Rumours of Rain
Page 1
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by André Brink
Dedication
Title Page
MEMO
FRIDAY
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
SATURDAY
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
SUNDAY
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
MONDAY
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Copyright
About the Author
André Brink is the author of several novels in English, including A Dry White Season, Imaginings of Sand, The Rights of Desire and The Other Side of Silence. He has won South Africa’s most important literary prize, the CNA Award, three times and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
ALSO BY ANDRÉ BRINK
The Ambassador
Looking on Darkness
An Instant in the Wind
A Dry White Season
A Chain of Voices
The Wall of the Plague
States of Emergency
An Act of Terror
The First Life of Adamastor
On the Contrary
Imaginings of Sand
Devil’s Valley
The Rights of Desire
The Other Side of Silence
Before I Forget
Praying Mantis
The Blue Door
Philida
Mapmakers (essays)
A Land Apart (A South African Reader, with J. M Coetzee)
Reinventing a Continent (essays)
A Fork in the Road (memoir)
this land asking for water is given blood
this land which carries the fire within it
– BREYTEN BREYTENBACH
André Brink
RUMOURS OF RAIN
MEMO
GNATS. A WHOLE swarm of gnats plastered on the windscreen and the wipers out of order. This, senseless as it may seem, is the first image to present itself whenever I try to recall that weekend. And it is just not good enough any longer. Let me put it this way: it is time I cleared up the ambiguities about exactly what happened in the course of those few days, from Friday to Monday. A curious thing to admit, since I was fully alive to what was happening all the time. Yet I’ve always felt that something must have escaped me, a submarine something – the way one sometimes wakes up knowing one has had a dream of tremendous importance, if only one can grope back towards it, rowing upstream against the sluggish water; but in the end the dream remains beyond one’s grasp.
I have simply not had the time for exploring it. If one is occupied, for twelve to fifteen hours a day, with meetings and memorandums, consultations, options, decisions, timetables and travels, time for a “private life” or for re-examining the past becomes a luxury and memories almost obscene. Now, suddenly and quite unforeseen, I find myself with nine days in London, an existence in transit between the conference of the United Nations Association, from which our delegation was forced to withdraw this morning, and my next negotiations in Tokyo not due until Thursday week.
I truly cannot remember when last I had this experience. It came so unexpectedly that I’m quite overwhelmed. Whenever during the past ten years or so I allowed myself a break of a week or a fortnight, I was accompanied by the rest of the family – Elise and Louis and Ilse – either to the sea or to the farm. Even so I usually returned earlier on my own to catch up with work. During that particular weekend, too, Louis was with me. Admittedly there were the occasional “lost” days or weekends, but then prearranged and with a fixed goal, with Bea. Once, two years ago, we had a full week in Moçambique, the last time before Lourenço Marques became Maputo. The sandy road to the south, the violent and vulgar purple of bougainvillaea, tatty gardens and scraggy fowls, emaciated Blacks waving and grinning in the dust, and at sunset the red and yellow bungalows of Ponta do Ouro. I remember our curious isolation, deprived of radio and newspapers, and the company of Portuguese soldiers in their dilapidated khaki trucks, accompanied by the small crippled Black boy they had with them as a mascot; and at night, when the day’s dull accumulated heat drove us from the bungalow, we slept on the beach, resigned to attacks by mosquitoes, sand-fleas and God knows what other heathen pests.
But this time it is different. I am utterly and irredeemably alone. Without any planning or prearrangement I am left with these nine days on my hands. In a way it is quite terrifying; at the same time I feel dazed by the almost sensual luxury of the experience. Here I am with no one to consider and nothing to account for. No dead to bury, no arrangements to make, no guilt to explain or exorcise. Just left completely to myself. Nobody even knows in which hotel I’m staying.
Of course I could have returned to Johannesburg with the rest of the mission earlier this evening as I would have done without hesitation a year ago. But that would have meant two extra flights within a week and something inside me resents the thought. Weariness? Apathy? Middle-aged inertia? Perhaps, sooner or later, one inevitably reaches this stage of simply feeling either unwilling or unable to go on before clearing up whatever lies behind in order to catch up with oneself. And now this coincidence has suddenly made it possible to indulge myself. It may in fact be more of a need than a luxury. It is difficult to explain this cornered feeling. I have to write myself out of it. It is reputed to be a form of therapy.
Is it only a retrospective illusion or was there indeed something unreal about that weekend? Even something apocalyptic, although I hesitate to use the word? In my more romantic days, when I still seriously thought of writing as a career, I might have described it as “the last weekend before the end of the familiar world”, or some equally melodramatic phrase. But I have shed my romanticism long ago and even my sense of humour is, according to Bea, no more than the positive side of my cynicism.
