Before I Forget Read online

  We sit in silence for a long time. I don’t know what to say next. I may simply start the conversation all over again; she won’t know. To fill the silence, I reach over and remove the heavy glasses from her nose. She makes a vague clasping motion with one hand as if to catch a fly, then gives it up. Naked, her eyes are an amazing childlike delft-porcelain blue. I breathe on the lenses and wipe them clean, repeat the process, then replace the glasses on the bridge of her bony beak.

  ‘All your girls,’ she repeats contentedly, momentarily screwing up her eyes. ‘I always enjoyed hearing about your doings. You came to me with all your loves, you remember? Every little one of them.’

  ‘Not all,’ I venture gently, embarrassed.

  ‘You kept secrets from me?’ I cannot fathom her eyes through the glasses. Is there reproach in them? Or a glint of glee? ‘I suppose I deserve it,’ she resumes without warning. ‘I kept secrets from your father too.’

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘I can’t remember now.’

  I try not to show my irritation. ‘Now Rachel’s gone,’ I say.

  ‘You said she was a married woman?’

  I should not have told her; I never thought it would stick. ‘Yes,’ I say tersely. ‘But that has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Did he kill her then?’ she asks unexpectedly.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Her husband.’

  ‘Of course not! What makes you say a terrible thing like that?’

  ‘Did you?’ she persists.

  ‘That is a preposterous idea.’ I half rise from the bed to go.

  ‘In love no question is ever preposterous.’

  I make an effort to contain myself. ‘I can assure you George and I were the best of friends.’

  ‘Who is George?’

  ‘Her husband.’

  ‘He trusted you?’

  ‘Of course he did.’

  ‘Silly boy.’ I cannot make out whether she is referring to George or to me. She reaches out to put her hand, like a chicken’s claw, on my wrist. ‘Don’t go. I need you, Boetie.’

  I hesitate and sit down again.

  ‘So what are you going to do about it?’ she asks anxiously. ‘What about the children?’

  ‘We don’t have children, Mam,’ I say. ‘We weren’t married.’

  ‘That didn’t stop your father.’

  I feel a cold hand clutching my guts. ‘What do you mean? Did he…?’

  ‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she says primly.

  I give up. ‘I was just trying to tell you about Rachel, Mam. Who was married to George.’

  ‘You can never trust a woman,’ she says with surprising emphasis.

  ‘I trusted her with my life.’

  ‘You’ve trusted too many women with your life, Boetie.’

  ‘I’ve never regretted it,’ I assure her. It comes out more strongly than I meant it to.

  ‘You must have had children,’ she says, a reproachful whine now adding an edge to her voice. ‘I’m quite sure you did.’

  ‘Helena and I had a little boy when we were married. Don’t you remember? Pieter. But that was over thirty years ago.’

  ‘Then where is he now?’

  ‘There was the car accident, Mam. Both of them died.’

  ‘You were always a reckless driver.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault. I told you so many times.’ But perhaps it was? Helena and I were quarreling, Pieter was crying on the back seat, pleading with us to stop.

  ‘So they’re all dead now,’ she sighs. ‘But that is the price one pays, isn’t it? You will be quite lonely now, I suppose.’ She sounds almost happy at the prospect.

  ‘I will, Mam. But there are memories.’

  ‘Indeed there are,’ she says brightly. ‘I remember so well how you used to save little frogs from the pond. You were afraid they’d drown.’

  ***

  Another sleepless night in front of the television. There’s something obscene in the mere act of watching. War as spectacle, as entertainment. The Rocky Horror Iraqi Show. Baghdad on Ice. (Except it’s on fire now.) The big chains must be pushing up their rates. And what they’re showing tonight is not just a sequel to last night. It also, somehow, cancels it. Already the earlier truths or affirmations now seem superseded. Saddam and his sons were not killed in the bunker after all, it would appear. We cannot be sure of anything we see with our own eyes.

