Before I Forget

by Andre Brink

  I did meet Nicolette through Amandla, that much is true. But in no way was she ever one of ‘them.’ For one thing, she would never have come near Siviwe’s casting couch. For another, she was much older than the rest. They were all in their twenties or very early thirties (a few still in their teens), whereas she must have been on the darker side of fifty: it was difficult to guess, and she would most certainly never tell. There was a curious vanity about her, she was obsessed with her ‘dignity.’ And yet I remember early mornings when she would bring me coffee and sit cross-legged on the foot of my bed, naked, with none of her usually rather overdone make-up on, as if she couldn’t care about the ravages of time. A lived-in body. The lines on her face especially. Her neck which was threatening to become scrawny. Her small but sagging breasts. Her drooping buttocks. White stretch marks on her belly. Too-bony knees and feet. And yet! It was not just that there were moments when I could see how beautiful she must have been once, twenty years ago perhaps—the sharp features, high cheekbones, striking nose, the long blonde hair, the cat-body with its languid, undulating movements, her kind of boyish grace—but that, in a way that had little to do with what could be itemized, she was beautiful now. She is one of the few women in my life I find impossible to translate into words, even though that is supposed to be my métier. I feel like a painter trying to paint a model who refuses to sit still, she is always moving about, pulling faces, frowning, pouting, putting out her tongue, eating an apple, smirking. Often she had the utterly vulnerable look of a little girl lost; then, in a moment she could become hard and cynical and aggressive, even offensive. Her eyes could be piercing and frank and direct; but often she would gaze about vaguely, with a myopic absence in her attitude, an almost professorial detachment. Her voice could be deep and sexy and seductive; but it might also be simply hoarse from too many years of too much smoking, too much drinking, too much everything.

  I met her at a do the exiles had arranged in the suburb of Aubervilliers one evening. Drab surroundings, modern concrete apartment buildings covered in graffiti, swarms of dirty little Third World kids cavorting about. She turned up late, escorted by someone I’d vaguely met but did not really know, Bongani-somebody, a large, loose-limbed man, pleasant enough when he was sober, but notorious for his aggressive behavior when he got drunk, which was most of the time. That night, too, it did not take long for him to lose it. He said he was tired and feeling shit and wanted to go home (he’d just come back from a month-long trip to Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev); Nicolette wanted to party. They argued in a corner for a while, in low voices. Then he started to shout obscenities at her. Somewhat to my surprise, she responded in kind. Some of the people were amused and egged them on, laughing. But that was the wrong thing to do. He went right over the top and hit her a straight right to the jaw which would have done any lock on a rugby field proud. She staggered back. A trickle of blood came from her mouth. A couple of men grabbed Bongani from behind to drag him off (but they were laughing, as if it were all a huge joke). That was when she lunged forward and let fly with an almighty kick—she was wearing tall black boots—that hit him in the groin and made him fold double, retching.

  ‘You fucking bitch, I’m going to kill you!’ he gasped.

  She spat blood into his face.

  Then he was dragged out by his comrades and, as I learned later, deposited in a taxi and sent back to wherever he had come from. Instinctively, I took her by the shoulders and steered her to a corner.

  ‘Let me go, dammit!’ she said, but without much conviction. And when I complied, she did not move away. I found a glass of whiskey and put it in her hand. Neither of us said a word. Her eyes, the color of smoke, were inscrutable.

  The party resumed like a stream that encounters a boulder in its way, churns for a moment in a white-water rapid, then whirls around it and ripples on as if there has been no interruption. At some stage, still without saying anything, she left my side and melded into the dancing. I watched almost absently, but soon found myself spellbound. She danced with the kind of demonstrative abandon that makes it impossible not to look. But in the end she drifted out of it again. All I know is that while the rest went on eating and drinking and making merry, the two of us landed on the floor in a corner and talked.

  ‘Thank you for rescuing me,’ she said through the blue smoke of her Gitane.

