A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  His nostrils widened and his big mouth creased down in emotional rebuttal. —It’s not for you. It’s not for you to spend your young life with those poor devils—and I can call them that because they’re my people, I’ve been one of them, I’m telling you, I’ve been without food or a place to go … That’s not getting rid. I’m going to tell you something—But he glanced up away from her rapidly as if at some sudden presence invisible to her, and returned with a change of mind and tone. —Come along with me to Mombasa tomorrow, you need a day off. All that misery, it gets on a person’s nerves.—

  —Oh I can’t, we’re seeing Mzee in the morning.—

  —Leonie will see the old Man. She’ll do all the talking, anyway, you won’t get a word in. You’re not really necessary.—

  —Of course not!— She laughed at the airy offence. —But she expects me, and it might be useful for me to know him.—

  —He’d see you any time, as soon as he recognized your name. Come for the ride.—

  —I’ve never been to Mombasa.—

  —Beautiful. I’ll drop you at the beach or the hotel—don’t you want to swim? Bring your things… I’ll be busy, you can do what you like. But we leave early, êh—five-thirty in the morning, can you get up?—

  —I’ll be up!—

  —Of course you’ll be up!—

  —When would we get back?—

  —Late tomorrow night. If it gets too late, we can find somewhere to sleep on the road. I have to be here by lunch-time, whichever way.—

  —To see Mombasa! Why not?—

  —But you better put on another dress …—

  She amusedly presented herself, stretching her back upright against her chair, palms open. He gave her a quick, up-and-down military inspection. —Haven’t you got something else? It’s a five star, the hotel where we’ll have lunch.—

  The General saw in her, that first evening, someone who could keep abreast of him; moving on.

  Shoved, the sliding doors of the wardrobe in her hotel room rolled back, lighting the interior. There hung the few garments of those who wear the sackcloth rejection of the West’s plenty or the battledress of identification with an eternal guerrilla struggle of humans against the evil in themselves. She put on the garments every day, replacing dirty with clean. There was nothing that would please an exiled Third World general preparing his liberation army for reinvasion. She felt a sudden impatience with these jeans worn white at the knees and these baggy shifts. If the shops had been open—she had the impulse to buy that splashy African cotton and wrap herself in the fancy-dress ‘confections’ the beach girl had displayed on the camel-saddle chair at Archie’s Atrium. She put out a shift and found some sort of token adornment in a necklace made of red seeds and porcupine quills—a tourist thing she had in her suitcase to take back as a gift for one of the Burns sisters who was looking after the child. The traveller’s alarm clock beside her bed was set for five o’clock. This time, before she went off on a jaunt to the sea, she left a note. It was pushed under Leonie’s door at dawn.

  A navy-blue blazer with gold buttons swayed on a hook provided between the front and back windows of the hired car. The General wore pale beige tropical trousers with a crease ruled exactly down each monumental thigh, hand-stitched Italian brogues on high-arched feet, and a batiste shirt whose placket and buttons strained to contain the rise of a punchbag-hard belly and the spread of pectoral muscles. His big head almost grazed the roof; his presence filled the car, giving off the pleasant scent of good soap and after-shave cologne. When he got out and went into the bush to have a pee, his passenger felt the weight of that presence emphasized by its absence. The moments scarcely interrupted their talk; within the landscape they were cleaving—villages, cyclists, roaming children, distorted crones with loads of wood or produce supported by a thong across the forehead—they were in the familiar territory of exile, that knows no hemispheres; a globe of blank spaces between those areas where one has been allowed in, whose climates are characterised not by rainfall and temperature but by whether one is tolerated only in inactivity or may seek alliances, support, and bases. There was no need to censor. Each knew the social and personal codes and morality of that territory, which those who had never been there could not, need not, know. —How can you ever explain?— He knew she was talking of the finger-supper questions, silences (of judgment), assumptions of understanding that understood nothing. —I don’t answer about Europe because no-one who hasn’t worked that way there can follow. It’s like when my little girl asks me where babies come from. I tell her. They grow in the mother’s tummy. That’s as far as she can go. Her innocence makes it unthinkable she could grasp how they get there—and more important, why. She doesn’t know enough to want to ask. The questions aren’t even ever the right questions—you know what I mean? In each society there’s a different way of putting things, a different way of interpreting what happens or what’s been said. What seems a lie to someone at Leonie’s wouldn’t be one somewhere where relations between people take place in completely different circumstances—politically, socially, oh, every way there is. Every way they can’t imagine.—

