He was not curious about her presence in the country; the norms of exile were constant displacement and emplacement on orders not to be questioned, or by circumstances over which the one in refuge had no control, either. The fact that she did have a refuge also gave her some credibility for him—what black man would believe a white girl would leave the luxuries of home without reasons valid for refuge? She wanted to introduce him to the people who had taken her in. But he had no use for diplomatic contacts with countries hostile to the organization, or which did not have, at least, an enlightened group which campaigned on its behalf. —I don’t know about their country … They’ve been wonderful to me.— And so, as Whaila (the white diminutives that diminished a black man in another way were being discarded, an African who spoke for his people before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights could not be called Johnny) assumed her loyalty to the cause, this became assumed by her as the reason for her presence, and the fact that the Ambassador’s family had taken her in both confirmed that she was an exile and that her protectors had some humanistic partisanship that might be useful. There followed a period when Whaila Kgomani was something of a prize guest. Emile and Marie-Claude did not usually entertain blacks other than those who were unavoidable through protocol—members and officials of Nkrumah’s government, and the representatives of other black states. —What pleasure is there? I don’t see the point of mixing just because they are black. What can you talk about with them? They serve us up the platitudes they think we want to hear because that’s what white people taught them. You never know what they think. Never give anything of themselves …—
Marie-Claude had a correction for her husband, this time. —Except when they are dancing. Or drunk.— She enjoyed the occasional boldness of one who didn’t know or chose not to know that European custom confines men and women to partners within their own party at a nightclub, and with a smile and flourish no-one could take offence to, sauntered her off into the rhythmical mob.
But this man from the south of the continent—her husband himself was the one who said it—he was a man with an intellect. —They may treat them badly down there in your country, Hillela, but it seems to sharpen their minds, mmh?— (The Ambassador always aimed exactly the right tone of banter at her, at the family table.) This one did not need wine to loosen his tongue but he knew how to drink it in a civilised manner, not swilled down because it was provided, free, by a white. His look, narrow eyes decoding the appearances of an embassy room, was not beguiled by the knick-knacks of European power—the coat-of-arms table silver, the humidor in which cigars were wheeled in, the royal portrait in which the face of the current incumbent fitted into the cut-out of medals and braid like the faces of revellers who have themselves photographed at a fairground. There was no predictable rhetoric, either. Hillela’s compatriot stood before the portrait, turned with the battle-lines of his mouth curving a civil smile. —That must be a great-great-grandson? His ancestor was the one who cut off hands when the workers in the plantations didn’t bring in enough rubber.—
Emile put up his own hands in mutual admission of the sins of the great-great-grandfathers. —Awful things happened on this side of Africa.—
—Well, he made his country estate over here, didn’t he …—
—It was only for a very short time. Then the other European powers got jealous, of course.—
—Of course. They were all the same family weren’t they? Cousins, uncles and that… Him, the English queen, the German king … we were their family property, man. But they were a cartel, really … We were talking about multinational companies just now; what’s new? Except that it’s not aunties and uncles banded together to own us, now, it’s foreign national economies. The extended family of the West …—
Here was a black man with whom one could talk of contentious matters in the European mode of scepticism and irony that makes communication possible between the social irreconcilables of power and powerlessness. In that mode, one can say anything, if one knows how to say it. The Ambassador, putting one arm round his beautiful wife and one round the girl: —I don’t know about the other whites in your country, but this one—we love her—
She went to them (‘almost as if to parents’ Marie-Claude remarked to her husband) and said she wanted to help the organization—clerical work. Never said right out that she was going away, leaving him; but the Ambassador knew her, knew it. He at once gave his wife a lead in generosity. —But Hillela can continue to live here. She has her room. We don’t need it … there’s no reason …— She did not stay on long. Just as well. It was not, after all, the right thing for the Embassy to open itself to complaints from her country that it was harbouring political dissidents from that country; wherever she went, it was not to diplomatic parties, now, and constantly in the company of the members of a banned organization.
