“I’m coming to the Finistère.”
“About time!” Then, after a slight pause: “You sound strange, though ... Something wrong?”
She bites her lip, her eyes suddenly misty.
“Come on, ousus, spit it out.”
“Not now, not over the phone.”
“I’ll fetch you at the airport, then. Did you book your flight?”
“I’m driving. I’m in Bloemfontein right now.”
“Why would you want to schlep all the way over here?”
She keeps quiet.
“Let me guess. The healing power of deserts — that little obsession of yours.”
There is another pause, in which she thinks she can hear André’s distant breathing.
“Zoe ... what happened?”
She bites her lip harder, till it hurts, but she hangs on: “Wait for me, will you?”
There is silence on the other end. She senses André is trying to assess the situation: Should I try to reach her in the Karoo? Or prompt her to confide in me? Only to reach the same conclusion she would come to if she were in his place: Let her be.
“Are you sure you can make it with that old Beetle of yours?”
She smiles sadly as she stares out of her hotel room window at the white Golf GTX parked outside.
“I’ve rented a car.”
Silence again.
“Will you stop at the Drostdy?”
“I guess so.”
“Goed. Take care, ousus.”
After having thrust her clothes bag into the car’s trunk, Zoe makes the automatic gesture of tying her hair in a knot on the back of her head as she has done hundreds of times, but stops with her arms in mid-air, suddenly realizing there is no longer anything to tie.
It’s late in the morning when she drives out of town. The sky is an irritating blue, the sunlight downright outrageous, rendering the squatter camps besieging the outskirts almost acceptable. A golden halo enwraps waste piles, open sewers, rags, stray dogs, dark-skinned children playing barefoot in the dust. She rushes past rows of tin shacks reflecting the rays of another realm. Then the Karoo opens again in front of her with its monotony of scrub and sun-baked plains. For over a thousand kilometres only solitary koppies break the horizon with their dumb, flat-topped shapes, until the grasslands give way to the vertical asperity of the Swartberg Mountains, down down south.
It takes another five-hour drive for Zoe to reach the small dorp of Graaff-Reinet. In the late eighteenth century, this out-of-time town was the first outpost in the interior of those settlers who left the Cape region seeking freedom and adventure, away from the restrictions of the Dutch East India Company. Since then, “the pearl of the Karoo” hasn’t changed much. The furnace of the Karoo keeps protecting its rough frontier spirit and the Cape Dutch style of its buildings. “One has just to remove the rare cars and replace them with ox carts to be brought back to that era,” Zoe remembers writing in her field journal when, early in her career, she spent two months in Graaff-Reinet, using it as the basis for a series of fossil excavations that would prove fruitless.
Though disappointing in terms of scientific results, she now considers that time as one of the most serene in her life. Her desert baptism took place among the hot rocks rising just over the settlement. It’s there that, for the first time, she encountered the power of geographical emptiness, the non-place where, as the Bushmen say, you can hear the stars sing. She still remembers how, through Bushmen’s eyes, she then looked at the madness of it all, the way people crammed themselves in megalopolises while their souls still needed the religiousness of absolutes.
Zoe has parked outside the Drostdy. Before taking in travellers by post and modern-day tourists, the former residence of the local magistrate witnessed the coming and going of reconnaissance parties, destitute farmers, migrant sheep-shearers, slaves in chains, greedy colonials: all souls adrift, straddling the midriff of the country along long-lost tracks. She stops to gaze at the inn’s white-washed façade, central gable and dark-grey thatch of dried wild reeds.
Once inside, as she checks in, the owners recognize Zoe from previous stays and invite her to have drinks in their private quarters. She politely declines the offer. She isn’t done for the day yet and has to rush, as in less than an hour it will all be over. Racing out of Graaff-Reinet Zoe takes the dirt road to the Karoo Natural Reserve. The access gate is still open, as she’d hoped. She leaves the car at the bottom of the escarpment and takes the steep path leading to the central peak. It takes her no more than fifteen minutes to reach the bluff only to realize, with disappointment, that the best vantage point is taken. A man up there, in dark cotton pants and white shirt, is looking down into the valley that once stood, with its moon-like scapes, in the centre of Gondwana before the continents started drifting apart. Whether he heard her coming, she cannot tell. Zoe crouches quietly on a boulder slightly set back, in a spot nearly as dominant as his.