  —That’s what makes the easy life tough in the States.— A glance, to see her laugh. —It’s happened to me, too. But what about the other way round? The other side of the world? Got to wear a different hat there, êh.—

  —People seem—older.—

  —Not so much innocence and icecream.—

  —The trouble there’s more likely to be they’re on to everything you haven’t said, when you ask or answer … But your hat’s always the one with gold braid, everywhere.—

  —The best place is here and now, on this road in Africa, with no hat on at all. Bare head, bare-foot. The chance doesn’t come too often. (His passenger had taken off her sandals and was lying back with her feet up on the dashboard.) D’you want to drive for a bit? The road will be passing through the Tsavo reserve soon and we can’t change over among the lions.—

  In command of a hired car, alone in the front with a casual acquaintance asleep on the rear seat (—I need to be fresh for what I have to do when we arrive—) there was in this trivial and marginal circumstance a sense of being that really belonged with permanence, not a day-trip. He rumbled a little, an inactive but not extinct volcano, back there. She snuffed at the old hot smells of grass digested and excreted, of wet grass growing, blowing with the wind-flow of her speed, that flushed away the scent of after-shave. The road was empty; the rump of a buck or two whom the approach of the car startled long before she was close enough to see more. At a detour she scarcely slowed down on the loop of sand road. The car sang a different tune, shuddering softly over corrugations beneath a fluffy surface. Then the wheel was wrenched away under her hands—she clutched at it, shocked, almost laughing, on a roller-coaster—and the space that enclosed her and the sleeping man went wild, displaced fiercely this way and that, back and forth across the road. She had her foot down on the brake as if on the stirrup of a bucking monster, the wheel twirled uselessly, the enclosed space tilted sideways, righted, tilted completely, she was upside-down, struck on the head, feeling at the same instant a huge thud at her back.

  The car landed on its four wheels and careered away through grass and trees, hitting nothing and coming to a stop where its own momentum ended. She had been thrown into the empty seat beside her. She saw him struggling up from the floor behind with the grouchy clumsiness of someone inconsiderately woken by a shake on the arm. He must have unfastened the buckle of his elegant belt for ease before he took a nap, and his first instinct was to close it dignifiedly. She began to laugh. He saw her laughing at him with eyes shaking and glittering with tears. The tears splashed onto her mouth: he laughed at her. —My God, what did you do? What did you do?—

  She could not stop laughing. —Woke you up. Sorry I woke you up.—

  —My God, what did you do?—

  Their amazement at being unhurt turned to euphoria. The doors were not jammed; they got
out of the car and examined each other, knees, arms, heads. —Are you sure you’re all right? You can’t be all right?— —But I am! Maybe a bump’ll come up here on my head.— He took her head entirely between his hands and felt it all over. —Does it hurt here? Here? —No. No. Just a little there, where I told you.—

  —No sign of a cut. You should let your hair grow, it’s a protection.— —Idiot, idiot I am, I braked. Everyone’s taught never to brake in a skid. I knew it, but I didn’t do it.—

  He got into the car and it started at the turn of the ignition key. Their faces exchanged triumph as he looked up at her through the window. —I’ve never before believed in miracles.— —But I’m a Catholic, so I do.—

