by Andre Brink
Her work would provide no obstacle, I knew: she’d just reached the end of a rather unstable period of temporary jobs (secretary for a firm of attorneys; editorial assistant on a ladies’ journal; helping out with evening classes at the Tech, etc.). She’d just been reappointed to the post of junior lecturer in Law which she’d had at Wits a few years earlier, before going overseas, but she was only due to start in a few weeks’ time. At the moment she was free. In other words, available.
And the next day, at eleven in the morning, after the flight had been delayed for over an hour, she arrived.
I’d never been to Ponta do Ouro before. It had been suggested and arranged by an old business acquaintance of mine in Lourenço Marques, Pedro de Souza. Bea and I first had lunch with him and his wife that afternoon: an error of judgement, I confess, for the De Souzas thought Bea was my wife and addressed her as such; and, unwilling to offend their middle-class morality, I was content to leave it at that: but Bea was very agitated.
Although it was only early September, it was an excessively hot day and the house was filled with flies; the woman could only speak a few words of English and Pedro himself wasn’t all that fluent; the heavy red wine gave us headache; and in their exaggerated hospitality the De Souzas refused to let us leave before three o’clock – by which time our nerves were rather strained.
So the atmosphere was tense when we finally drove off in my hired car. The first stretch of road was tarred and not too bad, although one had to be constantly on the look-out for swerving bicycles, playing children, lean black dogs and even, from time to time, chickens. But after we’d turned off to Bela Vista the road deteriorated into two sandy tracks with a dangerously high middle ridge. There wasn’t much to see. Farmhouses and unkempt gardens at long intervals; bougainvillaea; pigs in the road. For the rest it was pretty desolate. After some time one started wondering whether it was the right road after all, for the only signposts we passed were either illegible or torn down. And to either side the land lay uncompromising and sullen, even hostile.
For a long time Bea made no move beside me, except to look at the map on her knees from time to time; but it was obvious that she was perturbed. Whenever I glanced in her direction she sat looking straight ahead, expressionless. But the moment I turned my head away again I was aware of her watching me. It didn’t augur well.
“Why did you want me to come?” she asked unexpectedly, in her unnervingly direct way.
“Because the week suddenly fell open. I told you at the airport, didn’t I? I don’t know when we’ll get another chance like this.”
“And of course you never let a chance go by.”
“What do you mean?”
She didn’t answer my question. Returning to the attack again, she asked: “Why did you tell those people I was your wife?”
“I didn’t. They just assumed it. But it makes no difference.”
“Doesn’t it? Not to you, perhaps. But have you thought about how I must feel?”
“Is it such a humiliation to be Mrs Mynhardt?”
“No. But it is humiliating to have to pretend I’m not myself.”
“It’s really not important, Bea. Besides, it’s over. And now we have a whole week to ourselves.”
Her mouth moved. A small obstinate muscle tensed in her right cheek.
“Why did you want me to come with you, Martin?” she asked again.
“But I told you —”
“No, I want the real reason.”
“I was missing you.” I placed my hand on her knee. She didn’t shake it off, but remained rigid.
“And if I hadn’t come?”
“I would have been very disappointed indeed.”
“Would you have sent a cable to someone else then?”
“To whom?”
“I don’t know. But you must have other options.”
“What makes you think so?”
“A man like you always plans ahead. ‘For all eventualities.’”
“Bea, what’s the matter with you today? Why should I feel any need to be with someone else?”
“Why should you have a need to be with me?”
“Because —”
“Whatever you say, don’t say: ‘Because you’re you.’ I may scream.”
“Can’t you understand that I need you?”
“No.”
“You must believe me.”
“You just don’t want to be alone, that’s what.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I think you’re terribly scared of being alone, Martin.”
“Only people with something on their conscience are scared of being alone.”
“And there’s nothing on your conscience?”
“Of course not.”
“If your wife should find out about this week?”
“She won’t. That’s the whole point.”
“Why did you just send a cable?” she asked after a pause, the small muscle flickering in her cheek again. “Why didn’t you phone me so we could discuss it?”
“I wanted to surprise you.”
“Or were you afraid I might refuse?”
I smiled grudgingly. “All right, I admit I was afraid of that. And I was too eager to have you with me. So I didn’t want to give you any loophole.”
“I could have stayed away.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Do you know that when they announced the flight had been delayed this morning, I turned round and walked out of the airport building? I almost felt relieved. It seemed as if it had happened specially to make me change my mind.”
“But then you came back. That’s all that matters.”
“Do you really think so? Suppose I tell you I feel ashamed of having done it? Suppose I tell you I’ve never felt so humiliated in my life?”
I didn’t answer. But after rocking and swaying across another hundred yards of deep sand I stopped the car.
“If you wish, I can take you back now.”
I knew it would work. It always does.
