A Sport of Nature (28 page)

And all this while lying in the house that serves as a foreign news agency, the foreign correspondent himself out interviewing the Minister of Agriculture about a collective scheme for coffee farmers
.

No mention, ever, of what is planned up the rotting stairs, only what already has been done. Because how can there be trust? What is there to go by? One who left that home uninstructed, ignorant, like most of her kind
—
for personal reasons which are no reason, in the measure of what has to be done. What credibility has she to show for herself, now, but the protection of yet another man?

Without a cause is without a home; lying here. I've learned that. Without a cause is without a reason to be. That's all decreed by others, as elsewhere everything was decreed by the absence of one sister, the decisions made by two more, and the long-distance authority of a putative father on the road. Looking at him; gazed at by him. How well does he see, how
well does he see into the other self, this man who swims and makes love with his glasses on to see better
—
this man in whose narrow crowded face is concentrated the pull of a gravity that excites while it excludes
.

What choice is there?

He could take her in hand, maybe, with help from Christa and others. She might be made useful. But the real life of exile isn't giving the boys an eyeful on Tamarisk Beach, you know
.

Ah no, I'll tell about that, the real life of exile is, for your whole life, going home for the holidays wherever it's been decided you're to go
.

Exile is the inevitable
—
for whites like us, he is instructing. But the claim doesn't enter, the way his body does; it talk away from her without purchase, the way she now slides off his body. This one won't accept to be a humble apprentice to the only objective worth living for. Who does she think she is? Unreliable: and this judgment tantalizes him to come back into the flesh again, to find that just consolation, that peace and freedom that is certain, and lasts only minutes
.

The glisten of black eyes opening again
.

Why don't you go back? Let them deport you. Probably you'd be let in; your lawyer uncle could maybe get you off prosecution for having come out illegally: you're still under age. You've got a guardian or something? At worst you'll get a suspended sentence and a fine
—
your rich aunt'll pay, won't she?

But he is nibbling, kissing, feeding on me, his face wet with me, exasperated. Because if she isn't the right material, she isn't one of that kind, either. God knows what will happen to her
—
it is not his affair
—
but she has one sound instinct to share with him, it's expressed in her laughter if not in conviction, it's dense in her flesh: she will never go back to the dying life there, never
.

What choice? When the Ambassador and his family are posted to another country, of course I'll go with them. Of course; the credentials of the household contingent of such people are never disputed by immigration officials
.

*

At certain times, in certain places, harmony settles over a human nucleus like the wings of some unseen sheltering bird. Marie-Claude was a woman who had constantly to be going through the wardrobe of her blessings before others. Sometimes her actual wardrobe was invoked: —Emile insists he must give me a fur coat for leave in Europe, but I'm not the kind of woman who needs that sort of present, I'm not repressed in
any
way, not deprived of
any
kind of satisfaction, I mean, far from it—Hillela was so responsive; she stroked the fur against her cheek, so that Marie-Claude knew, could see the present was beautiful and rich in meaning; that she lacked for nothing; And in this country on the other side of Africa the language of the former colonists was her children's mother tongue, and she was freed of the tedious afternoon hour of acting schoolteacher. She could sleep, sleep, for that hour after lunch, knowing the children were not left in the care of some local black or half-caste. Her breasts released from straps and lace, her waist free of elastic, she lay naked in the shuttered dark of their room—hers and her husband's. Sometimes—now that she didn't have to shut herself up over schoolbooks—when he came in quietly to fetch something on his way back to the office, she murmured, so that he would come over to her, and then deliciously tense but playing sleepy, she could put his hand on her soft, heat-dampened pubic hair, and after merely submitting for a moment (of course, she knew he was thinking he ought to be going back to his office) he would silently and efficiently take off his clothes (of course, he had to keep them uncreased to put on again immediately for the office) and make love to her. It was years, and several postings, since they had made love like lovers, in the middle of a working day. No child would burst in; they were safely with Hillela.

He came from the office—merely across a loggia in another part of the Embassy complex, all of their life was securely under one roof—and saw Hillela, many afternoons, sitting among a tumble
of children and cushions, the children's limbs tangled close about her, their hands playing with her hair or fingers.