Njabulo Manaka, under whose kitchen table she had been accommodated, had moved on again; he was on trial in the home country for having infiltrated after military training in Algeria. Sne moved on. As customary now with her, once she was no longer even a lodger at the Embassy, she did not go to visit the family there. The Ambassador saw her as he was passing the market; her profile with the light catching the cheekbone, her breasts swinging forward as she bent to test the ripeness of some fruit; her old poverty diet she had told him about in the sweet, light confidences of bed. He put a hand on his driver’s shoulder, the car drew up in the swill of the gutter. —Get in.— She paid for her mangoes, first.
She sat angled towards him, knees neatly together, presenting herself, smiling as if she had been at the Embassy only yesterday.
—Where are you living?—
They spoke behind the driver’s ears open to them under his braided cap.
—There’s a house where we all live.—
—So you’re with him.—
—We’re all together.—
—Tell me. Hillela? … Well, if it hasn’t happened yet, it will. You’re like me. You’ll try … It’s quite a novelty, isn’t it. I’ve had a few of his kind, myself. I always was attracted. And of course where I come from, it’s no crime. No, to be fair, it’s still (he made a familiar damping-down signal with his fine caresser’s hand)—not done …—
She took the hand. Her own was sticky with the juice and dirt that had dried on the fruit in her lap, her cheeks were the colour and smoothness of the rose-brown mango skin, the black eyes were those that had opened under him many times, holding for his reassurance the depth of pleasure he could plumb.
—I’m pregnant.—
—Oh my God.—
She saw the pain that slid its blade into him; her face was that of a child confronted with the middle-aged rictus of an angina.
Not his! Not from him! Could not be from him. But what a regret? If it had happened when it would have been his, he would have been irritated by her, as usual with women, for not being more efficient.
But of course she was not like other women. He knew that. Young as she was, she understood her field. He had even reinterpreted an aphorism once, for her, but she probably hadn’t known the original and couldn’t really appreciate the point: —The proper study of woman is man.—
—Do you want me to arrange something?— He spoke now as he would to a friend who had got a girl into trouble; it was only natural to stand together when these nuisances occurred. He had to grant it to her, Hillela’s attitude to sex was that of an honorary man.
She shook her head. Then she lifted her throat; strangely, like a bird about to sing. Happiness is always embarrassing to onlookers. He gave her the mimed kiss, small sharp blows on either cheek, that marked both farewells and felicitations among people of his own kind.
Funerals and weddings are identical occasions when it comes to disguising in a generally-accepted façade of sorrow or celebration any previous state of relations between those taking part. If there was what can be called a wedding party at all when the black man married her (and there is no doubt that they were
legally married, whatever the status of her other alliances) it was given by the Ambassador and his wife at their Residence. Because of the political implications represented by the bridegroom, it was not more than a small unofficial cocktail party, where the children who were so excited to be associated with their beloved Hillela in public kept racing up to touch her dress or lean against her, and the closer and less stuffy friends among the diplomatic corps came to make a show of wishing her well, no matter how they doubted this would help. The young First Secretary, coincidentally in the country on leave from the post elsewhere where he had been useful as a suitable public partner, was able to be present. He cut short any critical speculation among the champagne drinkers with a term that, in its particular British sense, was a high compliment. —We had a lot of fun together. She’s a really good sport.—
And it was Marie-Claude, pulling down the sides of her lovely mouth in dismissal, who had the last word when later the rumour went round that the man had another wife—and children—somewhere, probably back where he and the girl came from. —To be one wife among several, the way the Africans do it—that’s to be a mistress, isn’t it? So she fits in, in her way, with a black man’s family. Hillela’s a natural mistress, not a wife.—
Lying beside him, looking at pale hands, thighs, belly: seeing herself as unfinished, left off, somewhere. She examines his body minutely and without shame, and he wakes to see her at it, and smiles without telling her why: she is the first not to pretend the different colours and textures of their being is not an awesome fascination. How can it be otherwise? The laws that have determined the course of life for them are made of skin and hair, the relative thickness and thinness of lips and the relative height of the bridge of the nose. That is all; that is everything. The Lilliesleaf houseparty is in prison for life because of it. Those with whom she ate pap and cabbage are in Algeria and the Soviet Union learning how to man guns and make bombs because of it. He is outlawed and plotting because of it. Christianity against other gods, the indigenous against the foreign invader, the masses against the ruling class—where he and she come from all these become interpretative meanings of the differences seen, touched and felt, of skin and hair. The laws made of skin and hair fill the statute books in Pretoria; their gaudy savagery paints the bodies of Afrikaner diplomats under three-piece American suits and Italian silk ties. The stinking fetish made of contrasting bits of skin and hair, the scalping of millions of lives, dangles on the cross in place of Christ. Skin and hair. It has mattered more than anything else in the world.
