Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

But, the next time, I went to bed with Cecil in her warm, crumpled bed that smelled of perfume and cigarette smoke. She argued about the light, but I wanted to see her face, to know what she was feeling. (Who knows what women feel, in their queer, gratuitous moment?) She looked, in the light, like she had that Sunday morning, in her dressing-gown. Pride, bewilderment, vanity, greed, want, and determination were not smoothed out by the banality of make-up; her eyes were faintly bloodshot from sun, smoke, and gin, and the shape of her smile, drawn in knowingly at one corner, was there, marked for ever on her face, even when her mouth was in repose. At the back of her neck, the real smell of her hair came out from under the chemical scents of the processes it was subjected to in that be-curtained shop below my office — the real smell of blonde pigment, waxy and acid, which I always notice at once, perhaps because I am dark.

‘I didn’t want you to see my stomach,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear to look at it myself.’

‘Why, what’s supposed to be wrong with it?’

She rolled over face-down with her elbows tight to her sides and said resentfully, ‘Haven’t you ever seen a woman who’s had a child? It ruins the skin of your stomach. It looks like crinkle paper.’

But whatever the human climate to which she had been exposed in her life had done to weather her face, her body was entirely itself, sure and beautiful. She was a loving woman in bed, clever and full of tender enthusiasm: Now just wait, she would say, just wait a minute. . as if her caresses were carefully prepared surprises that must not be discovered before the right moment. The narrow bed, intended for a single sleeper, kept her close to me as I wanted, all night; there was no inch away to which she could move, even if she had wanted to. Her whole body burned with a steady warmth of energy, even while she slept, and only her buttocks and her breasts were cool, the way some people’s hands are always cool.

I got up to leave very early in the morning, so that I should be out of the flat before the servant came in. I was coming back down the passage from the bathroom when I saw, standing in the open doorway of the second bedroom, in the colourless light that comes in before dawn, a little boy. He was barefoot, and in mis-buttoned pyjamas, and he was holding his pillow. He was quite awake, but perhaps not sure where he had awakened: in some grown-up part of the night he did not know. But even as he watched me the light began to golden, and he must have known it was morning. He did not speak and he did not move while I passed his room and disappeared through the next doorway. Cecil turned at the sound of me dressing, moved her mouth as if she were tasting, and put out her hand to me. I said: ‘Your child met me in the passage. What will he make of that.’

‘Don’t have to worry about him,’ she murmured. ‘He won’t say anything.’ When I was ready to go, she suddenly woke up properly and called me back to kiss her and reproached me for trying to slip away without saying ‘a proper good morning’.

There was no one in the passage when I left, and the door of the second bedroom was shut.

I wonder why it is that the life of poverty is regarded as more real than any other life. In books and films, the slice of life traditionally is cut from the lower crust; in almost all of us with full bellies, whose personal struggles are above the sustenance level, there is a nervous, even a respectful feeling that life may be elsewhere. The poor man has got it; he staggers beneath its violent weight, of course; one wouldn’t wish to be in his shoes — but he has it.

I thought about this idea a lot, at this time, when I was so often in the townships with Steven, and sometimes stayed for a night at Sam’s two-roomed house, sleeping on the divan in his living-room. I thought about it, but I never came to any firm conclusion. What do we mean by real life? That which is closest to the basic trinity, shared by all creatures: survival, food, reproduction? Then we indulge in romantic fallacy, stemming from some atavistic guilt, because, in life, reality is not an absolute, but consists of one set of conditions or another. To regard total pre-occupation with survival, food, and reproduction as the criterion of reality is to ignore other needs that men have created for themselves, and which, in combination with the basic ones, make men’s reality. In a society where laws take care of a man’s survival among his fellows, his part in commerce and industry ensures that he will eat as a matter of course, and his reproductive function is secured by the special mating system of marriage, the greatest reality of his life may consist in his meeting the growth of the financial empire which his brain and energy have created. The greatest reality, for the scientist, must lie in his patient onslaught on the opposition of the formula he can’t get right; for an artist, in accepting that no one, at present, will accept his particular vision. That is ‘real life’; for each man, the demands of his own condition.

I decided that possibly life in the townships seemed more ‘real’ simply because there were fewer distractions, far fewer vicarious means for spending passion, or boredom. To each human being there, the demands of his or her own condition came baldly. The reality was nearer the surface. There was nothing for the frustrated man to do but grumble in the street; there was nothing for the deserted girl to do but sit on the step and wait for her bastard to be born; there was nothing to be done with the drunk but let him lie in the yard until he’d got over it. Among the people I met with Cecil, frustrated men threw themselves into golf and horse-racing, girls who had had broken love affairs went off to Europe, drunks were called alcoholics, and underwent expensive cures. That was all. That was the only difference.

But was it? With so much to comfort and distract them, don’t people perhaps learn, at last, to feel a little less? And doesn’t that make life that much less ‘real’? — But, again, this sounded convincing, but seemed disproved in actual fact. For the people who frequented The High House (and also myself, my friends and acquaintances in England) made a great deal of their feelings, nervous breakdowns and other long-drawn-out miseries followed on their misadventures, and they knew that life very easily comes to a standstill; but the men and women of the townships, after brief and public mourning, wiped their noses with the backs of their hands, as it were, and did the next thing, knowing that nothing could interrupt life. There was the woman who lived in one of the houses that shared a yard with Sam’s house. One day she stopped us as we were entering the yard, and spoke to Sam. She was a cheerful, dirty slut with the usual pretty, milk-and-pee smelling baby falling over her feet, and Ella had often complained about her. When she had gone back to her house, Sam said to me, ‘D’you know anybody, any friend of yours in Sandown? That woman’s looking for a backyard room somewhere. She’s got people she washes for there, and she’d like a room nearby.’

‘What about her house?’

‘Her husband’s disappeared. Perhaps some of your friends have got a servant’s room they don’t use.’

Then, one night, there was a murder close by The House of Fame. Steven was hurrying home to one of his own drinking-and-talking sessions which I and a number of the hangers-on had not waited to begin (it was quite common for Steven to invite you to his room and then fail to be there when you arrived), and he came upon the dying man, lying in the street. He had pulled him up on to the steps of the nearest house, but: ‘He’d had it. Gone,’ Steven told us when he came in. ‘I’m sorry I’m so darned late, Toby, I’ve been fixing up insurance for an old Indian who owns a string of bug-houses’ — this was what the township cinemas were commonly called — ‘and, you know — he’s the sort of old chap who every time he wants to tell you something, no matter what, he’s got to begin right at the beginning of his life and lead up to it.’ He grinned, said, ‘Mind,’ and pushed aside the legs of the people who were sitting on his bed, so that he could put his smart tan leather briefcase under the bed. He straightened up and peered down at the side of his jacket, twitching at the sleeve. ‘There’s nothing on my suit, is there?’ One of the young men, who had never owned such a suit, jumped up to examine it, hitting at the cloth and saying, in Suto, that there was nothing to worry about. And it was true that there was a only a little red township dust on the suit, that dust that seemed more the powder of decaying buildings than the surface of the earth. But there was a smear of blood on one of Steven’s shirt-cuffs, like bright rust. ‘He’s made a bit of a mess of me,’ he said, and sighed. ‘Never mind, poor chap couldn’t help it.’