Beautiful Screaming of Pigs Read online

  She puffed on her pipe. A peaceful mood overtook her and she became lost in thought. ‘I went up there once.’

  ‘To Namibia?’ I said.

  ‘South West.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Long ago. Ek kan die jaar nie onthou nie. I went with Petrus. I remember the sand,’ she said dreamily, ‘there was a lot of sand…’

  In the silence that followed, we were all of us lost in the sand.

  Abruptly, the question rising from nowhere, I asked her: ‘What happened to Margaret?’

  Ouma was startled out of her reverie. ‘Who?’ she said. ‘I don’t know a Margaret.’

  ‘She was a friend of mine,’ I said. ‘When I was a boy and I came here for holidays – ’

  ‘Come on, Patrick,’ my mother said, suddenly impatient to get going. ‘It’s late already, we have to make a move.’

  I went upstairs to get packed. In half an hour we were playing out last night’s scene of arrival in reverse: my grandmother took me by the shoulders to say goodbye, while my mother closed the boot on our suitcases. ‘Come again soon,’ Ouma said. ‘Remember to eat, Patrick.’

  My mother kissed her quickly on the cheek. Then she got into the driver’s seat and started up the engine.

  ‘Have a nice time in South West.’

  ‘Namibia,’ my mother said. ‘Namibia.’ She let out the clutch too fast and we sprayed a wide circle of gravel as we wheeled around and started up the drive. I looked back, waving, but the solitary homestead, with the old peasant woman in front of it, had vanished already into the wilderness.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was with a sense of definite unease that I crossed over the frontier. After six hours of driving, by which time we were drugged with the heat, we came to the border post. Two sluggish fat guards came to meet us. One, tugging an Alsatian on a short length of chain, circled the car like a planet. The other, bored, gave us some forms to fill out. He examined our passports and stamped them, then he lifted up the boom and waved us indolently through.

  Under the bridge the green of the river was startlingly vivid in contrast with the colourless land all around. On the far side we came to another border post. Again the two guards, overflowing with ennui, almost like brothers of their fellows over the river. Again the forms, the questions; then the white boom lifting and the same-looking countryside opening out before us.

  It was both strange and utterly normal to be back. I had been in this country – South West Africa, Namibia – ten months ago. I had been posted here for almost a year; it would probably have been two if what happened to me hadn’t happened. But I’d never been here, so far south before: I was familiar with the north, which was a different landscape to this. The north was grassy and full of trees, almost lush in places, while this was a dry, bare, stark terrain, close to desert, which gave way in an hour or so to dry bush, studded with outcrops of stone, ridges of rock.

  My mother was tired; I drove, while she lay and dozed in the back. It was very hot by then. A white fist of sun clenched the car and wouldn’t let go. My hands were slippery on the steering wheel. I turned the radio off and a silence came down, inseparable from the numb, yellow, empty land outside. There were no people. We passed an occasional railway-line, or shack, or car, which burst like noise out of the violent, dead silence and then passed away again.

  As we went further, there were small signs of human life. These are poised, in my memory, in sharp relief against the hazy ribbons of heat: a youth slouched under an umbrella, with his hat pulled down over his face. A pair of donkeys, coshed by the sun, standing pointlessly harnessed to a cart. Performing in miniature the more historic trek of colonial pioneers, we came to Windhoek in the evening. Under a cooling sky we descended into a basin among the hills, and the buildings, the streets – after all the emptiness – were like a kind of explosion. Steam rose from the pavements, among the jacaranda trees, and I drifted for a while among the visions of houses, each one set in its little rectangle of sand. I stopped eventually next to a wall, on which somebody had splashed words in red paint: SWA IS ’N VRYSTAAT!

  ‘Mom,’ I said. ‘Hey, Mom.’

  She woke, dazed, wiping streaks of hair from her face. ‘What? What’s the matter?’

  ‘We’ve arrived,’ I said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  My mother had booked us into a hostel on the edge of town. It was a new, ugly building, in a garden with trees carrying white blossoms that gave off a sweetish smell. The whole place was full of UNTAG officials, here to monitor the elections. We were given ID cards and keys and shown to our rooms by a balding white man in shorts, who kept apologising in a whiney, nasal voice; he was sorry about everything, from the overcrowded lounge to the colour of the carpets.

  ‘Sorry about the view,’ he said, as he unlocked my room.

  ‘The view’ was of a township across a big open patch of veld, a vista of crowded tin shacks and fires burning in barrels. On the far side I could see empty grasslands stretching away.

  ‘This is the smaller room,’ he said. ‘There’s a bathroom through there. I’m afraid you’ll have to pay in advance. Sixty rand a day.’

  ‘You said fifty on the phone.’

  ‘It’s gone up – sorry about that. The whole city is full. You won’t get cheaper anywhere.’

  My mother opened her mouth to argue, then changed her mind. She paid tiredly, digging the cash out of her bag. As he went off, rolling the notes up like a cigarette, she called out to him: ‘A telephone! Where’s a telephone, please?’