  ‘I didn’t. I just brought you to a neutral corner.’

  ‘I’ll do better in the next round.’

  ‘What on earth brought you to the party in the first place?’ I wanted to know, because she was so obviously not one of us; at that stage I still thought she was French.

  ‘Bongani,’ she said matter-of-factly.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re attracted to South Africans?’

  ‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘I was born in that shithole.’

  Perhaps it was a mistake to enquire further, for she launched into a rambling story of which it was hard to make out head or tail. I can recall that a job with Dior featured in it, and a nightclub in Montmartre, and a father figure from the Old Testament, and a man who committed suicide because of her, and a pilgrimage to Chartres (before or after the suicide?) where she slept with a stranger whose face she never saw and whose name she never heard and whom in the raptures of love she begged to strangle her. ‘I thought that would be the best kind of death that could ever happen to me,’ she said. On some of those events she elaborated during the time we spent together afterwards. Once she got going she was such a hypnotizing, enthralling teller of tales that days and nights simply flowed together—but nothing was ever really clarified; she repeated many of her stories several times but no two versions were quite the same. But there was one event to which she returned compulsively and of which the details never varied, at least not much.

  ‘I slept with an ambassador,’ she confided in me, with a strange mixture of shyness and arrogance, as if that were her real—her only?—claim to fame in a rather confusing world. And after a brief pause (for deliberate effect?) she added in a stage whisper, ‘A South African ambassador.’

  ‘My God!’ was all I could say. ‘How could you? What on earth…? I mean, for God’s sake…’

  She gave a mysterious smile: supercilious? defiant? mischievous? ashamed? serenely confident?

  ‘Oh, it was long ago,’ she said with a shrug, but only after finishing her glass of neat whiskey. ‘Before things turned sour down there. Or just at the beginning. The time of that Sharpeville thing. Strange to think of it now, but you know, it didn’t really seem to matter.’

  ‘But how could you have got involved with someone like that?’ I repeated.

  ‘I think I loved him,’ she said simply. Her smile made her seem much younger, almost childlike. ‘Do you find that so strange?’

  I had to shake my head very slowly, but I did glance around to make sure nobody was listening. ‘No. I suppose if you really loved him, it is not so strange.’

  ‘Why would that make a difference?’ she challenged me sharply.

  ‘Because love is something else. Isn’t it?’

  ‘No it isn’t. Love is shit.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning nothing. I want some more whiskey.’ A pause. ‘Please.’

  I took her glass, and went to refill it, and came back to her. Many of the guests were already seeping out into the night.

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ she said after taking a good mouthful.

  ‘Mean what?’

  ‘That love is shit. I just didn’t like you saying it is “something else”. For God’s sake. What’s your name?’

  ‘Chris. Chris Minnaar.’

  She gave no sign of recognizing it, which I found singularly comforting.

  ‘For God’s sake, Chris Minnaar. Whatever love may be, it is never “something else.” It’s where we belong. Like the sky. I mean, if we were birds.’ Another of her pauses. ‘I wish we were.
I’ve always wanted to fly. Sometimes I do, when I make love.’

  ‘Like with your ambassador?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’ There was a harsh tone of suspicion, perhaps accusation, in her voice.

  ‘You were the one who started about him.’

  ‘But I said nothing about making love with him. For all you know we never did.’

  ‘You did say you slept with an ambassador.’

  ‘Did I?’ She took another swallow. ‘Well, then I suppose I did.’

  ‘Did he love you too?’

  ‘He treated me like his dirty little secret.’

  ‘And you revolted against that?’

  A shrug. Her smoky eyes narrowed briefly, but that was all.

  ‘Or did you meekly accept it?’

  She sneered. Then in a crude gesture wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, smudging lipstick across her cheek. By now she looked much older again.

  ‘I cost him his job,’ she said. ‘I made sure he was fired. For sleeping with the enemy.’

  ‘Poor man,’ I said with a straight face, but this time she did not take the bait.

