The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro (30 page)

With sex he was rejuvenated. He was granted new ideas, new confidence. He did not distinguish between his literary notions and the ingenuity in these sexual affairs.

Sex was a disease, sex was also a cure. He would feel the desire to make love to a particular woman—like a rooster spotting a hen. The seduction preoccupied him, made him impatient, drove his imagination, helped his writing. At last, when the day of assignation came, the act might be clumsy the first time, better the second time, a great deal smoother the third time, but after a while, gaining skill, it lost passion. Sex was the cure for sex, like medicine three times the first day, two the second, dwindling in dosage as the condition improved, until no more was needed; and then he looked for a new woman. His wife knew nothing, for—such was his sexual charge—he did not neglect her.

At the outset he believed that with Nolo the repetition would rid him of his desire—odd, too, for she was the first full-blooded African he had ever slept with, one of the plainest, and—since she was missing one arm—incomplete.

It was her strangest feature, something like an asset, for in the dark she seemed to possess not one arm but three. His whole body was gripped. She used her mouth. She clamped him between her agile legs and wrapped herself around him and, snakelike, squeezed him until he gasped for air. This small creature in the dark became an immense boomslang, and he the soft yielding thing being devoured.

He felt small, even vulnerable, caressed and embraced by this woman who had seemed like a child. He felt young when he was with her—the first time youthful, the subsequent times like a child, with a child's physical vitality and optimism, as though at the beginning of a long life. That he had only fleetingly felt with other women. Now it was a condition of being with Nolo: he was not an older man but a youth.

Everything contributed to this feeling—the time of day, the secrecy of the place, the passion of the act, the mysteriousness of the woman. It was all new to him. Being new, it took the place of his most original writing. He had not written anything since the day, weeks before, when he first saw Nolo in her blue blazer and pleated skirt in the shop. But sex with her much resembled his best days at his desk, writing brilliantly—was in some respects superior to those days—the desire he felt like the joyous drug that lay behind his most enigmatic fiction.

Here was the woman at first glance: dependable, serious-seeming, soberly dressed as only an African schoolteacher would be, rather tense with the self-conscious piety of the educated African—and a bit defensive, too: incomplete—that missing arm. She hardly smiled.

In the bedroom, in his
bakkie
(pickup truck, he explained to me), she was a cat—wild, reckless, full of surprises—and seemed to know what was in his mind at every moment.

Just like a cat, facing away, she crouched and raised her buttocks and said, “Do it to me”—she had no word for the act, did not want to know the word, only wanted the struggle and satisfaction.

That different woman in the dark helped him discover a different man in himself; and over the course of a month he discovered much else—all revealed to him when he was with Nolo, much as in the writing of a paragraph or a page he discovered with pleasure the thought or incident that lurked there, that proved he was uncovering something new.

So instead of burning itself out, the flame grew fiercer, hotter, and brighter.

He loved the idea that only he knew that she was two people, and neither of them was African in any sense he had known or seen before. And he a man, a
baas,
who had been born in the country!

He was enough of a man of the world, had lived long enough, to understand the lover's illusion of the beloved as someone unique—and, more than that, someone known only to the lover. The lover's conceit that no one else may intrude, no one else has the capacity to see or understand. Desire was this special way of seeing the lover as irreplaceable. Smitten meant hit on the head, he knew that, and he still felt that he was in sole possession of the truth.

Desire, need, urgency, made him reckless. He could hardly believe how much. Loving a black was breaking the law. What he felt was the nearest thing to love he had ever known—yet to call it that was unnatural and illegal, and while it was normal for him to feel affection and even desire, love was absurd.

Nevertheless, she gave him something powerful without speaking a word—bewitched him. She made him whole, made him strong, restored youth to him, gave him power. She inspired him. Seeing him the first time, she had seemed to understand him and silently to respond with promises. In their lovemaking she kept her promises. So she was true.

Without telling his wife why, he found a house for her, asked her to live in it, and said that he needed to be alone, to think.

