Zoë Wicomb - You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town

‘Oh, she said to him, “Danie,” jus like that, dropped the Boeta right there in the graveyard in front of everyone, she said, “He’s dead now and I’m not your sister so I hope you Shentons will leave me alone.” Man, a person don’t know what to do.’

Aunt Cissie frowned.

‘She was always so nice with us you know, such a sweet person, I jus don’t understand, unless. ’ and she tapped her temple, ‘unless your father’s death jus went to her head. Yes,’ she sighed, as I lifted my rucksack from the luggage belt, ‘it never rains but pours; still, every cloud has a silver lining,’ and so she dipped liberally into her sack of homilies and sowed them across the arc of attentive relatives.

‘It’s in the ears of the young,’ she concluded, ‘that these thoughts must sprout.’

She has never seemed more in control than at this moment when she stares deep into the fluffy centres of the proteas on her lap. Then she takes the flowers still in their cellophane wrapping and leans them heads down like a broom against the chair. She allows her hand to fly to the small of her back where the wood cuts.

‘Shall I get you a comfortable chair? There’s a wicker one by the stove which won’t cut into your back like this.’

Her eyes rest on the eaves of the house where a swallow circles anxiously.

‘It won’t of course look as good here in the red sand amongst the thornbushes,’ I persist.

A curt ‘No.’ But then the loose skin around her eyes creases into lines of suppressed laughter and she levers herself expertly out of the chair.

‘No, it won’t, but it’s getting cool and we should go inside. The chair goes on the stoep,’ and her overseer’s finger points to the place next to a tub of geraniums. The chair is heavy. It is impossible to carry it without bruising the shins. I struggle along to the unpolished square of red stoep that clearly indicates the permanence of its place, and marvel at the extravagance of her gesture.

She moves busily about the kitchen, bringing from the pantry and out of the oven pots in advanced stages of preparation. Only the peas remain to be shelled but I am not allowed to help.

‘So they were all at the airport hey?’

‘Not all, I suppose; really I don’t know who some of them are. Neighbours for all I know,’ I reply guardedly.

‘No you wouldn’t after all these years. I don’t suppose you know the young ones at all; but then they probably weren’t there. Have better things to do than hang about airports. Your Aunt Cissie wouldn’t have said anything about them. Hetty and Cheryl and Willie’s Clint. They’ll be at the political meetings, all UDF people. Playing with fire, that’s what they’re doing. Don’t care a damn about the expensive education their parents have sacrificed for.’

Her words are the ghostly echo of years ago when I stuffed my plaits into my ears and the sour guilt rose dyspeptically in my throat. I swallow, and pressing my back against the cupboard for support I sneer, ‘Such a poor investment children are. No returns, no compound interest, not a cent’s worth of gratitude. You’d think gratitude were inversely proportionate to the sacrifice of parents. I can’t imagine why people have children.’

She turns from the stove, her hands gripping the handles of a pot, and says slowly, at one with the steam pumping out the truth,

‘My mother said it was a mistake when I brought you up to speak English. Said people spoke English just to be disrespectful to their elders, to You and Your them about. And that is precisely what you do. Now you use the very language against me that I’ve stubbed my tongue on trying to teach you it. No respect! Use your English as a catapult!’

I fear for her wrists but she places the pot back on the stove and keeps her back turned. I will not be drawn into further battle. For years we have shunted between understanding and failure and I the Caliban will always be at fault. While she stirs ponderously, I say, ‘My stories are going to be published next month. As a book I mean.’

She sinks into the wicker chair, her face red with steam and rage.

‘Stories,’ she shouts, ‘you call them stories? I wouldn’t spend a second gossiping about things like that. Dreary little things in which nothing happens, except. except. ’ and it is the unspeakable which makes her shut her eyes for a moment. Then more calmly, ‘Cheryl sent me the magazine from Joburg, two, three of them. A disgrace. I’m only grateful that it’s not a Cape Town book. Not that one could trust Cheryl to keep anything to herself.’

‘But they’re only stories. Made up. Everyone knows it’s not real, not the truth.’

‘But you’ve used the real. If I can recognise places and people, so can others, and if you want to play around like that why don’t you have the courage to tell the whole truth? Ask me for stories with neat endings and you won’t have to invent my death. What do you know about things, about people, this place where you were born? About your ancestors who roamed these hills? You left. Remember?’ She drops her head and her voice is barely audible.

‘To write from under your mother’s skirts, to shout at the world that it’s all right to kill God’s unborn child! You’ve killed me over and over so it was quite unnecessary to invent my death. Do people ever do anything decent with their education?’

Slumped in her chair she ignores the smell of burning food so that I rescue the potatoes and baste the meat.

‘We must eat,’ she sighs. ‘Tomorrow will be exhausting. What did you have at Cissie’s last night?’

‘Bobotie and sweet potato and stamp-en-stoot. They were trying to watch the television at the same time so I had the watermelon virtually to myself.’

She jumps up to take the wooden spoon from me. We eat in silence the mutton and sousboontjies until she says that she managed to save some prickly pears. I cannot tell whether her voice is tinged with bitterness or pride at her resourcefulness. She has slowed down the ripening by shading the fruit with castor-oil leaves, floppy hats on the warts of great bristling blades. The flesh is nevertheless the colour of burnt earth, a searing sweetness that melts immediately so that the pips are left swirling like gravel in my mouth. I have forgotten how to peel the fruit without perforating my fingers with invisible thorns.

Mamma watches me eat, her own knife and fork long since resting sedately on the plate of opaque white glass. Her finger taps the posy of pink roses on the clean rim and I am reminded of the modesty of her portion.

‘Tomorrow,’ she announces, ‘we’ll go on a trip to the Gifberge.’

I swallow the mouthful of pips and she says anxiously, ‘You can drive, can’t you?’ Her eyes are fixed on me, ready to counter the lie that will attempt to thwart her and I think wearily of the long flight, the terrible drive from Cape Town in the heat.

‘Can’t we go on Thursday? I’d like to spend a whole day in the house with the blinds drawn against the sun, reading the Cape Times .’

‘Plenty of time for that. No, we must go tomorrow. Your father promised, for years he promised, but I suppose he was scared of the pass. Men can’t admit that sort of thing, scared of driving in the mountains, but he wouldn’t teach me to drive. Always said my chest wasn’t good enough. As if you need good lungs to drive.’

‘And in this heat?’

‘Don’t be silly, child, it’s autumn and in the mountains it’ll be cool. Come,’ she says, taking my arm, and from the stoep traces with her finger the line along the Matsikamma Range until the first deep fold. ‘Just there you see, where the mountains step back a bit, just there in that kloof the road goes up.’

Maskam’s friendly slope stops halfway, then the flat top rises perpendicularly into a violet sky. I cannot imagine little men hanging pegged and roped to its sheer sides.