by Naomi Holoch
Like the old woman, she would like to entrust something, she does not know what, to the new owners of that house where she will not set foot again. She had left things behind there, even habits—like the one of avoiding the creaking floorboard between her bed and her sister’s—which will be lost when the house turns into a new home. How could she ask someone not to fix the latch on the shutters in her room so that her window would always remain half-open, reassuring her every morning with a show of light? Or tell them that, near a spigot, by some evergreens, lies her dog, who struggled against poison throughout a long night and was buried by the gardener? Or warn them about a wild oleander, also at the back of the yard next to the toy shed, the leaves of which, pronounced deadly by their mother, made her and Clara sick one Saturday afternoon? Taking advantage of the fact that the kitchen was deserted after lunch, they had concocted a tonic, the virtues of which she has forgotten, made of vinegar, honey, and the forbidden leaves, which they called Delta Tonic. Memories like this one strike her as puny, pathetic; she has lost the place that would hold them together, and in time her memory will lose them too.
Is there something she should have done in that house and did not do? Something that will return to haunt her as it did this afternoon when she lay down to sleep, sated by an incoherent past? She dreamed twice of herself by the sea, at the end of the summer. On both occasions, she felt dissatisfied, with the sensation of having missed something very close at hand. She had not gone into the water that awaited her, and now it was too late and she had to start on her trip back. Was that an image of her childhood? If so, it does not surprise her: she still needs water, is always thirsty. There is something still lacking; if not, why write, as she does, mostly about unhappiness? Why write of the solitary ceremonies in which she took pleasure, the games she played facing a mirror, facing her sister? Childhoods, as someone has said, are always hellish and have naught to keep but little rotting souls and a small sleep.
She must tear herself away from her childhood: dwelling on it strikes her now as a vain habit. If she has not recorded moments of shared happiness from those days, it is because they did not exist, or perhaps because she did not know how to recognize them. Enough: to try to recover the past, falling into the temptation to remember incidents so as to later read them in a different way, is a useless task, just as it is useless to ask someone else to interpret them for her. For example, she sees herself in the bathroom when she was about eight, sitting on the toilet. In the narrow space between two tiles on the wall, between the toilet and the washstand, there are two nails: on one of them hangs a brass ring with a pink ribbon, on the other a brass ring with a blue ribbon. She knows that as soon as she finishes she must take the ring with the pink ribbon to her parents’ room and put it in a small crystal bowl (now in her possession) on her mother’s dresser. Clara had to do the same with the blue ribbon. That was how they communicated their message. It was a wordless ceremony, an indirect way of reporting a performance established by their mother, which sometimes turned into a contest: who would take the ribbon first? The few times she has referred to that ritual, in the presence of others, she has met with negative reactions: she and Clara were being denied any kind of direct contact with their bodies. That may be true; she does not know, and it does not particularly matter. What she does know and does remember is the pleasure of translating. That which her body had expelled became a ring (which she thought was gold), a silk ribbon, and an old crystal bowl. She also remembers (and this still strikes her as important) that she never wanted the pink ribbon, but always the blue one. She would have done the unthinkable to be the one to take the blue ribbon and leave it in her mother’s bowl.
She, her mother, her sister: so distant from one another. What happened to all three of them, women with ravaged features, almost robbed of their faces? Ultimately, the ones who did have faces, in life as in death, were her father and Aunt Sara. Theirs were faces meant to last—or is she imagining the faces she saw in the caskets so as to preserve in the past what she cannot preserve in the present? She does not see herself as having a face of her own, nor does she see Clara that way. As for her mother, she can only see her dead. Then her mother will really match the image she always remembers of her. Just as when she was young, before Clara was born, she will have very smooth, yet very strong skin. She will gather up her braids behind her ears and do her mouth like a little red heart. She will have very fine hands, those hands she has always wanted to kiss. She will have very delicate feet, feet she entrusts only to her shoemaker, just as she entrusts her hands only to her glovemaker. She will wear a turban and have pearls around her neck; she will carry a flat red purse under her arm and will pull on her black gloves after touching her daughter’s face to bid her good night. She will smell of a perfume that, as a child, she could not stand, but which she knew her father liked. Despite all of this—she will tell her mother in the casket—why was there so little said between us, how could we fight so often? Perhaps she will say this to her mother soon, while she is still alive, although she pictures herself saying it after her death, when her mother can no longer disarm her.
