Scenes from Provincial Life Page 6

  To cricket he looks for more than Johnny Wardle offers. Cricket must be like Horatius and the Etruscans, or Hector and Achilles. If Hector and Achilles were just two men hacking away at each other with swords, there would be no point to the story. But they are not just two men: they are mighty heroes, their names ring in legend. He is glad when, at the end of the season, Wardle is dropped from the England team.

  Wardle bowls, of course, with a leather ball. He is unfamiliar with the leather ball: he and his friends play with what they call a cork ball, compacted out of some hard, grey material that is proof against the stones that tear the stitching of a leather ball to shreds. Standing behind the net watching Wardle, he hears for the first time the strange whistling of a leather ball as it approaches the batsman through the air.

  His first chance comes to play on a proper cricket field. A match is organized for a Wednesday afternoon, between two teams from the junior school. Proper cricket means proper wickets, a proper pitch, no need to fight for a turn to bat.

  His turn comes to bat. Wearing a pad on his left leg, carrying his father’s bat that is much too heavy for him, he walks out to the middle. He is surprised at how big the field is. It is a great and lonely place: the spectators are so far away that they might as well not exist.

  He takes his stand on the strip of rolled earth with a green coir mat spread over it and waits for the ball to come. This is cricket. It is called a game, but it feels to him more real than home, more real even than school. In this game there is no pretending, no mercy, no second chance. These other boys, whose names he does not know, are all against him. They are of one mind only: to cut short his pleasure. They will feel not one speck of remorse when he is out. In the middle of this huge arena he is on trial, one against eleven, with no one to protect him.

  The fielders settle into position. He must concentrate, but there is something irritating he cannot put out of his mind: Zeno’s paradox. Before the arrow can reach its target it must reach halfway; before it can reach halfway it must reach a quarter of the way; before it can reach a quarter of the way…Desperately he tries to stop thinking about it; but the very fact that he is trying not to think about it agitates him still further.

  The bowler runs up. He hears particularly the thud of the last two steps. Then there is a space in which the only sound breaking the silence is the eerie rustling noise of the ball as it tumbles and dips towards him. Is this what he is choosing when he chooses to play cricket: to be tested again and again and again, until he fails, by a ball that comes at him impersonally, indifferently, without mercy, seeking the chink in his defence, and faster than he expects, too fast for him to clear the confusion in his mind, compose his thoughts, decide properly what to do? And in the midst of this thinking, in the midst of this muddle, the ball arrives.

  He scores two runs, batting in a state of disarray and, later, of gloom. He emerges from the game understanding less than ever the matter-of-fact way in which Johnny Wardle plays, chatting and joking all the while. Are all the fabled England players like that: Len Hutton, Alec Bedser, Denis Compton, Cyril Washbrook? He cannot believe it. To him, real cricket can only be played in silence, silence and apprehension, the heart thudding in the chest, the mouth dry.

  Cricket is not a game. It is the truth of life. If it is, as the books say, a test of character, then it is a test he sees no way of passing yet does not know how to dodge. At the wicket the secret that he manages to cover up elsewhere is relentlessly probed and exposed. ‘Let us see what you are made of,’ says the ball as it whistles and tumbles through the air towards him. Blindly, confusedly, he pushes the bat forward, too soon or too late. Past the bat, past the pads, the ball finds its way. He is bowled, he has failed the test, he has been found out, there is nothing to do but hide his tears, cover his face, trudge back to the commiserating, politely schooled applause of the other boys.

  Seven

  On his bicycle is the British Small Arms emblem of two crossed rifles and the label ‘Smiths – BSA’. He bought the bicycle for five pounds, second-hand, with the money for his eighth birthday. It is the most solid thing in his life. When other boys boast that they have Raleighs, he replies that he has a Smiths. ‘Smiths? Never heard of Smiths,’ they say.

