A Guest of Honour

by Nadine Gordimer

  When they had gone she sat on one of the beds in the room she had been given, swaying slightly, still, from the motion of the car, and telephoned the airways office. She was told she would have to wait two days for a connection to Zurich; there was a seat for her on the plane. They took her name and she said she would come to pay for the ticket later.

  It was a double room with two beds separated by a little night-table holding the telephone, an ashtray, and a booklet entitled, in English, French, and Portuguese, What to See and Where to Go. There was a bathroom and behind thick curtains she found a little slice of balcony. She went out for a moment. A half-moon of flat bay, the palms moving away at regular spaces along the curve, and just opposite the hotel, a new block going up behind screens of matting. In a gap, workmen sat on the tightrope of steel girders eating their lunch. Down below, a tiny square that must have been the plaza when the town was a garrison outpost was divided by sand paths and ornamental plants, like the quarterings of a heraldic crest. A workman with a paper forage cap on his head waved at her. She came inside, pulled the curtains again, and stood looking at the two beds. She turned down the cover of the one she had sat on while telephoning, and lay on her back. Six fake candles of the chandelier had made six shaded brown circles on the ceiling. The glass drops giddied slowly in some current of air that she did not feel. There was nothing familiar in the room but the picnic basket and the briefcase. And herself. It was on this day, exactly one week ago, that they had been on the road from Gala.

  One of the men at the reception desk of the Hotel Lisboa was short, with a large head of crimped hair, a tiny mouth blue-shaded all round no matter how closely shaven, and young brown eyes ringed like a marmoset’s. This large head was not very high above the counter and was always inclined in one kind of service or another—he was either changing travellers’ cheques, getting a number on the telephone for someone, or clicking the lead out of his little gilt pencil to draw a street-map. He spoke English fluently and it was he who told her how to get to the airline office. He would step out to prod at the button when the lift was slow to come; with a smile like the smile from a hospital bed he would take up the room-key dropped at the desk by a guest going out into the sun.

  She could recall at will every detail about this man’s face, it was a rubber stamp tried out on a blank page, whereas in Bray’s face there were gaps that could not be filled in. Between the cheekbone and the angle of the jaw, on the left side. From the nose to the upper lip. She could not put him together. She caught certain expressions and certain angles but she could not find the steady image.

  The promenade under the palm trees was much longer than it looked. It took more than half an hour, walking slowly, to reach the entrance to the docks. She would walk one way along the promenade and the other way on the opposite side of the wide boulevard, along the shops and buildings. Just before the docks there was a smelly place where the promenade was slippery with bits of fish and African women wholesalers bargained for catches and took them away, in the boots of the local taxis. On the town side was a new complex of banks and insurance companies, all mosaics and metal collage and the sort of monumental sculpture of black goddesses that white architects tend to commission in colonies where the local population is particularly malnourished. There were shops crammed with transistor radios, tape-recorders, and electric grills with well-browned plaster chickens stuck on their spits. There were older buildings, storerooms and warehouses shuttered blind, and others with peeling pastel façades, trompe-l’oeil pillars and garlands painted faintly round the doors and windows. At the pavement cafés men read newspapers; the white ones lowered them a moment when a woman passed. She sat in the street at one or other of the little tables for long stretches, drinking her black coffee well sweetened and watching the big birds that stood all day in the shallow water of the bay, looking stranded on the mud when the tide was out, and locked to their mirror-image, upside down in the calm pale surface, when the tide was in. Once she walked down to the edge of the sloppy mud but the birds did not move. There were concrete benches on the promenade. She sat for a while pestered by child beggars selling lottery tickets, and young Portuguese soldiers; perhaps the benches were the traditional place for picking up girls, although prostitutes in that town were hardly likely to be white. The young soldiers came from an ancient fort on one of the yellow hills above the bay; if she turned left instead of right, along the promenade, when she came out of the Hotel Lisboa, she passed beneath it. It was solid and worn as the crown of an old molar; the Portuguese had built it five hundred years ago and were there still—army jeeps went up and down the steep road to the battlements and sentries’ huts stood among the very old fig trees, rooted in the walls, that had never let go, either. At night it was floodlit; one of the sights mentioned in the trilingual guide beside the bed.

