The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro (29 page)

More of this and then the friend goes away, and Finsch is not insulted but calmed by the encounter. And though we have not been told explicitly what Finsch's gift is, we know what is happening when the men show up for the driver interviews.

“A bit more than a driver,” as Finsch explains, for he also needs a handyman and mechanic, someone to keep the car in good repair.

“What experience do you have?” Finsch asks the first man, who is a big blond ex-army sergeant.

“How much experience do I need? I can drive well, as if you'd know the difference. Put me behind the wheel and I will dazzle you.”

“Are you knowledgeable about engines?”

“The usual. I can change the oil, I can fuss and fool. Anything serious would go to a real mechanic—you can afford it. You can't expect me to know everything.”

“I need someone who's handy,” Finsch says.

“People like you always say that without having the slightest idea of what you mean. You'd never guess how little I know. But I know more than you.”

Other interviews follow, all the men just as harsh as this; and then a new note is struck, one of timidity, the man revealing himself as fearful of Finsch.

“I'll bet you're always snooping,” this man says. “You'll be watching everything I do.”

Finsch says, “You'll be expected to look after the car as well as drive it.”

“And it will never be enough for you. You'll do nothing but complain and make my life hell.”

After more exchanges, the man cringing, terrified of Finsch, he is offered the job, which, almost mute with fear—little to translate—the man accepts.

Lunch with the son-in-law was painful to read for all the obvious reasons, the young man mocking Finsch and reflecting on what a close resemblance he has to his selfish pig of a daughter and saying, “I am going to get something from you, or else. I am just deciding what it is I want.” Finsch remains serene. We see that he is content with his seemingly diabolical gift.

Later in the afternoon, in Nelspruit's white graveyard, Finsch meets a young woman. He realizes, as soon as she begins telling him she is there “to mourn a dear friend,” that her boyfriend has just left for a job in Durban. While she talks to Finsch she is pondering a scheme to ensnare him—get some money out of him—so that she can join her boyfriend.

“I see you glancing at my breasts. I know you want to play with them. You are so simple. But it is going to cost you. I know I can make you pay.”

“My wife is buried here,” Finsch says.

“That is wonderful news. You will be all the more willing to do as I say. You're pathetic, but what a lovely ring on your finger. That will be mine.”

“I miss her greatly,” Finsch says.

“One glimpse of my naked body and you'll stop missing her. You're weak, but I won't hurt you. After a little while I'll take what I deserve and go on my way.”

“We might meet for a cup of tea one day,” Finsch says.

“I'll wear my red dress. I'll hold my nose. Sometimes men your age can really perform. That's my only worry—your demands.”

Of course, Finsch avoids the woman—he has been warned. But he loses his serenity when he realizes that his knack for knowing what people are saying, what is in their heart, makes him lonely. He becomes isolated to the point where he won't see anyone, so disgusted is he by people's meanness and cynicism, their insincerity and greed. But in a redemptive moment with his daughter he understands that she genuinely loves him—or at least seems to. Dining with her, he reads her thoughts, as he has those of the others. Her kindness is sincere—or is it? Overwhelmed by a feeling of love, has he lost the ability to translate what she is saying into what she really thinks? The reader must decide.

There were about six other stories, the shortest of them about a farmer—another farmer—who finds a young abandoned monkey on his land. In his loneliness the farmer raises the monkey, names it, and trains it to become a helpful companion whom he comes to regard as a partner. At the end of the story the farmer is visited by a man who says, “Your monkey is staring at me.” The farmer loses his temper. “That is no monkey!”

A similar story about a gray parrot with a vast vocabulary and the same name as the main character: at the end you are not sure whether you are reading about the farmer or the parrot.

In “Drongo,” a bird appears on a veranda, pecking at the railing. The bird will not be deterred by the farmer, who is at first friendly—offering it food; and then hostile—plinking at it with a rifle. This simple bird visitation takes place against a backdrop of the wedding of the farmer's son, the appearance of the farmer's first grandchild, the promise of continuity. But without any warning the house collapses. “Eaten away.” Had he looked more closely the farmer would have understood that the drongo he killed was picking at termites and keeping the house whole. Now there is nothing of the house left.

Strange stories—but Prinsloo's life, the last years of it, were stranger than anything he wrote.

“Quite a curious thing befell me,” Lourens Prinsloo said to me—and as a writer I was keenly aware that he was trying this story out on me, as he had probably tried it out on other people. Because I was a writer myself I would not be able to use the story, though I would be allowed to repeat it, and when this master of the bizarre story finally wrote it, I could compare the version he wrote with the one he had told me in confidence.

I was listening hard, with the exaggerated attention a younger writer gives to an older one, an intense alertness that is both respect and curiosity. I was not taking notes—it would have been rude, would have seemed too businesslike—so I can only approximate what he told me as I have approximated his translated stories. But Prinsloo had a knack for dialogue, and speaking it, he made it easy for me to remember.

“It's an African story,” he said. And then he told me that he had been married to Marianne, a pleasant, helpful, loving woman who had borne him two sons, Wimpie and Hansie. The marriage had flourished for more than thirty years. Farming life had bonded them—she too was from a farming family, cattle ranchers from the wilderness of Kuruman. Prinsloo and Marianne were both descendants of the oldest families to arrive in South Africa, represented centuries of settlement and work, but also of a changelessness that is known only on a farm in the African bush. Her parents had traveled by ox cart; his had had motor vehicles, but even so, they lived the isolated lives of their ancestors, side by side with Africans and speaking their language and feeling that they knew them well.

As Prinsloo told me this, I was reminded that in his long stories all of his protagonists were either widowers or spinsters. He did not write of the satisfactions of married life—a significant omission, given the fact that he was smiling as he told me how happily married he had been.

