by Andre Brink
“Sounds formidable.”
“Wait till you meet her.” And while I found it almost impossible to move a finger in that crowd, she nonchalantly ducked under the raised elbows of a group of men and disappeared, returning within a minute with her treasure: “Well, Martin, what do you say? This is Beatrice Fiorini.” She pronounced it in very correct Italian. “You may call her Bea.”
We were an island in the crowd, pushed and jostled from all sides, yet isolated at the same time. Her hand was cool and firm. A small mocking smile, perhaps to hide her nervousness. The tiny muscle in her cheek. The mystery of eyes obscured behind dark glasses – even though it was night. She was wearing a knitted mauve coat reaching down to her calves, and a denim dress; a small silk scarf tied round her neck.
“Martin will keep you company,” Aunt Rienie assured her. “Such a pity Bernard couldn’t come. But I’ll see to it that – oh, excuse me, there are some new guests at the door.” And she disappeared.
“I’m quite relieved this Bernard bloke didn’t turn up,” Bea confided with a smile. “I was beginning to feel like a cow brought to auction.”
“I don’t think you would have regretted it. Would you like something to drink?”
“I had a glass somewhere, but God alone knows what’s happened to it.”
Her Afrikaans pronunciation was faultless; but with something sing-song in her intonation, an unusual roundness in the vowels, a slight hesitation on double consonants.
“Are you really Italian?” I asked over my shoulder, forcing a way for us through the crowd; she followed in my wake.
“Oh I’m a potpourri of everything.”
When we later reached a small open space on the balcony, I asked: “And how did you meet Aunt Rienie?”
“Pure coincidence,” she said. “A few of us have clubbed together to give legal advice to people in trouble. Mostly Blacks. The man working in the gardens of this building had a pass problem, and in the course of our enquiries I came to see Aunt Rienie.” The hint of a smile. “So she swallowed the fly.”
“That’s just her way.” I raised my glass. “Well, shall we drink to a pleasant evening?”
“It’s not really my sort of scene,” she said, hesitant. “If she hadn’t insisted so much – have you known her for a long time?”
“Since I was a student. I boarded with her.”
We started talking, the meaningless sort of conversation typical of such parties. And yet, even in those early hours there was an undercurrent – or is it wishful thinking, in retrospect? – of closeness, a form of recognition. Perhaps we were both relieved to have found someone to talk to in that mass of strangers.
In the slowly moving whirlpool of people – as some forced their way inward to find food or liquor, pushing out others in the process – we lost one another. Recognising some other acquaintances I began to drift in their direction; and when I looked round, she’d gone.
The party reeled on into the night, in its boisterous way. Small groups of men tightly huddled together and bursting out in sudden gusts of laughter. The shrill voices of excited women. Glasses passed on overhead from hand to hand. Arguments. Mild flirtations. Smoke. Snatches of conversation:
“He didn’t have a choice, he just had to kick.”
“I’m no critic, but any fool can see —”
“What else can you expect of the bladdy government?”
“It’s a lovely party, isn’t it?”
“You haven’t seen her when she’s in the mood yet—”
“Her father was a sculptor. He either died or failed, I can’t remember which.”
Once I suddenly saw her again in the distance, on the opposite side of the room, her white face and large dark glasses in a whorl of smoke; I waved at her and she waved back – not a greeting but a signal of distress.
I tried to jostle my way through the crowd towards her, but when I reached the place where I’d seen her, she was no longer there. With a strange feeling of loss I leaned back against the wall. Later it happened again, in exactly the same way. Something about her stark white face and large black eyes was beginning to haunt me. I felt a need to get back to her, to offer her some protection, standing in for Bernard for whose sake she’d been invited. But I couldn’t find her.
