The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

1

AN UNSPOKEN RULE stipulates that a writer does not appropriate another writer’s talk. The one who says, “An odd thing happened to me,” and tells you the oddity, is sharing a confidence that must not be betrayed, because he will eventually use it. Telling you is a way of trying it out, and the better he tells it, the more he possesses it, making it untouchable. There is no question of your borrowing it: any use of it is theft.

Lourens Prinsloo told me what happened to him at the age of sixty in similar words, stilted because his mother tongue was Afrikaans: “Quite a curious thing befell me.” But now he is dead, killed as a consequence of the events he described to me, so the story is mine to relate. No one else knows.

I could tell this story by inventing a fictional name for Prinsloo, but he is so well known, his work so widely read, that there is no point. And I have been around too long to hide myself in fiction.

I say “well known” and “widely read,” but that is in South Africa, of course. Prinsloo does not exist in the United States — untranslated, unpublished, not spoken of. I would never have been aware of him were it not for Etienne Leroux, my near namesake, author of many novels in Afrikaans, some of them translated into English, such as Seven Days at the Silbersteins and The Third Eye. Leroux, a farmer in Koffiefontein, in the Orange Free State, was introduced to me by Graham Greene. Greene put some aspects of Leroux’s farm life into The Human Factor, on the basis of several visits.

When Leroux came to London in the 1970s he urged me to visit him in South Africa. I did so, many years later, when I was traveling from Johannesburg to Cape Town after South Africa’s political transformation. Lourens Prinsloo was Leroux’s houseguest.

“I am homeless at the moment,” Prinsloo said, “but I am an optimist.”

Leroux called him Louwtjie, pronounced “low-key,” a name that suited him, for he had the most placid disposition. Prinsloo spent the day licking his thumb and turning over the typescript pages of his short story collection in the English translation, preparing it for publication. This typescript he shared with me — lucky for me. Because of a legal dispute that arose after his death, his family squabbling over the copyright and the royalties, there was no publication in English.

2

The best introduction to Prinsloo is the collection of stories I was privileged to read. Too long for magazine publication, too short for individual books, the stories — novellas, really — appeared two or three at a time in slim volumes, published in Afrikaans in Cape Town. They were admired by Afrikaners, but not enough of them to allow Prinsloo to write full-time. So, like Leroux, Prinsloo remained a farmer — lucerne and cattle and seed maize — supporting fifty black families.

The farmer-writers of South Africa were like the literary men of old Russia, running country estates and writing at night by lamplight of the rural life they led, servants’ quarrels, local gossip, scandals, superstitions, the low comedy of country life with its adulteries and pettiness, its vendettas and pieties. Blacks in South Africa were like the serfs in old Russia — owned, beaten, barefoot hut dwellers, worked to death. The setting was not a country but a twilit world of loneliness and squabbles, with darkness all around it.

Prinsloo’s stories were strange. Very long, very detailed, vividly depicted, they were like tales from another age. They had all the elements of Russian stories, but when animals and trees were mentioned they were freakish — two-headed calves, night-blooming bat roosts; and racial oddity abounded — albinos, freckled Bushmen, white men with one Zulu on a remote branch of the family tree. The stories tended to be forty to fifty pages long — what magazine would publish them? But published two or three together in a book, they looked impressive, well printed, on good paper, with tight bindings, old-fashioned handiwork of self-sufficient South Africans. I could not read them but I did have this translation, the pages thickened, physically dented, by the typewritten letters. That in itself reminded me how old typescripts showed the force of the prose, how words were punched into the page, underlinings were slashes and some exclamation marks punctured the paper, and altogether the typewriter gave the pages the raised texture of Braille.

Etienne Leroux, known familiarly as Stephen, didn’t mind that I was absorbed in Prinsloo’s manuscript rather than one of his. Typically generous, he said, “If you read these stories you will understand this place.” I supposed “this place” to mean Africa, though maybe he meant Koffiefontein, OFS.

The stories were the more terrifying for being rural comedies. The element of the grotesque that I associate with farming was in the grain of all of them, for a raw acceptance penetrates the barnyard. The nearer we live to animals, the more naked life is. Yet while varieties of animals and humans can seem ridiculous and conspiratorial on a big aromatic farm, they are partners deep down, for farm life makes everyone fatalistic. Faulkner at his broadest is a good example of that. Not much is hidden, modernity does not exist though faith is everywhere, life unfolds outdoors, and people's lives come to resemble those of their animals. Existence is a browsing and a fattening, and then comes the harvest and the slaughter.

The first story was the strangest. A white farmer in a remote dorp of the Free State lusted after one of his female servants. He could see that she recognized his desire, but she made no move, merely waited for him to act. He did nothing. He was nearing sixty, his wife a bit older, and “she had shut up shop some years before,” which I took to mean had lost interest in sex.

The farmer's wife was approaching a thorn tree one day to photograph a bird (a gray-headed bush shrike) when a snake (a boomslang) wrapped on a bough above her dropped to the earth and bit her. She died soon after. I was later to find that Prinsloo’s stories were full of the particularities of South African natural history.

Very soon after his wife’s death, the farmer consoled himself with his African servant. But he was so ashamed afterward that he did not repeat the deed. When the African woman appeared at his door she was turned away. Humiliated, she left his employ, but not before putting a curse on the farmer.

The farmer mourned his wife and asked her forgiveness. He took to staring in a mirror to assess his misery. One day he noticed a mole on his face that he had never seen before. Within a few days it grew larger, and soon it was “the size of a Krugerrand,” not a mole anymore but a deep brown blotch, an irregular stain that spread to cover his cheek. He could not hide it. Other parts of his body were similarly affected. The lower part of his left leg was brown. Soon his entire body was dark.

At first he dared not show his face in public, and for months — captive to his changing color — he did not leave his house. But when, inevitably, he had to go to town, he hid his dusky face. To his surprise he was not recognized, nor was he singled out — was not noticed at all. He came and went unseen by anyone, and with this new racial coloration became invisible.

He was so unrecognizable that, although he was fully present, a rumor circulated that he had died. To deny the rumor would have meant revealing himself, and so he let the rumor circulate. Hearing of his death, the African woman showed up with her child — the fruit of their brief union. She intended to stake her claim to the property, using their child as proof of what had occurred between them. The child was white. The woman was chased away by the servants, arrested for kidnapping a white child, and given a long sentence. That story was titled “The Curse.”

That element of the supernatural seemed to be a trait in Prinsloo’s work, and was more believable than the sort of thing you find in, for example, Edward Lucas White’s “Lukundoo.” In that horror story a white explorer in Africa comes down with a case of apparent measles — boils, anyway — and suffers as they grow, and at last, pricking them, he finds that each boil contains a little black man standing in his flesh, upright on the center of each eruption, looking furious. Prinsloo’s stories were subtler than that, but then Prinsloo considered himself an African.

