Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

He wondered whether she was deliberately provoking him, wishing to be thrashed and dominated. He was reaching for her wrist, on the point of grabbing it, when she pulled away, looking shocked, and said that he would have to think seriously about marrying her before he touched her again.

“You have no right,” she said.

That fascinated him, as though she were making a kind of promise: if they were legally together he would have a perfect right to make her submit.

She said no more, she just withdrew, she vanished into her schoolroom. He turned to his work, which had lain untouched, stopped cold, since he had initiated the affair with Noloyiso and left it as he had left his wife. But he was stumped. He could not make a sentence. Work that had taken the place of sex, that had inspired sex, that was inspired by sex, that had been his life, was inert. His pen was small and loose in his hand, just a dry stick he used to make crosshatches in the margins of his sheet of paper. He wanted to stab himself with the thing.

Or stab her with it, injecting her with ink. The one-armed Bantu schoolteacher had rebuffed him. Apparently her life was complete: she turned her back on him and went on teaching. Was it possible that she felt nothing?

At least he knew where she was. At certain times of the day, unable to work, the times when he would have worked, he crossed the dorp in his bakkie, bumped over the railway tracks that divided the town into black and white, and, parking on the road, he walked the last hundred yards on stony ground to the hencoop of a school.

Black children in the playground stared at him. It was not unusual for a white school super or inspector to appear, but this man went to the window and looked in, standing and staring like a reproachful ghost.

Nolo continued to teach her class, with him at the window. But when the bell sounded she hurried outside looking stern, her face immobile.

“If you don’t leave the premises I’ll have to call the police.”

“Premises”—this scrubby acre! “Police”—those lazy villains!

Prinsloo said, “I am not committing a crime.”

“You are trespassing.”

He thought: Imagine being accused by a Bantu!

But he said, “I want you to come with me.”

“You know my position on that. You know my terms.”

“Position”! “Terms”! He wanted to laugh. He hoped that her speaking to him in this way would fill him with self-disgust and act as a signal for him to reject her. Yet the opposite happened. He was humiliated and humbled. Her speaking sharply to him clarified his feelings. He realized that he could not live without her.

He divorced Marianne. The poor woman's face crumpled with grief, as though she had just gotten news of the death of a loved one. In a sense, that was just what had happened, for he was lost to her for good.

She begged him to change his mind. He pitied her, but he also wanted her to wish him well. He said so.

She said, “I don't wish you ill,” and then, considering the words she had spoken, added, “No, I do wish you ill. You deserve to suffer.”

He said, “I haven’t written a single word for six months!”—meaning that he had already suffered.

“You’re divorcing me and all you think about is your writing.”

“Because that’s all I ever think about.”

Why had he said this? Was it true? He did not think about his unwritten stories, only about Noloyiso the Bantu schoolteacher, who had one arm, who possessed him, body and soul.

He told Nolo in a letter what he had done.

She agreed to see him. She allowed his advances, they made love again, but it was understood that she would not move in with him.

“My people would call me a harlot.”

“Your people are always living together. That’s the usual arrangement!”

“With each other. In the same age group. Not with a white man. And you are old.”

She had him there.

What made Prinsloo think it would be a reasonable idea for him to introduce Nolo to Hansie? Wimpie was in Cape Town, or else he would have included him, too, at the lunch in the hotel dining room in the dorp. It was bad enough with Hansie; Wimpie would have made it worse. Prinsloo saw at once it was a mistake. Nolo and Hansie were the same age.

Hansie’s eyes were cold, his lips were tight with fury, his voice quietly mocking, asking questions that were accusations, not expecting answers.

“Doesn't it seem a bit strange to be eating in here, sitting at a table rather than standing outside at the window?”

Africans just seven years before had been forbidden to enter the restaurant and had used the take-away window at the side of the building.

Nolo said, “Not really. I always thought it was strange to use the window, and so I never did it.”

Prinsloo admired Nolo's composure. Her strength gave him strength.

“What's your opinion of Dad's books?”

That threw her. It was clear from her expression that Nolo did not know Prinsloo was a writer. What had his writing to do with their love affair? Nolo simply stared at him.

“She will read them when they are translated,” Prinsloo said.

“Praat u Afrikaans?” Hansie nagged.

“Ek verstaan net ‘n bietjie Afrikaans. Ek praat Engels, ” Nolo said.

Saying that was the nearest she had ever come to expressing a political opinion.

“Into English, of course,” Prinsloo said.

Prinsloo sat in a sorry slumped posture, as Hansie looked at his father with contempt for his foolishness.

The meal was awful. Before it was over he knew he had lost his son; that Hansie saw this unique woman and thought, Kaffir.

More alone afterward, Prinsloo saw that he had only one choice. He proposed marriage. Nolo accepted. The little ceremony took place in the town hall — Nolo’s elderly father, some of her cousins, an auntie, all of them dressed in stiff, ill-fitting clothes, newly made by a man working a Singer sewing machine on a veranda in the dorp. Nolo wore a long yellow dress. And another awkward lunch in the hotel dining room, the old man smiling with worry and saying, “I have never been in here before in my whole life.”

Later that day she moved into his house, bringing one suitcase, the size she would have used for travel of a week’s duration, containing everything she owned, including a clock, a Bible, some pictures, some books — serious self-improving ones; and she submitted to him.

She became his slave, but a happy one, joyous in their lovemaking — imaginative, too, for she allowed Prinsloo to dominate her utterly, to treat her like a servant, a whore, a sex object, a stranger, living out passionate fantasies of master and slave. She allowed it, then she encouraged it, finally she demanded it. Prinsloo tied her one arm and used her body; she did not object, she said she enjoyed it. She suggested more degrading episodes of submission in which she sat handcuffed to a chair or secured to the bedposts. She willingly got onto her knees, her one arm making a tripod of her posture. She urged him to thrash her buttocks, and while he did so, she raised them so that he could enter her. Still she asked for more, begging to eat him, drink him, swallow him.

When Prinsloo ran out of ideas for abusing her, it was Nolo who supplied him with variations, acts he had not imagined in his wildest fictions. How did she know what was in his head? Where had she heard of such things? Perhaps only an African knew how to please such a man, since sex is about power, and the African story was about power. What a mind she had! She was so willing to take any form of abuse she became his partner; she invited him to enslave her.

Her submitting in this way proved to Prinsloo that she was stronger than he was, that she enjoyed these games even more than he did, that the manipulation was hers: she was using him.