Borderline

by Marita van der Vyver

  When he gets out of the car along with her and Oreste and starts walking with them, she looks at him enquiringly.

  ‘If I come with you to knock on doors,’ he shrugs, ‘we maybe make progress a little faster.’

  Theresa nods gratefully, then drops her eyes to her feet in their comfortable flat sandals. ‘We’, he’d said. That single word moves her so, she doesn’t dare look at him or his smiling nephew right now, so she keeps staring at her toes.

  By lunchtime, those same feet are terribly tired from walking. It’s a relief to collapse into a plastic chair in a parador and quickly get some food inside her. She’d pleaded with her two companions to spare her one of the government’s official tourist restaurants – Nini had warned her that the service was as slow and indifferent as in any state institution – and Oreste had said right away that he and his uncle couldn’t afford the state’s restaurants anyway.

  ‘It is where we take tour groups that do not know any better.’ Oreste smiles sheepishly and quickly adds: ‘Also because private restaurants like this one are not allowed to serve more than twelve people at one table.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Ours is not to wonder why,’ Ruben says. ‘But the food in a parador is always better. The same ingredients – we do not have much choices – but made with love and, ah, imagination.’

  She watches him tuck into his empanadas. It’s the first time since they met the day before that his rare smile hasn’t vanished in an instant. Such an unusually large man must surely have an unusually large appetite. She wonders if he will cook tomorrow night’s dinner himself, or whether he lives with a woman who will make the food. You have dinner at my house, he’d said, not at our house. Although it was probably the notorious Latin American chauvinism that had been behind those words. He would be the boss of the house; even if he did live with a woman, it would still be his house. But of course that doesn’t mean that he might not also be a competent cook. After all, the Afrikaans men among whom she grew up had been just as notorious for their aggressive chauvinism – all those fathers and uncles who found it so easy to clench their fists and so hard to cry. And these days nearly all her male friends are capable cooks – several of them considerably more skilled than her.

  At times she fears that she might end up as the last woman in her circle of friends who lacks enough interest in food to ever become a good cook. In her student days none of her friends had been stars in the kitchen – not even her housemate who studied home economics – but the past two decades have produced so many sexy cookbooks and seductive food programmes on TV that just about everyone has become a decent cook. And, who knows, if she hadn’t been a loner for the past twenty years, if she’d had to constantly feed a husband or children, she might also have turned her limited culinary gifts to advantage.

  Fortunately, that hasn’t been necessary. There are other things she can do. She can read more books than all her formidable foodie friends combined, and that is consolation enough whenever she feels guilty that no one will ever nominate her as hostess of the year.

  She takes another greedy bite of her empanadas – simple meat-filled pastries that remind her of Italian calzones – and realises she is hungrier than she’d thought. The morning’s constant walking has stimulated her appetite, the dozens of doors they knocked on, the smells of food being prepared behind those doors. She even devours a ‘typical Cuban salad’, which looks surprisingly like her late mother’s typically unimaginative Afrikaans salad. A few iceberg lettuce leaves, a few slices of tomato, some onion rings. Except that her mother always drowned the leaves in a too-sweet mayonnaise dressing, or her father and her brother would have flatly refused to eat the ‘rabbit food’. The very same brother who these days dines on sophisticated salads in trendy Australian restaurants. The mere thought makes her nostalgic for the salads she grew up with.

  The eatery where she finds herself seated now, near the monastery of Nuestra Señora de Belén, couldn’t possibly be described as ‘trendy’. A cramped room with blue walls and a few plastic tables, with colourful plastic tablecloths, right up against the street, a row of luxuriant green pot plants in tins and buckets serving as a kind of partition between customers and the street, and a counter from behind which a scrawny grey-haired woman with droopy breasts under a sleeveless vest watches them, grinning. Apparently the grandmother of the family who runs the place. The mother and father are busy in the kitchen at the back, the son or son-in-law and daughter or daughter-in-law serve the food, while grandma keeps an eye on the cash register to see that no one leaves without paying. Or so Theresa speculates under the grandmother’s watchful grin.

