A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  I don’t know what you want to know. If anything. But I imagine that you are back in a family now; you have your own family, a professor husband, a child (I know that’s not his, that’s from another marriage). I’ve never been to Uncle Sam’s great U.S. but I can choose and furnish your house from the movies … how else? And you in it. No movie to supply that one.

  I suppose that house and you in it is a good idea. So that with it you may want to know the sort of things people want to know when they have family houses. The other cousins: maybe you’d like to hear about them. They all three have careers. Mark’s a urologist, a neighbor of yours, more or less, in Philadelphia. Brian’s in banking: Clive—I’m not sure what he’s doing, can’t remember for the moment, but whatever it is he’s very successful—I met him once, on a plane going to Cape Town. He gave me a card which I lost. Maybe you have a card now: Professor and Ms Hillela—what? Pauline didn’t say; you keep your other name when you lecture.

  It’s wonderful to be with blacks. Working with blacks. Already there are some who are senior to me, one or two who have been, for training, to England and West Germany. I take my orders from them. So I suppose I’m like Pauline, really. Where I get my thrills. It’s wonderful and sometimes it’s a terrible let-down. Alpheus’s garage was luxury compared with the flat near the Point I’m living in, but I’m still cut off from the vigorous ugliness of the life they live, different from my ugliness; what they find to talk about in their endless dialectic—no, synthesis—of laughter, anger and mimicry, their Sunday booze-ups, the childhood loyalties they never seem to give up—it’s not in a manner of speaking that they call each other brother.

  But what am I saying. You were married to a black. It must have been different, for you. Perhaps I should marry a black girl—if that were possible. (By the way, the law against that is going to go, too, one of these days. They’re looking for ways they can trim off the straggly edges without harming white power.) But I have to tell you I’m not attracted to black girls. Not so far. As if they could care.

  The kind of job I do—it’s neither legal nor illegal. It’s not really new, either. I’m making no great break-through for progress. It was done before we were born or when we were little kids by people whose names I’ve learned, Afrikaners like the Cornelius sisters and Bettie du Toit, and Jews like me, Solly Sachs and Eli Weinberg. Before the laws put a stop to it. Some of them landed in jail and exile, and others gave in and settled for working in white unions. So now it has to be begun over again, but this time there’ll be no stopping it. The gumboot dance won’t be hustled off the arena when the whites have had enough for their amusement. Our offices have been raided a few times; the police seem bewildered by what they find, might as well be reading upside-down. I’ve been questioned, along with another white involved. But they don’t seem to know what to do about us, yet.

  It was not prying, to read the letter meant for Hillela. As he read he saw that when he was writing to her, he was writing to himself. He tore up his letter and dropped it into the office waste basket among memoranda, spoilt photocopies, and the Coke cans his colleagues aimed there.

  The signals from the General’s free radio stations became stronger and stronger. His pilots, training in Bulgaria to fly MIGs, qualified and came back to the bush to operate from the captured provincial towns with their airports or airstrips. The government troops were fighting from besieged towns. The General rocket-attacked and bombed military bases but gave strict instructions that the oil refinery and the country’s two ports were not to be touched, nor were there to be any but unavoidable civilian targets. —I’m not going to walk into a ruined city and take on a wrecked economy.— But in the end there was fighting in the streets in which his former comrades, his neighbours when he was a young officer, his friends and perhaps even some members of his own family would be killed. Only the best of them was safe by his side, and no-one dared to recall that the Colonel had once belonged with the enemies his father had overcome. The General did not have to explain to Hillela his feelings about this; she had seen the homeless wanderers between army and army, war and war, sitting in the bush, she had brought the soup powder that comes after shrapnel.

  Some time before the army headquarters, police headquarters, broadcasting station and telecommunications centre in the real capital were taken by the General’s troops, and he entered the capital in a procession of armoured cars and tanks whose engine power was quickly superseded by the lava of crowds that carried them forward in battered, ecstatic eruption, the marriage took place in some Hilton or Intercontinental hotel where he flew to join Hillela for twenty-four hours. It was then that the General gave her her African name. She had forgotten the promise, taken as one of the kind offered her meaninglessly so often in the playfulness of sexual advances. —You’ll be there on the register: Chiemeka Hillela.— Now she remembered. —What does it mean?— He took a smiling breath that expanded the muscles of his neck as well as his big chest. —It’s not a name in my language, it comes from another country, but it means the same as my real name does. ‘God has done very well’.—

  His bell of laughter broke and reverberated, back and forth. She embraced him, the accolade of victorious commanders, her arms hardly able to reach around his shoulders.

