again. And don’t ask why I keep writing if I don’t intend you to see what I write. Wouldn’t it be ironic if I started keeping another journal in my old age? As if the last one didn’t cause enough destruction! And the last time I at least had a good excuse. I was young and confused. Fifty years later I am old and confused. The more things change?
The devil whose name is Memory brings no clarity, only longing and confused dreams. I have been longing for my family for days now, Deddy and Mammie and Kleinboet and Ouboet, yes, even Ouboet! I wish I could just see him one more time, to make him understand that I always loved him, even after we had nothing left to say to each other. Blood is blood, isn’t it? That, sweetheart, is something you have also learnt lately.
But I long above all for that period in my life, for those few carefree weeks in Portugal, when I got to know the two Fernandos, the dead poet and his exceptionally vigorous namesake who became my lover. I long for the courageous woman I was fifty years ago. Lord, I didn’t know it was possible to feel such deep longing for oneself!
VICTORY
Colette inspects herself in the full-length mirror in her parents’ bedroom. This is what the heroines in the romance novels she has been devouring lately always do at some point in the book. The easiest way to show the reader what the heroine looks like, and at the same time reveal how she feels about herself. It is one of the tips she has picked up since trying to write a few stories of her own. Not love stories – alas, at the age of fifteen-and-a-half she still knows far too little about love – just stories. Poems too, occasionally, inspired by the twilight confessions of Elisabeth Eybers, a gift from her father last year.
The biggest surprise of this new writing hobby is, even though she reads almost exclusively in English, nearly everything comes out in Afrikaans. It might have something to do with Elisabeth Eybers, who is to her knowledge the first woman to publish a volume of poetry in Afrikaans, and for whom she harbours almost the same fervent admiration as for Edna St. Vincent Millay. (Millay’s little poem about the candle that burns at both ends and will not last the night remains the most beautiful of all.) Or perhaps writing in Afrikaans is due to her excellent Afrikaans teachers at her excellent Afrikaans high school in the city. But perhaps more than anything else it is due to her father’s influence. Deddy, whom she has tried in vain to call Pappie for several years now, with his endless enthusiasm for this young language that emerged here on the southernmost tip of Africa virtually the other day.
‘Pretty as a picture,’ her mother says in English, appearing in the mirror behind her. The more Afrikaans her father becomes, the more deliberately English her mother becomes, or so it sometimes seems to her. ‘What do you say, Sina?’
‘I can’t believe it is our little Letty,’ says Sina, now also visible in the mirror, her hands clasped in admiration. Colette outgrew Sina years ago, but Sina pretends not to notice and simply carries on calling her our little Letty.
‘I look … grown-up.’
‘Isn’t that what you wanted?’ Mammie says with a laugh. ‘A dinner dress to make you look grown-up?’
She had indeed asked Mammie to make her a ‘grown-up dress’ for an evening party one of her classmates was having this weekend. But she never dreamed that a dress and high-heeled shoes could make such a difference. She was used to seeing herself in school uniform, a striped blazer with white shirt and tie, thick black stockings and ugly black lace-up shoes, her blonde hair in braids resembling two short, fat koesisters, one shoulder continually weighed down by the heavy book-filled satchel. Or on weekends in flat shoes and bobby socks and a comfortable skirt and sloppy joe pullover, or in the pants she liked so much and which continued to distress Ouma Trui so deeply. That was the Colette she knew, the one she felt at home with, a schoolgirl who would easily disappear in a crowd of other schoolgirls.
Now this strange young woman stands before her, in a dress of shining midnight-blue satin with a fitted bodice – which makes her breasts inside the new brassiere look a little absurd, like two funnels – and a skirt that flares extravagantly from the wasp waist down to mid-calf. A lovely young woman, that she cannot deny, but above all an unfamiliar young woman. Her ankles look ballerina-thin in a pair of Mammie’s black patent leather high-heeled shoes, her neck long and slender, and terribly white against the dark blue satin. Especially now that Mammie is lifting her hair and piling it onto the back of her head.
‘Hmm, I think we must curl it and pin it up, what do you think? And that neck wants something. A string of pearls?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Colette resists, her voice almost panicky, and shakes her head to let her hair fall back onto her shoulders. ‘I don’t want to look so different that the children in my class won’t recognise me tomorrow night.’
‘You’re still the same Lettylove,’ Mammie says soothingly. ‘Just older and lovelier. Wait, I think we can still take in the waist just a tiny bit more.’ Mammie pinches the fabric between her fingers, and asks Sina to pass the pin cushion from the dressing table.
‘No, please, Mammie, I can hardly breathe as it is.’
‘I also felt that way the first time I wore a step-in. You will get used to it.’
‘I don’t know how I’ll manage to eat anything tomorrow night!’
‘You mean you didn’t know?’ Mammie jokes. ‘Part of the purpose of a step-in is to force girls to eat like little birds. See, there’s about another half-inch of give around the waist …’
‘And if I picked up even half a pound, I wouldn’t be able to wear my dinner dress ever again, and then all your trouble will have been for nothing, Mammie!’
‘You are not supposed to pick up half a pound,’ Mammie jokes again. Although something in her voice sounds more like scolding than joking. ‘Not until you get to my age. Oh, what I would give to have a waist like yours again …’
‘When you were young, Mammie, wasps weren’t in fashion. You flappers all wanted to be flat and straight. Oh heavens, I wish I could rather be a flapper too. Just look at these ridiculous points my brassiere makes!’
‘We also had to suffer in silence in order to be so flat and straight. We had to bind our breasts, bind everything, which was no laughing matter in the scorching African sun.’ Mammie gets a faraway look in her beautiful blue eyes. ‘No, being a woman has never been a laughing matter. Especially not in Africa. Or what am I saying, Sina? All right, let us leave her the half-inch here in the waist.’
‘It’s just like you say, Meddem.’ Sina nods several times. Colette wonders whether it is the lot of women in Africa that Sina agrees about so enthusiastically, or the half-inch in the waist. Then all three of them glance simultaneously at the radio beside the dressing table, because the Andrews Sisters and Danny Kaye have started to sing ‘Bongo, Bongo, Bongo’, that silly song that always makes Mammie and Colette laugh.
‘Quick, turn it louder,’ Colette bids Sina, and moves her body to the beat of the music and feels the wide skirt swish around her legs. How lovely she looks dancing in the mirror, oh, she does hope there will be a bit of dancing at the party tomorrow. ‘So bongo, bongo, bongo, I don’t wanna leave the Congo,’ she and Mammie sing along with the Andrews Sisters, and even Sina, who can still barely speak English, joins in when they get to ‘oh no no no no no’, and arches her back and bends her knees so her wiggling bottom sticks out. ‘I’m so happy in the jungle,’ the three of them sing at the top of their voices.
‘Forget the Andrews Sisters, make way for the Cronjé Girls!’ Mammie cries out.
Colette