  Slowly rolling back to the road; she gave a little shudder and put her hand, as if to steady herself, on his broad knee as he drove. It was the touch with which they had examined each other for hurt. Quiet and emptiness of the landscape closed over the startling rupture as if it had never happened. A few hundred yards from where they had broken into the environment with their steel capsule gone amuck, he stopped the car, took up her hand and pointed it into the trees. Five or six elephants were browsing there at various distances, to be made out, patiently, one by one, by the fan of ears like giant leaves among dark foliage or the stir of a tree-trunk become a huge foot; had been there in their vast and dreamy existence, outside the short violent incident taking place in human time. If the skid had happened a few hundred yards farther along the road, the car would have burst down upon the beasts with an alien present. The car and its occupants could have been crumpled like a chocolate wrapper under their rage. The travellers sat in silence watching life on this grand scale of size and time. —It’s not so easy to kill me. It’s been tried three times.— He was looking out turned half-towards her with his elbow leaning on the open window and his hand hanging on the steering wheel: a face composed always to be observed, ambivalent nuance erased, features boldly and definitively simplified for emphasis. A face for a postage stamp.

  —Shall I tell you something?— From the moving car the forest scrub they were passing through again appeared uninhabited. They were alone as human beings are alone only among animals. —What I’m going to do when we get there? Certain people I’m going to meet? Nobody else in the world knows this, it’s going to happen in Mombasa because in Nairobi everyone’s got big ears. I’m going to meet people who are willing to kidnap my son.—

  Willing? But she asked nothing, her attention fixed hovering on the hieroglyph of a profile. The small nose, whose nostrils rested low and broad seen full-face, was curved, polished along an arch of bone like a weapon lodged in the flesh.

  —My son, that I trained in my own army, he was one of those who threw over my government. Yes, he was willing to have me killed. Now he’s going to have his chance: they’ll bring him to our bush headquarters and there, in the North, where we’re in control again, I’ll give him the choice—to defect to us.—

  He was waiting to see if there was any need to explain what could not be said, whether the experience of this white girl with whom nothing had needed an explanation so far, went so far as to ‘follow him’ as she would put it.

  She did not ask the question. Without moving his head he slid his glance. Her head was cocked back as if she had taken a deep breath, but the full lovely breasts were stirred only regularly, calmly, shallowly. She asked a different question; and that was his answer. —Your only son?—

  —No. The eldest—by the second wife. The first has daughters. My eldest—and the best of them. Right from the day he began to walk.—

  Alone on an East African beach again, among strangers. The General dropped her where there was no tamarisk but the same cloisters of palms to stroll along, and a swim was a gentle engulfment through ghost-pale shallows until the body was taken, like the streak of another substance into the watery layers of an agate, into the still, clear sea. Lusaka was landlocked, Eastern Europe and the brownstone locked each year in snow, in West Africa the open surf flung high and hissing upon sand tainted with cholera. She went back into the Indian Ocean through groups of tourists talking German, English children squealing, and a few black rocks, stepped round, that were African bodies. She floated and recalled without pain the yellow swimsuit and the emergence of the obsidian arms, head and torso from the sea. The water itself washed pain away; there was only the sensuality with which it did. She floated, and had nothing in the world but a pair of jeans held together with a safety-pin.

  The General did not arrive for lunch at the five-star hotel. She waited at the terrace bar, as arranged, and lazily refused the approaches of a handsome young German who had noticed her on the beach and now offered a Pimm’s Cup. As the bar emptied towards two o’clock, he did not believe she was really expecting any particular man (a girl like her would not be waiting for a woman) and came up to her again, his flat pink ears gristly clean and his blond hair marked round the hairline with dried salt. She shook her head, but with a smile that softened offence. —Anozzer time, maybe?— She ate a sandwich in place of the five-star lunch and gave the barman a note, describing to whom it was to be handed: —A large man in a blue blazer and beige pants. African.—

  In the hotel’s glossy gallery of shops she amused herself. There were the carved tusks and cotton galabiyas she had once sold but there was also a jeweller’s with amber from the Persian Gulf and a boutique displaying silk tunics and suède jackets: she went in and suddenly was trying on the kind of clothes she had not worn since Olga had taken her shopping each change of season. The adjustable mirrors showed a triptych of anxious concentration, making decisions between garments she was not going to buy anyway. With this or that one, she met—stopped dead by, as it were—herself, remarkably elegant; a possibility never considered. A whole hour in the booth smelling of other women’s perfume! Agitated, she fished her shift and spiky necklace from behind the layers of fancy dress, but as she was about to leave the shop, came back and did buy something, a French bikini swimsuit she had seen in the window before she first entered. She had brought a traveller’s cheque along with her because the jaunt was in the company of someone she hardly knew, and Mrs Whaila Kgomani was no longer a beach girl.

