The Double Half of the World E-Book

Simone Malacrida

• Herausgeber: Simone Malacrida
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Two families, two social and cultural contexts contiguous in space and time, are totally confined and divided not only by precise political choices, but also by the actions of individual people.
In apartheid South Africa, an in itself paradoxical situation becomes normality for decades and the same subsequent turning point overturns prejudices and expectations.
Entire communities suffer the consequences, adapting and changing, despite a rigid distinction destined to implode under the pressure of new generations.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

The Double Half of the World

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XXI

SIMONE MALACRIDA

“ The Double Half of the World”

Simone Malacrida (1977)

Engineer and writer, has worked on research, finance, energy policy and industrial plants.

ANALYTICAL INDEX

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I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

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In the book there are very specific historical references to facts, events and people. Such events and such characters really happened and existed.

On the other hand, the main protagonists are the result of the author's pure imagination and do not correspond to real individuals, just as their actions did not actually happen. It goes without saying that, for these characters, any reference to people or things is purely coincidental.

Two families, two social and cultural contexts contiguous in space and time, are totally confined and divided not only by precise political choices, but also by the actions of individual people.

In apartheid South Africa, an in itself paradoxical situation becomes normality for decades and the same subsequent turning point overturns prejudices and expectations.

Entire communities suffer the consequences, adapting and changing, despite a rigid distinction destined to implode under the pressure of new generations.

“God gave us two ears, but only one mouth, so that we could listen twice as much and speak half as much.”

Epictetus

I

Johannesburg, May-July 1964

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Forty-year-old Peter Smith was about to finish his morning ritual.

After breakfast, he headed to the bathroom to shave and then got dressed, as he did every working day before going to the bank.

He was a simple clerk, one of those who thought he was important because he handled other people's money and kept both his desk and his daily task perfectly in order.

Dutiful, without ever going over the top.

Respectful of roles and affable, courteous and in some ways heir to a British tradition that, in Johannesburg, he felt very strongly.

He had inherited it from his family and from what he had learned in his youth.

Respect for the dual motherland, England and South Africa.

Unlike his grandparents' or parents' generation, Peter aspired to full integration with the other white component given by the Boers.

The Boers were the real holders of political and military power, while their English descendants were given special treatment only in the economic field.

There they were respected and Peter had told himself that, starting from economics, he could aspire to something else.

And if he couldn't do it, he would leave it to his children.

Andrew, the eldest of ten years old, attended primary school with great success.

He was considered one of the brightest students and had inherited from his father the qualities of balance necessary to make his way.

Margaret, who was already seven years old and always hoped to escape from her parental memory of when she was much younger, was, on the other hand, a similar model to her mother Elizabeth, who, at thirty-eight, already considered herself a full-fledged woman, with nothing left to say.

He had done his part.

She had gotten married and become a mother.

A male-female couple, as befitted the best families in Johannesburg.

She was entirely devoted to the house and the education of her children, leaving Peter the task of taking care of the family's finances.

Her husband was more gifted and certainly more talented, at least that's what everyone thought.

All understood within their small circle of acquaintances and friends, as it was a common way of behaving, even among the Boers.

“Andrew, Margaret, hurry up!”

Even though it wasn't necessary, Elizabeth, called Betty by a few close friends, repeated this phrase every morning.

It was a way to mark the day.

At home, everyone was waiting for that signal.

The children, who by now had already finished getting dressed, and who, after that call, sprinted in a few seconds towards the exit of the house and even Peter had synchronized with this call.

As soon as his wife finished saying the sentence in question, the man left the room, tightening his tie and picking up his work bag.

In a short time, all three family members would say goodbye to Betty and leave the house.

The two young men would have headed to the bus stop, right on the corner of the street, while Peter would have started the car parked diligently in the garage to go to work via the same route as always.

Betty would have stayed home.

She would tidy up and clean, then take a bus, now empty of students, into town to go shopping.

There was always food or goods to buy or some other woman to meet.

Megan with her ailments or Sue for the gossip about their small community of acquaintances or Hillary to stay informed about fashion and the latest trends.

Usually, they met in groups of three to five, in small clubs consisting of tea rooms or directly in the homes of the various women.

Parties or gatherings were organized, especially for weekends.

Thus the children all grew up together and it was not uncommon for an acquaintance from a tender age to lead to an engagement and subsequent marriage.

So it had happened for Peter and Elizabeth and so it could also happen for their children.

What happened after the morning separation would be the talk of the evening, especially as regards Andrew and Margaret's school or news from Elizabeth.

Peter's work was obscure to the other members of the family and, in any case, had always been dismissed as incomprehensible to everyone.

“When you grow up you will understand,” was the phrase that was addressed to Andrew, considered the only one, as a male, who would be able to understand in the future.

Margaret and Elizabeth were not taken into consideration at all.

In the bank, there were all male employees except for the secretaries, who were all strictly women.

No customer would have felt comfortable being served and received by a woman and would have doubted her abilities, feeling treated as if she were of secondary importance.

Conversely, no man would ever be another man's secretary.

It was a perfect role for women, as they were caring, meticulous and ready to serve.

It was not uncommon for love stories to arise between some clerks and some secretaries.

Officially the bank discouraged this, but in practice single clerks were a sought-after prey for the secretaries, especially if the former were Boers.

Some extramarital affairs were also entertained, but these were less tolerated.

If discovered, the secretary would be fired and the employee would be given a severe dressing down.

Anyone who wanted to advance their career should not get involved in something like this, thus postponing certain opportunities until later.

The leaders, meaning by this term the managerial and executive part, could draw freely from this pool.

They were usually men over fifty, by now in an established position and with generally boring marriages, grown-up children with their own aspirations and wives by now devoid of meaning in relation to life.

