"Friday's Footprint" by Nadine Gordimer
"For herself, she learned to live with her guilt of loving, like some vague, chronic disorder."
Late Wednesday afternoon, while Z did Z**m lecture, I roamed the aisles of Clarke’s Bookshop and stumbled upon a book I had never heard of by an author I had never read, Friday’s Footprint by Nadine Gordimer, who from what little I know of South African literature is perhaps the only South African writer besides J. M. Coetzee internationally famous enough to have a shelf all to herself in the shop, though from what I could tell she did not have such a shelf.
I found Friday’s Footprint upstairs in the used section of the shop among the dusty and alphabetically disordered books which seemed as though in previous lives they faced the same fate as Óscar Amalfitano’s copy of Rafael Dieste’s Testamento Geométrico, by which I mean that the copy of Friday’s Footprint that I picked up for R150 (10,58 USD) looked as though it had been hung for a vague amount of time from a clothesline attached to a goalpost in a northwestern Mexican backyard — “it’s a Duchamp idea,” Amalfitano says, “leaving a geometry book hanging exposed to the elements to see if it learns something about real life” — by which I mean that over the course of the 60 years since this fifth impression was printed in Great Britain by Richard Clay and Company, Ltd., its pages had yellowed (except for a few brown splotches of unknown origin) and its yellow dustjacket had become lightly tattered, but it was to my eye otherwise in gracefully agéd condition, though whether this is because nature is in as short supply in the Western Cape (or Great Britain) as it is in northwestern Mexico I cannot say.
Seeing from the extensive blurb on the dustjacket that I was holding a collection of stories more concerned with the tensions that lie beneath the surface of human relationships than with the day-to-day frictions of the society in which [Gordimer] lives (or perhaps simply because I did not feel like buying another novel to quit) I bought the collection and walked home and reclined on the balcony and applied my headphones so that Z’s laughter sounded tinny and distant as if it were bouncing off the apartment windows opposite, which glinted orange in the declining sun. I read the story. In its pages I came to know Rita Cunningham, manager of a hotel in a Central African village 2000 miles north of Johannesburg, her home city, the city in which her husband, now deceased, scooped her up 17 years ago on business travel, when she was 23 and he was 16 or 17 years older, meaning that he was 56 or 57 the day he died in an accident of male psyche, i.e. the day his boat sank with him and his employees aboard while transporting goods up the river that the hotel overlooked — “‘Mr Cunningham, the boat’s full,’ another white assistant called — ‘Never mind, full! Put it on, man. I’m sick of seeing that bed lying here. Put it on!’ — ‘I don’t know how you’ll ever get it over, it makes the whole load top-heavy’” — so it is that Arthur Cunningham, once Licensed to sell Malt, Wine, and Spirituous Liquours, with his “even false teeth in a lipless mouth that was practical-looking rather than mean or unkind,” meets his end, leaving behind Rita, who occasionally looks out the window of the office of the hotel verandah and sees her husband’s death, which she did not witness, played out before her imagination:
Sometimes (what times? she struggled to get herself to name—oh, times; when she had slept badly, or when—things—were not right) she saw the boat coming across the flooded river. She looked at the wide, shimmering, sluggish water where the water-lilies floated shining in the sun and she began to see, always at the same point, approaching the middle of the river from the other bank, the boat moving slowly under its heavy load. It was their biggest boat; it was carrying eight sewing machines and a black-japanned iron double bedstead as well as the usual stores, and Arthur and three store boys were sitting on top of the cargo. As the boat reached the middle of the river, it turned over, men and cargo toppled, and the iron bed came down heavily on top of their flailing arms, their arms stuck through the bars as the bed sank, taking them down beneath it. That was all. There was a dazzle of sun on the water, where they had been; the water-lilies were thickest there.
What—things—aren’t right? Rita is vague with herself where she does not want to face the truth, or what she fears might be the truth, nor is she ever certain whether her memory is failing her, whether she is deluding herself into a good story about herself, that story being the innocence of her marriage to Johnny Cunningham, now “the man behind the bar, who talked out of the curl of his upper lip, [who] was small and slender and looked years younger than she did, although of course he was not—he was thirty-nine and only a year her junior,” brought on seven years prior as an employee of the hotel by his older step-brother Arthur, now dead.
“Friday’s Footprint” is one part romance — the story of Rita and Johnny’s movement towards each other in the wake of Arthur’s death (their mutual grief, their courtship, their marriage, its decay) — and one part horror story, since Rita is haunted by the the question of whether the origins of her marriage are as illicit as they look. Again and again she turns over their every interaction between from the start of their acquaintanceship — the dance nights during which she sat beside Arthur watching Johnny dance; all the moments their eyes met; the stretches of silence they shared — and the more she reminisces, the less certain she feels:
It began to seem to her that there was something of conspiracy about all these scenes. Guilt came slowly through them, a stain from deep down. She was beset by the impossibility of knowing—and then again she believed without a doubt—and then, once more, she absolved herself—was there always something between her and Johnny? Was it there, waiting, a gleaming eye in the dark, long before Arthur was drowned? All she could do was go over and over every shred of evidence of the past, again and again, reading now yes into it, now no.
When Rita’s folks in Johannesburg say to each other, “It’ll hit her when she gets back,” they mean that the weight of her husband’s death will hit her upon her return to the Central African village where she lives and works, but what hits her is something else, or at first appears to be something else: the realization that perhaps she had never loved him — “She never knew him, of course, because she had nothing of the deep need to possess his thoughts and plumb his feelings that comes of love,” — though she is simultaneously hit by desire, perhaps for the first time in her life, for Johnny. In Gordimer, as in the ancient Greek lyric poets (according to Anne Carson),
love is something that assaults or invades the body of the lover to wrest control of it from [her], a personal struggle of will and physique between the god and his victim. The poets record this struggle from within a consciousness—perhaps new in the world—of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability. (Eros the Bittersweet)
Gordimer records Rita’s struggle — the invasion of her body, the attempt to at once mine and repress the memory — with microscopic precision. In prose as psychologically layered, deceptively simple, erotically charged, domesticatedly depressed, and sensorially rich as that of last newsletter’s subject, John Cheever, she tells a tale of a woman not unlike Cheever’s swimmer, about whom his narrator asks a question that is just as relevant: “Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth?”
PS- I thank Murray Hines for pointing me to Gordimer. I recommend subscribing to his new Substack, “after the movies,” whose first installment, an essay on the legendary Janet Malcolm (RIP), was so good that it inspired me to return to this space.