Before I Forget Read online

  We listen with rapt attention. But at Leporello’s aria listing his master’s conquests—six hundred and forty in Italy, two hundred and thirty-one in Germany, a hundred in France, and already a thousand and three in Spain; including country wenches, maids-in-waiting, city girls, countesses, baronesses, marchionesses, princesses—you cannot help interrupting.

  ‘Poor man!’ you comment. ‘I’m beginning to feel sorry for him.’

  ‘That’s fatal,’ I assure you. ‘The moment a man succeeds in making a woman feel sorry for him, she is lost.’

  ‘There’s nothing pitiful about Don Giovanni,’ protests George. ‘Don’t let the music seduce you either. Surely, what needs to be cleared up is why he has become such a compulsive seducer.’

  ‘Because he’s lonely,’ you answer without hesitation. ‘And that’s why I feel sorry for him.’

  ‘Anyone can play the lonely card,’ I object.

  ‘Then what do you think drives him?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s always the same thing,’ I argue. ‘In his youth I’d say it is the urge to make a statement: I am here. The need for affirmation. But as he approaches middle age, who knows, it may simply be the need to be reassured. About his waning powers. About himself.’

  ‘Isn’t it pure arrogance?’ George challenges me. ‘Too much self-assurance, rather than too little?’

  ‘For me, there’s a kind of absurd courage about Don Giovanni,’ I maintain. ‘He might have been one of Camus’ heroes. And Mozart understood it perfectly.’

  ‘Not Mozart,’ you remind me. ‘The librettist, da Ponte.’

  ‘No, listen to the music. The libretto is just the story of Don Giovanni’s loves. It’s the music that looks into the heart of the man behind the loves.’

  George shakes his head. He is still smiling, but his eyes are deadly serious. ‘I don’t think Don Giovanni is about love at all. It’s about freedom.’

  ‘Now you’re sidestepping the issue,’ I say.

  ‘Just wait,’ he says. ‘We’re getting there.’ And he makes us wait for the last scene of Act One, when the Don’s house is invaded by the reveling peasants from outside. Then he says, ‘Why would they all suddenly break into song about viva la libertà?’ he asks. ‘To me, this is the key to the whole opera. And if you listen carefully, you’ll hear how Mozart anticipates this music through scene after scene that leads up to it. And how he keeps on reminding us of it until the very end.’

  ‘At the bitter end Don Giovanni goes to hell,’ you interrupt him. ‘Not much freedom in that, is there?’

  ‘Except if you see the Don’s freedom in the very fact that he has the choice to go to hell, and freely chooses it. In which he finally affirms his nobility in opposition to poor Leporello whose only choice is to find a new master.’

  ‘But surely you cannot exclude love from the story!’ I exclaim.

  ‘Of course not. But for Mozart love is only the litmus test. To determine whether one is truly free or not.’

  ‘Must it really end in hell?’ you ask. ‘That’s a terribly dark way of looking at love.’

  ‘Quite. But don’t you think there is a terrible darkness about love?’ asks George.

  ‘I thought you were the one who argued for light earlier in the evening,’ I joke.

  It is his turn to say, ‘Touché.’ But then he adds, ‘Perhaps in the end there is not all that much difference between light and darkness. The problem lies in our way of seeing. As Rachel has suggested.’

  About so much of our conversation that night I had occasion to think back on later, much later. Not least, two days ago when I stood looking down at your face pale in death.

  It was almost three o’clock before I left your house; and on the dark way home it all continued to whirl about in my mind. I needed time to sort it out. And when I got home, I went to my study and took out my recording—the Riccardo Muti—and played right through Don Giovanni once again as I made my notes. Once again I meticulously followed the life line of the compulsive womanizer, through one conquest after the other, until the magnificent moment when the Commendatore, the ghost of Donna Anna’s father, appears to offer Don Giovanni one last chance to repent for his multitudinous transgressions against women. But the lover refuses to mend his ways, and so he is sucked down into the vortex of hell. What a sublime and terrible ending. What sublime and terrible music. But as the final sounds died away and left me in utter, devastating silence, I was no closer to a solution for the turbulence in my thoughts. All I knew, and that at least came to me like an illumination, was that I had gone to Camps Bay to visit a woman with whom I had fallen in love on New Year’s Eve; but that when I came home I left behind two very dear friends.