  Most of the guests had gone by now; it was time for us to leave too.

  When we reached the door, she grasped me by the arm, as if in a sudden panic. ‘Can you take me home?’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘No, I mean: can I go home with you? Bongani will kill me if I went back to him now.’

  ‘Oh, but…’

  ‘I’m not asking you to fuck me, Chris.’ An ugly laugh. ‘Just to let me sleep at your place—a bed, a couch, a floor, anything. I can even sleep in a bath. I love baths. Until I’ve sorted out things back there.’

  I wasn’t sure whether to smile or frown, to be sympathetic or reluctant, to cold-shoulder her or be the gentleman. In the end, rather diffidently, if I remember correctly, I agreed. I asked Siviwe, our host, to telephone for a taxi. Aware of his sardonic look, I escorted Nicolette to the door and we went to the small apartment I rented at the time, behind the Gare Montparnasse. She did not speak on the way back.

  When we got home she asked for something more to drink.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked.

  ‘You think I’ve had enough?’ With that unpleasant, provocative look in her eyes she said, ‘You’re right. I’ve had enough. But I still want more.’

  An hour later, when I tentatively suggested that it was time to turn in, she suddenly became surprisingly docile. I showed her to the bathroom, and while she was inside remade my bed for her, and spread sheets and blankets over the couch in the small lounge for me, something I’d often done when I’d had guests before.

  She spent a full hour in the bathroom. When she came out, with an old blue dressing gown of mine draped over her, all her make-up had been removed and her face was naked. In some ways it looked older now, every line and wrinkle showed; but there was also a freshness about her, a complete vulnerability. Perhaps that is not the right word either. It was more like a complete honesty: Here I am, this is what I look like, I don’t care. Do you?

  I didn’t either. And she shook off the voluminous dressing gown, which suddenly made her look much smaller, thinner than before—not as skinny as Aviva, but slight nevertheless—and with an unusual mixture of defenselessness and quiet assurance. She knew her own body and was comfortable with it; and she could share it without giving herself away, but also without withholding anything.

  One notices small things about a new body. A little birthmark high up on her left thigh. A single, prominent curl disturbing the straight top line of the small triangle of her pubic hair; much later, as she lay in my arms with her naked back against my naked belly (Rachie de Beer?), the way she twirled and twirled a small lock of her blonde hair (dyed, but blonde) until she fell asleep and lightly snored. She even farted once, which I found an amusing and endearing show of trust.

  Sometime in the morning, not early, she folded herself out of the bed and wandered about with her vague, vacant gaze as if she’d forgotten where the bathroom was, although she had spent so much time there the night before. I followed her with my eyes, with an intense curiosity as if I were a discoverer looking at a new landscape. I took in the awkward grace of her body, no longer young, yet with a persistent, fluid youthfulness about it. The cellulite on her thighs below the flat buttocks which must once have been small and tight and round, the delicate web of blue and red varicose veins behind her knees, her too-often dyed hair tousled on her shoulders. I also noticed the bruises on her body, some old enough to fade into a yellowish green, others darker, angrier, recent. On her back and buttocks, her thighs, her breasts. Was that Bongani’s way of staking out his territory? Or had she been passed on from one lover to another? And yet it did not repel me. It was as if in spite of all the signs of having been used and abused, nothing had really touched her or harmed her, not where it mattered. And the marks of fading youth achingly brought home to me the awareness of my own aging body. She did not close the bathroom door when she went in. I heard her pee. When she re-emerged, I smiled and put out my arms towards her. Come, I wanted to say, let us be old together, let us be young together.

  But she wandered away again, towards the kitchen, and came back with an apple. Then stopped, and went back for another, which she offered me. Sitting cross-legged on the bed facing me, every wrinkle in her belly above her small mat of pubic thatch visible, she took her time finishing her apple, crisply biting into it, sending a fine spray of juice over the blanket, some of it clinging to her chin, her shoulders, her pendant breasts. It was an almost unbearably erotic experience.

