A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  The butterflies mistook the ceramic colours for those of flowers, they touched at the hands of the two humans as the hands touched the stones. She tried to read the braille of the past: —They lived here, there was a real palace? A town? It must have been lovely!—

  —For them, yes. Many palaces. Not necessarily lived in; they moved from one to the other. They traded, in slaves principally. It wasn’t lovely for the blacks. And after the Arabs came the Germans, and then the British. No more slaves taken, but not much difference otherwise: Now Teacher—he’s about to join this country to the island as one republic. God knows what will happen. Zanzibar is still Zanzibar; the people who rule don’t have the same ideas as Teacher, the Arabs there are still the rich and the blacks the poor. I think the blacks are ready to kill the rich and try to take over… I don’t know how the combined republic’s going to work, if they don’t. But you see how it all looks as if it’s buried, like this, in another few years these elaborate tombstones of powerful people will be covered entirely, like many others, we won’t be able to find this place if ever we come back here—

  —Oh I’d keep it clear, if I were the government, it’s so beautiful—the most beautiful place I’ve seen—

  —For picnickers, yes? For people like you and me, out for a drive? The only monuments preserved in Africa are those of people who conquered Africans; no-one wants to keep such memories. But they will only be buried … the old patterns of power, which were based on eternals like trade winds, that have no influence in the technological world, they remain as some kind of instinct from long ago, far back. Strange, uh? So that little island and this country will be called one again, under his African socialism, as they were by the old invaders, the Imams of Muscat.—

  She sat on a tombstone. —They could be taken away from here, put in a museum, at least.—

  He spread his hands. —No-one wants to interfere with a site that may have religious significance for some people.—

  —Then why don’t they keep it up?—

  —It’s here. So long as nobody disturbs it. That is what matters. It’ll always be here, even when it’s completely overgrown. It’s not only the religious ones. We all have things like that, that will always be there. So long as nobody touches. But you are still too young.—

  Immobile as the stone she rested on, she was hoping for a butterfly, hovering nearer and nearer, to land on her bare knee.

  —You’ve been here often, then.—

  —Yes. But not recently. And this will be the last time.—

  If he wanted her to ask why, he swiftly changed his mind. —Come. We are thirsty.—

  —Can I take just a small chip?— The fragment a half-stroke of script, in deep orange and blue.

  —No. Take nothing.— But he laughed. —You want to make a museum out of this and yet you steal its treasures.—

  They drove away, lost the site in a wake of swaying branches and stripped leaves. As they reached the main road, she called out. He braked for her. —Oh look! They’re feeding on something!— There were the butterflies again; dozens of them, settled on a splatch in the road. —It’s cow-shit! I always thought they lived on flowers.—

  That was what he had brought her along for, her eager responses, her lack of pretension—to amuse him. —My poor Hillela! The most beautiful place she finds turns out to be a graveyard full of slave-dealers, and her wonderful butterflies eat dung!— But he saw that irony and disillusion could not tarnish her; pessimism a pleasantry, a manner of speaking associated with him. She was innocent: that is all anybody has ever been able to draw out of him when he has been approached by the curious as one who apparently knew her, once—rather well. He says it with a sense of discovery, adamant and unexplained.

  Now at the hotel she was ready to go to her room and change into the yellow knit rag for a swim. The pink heels of the black boy in Arabian Nights dress led the way; there was one room, a large, beautiful room on two levels, with keyhole openings onto the sea, sofas, lamps, a bar corner, and one bed. Udi’s bag and hers were already in place on a luggage rack.

  She was looking at the bed. A strange bed, wide, low, and enthroned on a carpeted area between the two levels. She did not turn to her companion. The corners of her mouth dented a moment, then with a flick of the head, as if a fly had been encircling it, she went over and snapped open the elegant overnight bag the rich aunt had given her for one of the holidays to Cape Town—it was all she had had time to snatch from the cottage. She took out her yellow swimsuit.

