Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

‘This is Bob — Bob Ceretti, here on a visit from the States — Edgar Xixo.’

‘Jason, this is Bob Ceretti, the man who has the ear of presidents—’

Laughter and protests mingled with the handing round of the drinks. Jason Madela, going to fat around the nape but still handsome in a frowning, Clark Gable way, stood about, glass in hand, as if in the habit acquired at cocktail parties. With his air of being distracted from more important things by irresistibly amusing asides, he was correcting a matter of terminology for Robert Ceretti — ‘No, no, but you must understand that in the townships, a “situation” is a different thing entirely — well, I’m a situation, f’rinstance—’

He cocked his smile, for confirmation, to Xixo, whose eyes turned from one face to another in obedient glee — ‘Oh, you’re the muti man!’

‘No, wait, but I’m trying to give Bob an obvious example’ — more laughter, all round — ‘ — a man who wears a suit every day, like a white man. Who goes to the office and prefers to talk English.’

‘You think it derives from the use of the word as a genteelism for “job”? Would you say? You know — the Situations Vacant column in the newspapers?’ The visitor sat forward on the edge of his chair, smiling up closely. ‘But what’s this “ muti ” you mentioned, now — maybe I ought to have been taking notes instead of shaking Frances’s martini pitcher.’

‘He’s a medicine man,’ Xixo was explaining, while Jason laughed — ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ and tossed off the rest of his gin, and Frances went forward to bring the late arrival, Spuds Buthelezi, in his lattice-knit gold shirt and pale blue jeans, into the circle. When the American had exchanged names and had Spuds by the hand, he said, ‘And what’s Spuds, then?’

The young man had a dough-shaped, light-coloured face with tiny features stuck in it in a perpetual expression of suspicious surprise. The martinis had turned up the volume of voices that met him. ‘I’ll have a beer,’ he said to Frances; and they laughed again.

Jason Madela rescued him, a giant flicking a fly from a glass of water. ‘He’s one of the eggheads,’ he said. ‘That’s another category altogether.’

‘Didn’t you used to be one yourself, Jason?’ Frances pretended a reproof: Jason Madela would want a way of letting Ceretti know that although he was a successful businessman in the townships, he was also a man with a university degree.

‘Don’t let’s talk about my youthful misdemeanours, my dear Frances,’ he said, with the accepted light touch of a man hiding a wound. ‘I thought the men were supposed to be doing the work around here — I can cope with that,’ and he helped her chip apart the ice cubes that had welded together as they melted. ‘Get your servant to bring us a little hot water, that’ll do it easily—’

‘Oh I’m really falling down on the job!’ Ceretti was listening carefully, putting in a low ‘Go on’ or ‘You mean?’ to keep the flow of Xixo’s long explanation of problems over a travel document, and he looked up at Frances and Jason Madela offering a fresh round of drinks.

‘You go ahead and talk, that’s the idea,’ Frances said.

He gave her the trusting grin of some intelligent small pet. ‘Well, you two are a great combination behind the bar. Real teamwork of long association, I guess.’

‘How long is it?’ Frances asked, drily but gaily, meaning how many years had she and Jason Madela been acquaintances, and, playfully making as if to anticipate a blow, he said, ‘Must be ten years and you were a grown-up girl even then’ — although both knew that they had seen each other only across various rooms perhaps a dozen times in five years, and got into conversation perhaps half as often.

At lunch Edgar Xixo was still fully launched on the story of his difficulties in travelling back and forth to one of the former British Protectorates, now small, newly independent states surrounded by South African territory. It wasn’t, he explained, as if he were asking for a passport: it was just a travel document he wanted, that’s all, just a piece of paper from the Bantu Affairs Department that would allow him to go to Lesotho on business and come back.

‘Now have I got this straight — you’d been there sometime?’ Ceretti hung over the wisp of steam rising from his soup like a seer over a crystal ball.

‘Yes, yes, you see, I had a travel document—’

‘But these things are good for one exit and re-entry only.’ Jason dispatched it with the good-humoured impatience of the quick-witted. ‘We blacks aren’t supposed to want to go wandering about the place. Tell them you want to take a holiday in Lourenço Marques — they’ll laugh in your face. If they don’t kick you downstairs. Oppenheimer and Charlie Engelhard can go off in their yachts to the South of France, but Jason Madela?’

He got the laugh he wanted, and, on the side, the style of his reference to rich and important white industrialists as decent enough fellows, if one happened to know them, suggested that he might. Perhaps he did, for all Frances Taver knew; Jason would be just the kind of man the white establishment would find if they should happen to decide they ought to make a token gesture of being in touch with the African masses. He was curiously reassuring to white people; his dark suits, white shirts, urbane conversation and sense of humour, all indistinguishable from their own and apparently snatched out of thin air, made it possible for them to forget the unpleasant facts of the life imposed on him and his kind. How tactful, how clever he was, too. She, just as well as any millionaire, would have done to illustrate his point; she was culpable: white, and free to go where she pleased. The flattery of being spared passed invisibly from her to him, like a promissory note beneath the table.

Edgar Xixo had even been summoned to The Greys, Special Branch headquarters, for questioning, he said — ‘And I’ve never belonged to any political organisation, they know there’ve never been any charges against me. I don’t know any political refugees in Lesotho, I don’t want to see anybody — I have to go up and down simply because of business, I’ve got this agency selling equipment to the people at the diamond diggings, it could be a good thing if…’

‘A little palm-grease, maybe,’ said Jason Madela, taking some salad.

Xixo appealed to them all, dismayed. ‘But if you offer it to the wrong one, that’s the. .? In my position, an attorney!’

‘Instinct,’ said Madela. ‘One can’t learn it.’

‘Tell me,’ Ceretti signalled an appreciative refusal of a second helping of duck, while turning from his hostess to Madela. ‘Would you say that bribery plays a big part in daily relations between Africans and officials? I don’t mean the political police, of course — the white administration? Is that your experience?’

Madela sipped his wine and then turned the bottle so that he could read the label, saying meanwhile, ‘Oh not what you’d call graft, not by your standards. Small stuff. When I ran a transport business I used to make use of it. Licences for the drivers and so on. You get some of these young Afrikaner clerks, they don’t earn much and they don’t mind who they pick up a few bob from. They can be quite reasonable. I was thinking there might be someone up at the Bantu Affairs offices. But you have to have a feeling for the right man’ — he put down the bottle and smiled at Frances Taver — ‘Thank heaven I’m out of it, now. Unless I should decide to submit some of my concoctions to the Bureau of Standards, eh?’ and she laughed.

‘Jason has broken the white monopoly of the hair-straightener and blood-purifier business,’ Frances said gracefully, ‘and the nice thing about him is that he has no illusions about his products.’