— Asleep down there at the river, what will I care. —
— You think you’ve discovered the joy of simple tastes, I know, but it’s just that you’ve made enough money. —
— If you had my money… it offends you to think I’ve got what I want, through it. Free soul that you are: you’ve never forgotten your Sunday school dictum that money is wicked. And your psychologizing — doesn’t Freud say money is shit? But even shit is good — if you could just see this good thick carpet of ordure the cows have laid down in their paddock. It’s dry and friable, and when Jacobus spreads it on the fields and the irrigation jets wet it, there’s the smell of the sea here, a wonderful freshness, salt and sensual. —
— You think you’ve found peace but it’s just that no one as intelligent as you are — basically — (always a reservation, from her) could go on forever seeing those awful people you mix with, and eating those awful expensive meals in those ghastly hotels, and meeting those bloody awful charity-dispensing wives of other businessmen —
The young ones aren’t so bad. There are some lovely girls among the daughters. If one were to have long blond hair oneself, almost as long as theirs (from the back you can hardly tell the difference) and go about barefoot, it might make sense. Otherwise not.
— I can hear it. ‘He’s in love with his farm,’ they’ll say. But you don’t want them to come out and play at milkmaids. Perhaps you’ll really believe it’s love. A new kind. A superior kind, without people. You’ll even think in time there’s something between you and the blacks, mmh? Those ‘simple’ blacks you don’t have to talk to. The little kids we saw pulling a toy car they’d made of wire in the image of one like yours. —
Jacobus respects me. Perhaps. Old devil. They respect the people they know they can’t fool. They know where they are with me. I’m the one who feeds them. I wanted to buy you the toy — you raved over it so much as a great work of art. Could have put it with your collection of pots. They would’ve been thrilled to get a nice big fifty-cent piece and go off and pinch another bit of wire to make another car. But no. Your face: there was some dreadful blue I’d made by such a suggestion. You know the tactics: your expression saying, well, if you can’t see why not, it’s something that can’t be explained. What are you rich people made of, anyway — pig-iron? But I’m serious. What exactly is pig-iron? I really ought to know. I do know it’s used in the manufacture of steel -
I really don’t care a bloody damn about pig-iron. I leave most of that to my partners these days. You were always so transparent. After a little while I could see your bright little female brain working as one can see the innards in the bodies of those pale ghekos that ran on the ceilings in Central Africa. Who knows when it might be useful to spout a few technical terms relevant to the base metal industry? Perhaps in London now, six thousand miles away, thank God, from this mealie-field where the Hadedas, having flown up shouting, have circled and settled once again, you are adding your knowledgeable background comment to a discussion of the labour crisis in the country you left so heroically. Now let’s look at one of the biggest employers of exploited black labour, the steel and engineering industry. SEIFSA —? — oh ask the professor’s wife, she’s the expert on the inner workings of South African capitalist exploitation; she infiltrated the bed of a prominent industrialist — the Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of South Africa has not only maintained but in most cases accelerated the substantial improvement reflected in its half-yearly figures. Pig-iron production showed the biggest increase, and production of non-ferrous alloys the biggest decrease. In September the pig-iron industry produced 435,600 tons, compared with 340,000 tons in August. This brought the production of pig-iron for the period January to September to 3,296,200 tons, an increase of 12·7 per cent over the 2,924,400 tons produced in the same period last year. Now there are hundreds of thousands of blacks in the steel industry, more than 80 per cent of the labour force is black, and from a little research I once did I happen to know that in the pig-iron industry alone… She’s as well-informed as she’s good looking; and tough, too — a brave smile from the doorway of the plane before she turned tail and disappeared.
That long-suffering professor of yours whom I never met — You regard him as an honest man, then? —
Lying in my bed, you answered the question as if it were another: — I respect him. —
Just as I said — Jacobus respects me.
— Why do you laugh? I do. He’s devoted to his work and he doesn’t live off anybody’s back. Not directly. I suppose if one looks into where the money for those research grants comes from —
A bore in the end, just as much as any of those women whom you despised as being nothing more than a body. It would have become a bore. Ingesting, digesting and exercising moral problems clearly as a see-through gheko.
Fuckers, not lovers.
Once you were waiting for a phone-call from a lover late at night. It didn’t come. You slept, and were awakened at three in the morning, the phone already in your hand, by a voice abusing you with filthy words. One of those anonymous ‘nuisance calls’ one is supposed to report to the police. You told me it was the worst thing that had ever happened to you; but that was before you got yourself interrogated at John Vorster Square.
Lovers write letters and say things that the others feel obliged to trot out only in bed. One piece of flesh of all flesh remains opaque with mystery for them; it must be returned to again and again. And even when it has become too familiar, it is invested with something of what it once was. There is the obsession with which that yellow weaver thrusts worms and grubs and whatever it can find, down the gullets of those ugly fledglings — and there are thousands upon thousands of weavers, this year, and hundreds of the young must fall from the nests or be destroyed in other ways — you find them in the veld, ant-eaten already, the night after any heavy rain. Nourishment. Lovers take presents from each other they would not choose for themselves (what will his mother do with that agate egg when he gives it to her for Christmas? — every knick-knack shop in Madison Avenue is full of such things). They want something of each other; doesn’t matter what it is — a horse to ride? A bridge that could so easily have been built, just a matter of getting the boys to mix a bit of cement and carry over some posts and logs on the tractor? A dog kennel with an ingenious roof that lifts like a lid? — They find out. There is always a subject between them, my dear gipsy, always, always, they know what it is even if they are being shown round a farm that doesn’t interest them much, even if they don’t speak much, sitting side by side in a car. Look at that funnel of web some spider’s spread leading to its hole, and the beetle that’s struggling there, caught. If you come back to the same spot this afternoon, if it were possible ever to find it again, on this farm, you might see the beetle there still, maybe still alive, bound with filaments of shroud the spider will wind it in; sometimes it will be there for days until the spider drags it down into the hole — everything takes its own time out here, whatever you do. Listen to the frogs. The great rough rachet at which the throat of the first one of the evening engages at the same time every day. You are bored? I’m not. The frogs cease suddenly, later, just as they begin. This place is a quiet sleeper. Is he facing without eyes up through a sky of earth or is he lying here as they found him, turned away. There are languages and cultural difficulties. It isn’t possible to follow, from where he is one can’t imagine someone speaking as they speak: yes, master, the skelms from the location got me, just like the policeman said. Those blacks hit me on the head, they stuck a knife in my heart, they threw me away — No moon. You could lie out, down here. A quiet sleeper. Turn to her and without making contact with any part of her receive from her open lips, warm breath. Breathe her in as the kiss of life given a dying man.