Borderline

by Marita van der Vyver

  ‘When do you know for certain that your marriage is beyond rescue?’ her sister wanted to know soon after Theresa and Theo were divorced. Back then Sandra was still married to the incurably unfaithful Anton, and to Theresa her question had sounded like a cry for help.

  Theresa had looked at her pretty sister, so fine and feminine and long-suffering, and answered with heartfelt sympathy: ‘You will know. Trust me, there will come a moment when you know.’

  Theresa remembers her own moment of revelation, disillusionment, abandoning of hope as if it had happened yesterday. The same way she remembers the exact moment that evening in the cloakroom of a fancy Cape Town restaurant when she accepted that she and Theo would never become parents. Two years later, in the winter of 1995, she heard the final whistle blow on her marriage. Game over, not even injury time left. It had been a contest without winners.

  The sports metaphor seems unavoidable, because it was on the same night as one of the greatest sporting highlights South Africans had ever experienced. The Springboks had won the Rugby World Cup and Madiba, president of the newly democratic country, had captured the world’s imagination when he presented the trophy to Francois Pienaar wearing a number six green-and-gold rugby jersey like the captain, a green-and-gold cap on his head.

  ‘It was the happiest moment of my life,’ Theresa’s father had confessed on the phone the next day, his voice filled with emotion.

  Theresa had been too astonished to get a word out. What about the birth of your three children? Of your firstborn, your son, if not the two daughters that came after him? Surely that is supposed to be a highlight in any father’s life? And how do you manage to forget so soon that you were an ardent supporter of the previous government that imprisoned this new president in his Springbok jersey for three decades? How the fuck do you do that, Pa!

  ‘I’m glad you think so, Pa,’ was all she had said in the end.

  To keep the peace.

  Just like her mother.

  Theresa and Theo watched that final game on television with friends. At their friends’ house, because by then their own home had become a war zone, too dangerous to admit innocent bystanders. Theo had become a ticking time bomb that could explode at any moment, and Theresa was constantly waiting for that moment, rigid with tension. They hadn’t had friends over to their house in months, and almost never went out together any more. But the World Cup was the sort of once-in-a-lifetime occasion for which they were prepared to declare a ceasefire.

  Like the famous armistice on Christmas Day during the First World War – when soldiers on either side of the conflict climbed out of their trenches to wish one another a happy Christmas only to resume slaughtering one another a few hours later – that was what went through Theresa’s mind while she and Theo sat in front of the television in Karin and Kobus’s living room cheering on the Springboks along with the rest of South Africa. She knew that she and Theo would go back to war in a few hours. She just didn’t know that this would be the final battle.

  And yet there had been any number of signs that the end was in sight. She just hadn’t wanted to notice them. She had wanted, like her dear little sister, to believe that her unhappy marriage had not yet become so unhappy that it was beyond rescue.

  Besides, it was hard to give up hope at a personal level when the political changes in the country kept pumping her full of hope. Ever since the first democratic election in April 1994, the future of the ‘Rainbow Nation’ had seemed so promising – while all her hope for the future of her marriage was slowly draining away.

  Theo sank into a deep and dark depression, drank more and more and slept less and less, and the more he drank the more aggressive he became. Never physically aggressive towards her, for which of course she was grateful, but his verbal aggression regularly hit her like punches to the stomach or slaps in the face. Sent her reeling, stunned, as if she’d been assaulted. And often made her flee in tears to lock herself behind a door somewhere. Bedroom door, bathroom door, any door with a key or a lock, anything to get away from his rage.

  The rage hadn’t been directed at her personally – that was her only comfort, and it was cold comfort. His aggression was like a poisonous cloud gushing from a hole inside him, a hole she would never be able to fill, a cloud that choked her as well as him, simply because she lived with him. Collateral damage. The war term popped into her head unbidden. She was more convinced than ever that the damage had been done by the war he’d been involved in twenty years earlier.