In “Katje and Koelie,” the lives of an old woman and her servant are depicted with ironic sympathy. The women, one black, one white, the same age, have been raised together on a remote farm in the eastern Transvaal. At first they are playmates; then the black woman, Koelie, becomes Katje’s servant, washing her clothes, shining her boots. Katje teaches Koelie to read and write, and for a while the servant excels in her studies and speaks of leaving; but, hearing this, Katje forbids it, ends the lessons, and Koelie is reduced to servitude again, until Katje falls ill and is nursed by Koelie, who makes all the decisions. In middle life they have become like a married couple. Katje’s eyesight fails. Koelie becomes her eyes, and because she is literate she writes checks for Katje, deals with Katje’s money, and becomes Katje’s protector.

You think that something sinister is about to occur when Prinsloo describes them arm in arm, the black servant steering her white mistress, but it is only a characteristic death scene, one of Prinsloo’s signature devices: the white woman, sleepwalking, falls and breaks her hip, and lying an entire night, she is set upon by huge (“mouse-sized”) armored crickets (Acanthoplus dis-coidalis), which chew her flesh. Katje is found in the morning by Koelie, dead, part of her face eaten away. Koelie buries her lifelong friend and keeps one of the crickets, not, as the African staff thinks, for muti (medicine), but as the embodiment of Katje, now and then — this is the last paragraph — allowing the cricket to chew on her own arm.

“The Justus Family” reminded me of Arthur Schnitzler’s play Reigen: a series of ten encounters takes place, all of them sexual assignations, and all the characters change partners. In the first scene the soldier is bedding the shopgirl, in the second scene the shopgirl is being wooed by a lawyer, in the third the lawyer is pouncing on the society woman, and so forth until the last pairing, the soldier again, with the woman from the penultimate scene, linking her in this human chain to the first scene. It’s about syphilis, some critics have said; but why? Reigen is about how the world works. “The Justus Family” had a similar movement — peristaltic almost.

Prinsloo’s story, which opens with an obscure funeral, I took to be autobiographical, since there were eight children in it, the same as in Prinsloo’s family. Each of the children sought the approval of a domineering mother. Little alliances were formed among the children but none were secure; in fact, no sooner had one sibling confided in another than that one used the confidence to jeer at the sibling and take the secret to a brother or sister, who in turn passed it on, whispering it to another brother or sister, who of course broke the promise of confidence, undermining the teller and becoming the subject of more whispers. Peristalsis.

This story of apparent betrayal — no one is true, no one keeps a secret, everyone is mocked — is the more sinister and unsettling for the figure of the mother, a highly respected Boer matriarch and widow, who in fact keeps the whole process going. Her presence gives “The Justus Family” more density than Schnitzler's play, because it is more than just a round of sordid encounters; it involves complex interaction.

Whenever Mother Justus detects a note of resolution she steps in and stirs, feeding the whispers with whispers of her own, and so the story of the Justus family is really the story of this woman, whose children seem less and less malicious and more and more the victims of a manipulative and insecure mind. The shocked children realize their secrets have been betrayed. Mother Justus laughs and says, “If they were secrets, you wouldn't have told me.”

But they love and obey her, and when a black farm hand makes an offhand remark about her tyranny he is set upon by the children and killed. The obscure funeral on the first page is his.

The most ingenious and modern of Prinsloo’s long stories was one of his last, written in his period of birthday melancholy — perhaps for that reason it was his funniest, his crudest, his most unsparing. It is called “The Translator.”

The translator of the title is a wealthy farmer of citrus in Nelspruit named Finsch, who on his sixtieth birthday acquires the ability (we don't learn how, but it is so convincing we don't ask) to translate what people say to him into what they really mean. The story — novella, really — is all subtext and no text. In a verbal sense everyone who encounters Finsch is naked: nothing is hidden from him, people’s motives are baldly apparent.

I can only approximate the dialogue because I am recounting it from memory. The narrative is almost all dialogue, and the piece would make a superbly wicked play. As I mentioned earlier, I was given a thick typescript of Prinsloo’s stories at Etienne Leroux’s house. I spent a day and a night with it, and then was told to hand it back. I was not able to make notes. The only photocopier at the time and place was a big inky machine, predating the mimeograph. It was a Gestetner brand Cyclostyle machine which produced cloudy brown representations of text on crinkly curly sheets of flimsy paper that faded and became unreadable if sunlight fell upon them.

One of the aspects of the story that is lost in translation, Prinsloo told me, is the elaborate courtesy of the man Finsch, faced by people who plainly dislike him and want something from him. The moral, if such a cynical tale can be said to contain a moral, is that no one means what he says; everyone is out to get something they don’t deserve. But as soon as you conclude that in these encounters there is not an ounce of generosity, you realize that Finsch — for his amazing gift of translation — is the soul of kindness.

The narrative occupies an entire day in the life of Farmer Finsch, a day in which he sees an old friend, interviews some men for the job of driver, has lunch with his son-in-law, and later, walking in the graveyard outside Nelspruit (all Prinsloo’s stories seemed to take place in deeply rural South African settings), meets and talks with a pretty young woman.

In the opening paragraph, the early morning of that day, the old friend stops by for coffee. Finsch greets the man amiably and the friend says, “You look terrible — much worse than me. Your face is fat and blotchy, probably from drinking.”

The reader thinks: What’s going on here? But Prinsloo knows what he is doing; gives no warnings or preliminaries, just plunges into these heartless dialogues. Finsch the translator is implacable.

“And how are you?”

“As if you care, you egotist. Your money has blinded you to the misery of the rest of us poor souls.”

“I haven’t seen you for ages,” Finsch says.

“I never liked you! Once a year would be too often! God, what a scraggy neck you have. Watery eyes, too. The blood blotches are stamped on your face.”

Antagonistic people are scrupulous noticers of faults, Prinsloo seems to be saying. And Finsch, although burdened by this prescience, does not reveal what he is hearing.

“One of these days we should have dinner,” he says.

“I don’t think I could stand a whole evening. And now I want to go. I want to find a way of ending this conversation. It must be those cigars that make your skin like parchment.”

“Would you like a cigar? Here, take one.”

“You think that offering me a cigar means I’m your friend? On the contrary, it makes me despise you more, because it reminds me of how little you’ve given me in all the years I’ve known you.”

More of this and then the friend goes away, and Finsch is not insulted but calmed by the encounter. And though we have not been told explicitly what Finsch’s gift is, we know what is happening when the men show up for the driver interviews.

“A bit more than a driver,” as Finsch explains, for he also needs a handyman and mechanic, someone to keep the car in good repair.

“What experience do you have?” Finsch asks the first man, who is a big blond ex-army sergeant.

“How much experience do I need? I can drive well, as if you’d know the difference. Put me behind the wheel and I will dazzle you.”

“Are you knowledgeable about engines?”

