A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  —I don’t know, really. I wouldn’t have known whom to look for.— A lie. Resemblances, sisterly and filial, can’t be avoided. But the General’s consort did not look where she thought they were to be found, in Mozambique.

  The red mouth opened a little, the hands with the puffiness round the nails that results from some sort of manual work drew ringed fingers slowly down the powdered cheeks in preparation: —So you don’t remember me at all.—

  —I think I was only—how old?—about two. There’s a photograph in Lourenço Marques. I was there with you but I don’t remember—not where it was taken, not the palm tree, not being there with you. Olga framed a photograph—of you—one taken during the war.—

  —Nothing later?— Laughter. —That’s Len. He must have torn them up. You had no other idea of me?—

  —None.— No pictures, but letters. All sensations alive in the body, breasts, lips of the mouth and the vagina, thorax, thighs. Vasco. A thirst of the skin.

  —What’d they tell you? Len?—

  —That you’d made another life.—

  —Was that all? What could that mean to a child? How ridiculous. Len’s phrase.—

  —It didn’t really matter what he said, he was talking about someone I didn’t know, bringing up a subject that didn’t exist, you see. I travelled about with him when I was little, in the car.—

  And now remorse. —Oh my God.—

  —It was wonderful! I remember it all, sleeping on a teddy-bear cloth blanket in the back, between the sample boxes. We stayed together at hotels in little dorps; slept in the same room with him.—

  —‘Another life’. Sounds as if I’d gone into a convent. Len just never could face facts. Wouldn’t let me write, you know. And my sisters? When you were bigger?—

  —Pauline explained.—

  —That I’d gone away with a man.—

  Oh more than that. To another life—Len’s phrase wasn’t a euphemism. To look for passion and tragedy. The wrong place; when it really happens it happens on the kitchen floor.

  But a daughter cannot instruct a mother. —Yes, that you hadn’t been—right—for Len, and you’d fallen in love with someone else.—

  —So you were old enough to understand, by then.—

  —Oh yes. Some of my friends’ parents were divorced.—

  Vasco, my Vasco, the taste of you! You are still in my mouth. I read somewhere it’s supposed to be the taste of bitter almonds. Not true, not for yours, anyway. Like strawberries, like lemon rind, I always did eat the rind of the slice of lemon people put in drinks.

  The silence came back. The woman braved it. —He left me two years after we moved here.—

  —You’re not with Vasco anymore?—

  Ruthie, childish, self-absorbed Ruthie, never able to be aware of anything outside her own skin, that’s her charm in a way—doesn’t notice that if nothing else is remembered, the man’s name is known.

  —Oh, a long time. Things didn’t work out, here. We had nothing left. Neither of us had a job, so he went to Europe to look for something. He was going to send for me in Lisbon, but it’s never happened.—

  Mrs Nunes. —You’re married to someone else, now.—

  The woman shook her head slowly, smoothing into silence the remoteness of that possibility. —Not married. When I was still young … younger… I was fooled again a few times. I didn’t understand what men were.— A little late to begin explaining the facts of life. No doubt someone did that; so far as Pauline and Olga could be said to know them. Or poor Len.

  But the young woman was smiling at Ruthie as if she were the one capable of giving instruction.

  —And I hear you’ve got a daughter, too. I’m a grandmother!—

  —Yes, ten years old, she’s called Nomzamo and she’s at school in England.—

  —My friend saw the photograph in your room. Is she from this husband you’re with here?—

  —She’s a black child. But not from the man your friend’s described.—

  They laughed together for the first time. —Oh I’ve lived among them so long, it’s nothing to me, although I’ve never really had anything to do with them. And now, of course, they’ve taken over everything—I believe it’s the same in Mozambique—not like it was when I was there, there’s nothing in the shops, no water, even, half the time, in the old Polana. It was such a beautiful hotel. People used to say better than anything on the French Riviera—of course, you stayed there once with me! You did! When you were tiny! That’s where the photograph must have been … There were all the outdoor cafés, the nightclubs … and now nothing left. Just the same here; look at this dump of a hotel. They took over everything, but without the experience … that’s what happens. I often think, Pauline ought to be here, and see what it’s like—I was always supposed to be the impractical one, I lived in dreams, but what about Pauline … ! I work for them. Yes, I do.— The mouth moved half-humorously, half-emotionally. —I’m a housekeeper, too. At the Hotel Continental. They want white or at least half-caste people for the job because the other poor things always fall to the temptation to steal towels and sheets. Of course—these things are such luxuries to them! What will Olga say when she hears her sister’s a glorified maid in a hotel!— But Olga will never know; neither mother nor daughter has any contact with her. —Are you a professional? Did my sisters send you to a university? There was no shortage of money, my father must have left a pile, and Arthur’s a money-making machine. The more I ask, the less I find I know about you.—