  When she got up to throw the tiny core that remained into the waste-paper basket in the corner, she stopped in front of the bed and looked down at me.

  ‘Do you think I’m old?’ she asked, cupping her hands under her breasts to push them up.

  ‘I think you’re very lovely.’

  ‘You should have seen me when I was with my ambassador,’ she said. ‘I was beautiful then. And of course very young.’

  ‘It is enough for me to see you now. Come to me. I want you.’

  ‘You cannot have me.’ But she came to kneel in front of the bed and threw back the blankets and took me in her mouth, her long, damaged hair falling over her damaged, beautiful face.

  ***

  It was Sunday, and we spent most of it in bed. In between we dragged ourselves from the stained and crumpled sheets to prepare something to eat, and then crept back, and made love once more, and talked with passion.

  Like the night before, she kept returning to the man she called ‘my ambassador.’

  ‘What happened to him in the end?’ I asked, my interest stirred.

  ‘I lied to you last night,’ she said, as if that was an answer. ‘It wasn’t I who brought him in trouble. I mean, it was because of me, but I didn’t want to harm him. I tried everything I could to save him, but what was there I could really do? There was such a huge, powerful machine behind him.’

  ‘So he was recalled?’

  ‘Yes. But after that I wasn’t sure. I kept trying to find out, asking people. There was an old concierge or something at the embassy, Lebon his name was—it was still in the Avenue Hoche in those days, not that awful Fort Knox fortress on the Quai d’Orsay—and Lebon was a great gossip, so he kept me up to date. But of course there was no way of knowing for sure, the old salaud would turn anything into a good story. Anyway, it was from him that I heard my ambassador died. Of a stroke, Lebon said. Not so long after he left.’ I am surprised to see her eyes fill with tears. ‘You know, when I heard that, I just wanted to die too. In fact, I was so desperate, I jumped into the Seine, right behind Notre-Dame. It was something I’d often thought of doing, but I never had the guts before. But this time I did.’

  ‘But you didn’t die,’ I said soberly.

  ‘No, the bloody flics and the pompiers were
there too quickly. Treated me like scum. Just dumped me in a hospital. It was terrible. I thought, when I got out of there, I’d go straight back to the Seine. Only, I couldn’t face it going wrong again. So as soon as I was discharged I went to Notre-Dame, and bought a candle, a really long one, and lit it for him. It wasn’t much, but I thought, oh well, we can all do with a candle.’

  ‘I’m so glad you didn’t die.’

  She pulled a face. ‘I’m not so sure that it’s anything to be glad about. All I know is that I’ll now wait for the real thing. Unless I find someone like that man, when I joined the pilgrimage to Chartres for Easter, I told you about it…?’

  ‘The one you asked to strangle you?’

  ‘Yes. I still think that would be the best death of all. To go while you’re coming.’ A bright smile, but only for a moment. ‘But where will I find a lover prepared to do a thing like that?’

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ I said with mock seriousness.

  ‘Why wouldn’t you do a thing like that?’ Nicolette insisted. ‘If someone you really, really loved asked you to?’’

  ‘Please,’ I said, feeling a shiver caress my spine like a caterpillar moving all the way down. ‘Don’t even talk of such things. The mere thought gives me the creeps. We’re here now. Death is very far away.’

  ‘Death is never far away when you make love.’ As with everything she said, I couldn’t make out whether she’d really uttered something profound, or whether she was simply spilling whatever came to mind. And so we made love again, and for the time being at least kept death at bay.

  What I knew, then and during the time that followed, was that this was a dangerous liaison, and I was on dangerous ground. It would not be difficult to fall in love with Nicolette. And then I would be lost. It would be love, not because I could see in her the girl she might once have been, but because of what she was at that moment. Because she was no longer young, because of the beauty of time in her, and because, precisely, she made me aware of the death we both carried in our blood and bones.