Authors: Nadine Gordimer
Go out and play.
For the first few moments there, eyelids alternately squeezing and lifting wide at the immersion in that benign illumination, of the sun, birds who ring out like mobile phones. But there is no connection to be made between wild creatures, even the half-domesticated frequenters of the suburbs feeding on cultivated flowers, lawn worms, compost bugs, and the summons of technology. Telephone ring. In the bush in the forest among the dunes the mangroves the swamps, the creatures ignore you. Devices that regulate your being have nothing to do with theirs – unless they are hunted, expelled from their places in the universe – yes, air habitat as well as land – by logging, burning off, urban, industrial and rural pollution. Radiant nuclear fallout.
No connection between that quarantine room and out here.
The garden. It's both the place banished to in order to be got rid of by the preoccupations of an adult house, and the place to be yourself, against orders. Homework abandoned unfinished, there's no reproach in the nagging cries of hadedas, as they touch down on trees and earth-beds, close by.
Could almost put out a hand and touch one. The mother-of-pearl sheen casually attractingly flashed as the dull dark plumage catches the sun; wouldn't have noticed then just as it was years too soon for the glint of a glance from a woman to be caught.
The bits of wood from the greengrocer's fruit boxes, begged off Mr Farinha in his corner shop. Bright nails. Saw from the garden shed and hammer from the domestic repairs cupboard where spare lightbulbs and torch batteries were jumbled (other fathers are better-organised handymen). They can be arranged as they were, patterned about the open lawn, the glittering nails, and wheels from an old lawn-mower – old baby-stroller, could be. The boxcart into which this stuff set out is transformed, twisting unsteadily down the paths over there and clattering through the yard (concrete surface then) where Primrose is distantly singing a comfortingly monotonous work-song to herself.
Nothing outside doors and walls is ever really tamed. Confined. Roots of a pepper tree (
Schinus molle
) humping up under concrete once had to be dug up, severed. This boys' wilderness for tussling contests and cricket runs toted with a stick on sand, the breathless heat of sin in experiment with mutual masturbation down in the neglected patch behind the high, overgrown pampas grass, opened out into what cannot be reached lying in the designated room or sitting alone with plenty of reading matter in the livingroom it is better not to frequent too much. Here, radiance goes dark inside the body's terrain, there's only the light of the sun on the skin, rosy through eyelids closed at rest, not in sleep. The wetlands of St Lucia walked – how many months ago? – there are two Eras, BR, before discovery of the gland gone malignant, and AR, after radiance – that wilderness can be walked again from this small one, sequence by sequence, impression by impression, scent by scent. Alert as you go, you only register, with perhaps some moments of analysis, what there is to be understood later. The reading matter has not included the report passed on by Benni; it has been lying at the foot of the bed as if it were some irrelevant unsolicited leaflet, a piece of professional junk mail. Not to be allowed to distract from whatever it is that somehow totally occupies such concentration as there is. Survival, probably. While here with eyes climbing favoured trees, moving over the exhilarated pace of somersaults, pursuing the capture of a vivid grass snake green under kicked-aside leaves, he could think of looking at conclusions gathered from someone else's walk in the wilderness of swamp, mangrove, watery broth of life.
But when he got himself roused, back into quarantine to pick up the few sheets of paper conscientiously word-processed by an institute secretary, he put the thing aside, not on the foot of the bed again but slid on a pile of video cassettes.
Only out there, the garden, could the wilderness be gained, the unfinished homework be escaped. Leg over the sill; lying on the grass the many hours not tallied with a stick tracing in the sand. The days.
Nights. The nuclear family, father mother son, is asleep in reconstitution, reduced by quarantine.
