Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

Would you still become mad?

And now?

And now — two months, a week, six weeks later?

Now would you still become mad?

‘Eleanora will spend some time in Pisa after we go back to Italy, with her mother and the aunts,’ he was saying.

Yes, I knew why, too; knew from my mother that Eleanora was going to Pisa because there was an old family doctor there who was sure, despite everything the doctors in Milan and Rome had said, that poor Eleanora might still one day have a child.

I said, ‘How would you feel if Alan came here?’

But Marco looked at me with such sensual confidence of understanding that we laughed.

I began to plan a love affair for Eleanora. I chose Per as victim not only because he was the only presentable unattached man in our circle, but also because I had the feeling that it might just be possible to attract her to a man younger than herself, whom she could mother. And Per, with no woman at all (except the pretty Congolese prostitutes good for an hour in the rain, I suppose) could consider himself lucky if he succeeded with Eleanora. I studied her afresh. Soft white gooseflesh above her stocking-tops, breasts that rose when she sighed — that sort of woman. But Eleanora did not even seem to understand that Per was being put in her way (at our house, at the Au Relais) and Per seemed equally unaware of or uninterested in his opportunities.

And so there was never any way to ask my question. Marco and I continued to lie making love in the caravan while the roof made buckling noises as it contracted after the heat of the day, and the rain. Tshombe fled and returned; there were soldiers in the square before the post office, and all sorts of difficulties arose over the building of the road. Marco was determined, excitable, harassed and energetic — he sprawled on the bed in the caravan at the end of the day like a runner who has just breasted the tape. My father was nervous and didn’t know whether to finish the road. Eleanora was nervous and wanted to go back to Italy. We made love and when Marco opened his eyes to consciousness of the road, my father, Eleanora, he said, ‘Oh for God’s sake, why . . it’s like a dream. .’

I became nervous too. I goaded my mother: ‘The Gattis are a bore. That female Buddha .’

I developed a dread that Eleanora would come to me with her sighs and her soft-squeezing hand and say, ‘It always happens with Marco, little Jillie, you mustn’t worry. I know all about it.’

And Marco and I continued to lie together in that state of pleasure in which nothing exists but the two who make it. Neither roads, nor mercenary wars, nor marriage, nor the claims and suffering of other people entered that tender, sensual dream from which Marco, although so regretfully, always returned.

What I dreaded Eleanora might say to me was never said, either. Instead my mother told me one day in the tone of portentous emotion with which older women relive such things, that Eleanora, darling Eleanora, was expecting a child. After six years. Without having to go to Pisa to see the family doctor there. Yes, Eleanora had conceived during the rainy season in E’ville, while Marco and I made love every afternoon in the caravan, and the Congolese found themselves a girl for the duration of a shower.

It’s years ago, now.

Poor Marco, sitting in Milan or Genoa at Sunday lunch, toothpick in his fingers, Eleanora’s children crawling about, Eleanora’s brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts around him. But I have never woken up from that dream. In the seven years I’ve been married I’ve had — how many lovers? Only I know. A lot — if you count the very brief holiday episodes as well.

It is another world, that dream, where no wind blows colder than the warm breath of two who are mouth to mouth.

Dr Franz-Josef von Leinsdorf is a geologist absorbed in his work; wrapped up in it, as the saying goes — year after year the experience of this work enfolds him, swaddling him away from the landscapes, the cities and the people, wherever he lives: Peru, New Zealand, the United States. He’s always been like that, his mother could confirm from their native Austria. There, even as a handsome small boy he presented only his profile to her: turned away to his bits of rock and stone. His few relaxations have not changed much since then. An occasional skiing trip, listening to music, reading poetry — Rainer Maria Rilke once stayed in his grandmother’s hunting lodge in the forests of Styria and the boy was introduced to Rilke’s poems while very young.

Layer upon layer, country after country, wherever his work takes him — and now he has been almost seven years in Africa. First the Côte d’Ivoire, and for the past five years, South Africa. The shortage of skilled manpower brought about his recruitment here. He has no interest in the politics of the countries he works in. His private preoccupation-within-the-preoccupation of his work has been research into underground watercourses, but the mining company that employs him in a senior though not executive capacity is interested only in mineral discovery. So he is much out in the field — which is the veld, here — seeking new gold, copper, platinum and uranium deposits. When he is at home — on this particular job, in this particular country, this city — he lives in a two-roomed flat in a suburban block with a landscaped garden, and does his shopping at a supermarket conveniently across the street. He is not married — yet. That is how his colleagues, and the typists and secretaries at the mining company’s head office, would define his situation. Both men and women would describe him as a good-looking man, in a foreign way, with the lower half of the face dark and middle-aged (his mouth is thin and curving, and no matter how close-shaven his beard shows like fine shot embedded in the skin round mouth and chin) and the upper half contradictorily young, with deep-set eyes (some would say grey, some black), thick eyelashes and brows. A tangled gaze: through which concentration and gleaming thoughtfulness perhaps appear as fire and languor. It is this that the women in the office mean when they remark he’s not unattractive. Although the gaze seems to promise, he has never invited any one of them to go out with him. There is the general assumption he probably has a girl who’s been picked for him, he’s bespoken by one of his own kind, back home in Europe where he comes from. Many of these well-educated Europeans have no intention of becoming permanent immigrants; neither the remnant of white colonial life nor idealistic involvement with Black Africa appeals to them.

One advantage, at least, of living in underdeveloped or half-developed countries is that flats are serviced. All Dr von Leinsdorf has to do for himself is buy his own supplies and cook an evening meal if he doesn’t want to go to a restaurant. It is simply a matter of dropping in to the supermarket on his way from his car to his flat after work in the afternoon. He wheels a trolley up and down the shelves, and his simple needs are presented to him in the form of tins, packages, plastic-wrapped meat, cheeses, fruit and vegetables, tubes, bottles. . At the cashiers’ counters where customers must converge and queue there are racks of small items uncategorised, for last-minute purchase. Here, as the coloured girl cashier punches the adding machine, he picks up cigarettes and perhaps a packet of salted nuts or a bar of nougat. Or razor blades, when he remembers he’s running short. One evening in winter he saw that the cardboard display was empty of the brand of blades he preferred, and he drew the cashier’s attention to this. These young coloured girls are usually pretty unhelpful, taking money and punching their machines in a manner that asserts with the time-serving obstinacy of the half-literate the limit of any responsibility towards customers, but this one ran an alert glance over the selection of razor blades, apologised that she was not allowed to leave her post, and said she would see that the stock was replenished ‘next time’. A day or two later she recognised him, gravely, as he took his turn before her counter — ‘I ahssed them, but it’s out of stock. You can’t get it. I did ahss about it.’ He said this didn’t matter. ‘When it comes in, I can keep a few packets for you.’ He thanked her.