My Life as an African: A BiograFictional Memoir "The Truth But Not The Facts"
There isn’t much ‘dating’ in my co-ed high school. Boys and girls pair up if they like each other, but it doesn’t happen very often.
Now, I’m at university, sixteen or seventeen or eighteen, and things are different.
Some boys still continue in the same pattern, asking out a girl if they like her. Others date for sport, taking out many girls in series and parallel and seeing what works for them. Some aim at sexual experience. I know a few who say it’s good to date nurses who work at Groote Schuur Hospital — their implicit assumption being that, since nurses’ daily work is all about human bodies, they will have less inhibition about the whole business. And some try to optimize for the long run, dating marriageable girls on Saturday nights and what they believe are more available ones on weeknights.
I’m in the ask-someone-out-only-if-you-like-them-a-lot category, and it’s not often I like someone a lot. Absent that, occasionally I ask some girl out to a movie just for the sake of going out.
It’s a formal business. You ask someone if they’d like to go to a movie on a Saturday night. You buy tickets for the movie (all cinemas have reserved seats that must be booked in advance). You pick them up at their house and meet their parents. You drive to the movie. At intermission you go out to the foyer to buy a small box of fancy chocolates (Black Magic is the classiest) to give them. After the movie you drive them home and drop them off. The movie is the best part of it.
And occasionally girls ask you out. If they’re in high school it’s to their annual school dance, their hair pinned in place and you in a white shirt and tie. If they are at university, it’s to some wedding where they need a partner. Or, on hot summer Christmas Eves, to a party that one of their friends has decided to throw. It’s not much fun being the date of someone you don’t especially like
.
With the girls I am attracted to I’m a bit tentative about asking them out. We have exactly one telephone in our house; if I want to make a private call I have to unplug it from the jack in the hall, take it upstairs to my parents’ bedroom where there is the one other jack, make the call, and then return it to the hall. Adding to the inhibition, I have been led to believe in the unspoken rule: if you kiss someone, you have to marry them. No one actually pronounces that principle in our house, it’s ineffable, like God’s name, but it doesn’t need stating.
I manage to violate it, but it doesn’t come easy. I would prefer to know that the girl likes me before I ask her out. So often I obsess about symbols: what did that remark of hers mean? did I say something wrong that I must now regret and try to correct? And when I correct it will I make a new mistake? I am prone to this kind of thinking, analyzing the deep metaphysical meaning of social responses.
Part of a poem I publish in a university magazine:
Attempt at casual manner;
fly a tentative flag;
wave a contactual banner
parading feeling.
Yet you, either sensing dis-ease
or else inherently so
refuse to go along.
After too many of these episodes I make a decision: if you like someone, ask them out no matter what you think they might think. Better to let them see how you feel, or even declare it. There’s no shame in being attracted to someone. It will be much worse, for someone like me, to think about what you should have done than to simply be rejected.
Still, it’s too complicated. Sometimes I think of Mrs Azoulay and her womanly ways, who invited me in for a cool drink and quickly tried on her new dress for my approval. She was in a different category from the girls I am trying to figure out how to deal with.
One late afternoon in the street some friends and I discuss what age we’d choose if we had to remain there forever. I suddenly think of a paragraph in Robert Musil’s Young Torless:
“He looked through the little windows and the crooked, narrow doorways into the interior of the cottages with a gaze burning so hotly that there was all the time something like a delicate mesh dancing before his eyes … here and there as some some woman bent over her work her skirt swung high revealing the hollows at the backs of her knees, or the bulge of a heavy breast showed as the linen tightened over it … the cottages exuded a heavy sluggish air, which Törless eagerly breathed in.”
To my friends’ mystification I choose age 40. I temporarily imagine that being 40 would make me just right for a life of Torless’s imagined domestic sexuality with Mrs Azoulay.