Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

— I remember when I was little I used to think if I could get in there I’d build myself a secret hideout on that bit of land. I tried to roll boulders into the river to make stepping-stones, but it’s too deep, they disappeared. -

— We could have built a foot-bridge. I suppose all you need is some decent logs. A couple of cement piles —

The feet wobble on the stones, take a leap that at once regains balance and lands him free of the pit. — And that ring that woman lost, your friend? —

A couple of hours before the plane leaves is not enough. There is no point in beginning a discussion about anything; why ‘Namibia’ of all places. He will have to get on with it, go through with it like every other boy of his age. It was here that the letter was torn up and, for a moment, the bits of paper were about to be stuck under those stones which have been slightly dislodged by the weight they have just borne. A crust of earth-line shows on one that has been tipped free of the ground.

What is it you want of me? There is no need to go into the house at all today; it is better to allow time to give him a decent lunch at the airport before he takes off. — I hope the damned goat doesn’t eat its way through the last of my hay before she gets her bones thrown. —

But the barn, as it is passed, holds nothing for him; whatever is hidden lies where his mind is — elsewhere.

They are still standing around the yard and those women haven’t moved from the wall of the workshop. Jacobus must be said good-bye to; it is necessary to listen all over again to everything said before. Little white baas running barefoot in ‘Namibia’, black sons of servants now fathers of servants — you can’t escape it, you can’t hurt old Jacobus’s feelings. It all belongs to you. It will all belong to you. No need at all for either of us to go into the house; but as the Mercedes is turning in the yard, in good time for lunch and airport, he suddenly says he’s remembered there was something he meant to take along. What is there in that house? A few old clothes? You’d never get them near you, now, miles too small.

— No — something I think I left… I promised a friend at school — He’s evasive, he doesn’t want to be precise, probably because it’s not worth hanging about for, one could buy whatever it is, a new one, and not bother.

Jacobus is there the moment the car stops again. Pleased, used to delays, he is usually the one who lopes up with a request just as you’re leaving. Jacobus takes him to wherever it is the house keys are concealed. He stoops, blond strands falling over his face so that one never sees what the expression is, to run a hand over one of the cats at the kitchen door — those cats have gone wild, they don’t understand a hand may not be a threat. — And what does your kid do for love? — Tremendously concerned about love, your kind, although they hate so many and despise so much — governments, exploiters of cheap labour to extract ore, the people whose job it is to interrogate the loving activities of those who have right on their side (no doubt) to blow up trains, hijack planes and send letter bombs. -And your husband? What does he do for love while you are making love in there behind the locked-up windows in an empty house, a perfect place, with cologne in the bathroom and whisky by the bed.

Although the kitchen door is standing open the house is empty as if there were no one inside going silently over the polished floors barefoot, rummaging in the cupboards and pulling out a cache of remembered boxes from beneath the unmade beds. The interior of the car is as personal as a room; it is the habitation between habitations, hardly less than they. It even has its own sounds as a house has its creaks: a tick or faint tapping as metal cools or expands. He presses the keys of one radio station after another, running down the scale of snatches of music and voices back to silence. That stained rucksack adorned with the peace sign in red ink is all the luggage there is; it lies on the seat, the one strap is broken, the outside pocket is torn and scarcely holds a book sticking out of it. God knows what he’s doing in there; five-past twelve. The visitors, moving in the manner of people fettered by a long discussion that is not being concluded but merely made clumsily portable, are beginning to move in the direction of the kraal. He’s taken the book out of the rucksack to glance at for a moment — what sort of thing does he read. EROS HIMSELF overprinted on a picture of the god, bow and arrow, wings, everything between his legs, the lot. A nice sexy love story, just what at that age-A little sticker on the inside of the cover, with the name and address of a Cape Town bookshop. Borrowed. Handed from boy to boy at school. But why no girl on the jacket? EROS HIMSELF AN ANTHOLOGY COMPILED AND PUBLISHED BY THE CAMPAIGN FOR HOMOSEXUAL EQUALITY

As if — indeed, at that age again — he had suddenly got his hands on one of those copies of Lady Chatterley that, pirated and ill-printed in Egypt for sale to English-speaking soldiers, had found their way down from one desert country to another, he opens the book here, there, anywhere. The hands are deft and hasty. The sun-glasses trap the warmth in his face — he takes them off roughly. It’s not a story — articles, essays, with bits of poetry in between, an extract from the famous trial (Oscar Wilde). Homosexual Marriage: The Case for Sanction by Church and State. Sexual Pathology — or Love? The Healthy Norm: Law of the Jungle. An index means nothing. His eyes remember how to skim with intense concentration, tossing aside… the old equation of Darwinian selection with the healthy norm is an argument which, carried to its logical conclusion, must equate civilization with the jungle… residual disabilities… in any case, given the change in the law, why is not the homosexual campaign for equality, even if this involves attempting to change public opinion, as decent as, for example, the highly decent campaign of women who demand… if strong feelings are cansistent with a wide range of pathological activity … gay marriages are ‘repugnant’ to… inasmuch as heterosexual marriage as the basis for family life …

What does he find here? In books like this? If this is all, textbook mumbo-jumbo, legal jargon to make it sound dully respectable and normal — if this is what he wants.

Is this the subject?

Hidden away like the goat; you have to find your way to it. There is not much left to shock a man who knows the world.

— Ah yes, inviolate, you. You have multiple addresses and identities. That’s what you mean — you know how to hide and protect what you are. —

— In pig-iron, that’s what. —

— If it were as simple as that! —

— Well isn’t that how you see me by candlelight? Isn’t it your perversion to dirty yourself with what you call a tycoon? —

What instinct has led him to look at the book? Instinct? Sometimes his are what he thinks of as bestial, but different from this. A lover of women may have many inclinations in a lifetime, he remains a lover of women. His heart is actually beating audibly in his ears, hard and slow. For years he hasn’t been in communication with that other woman, his ex-wife, except through divorce lawyers, but he is writing rapidly now, Your son’s a pansy-boy. A bugger. She will understand; she will remember and take as an insult, perfect family woman that she is, these days, the reminder that she didn’t object to being made love to like that, herself. It must come from someone.

Could this be the subject?

Published by the Campaign For Homosexual Equality.

He belongs to some club, then. Already. Or did the university student give it to him. He got it all from some university student. That’s it, that’s more likely. That could be it. In Japan they would have arranged things better. By now, going on seventeen, some suitably worldly uncle would have taken him off to a suitable house with experienced girls. Or was that the French. Someone explained (talking late in a hotel bar, a nightcap after a conference) Latins never leave an adolescent to find his own way in these matters. Very sensible. Because unless you are lucky. It’s pure chance you meet what you need, just put out a hand…