Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

“That’s not it, that’s Helen.” John was always a little wild when he brought friends home. “Here the thing is in its pram, you idiot.”

The stranger. Paul the stranger. I have looked at that face as I shall never look upon another. There was a light in it for me that put something out; dazzled into black silence. So I shall never again answer with the vivid compulsion that made me watch the face of Paul, spelling it out feature by feature with my eyes, as if my finger traced it in the air and my lips moved about a name without sound.

So much has been written about the curious compelling fascination of the faces of some women, but I do not remember reading anywhere anything that would testify to the same innocent deadliness in the face of a man: a face such as Paul’s. Yet just as they do in women, these faces exist in men. It is as if a chance disposition of features, pleasant and ordinary enough in themselves, creates a proportion that is the magic cipher of power. The owners of these faces have only to look. They themselves cannot escape the power which is upon them; indeed some of them, a few men as well as many women, live their whole lives off it, making the world pay for a divine and lucky accident. Others, for whom it is not the only asset, are sometimes unaware of it, and even mistake the advantages it draws as due to some more responsible cause.

Paul was an enchanting talker. When he talked his body became a puppet animated by his mind; he mimicked, he made emotion graphic with his hands, his voice turned his anecdote this way and that in quick pleasure. From that first day, when we sat over the lunch which Jenny and I had opened out of tins, I felt that he took up attention in a special way: I found that while he talked I must watch him intently, and believed that this was because what he said and the way that he said it were so interesting. But in time I came to know that it was his face itself that held me, that face at which I could look and look so that sometimes the fascination would take me away entirely, and I would lose whole passages of what he was saying.

This angered me with myself then, and does still. My lip curls when I must admit that even had Paul not been what he was, had he been trivial, passionless and commonplace, I might still have loved him. The look of him never lost its power over me; even in anger and hurt it retained a higher authority that my whole self as a woman, deaf, dumb, blind, never failed to answer.

As it was, Paul was quick. Quick as opposed to dead in the most accurate sense, for in no one I have known could one have more clearly the sense of blood running, heart beating, impatient intelligence alight, even the attraction of his sex upon him like the gloss on the plumes of a male bird — a creature becoming rather than merely being. And all this he took as carelessly as if it were as common an evidence of life as the first gulp of breath we all draw with the same eagerness at the sharp moment of birth. In him, it seemed to me, most of the things the rest of us talked about or hazily aspired to, came to life. He had spent a magnificent childhood on the farm in Natal which had belonged to his father’s family since the middle of the nineteenth century, running wild with no consciousness of the loadliness of the life, riding horses and playing with young native boys of his own age and prowess. He spoke the two main Bantu languages, Zulu and Sesuto, with the colloquial familiarity among their formal difficulties that comes only when you have learned a language as you have learned to speak, and so, unlike the rest of us, he did not move half his life like a deaf man, among people whose speech and thought and laughter were closed to him. The almost feudal character of his life as a child included his parents’ odd English tradition of courtesy toward any difference that became evident as he grew up, between their ideas and his. His rejection of the farm for the study of law, and then his rejection of law in favor of social science, and a job in the offices of the Native Affairs Department in Johannesburg, they gently regarded as a matter of taste. When Paul spoke about them, you could not fail to feel the charm of the way in which they saw what Edna might have called a revulsion against a capitalist-imperialist outlook and way of life — the putting aside, in fact, of everything they had to offer — as a young person’s whim, in which it was parental and polite to show mild interest. So, unlike my parents and me, whose differences, like our lives, were on a closer, more suburban scale, Paul and the Clarks remained on affectionate terms.

When he came to the flat for the first time that day, he had just been home on a visit, and before that he had been in Rhodesia for four months. This was part of the six-months’ study leave he had been granted by the Department to write his Ph.D. thesis on “African Family Adjustments to Urban Environment.”

He was moving into a very small flat where the edge of the city raveled out into shabby suburbia — among the whores and the hoboes and the motor-spares business, he put it — and for a week was busy painting the one room and rearranging the intricacies of the cupboard-kitchen. — A dehydrated affair, he told us, open the doors, turn on the faucet and sprinkle — up comes the stove and the refrigerator. John and Jenny were amused but not particularly interested by his activity with the flat; I understood that he moved frequently, and they had gone through the whole reorganization process with him before.

He spent a great deal of time at the Marcuses’ flat and I gathered that he always had. He was also an intimate of most of their friends, and was almost always on his way from or to people we knew. Over lunch the first day there had been much talk of common friends, questions asked, news related. “Seen Isa yet?” John had said keenly. — Later I saw that there seemed to be a vying for the attention and company of Paul among his friends. Often Jenny would say severely, almost jealously, “Now don’t forget I expect you tonight. I’m making a pilaff and I don’t want you to turn up at eight full of Laurie’s beer and sardines.” Since we seldom made any special preparation for anybody, and certainly not for anyone who came as often as Paul, it was not the waste of dinner but the idea that he might prefer to eat with others which prompted her.

“Has she gone back to her book?” Paul asked. “There was a letter of hers supposed to be sent on to me from Luanshya, but it hasn’t come yet.”

John shrugged his lack of interest. “She wouldn’t be discussing it with me, anyway.”

“You should have heard her the other night,” said Jenny, warming to gossip, with an eager smile. “She simply snapped Helen up in one bite. One of her charming moods.”

When he had heard the story, Paul said, supplying the answer to a problem that didn’t puzzle him at all: “You were having an argument? A political argument with a man, and keeping your end up? Of course; Isa can’t stand intelligence in other women, don’t you know? She has the greatest respect for the views of an intelligent man, but she can’t listen to another woman talking sense. Oh, she’ll defend the equality of men and women all right, but God help the woman who’s equal to her.”

“Well, apparently she doesn’t think me intelligent enough,” said Jenny tartly, “because I’ve never had any trouble with her.”

In the laughter that followed, John hooked an arm round her neck, pulling her over to him, and said, “Never mind, Jen, Isa’s just sex and a brain and nothing in between.”

“John said that you would have been the one to deal with her,” I laughed to Paul. “He seemed to think you could defend the rights of women before the ardent feminist.”