Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

— There’s nice. —

Two words stay the movement that will put the Mercedes into reverse gear.

— Why don’t you eat. — They beg on street-corners and spend the money in the next bar; that’s what they’d do with it if they had it. No no.

— I nearly forgot. — The hand is lifted from him and rakes into the shelf for the packet, displacing at the same time something hard that rolls out onto the floor of the car. — Look at that! — She’s dived for it. A glass marble. It has been lying there as it lay in the dust and fluff (smell of cat) where I found it for you; it lies in the stranger’s hand that was on my thigh but did not touch me, an egg stolen from a nest, as you showed a brown agate egg in a stranger’s adolescent hand, a whole clutch of pale, freckled eggs that will never hatch. The car door is standing open on the passenger side. Hampered by her shoes, she is strolling a little way ahead.

— Come — she says — Come and look. —

She has half-turned, the face beckoning, the white packet of food in the hand that holds the white bag. She stays like that while there is a moment when neither moves, she half-turned among trees and he seen through the open door of the car, and while he gets out on his side and slowly closes his door softly, with no more than a click — distinct — between the two of them. No no no. But nothing stops Jacobus running or rather trying to run, like that. What for? What need of haste when everything is over long ago, dead when it was found. Violence is a red blossom for you to put behind your gipsy-ringed ear, a kaffir-boom flower you wear in London as your souvenir of foreign parts, like those Americans who leave Hawaii with hibiscus around their necks. But violence has flowered after seven years’ drought, violence as fecundity, weathering as humus, rising as sap. If it had not been for the flood, the best year for seven years. No no no. The scent of the trees is light and cool. Their narrow leaves browned by wet cover the earth like the shed wings of a horde of insects. They do not crackle underfoot because of the damp. She has taken off the coat (raincoat? people have got used to expecting rain every day) that she wore unfastened in the car, and spread it on the ground, the thing is spread-eagled with its arms out, only a head seems missing.

— This’s nice. —

He has no idea what he is going to say. — You could eat in the car. —

— Toasted bacon and egg — she says appreciatively. She has wrapped the white paper genteelly round the lower half of the sandwich, whose fatty smell is sickening against the freshness of the eucalyptus, but she speaks with her mouth full, showing bits of egg on good teeth, inoffensively. She’s young. She pats the raincoat she is sitting on; she’s kicked off, or perhaps it’s simply fallen off — one of her clumsy fashionable shoes.

— I don’t want to sit. — What he desperately needs to convey is that she is presumptuous, that he is being held up on his way to wherever it is she, living in another milieu, cannot know he is going.

— It’s nice here — She has stretched out, she’s making a wood of the place, a picnic out of it. She lies back, both shoes off, ankles crossed, propped up on one elbow and eating the messy sandwich, lazily smiling and enjoying the air.

— You should have eaten while I drove. —

She pats the raincoat beside her.

He sits, turned slightly away from her. The green of the trees, the suède-yellow mountains, the clean air are deceptive: this is a dirty place, an overgrown rubbish dump between mounds of cyanide waste, that’s all. There are bits of rusty tin and an old enamel pot lying near by. A porridge of old papers splattered against the trunk of one of the trees. He hears her licking her fingers.

— My, I was starving, man. You saved my life. —

— Come on. I must go. —

She lies there lazily, flat on her back now. She is wearing a tight pink cotton sweater with long sleeves and a round low neck. She pulls down her mouth, warm and relaxed and glistening with the business of eating, and squints, frowning, over her cheeks at her body, brushing crumbs from her breasts. She smiles again, making a play of sleepy, half-closed eyes.

— Get up. —

She puts out an arm to be pulled, then, he cannot ignore it; and on her feet completes the movement (as when her hand came to his leg in the car) by leaning her whole body against him, belly to belly, breast to chest. The mouth tastes of bacon and the contact of tongues and lips and opposition of teeth becomes, as always, the inhabiting of a place unlike any other place, a sliding and kneading between smooth resilient walls of pleasure that open ahead and close behind without room for anything else, without thought, without identity. Then he puts her away from him, let her fall if she will. He’s going back to the car, the road, the freeway.

— Oh just a sec — she begs — I must find somewhere. You know: I’ve got to go. Just wait one moment for me. —

The raincoat’s still on the ground. He has the impulse to lie there, exhausted, to flop down with his head hidden on his arms, and the leaves would be near his eyes. Not a pleasant place. The car looks abandoned. He does sit down again, but more or less on his hunkers, elbows on knees, and sees the car as it would appear to someone coming upon it, in this place. The toy-woman knows, she sees cars turn off into the plantation with couples in them. Others: that mess of wet paper, cigarette packs. No one knows who the people are who come here; the short journey, the destination, are unrecorded in the pattern or documentation of their lives. It doesn’t count. A stretch of waste ground that no longer serves its original purpose and for which a new one has not yet been decided, apparently; most of the mining ground round about has been surveyed and declared as townships of one kind or another, quite a profitable operation. No one knows and one goes away and never comes back to this place again although it is not more than a mile from the freeway. Unless something happens; it is the sort of place people might dump a body. One could be murdered here. We think something is happen . The Mercedes swept over the road into the culvert, and everything was kept in order, everything was maintained more or less as usual, as far as they know how. They were ready for the next white man. If it were not to be me, it would have been someone else. The next buyer. Perhaps they thought I was dead; they know another one will always come. They would take off their hats at the graveside as they’d take them off to greet the new one. — We think something is happen. — But it can only happen to me. They have been there all the time and they will continue to be there. They have nothing and they have nothing to lose. She’s come back and she’s lying beside him, pulling with propriety at her clothes. She’s a woman like all the other women, no better and no worse than the smooth, clear olive-coloured face, the dark hair and the Romany eyes she suggests as she lies quite quietly and intimately, sidled against him where he has stretched out on his spine. Without a cushion his head drops back too far for comfort and he has both hands folded under it. - It’s nice here. It’s nice here. - She giggles and murmurs, because that’s the way she thinks she will please; she’s taken her pants off in the bushes of course. No no. She’s opened her whole mouth over his, taking his lips entirely into the wet membrane inside hers, and his eyes staring up close like a jeweller’s loupe brought to her face show that the hairline isn’t clean at all, it’s a fake, it’s not the same at all, there are short rough curly hairs interspersed with blemishes and pimples that encroach on the face as sideburns —

While his tongue plunges down her throat to choke the bitch, stuff her, in the closed-up house with the whisky bottle on the floor and the cologne in the bathroom, his gorge rises in revulsion. No no. The grain of the skin is gigantic, muddy and coarse. A moon surface. Grey-brown with layers of muck that don’t cover the blemishes. She pulls away; she pretends that’s that, she knows how to excite; they’re panting, eyeing each other, and — suddenly — he has become aware as of a feature of a landscape not noticed before, of a pair of strong male calves in woollen stockings exactly on a level with his eyes, behind her shoulders some yards off in the scrubby growth the eucalyptus have put out. Between the leaves a pair of solid calves is in squatting position, facing knees-on but a little to one side so that a black pocket-comb is plainly visible stuck between a great calf-muscle and the ribbed turnover of a sock.