  —No. They would have—Olga would have paid—but I left when I’d finished school. Left where I’d been living—at Pauline and Joe’s. I’ve done all sorts of things, doctor’s receptionist, sung in discos, served in a shop, been a kind of governess in Ghana, once; and then political work in Europe, and jobs with aid organizations—in Africa, in America.—

  Ruthie followed as if she had planned it all herself. Now she could put a hand out and place it over Hillela’s, a parental blessing bestowed upon a bowed head. —Hillela, I’m so glad you’ve really lived. I knew you’d be well taken care of by my family but at the same time I felt ashamed that it would mean you’d grow up like them, and never know anything different. Every time I remembered you I thought that. It would come upon me suddenly in the most unlikely moments, moments when it seemed that the things I was doing, the things that were happening to me—they made it impossible that what I left behind in Johannesburg had ever existed, that I had ever been Olga and Pauline’s sister and Grandpa Hillel’s favourite granddaughter and married someone under a canopy.—

  The first touch in twenty-nine years. Her hand was trapped under the stranger’s palm and neither turned to let the palms meet nor slid away.

  —I know it couldn’t have been all honey. But I can see—you wouldn’t expect it to be. I don’t know you—don’t think I’m pretending to know you, I can’t—but I am your mother. The blood’s the same. You have a child of your own. And this man, I hear he’s some kind of politician, someone important—does he love you? Do things go well between you?—

  If you never have had a mother you never have been asked such questions. She was smiling, conceding a right that didn’t exist. —Things go very well. We’ll soon be living in his own country.—

  —You’ve turned out so good-looking, Hillela. And clever, I can tell. You remind me of Pauline when she was young—a certain look around the eyes.—

  The eyes: that was the moment to ask the question. But did it matter, any longer, whether she was Len’s daughter or the child of Vasco; abandoned or abandoner, both were gone. No need to invent a reason for her particular kind of existence taken in among antiques or bedding down with a cousin (the blood the same), when for her, too, all that had happened to her made it impossible that what was left behind, there, had ever existed?

  —Will you show me the photograph of the little girl? I need proof to believe I’m a grandmother!—

  —Of course. I’ll fetch it for you.—

  She ignored
the elevator, raced up the stairs and the room was staring at her as she burst in and took the leather frame from the dressing-table. It was a double frame that balanced ajar like a book; on the side facing the namesake, laughter-dents in her cheeks and her arms raised joyfully, was a photograph of Hillela and Whaila with the baby in the crook of his arm. It had not been looked at for a long time, although it was there on the dressing- or bedside-table in every hotel room and in the duffle bag that lay among the guns and grenades in. the farmhouse. Whaila, thirty-eight years old for ever in the garden of Britannia Court, the light catching his strong slender forearm with the watch there, distinctly, and the lines of pain in his smile that struck deep and never faded from the print. She slipped the photograph out from beneath the plastic window and clumsily, tremblingly, put it in a drawer. The veins of her neck swelled and for a moment the room lurched in tears.

  The woman had the good family manners to know she had stayed long enough; she had left the patio and was waiting in the lobby. She studied the namesake, considering fondly; maybe considering what to say, it was hard to find resemblances not blotted out by blackness. —She’s an adorable little girl.—

  They stood seeing together the daughter’s daughter, smiling politely.

  Hillela took back the photograph only for a moment. —Here, Ruthie, you have it.—

  The General said of course she must come and live with them. —Your mother is our mother. She will have her own quarters in our house, or her own house, same as my mother.—

  —She’s Ruthie. I don’t know her, I’ve never lived with her. I might as well take in anyone.—

  This had no significance for the General. Among his people most children were brought up by grandmothers or other kin as well as or in place of their mothers—anyone who performed the function shared the title: the mother remained the mother. —Hillela, you’re not adopted?—

  —Well, I was—but not by Ruthie.—

  —Then she’s your mother, even if you don’t know her face. I don’t care. We look after our elders.—

  —But even if we had a house—

  —You will have a house soon, a house you can’t imagine, a house with I forget how many—fifteen, sixteen rooms—And the thought of regaining his official residence roused him, so that he pressed the breath out of her and kissed her with his hands encompassing her head, as he had held it at the beginning, to examine it for hurt.

