October

by Zoe Wicomb

  Beg your pardon, hen, I’m Scottish, he interrupted.

  Well, just because you’re a tourist, doesn’t mean that you have to eat burgers and chips at McDonald’s, and swill beer at the Irish pub. There’s plenty of scope to be different.

  Good old considerate Craig had forgotten that she was the one with a full-time job, the one exhausted by teaching and the pressures of publishing, who needed a break. No wonder her tone was sneering. The next day she wheedled, Oh come on, Craig, I’ll die if I have to wait for a sun that may or may not show up. We’ve been to the Solway, now I need to get away, farther away.

  What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you stay put, enjoy leisure without thrashing about in airports? Are you not getting too old for this wanderlust? You know that banging on about sunshine is an excuse. You just want to be on the move, get to as many places as possible. Tick them off. Conspicuous consumption of space, eh?

  Mercia laughed, let it go. Except she would insist on the sunshine. It is the case, she said, that black people need more sunlight, that here in Scotland the expats—oops, I should say immigrants—are developing rickets.

  Craig picked up his guitar and started humming to a poor execution of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Mercia knew that if she arranged everything, every detail, paid for the flights, he would succumb. Which swung it. So, why did she not go on her own? That, she decides, is an unreasonable question. And why, after all those years, twenty-four to be precise, did they have separate bank accounts? Neither of them wanted to be married; the apartment was bought in both their names, but why the pitiful calculations for a kitty as prices fluctuated, the counting of pennies like students in a rented house? Yes, that was what they examined—bills and receipts, rather than their lives.

  When they first moved in together Craig said that as a feminist she would want to keep separate finances. Then they would not, like children, have to ask each other for permission to buy anything, he said, as she demurred. For Mercia there was no question of not being independent. Now it seemed absurd, an overvaluing of money, and bugger all to do with independence, equality, or feminism. Why would common finances involve her asking for permission to spend? Surely as responsible adults they could have trusted each other, even indulged each other. As it became clear that Mercia would earn more in her senior position at the university, the issue of finances was not revisited. Perhaps it would not have been possible for Craig, the poet with a part-time post, to raise it.

  Now Mercia winces at the vulgarity of waiting a year until Craig could manage to overhaul the heating system, afford his share of an expensive new boiler and radiators, and she blushes at the arrangement of contributing 65 percent to the gas bill since it was she who wanted heating during the summer evenings. How did they arrive at the figure? Did neither of them notice that instead of simplifying their lives, separate finances brought endless dreary consultations and calculations? How, she wonders, could a relationship survive such tedious, such shameful arithmetic? Neither of them was after all a spendthrift or a gambler. How much simpler, more civilized, it would have been to throw all money into the same pot and help themselves as and when the need arose.

  Mercia did not choose Lanzarote. Rather, it was the fact of a direct flight as well as the reduced cost of apartments in a fishing village some distance from the designated resorts that decided their destination. There was no time to do any other homework on the island, so that they were both delightfully surprised at the beauty of the place. For all the island’s inhospitable volcanic heritage, Father Culture was kept well in check, forced to doff his hat respectfully at Mother Nature. Surely the Lanzarotian architect and artist César Manrique should be proclaimed an international icon, should have been a Nobel laureate, Craig enthused, for managing tourism so strictly and sensibly, for the architectural restrictions he imposed, and above all for his aesthetic development of natural phenomena and disused structures. Why has the rest of the world not followed suit?

  They lounged and basked under a moderate sun and argued companionably about the merits and demerits of stifled individualism. Craig was emphatic. If people are allowed to paint their houses in their chosen colors, with no regard for the collective appearance, you should expect the triumphant ugliness of English streets. At least in Glasgow there was uniformity in tenement colors. Aesthetically pleasing, the black window surrounds and woodwork against blond or pink sandstone. But look at your country, he said. It’s criminal, the lovely coastline wrecked by rich people with no taste, who have the freedom to design and build monstrous houses with no regard for the collective outlook. Is there no town planning? Are there no architects in South Africa?

  Ah, but there are strict regulations for RDP housing for the poor, plenty of sad uniformity there, Mercia said.

