Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

After the game Marco Gatti used to put a towel round his neck tennis-star fashion and his dark face was gilded with sweat. The Swede went red and blotchy. When Marco panted it was a grin, showing white teeth and one that was repaired with gold. It seemed to me that all adults were flawed in some way; it set them apart. Marco used to give me a lift home and often came in to have a drink with my father and discuss problems about the road. When he was outlining a difficulty he had a habit of smiling and putting a hand inside his shirt to scratch his breast. In the open neck of his shirt some sort of amulet on a chain rested on the dark hair between his strong pectoral muscles. My father said proudly, ‘He may look like a tenor at the opera, but he knows how to get things done.’

I had never been to the opera; it wasn’t my generation. But when Marco began to kiss me every afternoon on the way home, and then to come in to talk to my father over beer as usual, I put it down to the foreignness in him.

I said, ‘It seems so funny to walk into the room where Daddy is.’

Marco said, ‘My poor little girl, you can’t help it if you are pretty, can you?’

It rains every afternoon there, at that time of year. A sudden wind would buffet the heat aside, flattening paper against fences in the dust. Fifteen minutes later — you could have timed it by the clock — the rain came down so hard and noisy we could scarcely see out of the windscreen and had to talk as loudly as if we were in an echoing hall. The rain usually lasted only about an hour. One afternoon we went to the site instead of to my parents’ house — to the caravan that was meant to be occupied by one of the engineers but never had been, because everyone lived in town. Marco shouted against the downpour, ‘You know what the Congolese say? “When the rain comes, quickly find a girl to take home with you until it’s over.” ’ The caravan was just like a little flat, with everything you needed. Marco showed me — there was even a bath. Marco wasn’t tall (at home the girls all agreed we couldn’t look at any boy under six foot) but he had the fine, strong legs of a sportsman, covered with straight black hairs, and he stroked my leg with his hard yet furry one. That was a caress we wouldn’t have thought of, either. I had an inkling we really didn’t know anything.

The next afternoon Marco seemed to be taking the way directly home, and I said in agony, ‘Aren’t we going to the caravan?’ It was out, before I could think.

‘Oh my poor darling, were you disappointed?’ He laughed and stopped the car there and then and kissed me deep in both ears as well as the mouth. ‘All right, the caravan.’

We went there every weekday afternoon — he didn’t work on Saturdays, and the wives came along to the squash club. Soon the old Congolese watchman used to trot over from the labourers’ camp to greet us when he saw the car draw up at the caravan; he knew I was my father’s daughter. Marco chatted with him for a few minutes, and every few days gave him a tip. At the beginning, I used to stand by as if waiting to be told what to do next, but Marco had what I came to realise must be adult confidence. ‘Don’t look so worried. He’s a nice old man. He’s my friend.’

Marco taught me how to make love, in the caravan, and everything that I had thought of as ‘life’ was put away, as I had at other times folded the doll’s clothes, packed the Monopoly set and the sample collection, and given them to the servant. I stopped writing to my girl friends; it took me weeks to get down to replying to Alan’s regular letters, and yet when I did so it was with a kind of professional pride that I turned out a letter of the most skilful ambiguity — should it be taken as a love letter, or should it not? I felt it would be beyond his powers — powers of experience — to decide. I alternately pitied him and underwent an intense tingling of betrayal — actually cringing away from myself in the flesh. Before my parents and in the company of friends, Marco’s absolutely unchanged behaviour mesmerised me: I acted as if nothing had happened because for him it was really as if nothing had happened. He was not pretending to be natural with my father and mother — he was natural. And the same applied to our behaviour in the presence of his wife. After the first time he made love to me I had looked forward with terror and panic to the moment when I should have to see Eleanora again; when she might squeeze my hand or even kiss me on the cheek as she sometimes did in her affectionate, feminine way. But when I walked into our house that Sunday and met her perfume and then all at once saw her beside my mother talking about her family in Genoa, with Marco, my father and another couple sitting there — I moved through the whirling impression without falter.

Someone said, ‘Ah here she is at last, our Jillie!’

And my mother was saying (I had been riding with the Swede), ‘I don’t know how she keeps up with Per, they were out dancing until three o’clock this morning—’ and Marco, who was twenty-nine (1 December, Sagittarius, domicile of Jupiter), was saying, ‘What it is to be young, eh?’, and my father said, ‘What time did you finally get to bed, after last night, anyway, Marco—’ and Eleanora, sitting back with her plump smooth knees crossed, tugged my hand gently so that we should exchange a woman’s kiss on the cheek.

I took in the smell of Eleanora’s skin, felt the brush of her hair on my nose; and it was done, for ever. We sat talking about some shoes her sister-in-law had sent from Milan. It was something I could never have imagined: Marco and I, as we really were, didn’t exist here; there was no embarrassment. The Gattis, as always on Sunday mornings, were straight from eleven o’clock Mass at the Catholic cathedral, and smartly dressed.

As in most of these African places there was a shortage of white women in Katanga and my mother felt much happier to see me spending my time with the young married people than she would have been to see me taken up by the mercenaries who came in and out of E’ville that summer. ‘They’re experienced men,’ she said — as opposed to boys and married men, ‘and of course they’re out for what they can get. They’ve got nothing to lose; next week they’re in another province, or they’ve left the country. I don’t blame them. I believe a girl has to know what the world’s like, and if she is fool enough to get involved with that crowd, she must take the consequences.’ She seemed to have forgotten that she had not wanted to leave me in Johannesburg in the company of Alan. ‘She’s got a nice boy at home, a decent boy who respects her. I’d far rather see her just enjoying herself generally, with you young couples, while we’re here.’ And there was always Per, the Swede, to even out the numbers; she knew he wasn’t ‘exactly Jillie’s dream of love’. I suppose that made him safe, too. If I was no one’s partner in our circle, I was a love object, handed round them all, to whom it was taken for granted that the homage of a flirtatious attitude was paid. Perhaps this was supposed to represent my compensation: if not the desired of any individual, then recognised as desirable by them all.

‘Oh of course, you prefair to dance with Jeelie,’ Mireille, one of the young Belgians, would say to her husband, pretending offence. He and I were quite an act, at the Au Relais, with our cha-cha. Then he would whisper to her in their own language, and she would giggle and punch his arm.

Marco and I were as famous a combination on the squash court as Mireille’s husband and I were on the dance floor. This was the only place, if anyone had had the eyes for it, where our love-making showed. As the weeks went by and the love-making got better and better, our game got better and better. The response Marco taught me to the sound of spilling grain the rain made on the caravan roof held good between us on the squash court. Sometimes the wives and spectators broke into spontaneous applause; I was following Marco’s sweat-oiled excited face, anticipating his muscular reactions in play as in bed. And when he had beaten me (narrowly) or we had beaten the other pair, he would hunch my shoulders together within his arm, laughing, praising me in Italian to the others, staggering about with me, and he would say to me in English, ‘Aren’t you a clever girl, eh?’; only he and I knew that that was what he said to me at other times. I loved that glinting flaw in his smile, now. It was Marco, like all the other things I knew about him: the girl cousin he had been in love with when he used to spend holidays with her family in the Abruzzi mountains; the way he would have planned Tshombe’s road if he’d been in charge — ‘But I like your father, you understand? — it’s good to work with your father, you know?’; the baby cream from Italy he used for the prickly heat round his waist.