The Conservationist (19 page)

— We could have built a foot-bridge. I suppose all you need is some decent logs. A couple of cement piles —

The feet wobble on the stones, take a leap that at once regains balance and lands him free of the pit. — And that ring that woman lost, your friend? —

A couple of hours before the plane leaves is not enough. There is no point in beginning a discussion about anything; why ‘Namibia’ of all places. He will have to get on with it, go through with it like every other boy of his age. It was here that the letter was torn up and, for a moment, the bits of paper were about to be stuck under those stones which have been slightly dislodged by the weight they have just borne. A crust of earth-line shows on one that has been tipped free of the ground.

What is it you want of me?
There is no need to go into the house at all today; it is better to allow time to give him a decent lunch at the airport before he takes off. — I hope the damned goat doesn’t eat its way through the last of my hay before she gets her bones thrown. —

But the barn, as it is passed, holds nothing for him; whatever is hidden lies where his mind is - elsewhere.

They are still standing around the yard and those women haven’t moved from the wall of the workshop. Jacobus must be said good-bye to; it is necessary to listen all over again to everything said before. Little white baas running barefoot in ‘Namibia’, black sons of servants now fathers of servants - you can’t escape it, you can’t hurt old Jacobus’s feelings. It all belongs to you. It will all belong to you. No need at all for either of us to go into the house; but as the Mercedes is turning in the yard, in good time for lunch and airport, he suddenly says he’s remembered there was something he meant to take along. What is there in that house? A few old clothes? You’d never get them near you, now, miles too small.

— No — something I think I left ... I promised a friend at school — He’s evasive, he doesn’t want to be precise, probably because it’s not worth hanging about for, one could buy whatever it is, a new one, and not bother.

Jacobus is there the moment the car stops again. Pleased, used to delays, he is usually the one who lopes up with a request just as you’re leaving. Jacobus takes him to wherever it is the house keys are concealed. He stoops, blond strands falling over his face so that one never sees what the expression is, to run a hand over one of the cats at the kitchen door - those cats have gone wild, they don’t understand a hand may not be a threat. — And what does your kid do for love? - Tremendously concerned about love, your kind, although they hate so many and despise so much - governments, exploiters of cheap labour to extract ore, the people whose job it is to interrogate the loving activities of those who have right on their side (no doubt) to blow up trains, hijack planes and send letter bombs. -And your husband? What does he do for love while you are making love in there behind the locked-up windows in an empty house, a perfect place, with cologne in the bathroom and whisky by the bed.

Although the kitchen door is standing open the house is empty as if there were no one inside going silently over the polished floors barefoot, rummaging in the cupboards and pulling out a cache of remembered boxes from beneath the unmade beds. The interior of the car is as personal as a room; it is the habitation between habitations, hardly less than they. It even has its own sounds as a house has its creaks: a tick or faint tapping as metal cools or expands. He presses the keys of one radio station after another, running down the scale of snatches of music and voices back to silence. That stained rucksack adorned with the peace sign in red ink is all the luggage there is; it lies on the seat, the one strap is broken, the outside pocket is torn and scarcely holds a book sticking out of it. God knows what he’s doing in there; five-past twelve. The visitors, moving in the manner of people fettered by a long discussion that is not being concluded but merely made clumsily portable, are beginning to move in the direction of the kraal. He’s taken the book out of the rucksack to glance at for a moment - what sort of thing does he read. EROS HIMSELF overprinted on a picture of the god, bow and arrow, wings, everything between his legs, the lot. A nice sexy love story, just what at that age-A little sticker on the inside of the cover, with the name and address of a Cape Town bookshop. Borrowed. Handed from boy to boy at school. But why no girl on the jacket? EROS
HIMSELF AN ANTHOLOGY COMPILED AND PUBLISHED BY THE CAMPAIGN FOR HOMOSEXUAL EQUALITY