  It was true that on the island the uniform white of the houses with their green paintwork inland, or blue at the seaside, was lovely, and that adherence to traditional low-rise buildings made for picturesque towns. Three cheers for Manrique, Craig called, and filled their glasses with exuberant bubbles of a bargain Veuve Clicquot that he had bought at the airport. She had fortunately stopped herself in time from asking whether he could afford it.

  We drink too much, Mercia said, but Craig said no, they didn’t drink enough, that another bottle was better than following the awful middle-aged trend of giving up alcohol for health reasons. Imagine being teetotal in order to extend impoverished drink-free lives. Mercia reached out for his hand; she couldn’t have agreed more. They would siesta on the private balcony. The Mirador del Río could wait for another day.

  It was then she asked, In Scotland, does the word yes count as a greeting? Or is that just used in Glasgow? I don’t remember coming cross it in the south.

  What do you mean? Where are you greeted with yes?

  In public places—shops, restaurants, libraries, dentists’. The person at reception, often a woman, will ask in a rising tone, which is to say a puzzled tone, or even something of a bark, Yes? As if you had stumbled into the wrong place. And that before you’ve got round to saying anything. Perhaps it’s not said to men?

  Well, I can’t say I’ve ever heard it. Could it not be a friendly tone? Perhaps it’s your paranoia—you really should watch yourself, not watch out for the imaginary slight.

  In some ways they might as well have gone home to the Cape. Mercia was surprised by the familiarity of the island, the wide plains of dry earth and sparse growth. Apart from black volcanic rock and the black dust through which determined flora burrowed its way out, the place was uncannily like that of her childhood. Good old Kliprand, she exclaimed. But no, distinctly more lush: fields of prickly pear for the cultivation of cochineal; ghanna bush hardly recognizable with plump parcels of rolled-up leaves; and gray old Jan Twakkie sprayed green, with branches tapering into elegant fingers of yellow flower, but familiar all the same in the way that prosperous relatives are familiar. Mercia had a vision of her entire extended family appearing on the horizon, scrambling over black rock: Murrays and Malherbes of the malpaíses. There’s no escaping us, they chanted in chorus.

  Craig nodded sympathetically; he had after all met some of that weird clan. Well, we are so close to Africa, only a hop and a skip away. The Canaries must have been used to ships from the Cape popping in for a bite to eat and drink, he said. Bet the islands had a reputation for being hospitable. That’s what seafarers would have needed them to be, even as the natives turned their backs and clung for dear life to their fruit and veg. Pretty Polly, pretty Polly, he twittered, such hospitable canaries.

  Actually, Camões has many stories of treacherous natives who thought nothing of plotting death for their visitors.

  Ah, but did they show hostility, or did they smile treacherously, was his riposte.

  Mercia remembered that Craig did not like being corrected by her. There surely is a difference between canaries and parrots? he asked.

  Dunno, she said. She hoped they would not argue about parrots.

  See, h
e said, stabbing at the map, here in the south it’s called Papagayo, that’s parrot. A Papagayo beach for nudists and French writers.

  Craig had found in a cupboard a raunchy French novel about Lanzarote with which he had struggled for a few hours. She pretended to have dozed off.

  Mercia wandered off, impatient with Craig’s enduring desire for sitting in cafés, drinking coffee. Actually, they argued about coffee. She thought she had gone off it—another sign of aging—never again would she touch coffee, but Craig said that such physical responses should be resisted, that the pleasure of sitting in cafés was more than the enjoyment of the drink. Mercia could see no sense in that.

  The malpaíses, arid wastelands of volcanic lava, a moonscape of broken rock hosting nothing other than dry lichen, stretched ahead as far as the eye could see. The smooth curves of volcanic mountains in the distance seemed to disown the jagged terrain they had once upon a time spewed up. A long way below an icy blue Atlantic thrashed against black rock, the same stuff that the elegant Mirador was crafted from, and Mercia, shivering on a promontory, buttoned up her inadequate jacket and clutched at her lapels. In spite of the cold these badlands were strangely familiar. The windswept malpaíses felt uncannily like home. Gazing down at a series of socos, semicircular windbreaks built of volcanic stone where farmers coaxed who-knows-what into growth, mollycoddled against the wind, Mercia’s eyes watered. Was it self-pity for the child who escaped from the sand-scouring easterly wind, who hid behind a thornbush, telling herself tales in which Nettie was cast as the wicked stepmother? The icy wind batted her between past and present.