I was on the point of mentioning this when he said, “Happiness is not a fit subject. Happiness is banal. People who read are not happy, or else why would they be alone in a room with a book in their hands? I am a farmer, and on a farm you are neither happy nor sad. You work too hard ever to consider such things. You have no set hours. You are part of a much bigger process of life and death. You tend your animals, you watch the weather, you hope for rain—the right kind at the right time. You try not to think too much, or else you'll go mad with worry. Farming is the opposite of writing stories.”

It was easy for me to recall his saying that, because it was a general statement of farming life. His next statement was memorable, too, for its succinctness.

“Nothing happened to me for sixty years. Then I had my birthday, and everything happened.”

His saying that made me especially attentive. I let him proceed at his own pace—first a long pause, a silence, as though to allow him to find something equally dramatic as a follow-up. And really, nothing could have been better than what he said next.

“Do you remember the African woman who appears toward the end of
Heart of Darkness
—probably Kurtz's lover, ‘wild, animal-like... flamboyant... all in feathers... a magnificent creature,' all of that?”

He had some of it right. Conrad describes the African woman in the most vivid terms: “a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman... treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments... She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent...” And so forth.

When I said I remembered her well, Prinsloo smiled one of his ironical smiles and said, “This woman, my woman Noloyiso, was nothing like her.”

If Nolo had been the educated eldest daughter of one of his farm laborers, there would have been no obstacle to his having a casual affair with her—though he had never touched an African woman in his life. Yet, because Africans had worked for his father, their children would work for his children, it was impossible not to regard them in a profound sense as his property: they all belonged to him. Many of the girls in the fields were pretty, but in time they lost their looks, they bore children, their lives were short. He saw them not as they were but as they would become.

Nolo he saw first at the store in town and was struck by her beauty, her youth, a sense of vitality—and it was only afterward that he found she was unmarried, thirty-four years old—late middle age for an African woman. She was not dressed in the African style. She wore a gray pleated skirt, a blue blazer over a white blouse. She could have been a dining car attendant on a minor branch of the Spoorweg. Her full name was Noloyiso Vilikazi.

Her head was small, round, close-cropped hair, with a child's face, a child's ears, large dark eyes, and her figure was slight yet sturdy. Prinsloo was a good judge of an African's strength. He could tell who would last in the fields, and the women were far superior to the men.

This woman was not in the least interested in him, but for the first time in his life Prinsloo's head was turned—and by an African. She was a schoolteacher in town, so he learned. She lived alone in a simple house in the staff compound. She had been educated at a training college. She was very pretty, but her beauty was not remarkable. He was fascinated by something else, a trait he had never noticed in anyone, man or woman. What struck him was that he, a great imaginer, could not imagine Noloyiso old. He was certain that she would always look as she looked today, as lovely, as young, with the same glow of health.

He needed that assurance. He was desperate to have her. And her seriousness, her indifference, her aloofness, even her posture, all these aspects like the aspects of a watchful impala—she had the same eyes—only made his impatience worse. The second time he saw her, he noticed that her left arm was missing. Had she just lost it? No, for her left side had been hidden from him the first time. The missing arm made her more attractive to him—not pity but the opposite, an admiration for her strength.

Something within him responded, an inner voice, which was not speech but knowledge. Yet if it were put into words, it would have said: With this woman you will be young again, you will be happy, you will be strong, you will sire children, you will love the land again, you will enjoy your food, you will know passion and desire, you will be loved, you will be admired, people will smile with satisfaction when they see you, you will live longer, you will discover new subjects to write about.

A sexual awakening, perhaps, but more than that, for sex was just hydraulics, a frenzy of muscle and fluid. A new life was what he saw. The beauty of it was that he knew this woman was able to transform him, to re-create him as though fictionalizing him, making him into the other, better person he had been as a youth, hopeful, happy, energetic, fascinated, innocent—someone who slumbered within him, the pure-hearted being who, to be animated and given life again, needed only to be woken with a kiss by this one unexpected woman.

What he saw and felt was like a definition of love. It was deeper than desire. It was the awakening of a whole being, and the need was powerful because only this one woman could do it. Without her, he was only his incomplete self, half asleep; with her, he was the better person—forgiving, strong, generous, imaginative—because of her love. Sex was part of it, sex was the magic; but the bond was love.

Mingled in his mind were sex and creation—his writing. He believed that he was an imaginative and prolific writer because of his powerful sexual instinct, that he owed the extravagance of his imagination to his persistent sexual desire, a sort of engine that drove his writing. He hardly distinguished between the two, his desire for sex, his desire to write, and steaming in all his writing was this rosy-hued lechery—even the sober-seeming people in his strange excursions, such as Finsch and Katje and the Justus family, were running a temperature. Sex was exploration and conquest, so he reasoned. And the fever of sexual desire gave the imagination its wild and sometimes blinding fulguration. Sex was also the hot velvety darkness behind the dazzle of his creation. He would have been lost without it, he would have been lost if he had been wholly fulfilled: repressing it was a way of harnessing it and using it. “Thwarted desire was the steam contained under pressure in the boiler of his body” was a line from one of his stories, I forget which.

No man in South Africa ever found it difficult to locate a like-minded woman, a willing partner. Prinsloo knew by the look alone whether a woman was willing. Farmers' wives, farmers' daughters, Rhodesians, Mozambicans; but commonest of all were the women known as “coloreds”—ambiguous mixed-race beauties who were welcome nowhere and everywhere, looking for security. The slightest hint that he was interested animated them, and he loved watching them and seeing how clever they could be in devising ways to meet him covertly, in a nearby dorp or in remote parts of his own land, for his farm was so extensive an estate as to have hidden corners and places for assignations.