—Come, papa, it's a guessing game. Come and play.—

—Papa, there's a lion and two hippos and they want to eat him up but he won't come into the water—Hillela's telling that story again because it's such a nice one …—

Smiling at him from among his children, her face as firm and clear as theirs; with his arrival, domestic content was perfectly rounded.

She did not have many duties—duty being what does not come naturally—in that posting, where the Ambassador was temporarily relieving a colleague recalled. In a French-speaking city, Marie-Claude had found more friends, liked to do her own shopping in boutiques run by French people who had stayed on under a black government civilisedly tempered, it was felt, by the fact that the President had a white French wife. Some people said the young girl in the Ambassador's household was a housekeeper, others assumed she was a relative of Marie-Claude—and Marie-Claude did not deny, only corrected this: —No, no, no relation at all! But it's true, she's like a young sister, a member of the family. The children adore her.— Certainly she played tennis, took part in sightseeing and dining-out parties, as any visiting favourite from Europe experiences Africa in pursuits imported long before her.

But there were times when the surrogate was alone in the house with only the half-awareness of the presence somewhere of servants that is like the sound of her own heart to any white brought up in Africa. Alone as if she were an ambassador's wife in a succession of interleading rooms, passing furnishings and objects with which she has no connection, interchangeable from Residence to Residence. If the Ambassador happened to come in he seized her sufferingly. Under his elegantly-hung suit his body swelled and prodded her; but that presence outside the beating of blood reminded that nothing further was permissible, not here,
not now. —Look what you do to me.— He was handsome, proud. She would shake that curly head, not culpable. —You know just what you do, my little girl, don't you.—

Sultan al-Hassam Ibn Sulaiman had never been here but the town floated as flower and palm fragments, islands and isthmus, on lagoons covered with a mail of waterlilies; a breeze touched, as if it were the black rags of bats themselves, flapping the air round the streetlamps as lights threaded on across bridges. She was seen in the town, where the cry of Edith Piaf came from the bistros, but mostly she kept to the quarter of embassies, villas and hotels. Regularly a young First Secretary from the British Embassy ran to meet her at an open-air bar for their six o'clock rendezvous. —You had better be seen with one or two young men—believe me, my treasure, no-one will believe you haven't got a man
somewhere
, if they don't see him.— A First Secretary was eminently suitable. —But you won't sleep with him, will you?— She was such a sensible girl, she understood a man has to sleep with his wife; that was different. —You won't, will you, eh?— When there was a sortie to a nightclub, where the presence of wealthy local blacks and the strident sexual beauty of black prostitutes was the amusement, Marie-Claude appointed the young First Secretary to partner her protégée. Emile danced with her dutifully once or twice, flirting publicly in exactly the harmless degree expected of the married males in homage to the irresistibility of the female sex that had, of course, delivered them to their wives.

Boutique, bistro, bar, nightclub—these were the marked routes of the diplomatic and expatriate community. There was a path of her own drawn through the grass; the grass closed it away behind her. It led across one of those stretches of ground that are called vacant lots in the cities of other continents; here it was a vacant patch in history, a place where once manioc had been grown and goats had wandered, now appearing on some urban development plan as a sports or cultural centre that would never
be built. A tiny scratching of planted maize was hidden in the grass, like a memory. Her path crossed those made by the feet of fishermen, and servants moving from and to where she was going, the enormous hotel that multiplied itself, up and up, storey by storey, shelf by shelf of identically-jutting balconies and windows that eventually had nothing to reflect but sky. There was no other structure to give it scale, nothing to dissimulate its giant intrusion on the low horizons of islands and water, that drew the eye laterally. Even the great silk cotton tree and the palms left as a sign of its acculturation when the site was cleared were reduced to the level of undergrowth beside its concrete trunk.

