Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  With these memories still a turmoil in my mind, as Helena and the artist huddled over the drawings on the dining table in their pool of light, I went outside and found a secluded spot among the rocks where I could nurse my desire and try to tame my thoughts. Occasionally the spray from a crashing wave would break exhilaratingly right over me. And suddenly Melanie was there beside me. We didn’t say anything, we removed only the most obstructive bits of clothing and went for each other like two cats. But even before I could enter her we heard Helena calling from behind through the silver fog.

  ‘Let’s just hide here, no one will find us,’ Melanie gasped in my ear.

  But the call was repeated, this time from much closer. And as if in response to an executioner summoning us to the block, I called back, ‘We’re here at the rocks. Come and join us.’

  The three of us sat there for another while; then the boyfriend, too, approached through the dark. And soon we all returned home, much subdued, for a couple of nightcaps and bed. Within minutes the sounds next door began again. This time, curiously, Helena was the one who responded with rare passion; and I had a hard time trying to concentrate.

  A month later we were duly married and were, I suppose, happy. Once or twice during the following years the women exchanged letters, promising to set up a meeting, and then it petered out. It must have been six months or so after the accident in which I lost both Helena and little Pieter—something which even after all these years I am reluctant to return to—and was leading an unusually monastic life of contrition and penance, when a letter came from Melanie. She had been married twice, and twice divorced, in the interim; she’d heard about the accident and offered her condolences. She was wondering how I was doing. I could detect no hidden subtext to the letter, and of course after those five years everything might well have dissipated. But on an impulse I dashed off a telegram: We have unfinished business.

  I was placing everything on the line.

  She replied the next day: When do you want me?

  Who was I to say no? I telephoned. Trunk calls still had to be booked in advance, and it took an hour and a half to get through, on a very bad line. But the key words were audible enough, and on the Friday morning I went to fetch her at the airport. With the exception of my period in Paris, it was the most concentrated bout of fucking in my life. Just as well we had only a long weekend; any longer, and you could have hung me over the washing line to dry. Still, I do think I lived up to her expectations; these days I couldn’t possibly have lasted the course. We drove to deserted beaches and made love; we drove into the mountains and made love; we followed the overgrown courses of rivers and made love in thickets or clearings; we wined and dined in restaurants and fondled; in between we dashed home and made love.

  And that was the pure joy of it: that neither had come with any hidden expectations, but purely to drain the cup of love to the dregs and then to pour another. And another. It couldn’t go on for much longer, the body can do only so much before it reaches—at least temporarily—the limits of its resources and possibilities. I was aching for a week after that, barely able to move; and then began to wish for more. And so did Melanie. We made telephone calls to and fro, and promised each other repeats and encores but we never did. One should not try to improve on perfection.

  But was that the real reason? I tried to persuade myself of it at the time. Now, with the unclouded vision of my old age, I know there was something else. Something which suddenly, without any warning, on our last day together, came to the surface. Just for a moment, but that was enough to make me wonder with a pang far beyond the delightful sufferings of the body, whether in the ultimate analysis the no-strings fuck is possible.

  We had driven to Kleinmond in the morning. She was to catch her plane in the early evening. It was still a nearly deserted place in those days; there were long stretches of white sandy beach on which one could walk naked for hours without encountering a soul. And we did just that. From time to time we would simply sink down on a towel and make love, then go on, then make another stop. Once we fell asleep, totally spent, on the firm sand. The tide was out. When we came to again, it was from the water lapping at our feet. I woke up first, and impulsively, like a puppy driven by instinct to find its mother’s teat, returned to the over-and-over explored yet still secret depths of her to probe the flanges and folds of her sex. And then I slid my body over hers, and into hers, and we rose together like the tide. It came washing right over us, half drowning us, as we came together.

  We walked back hand in hand, still naked, at the lace-edge of the tide. The salt water stung sharply where our passion had bruised and chafed and broken our skins and mucous membranes. But there was something ecstatic about it, a new awareness of our bodies, as if they had been newly shaped by love, by exquisite pain.

  We didn’t speak. I felt no need for it, I was so completely sated. But once, when we stopped briefly to look out across the sea, I saw that she was crying.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked with a sharp intake of my breath.

  She just shook her head and tried to turn away.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, feeling an unfamiliar distress rising in me; confronted unexpectedly by a whole wide landscape within her of which I had no understanding, not even an inkling.

  ‘Melanie?’

  Again she shook her head, and withdrew her hand from mine, and started walking on alone. I could see her shoulders shaking.

  ‘Melanie!’ I called after her, trying to catch up. ‘Please tell me. Talk to me.’

  She kept ahead of me. After a long time a sprinkling of houses came into sight again and we stopped to put on our clothes. Suddenly, dressed, we felt shy and couldn’t look each other in the face. I made to speak, but she quietly lifted a finger and pressed it against my lips. She was no longer crying.

  By the time we got back to the car she was very composed. But we still had nothing to say. And when that evening we said goodbye at the airport, our kiss was brief and almost perfunctory.

