Invictus - Carlin [75]
There was a knock at the door and a lady came in carrying a tray of coffee and tea. She was a white woman, middle-aged, wearing a floral dress with shoulder pads. Mandela saw her appear at the door at the other end of the room—a distance six times greater than the length of the cell that had been his home for eighteen years of his life—and immediately stood up, remaining standing as she placed the tray on a low table before the two men. “Ah, thank you very much. Thank you ve-ry much,” smiled Mandela, still standing. “And, ah, this is François Pienaar . . . Lenoy Coetzee.” Pienaar reached out and shook hands with her, and before she turned to go away, Mandela thanked her again and did not sit down again until the Afrikaner lady had exited the room.
Pienaar looked around the large wood-paneled office, vaguely registering a blend of decor old South African and new; ox-wagon watercolors side by side with shields of leather hide and wooden African scupltures. Mandela broke in. “Do you take milk, François?”
In less than five minutes Pienaar’s mood had been transformed. “It’s more than just being comfortable in his presence,” Pienaar recalled. “You have a feeling when you are with him that you are safe.” So safe that Pienaar had the audacity half-jokingly to ask him whether he would accompany the Springboks on a tour to New Zealand the following month. “Nothing would please me more, François!” he smiled. “But most unfortunately I have these people here in this building who drive me very, very hard and I know they will give me orders to remain here and work!”
To Pienaar’s relief, Mandela simply took charge from there, launching into a sequence of reminiscences and stories that made Pienaar feel, as he put it, like a little boy sitting at the feet of a wise old man. One of the stories concerned the theft of a chicken in Qunu, the village in the Transkei where Mandela had been raised and to which he still returned to dispense his ancient chiefly duties. One day when Mandela was visiting, a lady came around to his home to tell him that a neighbor had stolen her chicken. Pienaar picked up the story: “Mandela summoned the neighbor, who confessed he had done it, but only because his family was hungry. Then Mandela called both of them to his house and he ruled that the man had to pay the lady back two chickens. But she argued, she bargained, she wanted more, and they settled on more. But it was a lot for this guy, so Mandela helped him out with the repayment.”
Mandela chuckled throughout as he told the story, a peculiar one for him to choose to tell the Springbok captain at a meeting he had called with the clear purpose of forging a relationship with him in preparation for the following year’s Rugby World Cup. It was peculiarly light and inconsequential, too, given the solemnity of the surroundings, a room where, as Mandela had put it during an interview here a few days earlier, “the most diabolical plans were hatched.” Yet the story of the stolen chicken worked, in that it helped forge precisely the sort of complicit intimacy Mandela wished to establish with the young man. In sharing with him what had been something of a private confidence, a story Pienaar would not have read about in the newspapers, Mandela had found a way to the heart of the overawed rugby captain, making him feel as if he were in the company of a favorite great-uncle. Pienaar would not have guessed it at the time, but winning him over—and through him, enlisting the rest of the Springbok team—was an important objective for Mandela. For what Mandela had reckoned, in that half-instinctive, half-calculating way of his, was that the World Cup might prove helpful in the great challenge of national unification that still lay ahead.
Mandela never made his purpose overt in that first meeting with Pienaar, but he did edge closer to the main theme when he switched the conversation to his memories of the Barcelona Olympic Games,