African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [74]
The other servant, the gardener George, is a handsome smiling man who has created this garden under Ayrton R.’s guidance. The big problem in his life is his oldest daughter, who has a Spirit, which in her case shows itself by making her go rigid when she is criticized, and then she has to attack people. She is lazy and stupid, and when working for one of the new security firms–they supply guards for shops and houses, who are nearly all ex-Freedom Fighters–she had sex with all eight of the guards. The family makes visits to one nganga (shaman) after another, to get her accepted as an accredited medium, but they say she is an hysteric. If the ngangas would approve of the girl, the family’s fortunes would be made. As it is they are very poor, though he is paid many times the minimum wage.
‘Eleven children!’
‘That’s only the way we look at it,’ says Ayrton R. ‘He says you can never have too many. The main thing is to keep them fed and you can always do that. His wife has been trying to conceive her twelfth and failing and so she is depressed, because she feels she is no longer a true woman.’
‘And what about educating them? How about health?’
‘You’ve got to face it, there are a lot of people like him left. Perhaps more like him than like Dorothy, who is a modern woman. She’s clever enough to be in the Cabinet–she’d be better than most of them. She goes to the family planning clinic and saves all the money that man of hers doesn’t take off her to get her oldest son an education. But–although she is worth more than the gardener many times over, I couldn’t pay her as much as he gets because his male pride would suffer. And she approves of that. She has a very strong sense of what is proper. I tried to get the building society to pay for more rooms for the servants, but they said no, it wouldn’t add to the value of the house, and so, when there was a crowd back there when all her children arrived, I suggested she and her man should sleep in my spare room. She was terribly shocked. It wouldn’t be right. I’m afraid she is a very authoritarian lady. When this AIDS business began, I told her about it, to make her take it seriously–because the government wasn’t, then, and her reply was that all the sick people should be killed. I told her what she said shocked me, and she said, Then they should all be put in internment camps with armed guards.’
TALK ON THE VERANDAHS
And so for all of the first day we sit around talking, talking, while people come to visit, and I ease myself into Zimbabwe, this time cool as you like, dry-eyed as a judge, while facts and statistics (passionately offered) pile up in my mind, and pamphlets and reports appear from everywhere. No one talks about new Zimbabwe without partisanship, and during the next day, and then the next, people explain and complain and exhort while I think how pleasant to be in an atmosphere where not only everyone cares so much but assumes they can immediately and effectively influence events. How unlike life in Britain, or anywhere in Europe, where long ago decisions have been removed from the levels where citizens have their being, to summits of power high above their reach. And all this time I listen for the equivalent of The Monologue, but that has gone, as they say, into the mists of history. Instead certain phrases recur in every conversation and