She knew what was wrong. Many times in the past, working on one of his long stories, he had absented himself, vanished somewhere on his vast estate, so that he could understand the story better.

Nolo was like a character in one of his strangest stories. So was he. Exactly. The sense of living inside one of his own stories roused and compelled him to look deeper. The feeling did not pass away, nor even diminish. He wanted more of it.

Distracted, almost demented by this fever of passion and attachment, feeling unwell, he had no doubt that there was only one cure for his ailment, ridiculous as it might seem to the whites he knew—a sickening desire for the half-educated schoolteacher with one arm, just a kaffir and, outside the bedroom, a deeply moralistic munt. All he wanted, now that he was separated from his wife, was for the African to move into his house with him, something any African woman would have been eager to do, to share his life, to be waited on by servants, to know a degree of luxury that was way beyond the imagining of most of them, like winning the lottery.

She said no.

Prinsloo almost laughed. This was a ruse, surely. He demanded to know why.

“Because we are not married,” she said.

He stared at her.

“In the eyes of God,” she added.

“In the eyes of God we are!”

“Not married,” she said stubbornly, frowning, defying him.

This from a woman whose people hardly used the word, who stuck a spear upright, twangling in the ground, before the door of a rondavel, which meant,
I am a man. I am here. This is my woman.

Prinsloo still smiled. He said, “We have done nothing but sneak around and make love for almost a month.”

“I regret that.”

He reminded her of certain acts she had performed, words she had said, noises she had made.

“I should not have,” she said, looking demure, pressing her prim lips together. “Because of my Christian vows.”

Prinsloo wanted to hit her. He had spanked his children, and one drunken night he had smacked his wife; he had never struck an African, though such beatings were common enough in his stories—thrashings with sjamboks that cut flesh and drew blood. Having rehearsed them in his work, he was able to imagine snatching a whip and slashing her with it and belaboring her on the floor until she agreed with everything he said, until she submitted.

He wondered whether she was deliberately provoking him, wishing to be thrashed and dominated. He was reaching for her wrist, on the point of grabbing it, when she pulled away, looking shocked, and said that he would have to think seriously about marrying her before he touched her again.

“You have no right,” she said.

That fascinated him, as though she were making a kind of promise: if they were legally together he would have a perfect right to make her submit.

She said no more, she just withdrew, she vanished into her schoolroom. He turned to his work, which had lain untouched, stopped cold, since he had initiated the affair with Noloyiso and left it as he had left his wife. But he was stumped. He could not make a sentence. Work that had taken the place of sex, that had inspired sex, that was inspired by sex, that had been his life, was inert. His pen was small and loose in his hand, just a dry stick he used to make crosshatches in the margins of his sheet of paper. He wanted to stab himself with the thing.

Or stab her with it, injecting her with ink. The one-armed Bantu schoolteacher had rebuffed him. Apparently her life was complete: she turned her back on him and went on teaching. Was it possible that she felt nothing?

At least he knew where she was. At certain times of the day, unable to work, the times when he would have worked, he crossed the dorp in his
bakkie,
bumped over the railway tracks that divided the town into black and white, and, parking on the road, he walked the last hundred yards on stony ground to the hencoop of a school.

Black children in the playground stared at him. It was not unusual for a white school super or inspector to appear, but this man went to the window and looked in, standing and staring like a reproachful ghost.

Nolo continued to teach her class, with him at the window. But when the bell sounded she hurried outside looking stern, her face immobile.

“If you don't leave the premises I'll have to call the police.”

“Premises”—this scrubby acre! “Police”—those lazy villains!

Prinsloo said, “I am not committing a crime.”

“You are trespassing.”

He thought: Imagine being accused by a Bantu!

But he said, “I want you to come with me.”

“You know my position on that. You know my terms.”

“Position”! “Terms”! He wanted to laugh. He hoped that her speaking to him in this way would fill him with self-disgust and act as a signal for him to reject her. Yet the opposite happened. He was humiliated and humbled. Her speaking sharply to him clarified his feelings. He realized that he could not live without her.

