See No Evil

4

June 20, 1988

Well, I’ll try again after that junk I wrote a couple of days ago. It did make me feel slightly better: I’m calmer now. Still angry, but definitely calmer.

They say that a diary shows a future you the person you used to be. I wish I had written one nearly twenty years ago when I first came to South Africa. Then I was an idealist prepared to be appalled by this country. Somehow I fell in love with it, and with Neels. Together I thought we could play our own part in changing it. Instead, it seems to have changed us.

So maybe writing this will help me figure out who I am. Why I’m here. What I’m going to do next.

It’s been three days since we had that fight. It was the worst of our marriage so far, shouting, screaming, swearing at each other: at one point I thought Neels was going to hit me. He’s seemed so much more violent recently, since Hennie was killed. It scares me. He got in a fistfight last week with a stranger in the street, some drunken Boer who recognized him and called him a Kaffir lover. Neels hit him so hard he knocked him out. Three months ago he would have smiled and walked away.

Somehow I think there are going to be many more arguments. He told me he plans to close down the Cape Daily Mail and sell the rest of his South African properties. By “properties” he means newspapers. Apparently American investors are uncomfortable dealing with someone who has South African business interests. So Cornelius van Zyl plans to reinvent himself as a non-South African so that he can buy companies in the States and Britain and all over the rest of the world.

I asked him why he couldn’t just sell the Mail to a friendly proprietor. There are more and more businessmen who are critical of the regime these days. He says the paper is losing money hand over fist and no one would buy it. Although the readership is high, an increasing number of those readers are blacks and the advertisers don’t like that. Blacks don’t have any money to spend. He says he can’t go on subsidizing it for ever.

He’s even selling the family paper, the Oudtshoorn Rekord, that his father started sixty years ago. However many English-language newspapers he bought in South Africa he always said he would hold on to that Afrikaans one, in memory of his father. He clearly didn’t mean it.

Actually, he did mean it then. The point is he doesn’t mean it now. Why? What has changed?

I can’t help thinking that if he abandons the Mail and the other papers, and if he abandons South Africa, then he is abandoning me. I know I’m American, but he’s running away from me, not toward me. He spends more and more time in Philadelphia at the Intelligencer’s offices. He never asks me to come with him. Why not?

I’m losing him.

June 21

It’s a wonderful morning. After I got back from taking Caroline to school I went out for a walk, up to the picnic spot above our house. That’s where I’m sitting now as I write this. Above me is the Hondekop, the craggy outcrop of rock in the shape of the head of a great hound that gave its name to our house. To the right I can see the white cluster of buildings that is the town of Stellenbosch, and beyond that, thirty miles away, is a corner of Table Mountain. The narrow valley stretches up to the left, into the Hottentots Holland mountains. It’s cold this morning, cold and clear, with no wind. The vines are heavy with dew, and the morning sun is touching the tops of the crags on the other side of the valley, turning the gray rock yellow and gold.

Hondehoek is half a mile down into the valley. I love it. It is a classic Cape Dutch farmhouse built of white stone with a thatched roof, a single gable in the center, and the figures 1815 painted in black above the window. Inside, beautiful yellowwood beams frame the high-ceilinged rooms; the floorboards are also made of well-worn yellow-wood, except in the kitchen where the floor tiles are from Batavia. Actually, the original farm was built much earlier than the present building, by a Huguenot called François de Villiers who arrived from Lille in 1694. When Simon van der Stel ventured out of the confines of Cape Town to found Stel-en-bosch, he granted this land to de Villiers, who planted the first vines here, and the oak tree that still stands beside the front door. At about the same time, the first van Zyl arrived in South Africa on a boat from Amsterdam and established his own farm just on the other side of the mountain.

I’m so glad we bought this place. Neels wanted somewhere bigger. He and Penelope lived in a very grand house in Constantia; in fact Penelope still rattles around in there. But when I saw Hondehoek, I fell in love with it. We don’t need somewhere huge, and Neels has to admit that the sheer beauty of the place impresses his guests as much as a mansion would. It also means we don’t need a domestic army to look after it, just Doris and the new maid Tuesday for the house, and Finneas and some casual labor for the garden. I much prefer it that way, I would hate to be the mistress of a huge domestic establishment. We don’t manage the vines either; our neighbor down the valley does that, and does a very good job of it too. But we have retained the Hondehoek label, its Pinotage is renowned. Neels loves to show it off and actually I kind of like it too.

Doris must have lit a fire; a twist of wood smoke is winding its way up into the cold air of the valley.

The winters here are lovely. It’s the equivalent of December in the northern hemisphere: at home in Minnesota the ground would already be under a foot of snow, but here the leaves are not even off the trees. The vines are russet and brown, and the leaves on the oaks which line the drive up to our house are still a golden yellow. There is a good view of the garden from up here. A small lawn slopes down to a pond in front of the house, and beside it lies a formal rose garden. Most of the roses are blooming, as are the magnolia trees. I’ve planted a bed of fynbos, the strange indigenous plants of the Cape, on the other side of the lawn, next to the twin white pillars which hold the bell that used to call the slaves in from the fields. Most of them won’t bloom until the spring, but when they do, they’ll be gorgeous bulbous flowers of yellow, blue and red, nestling in those spiky green leaves. I have to admit, Finneas and I have done a good job.

They call South Africa God’s own country, and sitting here I can see why. No, I can feel why. We’ve lived here seventeen years now, I think. I’m not sure how I fit into the great teeming mass of contradictions that is South Africa, but I do know this about Hondehoek. It’s home.

