Later, when the Chinese shopkeeper walked me up the invisible mountain path to the hotel, he said again, ‘Sometimes in life, it’s not about knowing where to start, it’s knowing where to stop.’ He told me that when he was living in Paris all those years ago, he was lonely at the weekends, so he decided to take the train to Marseilles. He was walking near the port and the mistral was blowing and he hardly spoke any French, but when he saw two cops stop a North African boy, probably no more than ten years old, he stopped too. The boy was wearing a childish white cotton vest. It probably smelt of the soap powder his mother had washed it in. The cops lifted up his vest and started to punch his stomach. That was something he could not forget, the sight of adult men lifting up the vest of a child so as to hurt him more accurately. He found himself walking over to the boy who was tough and taking the punches, and he shouted to the cops in his funny Chinese French accent, ‘Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.’ It was not exactly heroic but it was what he wanted them to do. They did stop. They stopped and walked away.
The Chinese shopkeeper said, ‘You will want to stop here because we have arrived at your hotel.’ We stopped by the terrace and his head moved closer to mine. I could see the silver in his black hair.
When we kissed, I knew we were both in the middle of some sort of catastrophe and I didn’t know if something was starting or if it was stopping. The collar of his big winter coat was wet where the snow was melting. He took off his coat and handed it to me. ‘If you go for a walk you will need it and I have another one. You need to dress properly for the weather you find yourself in.’
After a while, I walked up the marble stairs, past the large cactus that stood in a pot on the landing and up to the battered oak door of a room on the second floor. I opened the door with the key Maria had slipped in to my hand when I gave her the cash. It was smaller than my room upstairs. Folded neatly on the end of the bed were a pile of blankets, and placed in front of a window that looked out on to the ancient palm tree in the garden was a desk and chair. It had obviously been tricky to squeeze the desk in, but Maria had carried it through the door and pushed it between the window and the bed.
I had a view. I had a writing desk. The room was warm. Burning in the fire were three large logs. In a basket nearby were other logs stacked neatly on top of each other. The room was so warm I knew the logs had been burning for some time.
Maria had left in a rush. In a snowstorm. Had she outgrown this world she’d made up here in the mountains? Was she not looking forward to picking the lemons and oranges in the orchard she had irrigated? She had also planted the vegetables and olive trees and built the beehives from which she gathered the thick, aromatic honey she served at breakfast. It was Maria who baked the bread and ground the coffee beans. The logs that would keep me warm through the night were chopped by her too. Maria had left in a rage and without enough cash. Did she want to stride out on her own and get on with whatever it is she had to do next?
It occurred to me that both Maria and I were on the run in the twenty-first century, just like George Sand whose name was also Amantine was on the run in the nineteenth century, and Maria whose name was also Zama was looking for somewhere to recover and rest in the twentieth. We were on the run from the lies concealed in the language of politics, from myths about our character and our purpose in life. We were on the run from our own desires too probably, whatever they were. It was best to laugh it off.
The way we laugh. At our own desires. The way we mock ourselves. Before anyone else can. The way we are wired to kill. Ourselves. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
There was something else I did not want to think about. That afternoon, when I stood by the sea and laughed at myself under the snow clouds, what had come to mind was the piano in Maria’s hallway, the piano that was polished every day but never played. I did not want to know that I had been shut down like that piano. For some reason I remembered the way I used to eat oranges as a child in Johannesburg. First I had to find one that would fit into the palm of my hand. So I searched the sack in the pantry for a small orange because the small ones were the juiciest. Then I rolled the orange under my bare foot to make it soft. It took a long time and the point was to get the fruit to yield its juice and not to split. This had to be sensed entirely through the sole of the foot. My legs were brown and strong. I felt so powerful when I figured out how to use my strength on something as small as an orange. When it was ready I made a hole in the peel with my thumb and sucked out the sweet juice. This strange memory in turn reminded me of a line from a poem by Apollinaire. I had written down this line in the Polish notebook, twenty years ago: ‘The window opens like an orange.’
The mute piano and the window opening like an orange and the Polish notebook I had brought to Majorca with me were connected to my unpublished novel, Swimming Home. I realised that the question I had asked myself while writing this book was (as surgeons say) very close to the bone: ‘What do we do with knowledge that we cannot bear to live with? What do we do with the things we do not want to know?’
I did not know how to get the work, my writing, into the world. I did not know how to open the window like an orange. If anything, the window had closed like an axe on my tongue. If this was to be my reality, I did not know what to do with it.
As I watched the snow gather on the fronds of the palm tree in Maria’s garden, I asked myself another question. Should I accept my lot? If I was to buy a ticket and travel all the way to acceptance, if I was to greet it and shake its hand, if I was to entwine my fingers with acceptance and walk hand in hand with acceptance every day, what would that feel like? After a while I realised I could not accept my question. A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly.
She will write in a rage when she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot.
— A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf (1929)
I had told the Chinese shop keeper that to become a writer, I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then louder, and then to just speak in my own voice which is not loud at all. My conversation with him had taken me to places I did not want to revisit. I had not expected to return to Africa while sheltering from a snowstorm in Majorca. Yet, as he had pointed out, Africa had already returned to me when I found myself sobbing on escalators in London. If I thought I was not thinking about the past, the past was thinking about me. I reckoned this was true because the Chinese shopkeeper, whose father was a steel worker, had told me that escalators, or the ‘revolving staircase’ patented in 1859 by Nathan Ames of Massachusetts and then re-designed by the engineer Jesse Reno, were first described to the modern world as an ‘endless conveyor’.
I rearranged the chair and sat at the desk. And then I looked at the walls to check out the power points so I could plug in my laptop. The hole in the wall nearest to the desk was placed above the basin, a precarious socket for a gentleman’s electric razor. That spring in Majorca, when life was very hard and I simply could not see where there was to get to, it occurred to me that where I had to get to was that socket. Even more useful to a writer than a room of her own is an extension lead and a variety of adaptors for Europe, Asia and Africa.