Love by Consent

There is something repugnant about a man who pays for a wife from a far away place. I mean a hard working honest man in a scenario and country that affords him the wealth for such a purchase, having never met or known the woman before.

Now, with that in mind, lets refine the sense of disgust a little. I don’t mean to allude to some of the more sinister turns such a trade can take. Indeed there are sex slave syndicates, that not so much purchase, but more like traffic women under all manner of deceit and coercion, from one part of the world to the other. Apart from the threats used to dissuade these women to return, there is also the shame and community induced disgrace involved that compels the chattels of this trade to not return home. This is a despicable business, and I don’t mean to take this discussion down these lines.

Also, I don’t mean to wrestle with how cultural power manifests across the sex divide. I think there is a lot to be said about how a man, coupled with institutional and material forms of wealth, feels entitled to do a human being some good in the world while at the same time validating and proving his perceived dominance of the better smelling sex. In contrast, I would be equally interested in this discussion if instead it be a woman purchasing a husband from some island or mountain place. However, the latter I don’t think is very accessible in many peoples imagination.

 But the actual purchase is essential to make for a smooth handover. This avoids the back and forth and jumps over what ever costly administrative mishaps there might be. It smooths over the advertising, the screening and the bribes necessary and condenses it into one single transfer of funds. Moreover, taking on such responsibilities might adversely compromise the pending marriage, for the hassle involved will be unforgettable and a distraction.

What intrigues me is how two people can commit themselves to a very fixed emotionally consuming and typically precarious relationship even before they have even met. No doubt, relationships always involve commitment at some level. But when do you bring in the commitment? Who would be so foolish to say, in the twilight of the first date, “I will never see anybody else but you”? Such words would surely, in most cases scare off the emotionally tenuous opposite.

Indeed the scenario I have brought to attention is not the meeting of equals. When you see the rather short and pudgy yet successful IT geek with the tall slim lady from benighted provinces, you can’t help guessing in your mind that they met over the Internet and she is begging him to fly over her mother and brother too. Fine, she might find short pudgy IT geeks attractive, but there is a sense in which, in some respects, two people cannot be said to be equal. Surely it is with the mismatch of perceived qualities that the one party, in a pairing of partners, might feel the need to hesitate. “I hate the way he dances”, “she has no idea about contemporary literature”, “I go to gym three times a week to look like this and he is happy to flaunt his paunch about” and so on.

There is always some reason or other to hold back. Even if it is not about mismatches. It could be to do with painful past experiences or maybe incompatible families and friends. So how can they do it? How do you stand there at the airport, anxiously waiting to meet the person you have made irreversible commitments to, knowing very well that you might resent her (or him) from the very beginning?

Worse still, what of the anxiety of knowing that there is no turning back. As he loads her only suitcase into the boot, noticing its ridiculous gaudy colors, he might foresee already the arguments over the apartments wall paper in the years to come. While he had hoped to explain the interesting history of the city and its developments as he drives her home for the first time, she might have a wonderful talent for instead warning him to watch-out for on coming traffic and pedestrians.

In the preceding months, when his insecurity about the absurd transaction was at its height and when he was wholly consumed by the fear that within a few months, as soon as she got her papers (so the horror stories at the local drinking hall went) she will run away, never to be seen again. But to his surprise, she quickly settles into his apartment and makes his home her own. So much so in fact, he feels a little estranged in his own house and its durables. It is she who has programmed the DVD recorder in ways he never dreamed. She has rewired and improved the alarm system and persuaded the cat to eat its food. She is quickly running a successful stall at the market outside the mall, is a popular new entry to the local personalities and it is she who introduces him to the interesting neighbours who have moved in next door.

He cannot share his doubts about his relationship with her. She has come so far to be with him and she is now a central part of his coterie of friends. Sitting outside in early winter, avoiding her but ostensibly reading the newspaper, he will wonder how she can so quickly play the role of the perfect partner, without ever going through the antagonistic stages that precede it. It is surreal and he has a sneaky suspicion that it is inauthentic. Some preliminary stages must be missing. The sex has lost its lustre. As before, he is lonely, only now he has lost his freedoms. Just as he had planned for months in isolation, on how to get a wife, he must start planning, all over again, on how to get rid of one.