He divorced Marianne. The poor woman's face crumpled with grief, as though she had just gotten news of the death of a loved one. In a sense, that was just what had happened, for he was lost to her for good.

She begged him to change his mind. He pitied her, but he also wanted her to wish him well. He said so.

She said, “I don't wish you ill,” and then, considering the words she had spoken, added, “No, I do wish you ill. You deserve to suffer.”

He said, “I haven't written a single word for six months!”—meaning that he had already suffered.

“You're divorcing me and all you think about is your writing.”

“Because that's all I ever think about.”

Why had he said this? Was it true? He did not think about his unwritten stories, only about Noloyiso the Bantu schoolteacher, who had one arm, who possessed him, body and soul.

He told Nolo in a letter what he had done.

She agreed to see him. She allowed his advances, they made love again, but it was understood that she would not move in with him.

“My people would call me a harlot.”

“Your people are always living together. That's the usual arrangement!”

“With each other. In the same age group. Not with a white man. And you are old.”

She had him there.

What made Prinsloo think it would be a reasonable idea for him to introduce Nolo to Hansie? Wimpie was in Cape Town, or else he would have included him, too, at the lunch in the hotel dining room in the dorp. It was bad enough with Hansie; Wimpie would have made it worse. Prinsloo saw at once it was a mistake. Nolo and Hansie were the same age.

Hansie's eyes were cold, his lips were tight with fury, his voice quietly mocking, asking questions that were accusations, not expecting answers.

“Doesn't it seem a bit strange to be eating in here, sitting at a table rather than standing outside at the window?”

Africans just seven years before had been forbidden to enter the restaurant and had used the take-away window at the side of the building.

Nolo said, “Not really. I always thought it was strange to use the window, and so I never did it.”

Prinsloo admired Nolo's composure. Her strength gave him strength.

“What's your opinion of Dad's books?”

That threw her. It was clear from her expression that Nolo did not know Prinsloo was a writer. What had his writing to do with their love affair? Nolo simply stared at him.

“She will read them when they are translated,” Prinsloo said.

“Praat u Afrikaans?”
Hansie nagged.

“Ek verstaan net ‘n bietjie Afrikaans. Ek praat Engels, ”
Nolo said.

Saying that was the nearest she had ever come to expressing a political opinion.

“Into English, of course,” Prinsloo said.

Prinsloo sat in a sorry slumped posture, as Hansie looked at his father with contempt for his foolishness.

The meal was awful. Before it was over he knew he had lost his son; that Hansie saw this unique woman and thought, Kaffir.

More alone afterward, Prinsloo saw that he had only one choice. He proposed marriage. Nolo accepted. The little ceremony took place in the town hall—Nolo's elderly father, some of her cousins, an auntie, all of them dressed in stiff, ill-fitting clothes, newly made by a man working a Singer sewing machine on a veranda in the dorp. Nolo wore a long yellow dress. And another awkward lunch in the hotel dining room, the old man smiling with worry and saying, “I have never been in here before in my whole life.”

Later that day she moved into his house, bringing one suitcase, the size she would have used for travel of a week's duration, containing everything she owned, including a clock, a Bible, some pictures, some books—serious self-improving ones; and she submitted to him.

She became his slave, but a happy one, joyous in their lovemaking—imaginative, too, for she allowed Prinsloo to dominate her utterly, to treat her like a servant, a whore, a sex object, a stranger, living out passionate fantasies of master and slave. She allowed it, then she encouraged it, finally she demanded it. Prinsloo tied her one arm and used her body; she did not object, she said she enjoyed it. She suggested more degrading episodes of submission in which she sat handcuffed to a chair or secured to the bedposts. She willingly got onto her knees, her one arm making a tripod of her posture. She urged him to thrash her buttocks, and while he did so, she raised them so that he could enter her. Still she asked for more, begging to eat him, drink him, swallow him.