No stimulation, no adrenaline rush.

It became so natural to take a break with a secretary.

Young, attractive, buxom, sensitive to expensive gifts and salary increases.

Easy prey for men who would have deluded themselves into thinking they could become young again, even if only for a few moments.

Usually, everything ended the same way it began, and there were few high-profile cases of marriages resulting in divorces.

It wasn't good and it caused a scandal.

The veneer of good manners had to be maintained, casting a veil of hypocrisy over the entire society.

Hypocrisy that permeated the entire structure, much more than a simple clerical job could suggest.

South Africa lived by the law of separate development, theorized years before and put into practice in the last decade.

Each racial community had to be physically and socially isolated and this imposed a distinction even between Boers and English, although both belonged to the whites.

What no one saw, and didn't want to see, were the blacks.

Schools were separated in terms of source selection and placement.

There were no schools for blacks in the white area of Johannesburg.

And there were no whites in the townships, which are areas reserved for blacks.

Everyone was segregated and couldn't see each other.

Peter's driving route was such that he never came into visual contact with Soweto or the other townships of Johannesburg.

No blacks were seen on the streets or in the workplace.

Actually, they were there but they had to be hidden from view.

The entire white economy of Johannesburg was based on the exploitation of black people, but these people, who were temporarily allowed to frequent white areas, were supposed to be invisible.

Locked inside industrial warehouses located on the outskirts or in non-residential areas, transported by special vehicles that shuttled back and forth at different times.

The souls of white people were not to be disturbed by potential subversions of any kind.

“We will not make the same mistake as the Americans,” was said in many quarters.

“And it doesn’t matter if they put sanctions on us or if they expelled us from the Commonwealth.”

Thus the Boers, the most intransigent, highlighted a clear difference with the English, from whom they distanced themselves by speaking in Afrikaans, their typical language.

Peter knew it, or at least had learned to know it, while his children studied it at school alongside English.

Only Elizabeth was unable to understand her, and this further cut the woman off from social communications beyond her narrow circle of acquaintances.

No one asked questions and no one protested.

That's how it was, and ultimately things were better than before.

Peter remembered his childhood and used to warn his children about “how lucky they were to live in those times.”

Like the elderly everywhere and at every time, Peter and Elizabeth, who had aged prematurely in their intellect, began their sentences with an indicative periphrasis whenever they addressed their children in order to scold them:

“In my time...”

Margaret always sat next to her brother on the bus because she felt protected, but her eyes scanned the other children and teenagers.

He was envious of those young men with milky skin and blue eyes.

Her golden, blonde hair sent her into raptures, while when she looked at herself in the mirror, she only saw an anonymous little girl wearing everything brown.

Hair and eyes.

White skin, but not ivory.

Being blond and blue-eyed was almost certain to belong to the Boers and this gave those children a great sense of security.

They walked with their foreheads held high and their gazes prouder, and even when they fell or were in difficulty, they gave the impression of being superior to the norm.

Conversely, Margaret had only seen black people twice and was terrified by them.

They had different physical features, with a flat nose and hair that was generally curly but attached to the head.

The greatest impression he had had was when looking at their hands, two-tone between the backs and the palms.

His brother Andrew shared neither this fear nor his previous envy.

He was happy with his life as it was and had never asked himself any questions.

Those would come with adolescence.

When the Smith family traveled outside Johannesburg, events that were very rare but engraved in the memories of all the members, Peter took care to understand if the areas were safe.

By this term he did not mean whether they were free from natural dangers, which is more than permissible in a country made up, for the most part, of countryside or natural parks or deserts, but he was referring to unpleasant encounters.

Basically, the black population.

Of which he was ignorant of everything, even that they did not constitute a single ethnic group.

In fact, blacks were much more divided among themselves than whites were, and therein lay their weakness.

“There may be many of them, but they don't know how to think and they hate each other,” this was taught in schools and History was there to prove it.

The whites had managed to dominate through ingenuity, education and compactness, and all this had overcome the numerical advantage.

“It’s not the quantity that counts, but the quality.”

The underlying idea advocated in every strata of South African society was that equality between men was nonsense.

Everyone was worth differently and therefore had to have different rights, all to achieve a better result for everyone.

The so-called apartheid, a term reviled abroad but considered a distinctive emblem to be pinned on the chest in South Africa, was based on these assumptions.

“Others don’t understand our situation and can’t judge us.”

With this statement all criticism from outside was dismissed, while the internal front was to be united.

The whites united against the blacks, more or less divided.

And this clash would also have involved politics and justice.

It was not acceptable that blacks could win in court, with white judges and juries.

With the white police having investigated, the blacks had to be condemned, especially their leaders.

For a year now, the head-on clash between white power and the ANC, the African National Congress, the party that had brought together the main black opponents and which had been declared criminal, because it had communist tendencies, whether real or presumed, had been the main topic of discussion.

In Soweto, this had been discussed for some time in the home of Johannes Nkosi, a thirty-five-year-old worker who left the township every day at dawn and returned at sunset.

While among the whites, Johannes was not allowed to do practically anything, especially not take time off work or go out.

He had an hour-long lunch break, which he spent in the back of the building after eating an indecent meal.

No food was allowed to be taken out of the township, nor was anything allowed to be brought into it.

There were guards who could search you arbitrarily and the prison sentence was normal for those who broke the rules, after a dose of beatings and truncheons as should have been the norm.

So the workers worked, ate quickly and then nested behind the building like ants, looking for shade during the summer season or the sun when it was cold.

Johannes barely saw his two children, ten-year-old Moses and seven-year-old Johanna, who attended an all-black school in Soweto.

Maria Khumalo, Johannes' thirty-year-old wife, took care of their care. She washed and sewed fabrics, almost always waste material from white people that was reused in the townships.

