Life Times Stories Part 12

'He's a medicine man,' Xixo was explaining, while Jason laughed 'Oh for G.o.d's sake!' and tossed off the rest of his gin, and Frances went forward to bring the late arrival, Spuds Buthelezi, in his lattice-knit gold shirt and pale blue jeans, into the circle. When the American had exchanged names and had Spuds by the hand, he said, 'And what's Spuds, then?'

The young man had a dough-shaped, light-coloured face with tiny features stuck in it in a perpetual expression of suspicious surprise. The martinis had turned up the volume of voices that met him. 'I'll have a beer,' he said to Frances; and they laughed again.

Jason Madela rescued him, a giant flicking a fly from a gla.s.s of water. 'He's one of the eggheads,' he said. 'That's another category altogether.'

'Didn't you used to be one yourself, Jason?' Frances pretended a reproof: Jason Madela would want a way of letting Ceretti know that although he was a successful businessman in the townships, he was also a man with a university degree.

'Don't let's talk about my youthful misdemeanours, my dear Frances,' he said, with the accepted light touch of a man hiding a wound. 'I thought the men were supposed to be doing the work around here I can cope with that,' and he helped her chip apart the ice cubes that had welded together as they melted. 'Get your servant to bring us a little hot water, that'll do it easily-'

'Oh I'm really falling down on the job!' Ceretti was listening carefully, putting in a low 'Go on' or 'You mean?' to keep the flow of Xixo's long explanation of problems over a travel doc.u.ment, and he looked up at Frances and Jason Madela offering a fresh round of drinks.

'You go ahead and talk, that's the idea,' Frances said.

He gave her the trusting grin of some intelligent small pet. 'Well, you two are a great combination behind the bar. Real teamwork of long a.s.sociation, I guess.'

'How long is it?' Frances asked, drily but gaily, meaning how many years had she and Jason Madela been acquaintances, and, playfully making as if to antic.i.p.ate a blow, he said, 'Must be ten years and you were a grown-up girl even then' although both knew that they had seen each other only across various rooms perhaps a dozen times in five years, and got into conversation perhaps half as often.

At lunch Edgar Xixo was still fully launched on the story of his difficulties in travelling back and forth to one of the former British Protectorates, now small, newly independent states surrounded by South African territory. It wasn't, he explained, as if he were asking for a pa.s.sport: it was just a travel doc.u.ment he wanted, that's all, just a piece of paper from the Bantu Affairs Department that would allow him to go to Lesotho on business and come back.

'Now have I got this straight you'd been there sometime?' Ceretti hung over the wisp of steam rising from his soup like a seer over a crystal ball.

'Yes, yes, you see, I had a travel doc.u.ment-'

'But these things are good for one exit and re-entry only.' Jason dispatched it with the good-humoured impatience of the quick-witted. 'We blacks aren't supposed to want to go wandering about the place. Tell them you want to take a holiday in Lourenco Marques they'll laugh in your face. If they don't kick you downstairs. Oppenheimer and Charlie Engelhard can go off in their yachts to the South of France, but Jason Madela?'

He got the laugh he wanted, and, on the side, the style of his reference to rich and important white industrialists as decent enough fellows, if one happened to know them, suggested that he might. Perhaps he did, for all Frances Taver knew; Jason would be just the kind of man the white establishment would find if they should happen to decide they ought to make a token gesture of being in touch with the African ma.s.ses. He was curiously rea.s.suring to white people; his dark suits, white shirts, urbane conversation and sense of humour, all indistinguishable from their own and apparently s.n.a.t.c.hed out of thin air, made it possible for them to forget the unpleasant facts of the life imposed on him and his kind. How tactful, how clever he was, too. She, just as well as any millionaire, would have done to ill.u.s.trate his point; she was culpable: white, and free to go where she pleased. The flattery of being spared pa.s.sed invisibly from her to him, like a promissory note beneath the table.

