Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

Loulou was on the lookout for her and left his friends sitting drinking beer on the veranda of one of their rondavels. “You don’t want have a little drink? No? Come I show you in my limousine my business I’m making nowdays—” He had dressed in pale blue linen trousers and, despite the heat, a brown mohair sweater with a gold thread in the knit. He wore it over his bare chest, where a gold chain followed the crease of fat round the base of his neck and ended in a big medallion with a red stone. The tail of some sort of civet hung from the leopard skin hat. The great rear bay of the car was filled with specially made cases, travelling-salesman style, but with the Loulou touch — locks of scrolly gilt and red plastic crocodile covers. “From U.S., from U.S.” He was selling the same old stuff — ivory paper knives and necklaces, crude copies of the famous seated figure of King Lukengu carved for him by the dozen in some Bakuba village up in the Kasai, masks decorated with cowrie shells and copper, made not for dancing but for the walls of white people’s houses. “If I can’t go Jewburg, I think now I like go over Portuguese side myself now tomorrow. I sell this; is not so bad place there … here, I make for you petit cadeau … yes, yes you take—” and she had to find a pair to fit her out of a bundle of gold — heeled sandals with thongs made of the skin of some poor beast. “Madame Edouard, but for why you sick, eh?” He stood back and shook his head over her, well aware that presents would not help. An African xylophone was being played up and down the Silver Rhino to announce lunch and his entourage rose with a screech of chairs, chattering and arguing, the girls laughing in their special careless, loose-shouldered way, waving about pretty black hands with painted fingernails like opalescent scales, breasts bobbing, earrings swinging, little black pigtails standing out all over their heads. He called some sarcastic-sounding remark, but all that happened was more giggles and one of the girls put her hands on her hips and stamped her foot so that her bracelets jiggled and so did her round backside in her tight pagne.

Rebecca was almost at the Bayleys’ when she turned and drove back to the Silver Rhino. They were sitting at lunch, their chairs tipped this way and that, the waiters pounding and sweating round them, beer bottles being handed up and down, Loulou at the head. Wherever he went he carried with him the atmosphere of an open — air African nightclub. “Are you really going?” “To Portuguese? Yes, I tell you — this place is enough. And the plane — nothing. I go. — I go there one time already, is not bad….”

She said, “Could I come with you, Loulou — would you take me.”

“For sure I take you! For sure! Demain? Sais-tu venir? You plenty bagage and biloko?”

The Bayleys did not know what to say to her. “And when you get there? What will you do?”

“I can get a plane.”

Vivien said, “You’ll go to South Africa then.”

She shook her head.

“Where will you go Rebecca?” Vivien spoke gently.

She told them about the money Bray had sent to Switzerland.

“Don’t repeat that story to anyone else. Not even your friend Loulou,” Neil Bayley said. Vivien was silent.

“I think I’ll go and take the money.”

They did not ask any more questions.

Vivien gave her a camel-hair coat she had brought from England: “It’s almost winter in Europe — you’ve got no warm clothes.” She had the two cotton dresses they had made, the old jeans and shirt (washed, no trace of red earth), the picnic basket and Bray’s briefcase. Neil had had to ask her to let him look in it for Bray’s passport and other papers but he had given it back to her.

Neil came into the bedroom where she and Vivien stood with the coat. “What about the air ticket?”

“I’ll borrow the money from Loulou.”

Neil nodded: Loulou was her husband’s associate, the matter of the money would be easily arranged. She said at once, “He’ll be pleased to have me pay in Swiss francs.”

When Neil had left the room, she said to Vivien, “I’ll never live with Gordon again,” and Vivien stood there, looking at the coat without seeing it, pressing her thumbnail between her front teeth.

They gave her one of their suitcases. When she had packed, it was still half — empty. Up to the moment she left they seemed to feel both somehow responsible to stop her and yet unable to offer any reason why she should not go. “I don’t think he’ll ever get through the border,” Neil offered. “Specially him. It’s probably known he’s done some gun — running in Katanga in his time.”

“He’ll get through all right. Gordon always says Loulou can do anything.”

He drove a day and a night with only a short nap two or three times with the car come to rest at the roadside. It was dangerous for anyone to drive so long and fast without rest but she knew nothing would happen. She found it was not that you don’t care if you live or die but just that you know when you can’t die. You have been left alive. He had brought with him only one of the girls, and there was plenty of room to stretch out and sleep. She and the girl had no common language, so their communication consisted of an occasional smile and a wordless accord about the times they needed to go off into the bushes together to pee. The heat was very great and with the speed produced a daze: forest, savannah, scrub, a change in motion winding down a pass. Loulou got on well with the officials at the border post and “forgot” two bottles of whisky left standing beside the air — conditioner that sweated water in the humidity. On the other side of the frontier was night, sudden bursts of cackling music as he tried to pick up some station on the car radio, confused sleep, the fuzzy bulk of him there in the sweater, the headlight beams cloudy with insects, dawn coming in as a smell of freshness before the light. They were in a near-desert, hard yellow earth funnelled into antheaps fifteen feet high, dowdy thornbush draped in tattered webs, huge baobab trees. They drove over wooden bridges above dry riverbeds. Towards midday all growing things ceased to exist and there was nothing but hard yellow cliffs, drifts of pollen-coloured dunes, more cliffs runnelled and sheered away by exposure, and then behind the yellow, a blue as bright and hard — the sea. Through the filthy villages, the escort of bicycles and chickens and overburdened buses and lorries that are the first sign of every colonial town, they came to factories with Portuguese names, cliffs clothed completely with the pink and white walls and tiled roofs, the dark trees and brilliant trails of bougainvillea of white men’s houses, and below, the pale cubes and rectangles of the commercial centre behind a curved corniche and a harbour-jumble of ships and cranes. Loulou took her to the Lisboa Hotel (“You like it — two bar for cocktail”) and gave her the equivalent of fifty pounds, partly in dollars, partly in sterling, in addition to the price in escudos of a ticket for Europe. On one of their trips to the bushes the girl had shown Rebecca packets of notes in a calico bag on either hip under her pagne— she seemed to have been brought along more as a piggybank than une petite folie. Loulou himself did not book into the hotel; he had his good friend in the harbour customs to go and see, and then he had promised to buy the girl a wig — she put her fingers on her shoulders and smiled demandingly to show that it must be long hair, really long — before they set off again to drive down south to the other seaport.

When they had gone she sat on one of the beds in the room she had been given, swaying slightly, still, from the motion of the car, and telephoned the airways office. She was told she would have to wait two days for a connection to Zurich; there was a seat for her on the plane. They took her name and she said she would come to pay for the ticket later.