This City

The taxi is quicker but I prefer the train. Instead of squeezing into a cramped Mitsubishi tin-can, with its glib woman harassing conductor and audacious traffic (in)sensibility, I prefer the train and its train station. Setting out from the air-conditioned bank to make a rare cash deposit, I walked through the leafy narrow streets to the Rondebosch train station.

The stationed is two huge slabs of concrete, isolated in a sea of maple and oak trees, hemmed in by suburban bungalows, cul-de-sacs and apartment buildings and linked to other islands by a single pair of rail-tracks. These tracks, connecting the hinterland behind the mountain to the inner city of cape town, transformed the string of old Dutch farms into demarcated plots for Victorian design housing for urban white workers. Now the rail tracks are dominated, a century later, above and below with bridges and subways, by cars and trucks with their asphalt roads. The trains now, for the most part, only bring in and take out the domestic workers, the security guards, the artisans, street hawkers and the petty thieves, from the distant squalor and crime reserves of the flats yonder, well away from the mountain.

My ticket is for third class, that class that is not first class. That class that does not sit pensive individuals, struggling to avoid each others attention. Instead it is the class that holds the wide double doors open when the train is in motion. That class where limbs dangle from overcrowding. A collection of carriages abound with preachers, confectioners, singers and petty thieves. Sometimes the carriages sing and dance, when they are full with large women in song and banging on the walls. The bouncing rail car, when in such a full throttle choir mode will hold the same gospel tune from one to terminal to the other, while replacing its singers many times over.

For me, these colorful surrounds with the slight perception of insecurity are a light thrill that I wear with feigned ambivalence while reading a book, as if unconcerned with the surrounds I have deliberately courted. Esoteric as I appear, the subalterns that ride with me return my signals with equal and deliberate nonchalance. Either that or they genuinely don’t see me. In among this throng of performances a dirge is sung to the tune of a guitar that ripples throughout the carriage, coating me with goose bumps with each wave. I can’t make out, beyond the dusty sweaty bodies, from whom the song originates but it is a man’s voice and his wail is guttural and plaintive. At the final destination in the city bowl, the carriage quickly empties, leaving behind a blind man sat with a guitar and black sunglasses clutching a small aluminium case for donations.

I stormed out the train, as I always do to speed past the boogie men and petty theives, through the connecting shopping centre of greasy foods and hair products to cross a sun soaked busy street of cars and street hawkers. I walked up a paved pedestrian street past cafes and curios in the shade of trees and colonial era city buildings that are clad with wood window shutters and gargoyles. I walked past the cobbled tourist market square, up the street towards the mountain, walking past car guards, design houses, dormant night clubs and expensive inner city apartments. Up the incline, until the ocean and the harbour was in view behind me. Up further still, past the restaurants and hotels, until I met Nadja, as scheduled for a breakfast of fresh juice and omelet with a view of the city bowl and all its transport terminals.

Nadja, my attractive Germain hero of Switzerland, who took me in when I was stranded with no place to stay, is now the stranger. It is she who is venturing into a country with potentially limited prospects to escape a life that has all the hallmarks of being successful and dull. I found it strange to speak to her on equal terms, where, for the first time, we were in a country that spoke my language (among others) where I knew the geography and I could pronounce on the history and the politics. But she has her reservations about the crime and her new boyfriends white masculine attributes of drink and braai(barbecue). I tried to tell her that her acute perception of crime, came from quarters least qualified to comment and most sheltered on/from crime. I failed to tell her that her insecurity came more from her new lover and his history than from anything else. That crime in this country is horrendous is a stumbling block for such an explanation. I had been beaten to it, ideologically speaking. Furthermore, my narrative is far too convoluted and nuanced in apportioning blame and placing accountability to counter what many see as just plain obvious.