“Can you imagine the two old things,” said Paul shortly, “a torch shining on their faces. Opening their eyes into it like those poor damn fool hares that get transfixed by the lights of your car on a dark road.”
Later he went to see the woman, because without the man (he had once been a railway worker and had some sort of pension) she was destitute and it seemed that Paul would have to try to get her a pension, too. She said to him: “What is wrong with this man? I stayed with two men before. The one ran away to Capetown. The other one died after thirteen years. Now this one is wrong?”
A kind of minor panic flew round among the colored people. Most of it was ridiculous and unfounded in danger, but its spark of actuality was the special distress and embarrassment that people feel when their sexual privacy is threatened, even by implication. People said to one another that they were afraid to go to sleep in the same room with their wives. The inevitable hooligans played the inevitable joke of climbing up to windows and waking people up by shining torches in their faces. One evening a colored clerk in Paul’s office confided, half afraid he would be laughed at, half afraid what he said should be taken seriously, “I used to be so proud of my wife’s European looks. You know she’s quite often been taken for a white girl? Now I’m wondering—” He stopped, wanting the assurance of Paul’s laughter that it was ridiculous to go on. And Paul laughed, but a moment later the thought forced itself up in the man again. “If anything like that happened to us, I’d do… I don’t know what—” He had the pleading, tense expression of abstraction that anticipates the doctor’s order for some too-intimate investigation. But of course Paul laughed again, and said to him, “For Christ’s sake, Robert, you know you and your wife are both colored, there’s nothing on earth to worry about. And anyway, they’ll only do this a few times. Just to satisfy the predikants and the Cabinet ministers.”
“Of course you can see a mile off his wife’s a colored girl. Only two or three shades lighter than he is,” Paul said to me. He smiled. “Out of a reversal of the very thing he fears now, he’s liked to think her that much nearer the distinction of whiteness.”
But later that same evening when we were sitting in a cinema, I had the feeling one learns to pick up so quickly from someone one loves, that his mind was not going along with the diversion of the film. He stirred in his seat now and then as people do when they come to the turning point of their own thoughts and then go back to the beginning all over again. Once he hesitated and then putting his mouth to my hair said: “The funny thing is, he’s always seemed—you know, I could talk to him without any mumbo jumbo, the way people like us talk among ourselves.” I nodded vehemently, my eyes still on the film, like a hostess who continues to give polite attention to her guests, while she tries to catch the gist of the urgent confidence someone is pressing upon her in whispers.
When we came out we were both in a rather passive mood—the film had turned out to be bad in a dulling way—and we drank our coffee comfortably, but without speaking much. Once we got home something that often happened suddenly happened again. The sheer pleasure of coming home together alone to sleep in the same bed, the same room, turned our passive mood inside out. Paul got into my bath with me and we fought and laughed and criticized each other’s washing technique. In their desire to know each other minutely, lovers return quite seriously to those dull questions to which children give so much weight: Do you wash your face first or last? Do you stand up when you do your legs or sit down and hold them up out of the water? Paul finished his performance, when I was already drying myself, by disappearing head and all under the water in the way that he knew horrified me. He came up laughing and lay there, water streaming from his hair, all his body broken up into wavering and ripples, magnified and distorted. As I gave him a cigarette, Auden’s line came to me, “… the bridegroom, lolling there, beautiful.” We got into bed half-damp and made love so ecstatically and swiftly that I murmured something about …” only over too soon …” and at once Paul began to make love to me again. We lay there with my hand on him lax the way I liked to keep it after he had parted from my body, on the edge of making love a third time or going to sleep, each possibility as delightful as the other. Neither asleep nor making love, we lay there in the balance between the two, our eyes open, not speaking. The lights of cars we could not hear, turning the bend at the top of the hill, perhaps, traveled over us faintly, one after the other, a long pause, then another and another, slipping down the window and the wall and across the floor and over the bed—where each saw the other’s face come up silvered and the peaks of the bedclothes like a fold of hills—then up the other wall and over the ceiling into darkness.
I took my hand away.
I took it away instinctively, in answer to some other withdrawal. Paul did not move, but with each wash of light I felt come into my mind through his own, the real pain and strangeness of that conversation with the man Robert, and even the jokes of the others. And I knew Paul was thinking of it; feeling for himself the impossibility of a white man understanding these things out of his own security.
Just as I went off to sleep I had one of those curious starts in my mind—the mental equivalent of the jump of a leg or an arm momentarily jerking your body back to wakefulness—that flips up a piece of past consciousness. I did not remember that incident of the Sunday afternoon I went with Joel to Macdonald’s Kloof; for a moment I was there. The sun was down and the air smelled of dust and eucalyptus. I walked past the old Afrikaner packing up baskets and rugs. I called to Joel, Wait, there’s something stuck to my shoe—and he picked up a little piece of twig and scraped at my heel. And the torn thing was there.