  Udi left the room. When he came back they saw one another first in the mirror she was standing before, tying a piece of Kanga cloth round her breasts over the yellow suit. He felt himself a voyeur thrust in to replace the figure in a favourite painting in one of his damp-rippled books, Manet’s Nana watched at her toilet by a gross man. His face showed it; but dismay was all the girl read. Hillela smiled at him in the mirror.

  —I’ve been to tell them we must have two rooms. I’m terribly sorry. I kicked up a fuss but it doesn’t help. They are completely full tonight, they’ve promised that if we stay tomorrow … Anyway, I can sleep on the sofa, they will bring bedding. Or in this climate … look at the carpet, how thick (now he was able to smile, and distance himself in one of his pleasantries)—my turn to sleep on the floor. Everyone has his chance, in this life, good and bad. —I’m really sorry, Hillela, that idiot on the phone got the booking wrong. Believe me, I didn’t expect this.—

  —Oh it doesn’t matter. Are you coming to swim? I’ll wait for you.— She was wiggling her toes in the white sheepskin carpet; he saw one little crooked toe folded over a straight one.

  He came out of the bathroom bearing his familiar unattractive head on an unfamiliar body; taken out of its wrappings, a hidden self appeared. It belonged to a younger, happier man, this well-made thick body with finely-turned muscular thighs and calves, and tight buttocks in black trunks. She had not been able to coax him out of his chair, but now he emerged of his own accord—or rather out of the volition of that hidden body—from the avuncular category in which a young girl would regard him. He hired skin-diving equipment and they laughed and clowned with Chaplin-flippered feet. He swam better than she did and led her into the green and purple-dark of passages undersea; be-goggled and rubber-finned, they were companionably identified with each other, the human species among other species that glowed with phosphorescence, steered past—hundreds of striped, ovoid discs making up one living streamer—or felt timidly with twiddling antennae from nests of rock, the blind silently tapping their way across the ocean bed. At sunset they walked on the beach like any other oddly-assorted couple seeking the retreat of a place like this: laughing black government Ministers from neighbouring states with their away-from-home girls, Greeks and Lebanese with their women, the wives sourly carrying their high-heeled shoes and trailing children, the mistresses hanging on the men’s arms and inclining their heads with animated affection, earning the trip.

  At dinner he ordered grilled fish. Again she ate with appetite the dubious food he avoided. —If I keel over and die during the night, you aren’t responsible.—

  —Don’t say that. I brought you here. I am responsible.—

  His sudden moments of solemnity were something she ignored, like an embarrassing tic disturbing someone’s face.

  A band shook and plucked at rattles and electric guitars. She did not seem to expect him to go so far as to dance with her; they drank wine, intensifying sea-laved well-being and the little, delightful shudders that puckered their sunburned bare arms with the night breath off the ocean. When a young olive-coloured man came across and asked her to dance, Udi watched her enjoying herself. The young man was a good dancer, someone transformed from obscurity by the grace and skill—perhaps the only skill?—he knew he had. She did more than follow; she moved as one body with the man she had never seen before in her life. Watching her, Udi had the impression she might never stop, that she might dance away, return night after night to the dance, to the man
because he was the dance, something someone so young could mistake . . dance her life away. My poor Hillela. An echo sounded from him, of another country and another time, set off by a body, moving thighs, embracing arms inherited from another dancer. That was what was unexplained, to himself as well, when he said it always adamantly, bluntly: —She was innocent.—

  But she came back. This dancer was not one to make mistakes. Trust her!—that was what others said of her. She came back and asked for soda and ice, took a cube out of the drink with her fingers and passed it over her forehead and neck. When the young man approached again to take her away she shook her head, smiling as if he knew very well why she was smiling; no, no.

  They walked on the dark beach again, late. A fine luminous mist made an element neither air nor sea; they could barely see each other. He did not speak and—a small vessel calling out at sea—she spoke only once. —I wish I had my guitar.— He knew she was happy.