Edgar Xixo had even been summoned to The Greys, Special Branch headquarters, for questioning, he said 'And I've never belonged to any political organisation, they know there've never been any charges against me. I don't know any political refugees in Lesotho, I don't want to see anybody I have to go up and down simply because of business, I've got this agency selling equipment to the people at the diamond diggings, it could be a good thing if...'

'A little palm-grease, maybe,' said Jason Madela, taking some salad.

Xixo appealed to them all, dismayed. 'But if you offer it to the wrong one, that's the . . . ? In my position, an attorney!'

'Instinct,' said Madela. 'One can't learn it.'

'Tell me,' Ceretti signalled an appreciative refusal of a second helping of duck, while turning from his hostess to Madela. 'Would you say that bribery plays a big part in daily relations between Africans and officials? I don't mean the political police, of course the white administration? Is that your experience?'

Madela sipped his wine and then turned the bottle so that he could read the label, saying meanwhile, 'Oh not what you'd call graft, not by your standards. Small stuff. When I ran a transport business I used to make use of it. Licences for the drivers and so on. You get some of these young Afrikaner clerks, they don't earn much and they don't mind who they pick up a few bob from. They can be quite reasonable. I was thinking there might be someone up at the Bantu Affairs offices. But you have to have a feeling for the right man' he put down the bottle and smiled at Frances Taver 'Thank heaven I'm out of it, now. Unless I should decide to submit some of my concoctions to the Bureau of Standards, eh?' and she laughed.

'Jason has broken the white monopoly of the hair-straightener and blood-purifier business,' Frances said gracefully, 'and the nice thing about him is that he has no illusions about his products.'

'But plenty of confidence,' he said. 'I'm looking into the possibilities of exporting my pills for men, to the States. I think the time's just ripe for American Negroes to feel they can buy back a bit of old Africa in a bottle, eh?'

Xixo picked about his leg of duck as if his problem itself were laid cold before them on the table. 'I mean, I've said again and again, show me anything on my record-'

The young journalist, Spuds Buthelezi, said in his heavy way, 'It might be because you took over Samson Dumile's show.'

Every time a new name was mentioned the corners of Ceretti's eyes flickered narrow in attention.

'Well, that's the whole thing!' Xixo complained to Ceretti. 'The fellow I was working for, Dumile, was mixed up in a political trial and he got six years I took over the bona fide clients, that's all, my office isn't in the same building, nothing to do with it but that's the whole thing!'

Frances suddenly thought of Sam Dumile, in this room of hers, three two? years ago, describing a police raid on his house the night before and roaring with laughter as he told how his little daughter said to the policeman, 'My father gets very cross if you play with his papers.'

Jason picked up the wine bottle, making to pa.s.s it round 'Yes, please do, please do what happened to the children?' she said.

Jason knew whose she meant; made a polite attempt. 'Where are Sam's kids?'

But Edgar Xixo was nodding in satisfied confirmation as Ceretti said, 'It's a pretty awful story. My G.o.d. Seems you can never hope to be in the clear, no matter how careful you are. My G.o.d.'

Jason remarked, aside, 'They must be around somewhere with relatives. He's got a sister in Bloemfontein.'

The dessert was a compound of fresh mangoes and cream, an invention of the house: 'Mangoes Frances' said the American. 'This is one of the African experiences I'd recommend.' But Jason Madela told them he was allergic to mangoes and began on the cheese which was standing by. Another bottle of wine was opened to go with the cheese and there was laughter which Robert Ceretti immediately turned on himself when it emerged out of the cross-talk that Spuds Buthelezi thought Ceretti had something to do with an American foundation. In the sympathetic atmosphere of food, drink and sunshine marbled with cigarette smoke, the others listened as if they had not heard it all before while Buthelezi, reluctant to waste the speech he had primed himself with, pressed Ceretti with his claim to a study grant that would enable him to finish his play. They heard him again outlining the plot and inspiration of the play 'right out of township life' as he always said, blinking with finality, convinced that this was the only necessary qualification for successful authorship. He had patiently put together and taken apart, many times, in his play, ingredients faithfully lifted from the work of African writers who got published, and he was himself African: what else could be needed but someone to take it up?