Deep in the night Aunt Rienie made her appearance in the centre of the crowded floor, clutching a thin volume bound in dark-red leather in her tiny hand. A small space opened up around her, from the centre of which she began to read to us. There was so much noise that no one more than a yard away from her could hear a word, but she was undeterred. After a while, pushing through to her immediate vicinity, I managed to catch a few phrases. It was Blake, the Songs of Innocence, read with exaggerated feeling:
“Till the little ones, weary,
No more can be merry;
The sun does descend,
And our sports have an end.”
It was just then that the commotion broke out close to me. What the immediate cause had been, I still don’t know; all I heard was the red-haired English lady shouting in a sudden outburst of quite uncontrolled hate:
“You bloody Boers, just a lot of hairybacks, that’s what you are!”
The next moment a hunk of a man with the physique of a lock-forward grabbed her dress in front of her flat chest, shaking her and asking in a broad accent: “Listen, you got a husband?”
“Let me go, you bloody brute!”
“I say, you got a husband?”
“Of course I have a husband,” she said, on the verge of hysterics. “There he is.” Pointing to a man on the far side of the room.
Giving one look in that direction, the lock-forward bulldozed his way towards a man seated on a chair, his back turned to his wife, quite oblivious of what had happened. The first he noticed of anything amiss was when the lock-forward picked him up bodily with his left hand, hooking him with the right and sending him sprawling into the crowd. The next moment everything was in uproar. Chairs breaking, bottles splintering, women screaming; and the whole room began to spin and mill around in confusion.
It is my principle to keep out of such frays. And when I was halfway to the front door, I suddenly discovered her beside me again: the strange pale girl in the dark glasses. Bea.
“I’ve had enough!” I shouted in her ear – the only way of communicating in the hubbub. “I’m going.”
“Please take me with you,” she said, clutching my arm in near-panic.
From the front door I looked back across my shoulder. Over the heads of the jostling, trampling crowd I could still see Aunt Rienie in the middle of the floor: a delicate porcelain figure with her book clasped to her breast and silent tears rolling down her cheeks.
Suddenly, shockingly, we were outside in the night, the warm autumn air on our faces.
“Good God,” Bea said after a few moments. “What a mess. Poor Aunt Rienie.”
“Oh she’s used to everything. There’s some sort of drama every year.”
We walked on through the quiet night lanes, passing under street lamps from time to time, aimlessly, just to get away from the noise.
“Thanks for taking me with you,” she said once. “I couldn’t stand it much longer.”
“I’ve been trying all evening to find you again,” I said impulsively. “But every time I missed you in the crowd.”
“And I tried to reach you. It was like a nightmare in which one tries to move but can’t.”
We stopped under a lamp post. I raised my hands and lay my open palms on her pale cheeks. I could feel her lips trembling. She was looking up at me.
“Do you always wear those sunglasses?” I asked.
She nodded.
Moving my hands on her face I took off the glasses. For a moment she tensed, then relaxed.
“Why do you do it?” she asked.
“Because you needn’t be afraid of me.” I put the glasses in my top coat pocket.
“I’m not afraid.”
We walked on again.
I have no idea of where we wandered that night. At some stage we reached the Zoo Lake. Vaguely in the back of my head I knew it was supposed to be dangerous in the dark, but I made no move to steer her away from it. We explored the entire geography of the night, over gravel and grass, through patches of light and long stretches of darkness, past trees and shrubs; sometimes we sat down for a while, on benches or on the grass. When the air became cooler I took off my coat and placed it over her shoulders, keeping my arm round her. And all the time, for hours on end, we went on talking. It was quite different from my experience with other women: even with my arm round her there was something comradely between us, rather than desire.
I’d often picked up girls at parties before. It’s so easy. And the sequence of events is so predictable, give and take a few minor variations or surprises. But not with Bea. We were interested in talking, not cuddling.
