A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  A servant interrupted with coffee and sweetmeats glazed with honey. The General’s son ate. He had the air of unreality of one taking the last meal before execution, unable to imagine the actuality of what he dreaded. She could not open her mouth to reassure him.

  Back in her hotel room between visits to the villa, she lay following the screen of the television with the sound switched off; she did not know, so far removed now from the General’s presence, whether there was any reassurance to be given. How long had she known the General? Behind the shared territory of exile, the shared beds in safe houses and Intercontinental Hotels, there was a whole lifetime of which not even the testimony of souvenirs, as in a beautiful room in Eastern Europe, was open to her.

  She bought jeans and T-shirts and took them to the villa. The heat hammered at the walls. It was a prison—the General’s prison—with marble-topped tables, thick hot carpets, and pictures, to be made out in the moted stuffiness, someone must have chosen. Furniture can be anonymous but someone has always chosen the pictures. The General’s son did not speak to her during those days but they experienced together, a drowsy gaze, over and over, on the Swiss alpine view and the Belle Epoque woman in a carriage at the Place de l’Opéra; the room buzzed with prayers being said in the adjoining one by the off-duty guards, who were not allowed to leave the house for the mosque. After a few days he still did not speak but appeared in the clean clothes looking like one of the black students, eager to demonstrate to free somebody, who came to hear her speak on American campuses. He was slim, with a bunched mouth and delicate pointed jaw; no resemblance to his father, his fingers were long and tentative in their movements. The favourite must have been a fragile child. Even though she had a child of her own, the abstract relations of her own childhood—Len the Other Man, Ruthie dancing, dancing in a nightclub—meant she had no understanding, was free of the patricidal and infanticidal loves between parents and children. It was another advantage her aunts had not intended.

  In her hotel room, piped music instead of prayer came through the back of the bedhead from the room next door while she telephoned Reuel. There was no direct dialling to the safe house he was in, in another country. A chocolate had been placed on a paper doily inscribed: The Management Wishes You Goodnight. She was eating it by the time the connection was established, and he heard that her mouth was full, a signal of calm audacity that reassured and at the same time delighted him.

  —Not a mark on him. But it’s an awful place.—

  —How’s that? I arranged for a house, a nice house!—

  —It’s hot and ugly, and the curtains are kept closed all the time.—

  He was laughing thunder down in his deep chest. —If he’s got any sense, he’ll never be in a worse place, my God, if you call that awful … ! You’ve been a lucky girl.—

  She told his father he wouldn’t speak to her. But the day she was to leave and explained he would be following, separately, to his father’s bush headquarters, he stood up—for a moment she thought he was going to clutch at her physically, not wanting to be left. —Who are you?—

  He knew her name; she had given it to him the first time she saw him, and seen disbelief in his face.

  —I’m your father’s lover. My husband was assassinated seven years ago.—

  He looked at her; appeared to be looking at her dark eyes, all shining pupil, her tight-skinned cheeks, mouth with the beginnings of the lines of her most habitual expression—generous, wary confidence—overprinting the relaxation at the corners of her lips, but he was following something else. Every feature of her—the breasts slung from the angle of bare collarbones, the dent of her navel visible under the thin cotton of her skirt, the ringless brown hands and dabs of red paint on her toenails—all these, of face and body, were markers and footholds showing the way. He had enough of his father in him to recognize this one not only knew the need to move on, but also what she would not reveal to his father: what it was necessary to do, to bring this about.

  I see, he said.

  He saw.

  By the time the General was ready to eliminate the government’s border outposts and push his forces, at last sufficiently large, properly clothed and well-equipped, to attack the second largest town in his country, his son had a black beret and a beard that broadened his face. His breast was crossed from shoulder to waist, on either side, by a sash like an Order made of the pointed steel teeth of machine-gun bullets. It is true that Hillela worked beside him for four weeks, that dry season of the General’s advance. They were with the General in an abandoned farmhouse that had once belonged to a white settler before the first war there, the old war of independence. It was the supply depot closest to the fighting; the farthermost point of a road able to carry heavy transport vehicles. The General’s men unloaded their cargo and stored the boxes in the house. The son was the best of them, yes; he worked until dawn. Hillela had a kitchen table at which she sat typing the serial number of each gun before distribution so that the General would know exactly what weapons were being deployed where. The specifications were not unfamiliar to her; her trips with Arnold stood her in good stead, as the Manaka cuisine once had done in other circumstances.

  The house with its curtainless windows was a creature who has witnessed so much that its eyes can never close. But everyone slept there during the day. It was stacked with grenades. If one were to have been faulty all would have gone off as a bundle of deadly firecrackers, blowing up the whole place. At midday the sun stripped the walls bare, ransacking yet again: bare boards, shelves of dead insects. At the same hour every day a bar of light rested on the eyelids of the General. He woke, and often made love to her and then would stroll with her in what must have been the settler’s farmhouse garden. Among the mud huts, like burned broken pottery, of the peasants who had moved in when there was redistribution of land and then, in turn, fled from the new war, there was still the remains of a swimming pool. In it were skeletons of frogs and a dead snake lying like a lost leather belt, stranded from the last rainy season. The General wished there were some way of filling the pool; he would have liked to do his twenty lengths a day.

