Free July's People by Nadine Gordimer Page A

pounce upon anything that could be twisted to give them credence. Yet how was that absolute nature of intimate relationships arrived at? Who decided? ‘We’ (Maureen sometimes harked back) understand the sacred power and rights of sexual love as formulated in master bedrooms, and motels with false names in the register. Here, the sacred power and rights of sexual love are as formulated in a wife’s hut, and a backyard room in a city. The balance between desire and duty is—has to be—maintained quite differently in accordance with the differences in the lovers’ place in the economy. These alter the way of dealing with the experience; and so the experience itself. The absolute nature she and her kind were scrupulously just in granting to everybody was no more than the price of the master bedroom and the clandestine hotel tariff.
    She had in her hand one of the clay oxen Gina was learning to make, that had been set to dry in the sun. Abstractions hardened into the concrete: even death is a purchase. One of Barn’s senior partners could afford his at the cost of a private plane—in which he crashed. July’s old mother (was she not perhaps his grandmother?) would crawl, as Maureen was watching her now, coming home with wood, and grass for her brooms on her head, bent lower and lower towards the earth until finally she sank to it—the only death she could afford.
    Maureen had the keys, kept overnight after she had fetched the rubber mat from the vehicle. She heard his voice, his energetic laugh, and saw him cross from hut to goat-kraal and back. To be seen is not necessarily to be acknowledged, where people’s movements are centred about the same kind of activity in every household, every day. Everyone was everyone else’s witness, and this bred its own discretion. Only the children hung together and moved like the comet’s tail of bees she had seen roll out of the sky the other day and bear down on tree after tree before attaching itself to one. She had never been inside his hut; Bam had. —He has some things from home. It’s smartened-up. He can’t live like the others.—Bam meant the home he and she had provided; he meant the wife and female relatives.
    She rehearsed her arrival at the door of his domain. It was only a hundred feet away. His quarters had been only across the yard, she had waved at his friends, his brothers who were eternally visiting, seen through the open door in summer, or heard them in there, round the electric heater she provided, in winter—she came right by his quarters every time she went to the double garage to drive off in her car. But she had never entered unless—rare occasion—he was sick. Then she knocked, and the attendant friends stood up respectfully (accommodated somehow on up-ended boxes, an old table—she provided one decent chair for her servant’s comfort but could not be expected to allow for the reception of half-a-dozen friends), and she would put down on the spotless bed the tray of light food she had prepared for him herself. His hut, here, was apparently something he kept to himself, apart from women. But she was a white woman, someone who had employed him, theirs was a working relationship; surely that was her claim.
    She had lived for more than two weeks within steps of that hut and could have lived there for ever without going inside it. She no more wanted to have to see her cast-off trappings here, where they separated him from the way other people lived around him, than she did back there, where they separated him from the way she lived. The old green bedspread with dolphins, mermaids and tritons printed round a fake facsimile of an early map of the world, the framed poster of Málaga—these things themselves (in his room back there) might not be displayed, but others of the same origin. He must have known, when she handed some new object on to him it was because it was shoddy or ugly, to her, and if it were some old object, it was because she no longer