  There is nothing to match the elation of riding a bicycle, of leaning over and swooping through the curves. On his Smiths he rides to school every morning, the half-mile from Reunion Park to the railway crossing, then the mile on the quiet road alongside the railway line. Summer mornings are the best. Water murmurs in the roadside furrows, doves coo in the bluegum trees; now and then there is an eddy of warm air to warn of the wind that will blow later in the day, chasing gusts of fine red clay-dust before it.

  In winter he has to set out for school while it is still dark. With his lamp casting a halo before him, he rides through the mist, breasting its velvety softness, breathing it in, breathing it out, hearing nothing but the soft swish of his tyres. Some mornings the metal of the handlebars is so cold that his bare hands stick to it.

  He tries to get to school early. He loves to have the classroom to himself, to wander around the empty seats, to mount, surreptitiously, the teacher’s podium. But he is never first at school: there are two brothers from De Doorns whose father works on the railways and who come in on the 6 a.m. train. They are poor, so poor that they own neither jerseys nor blazers nor shoes. There are other boys just as poor, particularly in the Afrikaans classes. Even on icy winter mornings they come to school in thin cotton shirts and serge short-pants so outgrown that their slim thighs can hardly move in them. Their tanned legs show chalk-white patches of cold; they blow on their hands and stamp their feet; snot is always running out of their noses.

  Once there is an outbreak of ringworm, and the brothers from De Doorns have their heads shaved. On their bare skulls he can clearly see the whorls of the ringworm; his mother warns him to have no contact with them.

  He prefers tight shorts to loose shorts. The clothes his mother buys for him are always too loose. He likes to gaze at slim, smooth brown legs in tight shorts. Best of all he loves the honeytan legs of boys with blond hair. The most beautiful boys, he is surprised to find, are in the Afrikaans classes, as are the ugliest, the ones with hairy legs and Adam’s apples and pustules on their faces. Afrikaans children are almost like Coloured children, he finds, unspoiled and thoughtless, running wild, then suddenly, at a certain age, going bad, their beauty dying within them.

  Beauty and desire: he is disturbed by the feelings that the legs of these boys, blank and perfect and inexpressive, create in him. What is there that can be done with legs beyond devouring them with one’s eyes? What is desire for?

  The naked sculptures in the Children’s Encyclopaedia affect him in the same way: Daphne pursued by Apollo; Persephone ravished by Dis. It is a matter of shape, of perfection of shape. He has an idea of the perfect human body. When he sees that perfection manifested in white marble, something thrills inside him; a gulf opens up; he is on the edge of falling.

  Of all the secrets that set him apart, this may in the end be the worst. Among all these boys he is the only one in whom this dark erotic current runs; among all this innocence and normality, he is the only one who desires.

  Yet the language of the Afrikaans boys is filthy beyond belief. They command a range of obscenity far beyond his, to do with fok and piel and poes, words from whose monosyllabic heaviness he retreats in dismay. How are they written? Until he can write them he has no way of taming them in his mind. Is fok spelled with a v, which would make it more venerable, or with an f, which would make it a truly wild word, primeval, without ancestry? The dictionary says nothing, the words are not there, none of them.

  Then there are gat and poep-hol and words like them, hurled back and forth in bouts of abuse whose force he does not understand. Why couple the back of the body with the front? What have the gat-words, so heavy and guttural and black, to do with sex, with its softly inviting s and its mysterious final x? He shuts his min
d to the backside-words in distaste but continues to try to puzzle out the meaning of effies and FLs, things he has never seen but that belong, somehow, to the commerce of boys and girls in high school.

  Yet he is not ignorant. He knows how babies are born. They come out of the mother’s backside, neat and clean and white. So his mother told him years ago, when he was small. He believes her without question: it is a source of pride to him that she told him the truth about babies so early, when other children were still being fobbed off with lies. It is a mark of her enlightenment, of their family’s enlightenment. His cousin Juan, who is a year younger than he, knows the truth too. His father, on the other hand, gets embarrassed and grumbles when there is talk of babies and where they come from; but that just proves once again the benightedness of his father’s family.

