Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  From that moment, precisely because I did not want to, not under any circumstances, I knew I would go back. I fought valiantly against the idea: it was preposterous, it was ludicrous, it could only end in disillusionment. But I had to go back.

  For a few humiliating weeks there was a toing and froing of letters; and then I found a reason to go to Durban (the major complication was that Helena decided that she’d like to go with me, which necessitated a lot of scurrying with new arrangements and explanations, all of which banalized and sullied an already unsavory endeavor). And I went, alone.

  Marion picked me up at the airport. This time I was to stay with her; the parents were away on holiday. What she hadn’t foreseen was that her older, married sister would unexpectedly break up with her husband and move into the parental home as well, broken-hearted and irremediably furious with the male of the species. There was still time to check into a hotel. But Marion, more and more scheming, less and less like the nymph from the sea I had miraculously known—once, oh in another lifetime, in a foreign land—had set her mind on the family home. The sister, she assured me, was too shattered to put in an appearance and would probably remain locked up in her room.

  It turned out differently. The sister, whose name is still a blank in my memory, bluntly refused to allow us to share a room (‘The man is bloody well married, Marion!’ I heard her scream). For most of the evening, after we’d come home from a restaurant, she and Maid Marion fought in the dining room, while I sat sulking in Marion’s little bedroom at the back of the house. I was tempted to call it a night and clear out, but every time the sister went to the bathroom or the kitchen, Marion would slip out to plead with me—oh please, please!—to stay: it could only be a few more minutes, an hour at most, and then she would be back in my arms. But some time after midnight she presented herself at my door, her face bloated with crying, to announce that she was going to spend the night in her parents’ bedroom. For some time I still went on hoping that during the night she might come tiptoeing, and naked as on the beach, to my bed; but when I ventured into the passage once or twice the light in the dining room, where the sister kept her bitter vigil, was still resolutely burning; and in the end, from sheer weariness, I fell asleep on Marion’s virginal bed. At least, I thought nastily, she wouldn’t have sand in her pussy this time.

  As I came from the bathroom in the morning it was just in time to overhear a conversation between the two siblings. I could make out that the sister had received a telephone call to summon her to her lawyer’s office for an immediate interview. As she rushed out, slamming the heavy front door behind her, she viciously shouted back at Marion, ‘So now you can have the whole fucking house to yourselves!’

  What followed was even worse. Wrapping herself around me like a clinging, bloodsucking forest creeper, Marion started urging me to go to the main bedroom where we could do the two-backed beast in the matrimonial bed. But I balked at the idea. Not that I was scared about not being able to perform under pressure—in those days, I regret to say, there was no coordination between my mind and my prick. It went—or came—as it wished, irrespective of whether I approved or disapproved. But somehow the whole business had just become too complicated, too sordid. Guilt about Helena was gnawing at me like the fox at the boy’s heart in the old fable. As soon as I could extricate myself I telephoned for a taxi and left. Marion remained moping in her room and did not even come out to see me off.

  ***

  ‘Did that teach you a lesson?’ you ask, in a tone of sympathy, yet unable to repress a chuckle.

  ‘It certainly did. Never to make love with a sister in the house.’

  ‘But did it cure the urge to stray?’

  This time I find it hard to answer. But how can I lie to you? ‘No,’ I say. ‘It was only the beginning.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘What makes you think I know?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Chris, I don’t buy that. You’re not one of the lower forms of life that act purely on instinct. I want to know.’ A pause. ‘And I think it’s time for you to know.’

  I cannot help smiling. ‘Fair enough. But I cannot promise it will get us far. I agree that trying to find answers or reasons cannot be avoided, it is part of the package. But surely it is not the only thing that defines us. Especially when we are talking about love. Perhaps love only begins where language ends. Which is why we talk about “making love”: the body enters into it to make something exist which was not there before. We literally make it, we bring it into being.’

  A challenging little smile. ‘Aren’t you now reducing the body to its sexual organs?’

  For a moment the word shocks me out of my line of reasoning; but then I recover. ‘No, Rachel, I mean a hell of a lot more. There are also eyes, and hands, and feet.’ For a moment I hesitate, then raise my hand with a show of audacity that surprises myself. ‘And even a little mole on the cheekbone.’ I dare to touch it with my finger.

  ‘Now you’re idealizing and romanticizing again,’ you scold me.

  ‘No. Because I accept the body with all its faults and foibles and failings, its bad smells and its weaknesses. But just as I cannot think of the body as only beautiful and seductive, I cannot think of it as exclusively ugly and repulsive. It is all of this, and also more. Always more. Isn’t that what it really is about? That moreness that makes us human.’

  ‘You’ve wandered very far away from my question, Chris.’

  ‘I don’t think I have. Look, I was with Helena: I think I can say I was happy with her, although happy is another of those words we use too glibly. At least we were not unhappy, we had a child, we had a reasonably good life, on the whole we functioned well together. I did not go in search of adventures because I felt unfulfilled at home, or because my wife didn’t understand me, or whichever of the old excuses one can think of. I had what I needed—if anything is ever as easy as that. What does a man really “need”? All I’m trying to say is that something in me wanted more, and still does. And I honestly don’t think it is something peculiar about me, but that it is something human.’