—When you touched me at the beginning (she takes his black hand and spreads it on her hip) this was a glove. Really. The blackness was a glove. And everywhere, all over you, the black was a cover. Something God gave you to wear. Underneath, you must be white like me. —Or pale brownish, it’s my Portuguese blood.— White like me; because that’s what I was told, when I was being taught not to be prejudiced: underneath, they are all just like us. Nobody said we are just like you.—
The smile deepens. —That wouldn’t be true either. Then you’d have a skin missing.—
—If you are white, there, there’s always a skin missing. They never say it.—
She says everything now. —When we are together, when you’re inside me, nothing is missing.— The train leaving Rhodesia behind, the Imari cat, the expectations of benefactors, the deserted beds—everything broken off, unanswered, abandoned, is made whole. She never tires of looking at his hands. —Not wearing anything. They’re you. And they’re not black, they’re all the flesh colours. D’you know, in shops—and in books!—‘flesh colour’ is Europeans’ colour! Not the colour of any other flesh. Nothing else! Look at your nails, they’re pinkish-mauve because under them the skin’s pink. And (turning the palms) here the colour’s like the inside of one of those big shells they sell on Tamarisk. And this—the lovely, silky black skin I can slide up and down (his penis in her hand), when the tip comes out, it’s also a sort of amber-pink. There’s always a lot of sniggering about the size of a black man’s thing, but no-one’s ever said they weren’t entirely black.—
—And what d’you think of the size, now?—
—I suppose they vary, same as whites’ ones.— While he laughs, she is even franker. —I still don’t much like African hair. I couldn’t say that there, either. Once when I was with my cousins on holiday, some hairs from the black cleaner’s head had somehow dropped into the bath, and my Aunt Pauline was furious with me because I pulled a face and wouldn’t bathe. I don’t know why I felt like that… all sorts of muddled feelings—the kind you get down there, you know? I suppose they haven’t all worn off … I like the feel of your hair in the dark, oh I like it very much, but I don’t think African hair is as beautiful to look at as whites’ hair can be, d’you? Long blonde shiny hair?—
—I want you to grow your hair long, very long …—
—Then you also think European hair is nicer, on the whole? But you won’t dare say it!—
—What if the baby has my hair?—
—I told you, I love your hair. I wonder what colour the baby will come out, Whaila?—
—What colour do you want?— Len had let her choose her cold drink with that gentle indulgence.
—I love not knowing what it will be. What colour it is, already, here inside me. Our colour.— She buries her head on his belly.
Our colour. She cannot see the dolour that relaxes his face, closes his eyes and leaves only his mouth drawn tight by lines on either side. Our colour. A category that doesn’t exist: she would invent it. There are Hotnots and half-castes, two-coffee-one-milk, touch-of-the-tar-brush, pure white, black is beautiful—but a creature made of love, without a label; that’s a freak.
One of her protectors took his texts not from the bible but from whatever book he chanced on in his library. Riding in a Ghanaian taxi she saw a legend placed for her on the dashboard: IT CHANGES. She was too big, for the time being, for the high-life on Saturdays. The dance of life didn’t have to be performed in a shop window: at that moment the jolting of the vehicle without shock-absorbers caused the foetus to turn turtle inside her. A queer feeling. It changes: exhilaration surfaced, as a wave turns over a bright treasure.