Foundation or no foundation, Robert Ceretti showed great interest. 'Do you know the play at all, Frances? I mean,' (he turned back to the round, wine-open face of the young man) 'is it far enough along to show to anybody?'

And she said, finding herself smiling encouragingly, 'Oh yes an early draft, he's worked on it a lot since then, haven't you and there's been a reading . . . ?'

'I'll certainly get it to you,' Buthelezi said, writing down the name of Ceretti's hotel.

They moved back to the veranda for the coffee and brandy. It was well after three o'clock by the time they stood about, making their goodbyes. Ceretti's face was gleaming. 'Jason Madela's offered to drop me back in town, so don't you worry, Frances. I was just saying, people in America'll find it difficult to believe it was possible for me to have a lunch like this, here. It's been so very pleasant pleasant indeed. We all had a good time. He was telling me that a few years ago a gathering like this would be quite common, but now there aren't many white people who would want to risk asking Africans and there aren't many Africans who would risk coming. I certainly enjoyed myself . . . I hope we haven't put you out, lingering so long . . . it's been a wonderful opportunity . . .' Frances saw them to the garden gate, talking and laughing; last remarks and goodbyes were called from under the trees of the suburban street.

When she came back alone the quiet veranda rang tense with vanished voices, like a bell tower after the hour has struck. She gave the cat the milk left over from coffee. Someone had left a half-empty packet of cigarettes; who was it who broke matches into little tents? As she carried the tray into the deserted kitchen, she saw a note written on the back of a bill taken from the spike. HOPE YOUR PARTY WENT WELL.

It was not signed, and was written with the kitchen ballpoint which hung on a string. But she knew who had written it; the vision from the past had come and gone again.

The servants Amos and Bettie had rooms behind a granadilla vine at the bottom of the yard. She called, and asked Bettie whether anyone had asked for her? No, no one at all.

He must have heard the voices in the quiet of the afternoon, or perhaps simply seen the cars outside, and gone away. She wondered if he knew who was there. Had he gone away out of consideration for her safety? They never spoke of it, of course, but he must know that the risks she took were carefully calculated, very carefully calculated. There was no way of disguising that from someone like him. Then she saw him smiling to himself at the sight of the collection of guests: Jason Madela, Edgar Xixo and Spuds Buthelezi Spuds Buthelezi, as well. But probably she was wrong, and he would have come out among them without those feelings of reproach or contempt that she read into the idea of his gait, his face. HOPE YOUR PARTY WENT WELL. He may have meant just that.

Frances Taver knew Robert Ceretti was leaving soon, but she wasn't quite sure when. Every day she thought, I'll phone and say goodbye. Yet she had already taken leave of him, that afternoon of the lunch. Just telephone and say goodbye. On the Friday morning, when she was sure he would be gone, she rang up the hotel, and there it was, the soft, cautious American voice. The first few moments were awkward; he protested his pleasure at hearing from her, she kept repeating, 'I thought you'd be gone . . .' Then she said, 'I just wanted to say about that lunch. You mustn't be taken in-'

He was saying, 'I've been so indebted to you, Frances, really you've been great.'

'-not phonies, no, that's not what I mean, on the contrary, they're very real, you understand?'

'Oh, your big good-looking friend, he's been marvellous. Sat.u.r.day night we were out on the town, you know.' He was proud of the adventure but didn't want to use the word 'shebeen' over the telephone.

She said, 'You must understand. Because the corruption's real. Even they've become what they are because things are the way they are. Being phony is being corrupted by the situation . . . and that's real enough. We're made out of that.'

He thought maybe he was finding it difficult to follow her over the telephone, and seized upon the word: 'Yes, the "situation" he was able to slip me into what I gather is one of the livelier places.'

Frances Taver said, 'I don't want you to be taken in-'

The urgency of her voice stopped his mouth, was communicated to him even if what she said was not.

'-by anyone,' the woman was saying.