She told me the whole intricate history of her life: her mother’s affair with the German soldier in the war, and the subsequent move to the United States; later, after her mother’s death, the emigration to the Cape, in the company of her Hungarian stepfather. His garage business in Mowbray. The smell of oil, a detail which had haunted her like an obsession all her life. Some nights, after the Hungarian had already gone to bed, she would steal into the bathroom and pick up his greasy overalls and press her face into them. The shock, in her fifteenth year, when late one afternoon in the dark, locked garage he’d pressed her against the wall and started fondling her passionately. Nothing had “happened”. It was only the shock. The smudges of oil and grease on her dress and legs and breasts. The man falling to his knees and bursting into tears, begging her forgiveness.
The inheritance money which had reached her unexpectedly from one of her Italian-American uncles in the States. University, where she’d fared brilliantly. Languages; then law studies. The compulsion in her to go on studying. In search of something impossible to find because it couldn’t even be defined.
“Two years ago I decided to go overseas. Something had happened, you see. One of my professors – but I don’t want to bore you.”
“Of course you won’t bore me. Please tell me.”
“I was still a student when we fell in love. He was much older than I, he could have been my father. It was he who found the post for me. Junior lecturer in the Faculty of Law.”
“Why didn’t you stay with him?”
“He was married.” A pause. She picked a stalk of grass and began to chew on it. Much later she went on: “His wife was an invalid. I never meant to – anyway, it happened. And I was too stupid or too weak to move out. Then his wife died. And all of a sudden – it’s difficult to explain – the spell was broken or something. It was all over. He wanted to marry me. But it was as if the death of his wife had made me realise for the first time how petty and sordid our love had been. I couldn’t forget her. You know, she’d often thanked me for helping her husband so much.” Another pause. “So one day I just decided to go overseas.”
“To escape?”
“Yes. But it was more than just running away. There was also something I wanted to go to.”
“What?”
“Well, you see, all my life I’d been unsettled. I’d known my mother for a few years only, and my father not at all. I still had some vague, confused memories of Italy, of our town, and of bombs and shooting and buildings being blown up.” She fell silent. Feeling her trembling lightly against me I tightened my arm around her. “And then the States, a foreign country I couldn’t adapt to at all. And another foreign country, South Africa. And Stepan, my Hungarian stepfather. Strange languages, and people, and lands, and cities. All the time. Somewhere in the midst of it all I think I’d just, somehow, lost myself. Can you understand that? And then the prof. For a year, for eighteen months there seemed to be a new stability in my life. Then I discovered it had just been another drifting island. So I thought, you know, perhaps if I went back to where it had all started, it might clear things up. I wanted to return to Perugia to try and find myself again.”
“Did you succeed?”
She shook her head. Repeating it after a minute. And then said: “Perhaps I was mistaken from the beginning. I thought one needed to define oneself in terms of a geography, and a language, and other people. I thought there must be people and places where one belonged automatically. But if there really is such a place I still haven’t found it. Perugia was beautiful, it’s the most beautiful country I know of. All those little spires, and the fields with white oxen ploughing, and the red poppies in the grass, and Fra Angelico and everything. But I remained a stranger. Here and there I still found someone who could vaguely remember my mother or my grandparents. But what use was it to me? It made no difference to me.”
“And then you came back?”
“Not directly. I stayed there for a year to finish my course. I was there on a grant, you see. And then I went to the States. I thought maybe I’d find some trace of myself there.” A short harsh laugh. “I couldn’t last there for more than just a few months. I was welcomed with open arms by my mother’s relatives and all the friends of the family. They had an incredibly strong clan feeling. But it was no use. I could never become one of them. I always remained me. And when I came back, I found that Stepan had also died. Poor Stepan, I really think he loved me. But it was all in vain.”
Insects were whirring and chirping in the grass. In the trees a nightjar shrieked.
“In a strange way it also made me feel free,” she went on. “Completely liberated. And now I’m responsible only to myself.” A pause. “But it isn’t easy to bear. Sometimes one thinks: If only I could come to rest for a short time, give myself to some cause, lose myself in something, it will be easier to carry on. But of course it can never happen.”
When she remained silent again, I asked: “What are you thinking about?”
She gave a short laugh: “A game.”
“What sort of game?”