James and Busewe were suspicious of her when she appeared up the stairs; now she was installed among them, in their makeshift office, in their house. But it was not as they had thought it would be: teach me, she said, not only in words but in her whole being, that body of hers. And as she had picked up protocol in an ambassador’s Residence she picked up the conventions to be observed, signs to be read, manoeuvres to be concealed in refugee politics. She cultivated friendships at the university so that she could borrow the standard works of revolutionary theory she could have taken advantage of in Joe’s study, and whose titles had shone at her in vain in Udi’s livingroom. The application and shrewdness with which she studied all cuttings, reports, papers, journals, manifestos brought an intimate aside from Whaila: —Never mind Portuguese—that’s your Jewish blood. Studious people.—
—Is it bad for you … I mean, that I’m white?—
—But you know there are whites with us, Hillela—Arnold, Christa, the Hodgsons, Slovo—
—Yes but it’s agreed, ‘the leaders will come from our loins’. It’s written. It means black. It must.—
Comically, she put a hand on either side of her hard, high belly. He leaned over, felt the warmth and liveliness that always came to her face at his approach, and stroked the belly as if over a child’s head. —Hillela, Hillela, I can see you’re ambitious for your children, you’re worried in case you can’t make a future prime minister in there.—
Her mouth bunched in derision of herself. —No, no, I only wonder about you. You’re one of those who decided that. ‘From our loins.’ You’ve told me you were only eighteen when you joined the Youth League. And you’re still an Africanist, you’ve always been one, haven’t you?—
He was accustomed to a woman becoming placid while carrying a ch
ild; there were times when he did not know what to say to this one, in whom sexual energy was not quieted but instead fired a physical and mental zest that kept her working all day, racing about through the crowds in the stunning heat, and questioning him at night. He wanted to say: what have I done to you? What am I to you, that you transform yourself?
—If you look for contradictions in individuals you’ll always find them. I’m not any different. There’s never been anything laid down about marrying a white. It’s of no importance.—
—What about the people in the camps. The things that are being said by some of them about the way the leaders are living.—
He smiled to catch her out. —So it’s a luxury and a privilege to have a white woman?—
Her black eyes shamed him. —Like whisky and nice houses and big cars—the things white men have at home. People can’t help judging by the way it was for them at home.—
—Well I haven’t got any whisky or big house and posh car, I’ve only got you. There are plenty of real problems to worry about. I don’t know what we’ll find when we go to Morogoro next week… The trouble is, the life in the camps is so monotonous, and we can’t send many people back down South to infiltrate yet. We’re not ready. The men want to get out and get on with it. That’s the real dissatisfaction. It’s not whether the leaders eat meat while they get food they don’t like. And Tanzania’s own people are poor, you can’t expect them to give ours more than they have for themselves … It’s the isolation. There’s nothing to do every day when the training’s over. You’re miles from anywhere. Think of being in a remote hole like Bagamoyo.—
—I was almost there. It was beautiful.— She smiled at an old life where one caught butterflies.
Arnold was the first to meet, hatched from the cocoon of the little tramp on Tamarisk Beach, Mrs Whaila Kgomani. There she was in the office, sitting on the edge of the head-of-mission’s table, arguing over the telephone with the owner of the building about responsibility for unblocking a drain. Huge, her belly and those wonderful breasts like elaborate vestments serving to emphasize the alert composure of that bright head, and those black eyes that absorbed all gazes, as they did his. Pregnancy did not blunt but made more powerful the physical presence that had once drawn him after her into the sea. On the bare boards of this no-place, no-time, she was an assertion of here and now in the provisionality of exile, whose inhabitants are strung between the rejected past and a future fashioned like a paper aeroplane out of manifestos and declarations. She got up and she and the dignitary from the Command kissed, not in the style of a foreign embassy, but as comrades in the cause, smiling.
A Sport of Nature Page 23