As if - indeed, at that age again - he had suddenly got his hands on one of those copies of Lady Chatterley that, pirated and ill-printed in Egypt for sale to English-speaking soldiers, had found their way down from one desert country to another, he opens the book here, there, anywhere. The hands are deft and hasty. The sun-glasses trap the warmth in his face - he takes them off roughly. It’s not a story - articles, essays, with bits of poetry in between, an extract from the famous trial (Oscar Wilde).
Homosexual Marriage: The Case for Sanction by Church and State. Sexual Pathology - or Love? The Healthy Norm: Law of the Jungle.
An index means nothing. His eyes remember how to skim with intense concentration, tossing aside ...
the old equation of Darwinian selection with the healthy norm is an argument which, carried to its logical conclusion, must equate civilization with the jungle ... residual disabilities ... in any case, given the change in the law, why is not the homosexual campaign for equality, even if this involves attempting to change public opinion, as decent as, for example, the highly decent campaign of women who demand ... if strong feelings are cansistent with a wide range of pathological activity
...
gay marriages are ‘repugnant’ to ... inasmuch as heterosexual marriage as the basis for family life
...

What does he find here? In books like this? If this is all, textbook mumbo-jumbo, legal jargon to make it sound dully respectable and normal - if this is what he wants.

Is this the subject?

Hidden away like the goat; you have to find your way to it. There is not much left to shock a man who knows the world.

— Ah yes, inviolate, you. You have multiple addresses and identities. That’s what you mean - you know how to hide and protect what you are. —

— In pig-iron, that’s what. —

— If it were as simple as that! —

— Well isn’t that how you see me by candlelight? Isn’t it your perversion to dirty yourself with what you call a tycoon? —

What instinct has led him to look at the book? Instinct? Sometimes his are what he thinks of as bestial, but different from this. A lover of women may have many inclinations in a lifetime, he remains a lover of women. His heart is actually beating audibly in his ears, hard and slow. For years he hasn’t been in communication with that other woman, his ex-wife, except through divorce lawyers, but he is writing rapidly now, Your son’s a pansy-boy. A bugger. She will understand; she will remember and take as an insult, perfect family woman that she is, these days, the reminder that she didn’t object to being made love to like that, herself. It must come from someone.

Could this be the subject?

Published by the Campaign For Homosexual Equality.

He belongs to some club, then. Already. Or did the university student give it to him. He got it all from some university student. That’s it, that’s more likely. That could be it. In Japan they would have arranged things better. By now, going on seventeen, some suitably worldly uncle would have taken him off to a suitable house with experienced girls. Or was that the French. Someone explained (talking late in a hotel bar, a nightcap after a conference) Latins never leave an adolescent to find his own way in these matters. Very sensible. Because unless you are lucky. It’s pure chance you meet what you need, just put out a hand ...

He has materialized in the dark empty kitchen doorway of the house. There he is. That hair hangs in his eyes and makes him frown, he always looks as if he’s frowning or puzzled, even when he smiles. His gaze is concentrated by the vertical line between his brows; he dips gracefully, sideways, to touch, once again, a cat that glides away before contact.

The book is in the hand resting on the steering wheel. It’s as if the father has been discovered rather than the son.

— What makes you read this? - There is no use temporizing. Anyway, the words come out as involuntary exclamation, the book might be a ball that has landed in the car.

— I’m curious. Curious to know. — He smiles. He’s pushed back his hair as if to show his face, he’s hesitated, just a moment, giving account of himself, standing there, before opening the door. He heaves the rucksack onto the floor, then gets in.

— Why not on the back seat. -

— It’s okay, doesn’t bother me. This car’s so big in front. You should have seen us squashed into the Von Falkenbergs’ Land-Rover! —

He holds out his hand to relieve the driver of the book that encumbers him and it is given over.

- Doesn’t look very interesting. -

His eyes can’t be seen. The blond head - from the back and side views like the head of a woman, although he isn’t effeminate at all, in face or body - gives the impatient gesture of freeing itself of some trace of ornament. — Quite interesting-He’s leaning awkwardly over the rucksack, trying to find a place for the book more secure than the torn pocket. No - he has been searching, while the car turns out of the yard, the angle pitching him forward towards the instrument panel, he delves, even displacing and repacking a pair of dirty socks that release the sourness of his desert sweat: he produces something.