  How to keep ice out of the heart! No dead metaphor, that. Like the newly arrived arthritis that gnawed at her wrists, there was a clenching sensation, a ripple of pain through what she imagined to be her heart, presaging this very day, the now of picking over Craig’s departure, looking back across volcanic runes, where scabs of lichen spelled out a future. How could the islanders take comfort in the outcrops of lichen? According to the brochure those scabs of barely live organisms promised, simply by being, by tenaciously surviving, to break down through eons of time the rough crust of volcanic lava into crumbly earth where life will one day, once again, take root. Some distant day, it promised, ghanna and Jan Twakkie and prickly pear will triumph, and transform that wasteland. Flooded inexplicably with the misery of the badlands, Mercia shook her head in disbelief. She was no artist, no poet like Craig who could imagine such a time. She rushed off to the next venue, Manrique’s house, where he had captured forever the flow of black lava. There it appeared to spill over a window ledge, lured into culture’s space of pristine white paint, and remain suspended in a building called home.

  An indefatigable tourist you, that’s what you are, Craig said the following day, playfully tugging at the cord of her trousers. Why not stay put today, lie on the beach, drink minty mojitos in the sun?

  But no, Mercia needed to press on, tick off Manrique’s architectural sites that simply had to be visited. Craig flicked through the brochure.

  Jardín de Cactus? Nope, he said, that’s where I draw the line. Being conscientious is not my thing. I’ve seen enough cacti without even looking, and what’s more, I happen to know that you bloody hate cacti too, so what’s with the spending good euros on a garden full of the vicious stuff?

  Mercia went alone, driving fearfully, gingerly, on the wrong side of the road. Craig was the driver, that was the deal he’d so casually reneged on, but she’d be the last person to mention it. Besides, the garden was worth the troubled drive. An old quarry at Guatiza had been transformed into an exquisite circular structure, an amphitheater with terraces of cacti from all over the world. Once again she admired the now familiar use of volcanic rock crafted into a pattern of crazy paving, paths that wound dangerously around the tiers in defiance of health and safety rules.

  In that warm, sunken space, protected against Atlantic winds, large mammillaria of thorn and robotic limbs of vicious prickles stood starkly against the blue sky. Here Mercia found, as she knew she would, the species from home. Euphorbias from Transvaal, quaintly labeled in the old geographic names of the trekkerboer, and the very melkbos from Kliprand—here sporting fleshy flowers—turned out to be another type of euphorbia. She thrilled at seeing the name given by Portuguese seafarers: Cabo de Buena Esperanza. Her own Cape of Good Hope, words printed on the municipal exercise books and rulers of her childhood. How often she derided that childhood. Yet, she could not but savor the memory of a little girl riding on her father’s shoulders as he taught her the homely names of plants.

  Mercia thought of the Swiss mercenaries who in bygone days, hearing the sound of cowbells, fell ill to the new name of nostalgia and languished for home. Was she here in the Jardín de Cactus being pricked into Heimweh? Was there no telling the difference between Fernweh and Heimweh? Did the former lead to the latter? Only a small matter then of shifting prepositions? Was there no choosing between the contradictions of longing for and longing to be away from home?

  Pull yourself together, girl! she admonished. Mercia had to remind herself that she preferred the lush flora of the Northern Hemisphere. Could Kliprand be aestheticized like this volcanic quarry? She feared not.

  On her return, Craig was not to be found reading his book on the balcony, with lunch prepared, as they had earlier arranged. There was no note. For a moment panic struck as she swiftly checked the bathroom and kitchen, and foolish tears threatened. Something ominous had happened. Had Craig left? packed his bag and gone? But no, his bag was there. Mercia took a deep breath. No doubt he had wandered to the beach for a swim. She splashed her face in cold water, grabbed her swimsuit, and walked down briskly to find Craig just emerging from the sea.