  The plane did not leave until six in the evening on the second day. She bought a bottle of shampoo and washed her hair and went to the little square to dry it in the morning sun. A ragged old black man in a cap with the coat-of-arms of the town was splattering a hose on the coarse leaves of the shrubs. There were no English newspapers but the reception desk at the hotel displayed a wire stand with Time and Newsweek for the foreign businessmen who sat at all times of day under the neon lights of the bar lounge, exchanging handshakes and the misunderstandings of language difficulties with local businessmen and their hangers-on. She had bought Time and turned the pages in the square while the workmen whistled at her from the scaffolding. Married, divorced, dead—actresses, members of deposed royalty, American politicians she’d never heard of. Pictures of a group of nude students burning an effigy on a towering bridge; of a Vietnamese child with her arm blown off at the elbow. Near the bottom of a page, the photograph, the name—EENY MEENY MWETA MO—WILL HE BE THE NEXT TO GO? This has been the year of the coup in Africa-half-a-dozen governments toppled since January. Good-looking good boy of the Western nations, Adamson Mweta (40) is the latest of the continent’s moderate leaders to find himself hanging on to the presidential seat-belt while riots rock his country. His prisons are full but even then he can’t be sure who, among those at large, Left or Right, is friend or foe. His Minister of Foreign Affairs, urbane anti-Communist Albert Tola Tola, is inside after rumours of an attempted takeover last month. His trusted White Man Friday, Africa expert Colonel Evelyn James Bray (54), who helped him negotiate independence, has been murdered in mysterious circumstances on the road to the capital. His one-time comrade in arms, Leftist Edward Shinza, has succeeded in stirring up an insurrection in the trade unions that has escalated from general strike to countrywide chaos. As if to prove this old friends taunts that he is no more than “the black watchman standing guard outside the white man’s enterprise,” Adamson Mweta has had to call upon Britain to send troops to his country. Will the invasion-by-invitation of the former colonial master keep him in his seat and the country’s gold and other valuable mineral resources in the hands of British and U.S. interests?

  Quite short; the last of the columns under the general heading of Africa. It was Mweta’s face that she had seen—Bray’s name was come upon in the middle of the text. She read the whole thing over several times. She walked down to the promenade and back along the shops and sat down again at one of the pavement tables. Other people had their newspapers and she had the magazine lying there beside the bowl full of paper sachets of sugar. The tide was coming in round the birds’ legs. A few empty tables away a man and a small boy were concentrating on something the man was drawing. The child had his head cocked sideways, smiling in admiration, anticipation and self-importance—the drawing was being done for him. The man was ageing, one of those extremely handsome men who might have a third or fourth wife the same age as a daughter. Every now and then he lifted his head and took a look under a raised, wrinkled brow at the sea for some point of reference. It was a very dark Mediterranean face, all the beautiful planes deeply scored in now, as if age were redrawing it in a sharper, darker pencil. Brillian
tly black eyes were deep-set in a contemplative, amused crinkle that suggested disappointed scholarship—a scientist, someone who saw life as a pattern of gyrations in a drop under a microscope. But he was shabbily dressed and poor looking. Perhaps an intellectual who’d got into political trouble in Portugal. The little boy hung on his arm in eagerness, hampering him. At last the picture was finished and he held it out at arm’s length against the sea and the little boy clambered down from his chair to see it properly. She could see, too—a picture of great happiness, past happiness, choppy waves frilling along, a gay ship with flags and triumphant smoke, birds sprinkled about the air like kisses on a letter. The child looked at it smiling but still in anticipation, looking for the—something—the secret marvel that exists only in children’s expectation. It was the man himself who laughed at his work in enjoyment. Then the little boy took the cue and eagerly laughed, to be with him. The child had a final pull at the straw of his orangeade and then the pair crossed the boulevard hand and hand, taking the drawing along. The man steered the child in a special kind of alert protectiveness that suggested the charge was temporary, or new; a divorced father who has abducted the child from the custody of a former wife. —But no, he was really too old to be the father; more likely a grandfather who found himself alone with a child; she had the strong impression that this was the last thing in that man’s life, all he had left.

  They were gone. For ten minutes she had felt a deep interest in those two human beings. One of the birds opened its wings—she had not seen them move before—and flapped slowly away over the bay.

  The plane came in late from stops farther south in Africa and by the time it took off the town was a scimitar of sparkle along the bay, a bowl of greenish light that was the sports stadium, a tilting stage—set that was the fort, and then a few glows dying out like matches on the ground. She saw nothing of the forests and deserts of the continent she was leaving for the first time, although the man in the seat beside her kept turning on his reading-light to look at the map stuffed in along with the sick-bag in the seat-pocket. Brownish shaded areas, green areas: drops of moisture shimmied outside the double window and she could not even see the darkness—only her own face. The hostess brought along a trolley of papers and there was the cover of that same number of the magazine there, and when the trolley was steered back, it was gone: somewhere along the rows of seat-backs, someone was reading it. The man who was her neighbour drank individual bottles of champagne with the air of doing so on principle rather than with any enjoyment and at an hour when at last there was no food being served and the lights had been dimmed he pressed the red button for the hostess and asked for seltzer. Since he was awake she took out of the briefcase (beside her, between her legs and the wall of the plane) the half-sheet of typing paper on which, in Bray’s handwriting, there was the name of the bank, the number of the account, and La Fille aux Yeux d’Or. She had looked at it a number of times since she had got into the plane. It was probably the last thing he had written. The cheque for Hjalmar? No, that must have been before. But she could not be sure; she did not know when he had decided to put down on that piece of paper the particulars about the account. She wouldn’t ever know if it really was the last time he was to write when he wrote: La Fille aux Yeux d’Or. There was nothing but the facts, the address, the code name. What could one find in the shape of the letters, the spacing? She searched it as the child had searched the man’s drawing.