  She landed in hospital because of an unbearable pressure on her chest, because she struggled to breathe and thought she was suffering a heart attack or that there was a blood clot in her lungs, some or other potentially fatal problem. It turned out to be ‘just a panic attack’ caused by stress and exhaustion, but it had certainly felt life-threatening. Her chest muscles had contracted in a spasm that made it painful to cough or sneeze or even laugh for weeks on end.

  Not that there was much left that she wanted to laugh about.

  Theo’s behaviour became increasingly bizarre. He claimed that their telephone calls were being tapped and sometimes refused to use the phone for days. He was convinced that strange cars were following him, so he would make long detours to shake off his pursuers and frequently arrived late for meetings.

  ‘It’s as if you’re James Bond in a stupid spy movie!’ Theresa accused him, far too upset to find it funny.

  One day he stormed out of their house and confronted a man who was sitting innocently in his Volkswagen Golf across the street. He grabbed the frightened young man by his shirtfront and dragged him out of the car. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ he shouted. The man stammered that he was waiting for his sister who lived in the house opposite. Afterwards the sister never greeted Theo or Theresa again.

  One night at the dinner table shortly before the opening game in the World Cup tournament was played, he announced that he was going to buy a firearm to protect himself.

  Theresa felt her last bit of patience snap like a branch, with an almost audible crack, and started screaming at him hysterically: ‘I am not going to allow a gun in my house. Do you have any idea how many people are killed with their own guns? You’ve lost your mind, Theo!’

  ‘It’s my house too,’ he said with icy calm and continued chewing his steak. ‘I have to protect you too.’

  ‘Who the fuck do you want to protect us from, Theo? The only protection you need is from your own demons that are driving you to drink and madness.’

  ‘So now I am possessed by demons.’ Still chewing, his voice still calm, his eyes on his plate of food, but his knuckles were white from the way he was gripping the knife handle. ‘Why don’t you phone my mother and ask that she and the dominee pray for me?’

  ‘Don’t tempt me. I am desperate enough to try anything. Even your mother’s prayers. But I promise you, if you walk in here with a gun, I’m kicking you out.’

  ‘You can’t kick me out, Theresa.’ He looked up from his plate, his eyes so terribly blue that she wanted to cry. The lush black lashes that made the blue look even bluer. She knew then already that these were eyes she would never forget. ‘It’s my house too.’

  By the winter of 1995 she was convinced that her husband needed psychiatric help, but she couldn’t convince him to look for treatment.

  ‘All women who are unhappily married think their husbands are crazy,’ he sneered.

  A ridiculous exaggeration, of course, but with a kernel of truth that she couldn’t deny. Every time her divorced friends complained about their ex-husbands’ unconscionable behaviour, a lump of doubt came to sit in her throat that no amount of coughing and spluttering could dislodge.

  Perhaps her husband’s behaviour was indeed ‘normal’ for an unhappily married man. Perhaps she was simply as self-pitying as all her friends who constantly moaned about their husbands’ lack of reason. How did you behave ‘normally’ anyway, when you were trapped in an abnormal situation? Or was an unhappy marriage in fact a ‘norma
l’ situation – because it had become the norm? Then surely anyone who wanted to escape from the norm would by definition behave ‘abnormally’?

  These were the kind of questions that made her feel as if she were being driven mad along with her husband.

  On the night of that rugby game he drank even more than usual, but not like their friends in celebration of the Springboks’ victory. Theo tried to drink himself into a stupor because that was the only way he could still fall asleep. She woke up in the early hours of the morning with a dry mouth because she had also drunk too much, trying to pretend that she was as overjoyed as the rest of the country about the result of a rugby game, and perhaps because she’d wanted to feel normal for a change. Like everyone around her. She wasn’t surprised when she didn’t find him in the bed beside her. On the contrary, she would’ve been surprised if she had found him there, because most of the time they no longer slept together.