  ***

  No. This won’t work. It avoids the real issues. Listening again to Don Giovanni in my home after coming back from you and George (as I am listening to it once more as a background to these notes), I returned to our conversation, and realized that what we had discussed, the words we’d used, had little to do with the real conversation taking place behind the talk. Perhaps we ourselves had not sensed clearly what that ‘real’ conversation had been about. But if I honestly wasn’t sure then, I want to know now. Evasion will no longer do, now that you are dead.

  What I believe I was thinking was this: that on New Year’s Eve I had been moved so profoundly by something in you that I’d left with a feeling that, yes, I could fall in love with you. Nothing final or definitive, but it was a distinct possibility. A feeling in my spine, or in what the more vulgar among the romantics might call my ‘heart’. I knew you were married—you’d spoken such a lot about George—yet as a person, as an entity, he had seemed unreal, absent. I have not had too many scruples about love in my life; yet in my dealings with women I have always tried as much as possible to avoid married women. (Not necessarily a decision on moral grounds. But on the purely practical level, think of it: if a woman has a big husband, he may beat you to a pulp; if the man is on the small side, he may shoot you—neither of which particularly appeals to me.) However, on that first New Year’s Eve, in the eagerness and newness of the discovery, which I felt was mutual, George never seemed wholly real to me, and so I was beginning to prepare myself for possibly making an exception. It is, after all, the privilege of age to find exceptions to most rules; and for all I knew this might be my last chance.

  But now I had met George. And found in him—what?—more than just a friend. Would it sound too melodramatic to say ‘a brother’? The brother I would have had if my mother hadn’t lost her first child whom she had told me about, not so much nostalgically as reproachfully, so often throughout my childhood. Someone close and intimate I know I’ve always missed. You had recognized the loneliness in me; thank you for that. (Why else would you have diagnosed Don Giovanni the way you had?) Now, suddenly, there he was. My lost older brother, almost forty years younger than myself. Weirder things can happen. And thinking of him as someone so close, drew you into the equation as well. I could no longer think of you simply as you, as Rachel Lombard. (The very fact that you bore his surname now marked you as part of him, and him as part of you.) You were no longer imaginable without George. Which made you no longer a potential lover, but a friend; my brother’s closest ally. Suddenly love was no longer an option. (At least not without the taboo of incest. But I’m not sure I was, as yet, conscious of that.) For the moment you were a dear and lovely friend, part of the new couple in my life, Rachel-and-George. Does that make sense?

  ***

  There was, on my way home from your house that New Year’s morning, a disturbing memory suddenly rising up inside me like a bubble from some submarine plant. How could I have forgotten about it? Now, after all these years, it returned, unsettlingly. I was back in the famous tree of knowledge at the bottom of Uncle Johnny’s orchard, that Sunday afternoon. And Driekie was telling me of her mother’s sermonizing about a girl’s legs being joined from kne
e to hip. But there was something else too, and that was the part I had forgotten.

  Some time before we had arrived on the farm in that distant December of 1938, she and her four sisters had gone for a walk to the farm dam one afternoon. They were alone, it was fiercely hot, and on a wild impulse, as they reached the farm dam, they’d stripped off their clothes before plunging into the muddy water, wonderfully cold below the warm surface on that blistering day. There was nothing unusual about that. But when they stepped out of the water again and went to lie on the steep bank to dry their bodies in the sun, she heard a rustling in the bushes nearby, and when she went to investigate, a young colored boy—about my age, she said—the son of one of the laborers, came scuttling from the undergrowth and fled like a hare towards the laborers’ little hovels. She recognized him, his name was David.