  ‘There’s a payphone downstairs in the foyer.’

  ‘I’m going to call Godfrey,’ she said to me.

  ‘We’ve only just got here.’

  ‘I know, but I told him I’d call. I said we’d all have dinner tonight. There’s a nice German restaurant near the academy.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll just stay here. I don’t really feel like going out.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said sternly. ‘You can’t leave me alone. I depend on you, Patrick.’

  ‘You don’t want to be alone with him? What are you talking about? He’s your boyfriend.’

  ‘You’re coming for dinner,’ she said. ‘It’s final. We won’t be out late. Come on, you’ll like him. We’ll have fun.’

  When she’d gone I started to run a bath. While the water gushed into the tub, sending up clouds of steam, I sat on the edge, feeling weary and worn out. Suddenly and without apparent reason, a familiar sensation started up at the base of my belly, spreading outwards to my arms and legs. It was a spasm, a shaking, a shadow passing over my soul. These little episodes had come to be referred to, in the language that had evolved between me and my doctors, as ‘attacks’. My attacks were part biological, part psychological, and they tore me up like a thin piece of paper. My teeth chattered. My bones vibrated. I perched on the enamel rim, trying to assuage my grief. I was oppressed and horrified by things. The angularity of objects. The symmetry of tiles.

  Then it was past. I turned off the taps, took a Valium and slipped into the bath. As the hot water and the drug took effect, I grew gradually calmer. I lay limply until my mother came in, smiling to herself.

  She ran a hand through my hair. ‘Dear Patrick,’ she said. ‘My baby.’ But I could hear from her tone that she was thinking about him, not me.

  ‘Was he home?’

  ‘Yes. We’re going over now. Don’t go all lame on me, darling. I’m not taking no for an answer.’

  I didn’t want to meet Godfrey. In some way I was afraid of him. I had seen a lot of lovers pass through my mother’s bedroom: young and old, men and women, the only thing they had in common was their transience. None of my mother’s affairs lasted long. No doubt Godfrey would go the same way, but till now he had managed to achieve a certain mythic presence by virtue of distance. The fact that he lived here in Windhoek, so far from Cape Town and our normal lives, made him different and somehow powerful.

  There was also the small matter of his colour. For all he
r experimenting and openness, my mother had never had a black lover before. I’m not sure why; she had broken a lot of laws already in her newfound political phase. But he was a first for her. And as with all her previous relationships, she was looking for something beyond Godfrey, some idea that he represented. She had been talking a lot lately about being African – about being connected to the continent somehow. But these declarations about how rooted she felt, about how much she belonged, sounded more plaintive than proud. I think there was a big psychological barrier that she had to overcome before she could get involved with him. On some deep level she was still a little Afrikaans girl on the farm, being watched and judged by her father and mother, maybe even by my father. And now she’d got past it; she’d freed herself.

  My mother – since she’d got divorced – told me everything. I was her confidant and friend. We discussed topics from menstruation to masturbation, so the details of her romance with Godfrey were hardly taboo. I knew how they had gone to bed together for the first time after she’d been up in Windhoek for two months. He was in his final year, one of a five-strong class. From the very first, she said, she’d been aware of his presence, but not because she found him attractive. On the contrary, he had a rude and off-putting manner with her. He did his best to show how bored he was when she was teaching. He yawned and fidgeted and looked around while she was talking, which had the effect on my mother of drawing her attention entirely, exclusively to him. The game developed as the weeks went by. He came late for class, he stared out of the window, he treated her like dirt.

  ‘And this excited you?’ I asked.

  ‘No, not at first. It infuriated me, it made me angry.’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘And so nothing. He kept on like that. The atmosphere was unbearable. Then one day I stopped talking and confronted him. He said he would speak to me after class. He waited when everybody had gone, and then his whole attitude changed. He was quite nice, actually. Sort of sheepish and sweet. He said he was falling behind. I was going too fast for him. He said he needed some extra classes and could I help.’

  ‘So you did.’

  ‘Not immediately, no. I could see what he was after. I wasn’t interested at first. He was... I don’t know, too earnest. Intense.’

  ‘So what made you change your mind?’

  ‘Persistence, probably.’ She thought about it and said, ‘Yes, persistence.’ Here she leaned forward and pressed a long-fingered hand to my arm, filled abruptly with earnestness of her own. ‘Let me tell you something, Patrick. In this world you can have anybody you want, absolutely anybody, if you just focus exclusively on them and keep at it. Don’t waver, don’t let your attention slip. People will come round to any idea, even an idea they hate, if you persist. Persist. Don’t ever give up.’

  So Godfrey persisted. Everybody in the class knew; by then the tension was palpable. And when she eventually gave in and invited him to her room for an ‘extra lesson’, what followed on was inevitable. The sex that first time was stupendous, she said. ‘Like an astral fuck, Patrick, if you know what that feels like. He banged my head against the wall at one point. I still have the bump – here, give me your hand.’ And she made me feel the oval lump on the back of her skull, like a secret badge.