  In our telephone conversations, even as we tried with a kind of desperation to rekindle from the cold embers a little flame that had died, neither of us ever spoke of that moment again. In due course the phone calls came to an end. We never broke up, we just did not go on.

  ***

  It is time to return to you. I have been avoiding the memory of that first meeting on New Year’s Eve. Not that there is anything to be scared or diffident about in the memory itself. It is not even a matter of being reluctant to remove the scabs and reopen old wounds. Perhaps I am just afraid that touching it in any way would diminish or spoil whatever had made it unusual, unique. Even at my age I believe in some kinds of magic.

  It is the search for this uniqueness, or at least the illusion of it, which has driven me throughout my life. When I find myself with a new woman, the magic moment is the first unveiling. That moment when she is lying beside me and I bend over her and touch her through her underwear, and she raises her hips so that I can take it off. That moment remains for me the most deeply moving. That is the threshold, the moment she announces her decision: Yes, you may, I consent, I want you, I want you to want me.

  Of course, I know what I will find, but not how it will be. The larger scheme is familiar, but not the detail. And this is the mystery, this is what it is all about. Oh, I know in advance that she will remind me of other women—a nipple or a knee or a toe, the little mole just here, a certain way of smiling, a gaze through half-closed eyelashes, a small gesture, how she tosses her hair back or moves her hand through it, a wrinkle in the tiny pointed hood of her clitoris, the intake of her breath as I enter her, the sounds she makes. Yes, yes, many reminders, all the time. (Only with little Katrien there could have been no reminders, it was the purest of beginnings, innocent of memory; even with Driekie in the fig tree there were already fleeting moments of comparison or recognition.) But the point of being with this woman, here, now, is that
she is not any of the others, not anyone else in the whole world or in the history of the world, but only she. Later, yes later, as familiarity increases, as newness wears off, and that which she has in common with others begins to outweigh what is unique in her, the relationship will change, sadly and fatally, inevitably. For the moment it is the discovery and acknowledgement of her incomparable quality which overrides all else. This is you; and the youness of you makes it possible for me to be me in relation to you. So the occasion to enter her, not just her vagina but her self, her thoughts, her memories, or that part of her she offers to make available to me, while at the same time she enters into me, a subtle osmosis… can there be anything more miraculous than that? On the level of the body I have often wished I could momentarily change places with a woman, to know, truly, if fleetingly, how it feels to be entered like that; but beyond the body, in the commingling of mind and memory, there is no strangeness, no distinction between self and other.

  And that is why I love them, the women, every individual one of them: each one has been adored, each one has been necessary. I have always been there in the bed of love, fully present, loving the reality of this body, every quirk and detail of it, every quivering sign of life. In this togetherness our bodies are us, but they are also more and less than us. Do they take us with them, or are we taking them with us? To wherever they can go, to wherever it is possible for us to go. Beyond words, even beyond music. Certainly beyond what we have known before or could possibly have known. This is the place of knowledge, and it enfolds us like a fig tree burning, it sets us free into an almost unbearable light.

  Each separate limb, as it touches or responds to touch, becomes a miracle beyond flesh and blood, illuminated by its own light, its own lambent fire, but without being consumed. I know that I can name each one of them individually, and that each name will mean more than it has meant before, each will be a sesame and a shibboleth, each one a candle of meaning, and perhaps a damnation which I am happy to accept. Eye, mouth, ear, shoulder, elbow, hand, hip, back, each the opening line of a poem, casting a spell, lifting a veil. Toe, foot, ankle, knee. Thigh. I pronounce you. You utter me utterly. And now I whisper it, holy of holies, going back to that word from my childhood: Filimandorus. But I go beyond it too, to the more ancient exorcising word—this is a return to origins—reclaiming it from insult or profanity, and calling it, simply: Cunt.

  There is a world around us, of violence and fear and deception and misery. There is a past behind us, a future ahead. But here, while we are here, it is just now, it is us: you, I, slick with sweat, indivisible, yet for ever separate.

  This, I should have told George, is where I believe I am most unlike Don Giovanni. He played the arithmetic game, he was fucking by numbers (‘In Italy six hundred and forty, in Germany two hundred and thirty-one…’); to me it is the glimpse of a woman’s uniqueness, her unrepeatability, which drives me on.

  I have heard many men say, ‘If you’ve seen one cunt you’ve seen them all.’ I most passionately beg to differ. If you’ve seen one cunt, you’ve seen precisely one cunt. If you’ve slept with one woman you’ve slept with one. It is not only a presumption but a blasphemy to generalize. The matter is too delicate, too miraculous, too profound for any reduction to common denominators. And it is this endlessly rediscovered incomparability of a woman which has kept me going for nearly eighty years.

  I have heard many men say, ‘If you’ve seen one cunt you’ve seen them all.’ I most passionately beg to differ. If you’ve seen one cunt, you’ve seen precisely one cunt. If you’ve slept with one woman you’ve slept with one. It is not only a presumption but a blasphemy to generalize. The matter is too delicate, too miraculous, too profound for any reduction to common denominators. And it is this endlessly rediscovered incomparability of a woman which has kept me going for nearly eighty years.