What was at stake was the future of the farm. As simple as that. But it involved more than a piece of land. If I may try to define it at this early stage I believe one may call it a sense of loss. (So much can come to an end simultaneously even though one fails to recognise it as an end at the time.) I can specify a fourfold loss. A father, a son, a woman, a friend. Perhaps even these are no more than tokens, symptoms.
But I must try not to presume, however difficult I find it, conditioned as I am by half a lifetime devoted to figures, statistics, programmes and prognoses, all the projects of Free Enterprise. I must try to come to grips with a larger and clearer landscape beyond the diversity of facts. Yet without the sentimental self-exposure fashionable in certain circles, since my Calvinist heritage frowns on such a striptease of the soul.
Exclusively for myself, I must take stock of what I have accumulated and see what happens. An intellectual exercise, like chess. (My “photographic memory” has so often amazed people and influenced business deals.) Let us call it a form of mental massage relaxing the knotted muscles, soothing the nerve-ends and finally, with precise timing, effecting the so-called “complete relief” which makes a new
start possible, without any after-effects.
The Thai girl (that is if she really comes from Thailand: they all lie without batting an eyelid; but she was unmistakably Oriental, quite attractive in fact) left three-quarters of an hour ago with a discreet click of the door. (DO NOT DISTURB.) I didn’t even hear her soft feet on the thick blue-grey hotel carpet, and remained with closed eyes, lying completely relaxed, the small white towel covering what Ma would call my “parts”.
(How would a masseuse remember a client? Only by the size and shape of his prick? Or would she observe more keenly? “Middle-aged gentleman, stocky but ‘distinguished’ as the phrase goes, dark hair greying at the temples, thick-rimmed glasses on a ‘Roman’ nose, rather flabby round the waist …?” One forfeits a lot with the removal of one’s clothes.)
More often than not with these girls one runs into a wall of transparent lies: they pretend to be “secretaries” or “shop assistants” or even “students” eager to earn a few extra quid as part-time masseuses. The Orientals tend to be both more honest and more thorough, as well as more sympathetic, which is why I generally insist on them. And tonight’s Thai girl – I neglected to ask her name – had the manner of a real professional. I dislike conversation while a girl is working on me (what is there, after all, to talk about?), but some seem to regard it as part of their duties to keep the client talking. Not this one. While I was first lying on my stomach, then on my back, she quietly and calmly and thoroughly went her way, leading deftly up to the moment when, “accidentally” brushing against my erection, the final service could be agreed on with a mere smile, a nod, and a confirmation of the tariff involved. Without any hesitation she went to the bathroom where I could hear water running; a couple of minutes later she returned naked, looking even more frail than she had in her clothes. A delicate bird of a girl with thin wrists, narrow hips, neatly trimmed pubic triangle, and the small barely swollen breasts one would expect of a fourteen-year-old, with a tiny crucifix on a golden chain between them. Lazily I lay caressing her nipples, watching them stiffen as she demurely went about her own duties, her fringe covering her eyes.
Call it the luxury of the perfect pasha, the arrogance of the supreme male chauvinist; or simply the easiest way out for a man with a “heart complaint”. (I’ve never had sex since that afternoon with Bea.) Yet I am inclined to see much more in this total surrender to a woman who demands from you no more than an arranged fee and who, outside the serene hour she has shared with you (nice romantic phrase this), has no further claims on you at all. It is one of very few situations which leave one completely free because no responsibility is imposed on either of the persons involved. You are not required to prove anything or attempt anything; you need neither anticipate anything nor interpret anything; you need not go to any trouble to find out more about her past or her state of mind: all that is, in fact, precluded and irrelevant. She offers no threat to your status or your integrity or your self-sufficiency, since she in turn neither expects nor demands anything from you. She is entirely at your disposal, and provided you pay her fee she is prepared to do anything and everything you require of her.
If I ask her name she will most likely give a false one. If I ask her about herself she will undoubtedly answer with a lie, just as I would if she were to enquire about me. And yet there is in our situation an honesty more profound than that of biographical detail. There is nothing equivocal about the nature of our contract or the implications of our association; supply and demand are in perfect balance. Consequently treachery or betrayal is inconceivable and the very possibility of disappointment excluded.
This does not suggest that we despise one another. On the contrary, I feel I can assert that in our mutual exposure and reticence we respect each other. I have often had the impression of getting closer to a woman in an hour of such contact than in the course of a lengthy affair. For in any close relationship there are so many other elements involving and distracting and distorting one; you are never really left intact; inevitably the situation imposes responsibilities and inhibits liberty. Which doesn’t mean that I am trying to deny or diminish someone like Bea in any way. Perhaps I should rather admit, however unlikely or incriminating it may seem, that I still do not understand her. And of all the factors involved in that weekend she remains one of the most inexplicable and ungraspable.