“The usual. I can change the oil, I can fuss and fool. Anything serious would go to a real mechanic — you can afford it. You can’t expect me to know everything.”

“I need someone who’s handy,” Finsch says.

“People like you always say that without having the slightest idea of what you mean. You’d never guess how little I know. But I know more than you.”

Other interviews follow, all the men just as harsh as this; and then a new note is struck, one of timidity, the man revealing himself as fearful of Finsch.

“I’ll bet you’re always snooping,” this man says. “You’ll be watching everything I do.”

Finsch says, “You’ll be expected to look after the car as well as drive it.”

“And it will never be enough for you. You’ll do nothing but complain and make my life hell.”

After more exchanges, the man cringing, terrified of Finsch, he is offered the job, which, almost mute with fear — little to translate — the man accepts.

Lunch with the son-in-law was painful to read for all the obvious reasons, the young man mocking Finsch and reflecting on what a close resemblance he has to his selfish pig of a daughter and saying, “I am going to get something from you, or else. I am just deciding what it is I want.” Finsch remains serene. We see that he is content with his seemingly diabolical gift.

Later in the afternoon, in Nelspruit's white graveyard, Finsch meets a young woman. He realizes, as soon as she begins telling him she is there “to mourn a dear friend,” that her boyfriend has just left for a job in Durban. While she talks to Finsch she is pondering a scheme to ensnare him — get some money out of him — so that she can join her boyfriend.

“I see you glancing at my breasts. I know you want to play with them. You are so simple. But it is going to cost you. I know I can make you pay.”

“My wife is buried here,” Finsch says.

“That is wonderful news. You will be all the more willing to do as I say. You're pathetic, but what a lovely ring on your finger. That will be mine.”

“I miss her greatly,” Finsch says.

“One glimpse of my naked body and you’ll stop missing her. You’re weak, but I won’t hurt you. After a little while I’ll take what I deserve and go on my way.”

“We might meet for a cup of tea one day,” Finsch says.

“I’ll wear my red dress. I’ll hold my nose. Sometimes men your age can really perform. That’s my only worry — your demands.”

Of course, Finsch avoids the woman — he has been warned. But he loses his serenity when he realizes that his knack for knowing what people are saying, what is in their heart, makes him lonely. He becomes isolated to the point where he won’t see anyone, so disgusted is he by people’s meanness and cynicism, their insincerity and greed. But in a redemptive moment with his daughter he understands that she genuinely loves him — or at least seems to. Dining with her, he reads her thoughts, as he has those of the others. Her kindness is sincere — or is it? Overwhelmed by a feeling of love, has he lost the ability to translate what she is saying into what she really thinks? The reader must decide.

There were about six other stories, the shortest of them about a farmer — another farmer — who finds a young abandoned monkey on his land. In his loneliness the farmer raises the monkey, names it, and trains it to become a helpful companion whom he comes to regard as a partner. At the end of the story the farmer is visited by a man who says, “Your monkey is staring at me.” The farmer loses his temper. “That is no monkey!”

A similar story about a gray parrot with a vast vocabulary and the same name as the main character: at the end you are not sure whether you are reading about the farmer or the parrot.

In “Drongo,” a bird appears on a veranda, pecking at the railing. The bird will not be deterred by the farmer, who is at first friendly — offering it food; and then hostile — plinking at it with a rifle. This simple bird visitation takes place against a backdrop of the wedding of the farmer’s son, the appearance of the farmer’s first grandchild, the promise of continuity. But without any warning the house collapses. “Eaten away.” Had he looked more closely the farmer would have understood that the drongo he killed was picking at termites and keeping the house whole. Now there is nothing of the house left.

Strange stories — but Prinsloo’s life, the last years of it, were stranger than anything he wrote.

3

“Quite a curious thing befell me,” Lourens Prinsloo said to me — and as a writer I was keenly aware that he was trying this story out on me, as he had probably tried it out on other people. Because I was a writer myself I would not be able to use the story, though I would be allowed to repeat it, and when this master of the bizarre story finally wrote it, I could compare the version he wrote with the one he had told me in confidence.

I was listening hard, with the exaggerated attention a younger writer gives to an older one, an intense alertness that is both respect and curiosity. I was not taking notes — it would have been rude, would have seemed too businesslike — so I can only approximate what he told me as I have approximated his translated stories. But Prinsloo had a knack for dialogue, and speaking it, he made it easy for me to remember.

“It’s an African story,” he said. And then he told me that he had been married to Marianne, a pleasant, helpful, loving woman who had borne him two sons, Wimpie and Hansie. The marriage had flourished for more than thirty years. Farming life had bonded them — she too was from a farming family, cattle ranchers from the wilderness of Kuruman. Prinsloo and Marianne were both descendants of the oldest families to arrive in South Africa, represented centuries of settlement and work, but also of a changelessness that is known only on a farm in the African bush. Her parents had traveled by ox cart; his had had motor vehicles, but even so, they lived the isolated lives of their ancestors, side by side with Africans and speaking their language and feeling that they knew them well.

As Prinsloo told me this, I was reminded that in his long stories all of his protagonists were either widowers or spinsters. He did not write of the satisfactions of married life — a significant omission, given the fact that he was smiling as he told me how happily married he had been.

I was on the point of mentioning this when he said, “Happiness is not a fit subject. Happiness is banal. People who read are not happy, or else why would they be alone in a room with a book in their hands? I am a farmer, and on a farm you are neither happy nor sad. You work too hard ever to consider such things. You have no set hours. You are part of a much bigger process of life and death. You tend your animals, you watch the weather, you hope for rain — the right kind at the right time. You try not to think too much, or else you’ll go mad with worry. Farming is the opposite of writing stories.”

It was easy for me to recall his saying that, because it was a general statement of farming life. His next statement was memorable, too, for its succinctness.

“Nothing happened to me for sixty years. Then I had my birthday, and everything happened.”

His saying that made me especially attentive. I let him proceed at his own pace — first a long pause, a silence, as though to allow him to find something equally dramatic as a follow-up. And really, nothing could have been better than what he said next.

“Do you remember the African woman who appears toward the end of Heart of Darkness—probably Kurtz's lover, ‘wild, animal-like… flamboyant… all in feathers… a magnificent creature,' all of that?”

He had some of it right. Conrad describes the African woman in the most vivid terms: “a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman… treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments… She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent…” And so forth.

When I said I remembered her well, Prinsloo smiled one of his ironical smiles and said, “This woman, my woman Noloyiso, was nothing like her.”

If Nolo had been the educated eldest daughter of one of his farm laborers, there would have been no obstacle to his having a casual affair with her — though he had never touched an African woman in his life. Yet, because Africans had worked for his father, their children would work for his children, it was impossible not to regard them in a profound sense as his property: they all belonged to him. Many of the girls in the fields were pretty, but in time they lost their looks, they bore children, their lives were short. He saw them not as they were but as they would become.

