Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

It was a double room with two beds separated by a little night-table holding the telephone, an ashtray, and a booklet entitled, in English, French, and Portuguese, What to See and Where to Go. There was a bathroom and behind thick curtains she found a little slice of balcony. She went out for a moment. A half-moon of flat bay, the palms moving away at regular spaces along the curve, and just opposite the hotel, a new block going up behind screens of matting. In a gap, workmen sat on the tightrope of steel girders eating their lunch. Down below, a tiny square that must have been the plaza when the town was a garrison outpost was divided by sand paths and ornamental plants, like the quarterings of a heraldic crest. A workman with a paper forage cap on his head waved at her. She came inside, pulled the curtains again, and stood looking at the two beds. She turned down the cover of the one she had sat on while telephoning, and lay on her back. Six fake candles of the chandelier had made six shaded brown circles on the ceiling. The glass drops giddied slowly in some current of air that she did not feel. There was nothing familiar in the room but the picnic basket and the briefcase. And herself. It was on this day, exactly one week ago, that they had been on the road from Gala.

One of the men at the reception desk of the Hotel Lisboa was short, with a large head of crimped hair, a tiny mouth blue-shaded all round no matter how closely shaven, and young brown eyes ringed like a marmoset’s. This large head was not very high above the counter and was always inclined in one kind of service or another — he was either changing travellers’ cheques, getting a number on the telephone for someone, or clicking the lead out of his little gilt pencil to draw a street-map. He spoke English fluently and it was he who told her how to get to the airline office. He would step out to prod at the button when the lift was slow to come; with a smile like the smile from a hospital bed he would take up the room-key dropped at the desk by a guest going out into the sun.

She could recall at will every detail about this man’s face, it was a rubber stamp tried out on a blank page, whereas in Bray’s face there were gaps that could not be filled in. Between the cheekbone and the angle of the jaw, on the left side. From the nose to the upper lip. She could not put him together. She caught certain expressions and certain angles but she could not find the steady image.

The promenade under the palm trees was much longer than it looked. It took more than half an hour, walking slowly, to reach the entrance to the docks. She would walk one way along the promenade and the other way on the opposite side of the wide boulevard, along the shops and buildings. Just before the docks there was a smelly place where the promenade was slippery with bits of fish and African women wholesalers bargained for catches and took them away, in the boots of the local taxis. On the town side was a new complex of banks and insurance companies, all mosaics and metal collage and the sort of monumental sculpture of black goddesses that white architects tend to commission in colonies where the local population is particularly malnourished. There were shops crammed with transistor radios, tape-recorders, and electric grills with well-browned plaster chickens stuck on their spits. There were older buildings, storerooms and warehouses shuttered blind, and others with peeling pastel façades, trompe-l’oeil pillars and garlands painted faintly round the doors and windows. At the pavement cafés men read newspapers; the white ones lowered them a moment when a woman passed. She sat in the street at one or other of the little tables for long stretches, drinking her black coffee well sweetened and watching the big birds that stood all day in the shallow water of the bay, looking stranded on the mud when the tide was out, and locked to their mirror-image, upside down in the calm pale surface, when the tide was in. Once she walked down to the edge of the sloppy mud but the birds did not move. There were concrete benches on the promenade. She sat for a while pestered by child beggars selling lottery tickets, and young Portuguese soldiers; perhaps the benches were the traditional place for picking up girls, although prostitutes in that town were hardly likely to be white. The young soldiers came from an ancient fort on one of the yellow hills above the bay; if she turned left instead of right, along the promenade, when she came out of the Hotel Lisboa, she passed beneath it. It was solid and worn as the crown of an old molar; the Portuguese had built it five hundred years ago and were there still — army jeeps went up and down the steep road to the battlements and sentries’ huts stood among the very old fig trees, rooted in the walls, that had never let go, either. At night it was floodlit; one of the sights mentioned in the trilingual guide beside the bed.