All around them, bizarre formations of dolerite rise from the grasslands: petrified organ pipes brushed by strokes of sunset light. The curved line of the horizon hangs from the sky like a giant seashell. In the silence, only the wailing cry of golden eagles can be heard, as the birds of prey soar in the wake of invisible updrafts. She sits there, motionless, watching a scene almost unchanged for millions of years. Slowly, her mind glides away and she relives that moment. Their last moment.
On the dot of midnight, Dario turns off the laboratory lights, leaving only the feeble glow of the microscope, and says: “This is your time, Dr. Du Plessis.” Bent over her fossils, Zoe doesn’t see that a few minutes earlier her lover had been clearing a space among the skulls on the bench. Filled with desire, he now pulls her to him and lifts her onto that blue Formica island surrounded by a sea of bones. Slowly and deliberately, he undoes the buttons of her lab coat. With a sudden flush, Zoe feels again his hands cupped around her breasts, his tongue warm and moist between her thighs. She remembers the feeling of floating suspended on the thread of their pleasure, her back arched above the blue island like a bridge to infinity.
Turning her head to the side, she is confronted by one of those ugly hominid skulls, but it doesn’t bother her — actually, it even increases her arousal.
That’s what we were, Dario: Two modern specimens of Homo sapiens re-enacting a ritual lost in the night of time. And that’s what we did: We performed a dance macabre balancing the life in our loins with the death of those enigmatic bones.
The sun finally sinks with its crimson farewell. Now, the darkness will quickly enwrap the scene.
The stranger doesn’t move, not even now.
Zoe quietly walks away, drowning in the navy blue of the coming night.
One hour and a shower later, she walks into the dining hall of the Drostdy Hotel. Nothing seems to have changed in this room of thick shadows with no artificial lighting. Despite the daily care of silent black hands, the patina of time has left its mark on this place deliberately left behind. The wooden floors creak with every step, wrought-iron chandeliers glow in the light of candles. A young black maid, dressed up in immaculate lace apron and bonnet, greets Zoe with a hint of a bow.
The room is half empty. An elderly couple have finished their meal and are about to leave. A solitary guest occupies a corner table. Zoe recognizes the stranger of the sunset by his clothing and the line of his shoulders. She is not surprised to find him here, the only place to have a proper meal in town. The man is rapidly taking notes on a black-leathered pad. He stops, stares for a little while into the void through a pair of gold-rimmed lenses and then goes back to his writing, trying to catch on the fly what he saw in his mind’s eye.
Crossing the room, Zoe walks past the carved wooden furniture, the pendulum that tolls like Big Ben in London, the gray stone fireplace. She throws a last glance at the three-arm candelabra on the tables before heading for the outdoor patio, where she asked to have her meal served. Normally, she would have books with her — “Another way to cut the world off when you
find yourself out there, in the world,” as André says. But this is no ordinary journey. She’s not here to make the most of her time; she’s here to annihilate it.
The waitress is back a few minutes later with a basket of fresh bread and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc from the Finistère Wine Estate.
“From the owners,” she says.
Before tasting the wine, Zoe inhales its scent. Less refined than that of a European one, she knows, but in that fruity bouquet, which mixes cedar with papaya, green melon with fresh honey, she finds her childhood again, the colours of the Cape in autumn, the melancholy of a rough ocean. They say people drink to forget; when she does it, which doesn’t happen often, it’s to remember. They also say that children are not aware of their happiness. Perhaps. But, as a child, Zoe savoured that feeling of untroubled blitheness aware that it would soon be lost. She would watch adults closely, see their gazes weighed down with nostalgia, hardened by life, and understand that there wouldn’t be second chances. Looking back at it now, that spark of childhood wisdom had something disturbingly premature, as if it contained within it the seeds of an omen, or of an inevitable retaliation: You cannot be happy for too long, or too often, in your life.