  The General came onto the terrace a moment after she was back there. He was carrying the blazer looped by one finger over his shoulder and his tie was loosened, but whatever experience he was fresh from left him unmarked in contrast with the attack of lust whose evidence was beside her in a black-and-gold plastic bag and the tendrils of hair stuck in sweat on her forehead. He was unperturbed at having missed lunch, or having been kept waiting by her when he did arrive: —I went to freshen up.— At ease with the rituals of five-star hotels, he looked a moment at his nails, twisting into place the ring that had been turned by a towel. The long time they had known each other—all that had passed since five-thirty that morning—made apologies understood, as between partners preoccupied in a joint enterprise not to be trivialised.

  —Is everything all right?— Her words were almost those they had used to assure no bones were broken.

  —That depends on him.— His eyes moved rapidly in confirmation of orders gone over. —Whether he resists—really.— The eyes fixed on her. —I’ve told them to be careful.—

  She did not arrive back in Nairobi that night. Leonie was not worried; she had found the note, Hillela was safe with Reuel, splendid fellow, Leonie herself would be confident to go to the end of the world with him. If only she could convince the State Department to be as confident that he was the man to support.

  They came to a country hotel. The wooden building stood on stilts among fever trees whose slender trunks gleamed phosphorescent green in a dark roaring with insect song. An old nightwatchman gave them a key attached to a slab of wood marked Room 8. They stood on a rickety gallery that was supposed to allow tourists to watch hippos come out of the river down below, but nothing moved in the frantically vibrating humidity. In Room 8 there was a fan that turned its face, clicking and
creaking, this way and that over them as they lay naked. They had already touched and felt one another, that morning, and that kind of familiarity was natural to turn into the other between a sexually-experienced man and woman. Yet she was a surprise to the General as his big body blotted hers from the face of the fan and the chilled layer of his skin and hers melted in his heat. She bore his weight vigorously and gave him great joy. And he could see in the dark the river-shine of eyes and the white of teeth—she kept her eyes open and was smiling—and when he had done with her he had the best feeling of all, that all he had felt was only the possibility of what she could make him feel.

  She was not sentimental in the morning, either. Each lay, before the other was aware, wakened by the farting grunts of hippos. —I thought it was you, snoring.— She leapt up, breasts jumping, wrapped the giraffe-printed bedcover round herself and went out to see the animals. He lay in the smell of her body, already specifically identifiable to him, and thought about the man who was his son.

  Leonie had to admit: if the State Department wouldn’t, Hillela had the nous to take up with the General when he was on the up-and-up again. She must have had a pretty good inkling he was sure of getting back into power. Perhaps she even knew something conventionally well-informed circles on African affairs didn’t? The love affair with Reuel went on for several months, after it apparently had started—that time when they went to Mombasa together—before she broke off with Brad. She was back in Africa on two or three working trips during the period; though nobody but she and Brad themselves knew for sure when the break actually came? Brad’s mother—who couldn’t believe anyone could do such a thing—said it seemed she had stayed on in the brownstone (presumably platonically?) quite a while after she told Brad. And he never said a word to anyone. Probably ashamed to.

  It was said she wanted to marry Brad to qualify automatically for American citizenship. That theory fell away as malicious gossip—she didn’t marry him, that was the point! Leonie defended her spiritedly, romantically; among the protégés two had ‘found each other’, there was a new career opening if the one in the brownstone had been abandoned. But the young white widow and her African child, ikon of liberation and reconciliation between the Third World and the Western World, taken on by a local Joseph who found room for her in a house with storm windows like their own, had no options, for others. In Committee, the ikon could only be turned to the wall. She ended there, for them. She had not even given the opportunity for an embarrassed farewell presentation.