  She had to walk through the living room to fetch water from the fridge and wasn’t surprised to see him sitting on the couch either. It was where he sat most nights, drinking until he passed out, and where she often found him in the mornings, asleep on his back, snoring and stinking, his clothes creased and covered in red wine stains. A picture that had become so familiar it didn’t even disgust her any more.

  But that night he was sitting playing with a gun.

  And in that instant everything changed. Her bare feet froze to the cold stone floor. She was frozen from head to toe, but it wasn’t because of the winter chill outside; it was an icy cold that came from deep inside her own body.

  He heard her catch her breath behind him and slowly looked around. The only light in the room came from a reading lamp next to the couch; it shone like a spotlight on the shiny black weapon in his hand. She had no idea what sort of gun it was. She wasn’t interested in guns. She didn’t want to know how they worked; she would never allow them inside her house. That had always been her position.

  But then her husband pointed the gun at her. In jest, she would’ve liked to believe, just to test her reaction, with the most hideous grin she had ever seen on his face.

  ‘Theo,’ she whispers, her voice raspy from shock. ‘What are you doing?’

  She is standing dead still, afraid that any sudden movement could startle him, that his finger might pull the trigger by accident.

  ‘I’m just wondering if you know what it feels like to point a weapon at someone else.’ He says this with the same revolting sneer. ‘Close enough to see the terror in their eyes. And then you shoot …’

  ‘No.’ She is breathing slowly, concentrating with all her might to stay calm, forcing herself to look into his eyes rather than at the weapon in his hand. But his lovely blue eyes have become black holes, unrecognisable, and the grin has vanished. His lips are now grimly clamped together.

  ‘Fortunately I have never been in a situation like that. I know you’ve had to …’ Watch out, she cautions herself. Careful – better not refer to the army or to military service or to any kind of war, it might upset him so much that his finger tightens around that trigger.

  ‘Then I suppose you also don’t know what it feels like to press such a cold barrel against your own head?’ Just as suddenly as he’d pointed the gun at her, he flicks his wrist and raises his arm and places the weapon against his right temple.

  ‘Theo,’ she pleads. ‘Please.’

  ‘Please what? Shoot yourself and release both of us from this hell?’

  She shakes her head in despair and tastes salty tears in her mouth. Still too scared to raise her hand to wipe the tears from her face. Afterwards she would always wonder if it had been her tears that persuaded him to let the weapon drop. Because suddenly the hand with the gun is lying limp in his lap, and he is staring ahead of him unseeingly, looking dead tired.

  Her frozen body moves instinctively. Before she knows it, she is sitting on the couch beside him, her hand on his, and very, very carefully takes the gun from him. His fingers let go without any resistance.

  Then she jumps to her feet and goes to stand a few steps away from him, out of his reach, staring at the thing in her hand with horror. Incredible how heavy such a small object can be, small enough to fit inside her palm, but as heavy as a coffin. And cold, colder than her feet on the stone floor, colder than death. This is when she starts to shake, delayed shock kicking in. Her hand jerks so uncontrollably that she fears the weapon may clatter to the floor and go off accidentally.

  ‘It’s not loaded anyway,’ he says with a gloomy little laugh.

  She is surprised by a wild urge to point the gun at him, to test his reaction, to discover if he’s telling the truth. She quickly puts it down on the bookshelf next to her in case the temptation overwhelms her. But still close enough to grab in case he makes a threatening gesture.

  ‘I warned you.’ Her voice sounds high and thin, all her feigned calm shattered. ‘If you bring a firearm into this house I can no longer live with you.’

  ‘We can’t live together any more anyway.’ He says it so wearily, so entirely without any agitation, that she instantly suspects that this entire show with the gun may have been premeditated. To force her to keep her word. To admit that it was all over. ‘I will move out tomorrow.’

  She stares at him for a few moments, speechless. ‘When did you decide?’

  ‘This minute.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Theo … perhaps we just need time apart … Perhaps we can try again after a while?’