  Your eyes are uncompromising and defiant. ‘Isn’t that the real problem, Chris? That you kept on desperately, compulsively trying to find that something somewhere else, always somewhere else, in other people, in women, rather than accepting that the only place you could possibly find it was inside yourself?’

  ‘What about paradise?’ I persist. ‘I’ve always thought that paradise is the only true fulfillment we can dream of—I mean something that literally fills us, completes us—but surely the point about paradise is that it can never be here, only ever somewhere else.’

  ‘That kind of paradise can never be real, only a dream, an illusion.’

  ‘You don’t think that dreams are relevant or indispensable?’

  ‘It still depends upon whether we are looking for them outside ourselves, or inside.’

  ‘I’m not sure that the distinction is so important. As long as we agree that paradise is necessary. As necessary as the fact that it can never be attained. Every time we think for a moment—because it can never be for more than a moment—it slips away. Was I in paradise with Driekie in the fig tree? Absolutely not. It seemed so. For a moment. But I cannot think of Driekie without thinking of that horrible prelude with David or the terrifying aftermath when she and her sisters humiliated me. Just as I cannot think of Marion on the beach that night without remembering the visit to her parents’ home afterwards. And even the girl on the train. She had no consequence. But I lost her without even speaking to her.’

  You do not answer immediately. But in the end you shake your head. ‘She could only have been a moment of paradise inasmuch as she became part of yourself. And then we’re back with what I first said.’

  ‘But don’t you understand? Even if she is inside me, she still drives me out to look for other moments and manifestations of paradise.’

  ‘On
ly if you’re looking for an excuse to go on philandering. If you keep on looking for paradise somewhere out there, breaking your legs after every new cunt you get a whiff of. In the long run it just isn’t worth it, because all that matters about them is what is already inside you. You only have to acknowledge it.’

  ‘How can I deny the impulse that makes us human?’

  ‘That is shit. Who are you to tell me what is “human”? Is the urge to fuck more important than the urge to share, or simply to be together?’

  ‘Can they not be expressions of the same urge? Is anybody ever totally and completely self-sufficient? What about the Hegelian You are, therefore I am?’

  ‘A wish to share with others is different from either making your whole life dependent on somebody else—or, worse, the need to make somebody else dependent on you.’

  ‘Those can be individual aberrations. They do not invalidate the urge.’

  ‘Don Giovanni’s need to fuck,’ you say, ‘is the urge to run away. He cannot face his loneliness, so he needs to impose himself. There is an imbalance of power. In the urge to share there is a recognition of equality. That makes it totally different.’

  ‘It is still an urge to go beyond yourself.’

  ‘The problem I have with your argument, Chris, is that you make your concept of what is “human” totally dependent on it. Doesn’t “human” also leave us a choice? To commit or not to commit?’ You lean forward. ‘Do you think I never feel tempted by another man? However much I love George? But I would never, ever, betray him. Because I chose, with open eyes, to stay with him.’

  ‘And if he had a fling?’

  ‘I would respect him for exercising his freedom of choice, and then I would tell him to fuck off.’

  ‘You wouldn’t really.’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘And if he comes to you to confess and asks to be forgiven?’

  ‘The need for absolution cannot cancel what happened. It would still have been an act of betrayal.’

  ‘Don’t you think “betrayal” is putting it rather strongly?’

  ‘That is what it is. I can’t think of anything worse than the betrayal of trust.’

  And then another memory breaks through whatever barrier has kept it from me for so long, the only one from my whole life which I would wish to obliterate. That last day we were together, Helena and I. The final quarrel in the car, little Pieter crying on the back seat. The wipers dumbly swishing to and fro, to and fro in the steady rain. It was about another woman. Ironically, one of the most insignificant of my little affairs. Inconsequential, as I would have thought of it—except that this time there were consequences. For how long Helena had known about my straying, I still don’t know. But on this day her long-suffering patience ran out. Her lovely face was ugly with anger. And what she said was scorched into my mind for ever—not just because of the accident that happened mere minutes later, but because of the words themselves. ‘It’s not that you slept with her, Chris,’ she said. ‘That is bad enough, but I think I could learn to live with it. But that you slept with her and now try to deny it. That is the betrayal. That you thought so little of me that you cannot even be honest with me. This I cannot forgive.’ She grabbed my arm in rage. I fiercely, blindly, tried to free myself from her grip. And skidded off the wet road in the rain.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ you ask quietly.

  I shake my head and look at you in some bewilderment. It takes a moment to return to what we have been talking about. Then, somewhat to my own surprise, I tell you about the memory.

  You also take a while before you respond. Then you ask very quietly, ‘Have you forgiven yourself for it?’

  ‘Can you forgive me?’

  ‘It’s not my forgiveness you need,’ you say, more gravely than I would have expected.

  For a long time it feels as if we have reached the end of our conversation. Then, with an urgency that almost shames me, I ask, ‘Don’t you think an act of infidelity can add something to one? Surely it may widen one’s experience, make one a more complete person, with more to share with one’s partner. You know, that was actually what I often felt, coming back to Helena.’

