Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

A rippling sensation up the back makes the shoulders hunch. The hand that wrote the words was like this one — the one that holds the paper: the same.

When I got out of the bath this morning I saw myself in the mirror and thought of you looking at me and you won’t believe me but my nipples came out and got hard. I watched in the glass .

The same, the same. As a deep breath taken fills the lungs, so the hands open as if to do things they did not know they could, the whole body centres on itself in a magical power. It sings in the head, the sense of the body.

They say this or that is ‘only physical’ but when you see something ugly and horrible like L’s grandmother, can’t eat, smells, can’t see (she doesn’t recognize anybody but he drags me along to show her the baby) you know that a body is what you are left with when you get old, so why should you ignore (crossed out) take no notice of it when you are young and it is marvellous, marvellous. If only they knew how marvellous. Maravilhoso. Is that right, my darling darling, how’s my progress? I’ve bought a dictionary. I know you don’t like to hear about anything that happened to me before you — real Latin jealousy, I laugh to tease you, but really it’s so sweet to me to have a man inside me who possesses a woman completely, nothing to do with being introduced: this is my wife. And this is my child, this is my dog .

Singing in the head, and the flush that comes before tears, but in another part of the body, and another kind of wetness.

I look at the others — my poor sisters, the one with that circumcised ox Arthur who will soon be rich enough, that’s for sure, to climb on top of her in a bed that used to belong to the Empress Josephine or someone, and the other one with her musty ‘professional man’ she shares the serious things in life with, even if the ‘only physical’ can’t be too great with a good soul like that. And she’s such a magnificent girl — I wish you’d meet her. No I don’t! What I wish is she had a man like you to bring her to life. What’s the use of trying to change other people’s lives if you don’t get a chance to live the only one you’re going to have. We didn’t ask to be born here. Nobody’s going to give it back to you, nobody’s going to thank you. I know, through you, I can be sure of what I feel and that’s the only thing you can be sure of (written above: ‘that matters’). I’ve had a husband, I’ve given birth. So what does it mean? These things were done to me. But with you I do things. I’m all over my body, I’m there wherever you touch me, and I’m there wherever I touch you. My tongue in your ear, in your armpit fur and your sweet backside. Oh my god Vasco, Vasco, my Vasco, the taste of you!

The same, the same. All sensations alive in the body, breasts, lips of the mouth and the vagina, thorax, thighs, charged, the antenna of every invisible hair stretching out. A thirst of the skin.

When I come back here you are still in my mouth. Like what? I read somewhere it’s supposed to be the taste of bitter almonds. Not true, not for yours, anyway. I wish I could describe it. Like strawberries, like lemon rind. I always did eat the rind of the slice of lemon people put in drinks. I’m crazy today, don’t listen to me. It was so sad not to know all these wonderful things for 24 years. My sister was talking today about fellow man. I don’t know what she’s going on about. There’s only one other person, and if you don’t find him … nothing else. It is so sad to be alone in your body. Do you understand what I write, my love? I can’t help writing to you, anyway. I never used to write letters, even during the war, my boyfriends used to send reams and I’d hardly write back. Honestly. I didn’t know letters could be like this. When you read, do you understand enough? Enough to love me. Do I make you grow big for me. Do I

The draft is unfinished. But there is an avowal written large and dug deep across the page: RUTH. Ruthie. Ruth; mother. Sweating and trembling with Ruthie’s desire; Ruthie has become mother.

The letter is being torn into small pieces, torn again through the syllables when an intact word stares up. On the way to bury the fragments in the yard bin outside the kitchen: there stands, in the path, the girl Alpheus has living with him in the garage. The girl’s stomach lifts her dress as the babyish potbelly of the child did in the photograph. The girl is pregnant; tries to efface herself from the notice of the white people in the house, and so, cornered, murmurs to the white girl her own age, Good afternoon, madam. The bits of paper cannot be put into the bin under anyone’s eyes. The fragments are taken to school and buried in the communal trash there, with the banana-skins and half-eaten sandwiches of tea-break.

It must have done some good. To bring the past into the open — in particular the past she didn’t have in memory, only heard obliquely referred to by others — would draw the girl herself more into the open? At least, Pauline thought it might have done. She had suggested to Joe that through Portuguese legal colleagues in Mozambique they might try again to make contact with Ruthie; middle-aged, like the rest of them by now, though who could imagine Ruthie fortyish!

Joe could. — A woman alone, no profession, drifting. It’s downhill.—

— But she’s not alone.—

— A woman who had a lover years ago. D’you think that type of thing lasts? Fourteen years hanging around nightclubs and bars. Poor Ruth. What was it he was supposed to be? Disc jockey? Professional dancing partner?—

But Joe had things to think of other than writing to ask colleagues to investigate a family matter, the whereabouts of a woman last known to have been cohabiting with a Portuguese citizen of no fixed employment. If Ruthie came to mind it was incongruously as one of the sentimental Latin love songs to which she once danced all night would have sounded against the singing of political prisoners caged in the Black Maria between prison and court.

The adolescent children continued to live a normal life — if, Pauline objected, one could regard as normal any life in the context of what was happening. Joe did not agree wholly with Pauline, in practice — though of course he did in principle — that they were old enough to pitch the tenor of their young lives entirely to the defiant cries and dirges of the time and place in which they were growing up. The atmosphere at home was enough to counteract that of the school where — yes, he knew, he knew — at prayers every morning Hillela and Carole had to offer thanks for the infinite mercy of a God in whose name other children were given an inferior education, were banished with their mothers to barren reserves, and deprived of fathers forced to become migratory labourers in order that the children might not starve. That was what was happening in the Transkei, where the family had had such wonderful camping holidays, where they had bought delicious oysters for nothing — in the new currency, the equivalent of twenty-five cents a dozen! — from the Mpondo women who gathered them off the rocks. Carole, although only ten at the time of a great bus boycott, had been old enough to understand the issue through the cloud of sunset dust in which thousands of black people tramped at the roadside; for many weeks, when her mother had fetched her from school in the afternoons, they had not driven home to milk and biscuits but taken the road to Alexandra Township and picked up as many of those people as the car would hold. Carole sat on the knees of washerwomen and office cleaners, to make room; there was a rotting-cheese smell of dirty socks; she had been afraid when the police made her mother stop, asked for the passes of the black people, and told her she would be fined for overloading her car. Hillela was not living with the family then. She had been taken in later. The year before Sharpeville; so this epoch in Hillela’s history was dated, in Pauline’s house, by the public one, as at school human history was dated by the advent of Christianity, B.C. or A.D. By the time Hillela was living there, Pauline used to come home from regular visits to someone in prison (could it have been the red-haired woman?) and tell of the cockiness and courage of this person who must have been a friend — Carole knew her, Carole iced a cake Bettie baked for her, but the prison matron wouldn’t allow the prisoner to receive it; Pauline brought it home again and the girls ate it.