  In the room with its ridiculous harem-bed he found Hillela lying plumb in the middle, a sheet over her shape up to the armpits. He came out of the bathroom in pyjamas. She gave an exaggerated sigh at her luxury. Then she shifted over to one side of the bed. He stood there with the spare bedding he had picked up from a chair. She patted the empty side of the bed.

  He went over to the higher section of the room and started arranging the bedding on the floor. When he turned her hand was lying palm up, rejected, where she had patted the bed.

  He came and picked up a pillow for himself. But could not walk away and leave her: her generosity, her honesty. He sat down on the bed and slowly took the sunburned empty hand. Her head was sunk deeply in the billows of down, her curly hair bleached the colour of bronze-brown seaweed and sticky with damp. Against cheeks shiny, reddened and slightly puffy with the fever of sun her eyes were glistening convex black in whose expression he saw only himself, himself as she must be seeing him.

  She smiled, in spite of that. —Mohammed won’t know.—

  He kissed the hand with his sad, marked lips and, not familiar with the old-fashioned gesture, she casually pulled the hand away. On his back, laying himself out straight beside the body of the girl that was volume and weight and softness, the angle of each flexed and relaxed limb rounded-off by the soft bed as a Matisse odalisque has no angles or Picassos of a certain period have no joints in the continuous curved lines of bodies in a bacchanal, he took the hand again. The odd-assorted couple were now figures on a tomb; he put an end to the image in himself by gently coming alive to turn and give her a child’s goodnight kiss on the cheek. But it was a long time since one of her surrogate parents sent her to sleep like that; she turned obediently, as a woman, so that he kissed her on the mouth, and was received by her mouth. She drew close to him and although she did not touch him with her hands, her body laid its caress along his side. For a long time he stroked her hair while she waited for the next well-known moves in love-making, and he waited to speak.

  —Hillela.— Try out the possibility by pronouncing her, invoking her. Take again the hand, the empty hand he could not fill. —I can’t, Hillela. Since my wife died it’s finished.—

  Of course he saw the girl misunderstood: so this was the famous love you read about in books, the eternal faithfulness, remote as the love religious people know for a god you can’t see or touch.

  —It’s not out of some vow or conviction, some such nonsense. It’s not at all even what Petra would want. She wasn’t that kind, trying for promises ‘you’ll never marry another woman’. My god no. From time to time, we both … we had others, and neither of us made a fuss. It wasn’t important for us while we were together; it only concerned each of us separately, you know. So it’s not that.—

  —Oh it doesn’t matter.—The phrase had served for the discovery there was only one bed; it served just as well for the decision that there was to be no obligation to make love. And in its banality—its innocence! yes—it absolved from humiliation, from loss of manhood, even from the pricklings of impotent desire, the shame of wanting what one was not able to take. He did not have to repeat with this child who by some instinct understood the male, loved men as one is allowed to say a man ‘loves women’, the panting and seesawing and desperate, hang-head feebleness (oh to take a knife and cut the useless thing off) that the bodies of bought women had abetted while bored and pitying, despising. Her ordinary little phrase brought about something else, if she could not—bless her—bring sexual relief. He could tell her. You could tell her anything; it suddenly became possible just because Hillela was there, lying beside him. —It’s because I killed her.—

  There could be no experience available to make it possible for the girl to deal with such a statement. She corrected him mechanically from a source that was all she had: something mentioned by Christa.:—No, no, she died in an accident.—

  —Yes. I was driving and I killed her. It was just before dawn and I’d insisted we drive all night to get home from a trip. I must’ve fallen asleep a moment, she didn’t have the seat-belt on, she was asleep. She never woke up, she was flung out and when I looked for her everywhere, the road, the bushes, she was dead, there. I’d hit a buck that must have jumped out into the road. Headlights blind them. She was quite dead. And the buck was still alive. Dying, but alive. I had no gun to shoot it. I’d killed her but I couldn’t kill the buck. I sat with the buck, because she was dead … and the buck knew there was someone there with it. That night was over, light came, and it looked at me all the time while her eyes were closed. It was a female, too. It looked at me until I slowly saw the sight going from its big eyes. I can tell you, I followed it wherever it was going, dying out. I followed all the way. And then. They were both dead and I was hours alone on the road with them.—

  He was stroking her hair again, comforting her for what he had told her.

