‘The bloody rand is such rubbish,’ she says. ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to afford another overseas trip.’
‘You’re telling me! It’s a catastrophe for my business. But Cuba is a case of now or never. Everything is changing now the Yanks are allowed back there again. A few years from now the entire island is going to be coast-to-coast Starbucks and McDonald’s.’
‘Are you speaking as a travel agent giving me professional advice, or as a friend who cares about me?’
‘Both,’ Nini answers promptly. ‘You know travel is the only thing you can spend your money on that will make you feel richer after you’ve spent it.’
‘That’s what you told Theo and me when we went on our first overseas trip together. And look where that got me.’
‘I thought you were just friends. How was I supposed to know you were going to jump into bed together the minute you were outside the country?’
‘I also thought we were just friends.’
‘It wasn’t me who talked you into going to Spain either. You know Theo always had this thing about Spain.’
‘I thought so, too, but now … now that I’ve found the letter … now I’m starting to think it was more about the language than about the country. In those days travelling to Cuba was out of the question – there was still a war on the border, we were fighting the Cubans – but we could go to Spain. And Theo tried really hard to learn Spanish. Remember?’
‘Alas, I do. He wasn’t terribly gifted. There was a block somewhere, as if his ear couldn’t hear the right sounds. Or his tongue couldn’t shape the words.’
He never really wanted to speak it, Theresa thinks. For the first time it dawns on her that he’d just wanted to be able to read ‘The Letter’.
When they first got to know each other as postgraduate students in Stellenbosch, his almost laughable effort to learn Spanish with the aid of correspondence courses and tapes and pictures on flash cards was just one more thing that made him different from the rest of their classmates. He was older than all of them, older and more serious. He already had a master’s degree in political science, had already started on the research for his PhD thesis, when he suddenly decided he didn’t want to be an academic, he wanted a ‘real job’, and then he registered for an honours degree in journalism.
She found him attractive from day one, but it wouldn’t have occurred to her to flirt with him. He was too aloof for that. Conceited, she initially thought, and most of their classmates would’ve agreed – a cold fish. Until they realised that he was merely socially awkward, a clever introvert whom it took a little extra effort to get to know.
He was thin and sinewy, with high cheekbones – Slavic or Russian, Theresa speculated, probably because she had read too many classic Russian novels – and his black hair always looked windblown even when there wasn’t even a breeze, possibly because he washed it regularly but never combed it, just shook his wet head the way a dog shakes its entire furry body to dry. His most striking physical characteristic were his eyes, exceptionally blue and accentuated by heavy black brows and lush eyelashes that made his face look androgynous, like the male rock stars of the time who wore eyeliner and make-up.
In Theo’s case any suggestion of androgyny began and ended with his face. Just his eyes, really. His clothes were as conventional as could be, typical male student-wear, jeans and tekkies and loose pullovers, nothing that would ever make him stand out in a crowd.
The first time they spoke to each other alone, after they’d already been classmates for about a month, was when she came across him unexpectedly in the botanical gardens one Saturday. On a bench under a tree, bent low over a book, so engrossed in his reading that he didn’t notice her until she stopped right in front of him casting a shadow on his feet.
‘Oh, hello.’ He looks a little annoyed, like someone who’s been shaken awake from a deep sleep.
‘Hi. I thought I was the only person I know who sometimes comes here to hide.’
‘Mierda. You’ve blown my cover.’
‘I won’t tell anyone. What are you reading?’
‘A dictionary.’
‘Ah! Words, words, words … My dad also reads dictionaries as a hobby. He’s a bit weird.’
‘Me too, I suppose. In my case they’re Spanish words.’
‘Do you speak Spanish?’ she asked, somewhat impressed.
‘No. That’s why I am studying the dictionary. I am trying to teach myself Spanish.’
‘Why?’
‘Why not? It’s a world language.’
‘Do you speak any African languages?’
‘Besides Afrikaans?’
‘I mean black African languages.’
