Parental Love vs. Romantic Love Theme Analysis

“Are we dead yet?”

“No.”

“You will tell me when we’re dead?”

“If I can, Roo, I will.”

She has many strategies to silence him. One of them, and often the most effective, is wit.

“So you’re off tomorrow,” he says, already knowing the answer.

“Straight after breakfast.”

“Without a backward glance, I hope.”

“In my experience, backward glances only crick the neck.”

He has a shameful secret: even today, he’s unaccustomed to the freedom he’s been given to drive around the country and go wherever he likes. Whenever he sits down in a restaurant or cinema, surrounded by white people, a part of him still expects someone to ask him politely to leave. It is a thing he could never mention to his daughters or even his wife. They would laugh at him and accuse him of making it up. Yet it is a thing he feels: he is an intruder in his own land, condemned to arriving at places where he will never quite belong.

As she speaks, she recalls the times he used to tease her, when teasing—no doubt learned in part from her—was the mode between them. At the time, their world seemed to permit little else: it didn’t even allow them to touch. But now there is no affection in this echo of their old style. Today everything between them seems to bristle with innuendo and hurt.

“If I remember myself correctly,” he says, “I would have wanted to eat that fish.”

“But you were a gentle child, always wanting to please.”

He lets out a sound like laughter and turns away.

“Don’t you mean always wanting to please you?”

She might be cleverer, but he knows he has a far better memory than she: for while she was in the clouds, he has been on the ground, living amongst the rest of humanity, knowing all along how her particular kind of cleverness diminished them.

So naturally he remembers that day they went to fish. It was a thing that was impossible to forget: him learning to cast on the front lawn, weaving the line back and forth through the air, back and forth, and her perched up there on her stoep, ordering him about and laughing at him like he was her toy, her toy monkey, with a battery up its arse.

“You know what I can’t forgive?”

“Sorry?”

“It is that you wanted to protect your seats.”

“My what?”

“The first thing I saw on getting back from boarding school,” he says, “was a black puppy, playing in the garden, chewing a rubber ball to bits. The second was Grace, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. As our love grew, that dog in the garden was growing too. My love and your fear, they grew together. And now, I can no longer separate them. When I think of one, I see the other. I see that double thing, that creature—the beast. Circling the garden, dripping blood.”

For the past six months, he has had a lover: a white woman with a daughter who attends the same school as his girls. She is wealthy and lives alone on a hill that overlooks the old city centre of Johannesburg. Her house is made almost entirely of pale blue glass, and yet she remains to him opaque. They are dipping their toes into the forbidden, as one might try out a new drug.

He doesn’t even particularly like his lover—as a person, that is—but at the time he didn’t have the right words to repel her. Nor did he have the inclination, in spite of not quite liking her: he was too curious, even flattered, to turn away.

It may be his dream house—this house transformed almost beyond recognition—but it still comes from her. Perhaps too much from her. Perhaps even today he’s too attached to his pain—and all he’s managing to do is reproduce it, with slight variations, all across the valley.

“Ah, Madam,” he tells her. “This is a strange land we live in. After all this time, you still want to be the mother. And me, I must still be something like your child. But that relationship—it can have no place in the future of this country.”

Looksmart has promised him a job and he has said he will send Bongani to a special school, so that his disabilities will not hold him back. Looksmart said it was time for black people to help each other. That the time of getting help from the whites is finished. And he agrees with this. He thinks it is time he walked away from this distasteful dance he has been engaged in for so long: where he has to disturb the grave of a child just because the Madam has decided it.

“But he said they loved each other desperately,” she says. “He said she was good.”

“Good?”

The world hangs in the air like the word ‘truth’: simply as another way of presenting oneself to the world.

“She had nothing,” Beauty continues, “and uBass—he paid her. Sis’ Grace did not think about good or not good. Ubezama ukuphila.”

“She was trying to survive?”

Patricia has to repeat the phrase in English in order to accept it fully.