Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

“To ensure the satisfactory working of this sewerage system (septic tank) great care must be taken to see that the following articles are not deposited in the system:

“Cold cream, vaseline, sandwiches, sawdust, moth balls, cannon balls, golf balls, fish balls, press balls, footballs, cricket bats, curtain rings, telephone rings, engagement rings, smoke rings …” The list went on in this strain, ending up: “… red tape, brassières, two-way stretches, mosquito nets, hair nets, fishing nets — or, in fact, any article at all which may cause the breakdown of the system.

“God save the sugar farmers.

“Given at Isendhla Beach this day, the twenty-fourth of December, 1958, under my hand and great seal.

“BIG CHIEF SHAKA.”

The house retained no impress of the life that it had contained, first permanently, and then from time to time. Each room was like a person who had no memory, blank, carrying the objects of its purpose — table, bed, cupboard, as a name-tag. Jessie went from one to the other, meeting herself in strips of wardrobe mirror, pushing a fist into an unmade bed, sitting down suddenly. The windows stuck. When they were shut everything outside was seen through a dim cataract of salt. Reddish heaps of powdered wood appeared overnight from the ceilings.

After a week, she made no more claim on the house than any other creature that drifted in and out of it. It was shade she and the children came under when they trailed up from the beach; there was food there, somewhere to lie down; she was no longer contained by walls but had a being without barriers moving without much change of sensation from hot sun to cool water, from the lap and push and surge of water to the damp, blowy air. When her eyes were open they followed the sea; when they were closed the movement was in her blood.

The porpoises went by in the swell beyond the breakers, or, when the water was calm, closer in. She watched them as a child watches the game of another family of children, projecting into the pleasure of her half-smile an inkling, from her own experience, of their sensations. Where the grass was not shaved down by the mower, low mauve flowers the shape of sweet peas came out in dew or rain, and closed away invisibly when the sun shone. At night shrill bells went off everywhere in the bush and voiceless creatures flew in to the light and left transparent wings on the floor; in the morning, they were swept out. Madge cut branches of wild gardenia and put them in beer glasses that the wind blew down. Whatever was beautiful was webbed by spiders and dust and alive with the attentions of big agile black ants. They watched out for snakes on the path, and when they were in the sea occasionally remembered sharks, as though evil were impossible in that buoyant suspension on the world’s watery back.

Clem was embarrassed because Jessie wore old canvas shoes that had flattened into mules under her heels, and did not put her hair up with care. Jessie stopped wearing the shoes and went barefoot “like Boaz”, as Clem said in reproach. “But you go barefoot all the time, at home too.”

“Well, we’re children.”

When they drove to the store Jessie put on a bare-necked dress and perfume and made up her face. Clem capered about before her, as if she expected a sensation. They drove along the path with bush making a noise like a finger-nail on the glass of the car windows, and then away from the sea on to the road that divided cane-fields. The moment the sea dropped out of sight something seemed to have been switched off and the car was hot in the silence. Indian children plodded along the road, back from school. An old black cane worker with the bearded, moustachioed “fine” face of Zulus in Victorian missionary chronicles appeared with a panga hanging from his hand. The road crossed the lines of the canetrucks and there was a point where you could see far inland, across the curves covered with the pile of cane to flat-topped mountains holding their outline in the heat-shimmer and distance. As far as you could see, and further, it was Shaka’s country; less than a hundred and forty years ago the black king had trained his prancing armies and spread his great herds of cattle here.

The road led round the golf-course and back towards the sea again, to the village. The hotel was there, in the thin firs. Cars round the bowling-green; old men in shorts and old women in schoolgirls’ hats were bending and straightening on the grass. Everyone with a good position on the mine had thought of a retirement like this; the faces were familiar ones, that went early into middle-age and stayed there, helped by the uniformity of false teeth and glasses, far into old age. What had possessed Bruno to will, as if for peace, to end up along with them? An impulse that never came to anything, of course; except perhaps that he could always remind himself that his “little place on the Coast” did exist, proof of an intention.

An Indian with expanding bands holding up his shirt-sleeves was directing some piccanins who were piling up empty brandy crates outside the hotel bottle store. More children — porcupine-headed Indians with faces eager to please, dusty African brats with unself-conscious faces, one or two coloureds with yellow skins, the legginess of white boys, and hair as black as the Indians’ and as curly as the Africans’—hung about the caddy master’s hut. There were games with sticks, scuffles and yells. The Indians watched with tremendous eyes, jerking their younger members to order. Cooks with baskets over their arms stood talking while their masters’ dogs wagged puzzled tails, waiting. The caddy master, another Indian, with thick white-streaked hair and a bad-tempered open mouth showing brown teeth, upbraided somebody, scattering dusty legs. Big cars rolled slowly down from the hotel and white children, raw-faced from the beach, stood aside clutching loaves of bread or ice-creams.

The store kept stuffed olives and caviar, as well as the usual supplies, for there were some smart houses along the hotel end of the beach now, and on the sun-decks and behind the picture-windows people from Johannesburg brought the eating-habits of their way of life with them. Occasionally you saw a man dressed in the white trousers, navy scarf and espadrilles of someone who had been to the Riviera in the Thirties; or a blonde lion-headed girl in tights who might have been walking along in Saint-Tropez in the present time; both were received with the same lack of impact by the local residents in the khaki shorts and sand shoes they had worn without change, in comfort and suitability, through both eras. Jessie’s children were stimulated by the store, not only by the garlands of blown-up plastic toys, the tin pistols, the comics and the sweets, but by the link, through the atmosphere of buying and selling, the miscellaneous activity set in motion by the exchange of even petty sums of money, with the city life they came from. It always surprised her to notice how healthily children accepted as life the things that were to imprison them later — the arbitrary picking up and putting down of buses, the herding of traffic lights, the crowded desperateness in shops, the whole acquisitive palsy. How was it that these same children grew up to become neurotic, ulcerous, under it? She herself had been just like them; there was no excitement, for the little bourgeois girl from the mine, like buying something. When did it turn into an activity that drained without replacement; when did the faces poked across the counters for their money’s worth become so clearly marked as faces possessing nothing of worth? What made you want things so fiercely and meaningfully as a child, and then come to a time when you bought without lust, out of need, and never out of wanting , which was a different thing, stemming from needs spiritual and unconditioned? One did not know when the lust died, for first it was put aside by sex and the tremendous effort gathered together by even the meanest of living creatures to blossom or feather, to put out a perfume or a fascinating way of talking, to stamp a love-dance in a forest or walk down a street with a message in the way each knee brushed past the other. And only when this was over and accomplished did you have eyes for other desires again, and suddenly discover that of all that was displayed on the counters and hanging on shelves and set out under soft lights — of all that was offered to make you want, there was nothing that would not break or clutter or occupy falsely where it had been done without.