“It won’t solve anything, will it?” she said, restrained. “I’m here now. We may as well go through with it.”
“What a wonderful way of starting a holiday!” I said bitterly.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you too. I hoped I’d be able to come to terms with it on my own. But all those hours we spent with those people: I suppose it gave one too much time for thinking. Now I feel – as if I need a bath.”
“Surely it’s not the first time in your life you’ve done this sort of thing!” I flared up, realising that everything might be wrecked unless I became very firm, even aggressive.
Much to my surprise she agreed immediately. “I know,” she said quietly. “And I don’t suppose it’ll be the last time either. One day, when all is over between you and me, someone else will —”
“For Heaven’s sake!” I said. “Why do you talk about everything being ‘over’? We’ve hardly got to know each other.”
“We’re not going to grow old together, are we?”
“Bea.” For a moment I felt helpless. “One can’t think in terms of endings when it’s only the beginning.”
“You’ve got to, if you want to be honest with yourself.”
“But while we’re still together —”
“I can’t bluff myself so easily, Martin. I wish I could, but I can’t.” She smoothed the map on her knees. “One day, I know, you’ll drop me.”
“I won’t ever drop you, Bea.”
She smiled. “You don’t really want to get involved. Not with me. With no one. If ever I should really desperately need you, you’ll drop me. Because then you’ll get scared of me. Or of yourself.”
“How can you say that?”
“All I want you to know is that I’m not asking anything. I don’t expect anything.”
“I’ve told you how much you mean to me, Bea. Ever since that first night. Now please —”
“No, don’t try to soothe me with love-talk. Pl
ease don’t be scared that you’ll hurt me or anything. Just tell me: what am I really to you?” And when I didn’t answer immediately, she went on: “You see? We’re just marking time, that’s all. No use pretending it’s different. Perhaps that’s the most any person can expect of another – otherwise we start annexing and possessing and smothering one another.”
In a moment of unreasonable anger I said: “Well, if it’s all so senseless and wrong and sinful and God knows what else to you, why the hell did you come then?”
“My God,” she said, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear her, “because I’m lonely too. Don’t you know that?”
I put my arm round her shoulders and pulled her closer, knowing I had to comfort her before she went too far. For a moment she resisted, then pressed her head against my shoulder. Another woman might have started crying, but not Bea. She almost never did. Only once I can think of. When she really felt desolate, as on that afternoon, one had the impression that tears were too facile for her, that her emotion came from so deep inside her that it belonged to an order different from that of crying. And I felt relieved, because I can’t stand tears in a woman.
Holding her in my arms and caressing her gently, in the car beside the sandy road in that desolate landscape, I accidentally knocked off her dark glasses and we both burst out laughing. The distance between us was healed again. It was possible to go on. The matter hadn’t been solved or cleared up in any way, but there appeared to be a silent agreement that, for the time being at least, we wouldn’t refer to it again. Perhaps it helped us to be more careful in our consideration of each other; perhaps we drew a subtler form of compassion from it.
After Bela Vista, a small place with wide dusty streets and old colonial houses in overgrown gardens surrounding a tatty square, the bush grew denser on either side of the road. Our isolation from the familiar world became even more complete. And crossing a wide river on a ferry, it felt like severing a last remaining contact.
I was just beginning to feel nervous about the approaching dark – there is no twilight in Moçambique and the night comes down very suddenly – when the tall fence of the holiday camp appeared before us in the sunset, and a guard in military uniform stepped into the road.
After I’d filled in the forms in the superintendent’s small office at the gate, the guard trotted off in front of the car to show us the way to our red bungalow in the farthest row, closest to the sea, separated from the beach by only a line of shady trees.
It was Friday, and a few cars were already parked in front of some of the other bungalows; there were children playing round the ablution block, and on the terrace of the restaurant a small group of people were drinking beer. The next day more cars arrived. But by Sunday afternoon all the strangers had left, for it was outside the holiday season and the only visitors were the weekenders. From the Monday we were all on our own in the camp. Except, of course, for the old pensioner in his office at the gate, and his guard, and some cleaners, and the couple running the restaurant – a man with a wooden leg, and a fat ‘woman who spent her days knitting.
It was so deserted, in fact, that Bea sometimes walked about naked on the beach. I found her behaviour slightly improper, but made no remark on it, realising it would either irritate her or come as a complete and unpleasant surprise to her. She wasn’t the sort of person to have any exhibitionist feelings about her body: if she did go without clothes from time to time it was simply that, quite unselfconscious, she couldn’t care less. And in a way I suppose it was fitting in the circumstances: for, seen through romantic eyes, Ponta do Ouro was our little paradise, a territory in which we belonged exclusively to one another; a place of discovery and mutual exploration.