  The morning’s knocking on doors produced a few scraps of information, sparks of light in the dark, although they found nothing that could lead them to the soldier’s daughter. No phone number or contact address. Just the sense, which kept growing stronger, that Angel’s wife and daughter were no longer living in Havana. That the wife might already be dead. And that the daughter vanished after she finished school.

  What Theresa recalls about the morning as she eats her lunch is a confusion of smells and colours and sounds.

  Aside from the overpowering food smells, especially of fried chicken and fish, boiled beans and rice – apparently staple foods in this country – she remembers the background smells of cigars and sewage and sweaty bodies in stuffy rooms and cat piss in tiny courtyards tucked between overcrowded homes. Which once again reminds her of how privileged her own existence in her own country always has been and probably always will remain. It has never been necessary for her to live with too many people in too little space. She has lived entirely on her own in her own cottage for almost a decade, while millions of her fellow citizens were huddled together like chickens in battery cages.

  The sounds that stay with her are above all those coming from TV sets everywhere, of Latin American soap operas being watched by women on sagging couches. And although she couldn’t understand a scrap of dialogue, it nevertheless reminded her of the most popular Afrikaans soapies. The histrionic performances and the theatrical pauses and the rousing theme tunes. In some homes she heard fragments of what she would designate ‘Cuban music’, Compay Segundo’s famous ‘Guantanamera’ and others belonging to that genre, but it was for the most part generic modern pop music blaring from radios. Along with toddlers squealing, mothers scolding, young women calling to each other from balconies while they were hanging up the washing, old women cackling with laughter.

  And colours wherever you looked.

  Yellow walls and blue doors and light-green window shutters, red couches and purple or pink plastic flowers, the women’s brightly coloured dresses, the men’s multicoloured shirts. Even skin tones came in a multitude of shades. She is used to different skin colours – after all, she comes from a multiracial country – but she has never seen such variety together in a single building or even a single apartment. From ghostly pale to rosy pink to coal black with a blue sheen, all woven into the rich Cuban tapestry. Surely this is what a real ‘rainbow nation’ is supposed to look like?

  ‘After lunch we start the next street block,’ Oreste says. ‘Are you ready for it?’

  She nods and wipes her mouth with a paper serviette. Perhaps this next round will produce a more useful snippet of information. A phone number, a place of work, a home address. In the meantime, she is grateful for the flickers of light that shone on Angel Perez Gonzalez’s life this morning. No more than sparks from a fire on a pitch-dark night. But it was something.

  The afternoon produces nothing new. Just more colours and smells, more noise and more faces, phrases she snatches at here and there like pieces of a puzzle. Although her certainty is growing that it is a puzzle she would never be able to complete. There are too few pieces and too many gaps.

  In the back seat of the convertible on the way back to her hotel, she begins to accept that no ‘family’ called Perez Gonzalez ever lived in that apartment. A few of the oldest neighbours remembered a pre
gnant woman, very young, more child than woman, really, but no one remembered the soldier.

  ‘Her name was Luisá,’ a tiny black woman with sharp little eyes said. ‘Lovely young girl.’

  Other former neighbours confirmed this information – both the woman’s name and her beauty.

  ‘A name starting with L …’

  ‘Luisá! Yes!’

  ‘Luisá Amat … what was her second surname again? Also something starting with “L”?’

  ‘Can’t remember her name,’ a fat sweating man admitted with a roguish grin, ‘but I remember how beautiful she was.’

  ‘Her hair was always perfectly done,’ his neighbour added admiringly. ‘Like the hair of a movie star.’

  ‘Yes, there was a soldier somewhere in the picture,’ another woman with masses of wrinkles framed by dyed blonde hair confirmed after some reflection. ‘She was a war widow who raised her daughter on her own.’