— I bought it in Windhoek. I thought, for Mummy. —

In the palm of the long hand with the three strands of the snake ring round the third finger (head and tail meet on the other side) is an egg. A semi-precious stone in the shape of an egg.

He will go straight to town once the plane has gone. Which means once he has delivered the passenger to the departure lounge on a full belly of T-bone steak and mushrooms, strawberries and cream, with a newspaper and a ten-rand note (prohibited; school pocket money is restricted to half that) for the journey. He never waits to see take-off; today the observation balconies are filled with families who have come to do so as a Sunday entertainment, watching planes that bring in or carry away no one known to them. He traverses yet again the murmurous reverberating concourse with communicants clutching talismans and holy relics - the bunch of proteas or lapel orchid for exit, the duty-free bottles borne home - and the liturgical announcement of arrivals and departures punctuated by the note of a musical gong, almost as in the similar concourse of one of the great cathedrals of the old world, to which stopover privileges give access, stages of the service are marked by the tinkle of a bell. Past the baggage claim area where this time a party of Indians returned from Mecca are grouped like a theatrical troupe in tinselled regalia, being embraced by weeping relatives. Habitually a face looking out for him, and the conversational ritual that is the ultimate sum of all journeys. — Good trip, sir? Everything all right? — — My knees need to straighten out, I had to take tourist class, cramped as all hell — He’s quickly free of the place and racing the engine unnecessarily as he reverses out of his slot in an echelon of cars.

He will be back in town within half-an-hour on the expressway but where the overhanging signs of different exits present him with an alternative he simply glides off, maintaining speed without hesitation, as if that were his intention all along, to the lower lane on the right. That road dives under the highway he has left, literally dodges - it is overhead a moment - the road to town. He’s on the way back to the farm, that’s where he is. The car is making for the farm. It’s done now. These great new roads have no provision for the retracing of steps. Once you’re on course, you’re on; that’s it. So he drives without let or hindrance (as the phrase goes) as one can only on an expressway, without distraction or interruption, a mechanical hare set streaking along its appointed lane of track.

There is the usual sort of Sunday gathering he was expected at - people would begin to turn up only in an hour or so from now, but he remembers the invitation or rather obligation as if it were something he has already missed. Not missed much: the drinks set out beside the swimming-pool in the hope it isn’t really still too chilly in the evenings for a braai, the host (Consolidated Steel Mills and twenty-eight per cent of the reopened platinum mines at Rustenberg) in his ‘Smile’ T-shirt - and who would not, at the sight. Pretty women laugh and hug him, his witty wife explains drily that he stole it out of their teenage son’s drawer, while the hoarse yelling exhortation of rock records provides exciting castigation from another generation, as if some mad prophet were being allowed to carry on raving somewhere in the beautiful garden. The expressway has dumped him in Sunday joy-riding traffic, but soon he is past the location, past the buses and the over-loaded taxis swaying about on their rumps, and set down sweetly on the dust of his own road, the farm road. The dust rises, he is lost in it, it’s kicked up behind him like covers drawn up to the ears. He’s driven straight back to the farm and to hell with it all.

It is still early enough for him to have come out for the first time on a Sunday. The sun’s still high - dropped from its zenith but hung flashing there like a smashed mirror, the last moments of the full of the afternoon. Sometimes when there has been a lunch-party to go to he hasn’t got out until around this time. He might never have been there already, today. The wait, outside the Indian shop, outside the house - the blond head, the toenails, from which the dust shakes off, standing out like eyes in a dirtied face: might never have been at all. A day last half-term - in May, he says it was.

He has the farm to himself. They ignore him, not even Jacobus is to be seen this afternoon. Over at the compound, a kind of swarming in the air, a thickening of sound and activity. It’s in full swing. Every now and then a reek of burning meat, burning offal - not the goat? Already? He goes into the barn; no sign there ever was a goat. Old goat Jacobus. Old devil. One story about a witch-doctor; another story about a sick man. Anyway, they are all at the compound and they ignore him, he can believe what he chooses.