The plane did not leave until six in the evening on the second day. She bought a bottle of shampoo and washed her hair and went to the little square to dry it in the morning sun. A ragged old black man in a cap with the coat-of-arms of the town was splattering a hose on the coarse leaves of the shrubs. There were no English newspapers but the reception desk at the hotel displayed a wire stand with Time and Newsweek for the foreign businessmen who sat at all times of day under the neon lights of the bar lounge, exchanging handshakes and the misunderstandings of language difficulties with local businessmen and their hangers-on. She had bought Time and turned the pages in the square while the workmen whistled at her from the scaffolding. Married, divorced, dead — actresses, members of deposed royalty, American politicians she’d never heard of. Pictures of a group of nude students burning an effigy on a towering bridge; of a Vietnamese child with her arm blown off at the elbow. Near the bottom of a page, the photograph, the name — EENY MEENY MWETA MO — WILL HE BE THE NEXT TO GO? This has been the year of the coup in Africa-half-a-dozen governments toppled since January. Good-looking good boy of the Western nations, Adamson Mweta (40) is the latest of the continent’s moderate leaders to find himself hanging on to the presidential seat-belt while riots rock his country. His prisons are full but even then he can’t be sure who, among those at large, Left or Right, is friend or foe. His Minister of Foreign Affairs, urbane anti-Communist Albert Tola Tola, is inside after rumours of an attempted takeover last month. His trusted White Man Friday, Africa expert Colonel Evelyn James Bray (54), who helped him negotiate independence, has been murdered in mysterious circumstances on the road to the capital. His one-time comrade in arms, Leftist Edward Shinza, has succeeded in stirring up an insurrection in the trade unions that has escalated from general strike to countrywide chaos. As if to prove this old friends taunts that he is no more than “the black watchman standing guard outside the white man’s enterprise,” Adamson Mweta has had to call upon Britain to send troops to his country. Will the invasion-by-invitation of the former colonial master keep him in his seat and the country’s gold and other valuable mineral resources in the hands of British and U.S. interests?

Quite short; the last of the columns under the general heading of Africa. It was Mweta’s face that she had seen — Bray’s name was come upon in the middle of the text. She read the whole thing over several times. She walked down to the promenade and back along the shops and sat down again at one of the pavement tables. Other people had their newspapers and she had the magazine lying there beside the bowl full of paper sachets of sugar. The tide was coming in round the birds’ legs. A few empty tables away a man and a small boy were concentrating on something the man was drawing. The child had his head cocked sideways, smiling in admiration, anticipation and self-importance — the drawing was being done for him. The man was ageing, one of those extremely handsome men who might have a third or fourth wife the same age as a daughter. Every now and then he lifted his head and took a look under a raised, wrinkled brow at the sea for some point of reference. It was a very dark Mediterranean face, all the beautiful planes deeply scored in now, as if age were redrawing it in a sharper, darker pencil. Brilliantly black eyes were deep-set in a contemplative, amused crinkle that suggested disappointed scholarship — a scientist, someone who saw life as a pattern of gyrations in a drop under a microscope. But he was shabbily dressed and poor looking. Perhaps an intellectual who’d got into political trouble in Portugal. The little boy hung on his arm in eagerness, hampering him. At last the picture was finished and he held it out at arm’s length against the sea and the little boy clambered down from his chair to see it properly. She could see, too — a picture of great happiness, past happiness, choppy waves frilling along, a gay ship with flags and triumphant smoke, birds sprinkled about the air like kisses on a letter. The child looked at it smiling but still in anticipation, looking for the— something— the secret marvel that exists only in children’s expectation. It was the man himself who laughed at his work in enjoyment. Then the little boy took the cue and eagerly laughed, to be with him. The child had a final pull at the straw of his orangeade and then the pair crossed the boulevard hand and hand, taking the drawing along. The man steered the child in a special kind of alert protectiveness that suggested the charge was temporary, or new; a divorced father who has abducted the child from the custody of a former wife. — But no, he was really too old to be the father; more likely a grandfather who found himself alone with a child; she had the strong impression that this was the last thing in that man’s life, all he had left.