“A party game. You probably know it. One is taken into a room and shown everything: all over the floor objects have been arranged – suitcases, bottles, chairs, plates, whatever they could lay hands on. Then you’re blindfolded and spun round, and left to find your way through all the obstacles on your own. In the beginning you’re terrified of bumping into something. Later you become almost panic-stricken in your wish to touch something, so you can find your bearings. But you’re lost. And when they finally remove the cloth from your eyes you discover the room is empty: they quietly removed everything while you were blindfolded. They all kill themselves laughing while you stand there feeling ridiculous. That’s the way it is for me. Trying to pick my way, blindfolded, through an empty room, feeling for obstacles which don’t exist.”
“I’ll hold on to you,” I said, touched by the terror in her words.
“It’s no use.”
“How do you know? You’ve only tried your prof. And he was an exception.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“What do you mean, Bea?”
“He wasn’t the only one I loved.” She appeared reluctant to reveal any more, but changed her mind after a while. “When I first went to university there was a young Jewish student in my class. Benjamin. He was the first boy I ever went to bed with. But after he’d taken me to his parents – he’d never wanted to, I had to insist – I realised it had been an illusion. They were very orthodox, they would never allow him to marry a shikse.”
“And so you ended it?”
“What else could I do? He couldn’t understand what had got into me. Men are scared of facing the truth even though they know it’s there, don’t you think so? I tried to make it as easy as possible for him” – a shrug – “but that was that.”
“Was he the only other one?”
“Why do you keep on asking?”
“Because you came with me tonight.”
“We’re going back just now. One can’t go on walking for ever. Don’t forget: sooner or later your blindfold is taken off.�
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“But we’re here now. And I want to hear whatever you’re prepared to tell me.” (Women have always found me a good listener: it’s more than half the answer. Still, I really meant it that night, I’m sure.)
She laughed again: “What will Aunt Rienie say if she knew?” Before I could reply she went on: “You know, that’s what really got me at the party. I recently read Ardrey; what he says about baboons. How the females, when they’re on heat, make sure their inflamed red backsides are turned towards the males all the time. I always thought a baboon male must be bloody perverse to fall for it, but they do. And whenever I get to parties nowadays and watch the women carrying on, I can’t resist the thought: ‘Jesus, so that’s what they’re really doing!’” She turned her head to me, watching me with her wide, naked eyes. “Is that why you brought me away with you?”
“I felt just as cornered as you were.”
She pressed my hands. “Thanks, Sir Galahad.”
“Why do you mock me?”
“I’m not. There really is something old-worldly about you. You’re so polite. I almost feel safe with you.”
It was too dark to make out how much of it was cynical.
“Like a father confessor?” I asked.
“Why do you say that?” she asked quickly.
“I didn’t mean anything. Except that you’re free to confide in me whatever you want to.”
Her mood changed, and became lighter. “I once went to confession with a rather deaf old priest,” she said, chuckling. “It was awful. It was just before Easter and everybody was queueing to get their bit done in time. But he was terribly hard of hearing. And every time I told him something he would ask in a loud voice reverberating right through the church: ‘You did what?!’ Followed by a ripple of giggling all down the queue.”
“Are you Catholic?”
“No.”
“Why did you go to the priest then?”
“I was Catholic.”
“Why did you drop it?”
“The first twenty years of my life – in spite of all that happened, all the people passing me on from hand to hand and from country to country – that was the one constant factor of my life. The Church. It was quite neurotic, the way I clung to it. At Mass I often went into a near-trance, taking an almost incestuous delight in devouring the flesh and blood of Jesus.” She turned her head to me again, but I couldn’t read her expression in the dark. “Then, after Benjamin and I had broken up, I realised the Church was just a dope. It made it even more impossible to be honest with myself. And so I had to break away from it.” She was silent for a minute. I could hear her breathing gently. “In a sense it was almost more painful than to break away from a man I’d loved. Because I knew that once I was out of that, there would be nothing left. It was the very last of the obstacles they took away from my blind room.”