She had forgotten to mention her mother’s profile. She will see it, already slightly sunken, when her mother is dead. It is the haughtiest profile she has ever seen and she cannot forget it.
She is writing in the dark. When she speaks of her mother and of her sister (not when she speaks of Vera, or Renata) her eyes blur. Thinking of the two of them, so far away, she immediately sinks (she cannot find a better word) into the memories she has of each. There is absolutely no passion, just a need to become one with her mother and sister, to lose herself in them. In her dreams she often gives them food. This comes like a sudden revelation: why does she feel she must feed them, why must she protect them? Why must she eat her father’s dry hand, in a recurring dream, so that her mother will not see it? She dreams of a restaurant in Paris, on the rue du Roi de Sicile, to be precise. She is taking her mother and her sister there, but once they arrive, the restaurant has disappeared. The three of them are starving and she is incapable of finding the place where one eats so well. Again, she dreams of the two of them: she has promised them an outing, almost an underground exploration of the city between two secret points very distant from each other. When she gets to a door, almost hidden between two old buildings, where the journey is to start, she cannot open it. As a guide she is evidently of little use. There is something, she tells herself, something in these dreams and in many others like them, dreams that have her continuously leading her mother and sister through cities—Antwerp, Paris, Rome, Buenos Aires—without knowing where she is going. In all of them there is a secret point she never finds.
She has had to mention the names of cities. This troubles her, but they are after all part of her dreams. She now decides to give places—all her places—their name. The snowy city where she met Renata and spied on Vera again is Buffalo, New York. The city where she met up again with Renata and Vera is Paris. The city where she grew up—and where she would grow up again, given the choice—is the city of Buenos Aires.
She has pointed out clues and now feels at peace. She is aware, however, that she has fallen into these tardy revelations so as not to go on facing those feminine presences, to protect herself from them. Suddenly they descend on her, like fearsome divinities, and all she can say is: “I summoned you here.” And more modestly: “I wanted all of you—mother, sister, lovers—to be here, I live only in you.”
Translated by Daniel Balderson
Dale Gunthorp
Drawing on her experience as a young adult in the strife-torn South Africa of the 1960s, Dale Gunthorp creates a tale of passion against a background of bias in her short story “Gypsophila” (1990). South African–born Gunthorp, now living in London, is a journalist in third world issues who turned to lesbian fiction when Britain’s Parliament banned the “promotion of homosexuality” in 1988. In its opening scenes, “Gypsophila” evokes the apartheid-restricted lesbian and gay ba
r life of Johannesburg. At the heart of the story, however, is the pursuit of a lesbian relationship that carries the narrator through late-night streets, where the obstacles to her journey are both historical and personal.
GYPSOPHILA
I didn’t bring the stuff into the house. My lover came home with it, great swaths, collapsing armfuls of tiny white flowers threaded on gray. She crammed it into a jug, gave it water, put it on the table in this silent room. And I stand in the doorway looking at hundreds of points of light shimmering like remote stars: gypsophila.
How odd these connections are, things yoked by one private history. Or even a nonhistory, by something that, in Johannesburg’s winter more than twenty years ago, didn’t happen.
I hadn’t meant to give her gypsophila. A bottle of wine would have been more appropriate, certainly more useful to me, already stiff with nerves. But although I had thought about the evening all week, nothing practical had presented itself, nothing so sensible as: should I take her champagne, a book, chocolates, flowers (proper flowers, not something that was only just not a weed)?
She hadn’t given much scope for planning, come to think of it. She had barely described the way to her flat after “Come and have a bite to eat at my place, say next Wednesday, eightish.” I didn’t hear what she was saying at first, there was such a din in the bar, such a din in my head.