  This is threatening to become unbearably heavy-handed. And I remember something Lawrence Durrell once said in an interview: ‘The French know that love is a form of metaphysical enquiry; the English think it has something to do with the plumbing.’ Let us not underestimate the plumbing; no home can function without it. And I have done my own fair share of plumbing, no doubt—and no shame—about that. There is something very sane and healthy and basic about it. Plumbing the depths. But it is only the enquiry which takes one beyond plumbing which makes it memorable. Here endeth the lesson.

  All of this to explain why I have been so reluctant to write about you, and our first night together, that New Year’s Eve: I have simply been afraid of revisiting it to find your uniqueness diminished or somehow faded. To be forced to acknowledge that what was so very special about it is the naked fact that there is nothing special.

  But now you are dead. And in a way I owe it to you, and perhaps to myself, to revisit it and affirm, or reaffirm, both its uniqueness and its commonality.

  It could not have begun in a more mundane manner. I was feeling low and lonely, an end-of-year feeling: another year gone and nothing new to show for it, after too many years of writer’s block. (After Radical Fire in the mid-nineties I haven’t been able to finish anything.) I couldn’t face spending the night alone, and I resented the idea of a jolly party surrounded by people beaming goodwill. But in the end I succumbed to what seemed the lesser evil and accepted an invitation from two old friends in Llandudno who thought it would be fun to see the New Year dawn together. Charl and Bridget. I set out early, much too early, from my home in Oranjezicht. As it was a glorious day I decided to take a leisurely drive along the beach road. Three Anchor Bay, Sea Point, Bantry Bay, Clifton, Camps Bay, Bakoven. The sun had about an hour to go before it would dip into the inky Atlantic, and the whole bay was shimmering like quicksilver. I had to stop for cigarettes. (How curious, it now strikes me, that cigarettes should have triggered it, as they brought about the beginning of your end, just over a year later.) I’d given up smoking fourteen months and three days before; but I knew Bridget always ran out of supplies during a party and thought I should make timeous provision. There was no parking at all along the beach road, so just after Blues I turned into Camps Bay Drive to find a café higher up. Soon I turned off when a shady little lane seemed more appealing, and then again and again. (‘You have a novelist’s way of driving,’ someone once said: Andrea, I think. ‘Never straight from A to B, always looking for the turn-offs and byways, enough to send anyone up the wall…’ ‘I always get there in the end,’ I retorted.) Gradually my mood lifted; but solitude still weighed on me, even after so many years on my own. But then, usually when I was alone in my life, it had been my own choice; now my choices were beginning to run out.

  At last I found a small supermarket in a deserted street, where I stopped for the cigarettes. And then, when I got into the car again, it wouldn’t start. Just my sort of luck: and I really know nothing about the insides of a car. After five minutes of more and more furious efforts, I was still stuck. Whenever I turned the ignition key there was only a disheartening click. The sun, now ponderous and red, was already touching the horizon like a big bloated balloon. With all the male self-assurance I could muster I opened the bonnet and started tugging at wires, first tentatively, then with more and more panicky rage, returning to the driver’s seat at irregular intervals to try the ignition again. Click. My hands were getting filthy; in the rear-view mirror I could see that my face was streaked with grease. That only made me more frantic.

  And then, out of the blue, I heard a rising volume of music approaching, and in a volcanic eruption of Beethoven from a car radio you stopped on the opposite side of the road and shouted something. At first I couldn’t hear what you were saying, and you had to turn the music down.

  ‘Do you need help?’ you asked.

  I was flabbergasted. People no longer do this kind of thing. I myself have given up stopping for strangers. Years ago I often did, particularly if an attractive female was involved. Not necessarily with any ulterior design: I might have been prom
pted by purely aesthetic reasons. On a few occasions it did have consequences, nothing very profound, but invariably entertaining. Once or twice it was the beginning of something more durable. Then, sometime in the eighties, I picked up a febrile sprite who called herself Claudia—I had reason not to believe her—with whom I spent a couple of nights, only to wake up one morning to find that she had cleared out, taking with her a large suitcase full of my possessions. And that was the end of another Good Samaritan.

  But you stopped for me. And you loved Beethoven. And you had these haunting looks. (The strange feeling of someone else looking at me with those eyes, through a glass darkly.) What more could I wish for in this world, right then?

  There was something dramatic about the contrast between your very dark eyes and your almost-blonde, rather disheveled hair. As you got out of your car, a not-so-young, bright blue Golf, I saw the rest of you. You wore a dark red, full-length dress of some flimsy silky material that clung to your contours. You were barefoot. I am particularly susceptible to young women with bare feet.

  You gave me a quick, searching look as I got out. Then, presumably reassured by my age, you streaked your fingers through your hair, and said, ‘May I try?’

  ‘There’s no life in here,’ I said. ‘But by all means try.’

  You tried.

  Click.

  You said, ‘Fuck.’

  I’m old-fashioned enough to disapprove of strong language in women, but somehow, coming from you, it was so unexpected, and sounded so sincerely meant, that I couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ you asked, in a tone of dark suspicion.

  ‘You,’ I said. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. But I wasn’t expecting you to run down the alphabet to F so quickly.’