  They were annoyed at being spied upon, but it was not really anything to be unduly upset about. Boys are boys. (‘If it were you,’ she told me in the tree, shuffling and blushing, ‘I wouldn’t have told anybody.’) But that evening at supper they couldn’t stop giggling and fidgeting, and when Aunt Bella demanded to know the reason, Driekie was finally persuaded to tell her.

  Their mother flew into a worse rage than anything they had ever witnessed before. ‘A Hotnot!’ she exclaimed in horror. ‘Spying on my daughters! You could all have been raped.’

  ‘He ran away the moment I saw him, Ma,’ she tried to explain. ‘And we all know him. He’s always fetching and carrying for us. And sometimes we even help him in the kitchen with his school work. He’s actually quite clever. And very polite.’

  ‘A Hotnot!’ was all she kept saying. Like one of their old 78 records with the needle stuck in a groove.

  Immediately after supper she marched to Uncle Johnny’s inner sanctum to inform him of the outrage. All the girls remained huddled on the doorstep behind her in trepidation, expecting some kind of apocalyptic eruption. But Uncle Johnny remained lying quietly on his back, his eyes staring at the ceiling.

  Perhaps that, more than anything else, caused her to explode.

  It was midsummer; it was still light outside. Aunt Bella slammed the study door behind her, summoned her daughters to follow her, and strode out of the house, down the slope of the hill from where they overlooked the whole glorious valley, to the row of dilapidated laborers’ shacks.

  From the yard, where a few mangy dogs glowered at them and some late chickens were still scratching among the discarded parts of an old broken-down wagon, Aunt Bella shouted at David’s parents to come out. They were briefly, and rather incoherently, informed of what had taken place. In the meantime a small throng of other laborers, in worn overalls or hand-me-downs (at least Christmas was near, when they would all be given their annual set of new clothes), had gathered at a safe distance to find out what the commotion was about. Once again the tale of horror was repeated, gathering size and momentum with every retelling.

  In the end little David was dragged from the house where, expecting the worst, he had been hiding under a bed (an unmistakable sign of guilt). His father and two of the other men were ordered to bring him to the barn where apricots and early figs and peaches were drying in their large wooden trays. Aunt Bella ordered the girls inside, to take up position against the wall. An old wine-barrel was hauled from a distant corner and rolled to within a few feet of the girls as they gazed in horrified fascination. And then David was dragged inside. Aunt Bella, who seemed to be possessed by now of some evil force beyond her own control, gave a series of brief orders. Her voice came in short barks, and she was breathing deeply. David’s clothes were torn from him, his wrists and ankles were tied with thongs hanging from a hook in the corner, and he was drawn spread-eagled over the barrel. Tears and snot were streaming from him.

  And then the three men, the father and his two helpers, were ordered to flog him. Two of them had lengths of hosepipe, the third a halter.

  At this point of her story, that Sunday afternoon in the tree, Driekie couldn’t go on. She just shook her head. By now her own face was streaked with tears.

  ‘It just went on and on, it didn’t stop. In the beginning David screamed at every blow, but later he just whimpered, he had no voice any more. It wasn’t like crying, it was like an animal. And still they went on and on and on.

  ‘And then, sometime, I heard myself shouting, I wasn’t even sure it was me, but I think it was. “You’re killing him!” And then they stopped. It was as if they’d forgotten what they were doing, or why. Then Ma said something to the men and they went out and brought a pail of water and threw it over David and he started making sounds again. By that time it was dark outside. But the barn was locked up for the night and David was left there until morning. And then my ma told him to wash up the blood.’

  This, as I seem to recall it now, was what had, in its inscrutable and terrible way, inspired Driekie and me to do what we did. I still don’t want to think of it. But now, I know, I won’t ever forget it again. What upsets me is that I’m not sure of what it says about Aunt Bella. Or about Driekie. Or, perhaps more disturbingly, about me.