The only difference was that this time, unlike the real time that it happened, we were not safe from disgust. We got into the car full of shame and I kept my face turned away from Joel, although I seemed to see his face all the same, as you do in a dream. And perhaps it was here that it all really became a dream, and I was asleep.
Chapter 25
I often ask myself now whether I was ever really happy at this time; and I find I must believe that I was. My measure of happiness so far—it changes all through life, like one’s idea of what age is getting old—is the intensity of my identification with living; those periods when I have known myself to be crawling through summer and winter like a slug falling listlessly from leaf to leaf have been the seasons of misery. And by this standard I was happy, though perhaps it was the kind of happiness that you can stand only once, and when you are very young.
The revelation of being well loved in the body is an astounding experience. It carried me along, buffeting through everything else that weighed in on me or harassed me, even the practical worries attendant upon itself. And there is no experience that gives one a closer feeling of being in life; in fact it is like an explanation without words that turns an abstraction into possessed reality.
Then, too, not only was Paul the source of this joy, he was also at grips with the huge central problem of our country in our time, something that had oppressed me not only in my intellect since I had grown old enough to have a concept of man’s freedom, but in my blood. What he could do was pitifully little and pitifully inadequate, but I was at that stage in idealism when the gesture was satisfying in itself. I believed then that the only way for a man to fulfill himself in South Africa was to pit himself against the oppression of the Africans. It did not matter in what way he did it; the thing was so sinister that there was hardly a job or profession where it was not implicit and the question did not come up, if not in so many words, a dozen times a day: Are you for them? Or will you add your weight against them, along with all the others?—And I believe this still, although I understand now the consequences of such a way of life, as I certainly did not do then; something that makes all the difference between one’s right to hold such a belief, and one’s unfitness to do so.
It seemed to me utterly satisfying that Paul should have chosen this job of his—hopelessly limited as it was by the who
le framework in which it functioned—rather than some profession whose prizes and successes were really only relevant to the world of Europe where a man did not start off with the immediate advantage of a white skin. The fact that he was so small and the thing he put himself against so enormous and tangled gave me a peculiar pride in my love for him.—It gave our relationship something of the quality that heightens the excitement of love during a war; I do not mean the quickened urge to mate in the threat of death, which you may feel whether or no you believe in the war, but the more complicated sense of the passionate integrity for what you both believe, in which your lover exists in the midst of the heedless crashing hostility that comes from both sides, sometimes his own as well as the enemy’s.
Of course, I could never express to Paul this concept of himself. He would have laughed it out of existence and have been exasperated with and even ashamed of me; he would not have said so, but I should have felt he was thinking again: the Mine, the Mine, showing itself in the excessive reaction from a life without a single real idea, to the extremes of romantic idealism. And I should have been conscious again of the dowdy unsuitability of the way I wore some of my convictions; like a woman accepted in fashionable circles who sometimes gives away her forgotten provincialism in her choice of hats.
But often, when I looked at Paul without his knowledge, a queer swelling excitement came up in the back of my throat, I wanted to grip tightly the arms of the chair I sat in: I had it all; there …
Most of the time Paul came home very late and very tired. Out of the official work of the Department had grown a whole extension of activity that almost doubled it; the impatience of people like Paul with the inadequacy, sometimes the total unsuitability, of what the Department offered the African townships made them try to supply something of what was missing, out of themselves. It was impossible, for anyone who saw the Africans as men and women with the same wants and hopes as anyone else, to be satisfied to hand out food or clothes or money to those who lacked the basic necessities, and ignore all those other nagging and endless and less easily satisfied needs that showed everywhere, in every street and every face. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no hope of change. The young boys kicking a stone along the gutter because they have no ball and know no game. The schoolteachers and young clerks borrowing books from the little library (a charity handout of the discarded books of white people) and reading in the paper of the plays they can never see, the concerts they can never hear.
Paul and a few other people in the Department helped with the organization of discussion groups, supplied a portable player and the loan of records for a music society; found journalists and lawyers and actors to go out to the bare solemn rooms at the Community Center to lecture. They commandeered bats and rackets from the cupboards of their friends to give some purpose to the one or two open pieces of ground that the Department listed on its reports under “Sports Facilities.” And they became expert at filling in applications for Departmental funds in such a way as to avoid their narrow stringency and stretch their validity to cover expenditure that was officially “beyond the Department’s scope.” “But I’ll wangle it somehow,” I have often heard Paul say, telling me of some scheme for which money or facilities were not available. He would narrow his eyes and lift his chin while he thought what lie, what approach, would be best. And though he laughed at his own craftiness that had developed so efficiently out of necessity, there was in his eyes at these times he afterward mocked a concentration of determination, blank, grim, that he did not see.
