Their poet laureate has slipped into his usual place, the cape of white hair tied back with a black ribbon today, catching up quietly, with swayings of the head, on what has happened to Julie’s find. — He must go underground. There is a world underground in this city, in all cities, the only place for those of us who can’t live, haven’t the means, not just money, the statutory means to conform to what others call the world. Underground. That darkness is the only freedom for him.—
Disappear. Julie, of whom this elderly man is particularly fond, among the friends, the one whom he’s said he regards as his spiritual daughter — she has a clutching sense of his divining, affirming her dread. While she tries to listen to everyone at once with confidence in their alternative wisdom, she keeps erect in her chair looking out for her lover’s appearance among the habitués coming and going in the EL-AY Café. She returns waves of the hand to those her eye inadvertently catches; his black eyes at last meet hers, her unique creature emerging from the forest of others.
Hi Abdu. Today they all get up from round The Table to receive him. Men and women, they embrace him, this side and that, in their natural way. It serves them better than words, now that the subject is there among them. All are around him, except the poet. He sits contemplating, saying to himself what no-one overhears, no doubt some quote from Yeats, Neruda, Lorca or Heaney, Shakespeare, that expresses the moment, the happening, better than anything said or done by The Table.
The victim thanks them politely; his hand taken up in hers, he sits down to listen. To be questioned and to hear his own replies. There is not much he can tell other than they drew from him with their brotherly welcoming when she introduced him to The Table months ago; or that he chooses to tell them? Sometimes she has to repeat to him something that has been said, as his head has been turned away — what is he seeking in this phalanstery of wine- and coffee-bibbers? Ever since he walked in with that piece of paper yesterday, his demeanour, his consciousness, by which one human receives another, has been that of seeking, an alertness that discards distraction. She orders coffee for him as she sees him glance at his watch; he’s arrived only after half his lunch break is over. Was there any sign that anyone at the garage knows? No-one said anything? No clue?
He drank his coffee in an unaccustomed way, spoke between gulps. — Nothing.—
— And the boss. Nothing emanating from him? — The follower of Buddhism thought there would be sensitivity to a change in atmosphere, even if there was no action.
She was interrupted — Look, man, can’t you catch on, Teresa, I told you it’s ridiculous to think the boss could turn himself in.—
Julie took careful note, in full attention, of all advice about what these good friends who knew how to look after themselves suggested should be done. She constantly referred this to him. He kept quietly gesturing he had heard. Their support surrounded him; as if he were one of them. As he got up to leave in the persona of the grease-monkey going back to the garage, he said without rejection — I have done all these things before. — There it was: the first time he was ordered to quit the country, when his permit expired.
She wanted to run after him but her place — it was to be left behind in the EL-AY Café. Ralph smiled at her, a victim for whom, when he told The Table he had AIDS, they could find no solution but the victim’s own bravado of laughter.
When he came back to her from the garage that evening she was ironing a pair of the designer jeans he always wore even when he was living wretchedly in a shed. A towel was folded on the table they ate off, the jeans were spread upon it; she was pressing one hand over the other that held the iron, to emphasize a seam.
He had never seen her at a domestic task of this nature. Although they choose to live in a converted outhouse instead of a beautiful home with shaded terraces and rooms for every private and public purpose, people like her have a black woman who comes to clean and wash and iron. Since he had moved in he had dropped his clothes into the basket provided, along with hers — she would put apart the overalls, stiff carapace made of the week’s working dirt, with a pinned note that they must be washed separately.
She looked up at him from his garment and her eyes swelled with tears.
So it had to come: the tears, sometime. He came over and put the iron aside from her hand and turned her towards him. It’s all right. He had to kiss her, this water of hers running salty into his mouth; all the fluids of her body that he tasted, her sweat, the juices of her sex, were there.
Then they went to sit on the sagging concrete step at the cottage door, looking out into the haggard tangle of fir and jacaranda trees darkly stifled by bougainvillaea, that was her end of the old garden where, far behind them a main house stood. She got up at once to go back into the cottage and fetch a bottle of wine — if bed is the simplest offer for oblivion, then among the friends wine is the best way of gathering nerve to tackle problems. She pulled the cork with an abrupt tug and took a swig, glasses forgotten. Handed to him, he put the bottle down on the earth. She began to go over with him the suggestions made by those, her friends, accustomed to get round authority. Again he listened to what he had heard before. Very practical, now, this Julie. She would go with the man David to a law library and familiarize herself with the relevant statute. She would ask around — people had to be wary when they revealed certain connections — about the kind of lawyer who was prepared to handle unconventional ways of evading laws. There must be many, many people like himself — the two of them — in the shit. (She knows he doesn’t like to hear her using these words that everyone uses — really there must be the same sort of necessity in his own language but of course even if he wanted to relieve his feelings in this banal way she wouldn’t understand.) They also might as well make an appointment with Legal Resources, they’ll know about conventional steps to take, human rights fundis must be well up in such matters.
The air was thickening about them in preparation for rain; he breathed it deeply several times. He was speaking to the black thicket of leaves and branches meshing a gathering darkness — Why do you choose those friends. Instead of your family.
For her, it’s as if she has overheard something not intended for her. The Table; but why change the urgent subject! Reluctantly she is distracted. I don’t know what you mean. Sometimes the limitations of his use of her language bring misunderstanding although she thinks she lovingly has taught herself to interpret him instinctively.
They are people doing well with their life. All the time. Moving on always. Clever. With what they do, make in the world, not just talking intelligent. They are alive, they take opportunity, they use the (snaps his tongue against his palate in search of the word) the will, yes, I mean to say, the will. To do. To have.
The crowd you saw at my father’s house. Those?
Yes, your father and the other men. They know what they speak about. What happens. Making business. That’s not bad, that is the world. Progress. You have to know it. I don’t know why you like to sit there every day in that other place.
The wind that sweeps a path for rain suddenly came between them. She jumped up to go indoors or not to have to accept what he said, let it blow away from them. He came in behind her.
The bottle has fallen and the wine leaks out, its passage catching the light from the windows, a glisten, before the earth drinks it.