She hears the gravel crunch a few feet away and sees the stranger coming out into the night. She senses his presence, but she is not annoyed by this. In fact, it’s as if she were still alone in the semi-darkness, or with a person whom she has known all along. The shells of their silences are touching without friction, like those of two old friends intent on fishing in the early hours. She hears the click of a lighter and, a few moments later, the aroma of Gitanes tobacco — the same brand her brother smokes — fills the air. The stranger casually tidies up his tuft of blondish hair. Then he looks around and sees her.
“Goeienaand,” he says, letting out the smoke slowly.
Zoe returns the greeting quietly, trying to smile. Failing. In the glow of the lamplight and behind round lenses, she meets two eyes that look at her gravely. There is something strangely familiar about him.
The song of cicadas becomes almost deafening.
“You know what I was writing?” he finally asks her.
“Of a sunset at the Valley of Desolation?”
“Of a woman in the sunset.”
Involuntarily, Zoe folds an arm across her chest, feeling suddenly exposed.
She looks at his hands: big, rough like ocean shells, fingers as sturdy as branches, nails short, square and in places half broken. Hands more used to working the land or the ropes of a sailboat than to holding a pen. He is well into his forties, she assumes, not fifty yet.
“Are you a writer?”
“A thief of stories, I suppose.”
She stares at him, uncomprehending.
“I steal from silence stories waiting to be told.”
Zoe wrings her hands, on the defensive, as though this man could also snatch the plot of her life.
“And you search for them in the Karoo?”
“Of course not. The dryness is what helps to distil the meaning. Maybe I’m not the only one who thinks this way,” he says, openly watching her reaction as he draws on his cigarette.
Zoe looks away, embarrassed, dodging the question.
“You always need places like this to write?” she asks instead, trying to avert the attention from her.
“Now that I’m allowed to spoil myself, yes.”
This man seems to follow enigmatic patterns of speech.
The waitress appears on the patio, walks quickly to him and whispers something in his ear.
“You’ll excuse me. I must go.”
“Please,” Zoe replies, dismissing him with a nod, thankful for the interruption.
Instead of leaving, as she expects, he stands there, watching her, his brow slightly furrowed.
“Meetings in the desert are never by accident,” he finally says. “We might see each other again.”
Perhaps it’s just an impression, but suddenly she seems to read deep sadness in the stranger’s eyes. Or is it just a reflection of hers?
“Who knows,” she replies with a faint voice, “perhaps on another blank page ...”
The next morning, even before sunrise, Zoe is already far away, racing towards the ocean.
4
THE FINISTÈRE
ONCE SHE IS through the Outeniqua Pass, Zoe breathes the ocean’s presence in the air coming through the open window, the heather wrinkled by the wind, the clouds running large and fast like sails unfurled across the world. At last she sees it, rough and immense, stretching all the way to Antarctica: sun-scorched Africa on one shore, eternal ice on the other; two extremes facing each other across 3,300 nautical miles. “No doubt God played with geography here,” Aunt Claire once said peering over her shoulder while Zoe was colouring a map of the region for a school project. “The ultimate contrast. No undertones.”
A memory far in the back of her mind floods in, poignantly.
Aunt Claire’s health has taken a sudden turn and Zoe has been summoned to her deathbed. She has just turned sixteen. As she enters the room, Aunt Claire gestures her to sit on the bed and takes her hand. She is breathing heavily, with great difficulty.
“My love,” she says, wincing with pain, “there’s something you should know about our family.” She stops to look at her, her eyes now troubled and moistened. “I was just a bit older than you when I found out what binds us firstborn females,” she then goes on feebly. “Great-Aunt Charlotte, your great-grandfather’s sister, had your hair colour: coppery as vine leaves in the fall. And the same jade-green eyes, I believe.” She pauses and sighs. Her hands start shaking violently. “Not enough time left to tell you all I should,” she rushes to say, her voice no more than a whisper.
