The Late Bourgeois World Read Online Free PDF

bit of candle, squashing withhis thumbnail (I always remember this description of his student days given by one of our friends) the bugs as they crawled out of their cracks.
    The Van Den Sandts must have relied on me to lead Max by the penis, as it were, into the life he was born for; and I suppose that was why she was inclined to take with sophisticated tolerance, unlike my own parents, the fact that I got myself pregnant at eighteen. ‘It’s just a
mistake
, that’s all,’ she said in a sort of soothing baby talk, as if a puppy had wet the carpet. And after Max and I were married she looked at me with mock censure, raising her eyebrows and smiling when we came to lunch one day: ‘Oh
look
at its little belly, if you please! My dear, all the old cats are going to start counting soon – but we don’t care a fig for them, do we!’
    Max’s face changed and without greeting her he turned and went out of the room. I found him in his old bedroom. ‘If I don’t bother about it, why should you?’ But what was a silly incident, to me, was the ruthless persistence of a social manner that had affectionately belittled him, all his life. Only a man could beget a child, yet she managed to make it something ‘clever’ and ‘naughty’ the children had done.
    It was while I was pregnant, in 1952, that the Defiance Campaign began. Max was one of a group of white people who marched into an African areaprohibited to whites, and he also went to Durban to camp with Africans and Indians on a public square in protest against segregation. Of course, the whole idea was to get oneself arrested and to go to jail. But the charges against Max were dropped, and although we never found out why, he was always convinced that his father had contrived it. If this was so, it was a terrible thing to do to Max; but of course they didn’t do it for Max, they did it for themselves. It wouldn’t have done for a prominent United Party MP to have a son in prison for defiance of colour bar laws, even though by that time the Nationalists had been in power for five years and Van Den Sandt had lost for good his chance of becoming a Cabinet minister. If Max wouldn’t act as a white man for white men, the Van Den Sandts wouldn’t let him act at all. That’s what they wanted to do to him. And then a time came when he made a bomb.
    They were gathering together their weekend purchases all round me, the good citizens who never had any doubt about where their allegiance lay. The steady winter sun, so bone-warming, so reassuringly benign (perhaps we can’t help feeling that if we have the best climate in the world we must deserve it?) shone on the shapes of bottles of wine and whisky, the prawns and cakes and bunches of flowers, plain evidence of the superior living standards of whitecivilization, that they were taking home. I saw them give their children pennies to drop into the SPCA collection box and the hat of the black beggar. Home-made bombs have not shaken the ground under their feet, nor have the riots, the marches, the shootings of a few years back, though like all decent people, they deplore the inhumanity of violence, and, reserving the right of constitutional action to themselves alone, commend it to others as the only decent way to achieve change – should one want such a thing.
    I too have my package of pork fillets and my chair in the sun; you would not know me from the others. We are all still alive and the cars are crawling impatiently one behind the other. Whereas Max is in the sea, in the soup, at the bottom of the sea; poor madman: I suppose it will be possible to say that, now, as it has been satisfactorily possible to say, in the end, of many who have proved awkward, including the one who didn’t know that a Prime Minister with a divine mission might need a silver bullet. Only madmen do such things. But can any white man who wants change really be all there?