  An American soldier has gone berserk, throwing grenades into the tent where his companions slept. A helicopter has been downed by friendly fire. If they just give the allied forces enough time, they might wipe themselves out, no need of an enemy. But even this may be a fiction thought up by—or dictated to—‘embedded’ journalists. There was a time when embedding was a literary conceit. We are swept along by narrative invention. The Middle East is the home of Scheherazade. The patron saint of us writers. One of my earliest and most passionate—and most abiding—loves. And don’t forget the little sister, Doniziade. Ah, Doniziade. I can imagine her huddling on their bed, listening to the stories as she becomes involved in the unfolding relationship between her sister (herself a just-nubile seventeen or thereabouts) and the insatiable King Shahriyar, bent on revenge for all the wrongs, real and imagined, done to him by women. Doniziade is the indispensable catalyst. Without her, no stories. Without her, who knows, no sexual charge, no love. What she has shown me is that there is always a third presence in the embrace of two lovers: I do not mean the memory of an earlier love, or the dream of a future one, not any corporeal being, but simply the image of a possible other. The image of an innocence, which is by definition already lost. It is never just you-and-me. Doniziade is the observing other who makes love possible.

  At the end of it all Scheherazade has produced three children. Storytelling can be a risky business. There is darkness on either side. I can see the little sister there with them, thin arms clasping tomboy knees, her small face rapt. Her grave, big, dark eyes miss nothing.

  ***

  Did it really begin with Nannie’s small, tight, milk-swollen breasts, or Katrien’s enthusiastic explorations, or Driekie in the fig tree? Or, much more likely, during Mam’s long illness in my first year of life, when the old housekeeper carried me swaddled in a cloth on her broad back, humming to me, singing stories to me, in her own language, Xhosa, insinuating the rhythms and cadences into me long before I could understand a word. The safety of that solid back, the softness of her ample buttocks, Tula, tula, little baby. We called her old Aia, for me she had no other name. Woman and story merging in that first awareness of being protected, sheltered, safe, blissful, sleepy, happy.

  Even if those were the beginnings, the first intimations of femininity in my mind, there was never any straightforward sequence. Chronology is boring at best. This, then that, then something else. That is not what matters to me. The eating of the fruit of knowledge does not introduce history, but discovery. And mostly one goes forward blindly. Or, as the Greeks had it, backwards: we don’t see the future approaching, only the past receding, learning to understand as we move further away from the event. In a way you, Rachel, predate Scheherazade and Katrien; Driekie follows conversations with Anna, or making love with Daphne. Time, the Italian writer Luigi Malerba says somewhere, is merely an expedient invented by man so as to stop everything happening at the same time.

  What seems to me to make more sense is that every turning point of the country’s history over the past three-quarters of a century seems to be marked by a woman in my life. And others in between, to consolidate or divert, to reveal or affirm or entertain. Kathy of the tapered fingers, Jenny of the limpid eyes, Marion with the sand in her pussy, Mia of the deep navel, dancing Daphne, freckled Frances, the wordless intensity of Helena, Maike shouting obscenities at the top of her voice when she comes, Anna under the stars. And you, Rachel. Always
back to you. But no chronology; it doesn’t work like that. They all merge into one another, yet each one is very distinct. Together, they spell me.

  I have read of a Frenchman who was asked by the members of his family on his deathbed which of his long life’s memories he would want to take with him, the best, the most cherished; and with a small smile of contentment, without any hesitation, he replied, ‘I have eaten well.’ When my time comes, I hope I’d be able to say with equal satisfaction and equal conviction, ‘I have loved well.’

  ***

  Where does the dancing Daphne really fit in? ‘Before’ Helena, ‘after’ Anna? She doesn’t fit in, that is the point. Not one of them does. That may be the only clue, if clue there is, to their mystery, if mystery there be. In a way, like all of them, she was just there, for a moment and for ever. Which is also why I’m wary of distinctions: one-night stands, lifelong loves. Where’s the difference? Which of these is Daphne? (Which of these, Rachel, is you?)

