Life Times Stories

Rain-Queen


We were living in the Congo at the time; I was nineteen. It must have been my twentieth birthday we had at the Au Relais, with the Gattis, M. Niewenhuys and my father’s site manager. My father was building a road from Elisabethville to Tshombe’s residence, a road for processions and motorcades. It’s Lubumbashi now, and Tshombe’s dead in exile. But at that time there was plenty of money around and my father was brought from South Africa with a free hand to recruit engineers from anywhere he liked; the Gattis were Italian, and then there was a young Swede. I didn’t want to leave Johannesburg because of my boyfriend, Alan, but my mother didn’t like the idea of leaving me behind, because of him. She said to me, ‘Quite honestly, I think it’s putting too much temptation in a young girl’s way. I’d have no one to blame but myself.’ I was very young for my age, then, and I gave in.

There wasn’t much for me to do in E’ville. I was taken up by some young Belgian married women who were only a few years older than I was. I had coffee with them in town in the mornings, and played with their babies. My mother begged them to speak French to me; she didn’t want the six months there to be a complete waste. One of them taught me how to make a chocolate mousse, and I made myself a dress under the supervision of another; we giggled together as I had done a few years before with the girls at school.

Everyone turned up at the Au Relais in the evenings and in the afternoons when it had cooled off a bit we played squash – the younger ones in our crowd, I mean. I used to play every day with the Swede and Marco Gatti. They came straight from the site. Eleanora Gatti was one of those Mediterranean women who not only belong to a different sex, but seem to be a species entirely different from the male. You could never imagine her running or even bending to pick something up; her white bosom in square-necked dresses, her soft hands with rings and jewel-lidded watch, her pile of dark hair tinted a strange tarnished marmalade colour that showed up the pallor of her skin – all was arranged like a still life. The Swede wasn’t married.

After the game Marco Gatti used to put a towel round his neck tennis-star fashion and his dark face was gilded with sweat. The Swede went red and blotchy. When Marco panted it was a grin, showing white teeth and one that was repaired with gold. It seemed to me that all adults were flawed in some way; it set them apart. Marco used to give me a lift home and often came in to have a drink with my father and discuss problems about the road. When he was outlining a difficulty he had a habit of smiling and putting a hand inside his shirt to scratch his breast. In the open neck of his shirt some sort of amulet on a chain rested on the dark hair between his strong pectoral muscles. My father said proudly, ‘He may look like a tenor at the opera, but he knows how to get things done.’

I had never been to the opera; it wasn’t my generation. But when Marco began to kiss me every afternoon on the way home, and then to come in to talk to my father over beer as usual, I put it down to the foreignness in him.

I said, ‘It seems so funny to walk into the room where Daddy is.’

Marco said, ‘My poor little girl, you can’t help it if you are pretty, can you?’

It rains every afternoon there, at that time of year. A sudden wind would buffet the heat aside, flattening paper against fences in the dust. Fifteen minutes later – you could have timed it by the clock – the rain came down so hard and noisy we could scarcely see out of the windscreen and had to talk as loudly as if we were in an echoing hall. The rain usually lasted only about an hour. One afternoon we went to the site instead of to my parents’ house – to the caravan that was meant to be occupied by one of the engineers but never had been, because everyone lived in town. Marco shouted against the downpour, ‘You know what the Congolese say? “When the rain comes, quickly find a girl to take home with you until it’s over.” ’ The caravan was just like a little flat, with everything you needed. Marco showed me – there was even a bath. Marco wasn’t tall (at home the girls all agreed we couldn’t look at any boy under six foot) but he had the fine, strong legs of a sportsman, covered with straight black hairs, and he stroked my leg with his hard yet furry one. That was a caress we wouldn’t have thought of, either. I had an inkling we really didn’t know anything.

The next afternoon Marco seemed to be taking the way directly home, and I said in agony, ‘Aren’t we going to the caravan?’ It was out, before I could think.

‘Oh my poor darling, were you disappointed?’ He laughed and stopped the car there and then and kissed me deep in both ears as well as the mouth. ‘All right, the caravan.’

We went there every weekday afternoon – he didn’t work on Saturdays, and the wives came along to the squash club. Soon the old Congolese watchman used to trot over from the labourers’ camp to greet us when he saw the car draw up at the caravan; he knew I was my father’s daughter. Marco chatted with him for a few minutes, and every few days gave him a tip. At the beginning, I used to stand by as if waiting to be told what to do next, but Marco had what I came to realise must be adult confidence. ‘Don’t look so worried. He’s a nice old man. He’s my friend.’