Nolo he saw first at the store in town and was struck by her beauty, her youth, a sense of vitality — and it was only afterward that he found she was unmarried, thirty-four years old — late middle age for an African woman. She was not dressed in the African style. She wore a gray pleated skirt, a blue blazer over a white blouse. She could have been a dining car attendant on a minor branch of the Spoorweg. Her full name was Noloyiso Vilikazi.

Her head was small, round, close-cropped hair, with a child’s face, a child’s ears, large dark eyes, and her figure was slight yet sturdy. Prinsloo was a good judge of an African’s strength. He could tell who would last in the fields, and the women were far superior to the men.

This woman was not in the least interested in him, but for the first time in his life Prinsloo’s head was turned — and by an African. She was a schoolteacher in town, so he learned. She lived alone in a simple house in the staff compound. She had been educated at a training college. She was very pretty, but her beauty was not remarkable. He was fascinated by something else, a trait he had never noticed in anyone, man or woman. What struck him was that he, a great imaginer, could not imagine Noloyiso old. He was certain that she would always look as she looked today, as lovely, as young, with the same glow of health.

He needed that assurance. He was desperate to have her. And her seriousness, her indifference, her aloofness, even her posture, all these aspects like the aspects of a watchful impala — she had the same eyes — only made his impatience worse. The second time he saw her, he noticed that her left arm was missing. Had she just lost it? No, for her left side had been hidden from him the first time. The missing arm made her more attractive to him — not pity but the opposite, an admiration for her strength.

Something within him responded, an inner voice, which was not speech but knowledge. Yet if it were put into words, it would have said: With this woman you will be young again, you will be happy, you will be strong, you will sire children, you will love the land again, you will enjoy your food, you will know passion and desire, you will be loved, you will be admired, people will smile with satisfaction when they see you, you will live longer, you will discover new subjects to write about.

A sexual awakening, perhaps, but more than that, for sex was just hydraulics, a frenzy of muscle and fluid. A new life was what he saw. The beauty of it was that he knew this woman was able to transform him, to re-create him as though fictionalizing him, making him into the other, better person he had been as a youth, hopeful, happy, energetic, fascinated, innocent — someone who slumbered within him, the pure-hearted being who, to be animated and given life again, needed only to be woken with a kiss by this one unexpected woman.

What he saw and felt was like a definition of love. It was deeper than desire. It was the awakening of a whole being, and the need was powerful because only this one woman could do it. Without her, he was only his incomplete self, half asleep; with her, he was the better person — forgiving, strong, generous, imaginative — because of her love. Sex was part of it, sex was the magic; but the bond was love.

4

Mingled in his mind were sex and creation — his writing. He believed that he was an imaginative and prolific writer because of his powerful sexual instinct, that he owed the extravagance of his imagination to his persistent sexual desire, a sort of engine that drove his writing. He hardly distinguished between the two, his desire for sex, his desire to write, and steaming in all his writing was this rosy-hued lechery — even the sober-seeming people in his strange excursions, such as Finsch and Katje and the Justus family, were running a temperature. Sex was exploration and conquest, so he reasoned. And the fever of sexual desire gave the imagination its wild and sometimes blinding fulguration. Sex was also the hot velvety darkness behind the dazzle of his creation. He would have been lost without it, he would have been lost if he had been wholly fulfilled: repressing it was a way of harnessing it and using it. “Thwarted desire was the steam contained under pressure in the boiler of his body” was a line from one of his stories, I forget which.

No man in South Africa ever found it difficult to locate a like-minded woman, a willing partner. Prinsloo knew by the look alone whether a woman was willing. Farmers’ wives, farmers’ daughters, Rhodesians, Mozambicans; but commonest of all were the women known as “coloreds”—ambiguous mixed-race beauties who were welcome nowhere and everywhere, looking for security. The slightest hint that he was interested animated them, and he loved watching them and seeing how clever they could be in devising ways to meet him covertly, in a nearby dorp or in remote parts of his own land, for his farm was so extensive an estate as to have hidden corners and places for assignations.

With sex he was rejuvenated. He was granted new ideas, new confidence. He did not distinguish between his literary notions and the ingenuity in these sexual affairs.

Sex was a disease, sex was also a cure. He would feel the desire to make love to a particular woman — like a rooster spotting a hen. The seduction preoccupied him, made him impatient, drove his imagination, helped his writing. At last, when the day of assignation came, the act might be clumsy the first time, better the second time, a great deal smoother the third time, but after a while, gaining skill, it lost passion. Sex was the cure for sex, like medicine three times the first day, two the second, dwindling in dosage as the condition improved, until no more was needed; and then he looked for a new woman. His wife knew nothing, for — such was his sexual charge — he did not neglect her.

At the outset he believed that with Nolo the repetition would rid him of his desire — odd, too, for she was the first full-blooded African he had ever slept with, one of the plainest, and — since she was missing one arm — incomplete.

It was her strangest feature, something like an asset, for in the dark she seemed to possess not one arm but three. His whole body was gripped. She used her mouth. She clamped him between her agile legs and wrapped herself around him and, snakelike, squeezed him until he gasped for air. This small creature in the dark became an immense boomslang, and he the soft yielding thing being devoured.

He felt small, even vulnerable, caressed and embraced by this woman who had seemed like a child. He felt young when he was with her — the first time youthful, the subsequent times like a child, with a child's physical vitality and optimism, as though at the beginning of a long life. That he had only fleetingly felt with other women. Now it was a condition of being with Nolo: he was not an older man but a youth.

Everything contributed to this feeling — the time of day, the secrecy of the place, the passion of the act, the mysteriousness of the woman. It was all new to him. Being new, it took the place of his most original writing. He had not written anything since the day, weeks before, when he first saw Nolo in her blue blazer and pleated skirt in the shop. But sex with her much resembled his best days at his desk, writing brilliantly — was in some respects superior to those days — the desire he felt like the joyous drug that lay behind his most enigmatic fiction.

Here was the woman at first glance: dependable, serious-seeming, soberly dressed as only an African schoolteacher would be, rather tense with the self-conscious piety of the educated African — and a bit defensive, too: incomplete — that missing arm. She hardly smiled.

In the bedroom, in his bakkie (pickup truck, he explained to me), she was a cat — wild, reckless, full of surprises — and seemed to know what was in his mind at every moment.

Just like a cat, facing away, she crouched and raised her buttocks and said, “Do it to me”—she had no word for the act, did not want to know the word, only wanted the struggle and satisfaction.

That different woman in the dark helped him discover a different man in himself; and over the course of a month he discovered much else — all revealed to him when he was with Nolo, much as in the writing of a paragraph or a page he discovered with pleasure the thought or incident that lurked there, that proved he was uncovering something new.

So instead of burning itself out, the flame grew fiercer, hotter, and brighter.