  ‘Chris! That is the most banal of all excuses.’

  ‘That needn’t make it any less true.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I fail to understand that.’

  ‘Sometimes it is the very things we can not understand which make life worth while, don’t you agree? To Creon, Antigone was mad. All that interested her was the impossible. And how can we ever “explain” Nastasya Filippovna? Challenging Rogozhin to get the money—and then burning it—and then going off into the night with him after all?’

  ‘And getting murdered for it.’

  ‘I’m sure she knew that was the risk she took. And she was willing to do so.’

  ‘Is this a plea for madness?’

  ‘A certain kind of madness, I suppose, yes. Unless you have a problem with freedom.’

  ‘Not with the concept. But if freedom is something you measure only in terms of yourself, your own needs and wants, I do find it problematic. And that affects your view of love too, doesn’t it? The moment you expand it to include another person besides yourself, it is impossible to express anything at all purely in terms of I want—I want—I want. Surely we should be more mature than just to think of our own pleasure.’

  ‘Do you really think my whole life has been a waste, based on illusions and false premises?’

  ‘Not at all. It is your life and I get the impression that you have always lived it as it has suited yourself, because you have never allowed anyone else into it. So for you it could work. And obviously has. For me it cannot. Not ever.’

  ‘Are you blaming me now?’

  ‘The very fact that you should think that, tells me that you are not as free as you hoped you were.’

  ‘How do you get there?’

  ‘Because it seems to trouble you that I think what I do. So my opinion matters to you. And that imposes limits on you.’

  ‘Your opinion does indeed matter to me. Because I care about you.’

  ‘But not enough to make you think of changing your life.’

  ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’

  ‘You can, if the dog cooperates.’

  ‘Not this one.’

  ‘Then it’s just too bad.’ Your eyes seem to be challenging me and pitying me and mocking me all at the same time.

  ***

  Sharing, you said. Simply being together. How much of it did you say from conviction, how much purely for the challenge of argument? For there were few things, I came to realize, you enjoyed as much as arguing. You certainly sent me back to my marriage with Helena. And the manner in which it was framed by my encounters with Melanie: the misty night on the rocks just before our wedding; the day on the beach after the accident, when Melanie came to me with all our unfinished business, and suddenly began to cry. Between these two brackets, Helena offered security, predictability, companionship: precisely the things I needed—precisely the things I needed to get away from. Later in life I came to miss, dearly, the sense of a ‘home’ to come back to, as Odysseus had, haunted by Penelope’s moon-cloth. On more than one occasion I seriously considered getting married again, but the risk seemed too great; and I was getting too used to having my own space and keeping my own hours (even though most of these were devoted to writing). You would call it selfish, self-centered. Undoubtedly. But it was also preventing others from getting drawn into my life and being hurt. At the same time it meant forfeiting the dimension of stability which, with Helena, had so ironically, perhaps even perversely, helped to make sense of my wanderings and rovings.

  It all goes back so far. I have noted the groping beginnings, the first tastes of paradise. But there was a specific crossing of a threshold, my own rites of passage, where, for once, I was indebted
to an older woman. Not that much older—she was thirty-five, I twelve years younger—but enough to make a difference. Anna coincided with a turning point in our history, the electoral victory of the National Party in 1948. There was only one other election in my life that marked me in such a personal way and that was in 1994, the country’s first free election, which I celebrated with Jenny. But I’ll come to that later.

  For black South Africans, 1948 marked a descent into darkness; for Afrikaners, a first step towards the light of political emancipation; for me, it celebrated an inner, very personal liberation. Until then, the joys of sex had tended to be involved with darker feelings of guilt and fear of damnation: Katrien brought the dire warnings about sin and punishment linked to the happy discovery of the filimandorus; Driekie in the fig tree was followed by the hellish orgy of the teenage Bacchae; the memory of the ice queen Isolde was overshadowed by the night in the men’s residence. But Anna was unadulterated pleasure.

  Anna van der Watt was a secretary in the party office in our constituency, in the same building where my father ran his practice. In more enlightened times she would have been an organizer, but at that time the position of secretary was about the highest a woman could aspire to. A most able person, with people skills I have seldom seen matched by others, and with drive, ambition, and enthusiasm which in the end must have made a decisive contribution to the result in that constituency. Anna was recently widowed. Her husband, a big-game hunter of some repute, had been shot by one of his colleagues on a trip into what was then South-West Africa—a tragic accident, the official version had it; a diabolically well-planned action by a man who’d had his eye on Anna for some time, said some insiders. If the latter was true, the two lovers were handling it with seasoned skill by having, as far as anyone could establish, absolutely no contact with each other after the mishap. (That is, until they unexpectedly got married eighteen months later, but that might have been another story.) Depending on the version one subscribed to, she was known either as the Merry Widow or the Black Widow. Certainly not the kind of woman a fresh-faced young man, newly out of university with an LLB (cum laude) to show for it, should get involved with. And I had no aspirations to do so either.