He understood, indeed, that something complicated was wrong, but he knew, too, that he wouldn't be there long enough to find out, that perhaps you needed to live and die there, to find out. All she heard over the telephone was the voice a.s.suring her, 'Everyone's been marvellous . . . really marvellous. I just hope I can get back here some day that is, if they ever let me in again . . .'

A Meeting in s.p.a.ce Every morning he was sent to the baker and the French children slid out of dark walls like the village cats and walked in his footsteps. He couldn't understand what they said to each other, but he thought he understood their laughter: he was a stranger. He looked forward to the half-fearful, disdainful feeling their presence at his back gave him, and as he left the house expected at each alley, hole and doorway the start of dread with which he would see them. They didn't follow him into the baker's shop. Perhaps the baker wouldn't have them they looked poor, and the boy knew, from the piccanins at home, that poor kids steal. He had never been into a bakery at home in South Africa; the baker-boy, a black man who rode a tricycle with a rattling bin on the front, came through the yard holding the loaves out of the way of the barking dogs, and put two white and one brown on the kitchen table. It was the same with fruit and vegetables; at home the old Indian, Vallabhbhai, stopped his greengrocer's lorry at the back gate, and his piccanin carried into the kitchen whatever you bought.

But here, the family said, part of the fun was doing your own shopping in the little shops that were hidden away by the switchback of narrow streets. They made him repeat over and over again the words for asking for bread, in French, but once in the baker's shop he never said them, only pointed at the loaf he wanted and held out his hand with money in it. He felt that he was someone else, a dumb man perhaps. After a few days, if he were given change he would point again, this time at a bun with a glazing of jam. He had established himself as a customer. The woman who served chattered at him, smiled with her head on one side while she picked the money out of his palm; but he gave no sign of response.

There was another child who sometimes turned up with the usual group. He would hail them loudly, from across a street, in their own language, and stalk along with them for a bit, talking away, but he looked different. The boy thought it was just because this one was richer. Although he wore the usual canvas shoes and cotton shorts, he was hung about with all sorts of equipment a camera and two other leather cases. He began to appear in the bakery each morning. He stood right near, as if the dumb person were also invisible, and peering up experiencedly under a thick, shiny fringe of brown hair, looked along the cakes on top of the counter while apparently discussing them in a joking, familiar way with the woman. He also appeared unexpectedly in other places, without the group. Once he was leaning against the damp archway to the tunnel that smelled like a school lavatory it was the quick way from the upper level of streets to the lower. Another time he came out of the door of the streaky-pink-painted house with the Ali Baba pots, as if he must have been watching at the window. Then he was balancing along the top of the wall that overlooked the pitch where in the afternoons the baker and other men played a bowling game with a heavy ball. Suddenly, he was outside the gate of the villa that the family were living in; he squatted on the doorstep of the house opposite, doing something to the inside of his camera. He spoke: 'You English?'

'Yes not really no. I mean, I speak English, but I come from South Africa.'

'Africa? You come from Africa? That's a heck of a way!'

'Fifteen hours or so. We came in a jet. We actually took a little longer because, you see, something went wrong with the one engine and we had to wait three hours in the middle of the night in Kano. Boy, was it hot, and there was a live camel wandering around.' The anecdote cut itself off abruptly; the family often said long-winded stories were a bore.

'I've had some pretty interesting experiences myself. My parents are travelling round the world and I'm going with them. Most of the time. I'll go back home to school for a while in the Fall. Africa. Fantastic. We may get out there sometime. D'you know anything about these darned Polaroids? It's stuck. I've got a couple of pictures of you I must show you. I take candid shots. All over the place. I've got another camera, a Minox, but I mostly use this one here because it develops the prints right in the box and you can give them to people right off. It's good for a laugh. I've got some pretty interesting pictures, too.'

'Where was I in the street?'

'Oh I'm taking shots all the time. All over the place.'

'What's the other case?'

'Tape recorder. I'll get you on tape, too. I tape people at Zizi's Bar and in the Place, they don't know I'm doing it, I've got this minute little mike, you see. It's fantastic.'

