Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

Unlike observers, she expected him back any day. She passed the days wandering purposefully about, looking, listening, smelling, tasting. The ancient town was a Mardi Gras for her, everybody in fancy dress that could not possibly be daily familiar: the glossy black men in braided cotton robes and punch-embroidered skull caps, the Arab women with all their being in their eyes, blotted out over body, mouth and head by dark veils, the skinny, over-dressed Indian children, bright and finicky as fishing-flies, the stumps of things that were beggars, and the smooth-suited, smooth-jowled Lebanese merchants touched with mauve around the mouth who sat as deities in the dark of stifling shops. Her watch was stolen in the hotel and she kept track of time by a grand public clock-face and the regular call of the muezzins from the mosques. There were no laws — nothing to prevent her going down into the black quarters of the town, here, except the rotting vegetables and sewer mud that had to be stepped through, and the little claws of beggar children that fastened on her whenever she smiled a greeting, not knowing that every day she had less and less to give away. She bought pawpaws and big, mealy plantains, more filling than ordinary bananas, down there; cheaper than in the markets. She picked them from the small pyramid of some woman whose stock and livelihood they were, arranged among the garbage, spittle, and babies scaled with glittering flies. She ate the fruit in place of lunch and dinner on a broken bench on the esplanade and did not get sick.

Olga, Pauline, even Len — they had never given her the advantage of knowing what to say to someone to whom one owes money and can’t pay. The wife of the hotel proprietor stopped her as she came along the verandah where her room was, and broke her silence.

— Going on for six weeks, and rates are strictly weekly, dear. You know that, don’t you? We aren’t running a charity. We have to pay even the yard boys the fancy new minimum wage this government’s set down, I don’t know how much longer we’re gonna be prepared to carry on, anyway. — A drop of water run down to one of the spiral ends of the girl’s hair had fallen on the dry sun-cancer of the woman’s forearm. — We have to pay for the water you’re using for those lovely cold showers you take whenever you fancy. — From the day that fellow went off with his briefcase, never mind the pyjamas left under the pillows, the proprietor had not been happy about the situation. There’d been bad experiences before with that CCC lot who’d taken over Tamarisk for themselves. That’s what the regular white residents from the old days called them: commies, coons and coolies. She looked at this cocky miss who played the guitar in her room as if the world owed her a living; looked in a way that made the girl feel she would be physically prevented, by the barrier of a scaly arm, from getting past her.

— I haven’t any money.—

She didn’t think of assuring that she was only waiting for ‘her friend’ to come back; of promising all would be set right and paid then — soon. It was only when she knew, quite simply, what to say that with that truthful statement another became true: she was not waiting. She was now one of the regular coterie of Tamarisk Beach, making out. She packed her bag and hung the room key on the board behind the unattended reception desk. The pyjamas she left under the pillows.

How are things? Oh, I’m making out . At best, the phrase used on the beach meant one had found somewhere ‘to stay’ (‘to live’ belonged to a kind of claim left behind in the home country) or that a relevant liberation organization had created a title, Education Officer, Publicity Secretary, Liaison Assistant , that provided a chair, if not a desk, in an office, and a stipend even more modest than that of a rich aunt. She had neither job, nor stipend, nor anywhere to stay unless the beach was somewhere, until Christa Zeederburg (her name should be recorded along with that of the woman art director with the octopus eyes) provided a sleeping bag on the floor of some other people’s flat. It is possible the girl actually did sleep out at Tamarisk a couple of nights, taking the warmth of the sand and the thick air for harmlessness, recklessly unaware of danger, as in one of those anecdotes about small children who are found happily unharmed, playing with a snake. More likely that whomever she drifted away from the beach with in the evening found themselves saddled with her for the night. And it was quite customary for people who had a place to stay to allow others to dump their suitcases and duffle bags there. One might live out of such a base, calling in when one needed a change of clothes. Why did she have only one pair of jeans, with a broken zipper? What had happened to the clothes, most of them quite good, she had appropriated by right of a hunted status before she fled with her lover? Clothing of ‘European’ cut and style was short in a poor country trying to save foreign exchange; probably, to buy herself pawpaws and plantains, she sold the clothes in the wrong places (Christa Zeederburg reminisces) at poor prices, foolish girl, compared with what could have been obtained on the other kind of black market. Oh if Pauline, if Olga had known how little one could make out on, in money, comfort, calculation, principles and respectability, and stay healthy and lively, with good digestion and regular menstruation!

But they were never to know, and no doubt she who had been their charge was to make sure she herself would forget.

Poor countries provide for poverty. There was not only cheap over-ripe fruit that had improved her figure — Christa, of course, had found a swimsuit and sewn in the sag, so that those who had not slept with the girl watched with the envious desire to know more the sucking movement of the flat belly under wet yellow knit, and the deep rift of breasts into which sea water trickled down out of sight. There were all kinds of vendors of goods and services without the surcharge of overheads. She was outside one of those stone-and-polished-brass banks she had no more business to enter than the old crippled black man who sat on the pavement with his portable workshop spread neatly handy. For days she had been flapping along with a broken thong on her only pair of sandals; for a coin the shoemaker repaired the sandal while she leaned against the bank walls with a bare foot tucked up beneath her. The sun on Tamarisk had provided her with the free cosmetics of a dark, fruit-skin tan and a natural bleach of her hair. The heat made her languid and patient; she was enjoying the sureness with which hands like black roots snipped a little patch of leather to size, folded and sewed it, attached it to the broken thong and hammered flat to the sole the nail that was to hold it in place. It was just then that she experienced a surge of something, a falling into place of people passing that came from the unfamiliar moments of standing still while all flowed, as if one belonged there like the shoemaker, instead of being in passage. And the Africans, the Arabs, the Lebanese, and the Europeans from embassies, economic missions and multinational companies wearing tropical-weight trousers wrinkled at buttocks and knees by sweat, no longer were a spectacle but motes in a kind of suspension, a fluid in which she was sustained.

A man among passersby noticed her in that moment; she did not distinguish him. But he had come into her orbit as others had done and were to do. A few days later Christa took her along to a friend’s flat. A free meal was never to be by-passed; on the way, she scarcely bothered to listen to Christa: —German fellow, I think he used to be in import and export, now he’s going to represent a trade union foundation that’s helping to organize in industry here. He got friendly with Mapetla and that crowd from home. That’s how I know him, and now he’s after me all the time, you know how persistent Germans are, wants me to teach him how to organize among blacks! He’s a very generous fellow. He keeps giving me books, newspaper cuttings, I don’t know what else. You’ll see what a lunch we’ll have … he’s got a cook and everything.—