  She put the paper away in the briefcase again. Beside her there were suppressed belches.

  If he had copied out (from some notebook? from memory?) the details of the account, of course, it must have been to give to her. So that she would know where to go. But if they were to be together there would be no need for her to have the piece of paper. He had put it in the briefcase, he had not given it to her. When was he going to give it to her?

  But perhaps it had been in the briefcase a long time. No notebook, no commitment to memory: kept in the briefcase for the record, and automatically taken along with them when they left as part of the personal papers, his and hers, they would need together. The man at her side fell asleep and she felt her mind begin to slide, too; there was a jerky snatch of dream with Bray walking about in it, but she drew back fearfully into wakefulness. And in hours or a little while, looking out into the blue—black that was clear now, she saw a burning crust along the edge of a darker mass. She thought of a veld fire but then was aware of a narrow reflection of the fire mirrored along its shape. It was a coastline down there—the seashore and little harbours lit up all night into the early dawn while the land mass behind was asleep. Now she saw blackly glittering swells of darkness: the sea.

  The man beside her was craning his neck at a polite distance over her shoulder. He said, “The coast of Italy.”

  She had never been out of Africa before. A feeling of intense strangeness came over her. It was day, up in the air. Down below, the people of Europe slept on. Soon there were the Alps in the cold sun, shining and elegant. Passengers revived to look at them, spread like a display for watches in a jeweller’s window.

  A black Mercedes taxi took her from the glass and black airport into the city. Gentle humps of fields were still green, or stubbled after harvest. A chill breath misted them over. All the new buildings were the same heavy black frames squaring-off glass that was the same sheeny grey as the lake reflecting the sky. A high jet spouted out of the lake as if a whale were kept in captivity there. The hotel the girl at the airport information desk sent her to was an old villa above the lake and she had to walk down the street to get a tramcar into town. The houses had little spires, balconies, towers, and were closed away behind double windows; along a wall, an espaliered pear tree held still a single pear, ruddy and wizened. She wore the camel-hair coat and her legs were cold. The tram faltered and teetered steeply down and she got off with everyone else at a terminus in the main street. She had, not in her bag but in her hand clenched in the pocket of the coat, the piece of paper: apparently the bank was in this main street. She began to walk along looking at the way the numbers ran, and she crossed because the evens were on the other side, and walked on and on, gaining the impression that everyone was making straight for her as if she were not there. Then she realized that here people kept to the right, not the left. The street was very long and wide and busy but she was not conscious of shops or people, only of numbers. There was a bank with a satiny façade with tiny show-cases where a beaming puppet in a blonde wig held up her savings, but that was not the one. She showed someone the name on the piece of paper and was directed a few yards on to a pillared portico and huge double doors. Inside she was in an echoing hall with a black-and-white tiled floor and a few mahogany and brass-railed booths pushed far back round the walls. A porter intercepted her on the way to one of them. He couldn’t understand her and took her to a pale clerk who spoke perfect English. They sent her in a mahogany lift up through the great vault of the building. The feeling of strangeness that had begun in the plane grew stronger and stronger.

  There was another echoing hall in which footsteps were a long-drawn-out approach or retreat. But here there was a corner with a thick carpet and leather-and-velvet chairs. She sat and looked at banking journals in French and German full of pictures of black frame-and-glass factory buildings and people skiing with wings of snow. An Indian man and woman were waiting, too—the woman in a gauzy sari with a cardigan over it—a stranger from another climate, like herself.

  She did not believe, now, that anyone in this place would know about the account, or that the account or the money, spoken about so far away, existed at all. An impostor in bare legs and borrowed coat went along corridors, past troughs of plants, a wooden bear with hats and umbrellas on its arms, into a large stuffy, muffled room unlike any office she had ever been in. Another wooden bear. A glassfronted bookcase. Table held up by a satyr caryatid. A desk too, but with its functional aspect so softened by tooled leather, photographs, and a pot of African violets in a gilt bask
et that it was just another piece of furniture.

  Herr Weber introduced himself like a doctor ready to hear any intimacy as blandly as he might ask about regular bowel action. He had a neat kind face and an old-fashioned paunch with a watchchain. La Fille aux Yeux d’Or might have been Schmidt or Jones; he wrote something with his silver pencil, rang a bell, sent for some papers. While they waited he made conversation. Bray had teased her that Goebbels and Goering as well as Tshombe had put away their millions in Swiss banks. Herr Weber was an old man— “Already forty years in this bank,” he told her, smiling. Where did she live? “Oh Africa must be interesting, yes? I have always wanted to visit—but that is so far. My wife likes to go to Italy. It is beautiful. And we have been once in Greece. That is beautiful. But Africa is beautiful too, neh?” Perhaps he had had this same conversation with Tshombe and would have it with the woman in the cardigan and sari— “Oh India must be interesting, yes?”—while all through the years he had sat safe among his family photographs.