  She had drawn back. The shine of her one cheekbone was impressed with the ridges of the insignia he bore, her eyes were inescapable; he found the challenge very attractive. —Why in another language? Because I’m a stranger?—

  —Now, now. Wait a minute. It’s an Igbo name, from Nigeria. I had a good friend there, I stayed with him and his mother, she treated me like her son. It’s in her honour I call you. She fed me, she clothed me the first time I was in exile, as a youngster. And her name was the same as mine, a female version; a name that was fated …—

  The name that was ready for her has been hers for official purposes ever since, but between the couple she remained Hillela, as he remained for her Reuel, his colonial baptismal name at the Catholic font. So that ‘Hillela’ has become the name of intimacy, withdrawn from the currency of general use and thereby confusing her identity and whereabouts, for others, further than these already had been. It was only by her face that Olga recognized the President’s wife in the newspaper photograph, that time, sitting there right next to Yasir Arafat.

  State Houses

  Aleopard stands in the entrance of State House. When Nomo has a week to spare between seasonal haute couture presentations in Paris, Rome, New York and London, and flies out to Africa, the moment of arrival for her is when she passes an elongated hand over the creature’s head in recognition of the way the namesake climbed on its back the first time she was brought to visit, as an eleven-year-old child. She has a leopard-skin coat at home in her Trastevere apartment or London mews flat (depending where she passes the winter). It was designed for her by one of the Japanese couturiers who have superseded the French since Chanel and Dior died.

  This other, a taxidermist’s, version of the leopard gives it flanks hard and hollow to the touch as cardboard under the bright-patterned tight silky fur, and a tongue like congealed sealing-wax in its snarling mouth. There are a small rock and clumps of dried grasses glued to the plinth with which it was supplied; the whole tableau a gift of homage to the State given by the oil concessionaires when the country became independent and the General was President for the first time, before the civil war. The entrance is an atrium, with wings of the house led to by open, white-pillared passages on either side. State House was originally Government House, and built to the standard design of one of the sovereignties of hot climates in the imperial era which, of course, flourished and declined before that of airconditioning. The President has wanted to brick up walls and extend to the whole place the airconditioning system he long ago installed in the public and private rooms, but Hillela’s early exposure to the stylistic graces and charms of the past, spending school holidays with a collector aunt, left latent in her an appreciation that has emerged in the mistress o
f the Presidential residence. She has insisted that State House appropriate Government House, not destroy its architectural character. She has been in charge of all extensions and structural alterations. A style of living commensurate with the dignity of the State, she persuaded the President, is not expressed in the idiom of the Hilton and Intercontinental (with which both have a strong emotional tie as the places where his return into his own was bargained for and planned). As for luxury—a measure of which every Head of State, even one as determined to live as close to his people as Nyerere was, must have in order to symbolize some estate now attainable to the people, since every head of a black state was once one of its oppressed people—real luxury is expressed in gardens and the indulgence of individual notions of comfort, idiosyncratic possessions. Behind the leopard of black independence, the atrium opens across the reception area from which official visitors waiting to be received by the President can watch, in the park, peacocks from the last governor’s tenancy trailing worn tails. Hillela would not touch, either, the collection of votary objects that surrounds the coat-of-arms that has replaced an imperial one: plaques beaten out of the country’s copper, the carvings by local artists of heroic agrarian couples, faithfully but subconsciously reproducing as an aesthetic mode the oversize head and spindly legs of undernourishment, and the toadying gifts of white visiting artists or the multinational firms who commission them—heroic animals, more leopards, elephants, lions—paintings as subconsciously reproducing the white man’s yearning for Africa to be a picture-book bestiary instead of the continent of black humans ruling themselves. She knows the strings of cheap pearls and pressed-tin miniature human limbs that encrust walls round the ikon in Eastern Europe called the Black Virgin—whether 14th-century anticipation of Black Theology or time and the grime of worshippers’ breath had made her so, the admirer who took Hillela on a weekend expedition to the shrine could not say.

  The President’s passage of heroes is also intact. Strangely, even his usurper did not remove them during the period of the counter-coup. When one of the aides with the thick squeaky shoes of policemen leads an official visitor to the President’s study, they pass under the photographed eyes of Lenin, Makarios, Gandhi, Chou En-lai, Mao Tse-tung, Patrice Lumumba, Nkrumah and Kennedy.