In my wallet I carry photographs – here they are – of Elise and Ilse, my wife and daughter (in discussions with Latins this has occasionally clinched a contract); yet it is Bea I can recall most immediately. Bea in a loose sweater and denim skirt, with boots or sandals; her short black hair and narrow face with high cheekbones, her large eyes smouldering behind the dark glasses with which she habitually masked her myopia; straight nose, wide mouth, strong chin; hands with long fingers and closely bitten nails. Not “beautiful”, I should imagine, in conventional terms (I once served on the panel of judges in a Miss South Africa contest), but with an intensity and, well, a strangeness which became more fascinating the longer one looked at her.
Passionate Bea. In different circumstances she might have led a Simbionese army; she might have inspired crowds on barricades or thrown bombs in Belfast – if only she’d found a cause in which to believe implicitly. But quite simply too intelligent to accept anything so absolutely as to plunge headlong into it. Angry, rebellious, uncompromising, and – I suppose – lost.
Was that why I couldn’t refrain from trying to “protect” her? A totally misplaced urge, of course. Because deep inside her she was quite independent: “For Heaven’s sake stop trying to annex me. You Afrikaners are all imperialists by nature. Always want to be the boss, even in love.”
You Afrikaners. How often did she use that expression? Sometimes irritably, sometimes off-hand or mocking: provocation came natural to her. Yet it has occurred to me that actually she may have envied me the certainty of that despised definition. For what could she call herself? True, she had the same green passport as I (with what hideous photograph inside!). But her mother had been Italian, her father allegedly a German officer who had arrived in Perugia at a crucial moment and soon moved on again; after the war the family left to join some distant cousins in the States; and by the time Bea was seven and her mother already dead, she emigrated to South Africa with a Hungarian stepfather. The only constant element of her youth was her Catholicism. Until, with the fierce determination characteristic of her, she broke away from that as well. “One has got to stand on one’s own feet. I don’t need any crutches. And I want to look the world squarely in the face.” Even though she constantly wore those sunglasses.
This fear of crutches or blindness or dependence on others, anything that could be construed as an easy way out, determined much of our relationship. Sex, for instance, played a relatively minor part whereas in all my other fleeting liaisons through the years it was the only raison d’être. I’ve often wondered: if there had been more sex between us, would the relationship have foundered like all the others? In which case I would have been freed from her. The sexual bond was there, but kept very much in the background. Not through any wish of mine: but Bea had a will and hang-ups of her own. And yet I’ve never known a more passionate woman, on the few occasions when she really let herself go. Actually I suspect that what inhibited her was basically the very fear of knowing how passionate, in fact, she was. Perhaps she was afraid of being swept away by her feelings and consequently by any other person involved in them. She was determined to remain in control.
Except for those few times. Our first night – the evening of the roaring party in Aunt Rienie’s small apartment choked by nearly a hundred guests, the drinking and perspiration and noise, chairs splintering and bottles breaking, and the frail old lady in the middle of the floor, oblivious of it all, reading Blake, with tears running down her rouged and powdered cheeks; and much later, the rustling of the wind in the leaves of the plane trees in front of the open window, and the obtrusive awareness of Bernard sleeping next door.
And then, of co
urse, the afternoon we met for lunch at the hole. We’d often arranged to meet at Dullabh’s Corner from where we’d go to the small curry place in the block, or to a discreet restaurant in Hillbrow, or somewhere out of town. I can no longer remember how it first became “our place”: the choice may have been influenced by the din and colour of an otherwise rather squalid district, since Bea always responded to that sort of robust street life. (Remember Diagonal Street.) Then there was a break of a month or so, nothing unusual. I was off to New York, returning via Brazil; other business came up – and when I finally turned up at Dullabh’s Corner that afternoon there was nothing but an enormous hole where the buildings had been. It took some time to connect it with newspaper reports about Indian shopkeepers removed by the Government to another group area, angry demonstrations and resistance, and forcible eviction (nothing serious: only a couple of injured and some children bitten by police dogs).
I can’t recall any strong feelings one way or the other in myself – one does grow immune – but Bea was very upset. There was something quite surprising about the violence of her reaction, which I found hard to reconcile with the woman I thought I knew. (But of course I shouldn’t forget about the war. She’d been only three years old when she left for the States with her mother, but who can tell what remains submerged in the mind of a child? And there must have been many bombardments in Italy at the time.)
When I arrived at Dullabh’s Corner there was no sign of her yet. As a result of the demolition there was more than enough parking space, so I got out to peer through a slit in the corrugated iron fence at bulldozers and cranes and men in orange helmets at work among the heaps of rubble. The sort of activity which had fascinated me since childhood. And it was only when Bea grabbed me by the arm that I discovered her presence.
She said something like: “Oh here you are. I was afraid I wouldn’t find you.”
And I: “But I said I’d come, didn’t I?” I tried to kiss her but she turned her cheek.