He loved the idea that only he knew that she was two people, and neither of them was African in any sense he had known or seen before. And he a man, a baas, who had been born in the country!

He was enough of a man of the world, had lived long enough, to understand the lover's illusion of the beloved as someone unique — and, more than that, someone known only to the lover. The lover's conceit that no one else may intrude, no one else has the capacity to see or understand. Desire was this special way of seeing the lover as irreplaceable. Smitten meant hit on the head, he knew that, and he still felt that he was in sole possession of the truth.

Desire, need, urgency, made him reckless. He could hardly believe how much. Loving a black was breaking the law. What he felt was the nearest thing to love he had ever known — yet to call it that was unnatural and illegal, and while it was normal for him to feel affection and even desire, love was absurd.

Nevertheless, she gave him something powerful without speaking a word — bewitched him. She made him whole, made him strong, restored youth to him, gave him power. She inspired him. Seeing him the first time, she had seemed to understand him and silently to respond with promises. In their lovemaking she kept her promises. So she was true.

Without telling his wife why, he found a house for her, asked her to live in it, and said that he needed to be alone, to think.

She knew what was wrong. Many times in the past, working on one of his long stories, he had absented himself, vanished somewhere on his vast estate, so that he could understand the story better.

Nolo was like a character in one of his strangest stories. So was he. Exactly. The sense of living inside one of his own stories roused and compelled him to look deeper. The feeling did not pass away, nor even diminish. He wanted more of it.

5

Distracted, almost demented by this fever of passion and attachment, feeling unwell, he had no doubt that there was only one cure for his ailment, ridiculous as it might seem to the whites he knew — a sickening desire for the half-educated schoolteacher with one arm, just a kaffir and, outside the bedroom, a deeply moralistic munt. All he wanted, now that he was separated from his wife, was for the African to move into his house with him, something any African woman would have been eager to do, to share his life, to be waited on by servants, to know a degree of luxury that was way beyond the imagining of most of them, like winning the lottery.

She said no.

Prinsloo almost laughed. This was a ruse, surely. He demanded to know why.

“Because we are not married,” she said.

He stared at her.

“In the eyes of God,” she added.

“In the eyes of God we are!”

“Not married,” she said stubbornly, frowning, defying him.

This from a woman whose people hardly used the word, who stuck a spear upright, twangling in the ground, before the door of a rondavel, which meant, I am a man. I am here. This is my woman.

Prinsloo still smiled. He said, “We have done nothing but sneak around and make love for almost a month.”

“I regret that.”

He reminded her of certain acts she had performed, words she had said, noises she had made.

“I should not have,” she said, looking demure, pressing her prim lips together. “Because of my Christian vows.”

Prinsloo wanted to hit her. He had spanked his children, and one drunken night he had smacked his wife; he had never struck an African, though such beatings were common enough in his stories — thrashings with sjamboks that cut flesh and drew blood. Having rehearsed them in his work, he was able to imagine snatching a whip and slashing her with it and belaboring her on the floor until she agreed with everything he said, until she submitted.

He wondered whether she was deliberately provoking him, wishing to be thrashed and dominated. He was reaching for her wrist, on the point of grabbing it, when she pulled away, looking shocked, and said that he would have to think seriously about marrying her before he touched her again.

“You have no right,” she said.

That fascinated him, as though she were making a kind of promise: if they were legally together he would have a perfect right to make her submit.

She said no more, she just withdrew, she vanished into her schoolroom. He turned to his work, which had lain untouched, stopped cold, since he had initiated the affair with Noloyiso and left it as he had left his wife. But he was stumped. He could not make a sentence. Work that had taken the place of sex, that had inspired sex, that was inspired by sex, that had been his life, was inert. His pen was small and loose in his hand, just a dry stick he used to make crosshatches in the margins of his sheet of paper. He wanted to stab himself with the thing.

Or stab her with it, injecting her with ink. The one-armed Bantu schoolteacher had rebuffed him. Apparently her life was complete: she turned her back on him and went on teaching. Was it possible that she felt nothing?

At least he knew where she was. At certain times of the day, unable to work, the times when he would have worked, he crossed the dorp in his bakkie, bumped over the railway tracks that divided the town into black and white, and, parking on the road, he walked the last hundred yards on stony ground to the hencoop of a school.

Black children in the playground stared at him. It was not unusual for a white school super or inspector to appear, but this man went to the window and looked in, standing and staring like a reproachful ghost.

Nolo continued to teach her class, with him at the window. But when the bell sounded she hurried outside looking stern, her face immobile.

“If you don’t leave the premises I’ll have to call the police.”

“Premises”—this scrubby acre! “Police”—those lazy villains!

Prinsloo said, “I am not committing a crime.”

“You are trespassing.”

He thought: Imagine being accused by a Bantu!

But he said, “I want you to come with me.”

“You know my position on that. You know my terms.”

“Position”! “Terms”! He wanted to laugh. He hoped that her speaking to him in this way would fill him with self-disgust and act as a signal for him to reject her. Yet the opposite happened. He was humiliated and humbled. Her speaking sharply to him clarified his feelings. He realized that he could not live without her.

He divorced Marianne. The poor woman's face crumpled with grief, as though she had just gotten news of the death of a loved one. In a sense, that was just what had happened, for he was lost to her for good.

She begged him to change his mind. He pitied her, but he also wanted her to wish him well. He said so.

She said, “I don't wish you ill,” and then, considering the words she had spoken, added, “No, I do wish you ill. You deserve to suffer.”

He said, “I haven’t written a single word for six months!”—meaning that he had already suffered.

“You’re divorcing me and all you think about is your writing.”

“Because that’s all I ever think about.”

Why had he said this? Was it true? He did not think about his unwritten stories, only about Noloyiso the Bantu schoolteacher, who had one arm, who possessed him, body and soul.

He told Nolo in a letter what he had done.

She agreed to see him. She allowed his advances, they made love again, but it was understood that she would not move in with him.

“My people would call me a harlot.”

“Your people are always living together. That’s the usual arrangement!”

“With each other. In the same age group. Not with a white man. And you are old.”

She had him there.

What made Prinsloo think it would be a reasonable idea for him to introduce Nolo to Hansie? Wimpie was in Cape Town, or else he would have included him, too, at the lunch in the hotel dining room in the dorp. It was bad enough with Hansie; Wimpie would have made it worse. Prinsloo saw at once it was a mistake. Nolo and Hansie were the same age.

Hansie’s eyes were cold, his lips were tight with fury, his voice quietly mocking, asking questions that were accusations, not expecting answers.

“Doesn't it seem a bit strange to be eating in here, sitting at a table rather than standing outside at the window?”

Africans just seven years before had been forbidden to enter the restaurant and had used the take-away window at the side of the building.

Nolo said, “Not really. I always thought it was strange to use the window, and so I never did it.”

Prinsloo admired Nolo's composure. Her strength gave him strength.