Zoe remembers the scene so vividly now, the anxious look in her aunt’s eyes as she gestured frantically towards the bedside table.
“Take these keys. Climb into the attic and look for a dark trunk hidden under some old carpets. The biggest key opens its lock. Inside, among other things, you’ ll find a small chest; open it with this smaller key and you’ ll find my diary and what’s left of Great-Aunt Charlotte’s diary after the fire that destroyed part of the house. Read them carefully. Those pages will tell you everything you need to know.” Zoe knows what trunk Aunt Claire is talking about. She and her brother have spent many hours together in that attic, hungry for memories, for traces left by their parents.
They were a remarkable couple, as far as she can now remember. Dad — well built, with dark fiery eyes and black curls dangling over his forehead; a farmer longing for the sea, ready to set sail on his cutter whenever he could get away. Mom — slim and distant, her blond hair always tied in a perfectly shaped bun; she was English, the daughter of impoverished noble landowners, and loved horses. Zoe’s father, Jean Du Plessis, had met her during a safari in what at the time was Rhodesia. He had been invited to a friend’s game farm and among the guest hunters had found this splendid Amazon — fifteen years younger than him — who could ride and shoot like a man. It was 1957. Six months later they were married, with their respective families’ disapproval. At least this is what Zoe was told. The Du Plessis family, in particular, didn’t forgive Jean’s betrayal of their volk. They wouldn’t forget what the British had done fifty years earlier during the Anglo-Boer War, when thousands of Afrikaner women and children had been left to die in Queen Victoria’s concentration camps.
Be that as it may, Gloria followed her husband to the Cape. However, it didn’t take long for this daughter of the British Empire to regret such boldness. Other than her love for horse racing, she had landed in the wrong place to socialize. Pretty soon she got as tired of the hunting trips as of the evening parties that Jean arranged for her in the great hall of the Finistère, the estate his dying father had eventually bequeathed to him, his only male heir, a year after their marriage.
Zoe grew up with the image of this blonde sylph wrapped in long silk dresses, busy entertaining guests in the glo
w of candles, a glass of champagne in hand, her lips a condescending half smile. This was Gloria: young, charming, and unsatisfied. Only many years later Zoe would find out from an old family friend that her mother cheated on her husband, and that the car accident that instantly killed both her parents took place after the two, drunk with rage and Martini cocktails, left a party fighting about Gloria’s love affairs.
Now that she thinks of it, all along Zoe has been attracted to women who look superbly sophisticated in their slim bodies, delicate traits, pale complexions — their deceitful frailness reminding her of her mother and highlighting, by contrast, how she differs from her. With her bulky breasts, sunburnt skin and muscular shoulders, she has nothing of Gloria’s seductiveness, nothing of the English huntress with whom her father fell madly in love.
“The virgin of the fossils.” This is what her colleagues call her instead. When she once inquired about it, Piet made a half-joke out of pure embarrassment, revealing a personal sore spot: “C’mon Zoe, it seems far easier for you to give yourself to an Australopithecus than to a man in the flesh.” She is not that impervious to the other sex, she has always believed. In retrospect, however, although she looked at them with the scepticism of a scientist, her aunts’ diaries did leave a mark on her. Her subconscious, she now realizes, acted as a potent inhibitor in her love relationships: The moment they turned emotionally demanding, she would walk away. Only Dario succeeded in breaking her subliminal veto. Now she has to face its dire consequences.
Once again, the vision of Aunt Claire’s deathbed resurfaces from the half-buried past.
Her aunt’s voice has grown softer and softer. She often pauses to suck air with an effort, her chest squashed by an invisible boulder. “Your life will be hard. You’ ll have to be strong ... At least, I had you and André to look after ... You children were my salvation,” she mutters as Zoe dabs at beads of sweat on her forehead with a cloth. “Don’t be afraid to go it alone, though. Find a purpose worthy of being pursued with utmost dedication. Don’t waste your life. Don’t make Charlotte’s mistake!”
The Afrikaner Page 3