June 22

Todd called. He hasn’t called for a couple of weeks now, he knew I’d be angry with him because of his letter, and I was. It turns out that he has a new girlfriend, Francesca, and the boy he wants to stay with over the summer vacation lives near her.

I’m glad he talks to me about his girlfriends and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to see her. But spending the whole summer away from his family? He’s only sixteen, for Christ’s sake, he’s going to be spending the next ten years at least running around after women.

Pathetic, really, isn’t it? A mother jealous of her son’s girl. But I really need him around here, especially now Neels is behaving so strangely.

Todd did tell me about the “Free Nelson Mandela” Concert he went to last weekend at Wembley Stadium. He said it was amazing; it lasted ten hours and a billion people watched it on TV around the world. He saw Eric Clapton and Dire Straits and some girl called Tracy Chapman who he said was “brilliant.” There was no coverage here, of course.

But he’s so far away! Caroline’s going to high school next year, but I want to keep her near me. Especially if Neels leaves.

June 24

Neels and I made love last night. It was nice. I was a little drunk, and relieved not to be fighting. He was very affectionate, I think he feels badly about our fight the other day, and so he should.

Afterwards he asked me whether the family should move to Philadelphia. We could buy a house, send Caroline to school there. We could keep Hondehoek and still spend some time here during vacations and so on. He said that he really thinks the regime is going to collapse sometime in the next five to ten years, and when it does it’s going to be ugly. He says he wants to make sure his family is safe.

We talked about Hennie. It’s two months ago today that he was murdered. We read about deaths all the time in the papers, but when the ANC blow up your brother with a landmine on his own farm, it really brings things home to you. He admitted that it was what had made him question whether South Africa could survive the fall of apartheid. He says he can’t get it out of his mind.

I started talking about not wanting to run away from this country, but he kissed me. “Be quiet, liefie,” he said gently. “Don’t answer me yet. Let’s go to sleep now and we can talk about it later, when you’ve had a chance to think about it.”

So what about it? What about moving to America? My knee-jerk reaction is “no,” of course. It would mean abandoning all that our marriage has stood for, all our history together. It would imply that I have wasted the last twenty years of my life stuck down here hoping and praying for the collapse of the system. We can’t leave just when it’s about to happen!

But America is my country, after all. Maybe I should just forget South Africa; it was a phase in my life that has come to an end. There will be other things to do in Philadelphia. Neels is very ambitious, I’ve always known that. He wants to build up a truly international newspaper empire. He’ll have the Philadelphia Intelligencer and the Herald, and all those local US papers. Then he’ll buy more. And I’ll be a media tycoon’s wife. I suppose I am that here, but I don’t feel like it, I feel as if I’m helping Neels right a terrible wrong. I know a lot of people would like the glitter and the glamour of all those parties in Philadelphia and New York and London. But not me. Really not me.

It might save our marriage, though. That is important to me. Maybe that should be more important than what happens in this screwed-up country.

Neels was clever to tell me not to say anything and just think about it.

I love him. I miss the old Neels, but what I need to figure out is if I can love the new Neels just as much. Or maybe there is no difference between the two. Maybe it’s all in my imagination, he hasn’t really changed.

June 26

Neels said Zan called him. She’s coming to stay with us in a couple of days, for two whole months. She’s got a place at the London School of Economics in September, and she wants to spend some time with her father first.

I am really not looking forward to it at all. She’s been in Johannesburg the last six years, getting herself into all kinds of trouble with the End Conscription Campaign and the Black Sash. I have no problem with that, in fact I admire her for it, but we’ve hardly seen her that whole time. Ever since she was fourteen she has been vile to me and to her father, but especially to me. Given how things are between Neels and me I’m not optimistic about her stay.

June 27

I am so angry I could spit. More than spit. I could rip Neels’s balls off.

I got a call from George Field this afternoon saying that Neels had summoned him into his office and told him he was going to announce the closure of the Mail tomorrow morning. He wants George as editor to stand by him when he makes the announcement to staff. George was in deep shock. He hadn’t seen it coming and he wanted to ask me what was going on. I told him about Neels’s international ambitions and the demands of American investors that he get rid of his South African interests. We talked about why he didn’t sell the paper and George confirmed that there are financial problems. But Neels could have tried, for Christ’s sake. I like George and I don’t like the way Neels is treating him.

I snapped at Caroline who ran off to do her homework. When Neels came home, I gave him hell. He was expecting it, I guess; he didn’t fight back. But he looked really angry. He stood still with his fists clenched, kind of shaking. He looked like he was only just managing to control himself. It worried me. Then I told him he wasn’t sleeping in my room that night, or any night, and he turned around and left, just walked out of the house.

Probably gone to drown his sorrows.

Asshole!

Later... technically it’s the morning of June 28.

Cornelius isn’t back yet. For a moment I was worried. I thought perhaps he had gone out somewhere, gotten drunk and then crashed the car on the way home.

But now I know what’s happened. There’s another woman. I know there’s another woman. I don’t know who she is or where she is, but that’s where he’s gone. He had this strange expression on his face just before he left this evening. He decided then that if I wouldn’t let him sleep with me he’d go and sleep with her.

That would explain this feeling I’ve been having that I’m losing him, that he’s slipping away. I was losing him. It’s not just about the Mail. As I write this he’s out there fucking some bimbo.

Well, screw him! The bastard. The absolute total fucking bastard!