Apart from having our meals at the restaurant we were tied to no routine. Every second day a large green lorry brought vegetables and meat, but no newspapers. The news, broadcast loudly in Portuguese by Radio LM whenever we sat down for a meal, was unintelligible to us; and the radio in our hired car proved incapable of receiving broadcasts in any civilised language. Which meant that for a week we literally knew nothing about what was happening in the world. At the same time, possibly because of the very unnaturalness of its absence, we were never allowed to forget about that world. Mainly because of the presence of the soldiers.
There was a company of them stationed on the other side of the camp, in the bushes beyond the fence. Early in the morning we would hear the jeeps and trucks starting up and driving off into the bundu, seldom returning before late afternoon. Then the boys sometimes came down to play ball games on the beach or to have beer on the terrace, surrounded by scores of horn-bills and metallic-blue starlings. That was all we knew of them. But they were there; even in their absence they were singularly present. Somewhere in those dense green bushes they were moving about on their secret manoeuvres, often at night as well.
There was one special circumstance about the soldiers which ensured that we would never forget them: the small Black boy they had with them. In a long, fumbling conversation the fat woman of the restaurant once tried to explain to us, in her inimitable approximation of English, that the soldiers had picked him up a year or two before in a village they’d destroyed somewhere, and had kept him as their mascot ever since. He took part in all their games; when a ball was kicked too far away he ran to collect it. And when they returned to their tents one of the men usually carried him on his shoulder like a little monkey. He seemed to be well treated. But not once in the course of the week we spent there did we hear him laugh or even see the slightest sign of a grin on his ancient, wizened face.
During the second half of the week there were the planes too, even more unnerving than the comings and goings of the soldiers. Once a day without warning, they would come roaring overhead not more than a hundred yards above the beach, following the coastline from north to south; a whole squadron of them, at such speed that the impact of their flight sent one hurtling to the sand. The first time they caught us completely unawares; they were so close that the shock continued to throb in one for minutes afterwards. (It was the last time, too, that Bea went naked on the beach.)
Afterwards, they returned every day. Had a war broken out in our absence? Had there been a coup? Were there terrorists hiding in the bushes close to camp? There was no way of finding out; and with a curious reluctance we didn’t want to ask the restaurant woman for information. There was an almost perverse satisfaction in the knowledge that the entire familiar world might have been destroyed in our absence. We felt like two shipwrecked survivors after a flood. Just the two of us in this small paradise: this minute enclave surrounded by soldiers lurking in the bush and surveilled by roaring planes. A dangerous idyll, wholly unreal, but cherished for that very reason.
From time to time she referred again to a distant future when all would be over between us: how we would then remember the past; what we would retain of it; what we should like to retain.
Usually I allowed her to have her way without interfering, for fear of turning it into another discussion like that one on the first day. But one day I couldn’t restrain myself.
We were on the expanse of flat rocks on the southern end of the beach, just this side of the tall dune separating Ponta do Ouro from the South African border. At low tide the entire rock-bed lay exposed, dotted with holes and pools and crevices, an incredible marine garden. She would spend hours there, squatting beside a pool and teasing the sea-anemones with a stick, or collecting sea-stars and shells, or catching small rock-fishes. From behind, sitting like that, there was something childlike and girlish about her narrow, bare, brown back, something vulnerable about her shoulders. But watching her from the front, her grave, attentive face (even when she wore those large dark glasses) or the slight droop of her breasts with the elongated dark nipples only half concealed by the gaping cups of her bra, there was no doubt about her womanliness, a maturity which bore both the scars of pain and disillusionment and the vulnerability of suffering.
And when, in that late aftern
oon, she once again spoke of the inevitability of an end, I reacted. What she said was:
“Ends are the only things one can be certain of.”
And then I demanded, as on the first afternoon: “Why do you insist on conditioning yourself for an end?”
“Isn’t that one’s only protection?”
“But by going on talking about it, you may be predestining an end which otherwise may not have happened at all.”
“Do you still believe in immortality then?”
“No. But I believe in enjoying what one has while it’s there. Without allowing the future to cancel the present.”
“Sure, I agree. The difference is that you enjoy it pretending it will always remain with you, whereas I never allow myself not to see the end.” She leaned over to catch a small fish in her cupped hand, but it escaped. Still bent over the pool waiting for it to show itself among the seaweed again, she said: “Every time I’ve loved a man, I knew it had to end sooner or later. The professor I told you about. The young Jewish student. The film producer in Perugia. Every time I knew it was quite impossible for it to last. Yet I refused to allow that knowledge to restrain me. One can’t deny or refuse life, you can’t close yourself to it.” With the back of a glistening wet hand she pushed back her dark hair from her sunglasses. “Only once I thought it was really going to work out. Only once I allowed myself to believe in immortality. Afterwards one doesn’t readily make the same mistake again.”
“What happened?”