'And what's in here?'

The aerial was pulled out like a silver wand. 'My transistor, of course, my beloved transistor. D'you know what I just heard? "Help!" Are the Beatles popular down in Africa?'

'We saw them in London live. My brother and sister and me. She bought the record of "Help!" but we haven't got anything to play it on, here.'

'Good G.o.d, some guys get all the breaks! You saw them. You notice how I've grown my hair? Say, look, I can bring down my portable player and your sister can hear her record.'

'What time can you come?'

'Any time you say. I'm easy. I've got to go for this darned French lesson now, and I have to be in at noon so that old Madame Blanche can give me my lunch before she quits, but I'll be around indefinitely after that.'

'Straight after lunch. About two. I'll wait for you here. Could you bring the pictures, as well of me?'

Clive came racing through the tiny courtyard and charged the flyscreen door, letting it bang behind him. 'Hey! There's a boy who can speak English! He just talked to me! He's a real Amur-r-rican just wait till you hear him. And you should see what he's got, a Polaroid camera he's taken some pictures of me and I didn't even know him and he's got a tiny little tape recorder, you can get people on it when they don't know and the smallest transistor I've ever seen.'

His mother said, 'So you've found a pal. Thank goodness.' She was cutting up green peppers for salad, and she offered him a slice on the point of her knife, but he didn't see it.

'He's going round the world, but he goes back to America to school sometimes.'

'Oh, where? Does he come from New York?'

'I don't know, he said something about Fall, I think that's where the school is. The Fall, he said.'

'That's not a place, silly it's what they call autumn.'

The shower was in a kind of cupboard in the kitchen-dining room, and its sliding door was shaken in the frame, from inside. The impatient occupant got it to jerk open: she was his sister. 'You've found what?' The enormous expectancy with which she had invested this holiday, for herself, opened her shining face under its plastic mob-cap.

'We can hear the record, Jen, he's bringing his player. He's from America.'

'How old?'

'Same as me. About.'

She pulled off the cap and her straight hair fell down, covering her head to the shoulders and her face to her eyelashes. 'Fine,' she said soberly.

His father sat reading Nice-Matin on one of the dining-table chairs, which was dressed, like a person, in a yellow skirt and a cover that fitted over its hard back. He had unsuccessfully put out a friendly foot to trip up the boy as he burst in, and now felt he ought to make another gesture of interest. As if to claim that he had been listening to every word, he said, 'What's your friend's name?'

'Oh, I don't know. He's American, he's the boy with the three leather cases-'

'Yes, all right-'

'You'll see him this afternoon. He's got a Beatle cut.' This last was addressed to the young girl, who turned, halfway up the stone stairs with a train of wet footprints behind her.

But of course Jenny, who was old enough to introduce people as adults do, at once asked the American boy who he was. She got a very full reply. 'Well, I'm usually called Matt, but that's short for my second name, really my real names are Nicholas Matthew Rootes Keller.'

'Junior?' she teased, 'The Third?'

'No, why should I be? My father's name is Donald Rootes Keller. I'm named for my grandfather on my mother's side. She has one h.e.l.l of a big family. Her brothers won five decorations between them, in the war. I mean, three in the war against the Germans, and two in the Korean War. My youngest uncle, that's Rod, he's got a hole in his back it's where the ribs were you can put your hand in. My hand, I mean' he made a fist with a small, thin, tanned hand 'not an adult person's. How much more would you say my hand had t'grow, I mean would you say half as much again, as much as that? to be a full-size, man's hand-' He measured it against Clive's; the two ten-year-old fists matched eagerly.

'Yours and Clive's put together one full-size, king-size, man-size paw. Clip the coupon now. Enclose only one box-top or reasonable facsimile.'

But the elder brother's baiting went ignored or misunderstood by the two small boys. Clive might react with a faint grin of embarra.s.sed pleasure and reflected glory at the reference to the magazine ad culture with which his friend was a.s.sociated by his brother Mark. Matt went on talking in the innocence of one whose background is still as naturally accepted as once his mother's lap was.