‘Afrikaans also began as a black language. Although our lily-white leaders probably won’t want to hear that.’
‘What I actually mean, is … well, don’t you feel guilty about learning a European language when you can’t speak to the majority of the people in your own country in their own language?’
He tilts his head to scrutinise her. She is still standing right in front of him, her hands on her hips, her demeanour perhaps more challenging than intended.
‘No,’ he says. ‘And you?’
‘Hell, I feel guilty about everything!’
‘Calvinist upbringing, I presume?’
‘It’s that obvious?’ she laughs. ‘I’m supposed to be good at languages. Can understand a bit of German and French, but after two years of Xhosa lessons, I can barely remember three sentences. It’s the structure of the language that is foreign to me, the grammar, it just won’t sink in. I know, I’m a Eurocentric colonial and I should be ashamed of myself.’
‘I learned Sotho when I was small. In case that earns me any brownie points. But then, I learned it from the labourers on my grandfather’s farm, so no Struggle credentials, I guess.’
It is the first time she notices what a clear blue his eyes are, not icy blue and stern like her father’s eyes, kinder, more amused.
‘So why choose Spanish?’
‘Because Sotho isn’t going to help me read Cervantes or Gabriel García Márquez.’
‘Wow. You’re a lot more ambitious than I am. All I aim to do with my smattering of French and German is order a plate of food or a glass of wine if I ever get to Europe. To ask the way to the nearest station. When’s the next train. Nothing more than the bare necessities.’
‘Depends on what you consider the bare necessities.’
‘Definitely not reading Cervantes in Spanish.’ His exaggerated show of disappointment makes her chuckle. ‘A glass of wine for sure.’
‘Hmm. You may have a point. Do you feel like having a glass of wine right now?’
‘And interrupt your Spanish lesson?’
‘I suppose I can continue the lesson in a bar somewhere. I could teach you to order a glass of wine in Spanish?’
‘Now there’s an offer I can’t refuse.’
That was how Theresa and Theo became friends, through a Spanish lesson, over a glass of wine in a student pub.
‘Una copa de vino tinto, por favor,’ Theo said after checking his dictionary to confirm that this was how you ordered red wine.
His pronunciation was so bad that even Theresa could tell it was not what Spanish was supposed to sound like. Nevertheless, she asked: ‘And what about white wine?’
‘Prefiero el vino tinto al vino blanco.’ He preferred red wine to white, he said, but ordered vino blanco for her.
And how do you ask for another glass, she asked when her glass was empty.
‘Otra copa,’ Theo answered after a quick look in the dictionary.
‘You have a long way to go before you can read Cervantes,’ Theresa observed. And when the second glass had been gulped down, she suggested that they order a bottle.
‘Una botella de vino!’ Theo called out without even looking at the dictionary, as if two glasses of wine were all it took for him to speak Spanish with confidence.
The friendship blossomed over the next three y
ears, but remained just that – friendship. The slightest suggestion of physical attraction was denied or suppressed or laughed off, as if they knew instinctively that they wouldn’t be good for each other if they became romantically entangled.
Besides, they were both already involved with other people.
Theresa was dating Beer, a big blond commerce student who played guitar in a campus rock band. But because Beer was far more serious about his part-time guitar-playing than his full-time commerce studies, Theresa spent almost every weekend evening sitting by herself in a pub watching younger female students swoon over her boyfriend, who was caressing the guitar strings with his long fingers and moving his hips suggestively to the beat of the music. About once a month they had a screaming row – she accused him of narcissism and insensitivity; he accused her of being jealous and childish – and afterwards they were both so remorseful that they made passionate love. Which convinced them that they did in fact like each other a great deal – in bed, at any rate – and the following weekend Theresa was back in the pub, peevishly watching her boyfriend swing his arse like he was Bruce Springsteen.