He earned little, but just enough to get by along with Johannes' salary.

Their children would have to study more than the two of them had been allowed to.

“Only in this way will there be progress.”

For Maria, conquests had to be made step by step, slowly and progressively.

“No one ever stopped the water,” she used to repeat, a phrase she had learned from her mother, who had heard all this in her youth and so on.

Johannes wasn't convinced.

Things were worse now than in the days of the Zulu Empire.

Where was the independence and splendor of the black lands?

“Would you prefer to live in a Bantustan?”

Johannes didn't think about it at all.

It would have resisted, however much Soweto might rot and become inhospitable.

By agreeing to move to a Bantustan, he would have ended up playing white politics.

“That's what they want.

Make us go away by telling us that we have a right to ten percent of the land, while we own one hundred percent.

It's a pure and simple expropriation.

They forget it.

We will stay here and fight.”

Johannes was a staunch supporter of the ANC, although it could not be said or disclosed.

Being a member and a supporter was enough for an arrest.

For this reason, he was awaiting the sentence that would change his life.

“But do you really think those people will save you and your children?

Deluded Johannes, my husband.”

Maria didn't believe any of this.

The courts and the police were “white people’s things,” as everyone used to say.

There was no hope that by legally and openly challenging the apartheid regime, a better solution could be achieved.

At that point there were only two alternatives.

Armed revolt or acceptance and change by steps.

Having set aside any desire for revenge, which was impossible to implement due to the overwhelming military superiority of the whites, there was nothing left to do but wait.

Educate your children to learn some nobler trade than that of a factory worker or a fabric repairer, and then aspire to a better position.

“Listening to you, it takes at least a century to reclaim our sacrosanct rights.”

Johannes spoke about it openly, even in front of the children.

“It's right that they know what future awaits them,” he justified himself, while Maria preferred to do it without their presence.

Children are easily influenced and do not possess the intellectual and psychological means to counter what adults say.

“Rather think about how we will get by.

Money is increasingly scarce here as food prices rise.”

Johannes had noticed it.

In Soweto, almost everything was lacking and life was terrible.

Yet, there were very few who were getting rich.

Blacks who exploited other blacks and who had found their fortune in the politics of separate development.

If placed in a competitive regime, certain rents of position would not have survived, but that was playing the game of white people.

“It won’t do any good,” he told himself, staring at the still half-asleep township.

He knew little about whites.

He had seen some, but without interacting with them.

Certainly, they were not seen around Soweto.

It seemed as if that piece of the city was invisible, swallowed up by the earth and made inaccessible.

How did they manage to live for years without noticing what was happening in their own city?

He consoled himself by thinking that at least his children had not had to endure anything similar.

Neither Moses nor Johanna had ever been out of Soweto.

For them, the city ended with the last tin shacks of the township and they were not even attracted to seeing the world of white people.

According to their father, there was nothing good.

Thus, there were various rumours circulating about what life was like in Johannesburg.

“I don’t believe everyone has a car.

My father works there and never told me.”

Moses was the least likely to believe what the other children said about white people.

He knew that a news story could be exaggerated and distorted and that the final result, after a few steps, would be the exact opposite of the original message.

He had seen him playing soccer with his friends on some makeshift pitch, for example when things were going from bad to worse with someone getting hurt.

From the real version to what was received, sometimes everything was reversed.

His sister Johanna, on the other hand, was easily manipulated.

“You don’t have to believe everything, stupid!”

Moses was sometimes ashamed of her, especially when they were in public, while at home, away from prying eyes, he became the best big brother in the world.

He played, joked, protected her and taught her just like a father would.

This duplicity did not belong to Johanna, who had always been spontaneous and sincere.

“You will go a short distance, my daughter,” her mother had told her, partly regretting but also pleased with her purity.

If everyone was like Johanna, there would be no problems in the world.

No war or abuse, oppression or violence.

Johannes witnessed little of all this.

He only had Sunday as a day of rest and couldn't completely disconnect from work.

The rhythms remained imprinted on him in a constant and imperishable way, without showing any signs of slackening.

He knew he would be one of many who would die on the job.

“Better this way than anywhere else.

Of excruciating diseases or in prison or with a few bullets in the body.”

He consoled himself with the certainty of his job, wasn't that what everyone was blathering about?

Work as a starting point.

Maria did not want to know anything about what her husband did outside Soweto, just as she did not think it was important to inform him about the fabrics, which were women's work and carried out only by women.

There were little girls a little older than Moses, and when Maria saw them, she almost wanted to cry.

It wasn't fair, but he understood how necessity and hunger could push one to do anything.

She didn't feel like judging those who were worse off than her.

By what right would he have done so?

Who was Maria Khumalo to pass judgment?

She would have been as arrogant as those whites who were supposed to judge the ANC leaders.

For Johannes there wasn't much choice.

Either the court would have accepted the defense's requests, deeming the defendants innocent and freeing them, as had already happened some time ago, or there would have been an exemplary punishment.

“Forget it,” was how his friend Patrick had brought him back to reality.

“They will not make the mistake of releasing them again.

Now that they have them all in cages, they won't let them out.

It will all be a staged farce, in which everyone already knows the sentence.

Life imprisonment.

This way they will never be able to make proselytes again.

Do you know how they treat us?”

Johannes shook his head and Patrick was just waiting to add the punchline.

“Like sheep.

This is how they treat us.

They think that by condemning all the leaders, we will be lost and bewildered and will stop.

They think it will all end here, but instead it will only be the beginning.”

Johannes let him speak.

He had arrived home, having finished the walk that took him from the bus stop to the shack where he lived with his family.

Patrick, on the other hand, lived three blocks away.

She was one of those hotheads who had not married in order to devote herself directly to the ANC cause.