He came to the villa often after that afternoon when the new Beatle record was heard for the first time on his player. The young people had nothing to do but wait while the parents slept after lunch (the place, where Jenny liked to stroll, in the evenings, inviting mute glances from boys who couldn't speak her language, was dull at that time of day) and they listened to the record again and again in the courtyard summerhouse that had been a pigsty before the peasant cottage became a villa. When the record palled, Matt taped their voices 'Say something African!' and Mark made up a jumble of the one or two Zulu words he knew, with cheerleaders' cries, words of abuse and phrases from familiar road signs, in Afrikaans. 'Sakabona! Voetsak hambakahle hou links malingi mushle Vrystaat!'

The brothers and sister rocked their rickety chairs back ecstatically on two legs when the record was played, but Matt listened with eyes narrowed and tongue turned up to touch his teeth, like an ornithologist who is bringing back alive the song of rare birds. 'Boy, thanks. Fantastic. That'll go into the doc.u.mentary I'm going to make. Partly with my father's movie camera, I hope, and partly with my candid stills. I'm working on the script now. It's in the family, you see.' He had already explained that his father was writing a book (several books, one about each country they visited, in fact) and his mother was helping. 'They keep to a strict schedule. They start work around noon and carry on until about one a.m. That's why I've got to be out of the house very early in the morning and I'm not supposed to come back in till they wake up for lunch. And that's why I've got to keep out of the house in the afternoons, too; they got to have peace and quiet. For sleep and for work.'

Jenny said, 'Did you see his shorts that Madras stuff you read about? The colours run when it's washed. I wish you could buy it here.'

'That's a marvellous transistor, Dad.' Mark sat with his big bare feet flat on the courtyard flagstones and his head hung back in the sun as if he didn't live in it all the year round, at home; but this was France he basked in, not sunlight.

'W-e-ll, they spoil their children terribly. Here's a perfect example. A fifty-pound camera's a toy. What's there left for them to want when they grow up.'

Clive would have liked them to talk about Matt all the time. He said, 'They've got a Maserati at home in America, at least, they did have, they've sold it now they're going round the world.'

The mother said, 'Poor little devil, shut out in the streets with all that rubbish strung around his neck.'

'Ho, rubbish, I'm sure!' said Clive, shrugging and turning up his palms exaggeratedly. 'Of course, hundreds of dollars of equipment are worth nothing, you know, nothing at all.'

'And how much is one dollar, may I ask, mister?' Jenny had learned by heart, on the plane, the conversion tables supplied by the travel agency.

'I don't know how much it is in our money I'm talking about America-'

'You're not to go down out of the village with him, Clive, ay, only in the village,' his father said every day.

He didn't go out of the village with the family, either. He didn't go to see the museum at Antibes or the potteries at Vallauris or even the palace, casino and aquarium at Monte Carlo. The ancient hill village inside its walls, whose disorder of streets had been as confusing as the dates and monuments of Europe's overlaid and overlapping past, became the intimate map of their domain his and Matt's. The alley cats shared it but the people, talking their unintelligible tongue, provided a babble beneath which, while performed openly in the streets, his activities with Matt acquired secrecy: as they went about, they were hidden even more than by the usual self-preoccupation of adults. They moved from morning till night with intense purpose; you had to be quick around corners, you mustn't be seen crossing the street, you must appear as if from nowhere among the late afternoon crowd in the place and move among them quite un.o.btrusively. One of the things they were compelled to do was to get from the church very old, with chicken wire where the stained gla.s.s must have been, and a faint mosaic, like a flaking transfer to under the school windows without attracting the attention of the children. This had to be done in the morning, when school was in session; it was just one of the stone houses, really, without playgrounds: the dragging chorus of voices coming from it reminded him of the schools for black children at home. At other times the village children tailed them, jeering and mimicking, or in obstinate silence, impossible to shake off. There were fights and soon he learnt to make with his fingers effective insulting signs he didn't understand, and to shout his one word of French, their bad word merde!