One night, the dog barked frantically in the small hours and Lyndsay got up to follow as it plunged released through the front door into the driveway. In the arrested silence between night and day the interruption of the dog echoed from a hard black sky. The security light triggered by any movement within its orbit caught a man spot-lit like a celebrity, approaching. She shouted, What do you want! Response customary for mendicants, panhandlers, idiotic for an invader with what was the shape of a weapon of some sort in the hand clutched at his side. The dog danced and leapt, barking deafeningly but the man must have heard her anyway and she heard, as if they were yelling in mad conversation, his curses at her in an African language and the foulest scatological English, as he stood his ground a moment before twisting violently to race ahead of the dog and half-scramble, half-vault over the garden's iron-bar gate.
The son down the passage, doubly isolated by the soporific prescribed for him, and the husband asleep on the side of his good ear with only the other, increasingly less reliable, above the bedclothes, were not roused; the son on a remote level of consciousness and the husband, hearing at reduced volume the kind of annoying fuss of the dog that generally had no cause other than its bad dreams.
In the morning when she told the two of the man in the driveway, they were amazed, reproachful in concern. But why didn't you call one of us! Two men in the house, why does a woman go to face an intruder in the middle of the night! Adrian knows this woman, his, is courageous in everything she does, but…
My dear mama
, foolhardy, I won't say stupid! Her son.
She pulled a smiling, deprecating mouth at the concern and the reproach.
Adrian. His father didn't seem to feel it as any diminution of manhood, that incident. You don't have to be macho – the quick word of judgment by which Benni measures male reactions so evident, she relates, in her working milieu – simply to accept that there are some situations which by reason of physique if nothing else, a male is the one fit to deal with. Adrian seemed concerned only to assure himself that Lyndsay was unharmed in any way at all, by the existence of a threat, by an experience of fear, as if he wanted to go over reverently that face that body that spirit of hers to be certain the five-minute confrontation in the night hadn't been traumatic: changed everything in her. You don't ever think, none of your business, in the ordinary course of living your own adult life, that there still may be this kind of sexually-charged emotion in your father for a woman, the woman that is your mother.
His father, having hired a permanent night watchman equipped with intercommunication to a security patrol company, has filed the incident, dealt with appropriately, among present living conditions.
It depends whose. An incident without harmful consequences may have another consequence within another living condition. A young man wouldn't have slept through the obvious summons of commotion if he were not less than a man, less than himself, stoned out of his mind into impotence as an inability to take any action, by drugs swallowed and radiance through the circulation of arteries blinding the brain. This's the monologue when lying in the quarantine's four walls while they, the others, Benni/Berenice, Adrian, Lyndsay, the friends who use the safe-distance telephone and email to enquire how you're doing, are all what is known as about their daily business. Busy-ness.
The garden is where the company of jacaranda fronds finger the same breeze that brushed the boy's soft cheek, where caught in peripheral vision a cent's-worth of never-exterminated snail moves by peristalsis over a stone, there is the wise presence that changes solitude of monologue into some kind of dialogue. A dialogue with questions; or answers never sought, heard, in the elsewhere. Not even the wilderness, where they must have, sometime, disturbed the readings of surveying instruments; the body of a fish floating belly-up? The doctors say there is significant improvement in those other readings. The radiance will soon fade and cease completely and the twenty-first-century leper may go back to touch and be touched.
Accepted and accepting.
What is it to go back to. You'll soon be home, had enough of us! Lyndsay's delight, for him. Berenice, across the space of No-Man's-Land – Why shouldn't we go off on a little trip, then? Indulge ourselves, one of the exclusive resorts the Agency represents, these really great game reserves… no… you've had enough of being away, just us and Nickie in our own place.
What is it: to go back.
The individual, the woman, the desire – the persona Benni/Berenice. Create her as the father did the mother, going over her being after she'd endangered it shouting,
What do you want
.
The man standing alone in the night of the garden ran away, back. The only time out in the garden ever at that time of night was when allowed to stay up to celebrate a New Year in a radiance of fireworks.