  The first few years could not have been all honey—to appropriate Ruthie’s phrase. Power is like freedom, it has to be fought for anew every day. The ousted president found refuge with Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire. He was far enough off not to be able to gather supporters in any number around him—and Mobutu knew he couldn’t get away with allowing that; it was by a secret accommodation, arrived at between the OAU and the General, that Zaïre had become an agreed place of exile for that gangster. But the now rebel forces—government forces when the General’s had been the rebel army—regrouped under the command of three ambitious officers who had escaped imprisonment by the General. They established themselves in the South-West of the country and for a time the civil war burned on. The General—now President—could contain it but not put it out. Not militarily. Now he had the advantages of the solid bases and heavy equipment of a conventional army (his former rebel one, enlarged by a sullen ‘reconciliation’ with and absorption of large numbers of surrendered troops) and the rebels had the disadvantages of makeshift command posts in the bush; but in the pursuance of guerrilla war the unconventional fighting conditions—as the President as General had so victoriously proved—often favour the apparently disadvantaged. The President thickened in the sedentary obligations of State House; in every way, he was not as quick on his feet as he was when he slept among grenades in the farmhouse. He had to begin to go abroad a lot, again; not as an exile, but as Head of State with an entourage in his private jet aircraft, he had still to seek friends, to importune, and to trade in the currencies of power. His white wife was no ordinary wife who would go along just to take advantage of a European shopping trip. She had the experience that fitted her for conclave; long ago, when she was very young, she had developed, along with the love-child inside her, a feminine skill of guardianship, an ability to see, moves ahead, what the opposition tactics were revealing themselves to be, and to intervene warning with the signal of a gesture or a look. Later, empty of love, taking notes of negotiations in cold countries, she had learnt to read more in the ellipses than the dictation. The President’s trusted advisers knew that the most trusted, the only one indispensable so far as the President was concerned, was one not of their number.

  She did perhaps find the odd hour to shop, as well. Quite soon after their alliance began the President had made it clear that his companion could not go about with him in cotton shifts, jeans, and sandals made by street cobblers. Fortunately, she knew fine fabric and good cut; as a child performed the equinoctial rites of storage, carrying silk and suède garments against her cheek.

  The collapse of the rebel forces which finally ended the war was brought about not by the President’s military victory but by the victories in conclave. The French were persuaded into embarrassment over the arms that were being supplied to the rebels through Chad; the Americans debated in Congress a cut-off of their ambiguous aid to the rebels, aid which at first the Under Secretary of State defended as a policy of bringing peace to the region. The cut-off was implemented and after the shortest decent interval the President successfully negotiated a $3 billion loan from the United States for the rehabilitation of war-devastated areas in his country. It was all as he had said: he had to win his war with arms from the East, and to win his peace with money from the West. The world press was amazed to report that only a rainy season after his troops still had been monitoring the physical surrender of arms in the South-West, his Ministry of Agriculture held an agricultural show in the region and the President was rapturously received when he addressed rallies there. His pithy style of comment on the event made a good quote: —My popularity comes from the full stomachs of my people.— He was accompanied by a military brass band from the capital, but not by Hillela. Absent in exile and occupied by war, he had not visited the people in the South-West for a long time, and it would not have been wise to reinforce any sense of his having alienated himself by bringing to them a white wife.

  He did not, however, take along one of the other two wives, the black ones, either. Hillela’s place, for him, cannot be filled by anyone else. The first wife resented her but scarcely had any opportunity to demonstrate that resentment. She was already fifty when the President brought Hillela to his capital, and more because of her venerable position as his first wife than her age, regarded as in retirement. She had her house and retainers in the village where she had spent her childhood. The President took Hillela to be presented to her; his escort keeping its distance, they drove alone as they had when they encountered the elephants but his monumental profile with the curved chip of nose was heavily sad: he would have wished to be taking her to his mother, but she had died while he was winning his war in the bush, and he had not even been able to be at her funeral. He repeated, as people do for themselves rather than the one to whom the observation has been addressed again and again: —The eldest is the best of them. All my children. And this one gave birth only to girls. She was very annoyed … blamed me! And then I had five sons with the other. That was worse, because since then she hasn’t been able to blame anyone but herself. Poor woman, she’s all right with her house and her farm, plenty of relations to work it for her. But I think she drinks. When our women drink, their faces get dead-dark and the red from inside their mouths begins to grow out to their lips. She was never a pretty girl, but lively.—

  She lived among altar-like pieces of 19th-century furniture which must have come down to her not only from her father—a chief—but from some European missionary family before him. The room was dark and the silences long as Sela’s; the first wife was put out rather than disarmed by the ease with which the white woman made herself at home where she should have been ill at ease in strange surroundings, feeling the reserve of a way of life that doe
sn’t belong to white people. In the kitchen with the relatives, she got talking as if she were back somewhere she knew well, and tasted the wild spinach being cooked to go with the maize porridge as if it were a treat. When asked whether she had any children: oh yes, a daughter. —A black child.— The old wife took the President’s smiling remark as a boast: this one was young enough to bear him black children.