  His friends hold to a different story: that babies come out of the other hole.

  He knows in the abstract of another hole, into which the penis goes and out of which the urine comes. But it makes no sense that the baby comes out of that hole. The baby is, after all, formed in the stomach. So it makes sense for the baby to come out of the backside.

  Therefore he argues for the backside while his friends argue for the other hole, the poes. He is quietly convinced he is right. It is part of the trust between his mother and himself.

  Eight

  He and his mother are crossing a strip of public ground near the railway station. He is with her but separate from her, not holding her hand. He is, as ever, wearing grey: grey jersey, grey shorts, grey stockings. On his head is a navy-blue cap with the badge of Worcester Boys Primary School: a mountain peak surrounded by stars, and the legend PER ASPERA AD ASTRA.

  He is just a boy walking beside his mother: from the outside he probably looks quite normal. But he thinks of himself as scuttling around her like a beetle, scuttling in fussy circles with his nose to the ground and his legs and arms pumping. In fact he can think of nothing about himself that is still. His mind in particular darts about here and there all the time, with an impatient will of its own.

  This is the place where once a year the circus pitches its tent and parks cages in which lions drowse in their smelly straw. But today it is just a patch of red clay packed hard as rock, where grass will not grow.

  There are other people too, other passers-by, on this bright, hot Saturday morning. One of them is a boy of his own age trotting across the square at an angle to them. And as soon as he sees him, he knows that this boy will be important to him, important beyond all measure, not because of who he is (he may never see him again) but because of the thoughts that are going on in his head, that burst out of him like a swarm of bees.

  There is nothing unusual about the boy. He is Coloured, but there are Coloured people everywhere. He is wearing pants so short that they sit tightly across his neat buttocks and leave his slim clay-brown thighs almost naked. He wears no shoes; his soles are probably so hard that even if he trod on a duwweltjie thorn he would merely check his stride, reach down, brush it away.

  There are hundreds of boys like him, thousands, thousands of girls too in short frocks that show off their slim legs. He wishes he had legs as beautiful as theirs. With legs like that he would float across the earth as this boy does, barely touching it.

  The boy passes within a dozen paces of them. He is absorbed in himself, he does not glance at them. His body is perfect and unspoiled, as if it had emerged only yesterday from its shell. Why do children like this, boys and girls under no compulsion to go to school, free to roam far from the watching eyes of parents, whose bodies are their own to do with as they please – why do they not come together in a feast of sexual delight? Is the answer that they are too innocent to know what pleasures are available to them – that only dark and guilty souls know such secrets?

  That is how the questioning always works. At first it may wander here and there; but in the end, unfailingly, it turns and gathers itself and points a finger at himself. Always it is he who sets the train of thinking in motion; always it is the thinking that slips out of his control and returns to accuse him. Beauty is innocence; innocence is ignorance; ignorance is ignorance of pleasure; pleasure is guilty; he is guilty. This boy, with his fresh, untouched body, is innocent, while he, ruled by his dark desires, is guilty. In fact, by this long path he has come within sight of the word perversion, with its dark, complex thrill, beginning with the enigmatic p that can mean anything, then swiftly tumbling via the ruthless r to the vengeful v. Not one accusation but two. The two accusations cross, and he is at their point of crossing, in the gunsight. For the one who brings the accusation to bear on him today is not only light as a deer and innocent while he is dark and heavy and guilty: he is also Coloured, which means that he has no money, lives in an obscure hovel, goes hungry; it means that if his mother were to call out ‘Boy!’ and wave, as she is quite capable of doing, this boy would have to stop in his tracks and come and do whatever she might tell him (carry her shopping basket, for instance), and at the end of it get a tickey in his cupped hands and be grateful for it. And if he were to be angry with his mother afterwards, she would simply smile and say, ‘But they are used to it!’