“This way I can act without pressure...”

He had read something and had been educated in general terms.

He understood that the bosses exploited the workers and the whites did the same with the blacks; therefore, a white boss did it doubly towards a black worker.

“Indeed, not doubly, but squarely.”

He had never understood the expression, since he had no rudiments of abstract mathematics, but he repeated it continuously, having heard it from those who possessed a higher education than his own.

Thus, Patrick, despite being younger and with less work and life experience than Johannes, felt he could give advice and educate someone he considered a comrade in arms, as well as a good father.

“Hasn’t he finished talking yet?”

Maria overwhelmed her husband with her usual complaint.

The woman didn't like Patrick.

A man without a family was considered useless and harmful, at least in Mary's eyes.

He had guessed by hearing the voices getting closer and by thinking about the only possible speech from Patrick.

Johannes nodded in disapproval.

He wanted to dismiss her rudely, but he preferred not to answer.

There was no point in arguing as soon as we crossed the threshold of the house.

And then he didn't have enough energy.

Perhaps after putting something in his stomach, like some samosa, assuming the wife had the ingredients available to prepare dinner.

It was a dish of Indian origin, learned who knows where from his wife but which had become part of the tradition.

A simple dish that is easy to prepare.

Eating every night wasn’t a given, or at least not for everyone in Soweto.

At least in that respect, Maria and Johannes had never let their children lack anything.

“What were you talking about?”

Moses was curious, but his father wouldn't let him in.

These were grown-up things and, although he understood his son's desire to rush things, it was better for him to stay away from them.

He would have had plenty to be fed up with in the future.

Johannes thought back to his ten years but nothing came to mind.

It was a blank period compared to what happened later.

During his adolescence, like everyone else, Johannes had discovered an attraction towards the opposite sex and, only after marrying Maria, his attention had turned to something else, namely the social and political situation.

The arrival of his children forced him to think about the future and not just about himself.

The day of sentencing arrived without too much preamble.

Eleven months had passed since the first arrests, which were followed by others.

It seemed like an infinite amount of time to wait, but then, as always, an event catches everyone unprepared.

“It was the result we expected,” Patrick concluded, not too surprised.

Life imprisonment for all except one of the defendants.

It was a way to clear one's conscience and to demonstrate that one was not condemning out of prejudice.

“Buffoons, that’s what they are.

But if they think they can bend us, they have misunderstood.

The liberation phase begins today!”

Johannes did not understand his friend's tone.

Triumphant despite the obvious defeat, but with a hint of bitterness.

It meant not having to hope for justice and the courts.

And how did it happen in a state where whites dominated every economic, political, social, cultural and military sector?

“We gave him a good lesson,” Peter understood from the conversation between two Boer colleagues, spoken strictly in Afrikaans.

The two chuckled at the news as they relaxed on their lunch break with their shirtsleeves half-rolled up.

It was permissible, in these circumstances, to not respect etiquette as long as everything was within the norm before the end of the break.

Peter, for his part, never abandoned the role of the perfect clerk with his aplomb, partly to demonstrate that he was superior in terms of style, descending from the English, more civilized and urbanized than four Dutch farmers who had settled in South Africa centuries before, and partly because of his character.

He had sensed that his colleagues were referring to the trial that had sentenced all the ANC leaders to life imprisonment.

On the other hand, where were we going with this?

Blacks and communists, the perfect union for the destruction of their country.

His family completely agreed with the verdict, as did the vast majority of whites.

“It’s about defending our society.”

What was happening in America with the civil rights movement not only did not change people's minds, but actually strengthened their belief in apartheid.

It was a way to demonstrate what black people would do if they were given even a little freedom.

“Without forgetting that here they are in the majority.”

Being surrounded, ultimately white guests on an overwhelmingly black continent, was crucial to understanding the approach.

Aside from Peter, no one in the Smith household had the wherewithal to fully understand the implications of the conviction.

Some had feared possible riots.

“Let them try.

This will be the excuse to put them all in jail and evacuate the townships.”

The not-so-quieted desire was that of mass expulsion to the Bantustans, where all the blacks would be concentrated.

No one cared about how their society would continue, without infrastructure and with a monstrous population density, but more worryingly no one had any idea how the white economy was already heavily dependent on black labor.

Entire industrial sectors in which white masters did a roaring trade, publicly showing the face of those who were against any possible integration.

Peter disdained such people.

They were not consistent.

“Even having a black housekeeper...”

It was something inconceivable.

Why force white women to work, thus having to relegate the housework to some black woman?

For economic reasons?

Certainly those who did so profited, since the salary of a white woman was at least triple that of what a black housekeeper was paid.

But Peter wasn't happy with that.

It was the eradication of tradition, with women no longer being the queens of the house.

And how would the children have grown up without a mother to take care of them?

Peter especially didn't like having black people enter his home.

He considered this as something dirty.

To mingle with “those people”, as he called them, not even having the courage to use the usual name or even the derogatory term that almost all the Boers always had on their lips.

Neri was already something sweetened.

In reality, what for others had been a watershed moment was nothing for Peter Smith and his family.

Everyone continued the same routine as always.

The same times, the same conversations, the same thoughts.

“We’re throwing a party with the Parkers.

They are so cute, and they have that dog that our children adore,” Elizabeth had thus worked to strengthen the bond between the English descendants.

In their homes, there was never a shortage of a Union Flag or a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, and Peter was proud that his wife bore such a high-sounding name.

When they got together, it was a way to remember the past and there was no better custom than singing the anthem, talking about cricket or rugby to still feel part of the Empire.

Such traditions might have distanced him from integrating with the Boers, but Peter had no intention of giving them up.

They were in his soul, deeply rooted, and so he should have passed them on to his children.