  —If we really want to do something …—

  —Of course. You must look after your mother.—

  —D’you think we could get a cheap ticket to Europe? I don’t believe she’s ever been. Even if it were only to Portugal—she Speaks Portuguese, apparently.—

  —That’s easy, if that’s what you want. Airlines must make sure all eventualities are covered.— He was laughing, zestfully packing his bag to go back to his bush capital. —TAP wants to keep its landing rights if a change of regime is coming.—

  Hillela had no address; it had not been pressed upon her, must have been clear in her face or manner that she would not know how to find any reason for another meeting. She went to the housekeeper to ask where Mrs Nunes lived. —You can h’ask for ’er at the Continental, madam, that’s where she works.— —No, her address at home. Do you know when her day off is?— —Like me, she’s off work Thursdays—tomorrow, you see, I’m not ’ere.— The housekeeper wrote a few lines on the torn-off border of a newspaper. —Is it far? — —There’s a bus, madam—but you take a taxi.—

  The General had left by the time the crows were squabbling on the balcony ledge in the early morning. It always was a day or so before she took possession of the deserted room again. The hearth-fire of the bed had gone out, cold. Hillela dressed, approached the/couple of taxis that leaned night and day against the kerb outside the hotel; and then went on walking. The heat of the day had not yet risen; there was a shimmer of humidity and the smell of salty wet stone and oil from the docks; the concrete of Tema rose from the waves, underfoot again, and sank away. She meant to walk in the direction of the fort, which she vaguely knew was that of the quarter indicated on the slip of newspaper in her bag, and pick up a taxi after she had had a breath of air, but she kept walking while the cross-wind on the causeway road that connected the town with the restinga, where the beaches were, blew about her its scarves and veils. The road to the fort hung as a slack, snaked rope from the walls. The Portuguese built their fortresses as indestructibly as the Danes and they have survived to be put to use everywhere on the coasts of Africa by successive powers, housing governors-general or colonial militia, and, at last, black heads of state or their army headquarters: the stony armour fits everyone, imperialist and revolutionary, capitalist and Marxist. She saw the fort up ahead with its great incongruously voluptuous bouquet of bougainvillea at the portal, then passed beneath it, and looked back once at it high behind her. She had not been up there, although she moved in official circles; Neto did not live in his palace as Nkrumah had done in Christiansborg, outside whose walls grass covered a grave: I saw the face of freedom … and I died. Military vehicles were tilting down the steep road and showering her with dust: this was army headquarters.

  At the other end of the causeway road she stopped someone riding a bicycle and showed him the slip of newspaper. He gabbled directions in Portuguese, but her vivid incomprehension and feminine friendliness roused him to make further efforts and he drew her a map in the dust. She turned left, and then left again, passing rows of tiny pink, bright blue, acid-green and yellow facades like children’s, iced birthday-cake houses. Pastel picket fences enclosed minute spaces of sand. The streets seemed deserted; row after row, pink, blue, green, yellow. Pleasure houses; places to store surfboards and waterskis and barbecue grills for prawns, doll’s houses where one could keep a girl, even, and visit her during the week when families were back in town.

  Ruthie lived in one of these. The address was correct. The chalk-blue door was opened by a small girl with black eyes and thin gold rings in her baby ears—Hillela herself, if she had not been left behind twenty-nine years ago. Perhaps Ruthie owned or rented the house, perhaps she hired a room there; perhaps it was Vasco’s pleasure house in which Ruthie had been left behind, and she hired it out to share with others? The child ran away to the kitchen, which could be smelled (green peppers and coffee, the odours released when Pauline was preparing a treat lunch), and there were voices talking across each other in Portuguese.