Marco taught me how to make love, in the caravan, and everything that I had thought of as ‘life’ was put away, as I had at other times folded the doll’s clothes, packed the Monopoly set and the sample collection, and given them to the servant. I stopped writing to my girl friends; it took me weeks to get down to replying to Alan’s regular letters, and yet when I did so it was with a kind of professional pride that I turned out a letter of the most skilful ambiguity – should it be taken as a love letter, or should it not? I felt it would be beyond his powers – powers of experience – to decide. I alternately pitied him and underwent an intense tingling of betrayal – actually cringing away from myself in the flesh. Before my parents and in the company of friends, Marco’s absolutely unchanged behaviour mesmerised me: I acted as if nothing had happened because for him it was really as if nothing had happened. He was not pretending to be natural with my father and mother – he was natural. And the same applied to our behaviour in the presence of his wife. After the first time he made love to me I had looked forward with terror and panic to the moment when I should have to see Eleanora again; when she might squeeze my hand or even kiss me on the cheek as she sometimes did in her affectionate, feminine way. But when I walked into our house that Sunday and met her perfume and then all at once saw her beside my mother talking about her family in Genoa, with Marco, my father and another couple sitting there – I moved through the whirling impression without falter.

Someone said, ‘Ah here she is at last, our Jillie!’

And my mother was saying (I had been riding with the Swede), ‘I don’t know how she keeps up with Per, they were out dancing until three o’clock this morning—’ and Marco, who was twenty-nine (1 December, Sagittarius, domicile of Jupiter), was saying, ‘What it is to be young, eh?’, and my father said, ‘What time did you finally get to bed, after last night, anyway, Marco—’ and Eleanora, sitting back with her plump smooth knees crossed, tugged my hand gently so that we should exchange a woman’s kiss on the cheek.

I took in the smell of Eleanora’s skin, felt the brush of her hair on my nose; and it was done, for ever. We sat talking about some shoes her sister-in-law had sent from Milan. It was something I could never have imagined: Marco and I, as we really were, didn’t exist here; there was no embarrassment. The Gattis, as always on Sunday mornings, were straight from eleven o’clock Mass at the Catholic cathedral, and smartly dressed.





As in most of these African places there was a shortage of white women in Katanga and my mother felt much happier to see me spending my time with the young married people than she would have been to see me taken up by the mercenaries who came in and out of E’ville that summer. ‘They’re experienced men,’ she said – as opposed to boys and married men, ‘and of course they’re out for what they can get. They’ve got nothing to lose; next week they’re in another province, or they’ve left the country. I don’t blame them. I believe a girl has to know what the world’s like, and if she is fool enough to get involved with that crowd, she must take the consequences.’ She seemed to have forgotten that she had not wanted to leave me in Johannesburg in the company of Alan. ‘She’s got a nice boy at home, a decent boy who respects her. I’d far rather see her just enjoying herself generally, with you young couples, while we’re here.’ And there was always Per, the Swede, to even out the numbers; she knew he wasn’t ‘exactly Jillie’s dream of love’. I suppose that made him safe, too. If I was no one’s partner in our circle, I was a love object, handed round them all, to whom it was taken for granted that the homage of a flirtatious attitude was paid. Perhaps this was supposed to represent my compensation: if not the desired of any individual, then recognised as desirable by them all.

‘Oh of course, you prefair to dance with Jeelie,’ Mireille, one of the young Belgians, would say to her husband, pretending offence. He and I were quite an act, at the Au Relais, with our cha-cha. Then he would whisper to her in their own language, and she would giggle and punch his arm.

Marco and I were as famous a combination on the squash court as Mireille’s husband and I were on the dance floor. This was the only place, if anyone had had the eyes for it, where our love-making showed. As the weeks went by and the love-making got better and better, our game got better and better. The response Marco taught me to the sound of spilling grain the rain made on the caravan roof held good between us on the squash court. Sometimes the wives and spectators broke into spontaneous applause; I was following Marco’s sweat-oiled excited face, anticipating his muscular reactions in play as in bed. And when he had beaten me (narrowly) or we had beaten the other pair, he would hunch my shoulders together within his arm, laughing, praising me in Italian to the others, staggering about with me, and he would say to me in English, ‘Aren’t you a clever girl, eh?’; only he and I knew that that was what he said to me at other times. I loved that glinting flaw in his smile, now. It was Marco, like all the other things I knew about him: the girl cousin he had been in love with when he used to spend holidays with her family in the Abruzzi mountains; the way he would have planned Tshombe’s road if he’d been in charge – ‘But I like your father, you understand? – it’s good to work with your father, you know?’; the baby cream from Italy he used for the prickly heat round his waist.

The innocence of the grown-ups fascinated me. They engaged in play-play, while I had given it up; I began to feel arrogant among them. It was pleasant. I felt arrogant – or rather tolerantly patronising – towards the faraway Alan, too. I said to Marco, ‘I wonder what he’d do if he knew’ – about me; the caravan with the dotted curtains, the happy watchman, the tips, the breath of the earth rising from the wetted dust. Marco said wisely that Alan would be terribly upset.