  ‘She was no widow,’ the woman’s sister said. The same lined face, like creased linen, only with steel-grey hair. ‘They were never married.’ With a spiteful twist of her thin lips, she added: ‘And she always kept herself aloof from her neighbours. As if she and her daughter were too good for the rest of us in the street.’

  The blonde sister clicked her tongue impatiently. (Oreste was only translating the broad strokes of this conversation under his breath; the rest Theresa had to deduce from their body language. It wasn’t hard.) ‘She was always friendly when you greeted her. She didn’t have time for idle chatter or gossip. Unlike some of us.’ The blonde sister shot the grey one a meaningful look. ‘She had to work hard to raise that daughter by herself.’

  ‘Not always by herself either.’ The grey-haired woman pursed her lips even harder. ‘For a while there was a man living in that apartment too. After the soldier died. Maybe more than one man. Women who looked like her never had to get on by themselves for very long.’

  Yes, an elderly man in a building across the street told Ruben, a beautiful woman had lived here with her daughter. In the early nineties they disappeared.

  No one knew where they went.

  ‘The child was clever,’ someone remembered. ‘She probably went on to study after school.’

  ‘And perhaps the mother went back to where she grew up? Somewhere in the east of the country. She had no family in Havana.’

  And right now that is everything she knows, Theresa realises as they drive along the Malecón, to their right the sea glittering in the late afternoon light. It may be all she will ever know. The mother vanished; the daughter vanished. The father had vanished such a long time ago that no one remembered him. How sad to die so young that your tiny portion of existence didn’t even leave a dent in other people’s lives. The thought fills her with the kind of despair she is going to have to drown in another cocktail tonight.

  As if he has read her thoughts, her young guide turns towards her and asks if she was certain she didn’t want to go somewhere for dinner tonight. Perhaps listen to a live performance of some Cuban music? Remember, he was at her service; he could accompany her anywhere she wanted to go.

  ‘Thank you, Oreste, but I’ll just have a sandwich at the hotel. All this walking and knocking on doors has worn me out.’

  ‘I know that you are not what we call ordinary tourist, Theresa,’ Oreste says with an unexpectedly serious look on his face. ‘You are looking for something different from the other people who come here. But it is not a crime to enjoy your stay, you know?’

  ‘I know. You’re sounding like Nini now.’

  ‘We make sure you enjoy tomorrow night,’ Ruben says when he pulls up outside the hotel. ‘Whether you want to or not. It is our, uh, patriotic duty.’

  His wry smile surprises her even more than his nephew’s unexpected gravity.

  Venturing into the maze of corridors in the hotel, she finds her room for the first time without getting lost. It makes her feel immoderately proud, and hopeful all over again. As if she is not yet too old to learn, as if her life could still change.

  10. BEECHIES, BRUT, AND BOEREWORS

  She drinks another mojito on the hotel veranda while gazing out over the twilit sea. Strange how quickly one invents one’s own little rituals to feel at home in a strange place. A tall glass with rum and mint leaves and slices of lime and lots of ice seems to do it for her on this island.

  As with the night before, her thoughts run to the cocktails of her teenage years, but this time there are other images that keep inserting themselves over the pictures of her idyllic memories of youth. Dense vegetation and armoured cars and young men in the tattered remnants of faded green uniforms. While she and Lynette flirted with three rich kids from Cape Town’s southern suburbs during that summer holiday in Stilbaai, Theo was trapped in Angola, in a war that was utterly unimaginable to her back then.

  A war she is still struggling to imagine after all these years.

  She wonders if Brandon and Bob and Leonard also ended up on the border eventually. Perhaps they could lay claim to British or European passports; perhaps they managed to get out of the country. Perhaps their parents didn’t deem it necessary for them to perform this ‘patriotic duty’ which was so important to most Afrikaans parents. Leonard had hoped to be selected for the navy rather than the army, she vaguely remembers him saying one night in the small tent behind the Seemeeu.

  ‘It’s what my brother hopes for too,’ she had told him, ‘or otherwise the air force. Anything to avoid wearing that ugly brown uniform with the floppy brown hat.’