Inside, the scale of unrelation, of disjuncture continued; through ceremonial purplish corridors she walked, past buried bars outlined like burning eyelids with neon, reception rooms named for African political heroes holding a silent assembly of stacked gilt chairs, crates of empty bottles and abandoned mattresses, sudden encounters with restaurant stage-props—plastic palm trees and stuffed monkeys from some Tropicana Room, rolled-up carpets from the Persian Garden. At the white grand piano outside a locked entrance where photographs of girls whom gilt text dated the previous year announced as direct from the Crazy Horse in Paris, she turned to a bank of elevator doors like the reredos of some cathedral. Her path was always the same; through the grass, through the carpeted tunnels of corridors, the soughing ascent to the same floor. She had her key to the room; the bed was big as the one in Sultan al-Hassam Ibn Sulaiman's fake palace. The Ambassador came by some path of his own through this dark ziggurat, pyramid, Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building raised to the gods of development; he could arrange everything as he arranged immigration papers. He shed the Ambassador. What a pleasure to be able to give so much pleasure! Enough to turn any young person's head. One day when he made love to her he smelled his children on her. It was a great sweetness to him; it
brought the two halves of his life together as they had never been before. An annealment, wholeness; a new eroticism.

—You have simplified everything.—

—Why me?— He had not concealed, despite the risk at the beginning that a young girl might have been shocked or even jealous, and withdrawn herself, that he had had many love affairs.

—I don't know, I don't want to know. Simplicity is the one thing that can't be explained. Not that you are simple, Hillela. You won't get away with that, my little girl! But that you are clever enough to make things simple.—

—Emile, why do you like other women so much?— She knew that was her category.

—Oh you are young, Hillela, you are still at the stage when you ask all the questions, you don't propose any answers.—

—Marie-Claude is so beautiful.—

—To have one beautiful woman. Once she is always there—it makes no difference. It doesn't help, you understand? Didn't she say it herself, about women: ‘Is it our fault'—well it's not their fault they are beautiful, so many of them, and how can I not … try? As soon as I have one, or sometimes two at once—although they don't know it—I see another and I have to prove to myself I can possess her. And so it goes on … gets worse as I get older. I'm forty-seven …— The birthday was recognized between them in a different context from that of the children's performance, arranged by Hillela, that marked it the week before. If he had ever met Udi Stück, he could have curiously confirmed the possibility of telling this girl
anything
, confiding
amour propre
to her stranger's hands.

He was smoking; this one smoked after love-making, the member of the Command in exile had drunk water, and far back, there was the one who had shed sibling tears. The smoke seemed to be drawn down all through his body as it was through his nose; his toes flexed, and his hand bent hers. —I need it like I need smoking.—

He turned and looked at her. He was silenced by what he saw, by what she understood beneath the crude and paltry words. Her black eyes gave him back his meaning in yet another question, unspoken: is life terrible as that?

After the room was left empty he went away to his secretary, attachés, telex messages and distinguished callers, with the smooth look round the eyes of a man in harmony with his body and free to be alert; any experienced staff recognizes the signs of a successful love affair and is thankful for the calm it generates. Hillela did not make her path to the Residence. She wandered; her body moved with the suppleness limbered by love-making, the pretty loll of breasts and the rhythm of her thighs were a confidence that made another kind of path through people in the streets. Men turned, as if at a reminder, to look at her; it was not her fault. Where the European city grid of right angles was overgrown and broken up by the purposeful tangle of African pursuits—the shortest point-to-point meander taken on foot between barbers and fruit-sellers, scribes and bicycle repairers—to be white was to feel invisible; only a sensuous self-assurance, while it lasted, could counter that. Hillela came to the docks. Her nostrils widened to snuff in the spice of cargoes swinging out on cranes overhead—coffee and cocoa beans—and the scrubbed smell of tar, the grassy scents of wet rope and putrid whiff of fish guts. The sun sank and flung colours up the sky. The black labourers who did not see her in their inward gaze of weariness, their self-image of religion and race, suddenly unrolled mats towards the East and bowed their heads to the ground. Their seamed heels were raised, naked, as they kneeled, their feet tense. The draped fishnets enlaced the sunset like the leads of stained-glass windows. A flock of prayers rose murmuring, vibrating, buzzing all round her, a groan of appeal and answer, supplication and release.