Andrew never disdained such initiatives, considering himself the future bearer of such roots, while Margaret was only interested in playing with the Parkers' dog.

He was a sturdy golden retriever, always ready to wag his tail and chase balls and balloons of all shapes and sizes, then returning panting and with his jaws wide open.

Her name was Derry and Margaret envied Jane, the Parkers' daughter, who was eight years old.

He knew more than her as he was a year ahead in school and could enjoy Derry's company every day.

He had also taught the dog to respond to some voice commands.

Peter would spend time with his Parker counterpart, John, who, when he was worried, would scratch his head, which was gradually receding from a late-onset baldness.

Between a roast beef and a homemade mustard sauce, Peter approached with a couple of ice-cold beers.

John had an expression that suggested he was having some trouble.

He was an insurance agent, one of those who worked with both companies and individuals.

Peter had insured everything from his car to his house, and John, in return, kept all the accounts at the bank branch where Peter worked.

It was a way to help each other and also keep an eye on each other.

“Something wrong?

Do you want to talk about it?”

Usually, the problems were limited to the family or work environment.

Some financial or career worries or, at worst, sentimental or health issues.

John had a brother who was a manager in one of the local manufacturing companies whose workers were all from Soweto.

For this reason, Peter had never invited John's brother.

He considered him a cross between a slave-driving slaver and someone who had soiled himself with the dregs of society.

John sipped some beer, grimaced and muttered something:

“My brother says we should start worrying.

You know the work he does and with whom.

That ruling sent them into a turmoil.”

For Peter, there was nothing strange.

There had already been other trials and other sentences and he did not see how this could influence the course of events.

He dropped the subject with a polite phrase.

“You’ll see that time will fix everything.”

He didn't want to ruin his Sunday and his barbecue.

Yet, it would have been enough to raise one's gaze, to bring it even before the horizon with a hot air balloon hoisted thirty metres high, and even Peter would have seen the townships.

Those places that in his life had never existed on any map or road route.

Packed with invisible people moving in totally unknown environments, with languages and food that had nothing to do with the Smith family.

At about the same time, at the Nkosi house, Maria had just finished preparing the dishes.

Definitely no beer, much less ice cold given the lack of refrigerators and appliances in general, and no meat.

Flour kneaded with water and vegetables.

Some fruit.

Nothing more.

If Johanna and Moses were still hungry, they would have had to make do otherwise.

They had never stolen, but the temptation had always been strong.

They almost always joined those who had something more or those who had grandparents who gave all kinds of food to their hungry grandchildren.

Johannes stared into space and felt that his stomach was not full.

The slop, as they called the shapeless and tasteless mush that was given to them in the company canteen, had the only virtue of satisfying their hunger.

What Maria cooked was certainly healthier and more refined, but it was little.

On the other hand, he would never have taken food away from his children and would have preferred to give it up.

“I’m going for a walk...”

The wife snorted.

Johannes was almost never at home, and even if he didn't stay there on Sundays, what kind of family could they be?

The children couldn't wait to sneak away, looking for friends and small groups to spend the afternoon with.

“It will rain tomorrow, maybe even by this evening.

“I’d better hurry,” Johannes muttered, shaking his head and looking for an excuse before heading out the door.

Moses was the first to slip through the hole and pop out, followed closely by Johanna.

“Wait for me, I know where you’re going...”

There was a constant bickering between the two, given the difference in age and gender.

Both were in that period of childhood in which one does not understand the usefulness of the opposite sex.

Johanna saw males as bullies and aggressive and threatening figures, even if ultimately stupid.

Moses considered females as capricious and fickle, too delicate but also evil.

Despite this, they always found each other and protected each other, always staying united because they understood that this was the only way they could have a hope of getting by.

The meeting was at the small field, hoping that there would already be some children with some grandparents nearby.

As far as Johanna and Moses were concerned, the grandparental figures were rather evanescent.

On the other side of Soweto and, above all, poor and struggling to get by.

Unlike his sons, Johannes took it easy.

He would wander around for a while looking for some friendly faces and acquaintances.

Maria would have finished tidying up the house and then she would have gone to visit her sister, who was not too far away, but with whom she didn't have much contact since their respective husbands couldn't see each other.

Johannes considered his brother-in-law a bad guy, one of those who trafficked under the table, and that man considered Johannes a good-for-nothing who would always let himself be exploited by the whites.

“The perfect black slave,” she called him.

Stranded in a township they did not want and where they felt like prisoners, the Nkosi family wandered in search of temporary shelter.

Games or houses, food or words, everything would have served to ease the difficulty of daily life.

Johannes passed by a diverse humanity.

Ghosts of other worlds and life that went on anyway, inexorable and insensitive to what was outside.

Is it possible that everything remained incommunicable?

That mutual listening was not possible?

Centuries of wickedness had materialized in a situation like this that was completely unwanted, at least by the majority of blacks.

As far as he could see, the whites were not so much hateful as afraid.

Fear of being swept away.

And then they armed themselves and committed abuses.

An old law of the jungle, transmuted from now-forgotten environments.

“Hey buddy, what’s wrong?

Are you feeling okay?”

Without realizing it, she had bumped into Patrick, who had glimpsed that absent gaze too often.

These were the alienated eyes of those who worked on assembly lines or who broke their backs for a pittance.

“Come on, I’ll offer you some bread and a drop of bum-bum.”

Johannes' stomach growled at the mere thought of swallowing something.

Not that Patrick could provide much, but the dry bread was fine for Johannes.

He would absorb the gastric juices and alcohol, gulping it down to numb himself and forget the injustices of the world.

Without a family and without a wife, Patrick had invested everything in the fight for the liberation of his people.

“They won’t stop us, we’re getting organized.

They will see what black brothers united are capable of.”

