Free The Late Bourgeois World by Nadine Gordimer Page A

putting papers together, and he pointed the knife at Felicity, saying in a cheerful impatient aside. ‘Come on, move that big arse, Sunbun, you know where you put the list I gave you –’
    It was his way of talking to her and I was astonished, this time, to see her cry. I suddenly understood that he had made love to her.
    He stood there with the steel blade dulled with the grease of cheese, gesturing at her, and she rushed out of the room with all her flesh – buttocks, breasts – quaking; it was somehow specially moving, as if some poor peaceful browser had been stuck with a spear. I went after her and bumped into Daphne, holding a freshly ironed dress that she must have tried to hand to her. I said quickly, ‘I’ll take it.’
    â€˜What she got to cry for?’ Daphne lifted her chin, she wanted me to know she knew, too.
    Max said, ‘She bloody well wouldn’t leave me alone. It started after a party and I was drunk anyway. She smothers you with her bloody great tits, you’ve got to fight your way out and that’s the easiest way.’ It was true that one couldn’t be jealous of Felicity. If she’d been a woman I had been jealous of it would have been different. But there was only one reason why Max made love to her. He knew it and I knew it. He needed approval and admiration so much that he was prepared to throw in a good fuck as payment. I could have forgiven him sleeping with a woman he wanted, but I couldn’t forgive him the humiliation in her big shaking body when she ran out of the room. I used to think of it when we were making love. And I couldn’t tell him because I myself couldn’t give the approval and admiration.
    Max shunned the Van Den Sandt’s standards of success but in a way they triumphed in him, passing on, like a family nose or chin, the rage to succeed. He did not weigh in on their scale, but he retained the revengeful need
to be acknowledged
. It came from them: the desire to show somebody. What? The objects of his purpose were not demonstrable in the way that money and social prestige are. Why is it that these people always win, even if only by destruction?
    Oh, there were other women. When he went underground during the State of Emergency in 1960, he lived with Eve King while hidden in her house. And before that there was the thing with Roberta Weininger – beautiful Roberta, she’s been under house arrest for some time, now. These love affairs caused me pain, and in its context I had one or two affairs of my own. I suppose I thought of redressing the balance – some such expedient. But this again was the use of measures designed for a situation that had very little bearing on the realities of ours. If I’d only known, it didn’t matter how many women Max had, it didn’t make any difference. Whether or not he could really love a woman, me or any other woman, was not what was vital to him.
    Spears went underground, too, but other members of ‘Umanyano Ngamandla’ were detained and when they came out of prison the movement broke up; most of them, including Spears, rejoined the ANC, then banned and become an underground movement. The notes for the methodology of African socialism had been safe from the security raids on our outhouse cottage because I had bundled the papers into a laundry bag and kept it hidden in the laboratory, all the time. When Spears came to see me one day I told him they were intact; he smiled, the days of the work on the methodology belonged to another time. Decades, eras, centuries – theydon’t have much meaning, now, when the imposition of an emergency law or the fall of a bomb changes life more profoundly in a day than one might reasonably expect to experience in a lifetime. Spears wasn’t drinking. He didn’t come often any more, and neither did William Xaba, another friend who always used to be in and out of the cottage. There was a move among politically