey, with whom, it was generally known in temporary pairings-off hardly kept count of, the little junior assistant had ‘got together’ at an agency lush. The woman whose loose, black-dyed hair was designed to make her look more like an elder sister than a mother not only picked up at once the scent of political danger holed up in its love-nest, was stirred by it and passed it on as a rill of risk to touch the agency with daring-by-association; she was also the one who kept absolute discretion when the girl’s confidence was taken further. What Sasha had feared did come to pass, but not when he was looking for his cousin in the cinemas where they had spent autumn afternoons. While electric currents were passing through the reproductive organs of others, Hillela had an abortion. It was arranged for her in good hands, by the kindness and understanding of the woman art director. Hillela was nineteen. It happened inside her; her body, her life: and the torture was one of the things he—Rey—had ways of knowing about, outside.

  On his birthday they took wine along to the house where, lately, they often met the same group of black men. Rey didn’t take any notice of birthdays, but it was somebody-or-other’s birthday every few days at the agency, and Hillela had acquired a style of adult celebration from there. She wrapped both serious and jokey presents elaborately, bought wine and a cake. The sexy card he glanced at without comment. The witty present (a beard-comb stuck into the orange whiskers of a toy orangoutang) he unwrapped and ignored, and the real elephant-hide attaché case with gilt fittings he looked at, lying there, as one does at something one is confused to see anyone could think one would want.

  The wine was drunk, anyway. That was all right. The black men were not those African National Congress Youth Leaguers she had met with him when first she had moved into the yard cottage. He was perhaps collecting other material; they talked closely with him, watching him, some with moving, responsive eyes, others with the in-turned glaze between lids that sometimes dropped, with which blacks keep themselves intact from the invasion of white presences. He was telling them about his ‘quiet trips’: whom he saw, where he had got himself into, in the Transkei, in Tembuland and Pondoland. He brought messages they tested in silence. She felt indignation welling in her as it did permanently, from another source, in him: Trust him! Trust him! But she was not expected to speak. Halfway through the evening a white man came in, apparently from having been only in some other part of the house. His murmured upper-class courtesies and round face that in its texture and tender colouring appeared to be stripped down of several outer skins, seemed to belong to an English climate, yet his recognition of the younger white man signalled acceptance to the blacks: —Of course—you intervie
wed me in Cape Town, at my house. Some Swedish or German paper … ?—

  The free-lancer changes journalistic alliances too often to be expected to remember or to answer. This one grasped the finger-hold of credentials to press his own questions both stoutly and humbly, in the manner of whites demonstrating loyal support for a black cause and aware of the superiority of the blacks’ inner circle of involvement, drawn by experience, language and blood. About ‘Qamata’—it had been described to him, in these rural inner circles in which his familiarity suggested he had been received, as a sort of church?

  They took their time. There was a spokesman from out of the lazy, acquired deadpan: —It’s their god, there. He comes from the sea.—

  —One of our gods, Xhosa gods… our religion we had, before.—

  —I was told he was the ‘ruler of the spirits’, a kind of Pantokrator … top man among the gods … ?

  —Yes, ruler of our other spirits… them all. Those country people, they still believe those things.—

  The journalist, with a movement of legs and behind, shifted his chair nearer the spokesman. —Or believe in them again? Weren’t they all dosed with Christianity at school?—

  Shrugs, and everyone waited for someone else to speak.

  —Many people were Christians, but they kept the old customs.—

  —Oh I know—I’ve been among the young abakwetha hidden away in the circumcision camps. That’s not quite the same thing. I mean, Qamata, as I understand, isn’t a hero who once lived, a warrior from precolonial or early colonial times. The old days. He’s a different thing, different kind of inspiration, isn’t he? A spirit that makes people fearless? Tells them what to do? White people are saying Poqo is like Mau Mau—of course you know that, it’s inevitable. But is the idea that Qamata … an African god, a Xhosa god is something that can chase away the god of submission, the Christian god who says ‘thou shalt not kill’, and make killing a sacrifice for freedom?—