Johannes let him speak.

The more the friend blathered, the less he would eat, leaving what was on the table for the father of the family to consume alone.

It was enough to just hint at a response every now and then.

A monosyllable or a movement of the head.

“Are you with us?”

Johannes would have done anything for the last piece of bread.

He felt fuller than he had ever felt before.

“Of course, of course, the struggle and the rights.

We will win against injustice.

We will fight.”

They were words empty of meaning.

Patrick poured himself his first and only glass.

He stared at it at the bottom and then threw it into his stomach without thinking.

“It will be long.

You don’t win a marathon in the first kilometer.”

Outside the first clap of thunder was about to announce the beginning of the rain.

II

Johannesburg - Durban, Autumn-Winter 1965

––––––––

Peter Smith's car moved slowly through the Johannesburg city traffic.

“This damned rain...”

It was truly hell when sudden downpours flooded the streets, turning them into rivers and streams.

The water gained speed even on minimal slopes, making a noise typical of the tires trying to make their way through that chaos, and tapping on the windows, the hood, and the roof.

Peter hated her.

He would have gotten wet despite the umbrella and all the precautions and this would have made him look less elegant.

“You’re not a real Englishman if you don’t love the rain,” his wife used to tease him.

Betty was the only one who could afford to do it without being scolded.

Peter looked at her badly, but then nothing happened.

Andrew, on the other hand, loved the rain.

He would have stayed under it for hours to feel himself covered by the clean liquid coming from the sky.

The water had no boundaries and could freely flow wherever it pleased.

No one in the Smith family, and indeed no white person, wondered what this meant in Soweto, where dirt turned to mud.

It was another way of segregating blacks, an expression that both the Zulu and the Xhosa shared, the two main ethnic groups that had fought for years, but who had now found a political and leadership union in the ANC.

What was the point of all this?

Only to arrest the leaders who were now serving life sentences in prisons with no possibility of communication with the rest of the world.

Politics and the mass media were erecting a censorship of everything coming from abroad, especially from the United States.

It was not okay to show and talk about black people demanding rights.

Marches, strikes and demands were detrimental to the structure of South Africa.

“The economy is doing great and we don’t have to worry,” Peter advised family and friends.

From his vantage point, he noticed how families were increasingly doing better.

There were more of them accessing financing requests for the purchase of houses, cars and other goods.

Household appliances had now entered the daily lives of many and were easing women's manual labor.

“Better a car than a black one!” he had emphasized pompously.

Peter had great admiration for those who were leading man into a new technological age.

Allowing everyone to free themselves from manual tasks was a great achievement.

He also noticed that almost everything came from white men, not women or people of other ethnicities.

It was a way to certify the superiority that the bank employee thought he embodied, without realizing that he too was being discriminated against.

Almost twenty years of hard clerical work had not been enough for him to access the levers of power in the hands of the Boers and their descendants.

Even speaking Afrikaans wasn't the winning choice.

The problem was the last name.

By introducing himself as Smith, everyone knew where he came from.

There were Boer families who still saw the English and their descendants as someone to oppose.

There had been a war in the past and a massacre, now lost in memory, but the worst was due to what happened in the last world war.

The British had allied themselves with the Communists, despite what Churchill had said.

And above all they had attacked Germany and the Reich.

Many Boers had been staunch supporters of Nazism, especially when it came to racial issues.

They only deviated from the main problem, which was not found in the Jews, but in the blacks.

Next up are the Indians.

Finally, what happened after the war, with the loss of the Indian colony and the surrender to the figure of Gandhi, was not well received.

The Afrikaners considered the English to be spineless.

Thus, Peter was excluded a priori.

If her mother had married a Boer, then with a different surname she might have aspired to enter their circle, although the greatest difficulty would have been placed on Elizabeth's shoulders.

It was almost impossible to bridge the gap in origin, even within the white community.

There were no explicit prohibitions, but the local community was oriented in this direction.

A Boer father would have been unwilling to see his son marry an Englishwoman, and this was not the case in the least in the case of a female child.

No one would have sold out their Boer purity to mix with the English, thus lowering their social rank.

It wasn't like that everywhere, for example in Durban or Cape Town there were other traditions, but in Johannesburg that was the norm.

Peter didn't think about it too much.

Now he had an immediate enemy in the form of rain.

He had parked in the usual spot.

He entered the office with an air of satisfaction.

He would have been safe there.

He thought that his children would also be sheltered and that heartened him beyond belief.

He took one last look outside and dove headlong into the double-entry bookkeeping.

Checks and registers, calculations and stamps.

This is how the office work was done, while waiting for some appointments with the main clients.

Peter enjoyed serving industrialists, those who came to him to understand how much they would receive and then give back over the years.

Every entrepreneur wanted to tell a part of himself.

His idea, what he imagined he would do with that money.

“A new shed, I can already see it finished.

Five thousand square meters...”

Peter always carried with him a conversion rule, something used by engineers or surveyors.

Accustomed to thinking in his family in miles or gallons or pounds, he had to conform to the European-style system in force in South Africa.

Society was experiencing bursts of optimism, punctuated by sudden setbacks.

For Peter there was still something to unravel and he hoped that, when his children entered the job market, everything would be resolved.

He shared these ideas with his friends and found a commonality of views.

If that's how everyone saw it, it must be right.

He didn't even think about analyzing just one point of view and selecting only that one at the source.

An abstraction to the universal of a minimal part.

A common mistake, but one that everyone made in a closed society.

You had to climb many positions up to get a global understanding, and usually the one who had it was one of those who had staged the whole situation.

There was a separation that was desired and imposed, certainly not a situation that fell from the sky.

The sun shone again in the early afternoon and Peter's smile returned.

He threw out a joke to his colleague Dirk, who only nodded.

