Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

But the afternoon was long. In the air were the echoes of other people’s activity; the distant plock of tennis, the swirl of arriving and departing cars at the other houses in the road, the sky ringing like a glass with the strike of church bells distorted aurally as the lake, from the hotel veranda, was distorted visually. There was a kind of thickening of the background silence, a vague uproar of Sunday enjoyment from the direction of the African township away over to the east. He thought he would look around there; he hadn’t, yet. Of course, he had known it very well when he was D.C., he had spent a lot of time down there; too much, for some people’s liking. But he knew that it had changed since then, grown; and there was a whole new housing scheme and a hostel for the industrial workers.

Raw red roads led off through the trees. People were strolling, pushing their bicycles as they talked; women held their children against their skirts as he passed, boys laughed and threw mango pits at each other, there were little groups of religious sects holding meetings under the trees, young couples in their best clothes and old men hauling wood or charcoal on sleds, Sunday no different from any other day, for them. The bright little new houses looked stranded in the mud; the forest had been cleared for them. There were some trampled — looking patches of cassava and taro and a beached, derelict car or two. The houses had electric light and children were playing a game that seemed to consist of hitting the telephone poles with sticks. They yelled defiantly and gaily at the white man in the car.

He saw the hostel on the rise that had been a kind of buffer, hiding the black village from the white; a modern, institutional building around which stalls and hawkers’ carts had collected like hovels without the palace walls. But he turned instead down into the old town that he remembered, and plunged along the unmade streets among close shacks, donkeys, dogs, and people. The old town was filthy and beautiful; in this low — lying ground palms grew, giving their soaring proportion to the huddle, and lifting the skyline to their pure and lazy silhouette. The place stank of beer, ordure, and smoke. The most wretched hovel had its setting of sheeny banana leaves, with a show of plenty in the green candelabra of pendant fruit, and its pawpaw trees as full of ripening dugs as some Indian goddess. Green grew and tangled everywhere out of the muck, rippled and draped over rotting wood and rusted iron. Romantic poverty; he would rather live here, with the rats under the palm trees, than up on the rise in those mean, decent cubes already stained with bare earth: that was because he would never have to live in either. A little naked boy waved with one hand, clutching his genitals with the other. An old man took off his hat in greeting. Bray knew no one and knew them all. There was an anonymity of mutual acceptance that came to him not at all in England and hardly ever in Europe — in Spain, perhaps, one market morning among the butting bodies and smiles of busy people whose language he didn’t speak. It wasn’t losing oneself, it was finding one’s presence so simply acknowledged that one forgot that outwardly one moved as a large, pink — faced Englishman, light — eyed and thick — eyebrowed behind the magnification of glasses, encased yet again, as in a bubble of another atmosphere, in the car. He drove slowly round with unself — conscious pleasure, not quite sure where he was going yet feeling that the turns he took were familiar ones, the way past the houses of people he once visited or knew. And then he came out at the nameless stretch of communal ground where the bus sheds were, and goats sought discarded mango skins, and women and children sat contentedly under the trees.

It was here, in this space to which people drifted on a Sunday, that the drumming came from, the drumming he had heard over in the town. There were little shops blaring jazz, with open verandas on which men stood or sat drinking. In the open ground in front of one was a wall — less thatched shelter beneath which tall drums were mounted over charcoal embers. When Bray’s car came to a stop, it was in the middle of a pause; a young boy was using a goat’s-skin bellows to flush the embers into heat to make the drums taut. Only one drum was keeping a dull beat going so that the rhythm could be taken up at any point, at any time. The undertone thudded gently through the chatter round about and the jazz. Bray just sat in the car in the midst of it all. Babies broke away and staggered onto the clearing, to be pursued and snatched up by older children. Others cried or were suckled. The women talked absorbedly and gazed about, alert to the children, but they had the smiling air of women who are spectators of their men. Some of the men were drinking, others stood together, fallen away from the centre of their activity. Somebody got on his bicycle and rode away; someone else arrived. The undertone of the drum was counterpointed by a louder beat, breaking over it from another drum; the drummer, putting an ear low, was not satisfied with the quality of the resonance and the counterpoint died away. The drummers were absorbed in tending the drums and did not speak to or look at the drinkers or anybody else. Their faces and hair were powdered with dust. They ordered the boy about and his strong pointed elbows moved in and out over the bellows; red eyes opened and closed in the charcoal. But with the brief counterpoint that was taken up and died away again, a middle — aged man with clips on his trousers had begun to tread, alone, in the clearing. Another joined him, and then another. Slowly, what had gone slack between the drinkers and the idlers was pulled close again; the drums were drawn in, the men were drawn in; there was an ever — mounting yet steady and serene jumble of movement and drums, shuffle, pause, and beat, that in all its counterpoint of sound and movement was yet the sum of one beat, experienced as neither sound nor movement, the beat of a single heart in a single body. It was not orgiastic or ecstatic, but just a Sunday afternoon dance; Bray lifted his long legs out of the car and stood leaning an arm on the boot, among the onlookers. People seemed to know who he was. A remark passed between them now and again; he asked a question or made an observation, as one does, out of proximity. An old man confirmed that the bars were fairly new. A young man waited for the old one to move on and then dismissed all that he had said: this bar was three years old. And the dance was an old — style thing that the old — fashioned people did. If I were you I’d be dancing, Bray said. The young man looked derisive and a woman laughed. The stamp and beat came up through Bray’s feet and theirs as if they were all standing on deck over an engine room.

A black Mercedes with the flourish of new officialdom about it drew an admiring acknowledgement of turning heads. It had stopped short, suddenly, in the middle of people. Bray was surprised by the approach of one of the white — collared, dark — suited passengers, who had jumped out and was hurrying over with long strides before which way was made for him. “Are you all right?” Before Bray could answer, the face of the mayor was thrust out of the back window of the car, and the voice called across in English, “Have you lost yourself, Colonel? Can we help?”

Bray had met the mayor a few days before, with Sampson Malemba. “No, no, just passing the time.” And then he thought it polite to go over to the car. “Thanks all the same.” “Sure you’re okay?” The mayor, a large man with his hair parted in the centre over his unmistakably Gala face, was dressed for some official occasion; or maybe he was simply enjoying paying visits in his handsome car, accompanied by relatives or friends dressed in their best.