‘And if Eleanora knew?’

Marco gave me his open, knowing, assured smile, at the same time putting the palm of his hand to my cheek in tender parenthesis. ‘She wouldn’t be pleased. But in the case of a man—’ For a moment he was Eleanora, quite unconsciously he mimicked the sighing resignation of Eleanora, receiving the news (seated, as usual), aware all the time that men were like that.

Other people who were rumoured or known to have had lovers occupied my mind with a special interest. I chattered on the subject, ‘. . . when this girl’s husband found out, he just walked out of the house without any money or anything and no one could find him for weeks,’ and Marco took it up as one does what goes without saying: ‘Well of course. If I think of Eleanora with someone – I mean – I would become mad.’

I went on with my second-hand story, enjoying the telling of all its twists and complications, and he laughed, following it with the affectionate attention with which he lit everything I said and did, and getting up to find the bottle of Chianti, wipe out a glass and fill it for himself. He always had wine in the caravan. I didn’t drink any but I used to have the metallic taste of it in my mouth from his.

In the car that afternoon he had said maybe there’d be a nice surprise for me, and I remembered this and we lay and wrangled teasingly about it. The usual sort of thing: ‘You’re learning to be a real little nag, my darling, a little nag, eh?’

‘I’m not going to let go until you tell me.’

‘I think I’ll have to give you a little smack on the bottom, eh, just like this, eh?’

The surprise was a plan. He and my father might be going to the Kasai to advise on some difficulties that had cropped up for a construction firm there. It should be quite easy for me to persuade my father that I’d like to accompany him, and then if Marco could manage to leave Eleanora behind, it would be almost as good as if he and I were to take a trip alone together.

‘You will have your own room?’ Marco asked.

I laughed. ‘D’you think I’d be put in with Daddy?’ Perhaps in Italy a girl wouldn’t be allowed to have her own hotel room.

Now Marco was turning his attention to the next point: ‘Eleanora gets sick from the car, anyway – she won’t want to come on bad roads, and you can get stuck, God knows what. No, it’s quite all right, I will tell her it’s no pleasure for her.’ At the prospect of being in each other’s company for whole days and perhaps nights we couldn’t stop smiling, chattering and kissing, not with passion but delight. My tongue was loosened as if I had been drinking wine.





Marco spoke good English.

The foreign turns of phrase he did have were familiar to me. He did not use the word ‘mad’ in the sense of angry. ‘I would become mad’: he meant exactly that, although the phrase was not one that we English-speaking people would use. I thought about it that night, alone, at home; and other nights. Out of his mind, he meant. If Eleanora slept with another man, Marco would be insane with jealousy. He said so to me because he was a really honest person, not like the other grown-ups – just as he said, ‘I like your father, eh? I don’t like some of the things he does with the road, but he is a good man, you know?’ Marco was in love with me; I was his treasure, his joy, some beautiful words in Italian. It was true; he was very, very happy with me. I could see that. I did not know that people could be so happy; Alan did not know. I was sure that if I hadn’t met Marco I should never have known. When we were in the caravan together I would watch him all the time, even when we were dozing I watched out of slit eyes the movement of his slim nostril with its tuft of black hair, as he breathed, and the curve of his sunburned ear through which capillary-patterned light showed. Oh Marco, Eleanora’s husband, was beautiful as he slept. But he wasn’t asleep. I liked to press my feet on his as if his were pedals and when I did this the corner of his mouth smiled and he said something with the flex of a muscle somewhere in his body. He even spoke aloud at times: my name. But I didn’t know if he knew he had spoken it. Then he would lie with his eyes open a long time, but not looking at me, because he didn’t need to: I was there. Then he would get up, light a cigarette, and say to me, ‘I was in a dream . . . oh, I don’t know . . . it’s another world.’

It was a moment of awkwardness for me because I was entering the world from my childhood and could not conceive that, as adults did – as he did – I should ever need to find surcease and joy elsewhere, in another world. He escaped, with me. I entered, with him. The understanding of this I knew would come about for me as the transfiguration of the gold tooth from a flaw into a characteristic had come. I still did not know everything.