“What's your opinion of Dad's books?”

That threw her. It was clear from her expression that Nolo did not know Prinsloo was a writer. What had his writing to do with their love affair? Nolo simply stared at him.

“She will read them when they are translated,” Prinsloo said.

“Praat u Afrikaans?” Hansie nagged.

“Ek verstaan net ‘n bietjie Afrikaans. Ek praat Engels, ” Nolo said.

Saying that was the nearest she had ever come to expressing a political opinion.

“Into English, of course,” Prinsloo said.

Prinsloo sat in a sorry slumped posture, as Hansie looked at his father with contempt for his foolishness.

The meal was awful. Before it was over he knew he had lost his son; that Hansie saw this unique woman and thought, Kaffir.

More alone afterward, Prinsloo saw that he had only one choice. He proposed marriage. Nolo accepted. The little ceremony took place in the town hall — Nolo’s elderly father, some of her cousins, an auntie, all of them dressed in stiff, ill-fitting clothes, newly made by a man working a Singer sewing machine on a veranda in the dorp. Nolo wore a long yellow dress. And another awkward lunch in the hotel dining room, the old man smiling with worry and saying, “I have never been in here before in my whole life.”

Later that day she moved into his house, bringing one suitcase, the size she would have used for travel of a week’s duration, containing everything she owned, including a clock, a Bible, some pictures, some books — serious self-improving ones; and she submitted to him.

She became his slave, but a happy one, joyous in their lovemaking — imaginative, too, for she allowed Prinsloo to dominate her utterly, to treat her like a servant, a whore, a sex object, a stranger, living out passionate fantasies of master and slave. She allowed it, then she encouraged it, finally she demanded it. Prinsloo tied her one arm and used her body; she did not object, she said she enjoyed it. She suggested more degrading episodes of submission in which she sat handcuffed to a chair or secured to the bedposts. She willingly got onto her knees, her one arm making a tripod of her posture. She urged him to thrash her buttocks, and while he did so, she raised them so that he could enter her. Still she asked for more, begging to eat him, drink him, swallow him.

When Prinsloo ran out of ideas for abusing her, it was Nolo who supplied him with variations, acts he had not imagined in his wildest fictions. How did she know what was in his head? Where had she heard of such things? Perhaps only an African knew how to please such a man, since sex is about power, and the African story was about power. What a mind she had! She was so willing to take any form of abuse she became his partner; she invited him to enslave her.

Her submitting in this way proved to Prinsloo that she was stronger than he was, that she enjoyed these games even more than he did, that the manipulation was hers: she was using him.

So he was absolved of any sense of guilt. Sex filled his life. These were the first weeks, the first months, of a passionate marriage. He loved her seriousness, he adored her recklessness. She was wilder than he was, she was impossible to know. His life was complete, like a finished story, but the marriage was both a satisfaction and a blurring, for now he had no idea who she was.

She had kept her promise. That was worth a lot. She belonged to him. His nonwriting life was as full as his writing life had ever been, as rich, as unexpected.

But one day, drawing her arm behind her, she hesitated before he twisted it, preparing to restrain her.

“Not too rough today. I don't want to hurt the baby.”

He backed off, raising his hands, as though she had shown him a weapon, and when he tried to resume, his efforts were enfeebled by what she had told him. He could not proceed.

6

The news of a baby surprised and preoccupied him in a way he had never known. He had hardly been aware of the births of his two other children. This was different. He monitored the progress of Nolo's pregnancy. He had the time. He was not writing. Anyway, this was better than writing and yet similar — something new every day, a discovery, growth, wonder, he was humbled. She was the pen, bringing forth something new. Nolo became inward, compact, budlike, concentrating on her body. She swelled, she lost her girl’s body, she became fruit-shaped; he studied her tightened flesh, he pondered the loss of her sexuality.

When the day came and she signaled that she was ready, the doctor arrived and Nolo gave birth in their own bedroom, a wonderful thing, a celebration, a boy, a gift.

The infant was gray at birth, then pink, darkening, with thick hair. He was not black or white, but maculate, pinkish patched gray, more a reflection of Prinsloo than either of his other children, intelligent, responsive, alert.

Nolo called him Nelson. Prinsloo called him Zulu, to represent his people: and “Zulu Prinsloo” had the right sound, a haughty assonance.

Children in Africa seldom cry, seldom fuss, don’t clamor for attention, don’t have to, since a cloth binds them to the mother’s back, a bundle she carries everywhere, and suckles whenever the child is hungry. Nolo kept the boy close, took him to bed with them, suckled him there, Prinsloo looking on, the child always lying between them.

Nolo was a new woman, fulfilled and fattish, beautiful in her bulk. The skinny young woman had become rounder, with pale clear skin and serene eyes and great heavy breasts.

“No,” she said when Prinsloo reached as though to weigh one in his lifting hand.

She would not allow his fingers the slightest touch, and she shrank when he approached.

The African custom stipulated that a woman could not engage in sex while she was breastfeeding. Nolo, who had never shown any curiosity for her culture, reverted to her traditional customs.

Months passed. Prinsloo played with the baby and, though rebuffed by the mother, was consoled by the child’s response — a bright child, golden-skinned, his own, more him than his others. He endured the no-sex stricture, and eight months later the child was still seeking his mother’s nipples.

Prinsloo, though indulgent and proud of the child, was eager to change places with him, to nestle between those breasts, where he had once spent whole nights.

Sometimes he took his small son to town, binding him into the baby seat in his Land Rover, the child contentedly gurgling. On such occasions, the entire day devoted to one trip to the dorp — no writing, no reading, only hours of proximity to the child — Prinsloo reflected that for over a year now he had not written a word; he had been silent. Had anyone noticed?

That day of writing would come, he was sure, though this was the longest he had gone without writing, for his creative life had been spent writing stories end to end, finishing one, starting another, linking them in his head; and this was a break, an emptiness.

What made him confident was the knowledge that this too was a story, his love affair, the marriage, the child. Not that any of this compensated for setting words down on a page, yet he was living an African story.

The most African of African stories, for he was a farmer, descended from Boers who had trekked to the Transvaal two hundred years before; he was a white man who had made a whole life and abandoned it upon falling in love at a feed store with a black woman who had one arm; he had embarked on a new life, a new family, with a mixed-race child — an amazing story, and living it was almost as satisfying as writing it.

He wanted more. The fullest expression of her fantasies was fresh in his mind, the slave business, the submission, the play with silken ropes and restraints, the leather mask, the gag.

The child was asleep in the next room one hot afternoon. Prinsloo approached Nolo from behind. They were alone in the dark humid shadows of the house, he was impatient and eager, wishing to hold her and subdue her and use her as she had allowed him a little over a year ago. Not just allowed; she had encouraged him, pleaded to be dominated, begged him to tie her to the bedposts, her eyes glistening with anticipation as he knotted the ropes, and when she was immobilized and he was sitting astride her, her sighs of satisfaction. The ritual had been central to their love affair and had been a marriage rite, too.