  You’d better not go in, he said, as he offered his pale lean back for the rubbing in of sunscreen. A notice has just gone up, and he pointed to the board. Medusa has arrived, so swimming is not recommended today. He mimed the waving of jellyfish tentacles. Anyway, it’s lunchtime. I thought we’d have tapas here at the café. My treat, he grinned.

  And I’ll see if I can find you a Daily Record and flat Scottish beer, Mercia said. Was he not going to ask about her driving?

  Funny how Craig did not seem to hate that kind of holiday after all, seemed to take to lounging about in the sun like a duck to water. So that it came as a shock when on the fourth night he said he had had enough. Even of Manrique. That Mercia should excuse him from further sightseeing. He stayed at the apartment with his laptop, writing or sulking on the balcony in the sun.

  Mercia found that driving on the wrong side of the road was not as terrifying after all. Dinners in the evenings were civil, even pleasant, since she was determined not to admit defeat. There was no question of probing. Craig had surely already met the new woman. Had he been pining for her? Mercia had always thought that she would know instinctively if Craig were to be unfaithful; she is ashamed of having had no idea.

  Mercia thinks she should forgive herself the cowardice. She must have sensed that their days were numbered, that probing would hasten the end. Now, driving along the deserted national road to Cape Town, burdened with knowledge that she would not like to pass on to anyone, she feels something lift, feels relief that Craig has gone, that he has found someone else, left, departed, dumped her—whatever. Wincing at the thought of her abject questions, Mercia is grateful that he refused to supply any details of the new relationship. He was right: she is better off not knowing, and thus not having any basis on which to imagine his new life. Now that she is freed from telling him about Nicholas, Craig can surely no longer be mourned.

  Here, approaching the city, with a garishly lit Table Mountain growing closer and the cool coastal breeze in her hair, the briny air brings a strange calmness. Mercia notes that she is speeding. She takes her foot off the accelerator.

  Much as Mercia would like to discuss Nicky with her dear friend Bella, who after all has raised three children, she is relieved that Bella is still visiting her own family in Por
t Elizabeth. They both arranged to return at the beginning of the following week, but fortunately Mercia has keys and may come and go as she pleases. And fortunately she left a suitcase at Bella’s. She has not brought back her bag from Kliprand, does in any case not want to wear the clothes tarred with the nastiness of uncovered history.

  Mercia is just in time to pick up bread and coffee at the 7-Eleven store. Funny how she has returned to coffee since Craig has left. She looks forward to a bath, imagines the effluvium of shame taking form as a grimy ring left on white enamel. Mercia hopes to hole up for the weekend, or rather, settle in the shade of the garden with the problematic chapter of her book. She expects it to be a struggle, but away from Kliprand she might well return to writing. It would be good if Bella could look over that chapter. Bella is a social scientist who is amused that after all these years Mercia still writes about South Africa. They have been reading each other’s work ever since their student days, and Mercia’s absence leaves her more in need than ever of her friend’s local take on home affairs.

  The alarm system bleeps as she opens Bella’s front door, and then her mind goes blank. Damn, she can’t remember the numerical code, the bloody code she used only a few days ago. Now there is the usual drama of the security company arriving, the usual absence of neighbors too fearful to investigate the blaring alarm but peering through the blinds all the same. Fortunately Mercia remembers the code name to cite to the uniformed security guard who arrives armed to the teeth, a name that will legitimize her entry. As it happens, she was there visiting when Bella moved into the house and had the alarm installed.

  Let’s have Cedric Visagie as the code name, and together they laughed, remembering the handsome, charismatic young man from their student days who had had the audacity to date them simultaneously. He had fabricated for each a story about having to keep their relationship secret, something to do with his role in what they inferred to be MK, and the young women, feeling the thrill and privilege of their brush with the armed wing of the revolutionary movement, were eager to comply. Although not bosom friends at that stage, they had rooms in the same student house, each conducting her secret relationship. Until Mercia grew suspicious. She thought that she had seen Visagie’s car drive slowly past the house just as Bella came in and babbled about being out with a cousin at a new club in Woodstock. Fabulous new band, she said. Mercia should come along some time.