  He shakes his head and manages a wry smile. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t love you any more.’

  How strange to have waited such a long time to hear such a simple phrase. And then it nevertheless hurts so much when at last you hear it: I don’t love you any more.

  ‘But perhaps … who knows … maybe you could learn to love me again? Because I still love you, Theo. You know it. I just can’t live with you any more.’

  He shakes his head again, this time without the smile. ‘I don’t know. According to my mother’s Bible you must love your neighbour like you love yourself. Not that she ever applies it to any of her neighbours unless they’re white. But what do you do when you can no longer love yourself?’

  Lost and lonely he sits there on the couch, bent forwards with his elbows on his knees and his hands in his hair.

  It takes every last drop of willpower to keep herself from walking up to him and wrapping her arms around him. It wouldn’t help him; he has travelled far beyond the comfort of an embrace. And it would only make everything even harder for her, and for her heart that still refuses to obey her head.

  ‘Maybe … you could learn … to love yourself again?’

  It’s the only scrap of hope she can offer him, as inadequate as the coins you guiltily shove into a beggar’s hand. She braces herself for his cutting sarcasm: Spare me the Psych 101 lesson. Jeez, Marais, in which women’s magazine did you read that? Are you now going to join my mother and her dominee and start praying for me?

  But all he says is, ‘I don’t believe I will ever be able to do that again’, with his head still in his hands.

  It was this image that would stay with her, every time she thought of the final night she and her husband had spent together in their home. Not the demented grin with which he’d pointed the weapon at her, nor the cold-blooded way in which he’d placed the barrel against his own head. Just the vulnerability of a man holding his head in his hands because he doesn’t want you to see him crying.

  To this day she doesn’t know if the gun was loaded.

  The following weekend she drove to her parents’ house in Worcester – mainly to escape from her own home for a few hours, from the unbearable emptiness and ear-splitting silence since her husband left – and asked her father to get rid of the gun. His blue eyes were full of questions, but he just nodded and said that he would.

  She didn’t tell him that she had left her husband.

  It took weeks before sh
e could scrape up enough courage to confess to her mother that she was getting a divorce. Her mother didn’t seem shocked, just nodded sympathetically, as if she’d been expecting it. Instead it was Theresa who was shocked. If it had been so obvious to everyone how much trouble her and Theo’s marriage was in, no wonder her father had seemed almost eager to take the firearm from her without asking any questions. She preferred not to think about what must have gone through his mind.

  And she never talked to him about it.

  There were so many things she never talked about with her father, Theresa thinks, staring at the ceiling in Amado’s bedroom, not with her father, her brother or her husband. And now they are all beyond her reach, dead or senile or in another country, and she is in Cuba, dragging a suitcase full of questions behind her.

  When she was younger, she thought the answers would arrive by themselves as she grew older, like the wrinkles and the grey hair, without her having to look for them. Now she has both wrinkles and grey hair, and she is learning, finally, that every answer you find as you grow older only leads to more questions.

  21. ROPA VIEJA

  Although the previous night in the bar Oreste had assured her with his usual enthusiasm that Viñales was located in a beautiful area amid tobacco plantations and green farmlands and ‘enormous boulders as tall as hills’, the journey in the open-top sports car nevertheless surprises her. The tobacco fields are bare because the harvest is over early in the year – by the end of winter, she learns from Ruben, and the next season’s tobacco won’t be planted until autumn – but the rest of the spring landscape is densely vegetated and deep green. The ‘boulders as tall as hills’ have strange shapes and soft curves, overgrown with bushes and trees, so from a distance they look like pets hiding underneath a green blanket.

  ‘Mogotes,’ Ruben says behind the wheel. ‘That is what these hills are called. Typical of a karst landscape.’ He notices her frown and adds, amused: ‘You did not do your homework, did you? If you have read that little guidebook of you, you will have known what “karst” was.’