It was Johannesburg’s only regular gay bar in those days, and not even a proper bar. It was the Pro, a slit of a place in a drab modern hotel, where actors hung out after the theater. Since the law excluded women from real bars, drinks were brought in from the kitchen and it had the legal status of a “lounge.” Since apartheid was a fact of life, only the ponciest of African queens, only the butchest of Indian dykes could appear—noncitizens acceptable, in this underworld that was deviant but uncourageous, so long as they were no more than bedding material. They brought the total numbers to about twenty. Perhaps the Pro had only come by its label of gay bar because Beatrice was there every night. At about ten, he, a rugby-forward-sized Boer1 well into his fifties, would arrive on stiletto sandals, or wearing pendulous earrings, always with carrots in a little wicker basket—and he joked and teased, sang dirty songs, and drank hugely until closing.
I was also there every night. To feed this habit, I had taken a flat around the corner. I was twenty-one and alone. I had had a lover at school and later languished after various stony-hearted women, but I wasn’t looking for a lover, though I thought constantly of love. I was looking, I suppose, for sex. I thought I was searching for meaning.
Sometimes women came in, in twos or fours, and, whatever I was looking for, I would look at them. They had bleached short hair lacquered into duck’s-asses unyielding as metal, masses of lilac or green shadow around eyes ringed with black, mouths dry with nicotine and no lipstick. They laughed with Beatrice and the queens, but not with me. They prodded one another with the toes of their long, pointed boots and smiled lazily at one another, till the blood was bursting against the walls of my temples.
Some spoke in English, in loud, classy, colonial voices. From these I learned who was cheating on whom, what BMs2 were secretly camp; who was on the run from Priscilla, doing a Dora,3 or knocking off the most gorgeous bird.
Others sat in tight huddles. From them I pulled at threads of darker-toned talk, in Afrikaans. Occasionally, these close women would break out to twit Beatrice (fellow Afrikaner, fellow pervert, but farther down the line) in nervy music-hall English. Sometimes, as they got drunker, their voices and fists would rise in fury against the world. There was Evonnie of a powerful musculature who, after a few drinks, would challenge Beatrice to arm wrestling and lose with very bad grace. Sarie and Sannie would arrive incensed at their boss and leave incensed with each other. Petronella displayed jagged lines on her wrists, carved, she said, with shards of milk bottles. Sometimes their rage spilled over: one or two would be bundled into taxis by the management, and a wave of relief would roll through the bar. And Beatrice, shaking his earrings till they chimed like bells, would say: “We, the Boers, the Lord’s Chosen People: we are not couth.”
I didn’t stare at the English Barbie dolls, but nobody seemed to mind or notice how hard I peered at these women whose stories were engraved on their faces. Discretion is not an option for Daughters of the Volk guilty of the only unnameable vice of an ethic obsessed with vice. I was also repelled by them, and for the same reason. It was many years and many failures later that I learned not to be shocked by people who flaunted, like a colonel’s ribboned medals, their mutilated psyches.
Weeks passed. The men were kind, but I wasn’t looking for their barbed companionship. I wanted to join the women but couldn’t make the move. If, in the lavatory, someone smiled, I would rush out blushing, my hands still wet and my hair uncombed. These were my people, but I was not theirs. Their clammed unhappy world was my world, and it terrified me. Like a child who could not swim sitting on the edge of a swimming pool, I watched and envied their sport and tried to nerve myself to plunge into an element that seemed bottomless and unsupporting as the deep blue of outer space.
Then one night the moment to plunge chose itself. Diana came in, with three dykes—two bleached duck’s-asses, one delicate-featured Indian woman. Like everyone else, they wore tight pants and swirled their cigarette holders. Their talk was directed inward. But Diana’s eyes, great pools of gray, gazed idly around the bar and encountered mine. She held my look for a second, then, with a nod, turned back to her friends.
Champion eavesdropper that I was, I soon picked up their conversation. Though her talk was laced with all the slang I was still learning to push past my lips, she was talking about subjects it was surely not proper to raise in the Pro. In a measured public voice, she was complaining about the pay and working conditions of black actors. She wasn’t saying anything clever or witty. She had no suggestions about what anyone could do about it. She was embarrassing the only African there, a pretty young man wearing a coral necklace, perhaps ruining for him a few hours of fantasy, reminding him that the oppressed have a duty to be angry. But I wanted to hear more, and to know her. I wanted to look through those clear gray eyes that could see into our ghetto with its spider-encrusted wires and also into other people’s iron ghettos: see beyond.