  Leonard’s lean profile had been illuminated only by the moon and the glowing coal at the end of his cigarette. Even in army browns he would have looked good. You can’t argue with beauty. In a white or black navy uniform he would have been absolutely irresistible.

  ‘I think I have a good shot at the navy. I grew up on the coast and I’ve been sailing with my dad since I was small.’

  Something Theresa’s brother with his small-town teacher-father of course couldn’t claim.

  She had taken a drag of Leonard’s cigarette, mostly so that it would be finished sooner and he could kiss her again. His mouth had smelt of Camel and beer and Beechies, his hair of seawater, his body of Brut and something else, a scent she didn’t know. Perhaps that was what masculinity smelt like, she had thought. She couldn’t wait to get to know it more intimately.

  But before they could get back to kissing, Lynette had crawled inside the tent with Brandon and Bob hot on her heels, just about panting with lust. The devious Lynette had somehow managed to twist both Brandon and Bob around her little finger (and around other parts of her body too). She kept playing them off against each other so they remained on tenterhooks about whom she would choose.

  Expecting the two rivals to come to blows any minute, Theresa had warned Lynette that she was playing a dangerous game. ‘Why do you have to string them both along? Choose one and be done with it.’

  Lynette had widened her eyes in a show of innocence and raised the hand with blue nails to her lips to draw on a cigarette seductively. ‘Why do I have to choose? Brandon is good-looking. Bob is funny. I like them both.’

  Why do I have to choose? Years later, when Theresa had watched the French cult movie Jules et Jim, Jeanne Moreau’s character had reminded her of Lynette. Her teenage friend had in fact been astonishingly open-minded for an Afrikaans girl from Pretoria. In the seventies.

  But the three filthy rich rooinekke – as Theresa’s brother had called them, with equal parts scorn and envy – had given no sign of political awareness.

  Lynette’s brother Waldie said nothing, just glared when Jacques teased them this way. Waldie and Jacques were both seventeen, about to embark on their final year at school, but while Jacques was clever and popular and athletic, had already been elected head boy for the year ahead – the kind of son any father would be proud of – Waldie was clearly an embarrassment to his ambitious father. He struggled at school, caused trouble with the teachers, bullied the younger kids. Larg
e and clumsy and ugly, with protruding ears and acne. Not fair, Lynette often said, that Theresa’s brother got both looks and brains when her brother got neither. Waldie despised the English for what they had done to the Boer women in the concentration camps – and the blacks for what he imagined they would do to the Boer women given the chance. Lynette had absolutely no intention of introducing him to the filthy rich rooinekke.

  Theresa can’t remember the rooinekke ever saying a single word about an unjust government or anything like that. They were just three white boys looking for a good time. Like all the Afrikaans boys she knew.

  And aside from that one time Leonard had shared his wishful thinking about the navy, not one of them ever mentioned military service or the border.

  ‘Why were you dropped here by a chauffeur?’ Theresa had asked on the second night when the five of them were walking from the hotel to the disco and she could no longer contain her curiosity. They spoke to each other in English.

  Obviously, as Lynette would say.

  ‘We wanted to hitchhike, but my mother was in a complete state because my brother died in a car accident last year,’ Brandon had said, as casually as he could. They were crossing the bridge and the river shone in the moonlight. Their footsteps sounded loud in the sudden silence that followed. Even Bob didn’t crack one of his usual jokes. ‘The idea of us getting into strangers’ cars totally freaked her out. So then my old man said fine, we could go on holiday on our own, but he would see to it that we got here safely.’

  And she had thought he was a rich kid without a care in the world.

  ‘But why did you pick Stilbaai when you didn’t know anyone here?’ Lynette had asked when the silence had gone on for too long.

  ‘Precisely because we don’t know anyone here,’ Bob grinned. ‘It’s like a journey of discovery. Like Ten Thousand Leagues under the Sea.’

  Twenty thousand, Theresa had almost said, but didn’t. Her mother always told her boys didn’t like girls who were smarty-pants.