Роберт Фиш - Rough Diamond

They spoke of many things that day; their pasts, so different: a girl raised in a small town like Simonstown on the tip of South Africa; a boy brought up in the slums of London. A girl who was an only child and now an orphan; a boy from a large family, a father, a mother, a brother, and two sisters, with aunts, uncles, nephews, and cousins all over the place. They spoke of their schooling, hers a church school with rigid discipline, his the Jews’ Free School in Bell Lane in the East End, and the further education picked up in the streets. They spoke of the troubles each had gotten into as children, and Barney learned that despite the differences they had many things in common. They were, after all, still two teenagers, brought through the oddity of events to play the role of adults. And Barney did the entire final speech of Mathias from The Bells without the slightest trace of Cockney accent, while old Rhodes looked up from his grazing with eyebrows cocked to see his master posturing so oddly — and Barney, of course, did not admit that he had been practicing the speech ever since he had last seen her, and Fay clapped her hands and congratulated him, nor did she admit she still thought it very funny, even without the accent. And as they rode back to Kimberley in the afternoon, with the sun warm on their backs and their silence as intimate as their conversation had been, Barney suddenly broke that silence. “You’ll like my brother, Harry. We’ll stop by and you can meet him when we get back. He’s taller than me, and real good-looking.” It had occurred to Barney that Harry was a long way from that girl of his he had spoken of — if she really existed and Harry hadn’t invented her to make Barney feel better — and that Harry and Fay would make a great couple. If he couldn’t have her, and it was evident he never could, at least his brother was someone he knew, liked, and trusted. It was true that Harry had no great drive, no great ambitions to get ahead, but he, Barney, would be in the family and he had drive enough for both of them. And for a girl like Fay, maybe even Harry would begin to get ambitious.

Fay merely looked at him a bit oddly, but said nothing, and Barney thought he had said enough on the matter for the time being. Nature, he was sure, would take its course. It was a bittersweet feeling, but there was actually no sacrifice involved, and he was honest enough with himself to admit it. He had no chance with Fay; he had never had any chance with Fay. So it wouldn’t be as if he were giving her up; he had never had her. They continued back in the silence he had broken, each with his own thoughts, with old Rhodes plodding along undoubtedly with his own thoughts, too.

And Fay did like Harry when she met him. He was handsome, he was clever, he was funny. Barney watched the two of them in silence as they exchanged mots and Fay laughed, and he remembered how she had laughed when he had done Mathias on the trek, but it was an entirely different kind of laughter. Now she was enjoying herself, not the way she had been when he had seen her outside her tent a few nights back. And when he got back from taking a quiet Fay home and dropping a tired and hungry old Rhodes at his stable, Harry was waiting up for him.

“You were right. She’s a beautiful girl,” Harry said.

“I never told you she was beautiful.”

“She is, anyway,” Harry said, and laughed.

“Did you like her?”

“Very much,” Harry said, and looked at Barney with that wise look of his. “Why?”

“Nothing,” Barney said shortly, and went to bed, wishing somehow that he hadn’t introduced the two, although he knew this was simply stupid. A girl like Fay was not going to be without a steady beau forever, and why not Harry? But why Harry, as far as that went? It was all very confusing. Best not to think about it. Concentrate on the kopje walloping, make money, get rich, and forget about Fay. Except as a friend, because as a friend he had asked her if he could come visiting the following Wednesday, and when he saw her then he intended to ask her to go on another picnic the next Sunday. And the Sunday afterward, and the Sunday after that. He fell asleep, dreaming of all the Sundays to come, and the wonderful pain of being with Fay and knowing he could never have her…

When Armando Mattos Silveira de Costa was a mere child in his native country of Angola, he was by far the largest child his age in the district, if not in the entire country. His mother, as proud of him as she could be even though his birth had been such that she could have no other children, used to pinch his fat cheeks, leaving large red blotches, and say to the neighbors, “Have you ever seen such a child? And you should see how he eats! He’ll grow up to be a giant!”

And as Armando grew up he did, indeed, appear to be headed for gianthood. His appetite also seemed to increase. His father, a poor planter with a poor farm in the Benguela district on the Cubango River, was hard put to furnish the food his son consumed. It was true that as Armando grew he was also becoming more useful on the farm, since at the age of fourteen he could easily replace an ox in pulling a plow, but on the balance, as far as his father was concerned, it appeared that Armando was going to eat more than the extra output the farm would gain from his strength. It was a problem! his father thought with his usual bitterness, and one seemingly without solution, since the boy was the apple of his mother’s eye — which was one more reason his father had grown to hate his son. What boy of fourteen still slept with his mother, thus depriving his father of his marital rights? And the woman apparently could not understand the simple fact that, in addition to robbing his father of the normal love any man should expect from a wife, her monstrous son was going to eat them out of house and home, especially as he grew bigger and — supposedly — even hungrier.

Until one day when Armando’s father took the boy — then eighteen years old and huge — into Nova Lisboa with him to help him unload the ox wagon containing what little of the farm’s produce was left for sale in the market square. It was not that Armando’s father was not strong enough to unload the wagon himself — he was also a large man, although not Armando’s size — but his growing hatred for his son was equaled only by his own laziness. Besides, he saw no reason why the overgrown lout should not earn at least a small portion of his board.

Their small stock was soon disposed of, and the two started off to pick up the necessities they had been instructed to return with by the planter’s wife — a fifty-kilo bag of flour for baking, fifty kilos of sugar to last the coming season, and some salt and thread. Armando had easily lifted each fifty-kilo sack, one in each hand, placing them in the wagon with their other purchases, when his father jerked a thumb at him.

“You wait here, and I mean here! ” he said brusquely, pointing his thumb downward, and headed across the square to a bar, walking inside. Armando waited where he was, and then he noticed something he had never seen before. Across the square from him, almost next to the bar his father had gone into, a man was nailing some colorful posters onto a wall. Armando walked over to see what they were all about. They were apparently advertising a circo , whatever that was, that was being held in a large tent in a different square. Armando didn’t know what the posters were all about, but he did like the colors of them, and there was a girl’s picture on one of them which portrayed her in a costume that left her as close to being nude as Armando had ever seen a girl other, of course, than the natives his mother kept sending to his bed to keep him — she said — from touching himself and going crazy. Armando was still admiring the colorful sheets when his father came out of the bar, smelling of whiskey. He frowned direly to see his son had not remained at the wagon where he had been told to stay.