Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

He was back where he started, in the rondavel room at Roly Dando’s. He lay on the bed and looked at the light hanging from the ceiling beam and the combed pattern of the thatch. Bluebottles bumbled hopelessly against the fixed central panel of the window and never found the open sections. They thudded and bounced against the unresisting, invisible barrier; at the drowsiness that overcame him. Behind closed lids in the swarming red — dark of himself she was there with her square — jawed, innocently belligerent face, the face of a woman who has always to fend for herself, some draggle — teated female creature whose head, above a well — used body, remains alert for her young. She suggested many things to him. Also an early Greek, in the inevitability that hung about her life. An Iphigenia who would have understood that Agamemnon must trade her for a favourable wind. He thought, perhaps it’s that she’s a commonplace girl, really, someone very limited, with courage but not the intelligence to use it for herself, and I’m just a middle — aged man enjoying the last kick of the prostate. It was a phrase he and Olivia used tolerantly, of friends’ affairs; he had forgotten who coined it. (He saw the girl’s breasts with the marks on them, her meaty thighs really too heavy for trousers.) It could happen to oneself, like cancer or a coronary; like dying. One connected it only with other people, but it could come. — Well, if this was what it was, no need to be tolerant — envy was more appropriate, if the superiorly tolerant ones only knew.

But Olivia would know that, too. Olivia had great intelligence; in the second sense as well, intelligence of everything: the body, too. At the beginning — for years, in fact — they had had that between them; Venetia and Pat, the young matron and the would — be actress, were made out of what had seemed unsurpassable intimacies. Olivia must remember them; but he was living them. For her, with her, they belonged to the past. The body has a short memory. His had forgotten her long before he began to make love to the girl. What had happened to Olivia and to him now seemed as useless to question as the result of an air crash; he was the survivor. He was aware of the sexual arrogance of this interpretation … a bird called out, persistently, overhead on the roof and he opened his eyes with a sense of having heard exactly that note before. He bunched the limp pillow behind his neck and set himself to read through the Party Congress agenda slowly, making faint pencil crosses here and there.

Roly Dando had had his operation and no longer interrupted the evening drinking with trips to the bushes, but the look of some annoying inner summons that twinges of the bladder had brought to his face had become permanent. With poor Dando, with everyone he met in the capital, Bray felt his own well — being must announce itself for what it was; that it would be as easily recognized, in its way, as the dark — ringed eyes of the adolescent masturbator. But Dando said nothing. The distance between them was difficult to analyse. Whether it was a matter of sexual energy, of age, of changing political and personal directions, was something that could not be separated from the atmosphere of the garden, which was not as it had been, although they sat there together just as they had always done.

Dando, too, had noticed that Mweta’s intention to take to himself the right of appointing the Secretary — General of the United Trades Union Congress was coming up on the PIP Congress agenda. He dismissed Bray’s surprise that it had got so far. “There isn’t anything that isn’t Party business. I suppose Shinza drummed up so much support, the secretarial crowd couldn’t avoid it. Just as by bringing the whole trade union affair under fire at Congress, Shinza can’t avoid showing his hand. He must have good reason to believe he’s going to be Secretary — General again himself, if it’s left to UTUC elections in the old way.”

“Mweta’s shown his hand too. If he’s going so far as to bring in a new act just to keep Shinza out of the unions.”

“Oh it’ll only be a proclamation, you don’t have to bother with a new act. The old Industrial Conciliation Act allows for it, it’s a piece of good old colonial legislation, tailor — made to keep the blacks in their place. It’ll do perfectly now.” Dando drained the bottom of his glass, where the gin had settled, and pulled the skinny tendons of his jaw wryly.

“If Shinza became Secretary — General of UTUC again it would provide a perfect opening.”

“For what, man, for what?”

“If Mweta would see it. A perfect opening to take Shinza back into the fold without loss of face. Shinza would have taken the step out of ‘retirement’ himself, he would have the one key position outside government; Mweta could simply put out his hand without patronage and without humbling himself in the least, and take him in. And the solution to labour troubles, the end of the split factions in the unions, at the same time. He would have a strong government then, all right.”