One Friday night early in January we were coming home from a Brains Trust which had been held in one of the native townships. Gathered in the hall there had been the usual small group of subdued, expectant people; the air of awkwardness about them coming from the lack of group consciousness, the unfamiliarity of identifying himself with anyone that marks the intellectual who lives in a backward society and is accustomed to being the lone, the self-excluded. The joy of finding themselves among their own kind could not come to them as spontaneously as it did to the dancers of jive who filled the hall on other nights. When I came in, I felt a pang of anxiousness for the meagerness, the curious tameness of the whole show—something that, I knew by now, inexplicably vitiates efforts of this nature just as it does those occasions of genteel patronage when white people distribute prizes and shake their heads over the charm of black babies, or the skill of black handiwork. Paul dashed across the stage (six chairs were set out behind a long table, there was a carafe and a glass at one end) and I thought in a burst of irritation, Christ, why do they have to treat him as if he were a city councilor deigning to be present—why can’t they give him the due of thinking him a man, like themselves.
But the people whom Paul had asked to sit on the “Trust” were black as well as white, all interesting speakers and all public personalities in one way or another, and when the discussions got started and the surface of the audience’s solemn attention was broken up by the pleasure of interest, a buzz of murmur or dissent, and often—for one or two of the speakers were really witty—by laughter, audience and speakers forgot themselves in one another, and in this perfectly natural relationship between human beings, the whole thing became a success. It was obvious, too, that Paul’s personality had a lot to do with this. Here, as always among people, he had the instinct of giving them what they wanted and then taking fresh stimulation from the giving. And then he had the advantage of being, in himself, as perfectly at ease with both Africans and Europeans as any white man could be in our time; he knew most of the audience, the individual foible or special point of view, and when opinions from the floor were called for, he could look out over the heads and bring in a response by resting his eyes in a knowing, smiling, challenging way on the very person who would be likely to have strong feelings on the subject under discussion. I watched him, sitting and listening to the speakers between the times when he would have to rise and sum up the “Trust’s” opinion; his mouth opening a little with a quick intake of breath now and then when some comment on or disagreement with what was being said almost moved him to interrupt, his body curled up like a spring, one leg over the other, elbow in the palm of the hand of the arm that was tightly across his chest, fingers of the other hand, that pushed against his cheek, twirling a strand of hair at his temple. Once he screwed up his eyes and looked out quickly over the heads at me with the abstracted following air of someone who feels the attention of another like a reminder. I had the queer moment of seeing him look at me for a second as it must be when he looked at a stranger; and then he winked, the purposefully lewd batting of an eyelid that he sometimes used in a very different situation.
So coming home in the car I felt, over the slight uneasy excitement that the thought of the morning, nearer now, claimed me (my parents had arrived back from Europe on Wednesday; I was going to spend my first week end with them), animated by flashes of the evening on the surface of my mind. I chattered about it; what this one had said, how that one could possibly hold such-and-such an opinion—but did not have much response from Paul. He leaned forward a little as he drove, with a silencing movement. It was only then that, quite taken up with my own talk, I felt he had not been listening, or rather had been resisting what I said.
“—What is it—?”
He frowned. And after a moment when we both listened, I not knowing for what: “It’s nothing. That ticking again. Must be something in the mechanism of the clock, that vibrates at a certain speed.” He settled back and after a short silence the dusty bright hall began to light up in my mind again. “It must be a hell of a surprise to a man like Carter Belham to find himself answering awkward questions on the methods of the press, to old Fube. And Fube was at him and at him, with his, I’d like to ask you further, and There’s just one more point. … Did you see. Once or twice Belham simply blustered. There just wasn’t anything he could say.” My voice sank into my thoughts. Carter Belham, the big, brandy-suave editor of one of the newspapers belonging to a powerful conse
rvative group, nipped into discomfiture by the dry voice of the native schoolteacher (the kind of “decent” scholarly African he was accustomed to pleasing by calling him “Mister”) asking if he could tell him if any directive was given to newspapermen reporting affairs affecting Africans?—The editor trying to turn the advantage to himself by putting on that air of good-natured helplessness which is intended to suggest the bulldog worried at by something small and sharp-toothed: the bulldog restrained in his very possession of his own invincible jaw. “I’ll bet he would never have come if he’d known it was going to be like that?”
But Paul seemed suddenly very tired and he let my talk drop. In a little while he said, out of silence: “Half of them weren’t there. Sipho and Fanyana and the others. The ones who count weren’t there.”
The Lying Days Page 31
