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.