Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

“Right out, I can tell you.” He wanted to say, “It’s all finished with, years ago,” but he felt a horror of admitting that there was anything to talk of about himself and the woman who had been his wife. He said, “I haven’t even sent money for the child — not since about last January.”

“I know. I’ve been letting her have something.”

Gideon nodded. Sandile had never paid him the last hundred pounds for the car; it was fair enough.

Gideon didn’t know how to go, but he could not stay, so he stood up, and looked without seeing round the lean-to. “So long, Sandile.”

Sandile remained sitting, holding a stub of cigarette turned inward to his palm.

“That’s all,” said Gideon.

“O.K.,” said Sandile in deep uncertainty.

The living presence of his wife, in another town, had never influenced Gideon; he felt neither tied to her nor free of her: she was a curiously negative factor. It did not seem at all odd that he occasionally spoke about his child, as if the boy belonged to him alone. Clara had been young and pretty, and it had been all right for a year or two, while she was a school-teacher’s wife. Like most African wives, she stayed at home when he went out at night. She was proud that he could paint a bit and pleased that this sometimes brought in some extra money.

She would have been satisfied to see him go on painting scarves for the white shop in town, all his life; at least that was what he told himself when he began to find that he couldn’t talk to her on Sundays, when they were at home together. She looked at his paintings, when he really was beginning to paint, as the wife of a gangster might look at the guns and knives present in the house. She cared only for prettiness, for the little sweetnesses and frills that clerks acquire to soften the rough chunk of the labourer’s life. She was only concerned with covering ugliness and did not know the possibility of beauty. In three years he had outgrown her as inevitably as a child outgrows its clothes. Every time he looked back at her, she was lagging a little further behind. When he thought he was going away on the scholarship, it was natural that she should go to live in Bloemfontein with her mother and sister for the year that he would be away. Then had come the lengthy passport trouble, the postponement of the scholarship, the final refusal of the passport, and the months when he was mostly drunk and had no job. She had stayed on and on with her family, and she had quite a good job in a small factory. He and she simply lost sight of one another.

As he walked out of the shop and along the streets of Alexandra, the naked-bottomed children, the skeletal dogs, the young girls in nylon and the old women who shuffled along under the weight of great buttocks, the decaying rubbish in the streets, the patched and pocked houses, the bicycles shaking as if they would fall apart, the debased attempts at smartening up some hovels that made them look more sordid than those that were left to their rotting drabness — everything around him spoke of her. It was the ambition of her life to be clean and decent, yet this squalor thrust her existence upon him. Isolation rose higher in him every minute, a drug beginning to take effect at the extremities; it was his defence, but it was also alarming. From it he saw, fascinated, that she did not think it impossible to regard as “husband” a man she had lost touch with three years ago; she accepted what any housegirl or cook accepted — that a black woman cannot expect to live permanently with her man and children; she must shift about and live where and how poverty and powerlessness allow. He might have been an indentured labourer, away from home for long periods out of necessity. Three years’ absence had no significance for her so far as the validity of marriage was concerned.

He tried on himself some specific moment of her existence — licking her lips before she spoke, fastening a wide shiny belt round her middle — as a tongue goes to test the sensitivity of a tooth. She could have been one of the women passing him in the street. He was approaching the row of Indian shops at the top of the township, now, and there were some pretty ones about, girls coming from or going to the bus terminus. He saw the thickness of their calves and ankles, the selfconsciousness of their plastic smartness. He had in his mind, mixed with the shapes and colours, the coming together of objects and movement that was always working towards the moment when he began to paint — the thin wrists and ankles, the careless style of Ann. Little breasts of a woman who bore no children. Flat belly with the point of each hip-bone holding a skirt taut. Soft thin hands smelling of cigarette smoke. “What’ll we do today?” A woman without woman’s work or woman’s ambitions. The idea of her possessed his imagination entirely, so that when he went into a shop to buy cigarettes he unconsciously adopted the manner that came naturally to her, of assuming without offence that she must have what she wanted before anyone else’s claims of time or precedence.

There had been days, lately, when he had left the flat, the Stilwell house — all of them in the city, and their life there — with an almost gleeful sense of escape. He left them and plunged back where they couldn’t find him, couldn’t follow, didn’t know the internecine life of his home, the townships. All ambiguities fell away there, while he drank with Sol. They were never free, now, of him. The Stilwell house was grouped invisibly round him as an empty chair at a dinner table affects the seating of those present. But he could disappear where there was no trace of their existence, in the places to which they had banished his kind.

He turned back from the shops down one of the dirt streets. An orange-seller sat beside a bright pyramid, paring the hide of a horny big toe. Gideon walked past him and went to a yard he knew. He bought himself a brandy, but he spoke to no one and the usual talk of the other customers, of bribes to get houses, of how much a week went on hire purchase, of gambling, of police raids, of the man found murdered just near the bus sheds last night, did not draw him into its familiarity. He had meant to look in at his room, but he did not go there and took a bus to the city and went straight to the flat, where, taking on at once the automatic watchfulness that the city exacted from him as a presence that was perpetually clandestine, he went, hiding himself, up the back stairs and let himself in. When the door was safely locked behind him, he went into the living-room and sat smoking, in one of the big chairs. A knock came at the door but, as always when he was in the flat, officially there was nobody there to answer it. He heard the footsteps retreating down the corridor, and the sough of the lift dropping through the building. As he smoked he looked slowly round the objects in the room and, in the silence, a strange feeling came over his body: his skin contracted like the skin of water wrinkling under a shiver of wind.

The one place in which he felt in possession of himself was when he was in some small room with the men with whom he planned, argued, and several times had been in prison. They talked too much, they intrigued too much — these things he could criticise when he was away from them. But when he sat with them, again and again he was so much like them, so much one of them, that he was as guilty as they of the faults he criticised. Here he knew himself to be what Callie Stow had reminded him a black face didn’t necessarily make one — an African. Listening to Zeke Zwane who was pompous, or Mdaka Mkwambi who was long-winded, or Mabaso who was too cautious, or Dr Thabeng who saw himself as another Nkrumah, he was at peace, he was secure among the members of an outlawed organisation who themselves, as individuals, many of them, were banned from attending meetings anyway. Here there was no shade of ambiguity; he was a man who had given up the futility of a life of choice (oddly enough, he did not admit to himself that he was actually painting again; like his presence in the flat, the fact had no official existence) and accepted the one thing possible — struggle. The struggle of a beetle on its back, most of the time. Bungling, slow as history, muddled, impeded by ignorance, growing by fits and starts, crushed, unkillable — he belonged to it and whatever happened to it would happen to him.