  Daphne fascinated me from the first time I saw her on stage, long-limbed and lithe (all the clichés which she imbued with new meaning), with a shower of blonde hair down to the curve of her buttocks. A dancer’s body, and a mind like a scalpel. I was hooked immediately. And it was a constant challenge to be with her. She could talk about a stunning range of subjects—the ice ages of Europe, bisons in America, colonial exploitation in Africa; and unfailingly she would return to the political situation in the country and her acute sense of implication in it—but her passion was dancing, whether classical ballet or flamenco or Latin American extravaganzas. And she was proud of her body, with reason. She enjoyed showing it off, whether on the stage or alone with me. But no sex. Strictly no sex. That, she believed in total earnest, would dissipate her energy and make her lose her focus. Yet in everything but the ultimate act of consummation she was as ardent as a flame, as articulate as a dervish. How many times did she writhe in my arms, nearly sobbing with passion, pleading, ‘No, Chris, no. Please! I don’t think I’ve ever wanted something as madly as this, but I daren’t. You must help me to say no. Please help me.’

  And then, at the same time, her weird, almost religious, fanatical castigation of the same body which could bring her to the edge of ecstasy, or move in the spotlight on a stage like a firebird, a feather in a high wind. Around her waist I discovered, the first time she allowed me to remove her top, a coarse knotted rope, tied so tightly that it left unsightly marks of many colors on her smooth skin: deep reds and purples, which in the older bruises had begun to edge into greens and yellows.

  At first she refused to talk about it. But I persisted. Was it something religious? A St. Teresa of the stage?

  ‘No. It’s nothing of the kind. I don’t even believe in God.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘It has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘I really don’t understand you, Daphne.’

  At long, long last, perhaps in desperation, she told me. ‘It’s this country,’ she unexpectedly confided, as if that would clear up everything. ‘Don’t you see?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ Of all imaginable excuses, this surely was the most far-fetched.

  But she continued, deadly serious. ‘Every morning when I come to work, I drive past the black townships from my parents’ plot. I see the children begging in the streets. The papers are full of reports about forced removals, about all the misery around us. And it gets worse every day. Ever since Sharpeville I have the feeling that the country is sinking deeper and deeper into a morass all the time. There is so much suffering, and so much anger.’

  ‘That I can understand,’ I agreed. ‘It was Sharpeville which plunged me into writing.’ I remembered so well: I’d been writing ever since I was twelve or thirteen; but then Father had intervened. One evening he summoned me to his study where he held up an exercise book in which I’d been writing a ‘novel’ and which he’d confiscated while going through my drawers in my absence. ‘What is this?’ he demanded. Flushed with embarrassment, but perhaps also with a touch of pride, I tried to explain. He flung down the book on his big desk, which had so often been my site of punishment and humiliation. ‘I have read what you wrote,’ he said in a frosty voice. ‘I’m afraid there is only one word for it, and that is shit. You understand me? I won’t have a son of mine spend his time on such nonsense. You must be bored, as you obviously have nothing better to do. From now on you will do more sport. And I shall make arrangements for extra lessons in Latin. If you want to follow in my footsteps and become a lawyer, you can never start too early on Latin. Don’t let me catch you wasting your time and mine again like this. Is that understood?’ He patted the edge of the desk with a meaningful gesture that made my little balls contract. And that was that. I did not stop writing: I only went to more trouble, helped in no small way by Mam, to keep it concealed. Through the rest of my school and university career, and later following in Father’s awe-inspiring footsteps as a lawyer, I kept my writing strictly to myself. She hid everything I produced in her stocking drawer. Until the explosion of Sharpeville shocked me so deeply that I could no longer be silent. That defining event when the police fired on an unarmed crowd of black people, mostly women protesting against the law that imposed on them the obligation to carry passes, killing 69 of them, the majority shot in the back as they were trying to flee. (By that time the irrevocable break between me and Father had already led to his premature death, which as it happened coincided with a premature ejaculation—or so Mam learned, much later, from the shamefaced secretary who had been at the receiving end of it.) And under the influence of Marlene, the young auburn-haired woman I was with at the time, I wrote A Time to Weep, which caused an unexpected furor and decided my future as a writer.