  ***

  My nights, lately, are often shaped like doughnuts, with a hole in the middle. Usually I simply remain lying in bed, largely at peace with myself and the world, until I drift off again. Or I put on a CD and listen to music. Or, if sleep really seems out of reach, I turn on the light and read for an hour or two. But over the last few nights there is a new diversion: the war in Iraq. It steadies the nerves and calms the senses. The soporific effect is guaranteed, because it is all so very far away, and endlessly repetitive, and much less real than a war movie. The Iraqis have now begun to show dead or captured enemy soldiers. Saddam is reported to have left Baghdad in an ambulance. Which remains, in every sense of the word, to be seen. In Nasiriyah there has been heavy fighting, quite spectacular; but Mr. Bush or his many advisers could take a leaf from the book of the people who organize Bastille Day fireworks in Paris.

  A little over a month ago there was the depressing symbolic moment when General Colin Powell stood up at the Security Council to declare war on Iraq. Behind the podium the huge tapestry of Picasso’s Guernica had, inexplicably, been covered with a blue cloth. It was as if history itself was hiding its face in shame. And now we are watching the consequence.

  This war comes with so much baggage on both sides, so many lies told, so many atrocities committed, so many strings attached, that nothing can be clear any more. All is suspect. It is itself an atrocity and an act of terrorism, the latest chapter of the West’s interminable crusades against the Saracens. (And one cannot but remember that already in the Middle Ages Arab historians referred to the Crusaders as barbarians, who knew nothing of medicine, culture, or civilization.)

  So many reasons have been advanced for this enterprise. But ultimately it is war for the sake of war. A no-strings war, as one sometimes—too rarely?—encounters the no-strings fuck.

  ***

  The no-strings fuck. A consummation devoutly to be wish’d. But realistically attainable? I’m not too concerned, in these notes, about finding reasons for links or sequences: why this, now, and not something else? But perhaps it is Melanie who comes back to me now because of a need to return, from the complications of the present, to a moment that seems totally straightforward and unambiguous and simple. But how trustworthy is the recollection?

  I met her shortly before my marriage to Helena. They were best friends, Helena an assistant to an architect, Melanie an actress. Helena was the quiet one, intense, private, devoted. Exactly what I needed at the time, I believed. It was in the mid-sixties, not too long after my spell with Daphne, and back in Cape Town I was doing a fair amount of work for the theatre; I had made my first splash as a writer and was basking in the publicity, but wanted to get back into a more secluded existence and Helena provided the shelter and security I craved. Melanie was the wild one, the flamboyant and unpredictable one, the bohem
ian. When I met her there was electricity in the air. The sexual tension must have been obvious to all but Helena—which makes me wonder: how well did I really understand Helena? But it was a month before the wedding. (How we finally decided to get married is another story.) Helena and I spent a weekend at Umhlanga Rocks with Melanie and her current boyfriend: she used to go through men as if she were trying on clothes in a shop, without even bothering to retire to a cubicle or draw a curtain.

  This one was a total mismatch, a very beautiful but shy young man (I cannot even remember his name) who seemed to spend all his time drawing. Inevitably, he and Helena turned out to be wholly in sync, as they say, and spent most of the time together comparing patterns and designs and textures. On the last evening the four of us went for a walk along the sea. There was a heavy fog through which, from time to time, the moon briefly showed itself in an impossibly romantic, silvery light shimmering like ectoplasm. No one spoke. Helena and I were holding hands; so were Melanie and her young man. But she and I were in the middle and from time to time as we walked our hands would touch or her hip would briefly press against mine as she moved her legs. Entirely by accident, of course. I had such an erection that it was difficult to walk, but everything was mercifully obscured by the night. After we got back to the beach flat we had rented, Helena and the boyfriend huddled together at the dining table over a set of drawings. I was not in a mood for socializing, preoccupied as I was with a new novel, and emotionally perturbed by Melanie’s proximity. Her physical closeness during the walk, the memory of her lovemaking with the boyfriend the night before: long low moans and whimpers coming through the thin wall that separated their room from ours, and gradually increasing to a scream of ecstasy ringing and ringing in the night like a siren. (It had charged me up unbearably; but it totally switched off Helena. And after she had fallen asleep I had to masturbate on my side of the bed to calm myself down. By which time Melanie was starting again next door. What had her young man done to deserve such largesse?)