Theo didn’t have a steady girlfriend; he had a series of catastrophic hit-and-run encounters with girls whose names Theresa could never remember because they clung to his arm so fleetingly and because they all seemed to be cut from the same cloth: small and slight, soft-spoken with helpless expressions, usually with dark hair and big dark eyes like Walt Disney’s Bambi.
Two things were soon clear: Theo was irresistibly attracted to a particular kind of female helplessness that aroused his protective instinct – and Theresa was the exact opposite of that kind of girl. She was tall and strong, with large hands and feet; she was independent and rebellious; and she absolutely hated feeling helpless.
But it didn’t matter, because Theo was not exactly the type of guy that set her own hormones astir. She was attracted to big blond Vikings like Beer, rather than slender Mediterranean-looking men with high cheekbones like Theo. Which meant that she and Theo could be really good friends, throughout their journalism year, and, subsequently, when they both went to work at the same Afrikaans daily in Cape Town, where they convinced each other that it was possible to work for a pro-government newspaper if you didn’t agree with the government, until after a year or two they realised that it wasn’t in fact possible to change this system from within and together decided to look for work elsewhere.
And they remained friends after she became a copywriter at a Cape Town advertising agency and he went to work for a Cape Town publisher. And after her relationship with the Viking ended because he packed away his guitar, started wearing ties, and accepted a job offer from an international firm in Johannesburg.
Even when Theo finally managed to date the same Bambi for longer than six months, Theresa successfully refrained from criticising his choice of bedmate and they remained the best of friends. Just friends. Nothing more than friends.
‘Every girl needs a good male friend,’ she explained to her sister, who was baffled by what was going on.
Sandra was in fact more Theo’s kind of girl, small and sweet-tempered and defenceless, but Sandra had been with Anton since their student days and wouldn’t even look at other men.
As if she were afraid she might see something she liked better than what she had, Theresa sometimes speculated.
‘I thought that’s what gay men were for,’ Sandra said. ‘Having a gay best friend is fantastic, but if he’s straight … I don’t know … Once sex rears its ugly head …’
‘You’re referring to the male sex organ, I presume?’ Sandra’s look of embarrassment made Theresa snort. ‘I’ll take my chances. I need male company. I’m crazy about my girlfriends, but they don’t challenge me. I know how their minds work, we play on the same team. Theo is something completely different. He is the brother I always wanted.’
‘But you already have a brother.’
‘Oh, come on, Sandra, you know perfectly well Jacques and I can barely exchange three sentences. We inhabit different worlds. With Theo I can talk about things that really matter to me, about books and movies and politics and philosophy. We’re on the same wavelength.’
Sandra just shook her head and smiled. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you, hey?’
Words that would come back to haunt her.
Because one evening, after three years of friendship, Theo convinced her to join him on a trip to Spain. As a stand-in for the umpteenth Bambi who’d been scheduled to make the trip – her flights and accommodation were already booked, but then Theo and Bambi started fighting shortly before the departure date and decided it would be best if they parted ways. And then of course Theo thought, Hey, if Theresa came along she would finally get to order a glass of wine in Spanish.
‘Una copa de vino blanco, por favor,’ Theresa agreed with a laugh.
Funny how such life-changing decisions are taken on the spur of the moment, she would reflect later and often. Chuckling over a glass of wine. Because how can you tell at that moment that it’s one of the most important decisions you will ever make. It’s only looking back years later that you recognise that a different decision right at that moment would have changed everything.
Or perhaps not.
‘If not in Spain, we would probably have ended up in bed together someplace else,’ she tells Nini on the phone. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars …” Can you tell me exactly what it says in the letter?’
5. CROCHET DOILIES
It’s the same flat in the same tree-lined street in Sunnyside, but nothing is the same any more. Theresa realises this the minute the Uber pulls up outside the building and she notices the Zimbabwean driver’s puzzled expression. He looks far from convinced that this is the kind of address a white middle-aged woman with American designer sunglasses and a French designer handbag would want to visit.