  Ruthie must have just washed her hair. She wore a towel turban that pulled firm the skin of her temples and cheeks; the lost beauty her sisters talked of almost emerged—useless beauty thrown away so cheap on the first man to take it up in a nightclub. It was her turn to lead the way, chattering and apologizing for her dressing-gown. They went into what must have been the communal room: paper flowers before a plaster Virgin Mary, piles of gritty records, a photograph of a frock-coated man and a woman in a high collar under oval convex glass. They sat on a sofa protected by crocheted headrests and arm-mats. The curtains were closed against the sun and again what was said was said in patterned dimness, twenty-nine years submerging their faces under the dissolving play of depths.

  Ruthie’s chatter stopped instantly. —Europe. But what would I do there. I mean, I don’t know anybody.—

  —We’ve got friends who would look after you.—

  —Oh no. Thank you, it’s very generous, tell your husband, I don’t know what to say … No, I’d better stay. I’m used to it, now. I speak the language pretty well, you know. After such a long time. Some of the whites who went away when it was all finished for them, they’ve come back, they can’t settle down there, after here—even though everything’s changed so much. And would I get my job back … Europe. I’d better stay where I’m used to.—

  Five weeks after a certain telephone call from his mother Sasha followed the impulse, and wrote to the Department of Political Science at M.I.T. asking whether the Department would be good enough to supply him with the address of Mrs Hillela Kgomani, wh
o had taken part in a seminar on Africa (he apologized for not being able to be more precise) the previous spring. It was necessary for him to contact Mrs Kgomani for reasons of research. He requested that if it appeared that his letter was directed to the wrong department, it might be passed on to the appropriate one. He received a courteous reply, and the address of the brownstone. But although Hillela wrote several times to Brad over the next year, she never gave any address other than that which would place her in a city at the moment of writing: ‘Algiers’, ‘Luanda’. If there is nowhere to reply to, of course, the one to whom a letter is addressed cannot fall to the temptation to write back, and cannot deliver any slight through not doing so. Trust her to protect herself … She would not know the joy and pain her handwriting caused.

  Brad wrote across the envelope from South Africa: return to sender.

  Unwanted, unopened, dead letters come back slowly, by sea mail. Sasha opened his and could not stop himself from beginning to read: … my “field” (as my mother says, as if we were sheep she’d like to keep corralled chewing on this bit of grass or that) turns out to be not so different from yours, after all. I suppose that’s why I’m writing. I chucked up law (again, the first time was for the army) and I’m working with a black trade union in Durban, the place you once ran away to with your friend, I’ve forgotten her name, and left the whole house in a state of shock … I’m relieved to be away from JHB, I’m no longer with that girl, either. And the house is gone, they sold it before they left. But I hate the climate. I’ve never liked lying about on beaches, which is what everyone finds the compensation for breathing warm soup instead of air, night and day, in summer. I haven’t had a winter here, yet. What I do: I’m helping to organize workers. It’s as simple as that but of course it’s not simple at all here. You would have gone off to take a shower or gossip on the phone if I’d talked about such things, but now I suppose you’ll know something of them. Maybe more than I do. Pauline said you lecture. African problems—she didn’t know the details, she thought it was refugees, but anyway, refugees are ex-employees, potential labour, an unemployment problem among other things, so you’re certain to have picked up a lot from them. As you must know, blacks’ unions here at home still aren’t allowed to participate in the official industrial conciliation process, but this won’t be able to go on for much longer, whatever the government would like. As blacks have become the main work force, not only traditionally in mining, but in the engineering, construction and other secondary industries, being able to negotiate directly only with whites has left the bosses a fraction of the labour force to parley with. The recognized trade unions are a farce, and these pragmatic capitalists have to deal with reality. So it’s certain that in a year or two black unions will have to be recognized. And there’s the question of mixed ones—but I won’t go into all that. The only thing that was alive for me in law was labour legislation, and now at least I’m doing something practical with all that stuff I mugged up. Black workers have little or no experience of the kind of organizing skills they’re going to need, or the kind of structures, right from the shop floor, they have to set up. Not that there’s always a shop floor—I’m mostly concerned with dockworkers, at present. All I ever knew about them when I started was that they invented (should I say ‘choreographed’) the gumboot dance, you know, the calf-slapping-and-stamping performance, tin whistles shrieking between their teeth—teams of them used to be brought to put on for Pauline’s indigenous art shows. It’s not much of a career; I only mind for Joe—but believe it or not, Carole has taken up where I dropped out, she’s articled to the firm he joined in London! So that’s good, for him. He didn’t want to leave but my mother decided he was useless here. And that was that.