I saw Eleanora nearly every day. She was very fond of me; she was the sort of woman who, at home, would have kept attendant younger sisters round her to compensate for the children she did not have. I never felt guilty towards her. Yet, before, I should have thought how awful one would feel, taking the closeness and caresses that belonged, by law, to another woman. I was irritated at the stupidity of what Eleanora said; the stupidity of her not knowing. How idiotic that she should tell me that Marco had worked late on the site again last night, he was so conscientious, etc. – wasn’t I with him, while she made her famous veal scalop-pini and they got overcooked? And she was a nuisance to us. ‘I’ll have to go – I must take poor Eleanora to a film tonight. She hasn’t been anywhere for weeks.’ ‘It’s the last day for parcels to Italy, tomorrow – she likes me to pack them with her, the Christmas parcels, you know how Eleanora is about these things.’ Then her aunt came out from Italy and there were lunches and dinners to which only Italian-speaking people were invited because the signora couldn’t speak English. I remember going there one Sunday – sent by my mother with a contribution of her special ice cream. They were all sitting round in the heat on the veranda, the women in one group with the children crawling over them, and Marco with the men in another, his tie loose at the neck of his shirt (Eleanora had made him put on a suit), gesturing with a toothpick, talking and throwing cigar butts into Eleanora’s flower-trough of snake cactus.

And yet that evening in the caravan he said again, ‘Oh good God, I don’t want to wake up . . . I was in a dream.’ He had appeared out of the dark at our meeting-place, barefoot in espadrilles and tight thin jeans, like a beautiful fisherman.

I had never been to Europe. Marco said, ‘I want to drive with you through Piemonte, and take you to the village where my father came from. We’ll climb up to the walls from the church and when you get to the top – only then – I’ll turn you round and you’ll see Monte Bianco far away. You’ve heard nightingales, eh – never heard them? We’ll listen to them in the pear orchard, it’s my uncle’s place, there.’

I was getting older every day. I said, ‘What about Eleanora?’ It was the nearest I could get to what I always wanted to ask him: ‘Would you still become mad?’

Would you still become mad?

And now?

And now – two months, a week, six weeks later?

Now would you still become mad?

‘Eleanora will spend some time in Pisa after we go back to Italy, with her mother and the aunts,’ he was saying.

Yes, I knew why, too; knew from my mother that Eleanora was going to Pisa because there was an old family doctor there who was sure, despite everything the doctors in Milan and Rome had said, that poor Eleanora might still one day have a child.

I said, ‘How would you feel if Alan came here?’

But Marco looked at me with such sensual confidence of understanding that we laughed.

I began to plan a love affair for Eleanora. I chose Per as victim not only because he was the only presentable unattached man in our circle, but also because I had the feeling that it might just be possible to attract her to a man younger than herself, whom she could mother. And Per, with no woman at all (except the pretty Congolese prostitutes good for an hour in the rain, I suppose) could consider himself lucky if he succeeded with Eleanora. I studied her afresh. Soft white gooseflesh above her stocking-tops, breasts that rose when she sighed – that sort of woman. But Eleanora did not even seem to understand that Per was being put in her way (at our house, at the Au Relais) and Per seemed equally unaware of or uninterested in his opportunities.

And so there was never any way to ask my question. Marco and I continued to lie making love in the caravan while the roof made buckling noises as it contracted after the heat of the day, and the rain. Tshombe fled and returned; there were soldiers in the square before the post office, and all sorts of difficulties arose over the building of the road. Marco was determined, excitable, harassed and energetic – he sprawled on the bed in the caravan at the end of the day like a runner who has just breasted the tape. My father was nervous and didn’t know whether to finish the road. Eleanora was nervous and wanted to go back to Italy. We made love and when Marco opened his eyes to consciousness of the road, my father, Eleanora, he said, ‘Oh for God’s sake, why . . . it’s like a dream . . .’

I became nervous too. I goaded my mother: ‘The Gattis are a bore. That female Buddha.’

I developed a dread that Eleanora would come to me with her sighs and her soft-squeezing hand and say, ‘It always happens with Marco, little Jillie, you mustn’t worry. I know all about it.’

And Marco and I continued to lie together in that state of pleasure in which nothing exists but the two who make it. Neither roads, nor mercenary wars, nor marriage, nor the claims and suffering of other people entered that tender, sensual dream from which Marco, although so regretfully, always returned.

What I dreaded Eleanora might say to me was never said, either. Instead my mother told me one day in the tone of portentous emotion with which older women relive such things, that Eleanora, darling Eleanora, was expecting a child. After six years. Without having to go to Pisa to see the family doctor there. Yes, Eleanora had conceived during the rainy season in E’ville, while Marco and I made love every afternoon in the caravan, and the Congolese found themselves a girl for the duration of a shower.

It’s years ago, now.

Poor Marco, sitting in Milan or Genoa at Sunday lunch, toothpick in his fingers, Eleanora’s children crawling about, Eleanora’s brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts around him. But I have never woken up from that dream. In the seven years I’ve been married I’ve had – how many lovers? Only I know. A lot – if you count the very brief holiday episodes as well.

It is another world, that dream, where no wind blows colder than the warm breath of two who are mouth to mouth.