  The small airport was taken with the town. When the General sent her out during the mopping-up operations (which included the looting of bars and brothels by some of his long-deprived troops) it was from his stance on this strategic bit of liberated territory that he saw her off in one of his Libyan planes. The son, now with the rank of colonel, was alongside his father. Not customary, among these people, to kiss when not making love, and so she did not offer any dab on either cheek to the young man, but they clasped hands and the corner of his bearded mouth went up in a smile, slowly exchanged. It was as if, at last, they had turned to acknowledge together the view of the Swiss Alps and the lady in the carriage on the Place de l’Opéra.

  *

  Agostinho Neto was another friend of the General who had become President of his country. Hillela waited safely in Angola while the General and his son advanced, captured airstrip by airstrip, village by village and town by town, towards the capital she had never seen. She must have lived for seven or eight months in that hotel in Neto’s capital, with one trip to England to see the namesake. She took Nomo to visit the Holland Park couple with whom they had stayed when she was small—at ten, what long thin black legs she had! The wife babbled on about her surely going to be a dancer or a model, she kept talking, afraid Hillela would take advantage of any gap to ask if she and her child could occupy the guest room again. But Hillela was in no need of being taken in; she had been provided with a flat by some organization or other, she didn’t name it, and, as the husband remarked, it was idiotic to be nervous, so obvious Hillela was not short of money, the child was at Bedales, and how well Hillela looked, prettier than ever. She was vague when asked what she was doing in Africa—Luanda, of all places. She had worked with various refugee organizations but now was not sure what would come next. From the way she got into the taxi he found for her when she left, from the way sh
e settled herself and quickly remembered to smile through the window, her mind already discarding the visit like a used ticket, he knew—he couldn’t say why—what had come next was a new lover, and whatever role that meant. Once she had gone, the wife agreed: there was nobody quite like her; awful and rather marvellous.

  The General came to Luanda expectedly unexpectedly, every few weeks. It was not only to fill with the scent of his after-shave, the grunts as he did his twenty morning push-ups on the carpet, the glowing weight of his body in bed, a room registered in the name of Mrs Hillela Kgomani, but also to consult with Neto and others in the Organization of African Unity. Alliances must be negotiated with foresight. Self-assured of winning his war, he was already looking towards his stature in peace. She always knew if he had arrived and entered the room while she was absent; his presence expanded it before she noticed his bag or the newspapers spilled on the bed. She was alone in that presence—he had been in town since the previous night and was out at a meeting—on a day when the telephone rang and it was not he ready to say where to join him for lunch. There was someone to see her, downstairs. Who? A woman asking for her.

  What woman? —The lady won’t give her name.—

  A strange hackle of fear rose from somewhere long quieted. She stood for an instant once again behind the refrigerator door and felt the thud of her own death.

  —I don’t see people who won’t say who they are.—

  The telephone rang again and it was the General. The young man behind the reception desk came running out on his two-inch-heeled shoes, bum-tight black pants waggling, to open the lobby doors as she passed. Colonists never leave; they leave their blood and style behind. He wore a pendant on a glossy chain dipping down into his open-necked shirt, like any Portuguese dandy, and in his watered-down African face his eyes were the polished aubergine-coloured ones—like her own. —That ’oman, she speak Portuguese to me.— But he saw madam was not interested, she had the face of someone who has just come from her bath and her mirror and is ready to be received by company that commands the best table in the restaurant.

  The next afternoon the persistent caller was there again. —I tell her, without she says the name (a shrug in the voice)—she say, Mrs Nunes.—

  A General’s consort meets many people and does not always remember doing so, particularly if they are wives, who appear only in marginal social contexts and usually don’t have much to say. It might be that this was one of those whose offers of invitations to visit she had accepted without any intention of pursuing.

  Hillela came down into the lobby, thirty-three next birthday, not grown tall, grown to be a young woman with deep breasts and a curly head well-balanced on a straight neck, shiny cheeks without make-up, a black, brightly-suffused gaze.

  A woman was sitting on the plastic-covered bench where only the nightwatchman ever sat. Her skirt was arranged round her knees and her feet were neatly together, pushed up by high-heeled sandals. She pressed the heel of her palms on the bench and got up. She came slowly nearer; stopped.

  —I’m Ruth.—

  The young woman tilted her head a moment; but the other was right, there was no need to make any other claim.

  —The housekeeper here’s a friend of mine, she often talks about the people who come to stay, it’s only natural. She said there was someone with an unusual, pretty name—‘Hillela’. She’d never heard of anyone called that before—I didn’t say anything but I thought, what a great coincidence. So I asked what you were like, about how old …—

  —Won’t you have some tea or something cool to drink.—

  As if this were one of the wives to whom politeness was due. That’s what came out. That’s all. She heard the slither and clip of high heels behind her. They sat down between potted palms. No-one appeared to serve them. A long, long silence, twenty-nine years of silence uncoiled around the two women, it stretched and stretched to its own horizon, like the horizon drawn by a landscape of cloud rimmed by space, seen from a plane thousands of feet removed from the earth, from reality. Silence was another dimension: ‘mother’, ‘daughter’.