  I turned back to Daphne and her murderous rope. ‘I understand what it does to you. But what has that got to do with this ghastly rope around your body?’

  ‘It’s because there’s nothing I can do about what’s happening. Nothing at all. At least you can write, you can make sense of it. You wrote A Time to Weep. It’s an amazing book. But what about me? I’m a dancer. What difference can I make? Most people just look the other way when they see what is going on. That’s why I thought: at least I can make sure that I keep myself aware. Even if I can’t change anything, I can keep myself from forgetting. I want to make sure that with every move of my body, on stage or off, I won’t ever allow myself to ignore what is happening beyond my own little world.’ She clasped one of my hands in both of hers. ‘Now do you understand?’

  ‘It sounds pretty barmy to me.’ But then I nodded slowly. ‘Perhaps, in a way, I see what you mean. But even so…’

  ‘Just try. Because I’m asking you. Do it for me.’

  I sighed. ‘I’ll try.’

  In spite of my promise, I could not stop imploring her, hoping against hope, fired by the fierce conviction that a body like hers could not be allowed to remain unfulfilled—and for such a nebulous, absurd, outrageous cause. However serious she was about it, however noble her intent, it served no purpose whatsoever, it made no sense, it was a criminal waste. My God, the nights I spent in passionate pleading, as I removed one after the other of Salome’s separate veils, until the last, the obdurate last. ‘No, no, no, please, Chris. If we do this I may just as well give up dancing. Don’t you understand?’

  No, the hell I didn’t. There were times when I was driven to such an extreme that I would shout at her, the worst obscenities. ‘You’re a fucking tease, Daphne. You’re a fake and a phony. You’re a selfish, twisted bitch.’ Which she seemed, in fact, to enjoy.

  And once, when my desire was driven beyond endurance, I found myself ejaculating in rage and despair.

  Her reaction was wholly unexpected. ‘You poor, poor darling. What has happened? I didn’t mean to torture you. Was that terrible? I feel just awful, I’d never ever want to hurt you.’ And then the ultimate twist, as she suddenly went down on her knees in front of me:
‘Chris, may I taste it? Please. Just once?’

  I was in such a state that I could not refuse. She unzipped me and took out my still half-tumescent member, and started to lick the sticky moisture, which in spite of the copious emission of only moments before, brought me back to rampant urgency. I wanted to stop her, but couldn’t. And she, I presume, in that strange, intense innocence which characterized her whole relationship with me, had no inkling of what was happening and inevitably still going to happen. Until I came in her mouth and she gurgled in surprise, though not in dismay, and swallowed it to the last drop.

  At least, I thought, this would point a way to the future. If intercourse was ruled out, this was a not altogether unacceptable substitute. But Daphne stood fast. This had happened, and could not be undone. In a way it had been a learning experience. A kind of illumination. It had revealed to her new possibilities, and perhaps new frontiers, of the human body, of male and female endurance. But the risk was too big. The next time she might be tempted to go further. And then everything would be wrecked. So it should never, never be allowed to happen again. Promise?

  I wanted to tell her as finally and furiously as possible, to fuck off. But of course I couldn’t. A bird in hand and all that.

  For how long it could have gone on in this way, I really cannot tell. But then came that evening.

  I’d gone to the theatre with her. She danced. One of the most sensuous performances I’d ever seen her in. When we came out, she was on a high. We celebrated in a restaurant. We both drank too much, which in itself was something exceptional for Daphne. Afterwards she made me drive her to her parents’ home. Only when we got there did she confide in me that they had gone to Durban for the weekend. But there had been no lewd purpose to the invitation, absolutely not. She wanted, she said very simply, very directly, to dance for me. For me alone. Outside in the garden.