From a home improvement guide he learns that for each metre of concrete he will require three bags of sand, five bags of stone, and one bag of cement. If he makes the apron around the house ten centimetres deep, he calculates, he will need thirty bags of sand, fifty bags of stone, and ten bags of cement, which will entail six trips to the builders’ yard, six full loads in a one-ton truck.
Halfway through the first day of work it dawns on him that he has made a mistake of a calamitous order. Either he misread the guide or in his calculations he confused cubic metres with square metres. It is going to take many more than ten bags of cement, plus sand and stone, to lay ninety-six square metres of concrete. It is going to take many more than six trips to the builders’ yard; he is going to have to give up more than just a few weekends of his life.
Week after week, using a shovel and a wheelbarrow, he mixes sand, stone, cement and water; block after block he pours liquid concrete and levels it. His back hurts, his arms and wrists are so stiff that he can barely hold a pen. Above all the labour bores him. Yet he is not unhappy. What he finds himself doing is what people like him should have been doing ever since 1652, namely, his own dirty work. In fact, once he forgets about the time he is spending, the work begins to take on its own pleasure. There is such a thing as a well-laid slab whose well-laidness is plain for all to see. The slabs he is laying will outlast his tenancy of the house, may even outlast his spell on earth; in which case he will in a certain sense have cheated death. One might spend the rest of one’s life laying slabs, and fall each night into the profoundest sleep, tired with the ache of honest toil.
How many of the ragged workingmen who pass him in the street are secret authors of works that will outlast them: roads, walls, pylons? Immortality of a kind, a limited immortality, is not so hard to achieve after all. Why then does he persist in making marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them?
To be expanded on: his readiness to throw himself into half-baked projects; the alacrity with which he retreats from creative work into mindless industry.
16 April 1973
The same Sunday Times which, in among exposés of torrid love affairs between teachers and schoolgirls in country towns, in among pictures of pouting starlets in exiguous bikinis, comes out with revelations of atrocities committed by the security forces, reports that the Minister of the Interior has granted a visa allowing Breyten Breytenbach to come back to the land of his birth to visit his ailing parents. A compassionate visa, it is called; it covers both Breytenbach and his wife.
Breytenbach left the country years ago to live in Paris, and soon thereafter queered his pitch by marrying a Vietnamese woman, that is to say, a non-white, an Asiatic. He not only married her but, if one is to believe the poems in which she figures, is passionately in love with her. Despite which, says the Sunday Times, the Minister in his compassion will permit the couple a thirty-day visit during which the so-called Mrs Breytenbach will be treated as a white person, a temporary white, an honorary white.
From the moment they arrive in South Africa Breyten and Yolande, he swarthily handsome, she delicately beautiful, are dogged by the press. Zoom lenses capture every intimate moment as they picnic with friends or paddle in a mountain stream.
The Breytenbachs make a public appearance at a literary conference in Cape Town. The hall is packed to the rafters with people come to gape. In his speech Breyten calls Afrikaners a bastard people. It is because they are bastards and ashamed of their bastardy, he says, that they have concocted their cloud-cuckoo scheme of forced separation of the races.
His speech is greeted with huge applause. Soon thereafter he and Yolande fly home to Paris, and the Sunday newspapers return to their menu of naughty nymphets, errant spouses, and state murders.
To be explored: the envy felt by white South Africans (men) for Breytenbach, for his freedom to roam the world and for his unlimited access to a beautiful, exotic sex-companion.
2 September 1973
At the Empire Cinema in Muizenberg last night, an early film of Kurosawa’s, To Live. A stodgy bureaucrat learns that he has cancer and has only months to live. He is stunned, does not know what to do with himself, where to turn.
He takes his secretary, a bubbly but mindless young woman, out to tea. When she tries to leave he holds her back, gripping her arm. ‘I want to be like you!’ he says. ‘But I don’t know how!’ She is repelled by the nakedness of his appeal.
Question: How would he react if his father were to grip his arm like that?
13 September 1973
From an employment bureau where he has left his particulars he receives a call. A client seeks expert advice on language matters, will pay by the hour — is he interested? Language matters of what nature, he inquires? The bureau is unable to say.
He calls the number provided, makes an appointment to come to an address in Sea Point. His client is a woman in her sixties, a widow whose husband has departed this world leaving the bulk of his considerable estate in a trust controlled by his brother. Outraged, the widow has resolved to challenge the will. But all the lawyers she has consulted have counselled her against trying. The will is, they say, watertight. Nevertheless she refuses to give up. The lawyers, she is convinced, have misread the wording of the will. She is therefore giving up on lawyers and instead soliciting expert linguistic advice.
With a cup of tea at his elbow he peruses the last testament of the deceased. Its meaning is perfectly plain. To the widow goes the flat in Sea Point and a sum of money. The remainder of the estate goes into a trust for the benefit of his children by a former marriage.
‘I fear I cannot help you,’ he says. ‘The wording is unambiguous. There is only one way in which it can be read.’
‘What about here?’ she says. She leans over his shoulder and stabs a finger at the text. Her hand is tiny, her skin mottled; on the third finger is a diamond in an extravagant setting. ‘Where it says Notwithstanding the aforesaid.’
‘It says that if you can demonstrate financial distress you are entitled to apply to the trust for support.’
‘What about notwithstanding?’
‘It means that what is stated in this clause is an exception to what has been stated before and takes precedence over it.’
‘But it also means that the trust cannot withstand my claim. What does withstand mean if it doesn’t mean that?’
‘It is not a question of what withstand means. It is a question of what Notwithstanding the aforesaid means. You must take the phrase as a whole.’
She gives an impatient snort. ‘I am paying for your services as an expert on English, not as a lawyer,’ she says. ‘The will is written in English, in English words. What do the words mean? What does notwithstanding mean?’
A madwoman, he thinks. How am I going to get out of this? But of course she is not mad. She is simply in the grip of rage and greed: rage against the husband who has slipped her grasp, greed for his money.
‘The way I understand the clause,’ she says, ‘if I make a claim then no one, including my brother-in-law, can withstand it. Because that is what not withstand means: he can’t withstand me. Otherwise what is the point of using the word? Do you see what I mean?’