  Things calmed down a little after that, but still their affair was intense. She was leaving soon, so time was limited. On top of that, liaisons between staff and students were illicit, so all their encounters were furtive and charged with danger. They coupled in cars or out in the open air sometimes. There was always a rough edge to it, a touch of the violence of that first time.

  ‘What do you mean, violence?’ I said cautiously.

  ‘Well, not violence, really. Not like you think. I just mean... he’s not soft. He never kisses me, for example.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘No. And he won’t let me lie close to him afterwards. He’s quite cold. It’s hard to get any feelings out of him. But that’s his background, you know. The kind of life he’s led.’

  When she got back from her time up north, she was full of new energy and enthusiasm. I could sense it from afar, in the letters she sent me up on the border. She didn’t tell me about Godfrey – not till I returned home – but she was full of that new talk about being in harmony with the continent. And when she did eventually give me the full story, she wanted me to believe that sleeping with Godfrey ‘was a political act’.

  Despite all this nonsense, she did look very happy. There was a radiance in her face that I hadn’t seen before. That she felt so good made me feel good in turn. I was partaking vicariously in this elemental connection; this contact she’d made with the earth. After the military twilight I’d recently been through, I also needed union with Africa. I didn’t understand her esoteric jargon, her talk of belonging and peace, but I liked seeing my mother in this state, and I didn’t question it too much.

  I also didn’t believe she would see him again. I knew her too well, and how her big passions faded quickly away. He was a radiant idea, but after he’d phoned for a few weeks she would get bored, meet someone else, and this particular phase would be past. So I happily joined in her plans to go back up to Windhoek to see him, never thinking for a moment that it might actually happen. It was just talk and fantasy, nothing real. But after a year, a year and a half, had gone by, the phone-calls were still coming, and the talk was still the same. And even so, when the first free elections were due, and my mother declared that there could be no more fitting time to go back up to Windhoek, I still didn’t entirely believe her.

  It was only now – now that we were actually here – that the idea had become fact. Maybe this was true for her as well as for me. Thousands of other people had come here for the elections, for the first true day of freedom, but we were here to see him.

  While my mother was in the bath I sat on my bed, the light off, watching the under-lit spectacle of the township through the window. It was a scene you would never find in any upmarket white suburb: the dogs running around, the little groups of people in the street, the dirt and drunkenness – the raw vitality of it all.

  My mother took a long time to get ready. When she eventually emerged she was wearing make-up and perfume, two things she had sworn on principle never to use again after she’d left my father. She simpered and twirled around for me to see. She had on a green skirt and sandals and a white blouse. Around her neck was a string of pearls that I dimly remembered my father giving her after he came back from an overseas trip somewhere. And it was only after we had crossed the yard to our car and were driving through the sultry streets again that I noticed she had shaved her legs – another broken covenant.

  Though full night had fallen and there were clouds in the sky, the heat was unbroken. ‘God, it’s unbearable,’ she said, dabbing at her neck with a hanky. The headlights in the car were erratic and at night she always crouched over the wheel alarmingly, as if in preparation for disaster. As we went she pointed out places of interest on either side: ‘the administrator general’s house,’ she told me, ‘the police station... that’s the way to the airport... ’

  Godfrey wasn’t a student anymore; he worked for SWAPO now. We were going to fetch him at his house, which was in the township. The view I could see from my hostel room window included the road we were on now. There was a clear dividing line where Windhoek came to an end and Katatura began; as we crossed over this line I said to her, ‘Are you sure you know where we’re going?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. I’ve been here hundreds of times. You don’t have to worry, Patrick. It’s perfectly safe, I promise you.’

  I’d visited perhaps three or four townships in my life. A few times, when I was small, I’d been with my father when he drove one of his workers home. But those trips were distant memories and belonged anyway to another point in history: before 1976, before Soweto happened. In recent years, of course, the townships had become war zones. These days the soldiers that weren’t sent up to the border were sent to the townsh
ips instead – a different sort of border. Somebody from my matric class at school, a boy I hadn’t known very well, had been killed in one of these township battles.

  Although they were usually invisible, the townships were always close by. They encircled our cities like besieging battalions. They were always just out of sight, over a rise, behind a hill, discharging smoke and noise and a daily cargo of flesh. Buses and taxis came in and out, trains rattled in their guts. The newspapers at night carried stories of the terrible things that happened in them. We’d made them what they were, then despised them for what they weren’t. They were a negative print of our lives.

  Godfrey lived in an untarred little street, with tiny houses clustered close together like clams. There were no pavements, no lights. We swerved around a group of boys playing soccer in the gloom, who seemed utterly uninterested in us, then passed a horse that was ambling aimlessly, and pulled up at a house like any of the others. There was a warm breeze stirring as we got out. Perspiration pricked out the line of my spine. I followed my mother through a lopsided gate, across a dusty yard, to a tin door. As we were about to knock a skeletal dog came running at us, but it was tied to a chain and couldn’t come close. Only after it jerked up short did it start to bark – furiously, manically, but somehow without passion.