Nadine Gordimer - The Late Bourgeois World

A sexual connection. But there is more to it than that. A love affair? Less than that. I’m not suggesting it’s a new form of relationship, of course, but rather that it’s made up of the bits of old ones that don’t work. It’s decent enough; harms nobody, not even ourselves. I suppose Graham would marry me, if I wanted it. Perhaps he wants it; and then it would all change. If I wanted a man, here, at this time, in this country, could I find a better one? He doesn’t act, that’s true; but he doesn’t give way, and that’s not bad, in a deadlock. He lives white, but what’s the point of the gesture of living any other way? He will survive his own convictions, he will do what he sets out to do, he will keep whatever promises he makes. When I talk with him about history or politics I am aware of the magnetic pull of his mind to the truth. One can’t get at it, but to have some idea where it is ! Yet when he’s inside me — last night — there’s the strangest thing. He’s much better than someone my own age, he comes to me with a solid and majestic erection that will last as long as we choose. Sometimes he will be in me for an hour and I can put my hand on my belly and feel the blunt head, like a standard upheld, through my flesh. But while he fills me, while you’d think the last gap in me was closed for ever, while we lie there silent I get the feeling that I am the one who has drawn him up into my flesh, I am the one who holds him there, that I am the one who has him, helpless. If I flex the muscles inside me it’s as if I were throttling someone. He doesn’t speak; the suffering of pleasure shuts his eyes, the lids are tender without his glasses. And even when he brings about the climax for us — afterwards I am still holding him as if strangled: warm, thick, dead, inside.

That’s how it is.

But I don’t think of it often; and sitting on my balcony in the midday sun that cannot possibly be called ‘winter’, it simply took a place in my consciousness (I was growing drowsy from the dry warmth) with the pigeons toeing their way along the guttering, two children I couldn’t see, but could hear shooting water pistols at each other, below my feet, and the men on the bit of grass above the pavement opposite. They were black men with their delivery bicycles, or in working overalls. They lay flung down upon the grass, the legends of firms across their backs. They were drinking beer out of the big red cartons, in the sun. We were all in the sun. There is a way of being with people that comes only by not knowing names. If you have no particular need of anyone, you find yourself belonging to a company you hadn’t been admitted to before; I didn’t need anybody because I had these people who, like myself, would get up and go away in a little while. Without any reason, I felt very much at home.

In spite of everything.

Their talk went on sporadically, in the cadences I know so well, even if I don’t understand the words. It was the hour when all the flat-dwellers were at lunch and only they had time to lie on the grass, time that had no label attached to it. After a while I went in and cut myself the crust of the loaf I’d bought and put some papery shop-ham on it and ate a banana in which there was winter — a hard centre and a felted taste. When I had food in my stomach I was overcome by weariness and lay down on the divan in the living room, where it was warm, under the rug from Bobo’s bed.

A vision of seaweed swaying up from deep underwater.

Not asleep but awake in the vision, as I opened my eyes in the room. At once close to the water where the heads surface in bunches of torn rubber ribbons sizzling with the oxygen of broken water, bedraggle in the wash from the rocks; and at the same time looking down from the cliff high where the road is, down on the depths tortoiseshell with sun and the rippling distortion of the great stems, brown thrashing tubes that sway down, down, out of the focus of lenses of water thick as bottle-ends, down, down.

The water rushed into Max’s nostrils and filled his mouth as it opened for air. For the first time it came to me as it must have happened when he made it happen. The burning cold salt water rushing in everywhere and the last bubbles of life belching up from places where they had been caught — the car, under his shirt, in his lungs, filled with the final breath that he had taken before he went down. Down, down, to where the weeds must, at last, have their beginning. He took with him a suitcase of papers that could not be deciphered. So much sodden muck. He took them with him, and no one would ever know what they were — writings, tracts, plans, letters. He had succeeded in dying.

I was lying still in the room and my eyes were filled with tears. I wept not for Max’s death but for the pain and terror of the physical facts of it. The flowers had stirred and opened while I slept and the warm room was full of scent. I lay quite still and felt myself alive, there in the room as their scent was.

Max’s death is a postscript. A postscript can be something trivial, scarcely pertinent, or it can be important and finally relevant.

I believe I know all there was to know about Max. To know all may be to forgive, but it is not to love. You can know too much for love.

When Max and I got married he left the university and took a job — many jobs. None of them lasted long; there were so many other things to do, at that time there were still things you could do whose immediacy appealed to us — discussion and study groups in the rooms of people like ourselves and in the black townships, open-air meetings, demonstrations. The Communist Party had been declared illegal and officially disbanded, but in the guise of other organizations the whole rainbow from politically conservative do-gooders to the radical left-wing could still show itself fairly openly. Above all, African nationalism was at a stage when it had gained confidence and prestige in the eyes of the world through the passive resistance campaigns, and at home seemed ready to recognize Africans of any colour who wanted to be free of the colour bar. In our little crowd, Solly, Dave, Lily, Fatima, Alec, Charles — Indian, African, Coloured and white — Fatima gave Bobo his bottle, Dave laughed at Max’s bad moods. The future was already there; it was a matter of having the courage to announce it. How much courage? I don’t think we had any idea.

Max’s first job was abandoned because they wouldn’t give him three days off to attend a Trades Union conference. Max had been reading politics as a major subject at the university, but there were great gaps in what he felt he ought to know; at the time he was concentrating on trying to give a small group of politically ambitious Africans some of the theoretical background in economics that they wanted. I forget what happened to the next job — oh yes, he got a typist to mimeograph some leaflet during office hours. And so it went on. The jobs came last in any consideration because they were of no importance. He took whatever he could get to do that would help to keep us going. He had no particular qualifications, anyway; he had been studying for an arts degree, which his parents had seen as a harmless alternative to commerce or accountancy, and that he had seen as freedom of mind. The nature of the degree didn’t matter much to them; he’d been expected to join one of his father’s companies on the accomplishment of it, that’s all.

Max was supposed to be going on working for his degree, at night, but at night there was less time than during the day, since the study groups and meetings were all held after working hours, and friends came for sessions of talk that used to last half the night. I went back to work when Bobo was five months old, and we had a nanny, Daphne, a tough, pretty, real Johannesburg nanny who looked after Max, when he was at home, as well as the baby. Once she and I both suspected in the same month that we were pregnant, and, without my bothering Max or her telling her boyfriend, we managed to mend our situation by promptly taking some pills exacted from my doctor with a warning that they wouldn’t work if we were.