Back, to gain forgiveness, make up to the small boy (he's the spitting image of you over again) for desertion by
Daddy! Paul!
while the fingers had to be prized off the bars of the gate. Oh the boy's so young, that will be forgotten, filed away in childhood.
Only to come back, maybe, before a psychiatrist trying to unknot an adolescent's painful aggression. So many half-grown about whom no parents can fathom why these menacing creatures they've produced are as they are.
What do you want. What did you want. What did you settle for.
Five years passed – a state of existence in which the question – if it is one, because a choice was made – doesn't sound from within. There was – is – no place for it there. But
this
unimaginable concept of Life Time, the inconceivable: a state of existence which could-should never have happened, brings a knowing of that which was not admitted. The emanation irradiates the hidden or undiscovered.
To go back, to the contradiction that surely cut through the intimacy a man and a woman make together. That unit of being that is sexual fulfilment within the other conditions of being,
being in the world
, commitment of religious or political faith, commitment of values (can't weigh them in year-end bonus), what you live by in what matters, idea of what is meaningful for each in the aims of work, beyond the common needs it meets – can it be divided. You go your way I go mine while we belong easily together. A good fit. The evidence of that achievement the two-in-one tender flesh of the child. Who wants to face the fact that this 'achievement' also can result from the greatest possible alienation between a man and a woman 'together': rape.
Benni means well when Berenice offers a weekend transition from the state where the Untouchable has been a hermit within his own body – my god, of course she's tried to understand what this is, in her way – and coming: home. To take up where everything was left off. Meant well. So why allow an answer to a question, so long never put to the self, to open up such significance. It was nothing, her thought to please, quickly passed over. A nothing he has all the time in this existence to follow how and why it would come to mind in the one who proposed it. For Benni there is a Berenice solution to his return from an absence unlike any, a few days' break in the bush offered by one of the clients whose public relations the Agency handles. Luxury suites, pool and sauna, the Big Five sure to be seen on game drives, a portable bar on board the open-viewing vehicle. He loves the bush doesn't he, its animals, birds, insects, before he goes home again to their threesome life together let him return to make the connection with the working life he's so wrapped up in. For Benni, Berenice's recommendation is a microcosm of that wilderness. She's right, in a way. These places simulate life in the wild for indigenous animals who otherwise would not survive industrial and urban expansion; the territory bought by what is known as the leisure industry is land where the equally indigenous people were driven out by conquest of old colonial wars and exchanges of papers of possession for paper money, ever since, between generations of conquerors become lawmakers. Many of the corporate clients of whom the Agency is proud (high-profile is the coveted category in the business) are consortia that bid for rights to build resorts where the environment won't survive this kind of development, nevertheless. There was – is, he must not think of as no longer there, the terrain where he is not – a consortium lobbying the government with assurance of exceptional tourist potential, economic uplift of the surrounding region (the full litany), for such a scheme to build an hotel, casino, yacht marina as part of the vast drainage plan the government envisages. Development Disaster.
Whom does Berenice believe. Him, her man, or the client. What is her conviction when he comes from the wilderness and tells of the irreplaceable forest felled to make way for the casino, the fish floating belly-up in all that's left of a watercourse diverted to feed an Olympic-size swimming pool and replica of one of the fountains of Rome. What's her conviction within herself. His, or the client's? Or it's not as crude as that. Macho as that, she would interpret. It's something – Stop. Stop hearing the answer. But you cannot go back without knowing it.
She is that persona who has no need of convictions.
What is it? A terrible lack. A kind of awful purity? A virginity; or underdevelopment. That term fits.
Don't judge. For five years, if you count only the outward symbol of marriage as the unit of intimacy, not the love affair that preceded the formality, there was present always that while occupying the same bed you don't occupy the same fundament: to know your conviction of
being in the world
. Conviction, which? You cannot have two to live tolerantly by, outside the sense of self. One for the client and one at home. How could he, himself, whose work, reason-to-be is preserving life, live so long with an intimate, herself, who was successfully complicit in destroying it.