Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

But this man from the south of the continent — her husband himself was the one who said it — he was a man with an intellect. — They may treat them badly down there in your country, Hillela, but it seems to sharpen their minds, mmh? — (The Ambassador always aimed exactly the right tone of banter at her, at the family table.) This one did not need wine to loosen his tongue but he knew how to drink it in a civilised manner, not swilled down because it was provided, free, by a white. His look, narrow eyes decoding the appearances of an embassy room, was not beguiled by the knick-knacks of European power — the coat-of-arms table silver, the humidor in which cigars were wheeled in, the royal portrait in which the face of the current incumbent fitted into the cut-out of medals and braid like the faces of revellers who have themselves photographed at a fairground. There was no predictable rhetoric, either. Hillela’s compatriot stood before the portrait, turned with the battle-lines of his mouth curving a civil smile. — That must be a great-great-grandson? His ancestor was the one who cut off hands when the workers in the plantations didn’t bring in enough rubber.—

Emile put up his own hands in mutual admission of the sins of the great-great-grandfathers. — Awful things happened on this side of Africa.—

— Well, he made his country estate over here, didn’t he …—

— It was only for a very short time. Then the other European powers got jealous, of course.—

— Of course. They were all the same family weren’t they? Cousins, uncles and that… Him, the English queen, the German king … we were their family property, man. But they were a cartel, really … We were talking about multinational companies just now; what’s new? Except that it’s not aunties and uncles banded together to own us, now, it’s foreign national economies. The extended family of the West …—

Here was a black man with whom one could talk of contentious matters in the European mode of scepticism and irony that makes communication possible between the social irreconcilables of power and powerlessness. In that mode, one can say anything, if one knows how to say it. The Ambassador, putting one arm round his beautiful wife and one round the girl: —I don’t know about the other whites in your country, but this one — we love her—

She went to them (‘almost as if to parents’ Marie-Claude remarked to her husband) and said she wanted to help the organization — clerical work. Never said right out that she was going away, leaving him; but the Ambassador knew her, knew it. He at once gave his wife a lead in generosity. — But Hillela can continue to live here. She has her room. We don’t need it … there’s no reason … — She did not stay on long. Just as well. It was not, after all, the right thing for the Embassy to open itself to complaints from her country that it was harbouring political dissidents from that country; wherever she went, it was not to diplomatic parties, now, and constantly in the company of the members of a banned organization.

Njabulo Manaka, under whose kitchen table she had been accommodated, had moved on again; he was on trial in the home country for having infiltrated after military training in Algeria. Sne moved on. As customary now with her, once she was no longer even a lodger at the Embassy, she did not go to visit the family there. The Ambassador saw her as he was passing the market; her profile with the light catching the cheekbone, her breasts swinging forward as she bent to test the ripeness of some fruit; her old poverty diet she had told him about in the sweet, light confidences of bed. He put a hand on his driver’s shoulder, the car drew up in the swill of the gutter. — Get in. — She paid for her mangoes, first.

She sat angled towards him, knees neatly together, presenting herself, smiling as if she had been at the Embassy only yesterday.

— Where are you living?—

They spoke behind the driver’s ears open to them under his braided cap.

— There’s a house where we all live.—

— So you’re with him.—

— We’re all together.—

— Tell me. Hillela? … Well, if it hasn’t happened yet, it will. You’re like me. You’ll try … It’s quite a novelty, isn’t it. I’ve had a few of his kind, myself. I always was attracted. And of course where I come from, it’s no crime. No, to be fair, it’s still (he made a familiar damping-down signal with his fine caresser’s hand) — not done …—

She took the hand. Her own was sticky with the juice and dirt that had dried on the fruit in her lap, her cheeks were the colour and smoothness of the rose-brown mango skin, the black eyes were those that had opened under him many times, holding for his reassurance the depth of pleasure he could plumb.

— I’m pregnant.—

— Oh my God.—

She saw the pain that slid its blade into him; her face was that of a child confronted with the middle-aged rictus of an angina.

Not his! Not from him! Could not be from him. But what a regret? If it had happened when it would have been his, he would have been irritated by her, as usual with women, for not being more efficient.

But of course she was not like other women. He knew that. Young as she was, she understood her field. He had even reinterpreted an aphorism once, for her, but she probably hadn’t known the original and couldn’t really appreciate the point: —The proper study of woman is man.—

— Do you want me to arrange something? — He spoke now as he would to a friend who had got a girl into trouble; it was only natural to stand together when these nuisances occurred. He had to grant it to her, Hillela’s attitude to sex was that of an honorary man.

She shook her head. Then she lifted her throat; strangely, like a bird about to sing. Happiness is always embarrassing to onlookers. He gave her the mimed kiss, small sharp blows on either cheek, that marked both farewells and felicitations among people of his own kind.

Funerals and weddings are identical occasions when it comes to disguising in a generally-accepted façade of sorrow or celebration any previous state of relations between those taking part. If there was what can be called a wedding party at all when the black man married her (and there is no doubt that they were legally married, whatever the status of her other alliances) it was given by the Ambassador and his wife at their Residence. Because of the political implications represented by the bridegroom, it was not more than a small unofficial cocktail party, where the children who were so excited to be associated with their beloved Hillela in public kept racing up to touch her dress or lean against her, and the closer and less stuffy friends among the diplomatic corps came to make a show of wishing her well, no matter how they doubted this would help. The young First Secretary, coincidentally in the country on leave from the post elsewhere where he had been useful as a suitable public partner, was able to be present. He cut short any critical speculation among the champagne drinkers with a term that, in its particular British sense, was a high compliment. — We had a lot of fun together. She’s a really good sport.—

And it was Marie-Claude, pulling down the sides of her lovely mouth in dismissal, who had the last word when later the rumour went round that the man had another wife — and children — somewhere, probably back where he and the girl came from. — To be one wife among several, the way the Africans do it — that’s to be a mistress, isn’t it? So she fits in, in her way, with a black man’s family. Hillela’s a natural mistress, not a wife.—

Lying beside him, looking at pale hands, thighs, belly: seeing herself as unfinished, left off, somewhere. She examines his body minutely and without shame, and he wakes to see her at it, and smiles without telling her why: she is the first not to pretend the different colours and textures of their being is not an awesome fascination. How can it be otherwise? The laws that have determined the course of life for them are made of skin and hair, the relative thickness and thinness of lips and the relative height of the bridge of the nose. That is all; that is everything. The Lilliesleaf houseparty is in prison for life because of it. Those with whom she ate pap and cabbage are in Algeria and the Soviet Union learning how to man guns and make bombs because of it. He is outlawed and plotting because of it. Christianity against other gods, the indigenous against the foreign invader, the masses against the ruling class — where he and she come from all these become interpretative meanings of the differences seen, touched and felt, of skin and hair. The laws made of skin and hair fill the statute books in Pretoria; their gaudy savagery paints the bodies of Afrikaner diplomats under three-piece American suits and Italian silk ties. The stinking fetish made of contrasting bits of skin and hair, the scalping of millions of lives, dangles on the cross in place of Christ. Skin and hair. It has mattered more than anything else in the world .