  So this boy who has unreflectingly kept all his life to the path of nature and innocence, who is poor and therefore good, as the poor always are in fairy tales, who is slim as an eel and quick as a hare and would defeat him with ease in any contest of swiftness of foot or skill of hand – this boy, who is a living reproof to him, is nevertheless subjected to him in ways that embarrass him so much that he squirms and wriggles his shoulders and does not want to look at him any longer, despite his beauty.

  Yet one cannot dismiss him. One can dismiss the Natives, perhaps, but one cannot dismiss the Coloured people. The Natives can be argued away because they are latecomers, invaders from the north, and have no right to be here. The Natives one sees in Worcester are, for the most part, men dressed in old army coats, smoking hooked pipes, who live in tiny tent-shaped corrugated-iron kennels along the railway line, men whose strength and patience are legendary. They have been brought here because they do not drink, as Coloured men do, because they can do heavy labour under a blazing sun where lighter, more volatile Coloured men would collapse. They are men without women, without children, who arrive from nowhere and can be made to disappear into nowhere.

  But against the Coloureds there is no such recourse. The Coloureds were fathered by the whites, by Jan van Riebeeck, upon the Hottentots: that much is plain, even in the veiled language of his school history book. In a bitter way it is even worse than that. For in the Boland the people called Coloured are not the great-great-grandchildren of Jan van Riebeeck or any other Dutchman. He is expert enough in physiognomy, has been expert enough as long as he can remember, to know that there is not a drop of white blood in them. They are Hottentots, pure and uncorrupted. Not only do they come with the land, the land comes with them, is theirs, has always been.

  Nine

  One of the conveniences of Worcester, one of the reasons, according to his father, why it is better living here than in Cape Town, is that shopping is so much easier. Milk is delivered every morning before dawn; one has only to pick up the telephone and, an hour or two later, the man from Schochat’s will be at the door with one’s meat and groceries. It is as simple as that.

  The man from Schochat’s, the delivery boy, is a Native who speaks only a few words of Afrikaans and no English. He wears a clean white shirt, a bow tie, two-tone shoes, and a Bobby Locke cap. His name is Josias. His parents disapprove of him as one of the feckless new generation of Natives who spend all their pay on fancy clothes and give no thought to the future.

  When his mother is not at home, he and his brother receive the delivery from the hands of Josias, packing the groceries away on the kitchen shelf and the meat in the refrigerator. If there is condensed milk, they appropriate it as booty. They punch holes in the can and take turns sucking till it is dry. When their mother comes home they pretend that there was no con
densed milk, or that Josias stole it.

  Whether she believes their lie he is not sure. But this is not a deceit he feels particularly guilty about.

  The neighbours on the east side are named Wynstra. They have three sons, an older one with knock knees named Gysbert and twins named Eben and Ezer too young to go to school. He and his brother ridicule Gysbert Wynstra for his funny name and for the soft, helpless way in which he runs. They decide he is an idiot, mentally deficient, and declare war on him. One afternoon they take the half-dozen eggs Schochat’s boy has delivered, hurl them at the roof of the Wynstra house, and hide. The Wynstras do not emerge, but as the sun dries the smashed eggs they turn to ugly splashes of yellow.

  The pleasure of throwing an egg, so much smaller and lighter than a cricket ball, of watching it fly through the air, end over end, of hearing the soft crunch of its impact, remains with him, long afterwards. Yet his pleasure is tinged with guilt. He cannot forget that it is food they are playing with. By what right does he use eggs as playthings? What would Schochat’s boy say if he found they were throwing away the eggs he had brought all the way from town on his bicycle? He has a sense that Schochat’s boy, who is in fact not a boy at all but a grown man, would not be so wrapped up in the image of himself in his Bobby Locke cap and bow-tie as to be indifferent. He has a sense that he would disapprove most strongly and would not hesitate to say so. ‘How can you do that when children are hungry?’ he would say in his bad Afrikaans; and there would be no answer. Perhaps elsewhere in the world one can throw eggs (in England, for instance, he knows they throw eggs at people in the stocks); but in this country there are judges who will judge by the standards of righteousness. In this country one cannot be thoughtless about food.