Prinsloo snatched her arm, held her, and before she had time to struggle or shout encouragement he gagged her with a scarf and drag-shuffled her to the bedroom. Now she fought him — that feeble pretense, wagging the stump of her arm, had always been part of the ritual — but her opposition only excited him the more. He turned her over, his hand jamming her head down, her face into the pillow, and he mounted her from behind. He took her muffled howling for the eagerness she had shown before, and he covered her with his body, one hand holding her skull, using his other hand as though thrusting hard with a dagger until he was done.

He had possessed her, she was his captive, as in the oldest days of the colony.

But when he was exhausted and lay beside her, loosening the scarves, she swiped at him with her good arm, and dragged off her gag, and accused him of abusing her. In the past she had flattened herself against him in gratitude and obedience, like a cat warming herself against her owner.

Drowsing, stuporous after sex, he was rattled by what she was saying.

“You're joking.”

“You raped me.”

“You want me to. It's a game.”

“Your game.”

“Our game. You're my wife.”

“I’m afraid of you,” she said, and she touched herself where he had held her roughly, smoothing the pinch marks on her skin.

“No,” he said, and looked closely at her, expecting her to laugh.

“I want a divorce,” she said.

Prinsloo had no reply. What she had just said knocked the wind out of him, and all he could think of was his first wife’s anguish, a suffering he understood now, how she was shattered when he said he wanted to leave her, looking at him with horrified eyes, hoping it was not true.

Nolo, never much of a talker, said there was nothing to discuss. She regarded him as an intruder — kept away from him, did not argue, watched him coldly.

“I want you to leave.”

Minutes after sex, this rejection.

Prinsloo was smiling at her schoolteacher’s tone, the shrill authority.

“This is my house,” he said.

“How can you force me to leave with a small child?”

7

Prinsloo’s estate had been vast, not just fruit trees and lucerne, tobacco and seed maize, but animals — sheep, cattle, poultry, an experimental ostrich farm, a game ranch with herds of eland and waterbuck, zebra and buffalo; crocs and hippos in his river. A settlement of workers, too, that amounted to an African village. Underneath it all, below a ridge that ran like a protective berm at the southern limit of his land, were seams of platinum. A mining company’s survey promised a great haul of ore, and though what was under the ground was the government’s, not Prinsloo’s, the mining company would have to lease many hectares for buildings and equipment.

Half of this Prinsloo lost in his first divorce; half of what remained he lost in the second, the sudden split from a woman he hardly knew. What appalled him was that he had been looking at people just like her his whole life and believed he knew them, and how could Nolo be any different? Some of them, Africans like her, had appeared in many of his stories. He wrote about the intimacies of their lives, he approximated the way they spoke, he described their heartaches and tribulations.

He knew nothing, this proved it: he was a man of sixty-one, rendered imbecilic by his rashness. “I'm stupid,” he said to people, startling old friends and perfect strangers, shoeshine boys and parking lot attendants and the men in skullcaps who pumped gas for him. “I'm stupid. Look at me. I’m not joking — I'm an idiot.”

Like a man making a mockery of himself after losing a large wager, seeing his money swept off the table, and laughing horribly, a fool who seems dangerous because he has nothing more to lose.

“Stupid!” And, saying so, cranking his finger at his ear to mean “out of my mind.”

He had lost the dairy, the game ranch, the cattle, the sheep, the orchards, the farm, the ridge of ore, even the workers' settlement. The lovely farmhouse, roomy and white-plastered, from which he had sent his first wife, was now Nolo's. He kept the chicken operation and hired a colored man, Petrus, as a farm manager, and he moved away.

The day he left, giving his last instructions to Petrus, he caught a glimpse of Petrus's wife, Myra, who looked patient and winsome, with a small child, and thought: Why didn’t I marry her or someone like her? I would still be here, in my study, at my desk, writing my story, a good story, about the farmer who marries a submissive black woman with one arm.

He did not say, “They're all the same.” He said, “I made the worst possible choice, not an informed decision but a reckless throw of the dice, and I lost.”

You would have done, he thought whenever he saw an attractive woman, white or black, usually black, and he reproached himself for having been such a fool. I’m stupid!

He did not mind that he was a laughingstock — he deserved to be hooted at. He minded that he had no life — that he had forfeited all his effort, his inherited property, the work he had done. He kept a few things, the clock, his grandfather’s saddle, the photographs, his manuscripts, a rotting collection of assegais and knobkerries, baskets, neck rests, spears.

The fact of the child Zulu — he could not bear to think of him as Nelson — was the worst of all. The mixed-race child he loved belonged to a devious black woman he now hated. But was devious the word? He told himself yes, but in his heart he knew the choice to leave his wife and marry her was his alone. He could have said no, even as Nolo made noises about her Christian vows.

I wanted to write, I had no subject, I was stuck, I thought this would help, I loved her.

He could barely recall the sequence of events that had led to his being almost homeless. He winced, remembering sex with Nolo, how she had pretended to be his slave, how her being his slave had made him stupid.

Writing this African story might redeem him. The story might be perfect, but even if it was not, it was true, and the truth was always prophetic. He imagined all being well if he wrote his story unembellished, a narrative of a white farmer and his submissive black lover, keeping all the details: the sjambok, the slave chapel, the barred windows, and the fields of lucerne glowing in the moonlight. The story was about sexual desire — how it was mute and ignorant magic that cast a spell, making the lovers dumb.

But he did not write it. He missed his son and he devised ways of seeing him.

Nolo seemed to welcome his visits. She encouraged his taking the boy out, but she could be unsentimental and rigid — her schoolteacher’s severity adding to her enigma — and one day Prinsloo showed up without warning, aching to see his son, and she called the police, who arrested him for trespassing. His own house! Black police.

Prinsloo appeared in court, sitting in a dock that was a steel cage, packed with farm invaders, all of them Venda, who badgered him for cigarettes.

The country was upside down, the government black now, though the judge was white. Prinsloo got off with a warning and a fine, just like the farm invaders. And the day after he paid the fine Nolo sent him a letter through her lawyers saying she wanted more money.

8

The harsh syllable ach gargled at his back teeth and made his jaw sore with incredulity. Ach! The woman he saw as simple and submissive had become his tormentor — ingenious, wicked, venal. She allowed him to see the child but at the same time demanded more money. When he delayed paying she found ways of obstructing his access to the boy, and so he paid up, hating the unfair tax on him for seeing his own child. He told himself that a woman of his own race would never have subjected him to this humiliation.

He drove to the house in the morning, early. The child was already in the road, the servant holding him by the hand. Prinsloo drove the child to school — not the school where Nolo had taught but a private preschool outside the dorp. Prinsloo waited, killing time in the dorp, then fetched him in the afternoon, hoping the boy would be hungry, so that he would have the pleasure of feeding him.

