The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories Volume Two. Doris Lessing
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left. It was on such a trip that he had walked up to our house and stayed the night.
The Africans called him Angry Face. This name implied that it was only the face which was angry. It was because of his habit of screwing up then letting loose his facial muscles. They also called him Man Without a Home, and The Man Who Has no Woman.
The women found him intriguing, in spite of his sixty years. They hung about his hut, gossiped about him, brought him presents. Several made offers, even young girls.
The Chief and his elders conferred again, under the great tree in the centre of the village, and then called him to hear their verdict.
‘You need a woman,’ they said, and in spite of all his protests, made it a condition of his staying with them, for the sake of the tribe’s harmony.
They chose for him a woman of middle age whose husband had died of the blackwater fever, and who had had no children. They said that a man of his age could not be expected to give the patience and attention that small children need. According to my friend, who as a small boy had heard much talk of this white man who had preferred their way of life to his own, Johnny and his new woman ‘lived together in kindness’.
It was while I was writing this story that I remembered something else. When I was at school in Salisbury there was a girl called Alicia Blakeworthy. She was fifteen, a ‘big girl’ to me. She lived with her mother on the fringes of the town. Her step-father had left them. He had walked out.
Her mother had a small house, in a large garden, and she took in paying guests. One of these guests had been Johnny.
He had been working as a game warden up towards the Zambesi river, and had had malaria badly. She nursed him. He married her and took a job as a counter hand in the local store. He was a bad husband to Mom, said Alicia. Terrible. Yes, he brought in money, it wasn’t that. But he was a cold hard-hearted man. He was no company for them. He would just sit and read, or listen to the radio, or walk around by himself all night. And he never appreciated what was done for him.
Oh how we schoolgirls all hated this monster! What a heartless beast he was.
But the way he saw it, he had stayed for four long years in a suffocating town house surrounded by a domesticated garden. He had worked from eight to four selling groceries to lazy women. When he came home, this money, the gold he had earned by his slavery, was spent on chocolates, magazines, dresses, hair-ribbons for his townified stepdaughter. He was invited, three times a day, to sit down at a table crammed with roast beef and chickens and puddings and cakes and biscuits.
He used to try and share his philosophy of living.
‘I used to feed myself for ten shillings a week!’
‘But why? What for? What’s the point?’
‘Because I was free, that’s the point! If you don’t spend a lot of money then you don’t have to earn it and you are free. Why do you have to spend money on all this rubbish? You can buy a piece of rolled brisket for three shillings, and you boil it with an onion and you can live off it for four days! You can live off mealiemeal well enough, I often did, in the bush.’
‘Mealiemeal! I’m not going to eat native food!’
‘Why not? What’s wrong with it?’
‘If you can’t see why not, then I’m afraid I can’t help you.’
Perhaps it was here, with Alicia’s mother, that the idea of ‘going native’ had first come into his head.
‘For crying out aloud, why cake all the time, why all these new dresses, why do you have to have new curtains, why do we have to have curtains at all, what’s wrong with the sunlight? What’s wrong with the starlight? Why do you want to shut them out? Why?’
That ‘marriage’ lasted four years, a fight all the way.
Then he drifted North, out of the white man’s towns, and up into those parts that had not been ‘opened up to white settlement’, and where the Africans were still living, though not for long, in their traditional ways. And there at last he found a life that suited him, and a woman with whom he lived in kindness.
There are some countries in which the arts, let alone Art, cannot be said to flourish. Why this should be so it is hard to say, although of course we all have our theories about it. For sometimes it is the most barren soil that sends up gardens of those flowers which we all agree are the crown and justification of life, and it is this fact which makes it hard to say, finally, why the soil of Zambesia should produce such reluctant plants.
Zambesia is a tough, sunburnt, virile, positive country contemptuous of subtleties and sensibility: yet there have been States with these qualities which have produced art, though perhaps with the left hand. Zambesia is, to put it mildly, unsympathetic to those ideas so long taken for granted in other parts of the world, to do with liberty, fraternity and the rest. Yet there are those, and some of the finest souls among them, who maintain that art is impossible without a minority whose leisure is guaranteed by a hardworking majority. And whatever Zambesia’s comfortable minority may lack, it is not leisure.
Zambesia – but enough; out of respect for ourselves and for scientific accuracy, we should refrain from jumping to conclusions. Particularly when one remembers the almost wistful respect Zambesians show when an artist does appear in their midst.
Consider, for instance, the case of Michele.
He came out of the internment camp at the time when Italy was made a sort of honorary ally, during the Second World War. It was a time of strain for the authorities, because it is one thing to be responsible for thousands of prisoners of war whom one must treat according to certain recognized standards; it is another to be faced, and from one day to the next, with these same thousands transformed by some international legerdemain into comrades in arms. Some of the thousands stayed where they were in the camps; they were fed and housed there at least. Others went as farm labourers, though not many; for while the farmers were as always short of labour, they did not know how to handle farm labourers who were also white men: such a phenomenon had never happened in Zambesia before. Some did odd jobs around the towns, keeping a sharp eye out for the trade unions, who would neither admit them as members nor agree to their working.
Hard, hard, the lot of these men, but fortunately not for long, for soon the war ended and they were able to go home.
Hard, too, the lot of the authorities, as has been pointed out; and for that reason they were doubly willing to take what advantages they could from the situation; and that Michele was such an advantage there could be no doubt.
His talents were first discovered when he was still a prisoner of war. A church was built in the camp, and Michele decorated its interior. It became a show-place, that little tin-roofed church in the prisoners’ camp, with its whitewashed walls covered all over with frescoes depicting swarthy peasants gathering grapes for the vintage, beautiful Italian girls dancing, plump dark-eyed children. Amid crowded scenes of Italian life appeared the Virgin and her Child, smiling and beneficent, happy to move familiarly among her people.
Culture-loving ladies who had bribed the authorities to be taken inside the camp would say, ‘Poor thing, how homesick he must be.’ And they would beg to be allowed to leave half a crown for the artist. Some were indignant. He was a prisoner, after all, captured in the very act of fighting against justice and democracy, and what right had he to protest? – for they felt these paintings as a sort of protest. What was there in Italy that we did not have right here in Westonville, which was the capital and hub of Zambesia? Were there not sunshine and mountains and fat babies and pretty girls here? Did we not grow – if not grapes, at least lemons and oranges and flowers in plenty?
People were upset – the desperation of nostalgia came from the painted white walls of that simple church, and affected everyone according to his temperament.
But when Michele was free, his talent