  —I’ve never seen a dead person.—

  —I know. I can see it in your face.—

  —But you didn’t kill her. That’s not killing.—

  —I was driving, I’m alive, I killed her. Dead asleep. And the buck, the buck was witness. My body seems to know. So there it is. Since then, my body calls me murderer.—

  She made no routine protestations, offered no platitudes of sympathy. They lay a while; what had now been put into words for the first time must find its level in consciousness. Then she got up and went over to the miniature refrigerator and bent to choose. The short spotted cotton shift she wore hitched over her rump as she came back to the bed with a bottle whose label’s lettering had run with condensation. —I think it’s beer.— She took a swig and handed it to him. —You should go and live somewhere else. Then it will be all right again.—

  He pulled himself up against the pillows to drink. —The murderer can’t leave the scene of the crime.—

  —Udi, it wasn’t this road?—

  —No.— But she would never know; intimacy and confidence come and go between an odd-assorted couple like the moon passing in and out of clouds.

  She sat cross-legged on the bed, schoolgirl style.

  —I’d go away if something terrible like that happened to me. Somebody of mine dead. Nothing really terrible’s happened to me, so I suppose … Something that did—something I did—it seemed awful at the time, everyone said how awful … but … not like dying! D’you know why I had to leave home? Where I lived with one of my aunts? My cousin and I used to make love. He was a bit younger than I was. For a long time, we made love.—

  —A real cousin? First cousin?—

  —Our mothers are sisters.—

  —How did it come about?—:

  —My fault.— The moon passed behind a cloud again. He respected that. He leaned over and put his arm round her, shared the beer turn-about. Hillela choked because she had begun to laugh while drinking. —When they found us.— She gasped, laughing. —It was like the three bears. Who’s been sleeping in my bed?—

  The Diplomatic Bag

  Leopard skins mounted on scalloped green felt, dead snakes c
onverted into briefcases, elephants turned into ivory filigree carvings, bracelets, necklaces and paper knives, and table-legs with a copper rim decorating what was once a pachyderm foot—the AFRICAN ARTS ATRIUM did not sell powdered rhino horn, however; that sort of disgusting stuff was for local people in the magic and medicine trade down the road. Hillela wore—‘modelled’, as Archie Harper, the old Africa hand of a special kind, who employed her, insisted—the dashikis or galabiya-inspired dresses of African cloth her employer had made up by his ‘connection’ of Indian piece-workers who sat at their machines on the earth pavements all over the old town. The long dresses became bizarrely slit—some from the first vertebra to the small of the back, as well as to the thigh on both sides—during the period of her employment, because Archie found his assistant-cum-model so ‘innocently inspiring’. He was not himself attracted to women, but had the homosexual’s shrewd and kindly understanding of how they like to make themselves attractive to men: this girl (a real poppet; he knew from the beginning she would go far) inside his one-of-a-kind creations was the best way to encourage customers to clear the racks.

  Business was torpid (—No tourists where you can’t buy contraceptives or whisky, my dear—) but this expatriate, an Englishman, couldn’t leave, either. He was quickly on girlish confiding terms with his assistant: he wouldn’t leave his two young Arab lovers, twin brothers they were, he’d brought them up in his own house since they were fourteen. —You will never find anything ne-early like them in England. Ne-ever. Guardsmen with smelly feet who’re only after what’s in your pocket, that’s all. Revolting.—