He loved him, it was agony, he sorrowed for the child and himself, saw his own frailty in the small frail figure walking away from him later on, up the path toward the house — the old white-plastered Prinsloo farmhouse, the model for so many of the farmhouses in Prinsloo’s stories. What pathos in that little head and those narrow shoulders, the skinny legs and small trotting feet.

The child was like a little old man, like Prinsloo himself, and Prinsloo feared for them both and hated the one-armed woman who was the cause of this whole horrible affair. But how could Prinsloo blame her when he himself was the cause, first as an intruder, then a terror, finally a weakling. Nolo was looking old, too — as old as he felt. She had aged quickly, as African women do, losing their looks in their thirties, in their forties becoming crones.

Once, he saw Marianne. She did not recognize him. Had he grown so ugly and so different? She was first startled by him and then, recovering, hardened against him. She spoke of emigrating to Australia with Hansie. Wimpie was in Cape Town.

He forgave Marianne for her coldness. Nolo was crueler than she was, and with what reason? Was she demented? Was she simply ambitious and material-minded? He reflected that a woman who had married so late had to have something wrong with her. The missing arm did not explain much. She seemed to take pleasure in his suffering. She bled him. Her money demands were like whippings. Was she a sadist? Africans could be cruel, and some were jubilant in their cruelty, finding power in violence and feeling joy. Used to pain, their most merciful judgment was Let him die, not because they lacked a common bond of humanity but because they felt it and despised it. Revenge made them happy. He was amazed to see that they were just like everyone else on earth.

Prinsloo heard she had a lover, but could not prove it. Anyway, what if she did? She had no sentiment. The lover would be swindled — good riddance; or she would — ditto.

What tipped him off was her saying, “I want to work.”

What work could a one-armed woman do, apart from the teaching she had done before? What need was there? She was wealthy. She owned a farm bigger than a township, and a settlement of black workers within the farm, humans and animals and all their food, too. So what she was saying in wishing to work was that she wanted to circulate, have some freedom, be social.

This business with Nolo made him think of his first marriage, and always with regret. Marianne had never been manipulative. He reproached himself for having been so hard on that patient woman. And he played along with Nolo, encouraging her to work. She became a committee member in the dorp's local government, not much money, but an office, some status, and offering occasions to dress up, ceremonials, welcoming foreign visitors, formal teas, lawn parties. Nolo left the child in the care of an old servant.

Prinsloo easily persuaded the servant to release the child, so that he could take him for a drive. Prinsloo brought biltong and bread, and they sat at the margin of the game ranch Prinsloo had built and lost, and they watched the eland browsing in the bush. Prinsloo returned to find the police waiting for him — black police. They arrested him.

“Attempted kidnapping, baas.”

“That’s my child!”

Nolo would not return his calls, she worked through a lawyer, took out a restraining order, demanded more money to pay her legal expenses, and this time there was nothing in return, only the promise that if he paid promptly she might not ask for more.

Prinsloo had lost everything, even his own freedom. He had nothing left, nowhere to go.

9

He said to me, sounding like a character in one of his stories: “I imagined a new life. This was a new life. But not the one I imagined.”

What he called his exile was not exile in a conventional sense. He was not driven out of South Africa. He found a place to live in, just a bolthole in Johannesburg, and made visits to his friends. Most of them dreaded his arrival because of the failure and hopelessness he dragged with him. But Prinsloo made it impossible for them to refuse. “I want to come and sleep on your floor for a few days.” How could they turn him away? Etienne Leroux in Koffiefontein, one of his staunchest friends, encouraged him to visit. Prinsloo said that his condition could perhaps best be described as “internal exile.”

He had lost his estate, his first family, his second family, his writing life — the life that he wanted, that he had never believed anyone could take from him. But no, he had handed it over.

“Exiled!” He joked about his homelessness. Not bitterly but lightly, because he had no hope, and the facetious humor of the truly hopeless sustained him. He knew that no one could tut-tut and remark upon how things would improve. Nothing would improve.

“It’s a tragedy,” Etienne said to me.

All I had heard in South Africa were stories about massacres, political scheming, torture and imprisonment, different sorts of violent crime — nothing about a domestic tragedy such as Prinsloo’s. And with all the extravagant stories of terror circulating, no one wanted to hear Prinsloo’s story. He tried telling it; no one would listen, the country was changing too fast for anyone to have the patience for pettiness.

It was about this time that I met Prinsloo, a white-haired man, prematurely feeble, making each complaint into a joke, seeming to ask for reassurance, then jeering when I tried to reassure him.

“But he will write it,” Etienne said.

A writer needs to take pleasure in solitude. Prinsloo could not bear to be alone now. He loved the fact that I was a visitor to South Africa, that I was eager to read his typescript of stories, that I was such a stranger to him, so willing to listen. And over the course of the week or so that I stayed in Koffiefontein he told me his story.

I listened closely, excited at the thought that this man, such a fabulist in his own work, had material of this kind for a new story, perhaps his greatest. It would be the equal of André Brink, or J. M. Coetzee, or Leroux himself. It was an African story but a peculiarly white man's story, one of Prinsloo’s weirdest, as though everything he had written had prepared him for it.

Even before he finished telling me the story, I sort of understood it: at the point in his life when Prinsloo loses the imagination to write his extravagant stories, he decides to embark upon a narrative of his own. Leaving the security of his marriage and family and ancestral farm, he makes love to and marries a onearmed African woman schoolteacher whom he has met in a feed store. He proves his point, acts out a story he could live, but loses the ability to write. What he hoped would be greater inspiration almost destroyed him.

His eyes were lively as he told me his story, and with a strange glee and no self-pity he answered every question I had, smiling even as I asked for more details about the wooing, the lovemaking, the bondage and submission, the slavery reenactments.

Then he said, “That episode is the story I should have written. But I couldn’t both live it and write it. So now I know how the rest of the world suffers.”

He was never more animated than when I tried to tell him that his story was unique.

“No! No!” He got to his feet and, unsteady, his laughter revealing his decaying teeth, the rattle of his bad lungs, he said, “Not just my story. That’s why it is useless to write. Many men have lived this. The woman that arouses our sexual passion — weak, pretty, submissive, childlike — is nearly always the opposite of the woman we want to live with, who is strong, undemanding, motherly, and trustworthy. In my case there is no moral to be drawn. It’s just an African story.”

He died alone, unknown, unmourned. His farm was not improved, yet the momentum of its operation had never been interrupted and it continued to prosper. Nolo did not remarry. She became fiercely respectable, sometimes lending her name to good causes. She had not changed her name from Prinsloo. When foreign visitors toured the province her estate was one of the stops, the foreigners marveling at the fruitful fields and the animals, and clucking at Nolo’s son, praising his looks and saying, “Where did you get those lovely eyes?”