  —You don’t mind my coming.—

  The remark did not break the silence, it was nothing, swallowed up by it. She shook her head.

  She got up and pressed a bell on the wall.

  —Really—I’m not thirsty. Don’t bother.—

  But she was pressing the bell again and again, it could be heard shrilling from behind the louvres of the patio bar.

  Even for one so used to adapting to others, so skilled and quick to adjust, how does one talk when one doesn’t know to whom one is talking—acquaintance, secret friend, someone standing in a relationship never tried out? There was at least something in the silence, something to say:—You live in Mozambique.—

  —I did, in Lourenço Marques—used to be, Maputo now … We moved here in the late Sixties, my husband thought there was more opportunity. With the oil, you know.—

  Vasco. The name torn in pieces and stuffed into a bin with the crusts of school sandwiches. To have inside me a man who has nothing to do with being introduced: this is my wife, this is my child, my dog. The woman had the creamy opaque skin of the generation that used face powder, the skin of Olga. The high brow of Pauline was still smooth and the neck unlined but its fullness quilted. The beautiful painted mouth, shiny as tar in the photograph beside the silver dish of Liquorice All-Sorts, opened on false teeth. —How is Pauline? Is she still married to old Joe? And Olga? I don’t suppose I’d recognize them, now—or them me (acknowledging good-humouredly the hair dyed red). Olga must be sixty!—she’s the eldest, and I’m fifty-three, I was twenty-one when you were born. Sixty! But I’m sure she won’t look it, she was always afraid of using herself up—you know? Precautions. ‘Don’t cry, it makes your eyes red.’ Even when we were children, she used to cream her elbows and knees when she got out of the bath. She was so pretty and so afraid—at fourteen, of wrinkles! I threw her into terrible confusion when we were young girls and I read somewhere that if you shaved your legs you lost your sex appeal—she was always perfectly depilated. Well, anyway, all she got was Arthur … I suppose he’s still around—

  That circumcised ox, and he did become rich enough for her to buy a pair of Imari cats and an 18th-century Blackamoor holding up a globe, and Jethro carrying cream scones to her swimming pool.

  —My darling Pauline … has she stuck with Joe? I’ve often wondered … though I didn’t write often … No, well, that’s not true, I didn’t write at all after about a year. I’m not going to lie to you. I can’t picture Pauline living a whole lifetime with that nice deadpan stuffed with legal documents, he was like a suit of old clothes filled with paper to keep birds away. I always knew, I hoped she’d still have some other life, she could have done anything—She wasn’t like Olga or me. And all she had was Joe and her drunken black friends sponging on her. How is Pauline?—

  But she knew no more than this woman, about the sisters, the aunts. She had been gone since she was nineteen.

  —And you don’t write?—

  —No.— Gone, like Ruthie.

  A black man in a waiter’s suit that gaped between the buttons on jacket and fly stood by with a tin tray. An icecream was ordered—Well, all right, I’ll have something!—and a soda.

  —Did you live with Olga or with Pauline? In the end?—

  Now it was two schoolgirls meeting years later; the icecream was being smoothed, tiny cardboard spoonful by spoonful, between sentences.

  —With both. At different times. I went to boarding-school in Rhodesia and I used to spend the holidays with Olga.—

  —She had only the three boys? She always envied me, getting a girl.—

  —Clive, Mark and Brian.—

  —And Pauline?— Ruthie had never written and now this woman wanted to register a preference for Pauline to have been the surrogate.

  —Oh, I used to be invited a lot to Pauline’s. And then when I left Rhodesia, I went to live with her and Joe.—
r />   A smile. —Len. It was he who didn’t want me to write, you know. You were too small to read, anyway.—

  But not later. I’ve had a husband, I’ve given birth, these things were done to me, but with you I do things, I’m all over my body, I’m there wherever you touch me, my tongue in your ear, your armpit fur and your sweet backside.

  —Pauline had only the two, didn’t she, Alexander—Sasha—and the little girl, just a baby, when I went away.—

  —Carole, we went to school together.—

  —Sasha was a darling little boy. Did you get on well? You and Pauline’s children?—

  —Yes, it was fine.—

  —No jealousy? We sisters never quarrelled, we were very, very close.—

  —I know. They were always talking about you.—

  Sideways on the iron café-chair, the legs were arranged exposed from the knees as they had been on the lobby bench; elegant legs narrow at knee and ankle, displayed as all that was left to display by a woman whose fine breasts (breasts of Hillela) now met, where a waist like Hillela’s had been, a solid bolster that was diaphragm, belly and hips in one. —You wonder why I came. Why I’ve bothered you. Hillela.—

  She was smiling without admission or reproach. —No I don’t. Curiosity. It’s natural.—

  Offended, all the same; and the momentary twitching expression of one who is used to enduring the carelessness of others. —It’s a bit different from my friend who happens to work here, I think. Not just ‘curiosity’; couldn’t be, could it? If you’d known I was here, would you have looked for me?—