She gets out of the car and thanks him with a reassuring smile, but he nevertheless waits in his silver-grey Toyota while she walks up to the building and presses the intercom button at the front entrance. The glass door is cracked and the small round indentation at the centre of the radiating cracks looks as if it was made by a bullet. Can’t be. What does she know about bullet holes or bulletproof glass anyway, except what she’s seen in movies? She waits for the door to open, uneasily aware that she is the only white person in sight among the pedestrians and loiterers and pavement vendors all around her. There’s a primary school across the street, with a playground full of squealing, shrieking children in school uniform and not a single little white face among them.
When her former mother-in-law first moved here in the early eighties after her husband died, it was a fairly impressive block of flats in a somewhat bohemian but nonetheless respectable neighbourhood close to Pretoria’s city centre. Excellent value for a miserly widow’s money. Theresa recalls that the interior of Elize van Velden’s flat was unusually spacious, spread out over two floors – a duplex, as Elize always referred to it, never just a flat – with large windows admitting plenty of natural light and a sunny balcony turned into a lush green, plant-filled sanctuary.
She presses the intercom button again, uncertain if it’s still working, grateful to the patient Zimbabwean driver still waiting in the Uber. Just when she reaches in her bag for her cellphone to try and call, the door clicks open and two young black men walk out, laughing. She quickly slips through the door with a wave to her Zimbabwean guardian angel in the street. The tiled floor feels sticky under her feet. There’s an empty Coke tin and the flat cardboard box of a takeaway pizza lying in a corner near the lift. And the lift is Out of Order, according to a handwritten notice that’s been slapped onto the door.
Theresa starts climbing the stairs to the fifth floor with a heavy heart. How on earth does a widow in her eighties survive on the fifth floor of a dilapidated building with no lift? She pauses on a landing, not only to catch her breath, but also to summon up courage, because heaven knows this meeting after so many years feels
like a trial. And now that she’s become aware of her former mother-in-law’s straitened circumstances, the temptation to turn around and get the hell out of here is almost irresistible.
But she carries on climbing the stairs to the fifth floor, then walks down the long corridor to Elize van Velden’s flat. When she raises her hand to ring the doorbell, the door swings open and she comes face to face with an old woman, grossly overweight and leaning heavily on a walking frame. The presence of the walking frame makes the absence of a lift seem even more shocking.
While she was making her way up the stairs, this woman must have shuffled from one end of the flat, painfully slowly and with the help of the walking frame, to reach the front door in time. Theresa suddenly feels a lump in her throat, even though she can discern no friendliness in her former mother-in-law’s tiny black eyes. It’s not that her eyes have become smaller, it’s that her face is so swollen with obesity that her eyes look Japanese. The sparse hairs on her head are dyed the same yellowish blonde as before, but on either side of a somewhat crooked centre parting two wide strips of grey have grown out. The overall impression is of a parched yellow lawn of which a section in the middle has been treated with weed killer.
Theresa hesitates in the doorway because she doesn’t know how to greet this former relation by marriage. A kiss on the puckered mouth is out of the question, a European cheek kiss would seem affected, a hug excessive and false – and the walking frame hinders all intimate physical contact anyway.
The problem is solved when Elize simply nods and turns around and starts shuffling back to the sitting room.
‘Close the door before the noise and the stench get inside,’ she barks over her shoulder. ‘As you can see, it has turned into a township around here.’
Theresa watches the old woman inch towards the couch, one small step at a time, grunting. The lump in her throat is gone. If she had hoped that the New South Africa would take the edge off some of her former mother-in-law’s prickly racism, she’d apparently been mistaken.
The fact that the once-proud Widow van Velden has become trapped against her will in a formerly white neighbourhood that has become blacker and poorer right before her disbelieving eyes – a prisoner in a walking frame on the fifth floor of a building with a broken lift, all her black neighbours so far outside her frame of reference that there is no way she would ever want to befriend them – this entire situation suddenly strikes Theresa as an absurd form of punishment.
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