He had other things on his mind, that thirty-eight year old young man with a powerful physique that recalled his past as an amateur rugby player.

Dirk had just been granted the right to a personal secretary, one of the many privileges that Peter, despite his greater seniority, had not yet achieved and perhaps never would.

Dirk had a correct first name, last name and physiognomy, derived from his family tree and genetics.

The secretary was a young twenty-two year old, unmarried while Dirk was already married with a five year old son.

Dirk's wife was one of those independent women who had always wanted to work and who preferred to hire a black housekeeper who, every day, left Soweto to stay in the confines of a white house in complete solitude.

She would enter that place and stay there until Dirk's wife returned for lunch.

The woman would let her out and the housekeeper could return to the township to perform other work for other employers.

Dirk's secretary did not go unnoticed and the man wondered if those quick glances, those clothes and those perfumes had been worn and used to please him.

If this had been the case, there would have been a more or less consolidated practice.

Making jokes, winking.

Then move on to the next level of small touches in a closed office, feeling out reactions.

Finally, the invitation.

Almost always in a couple of places nearby.

Nothing public, but rather clandestine, but just to remain in solitude.

Usually, secretaries lived in small rented apartments and were alone, which was useful to the man on duty as he could use other people's houses for more or less romantic dates.

At that point, the relationship would have begun, unbeknownst to anyone, despite the general intuition about what had happened.

As these stories began, so they most often ended.

Usually, after a period ranging from three to twelve months, the secretary would begin to ask for something more than gifts or raises or career advancements.

He demanded exclusivity with the complete abandonment of his wife.

And that was an almost insurmountable obstacle.

The first disagreements and arguments began, with the first scenes of jealousy.

At that point, the man would most often back out, while in a few other cases the woman would try to trap him, that is, to get pregnant at will.

They were dramatic cases that rarely ended positively.

In rare circumstances one witnessed what the secretaries feared, namely the end of the relationship with the wife and the establishment of a new marriage with a new family.

Statistically, the game was not worth the candle for either side, and Peter had understood this for a long time.

Why then did so many people, cyclically, fall for it?

By a simple law of mutual attraction without thinking about the consequences.

Moments of a pleasant present that were traded for endless periods of future torment.

Dirk was going through one of these early stages, so any thought other than that of the secretary seemed superfluous, let alone one involving an English colleague.

Peter took it all in stride and didn't react.

It had been years of constant habit and he had now lost count.

“Society around us is changing and they won’t be as unlucky as we were,” he told his wife a few days later.

Elizabeth did not fully understand these speeches.

His life had unfolded in three distinct phases.

First as a daughter.

Obedient and in line, perfectly faithful to her role.

Later, as Peter's girlfriend and wife.

It had been the most carefree period, the one of greatest vitality and discovery.

Love, sex, life together.

Everything seemed to take on a different color and she was truly happy.

Finally, as a mother.

Since Andrew was born, everything had changed.

Rhythms and habits.

Just be carefree and enjoy the present.

Now he had a duty and he had to fulfill it.

How long had his happiness lasted?

Much less than ten years, too short a period to be enough for a woman, but that was the way Elizabeth was.

Few aspirations and few whims in the head.

He would have liked to pass all this on to his daughter Margaret, but the little girl had always put up a certain resistance.

The little girl wanted to consider herself free and had understood that not having problems at school meant not having her private sphere invaded.

Her parents worried less and that seemed to be a good thing for everyone.

So, she was acting good, as she had been told, but she didn't feel good.

She took no interest in what her mother or her mother's friends thought or said.

Without ever showing it, he had inherited Peter's characteristics of wanting to integrate at a high level, while Andrew was more peaceful and accommodating.

Almost through a chemical reaction, the reagents had recombined and swapped places, giving a result completely different from what was expected.

However, just like in science, new phenomena had appeared compared to the past and everything was concentrated in the mind of eleven-year-old Andrew.

Unlike his parents or his sister or even his grandparents, Andrew was not aligned with some kind of isolationist good.

As a descendant of the English, he should have felt comfortable remaining alone or conceiving of his community as small and self-contained.

Family, friends, acquaintances.

Like bubbles or an egg, with protective shells.

This was also in line with the very idea behind South African society.

Instead, Andrew had an explorer's soul.

What he liked about books was that they took him to other worlds and other times.

History, geography, literature and science spoke of discoveries and walls to be torn down.

Of empires that had fallen and of rivers to be navigated or oceans to be sailed.

Everything dynamic and nothing still.

He knew he was too young to feel free to do, say and go wherever he wanted, but in his mind he had already traveled around the world and beyond.

He admired what the United States and the Soviet Union were doing not so much in terms of weapons and wars, but in terms of the challenge of space and the Moon.

They had sent satellites and men into orbit and every month there was a next step.

For Andrew, it was a challenge to the boundaries and conventions that man had drawn.

Sooner or later he would have liked to cross the threshold of a Boer's house, but also to see Soweto, the black township that everyone talked about as if it were Hell.

Yet, poems about Hell had been written that were also read in school.

Why not experience it for yourself?

He knew he had to keep everything hidden inside himself, without spreading anything outward.

She couldn't even tell her sister anything, as Andrew watched her body grow.

Getting up and getting stronger made him proud.

Even in playing sports, he understood how he could run faster and longer, although he was not attracted to either cricket or rugby.

Andrew preferred the elegance of tennis or the physical genius of football or the perfection of athletics.

He imagined what the ancient Olympics were like, as well as the modern ones, the last of which had been held the previous year in Tokyo.

About a year had passed and Andrew had read a few newspaper articles and even seen a few pictures on television.

Sooner or later, one dreamed of being able to attend live and of being able to expatriate.

He had had enough of Johannesburg and the few trips his father had planned.