I didn’t have the boldness to break in to her talk (which at her table was being met with yawning indifference). I just sat there and willed her to do something.
She did. She went up to the bar. I emptied my glass at a gulp and followed.
She ordered; I ordered; she half turned toward me: “That accent of yours? You’re not from Johannesburg.”
I nodded.
“Ghastly place, Jo’berg.”
I was suddenly shy. Perhaps I grinned.
She was studying my face: “You’re from?”
“Natal. The sugarcane country.”
There was a pause. Soon she would nod again and move off. I had watched too long; my tongue was tangled in my thoughts. I trawled for it. Out gushed, in an awful tweety-pie voice: “Black canecutters have even worse working conditions than black actors.”
“I’m sure they do.” Her eyes wandered to my table, took in the plastic handbag and grubby white nylon gloves, then settled beyond, on the Tretchikov print, the one then to be found in every other public place and living room, of a rose flung down beside a dustbin. She sighed.
“You shouldn’t be drinking alone, if you’re taking brandy and water,” she said. “Come and join us.”
Beatrice, perched on his usual stool at the bar, had been watching this scene with raised eyebrows. As I turned to follow Diana, he grabbed my ponytail. “Don’t give in so quick, darling.” His forearm locked against my throat. “Patience, girlie. You’re only a virgin lover once; hold out for the best bid.”
At times I’d been grateful for Beatrice’s jokes; though they unnerved me, they reminded me that I existed. But tonight he was low company, and I wriggled free.
“Or if you must do it”�
��he reached into his basket and handed me a limp bunch of carrots—“take me too. I adore lettie ladies. All that delicious squishy boneless juicy slurping—like oysters making love.”
Diana’s gray eyes turned to steel. “Drop dead, you overfed capon.”
“Oh gorgeous.” Beatrice’s vast body shriveled like an oyster squirted with lemon. “Tongue like a whip on this diesel dyke. I’ll sit so quiet in the corner. I’ll let you gag me to suppress my cries of ecstasy.”
Diana’s arm now wrapped my shoulder as she led me away, and I knew that Beatrice had done me a favor.
I don’t remember what she said, what I said, what the dykes said. Only that there was a burn on my shoulder where her hand had rested; that what she did say was wiser, subtler, and funnier than anything ever said before; that her eyes took in the entire world; that in the center of their gray deepening to black hovered something unfathomable. She was certainly nice to me, bowing her head to ask if I wanted a cigarette, if I had a job, if I missed my mother, if I lodged nearby, if there were poisonous snakes in the sugarcane. I said yes to all these things.
Then, “Have a bite at my place,” to which I also said yes.
They pulled on their leather jackets and left before closing time, roaring off on two Lambrettas, one of the dykes with her arms tight around Diana’s ribs, and I watched them vanish into the cold neon-pointed night.
In the seven intervening deserts of nights, Diana didn’t come into the bar. But Beatrice’s interest in me blossomed and, in the absence of Diana, I was again grateful for his friendship. “Come sit on my knee, girlie,” he would say, “and hear Auntie’s warning about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Beware, my lovely. Beware of women, but most of all beware of brickies.”4 The two outsiders now in huddle as exclusive as anybody’s, he told me how, in the early hours, he would be haunting the metal halls of the railway station in search of brickies. Most nights he picked up one or two. I don’t know if he offered them carrots. Sometimes he chose badly—or perhaps too accurately—and ended up in hospital. Occasionally he got a policeman by mistake and ended up in the prison hospital instead. “Let Auntie’s ruined complexion,” he would say, “be a lesson to you of the perils of crawling outside the laager,”5 and his crumpled face, brandy-scented sweat and grease oozing from its open pores, would bear down on mine. “You, little meisietjie,6 you still have a choice. Let Mama pick you a husband and buckle down to it. Do as Auntie says and you’ll get a garden with a swimming pool in it. You can spend your days there, dreaming about lettie ladies over your G&T.”