“With Edward Shinza breathing fumes down his neck.”

Bray smiled. “He isn’t drinking these days.”

“It’s not brandy I’m thinking of. The revolutionary spirit.”

“No harm in a bit of that.”

Dando settled back for attack, his chair a lair. “I should bloody well hope so. I should bloody well hope there is. I don’t know what mugs like me’ve wasted our time for on this continent if the ideas we brought to it haven’t any harm in them for the set — up the blacks took over from the whites.”

“Well, there you are.”

“Here I am, all right.” Dando’s look lunged hit — or-miss round his garden; caught, his old dog cautiously wagged its tail. “But Mweta isn’t going to have any continuing revolution stuff pressed on him by Edward Shinza or anyone else. When he talks about building on solid foundations and so on he means just that — not the peasants’ toil and all that, but also the two — bricks-high capitalist state that was already under way here. He may put on a few decent outbuildings of state — owned enterprise here and there, you understand — but there’ll be no change of style in the main structure. It’ll look a bit like a Swiss bank — or perhaps a West German one’s better. The extended family will have their huts in the grounds and they’ll get quite a few pickings from Golden Plate dinners, they’ll be better off than they were before, mind you, and they won’t mind. Mweta genuinely believes that’s the best he can do and he’ll certainly do it the best way it can be done. A little black Wirtschaftswunder. If he let Shinza near at all — if he let him climb up by way of UTUC, he knows quite well what he’d have on his hands — the risk of the trade unions setting up in opposition to the government. That’s what Edward Shinza’s after, that’s his comeback by constitutional means, that’s what he’s going to try for, and our boy knows it.” He poured another drink for Bray as if to stop his mouth.

“I can’t see it. I don’t think Shinza’d stand a chance. If he’s making a bid for power through the unions, it’s to put himself in a position where, as I said, Mweta can recognize he needs him, as he always did. It’s strange, even now when he talks against Mweta, sometimes with pretty strong resentment — he has a kind of concern, a feeling of responsibility, for him; still. Anyway — feeling or no feeling — I don’t see he’d stand a chance of the other thing.”

“Why in God’s name not? Don’t you see? Do I have to spell it out, Bray? You know UTUC and the Party have always been virtually the same thing, all these years until now. They both drew members from the same class, they had a similar intellectual formation — as far as political methods and social and economic attitudes were concerned, there wasn’t any major difference between them. Some of the leaders of both were even the same people! Look at Shinza himself — first chairman of PIP and at the same time Secretary — General of UTUC. And Ndisi Shunungwa and a bunch of others. In spite of this, a situation could have developed early on where although they were in double harness the one could have pulled ahead of the other, eh? — you could have had the situation where a labour organization comes into conflict with a less progressive — minded political party. It didn’t happen — it couldn’t happen then because of two factors: the country wasn’t free of outside political domination and it hadn’t reached a certain level of industrialization. Eh? But now it’s a different story. We’re independent, the front line’s not at Government House any more. In theory, UTUC ought to give purely professional considerations priority, now — they ought to go for corporate trade unionism. But UTUC is also virtually an integrated trade union, eh, part of the state, supposed to carry out the state’s policy and aims — wasn’t there even a clause to this effect in UTUC’s constitution? I’m damn sure there was. UTUC’s the representative of the workers and the junior civil servants, but it’s also a kind of strong arm of the state department of labour — and that’s a hell of a balancing act to bring off, my lad. UTUC’s become a two — headed calf and there’s Shinza’s chance to make the killing. All he has to do is set himself up as champion of the rights of the workers against the state’s domination of the unions and subordination of the welfare of the workers to the demands of the state. He’s doing it. Look at his inspiration.” He chopped his upended palm on Bray’s agenda, with its marked resolutions. “He’s done it with a dozen wildcat strikes all over the country. They listen to him on the quiet and defy their own union officials because the contradiction with its built — in dissatisfactions is there already — the two — headed calf.”