Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

The letters I wrote to Ludi became more important to me than those I received from him. In them, I assumed our world in common. His, full of descriptions of places I could not imagine, always written from the moment of the present, seemed to have less and less to do with the Ludi of the South Coast, the bright hair, the shortsighted look, the warm strange breast. In time, the infrequent letters were not the painful thrill, the charged token they had been. I could almost have done without them entirely. … For while believing that I was living Ludi’s way of life by keeping aloof from that of my home and the Mine, I had all the time been creating a third way of my own, as unconsciously as a spider salivates his thin silver lifeline of survival. The frailty of dreams, imagination and memory was changed and churned by some unsuspected emotional digestion into a vanity and cultivation of myself. Like most finished products, nothing could have resembled less the raw material of emotion from which it was processed. And also, like most survival changes, it was accomplished by personality, unrecognized and unrealized by the conscious mind.

I spent a great deal of time reading, and these were not books about which I would write to Ludi. I began to read poetry, Auden and T.S. Eliot, reading it always for the sound and feel of the words rather than for the meaning, which sometimes I sensed, but seldom knew with my intellect. Then I took Pepys’s diary out of the library, and Tobias Smollett. — There is a theory that, given the free choice to hand of various foods, babies who see them only as blurs of color and shape will instinctively choose those necessary for balanced sustenance; perhaps the same is true of a hungry mind. One book led me to another; a quotation from one author by another, a mention that a character was reading so-and-so, sent me to the source itself, so that I had Hemingway to thank for John Donne, and D. H. Lawrence to thank for Chekhov. But in nothing that I read could I find anything that approximated to my own life; to our life on a gold mine in South Africa. Our life was not regulated by the seasons and the elements of weather and emotion, like the life of peasants; nor was it expressed through movements in art, through music heard, through the exchange of ideas, like the life of Europeans shaped by great and ancient cities, so that they were Parisians or Londoners as identifiably as they were Pierre or James. Nor was it even anything like the life of Africa, the continent, as described in books about Africa; perhaps further from this than from any. What did the great rivers, the savage tribes, the jungles and the hunt for huge palm-eared elephants have to do with the sixty miles of Witwatersrand veld that was our Africa? The yellow ridged hills of sand, thrown up and patted down with the unlovely precision that marked them manufactured unmistakably as a sand castle; the dams of chemical-tinted water, more waste matter brought above ground by man, that stood below them, bringing a false promise of a river — greenness, cool, peace of dipping fronds and birds — to your nose as you sat in the train. The wreckage of old motorcar parts, rusting tin and burst shoes that littered the bald veld in between. The advertisement hoardings and the growing real-estate schemes, dusty, treeless, putting out barbed-wire fences on which the little brown mossies swung and pieces of torn cloth clung, like some forlorn file that recorded the passing of life in a crude fashion. The patches of towns, with their flat streets, tin-roofed houses, main street and red-faced town hall, “Palace” or “Tivoli” showing year-old films from America. We had no lions and we had no art galleries, we heard no Bach and the oracle voice of the ancient Africa did not come to us, was drowned, perhaps, by the records singing of Tennessee in the Greek cafés and the thump of the Mine stamp batteries which sounded in our ears as unnoticed as our blood.

Only what was secret in me, did not exist before my mother and father or the talk and activity that pursued life in our milieu, leaped to recognition in what I read. The power of love signaled to me like lightning across mountains of dark naïveté and ignorance; the sense of wonder at the pin speck of myself in a swirling universe, a creature perpetually surrounded by a perpetual growth, stars and earthworm, wind and diamond. Out of poetry and the cabalistic accident of someone’s syntax came the cold touch on my cheek: this. You. So that when my father pointed at the winter night sky, not the air-blue infinity of summer, but a roof far off as silence, hard blue as a mirror looking down on a dark room — when he pointed up and said: Orion … that’s the Southern Cross, and over there, on the left, see, I think it’s Saturn — I knew that to know the names is to know less than to know that there can be no names, are no names. The bat-squeak of a man’s voice in the enormous darkness could not explain the stars to me.

And so, too, when I lay in the bath looking down at my naked body, the sight of it suggesting the pleasures of which it was capable, it was not the touch of Ludi (like the thrilling of a bell that sends messengers running, doors opening, lights up) that I imagined any more, but only the pure sensation: the potentialities of loving that lay there. Constantly relived, Ludi’s love-making had worn transparent with recapitulation, so that now his image rubbed off entirely; but my body was real, and its knowledge.

One afternoon in July I took a train to Johannesburg. I went in after an early lunch to book seats for a musical play which my parents wanted to see, but when I came out of Johannesburg station into the city I took a tram to the University instead. There I walked about beneath an expression of worried purpose, slightly amazed at myself. In the foyer of the main block, where the administrative and inquiry offices were, it was easy to stand before the boards reading faculty notices and posters advertising student dances and debates. But along the wide sloping passages that led down to common rooms and tearooms, the preoccupied faces of girls and young men seemed to me to be a continual challenge to produce my right and identity. Each pair of eyes that met mine seemed to precede a threat of the question: Yes? I stood at last in front of a boldly painted exhortation to support the Student’s Representative Council in some stand it was taking over the Color Bar, seeing nothing but a cigarette butt and a piece of crumpled paper near my left foot, and when a voice behind me spoke my name I melted in alarm as if an expected heavy hand had come down on my shoulder. It was Basil Tatchett, from the Mine. “So? You here too? I haven’t seen you before. Don’t you travel? — Are you staying at the hostel? My folks won’t let me—”

I did not know what to say—“No, actually I haven’t started yet, I’m just getting fixed up now.”

“But that’s a waste; they won’t let you take credit for half a year, will they? You’re doing Arts, I suppose.” He had his mother’s long, spade-shaped jaw and way of feeling it as he spoke, as if he were privately wondering whether he needed a shave. I do not think he had ever spoken to me before in his life, in that manly animosity which schoolboys bear toward schoolgirl daughters of their mother’s friends, but now he believed we shared the distinction of the University against the mediocrity of less fortunate Mine contemporaries. “John’s here — John Eagles — he’s with me. And Lester Beckett.” He stood talking for a few minutes of people who were names to me and then, with a shrug toward his bundle of books, was gone.

When he left me I felt calm, commanding, adventurous. It was as if all the tortuous calculations of a combination lock had been resolved accidentally by the careless twiddle of a passing hand. I did not know him and I had scarcely listened to what he had to say to me. But a door flew open. I knew exactly why I had come to Johannesburg on this particular afternoon, I knew that stepping on the tram had not been an impulse but the decision of the voices from my mother’s tea parties reaching me alone in my room, the aimless silence of the garden, the bent heads of my mother and father under the red beaded lampshade. I walked straight over to the inquiry office, and I did not need to look busy or purposeful.