Little did he know what Peter had in store for him as a surprise that year.

For the first time, the Smith family would go to the seaside, in the Durban area.

A train journey of about six hundred kilometers to show the children the wonders of the Ocean.

When Peter and Elizabeth were first married, they had visited the whole coast as far as Port Elizabeth, but had never returned.

Cape Town remained unknown to them, while the closer Pretoria was quite well known, even though they judged that there was nothing really interesting to visit.

Andrew could have indulged in his exploration projects and his imagination would have exploded, while Margaret would have understood the territorial grandeur of their country.

Of course, Peter had expected to see black people.

It was impossible to think of limiting the view, despite the completely separate carriages.

“It's a price we'll have to pay, but for our children we'll do this and more, right Betty?”

His wife had been convinced after Hillary had spoken highly of the family holiday in Durban.

“You’ll see, they’ll serve you like a real lady!”

Elizabeth would have been as comfortable as ever, wherever she placed herself in a society with little change from the past.

Her friend had also told her about something else.

“You’ll see what kind of guys there are...”

He was referring to boys younger than their husbands.

In Durban there were beaches that attracted young white men in the hot season.

The explosion of muscles and hormones was a strong motivational viaticum for everyone, including ladies who were now considered elderly.

Betty had smiled without thinking too much.

The times of passionate love were over and he didn't know where they had gone.

Whether among habits and duties or among the folds of the past.

The Parkers would not accompany the Smith family, preferring the Cape Town area.

“It will be for another year...”

So Margaret wouldn't even have the company of her friend Jane and her dog Derry.

She would come to terms with it and find other games and other friendships, or so they hoped.

It had been agreed that nothing would be told to the boys and that everything would be a surprise for Christmas.

A way to be together in other environments and places, far from Johannesburg, the city they thought they knew, but which, in reality, was unknown in its entirety.

Little or nothing was known about what was happening in John's brother's warehouses or in those built with financing from banks, including Peter's.

Nothing about slave-like working conditions without respect for safety regulations or working hours.

Those who employed black labor had three clear advantages over their competitors.

Less personnel costs, less management costs, less controls.

This was offset, but only partially, by having to hire more staff.

“They are not as specialized as white people...”, it was said.

Now, after years, skilled labor could be found in Soweto too, and the conditions of the township, certainly not included in the economic boom that had characterized Johannesburg, would have guaranteed further years of such a pool of man-hours.

Some people had risen up to protest, some white people who didn't like the fact that others were making tons of money or that products were "made by blacks", but these minorities had been silenced with handouts and bribes.

In reality, what was feared was the unionisation of the workers and that was why the ANC had to be hit preemptively.

If blacks had organized, it would have been the spark of the revolt and there were two categories considered dangerous.

Workers and young people.

The former because they could block the production chain and the latter because they were easily impressionable and susceptible to emotional speeches and impact on the less rational side.

“Come here to the shade...”

Patrick turned to Johannes during the break.

They had been working together for about six months, since the bachelor had been hijacked by the ANC to one of Johannesburg's engineering factories.

The fact that he personally knew at least three other workers was a guarantee for the Congress that his ideas were well-rooted.

Talking was not allowed during shifts unless it was production-related.

In truth, none of the workers cared to let the whites know how to increase their turnover.

There were dead times in the processes that could be minimized or eliminated.

A real work team would have cooperated to increase production in exchange for better working conditions.

More breaks, reduced hours, a better canteen or systems to eliminate dust or excess heat.

None of this was guaranteed in the slightest; in fact, white bosses saw these investments as new money to be put in or as excuses for blacks to work less.

They did not understand that increased production would cover much of those additional costs, ensuring greater profit.

The system was already profitable in itself and lacked the driving force for improvement, with the added great prerogative of not proving weak.

No concessions, otherwise everything would have become an avalanche.

It started with a work break and the next generation would demand the vote and equal rights.

The ANC knew all this and did not want to stop the mechanism at all.

“From exploitation will be born the revolution.”

That's how it was taught.

The more blacks were squeezed and oppressed, the more there would be the desire to act radically.

Now that the leaders were in prison, Congress was in a transition phase, with those who were holding fast to previous directives and those who were instead thinking of new ones.

Patrick had been sent to prepare the ground.

To demonstrate that the Congress was close to the communities and that everyone was in the same condition, forgetting that minority part of the population in Soweto who had enriched themselves on the backs of their own brothers.

Patrick had to move carefully and so he had set up a system of gestures that involved the use of hands, feet and facial expressions.

What could not be expressed in words, could be done in another way.

“Get out of the heat, otherwise you won’t make it to the end of the day.”

Johannes came over and sat down on the floor.

A whitish powder that stuck to your pants and wouldn't shake off even after four or five hard hits.

“Your children?”

Family topics were allowed and would not cause any concern.

Patrick knew that there were black workers who had an undercover spy role.

For a few portions of food and without being checked in Soweto, they sold their comrades' information.

Even internal punitive expeditions had not worked since these people were considered untouchable.

When an infiltrator was taken aside and threatened, or worse, beaten up, then the whites took it out on everyone else.

They were a mechanism of increasing violence in which the clubs, pistols and rifles were in the hands of whites only, who were waiting for nothing more than an open clash to justify massacres.

For this reason, Patrick always moved with caution.

Johannes had understood and would use code words interspersed with the overflowing truth about his family, so as to make the speech impeccable.

“Moses continues to go to school.

He seems good, but sometimes he doesn't respect authority.

The critical age is coming, the one in which he should be monitored closely.

The little one seems more composed.

She speaks little, even though she is a female.”

Patrick shook his head and smiled.

“Hey buddy, never seen a female who talks so little!”

Johannes moved his foot, creating a cloud of dust.