African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [73]
We stand in the middle of this garden and breathe in garden air, facing up to the house that lies in a long curving shape, made longer by a discreet wall screening the servants’ quarters.
‘Well, are they any better than they used to be?’ I ask, meaning the accommodation for servants, once a small brick room, or two, that held the lives of one, two, three, servants, and often many of their friends as well.
‘The rooms are much better, yes, but it depends on what they hold.’
‘And what do these hold?’
‘The gardener has eleven children, and sometimes he and his wife have them all here. And the cook has three, and they are sometimes all here. And she has her man living here too.’
‘Illegally?’
‘Not illegally these days. But that isn’t what I wanted you to notice. What I’ve learned living here, is about space.’
‘You have plenty of it.’
‘Yes, but just take a look down there.’
At the end of the garden were two substantial patches of mealies, standing glossy and thick, and a patch of rape.
‘That patch there is my mealies, for sweetcorn, and that other patch is theirs. When an African buys a house anywhere the first thing he does is plant a patch of maize, even if it isn’t big enough to give them more than an occasional cob or two. Maize it has to be. It is a symbol. And that patch of maize appeared as soon as I set up house here. It was not a question of asking me: it is their right.’
‘And then?’
‘The rape is the relish. It makes sense, because that patch will keep them in green stuff, they pull a few leaves at a time. Full of vitamins. And when I dug up a guava tree I thought was in the wrong place–suddenly I was confronted by the cook and the gardener, both in tears, accusing me of an unkind heart. It was really their guava, do you see? So I planted another at once. Parts of this garden are their space. Their right.’
‘That’s something new, then.’
‘Yes, it is. And now look up there.’
Up there is a ridge where, among well-established trees, are large houses.
‘And up there the new Chefs live. Their houses are three or four times the size of this one. They wouldn’t be seen dead even visiting a house like this. They wouldn’t be seen talking to a mere university intellectual like me.’ He sounds amused, more, full of relish: I was to learn that this relish, this enjoyment in the unexpected, was very much the note of new Zimbabwe.
Inside the house breakfast was on the table, presented by Dorothy, the cook, a plump smiling lady. Then we sat all morning and talked, about Zimbabwe, with the same relish and pleasure. I had seen by now that the miserable greyness, the sullenness, of last time had gone–I had dreaded it, and there had been no need.
We also talked about the servants as the whites have always done, not only the minority who were able to see themselves as a part of a pretty remarkable history. All around them that sea of black people, whose lives were so different, who thought so differently; hard ever to know about those lives, those thoughts, but here, in this house, close as your family, are these people, and so you talked about them, speculated, as if from them you could learn everything about the rest.
And in any case Ayrton R. was afflicted by the unappeasable conscience of the liberal, and suffered for the whole institution of servants past and present. For the real wrong is that everyone, in the whole world, ought to be living in just such a house as this one, with its large rooms and its comfort. And without servants?
Dorothy had a baby at fourteen and was thrown out of school, her parents seeing no reason why they should make things easy for her. ‘The terrible wastage, the destruction, of African women,’ mourns Ayrton R. seeing in Dorothy the world’s millions of women who get pregnant so young and have to pay all their lives for their mistake. Dorothy had four children, by different men. To keep the children, and often the men, she ran a shebeen