The Promise I Finally Kept at the Edge of the Indian Ocean

The trip she never stopped mentioning

For the better part of thirty years my wife, Marietjie, would mention Mozambique the way other people mention the weather. It came up at braais, at funerals, in the car when the radio went quiet. She had a cousin who went up in the eighties and came back talking about water the colour of a swimming pool and prawns the size of her hand, and somewhere in that story a seed went in and never stopped growing. I always said yes, one day. One day when the children were finished with school. One day when the bakkie was paid off. One day when work was quieter, which it never was, because I ran a small panelbeating shop in Boksburg and work is never quiet when you are the one who answers the phone.

Then last year my body made the decision for me. I will not dress it up. My chest started talking to me on a Tuesday in March, a dull squeezing thing I told myself was heartburn, and by the Thursday I was lying on a table in Milpark while a man younger than my own son put a camera into the artery of a fifty-seven-year-old stranger and told me afterwards that I had been walking around with a pipe that was almost closed. Triple bypass. They opened my chest with a saw. I remember nothing of the operation and everything of the months after it, the pillow I had to hug when I coughed, the walk to the gate that left me grey, the way Marietjie slept on the edge of the bed with one hand on my arm as if she could hold the beat in place herself.

I spent that whole winter frightened. Not of dying, exactly, though that too. Frightened of how little I had actually done with a life I had spent entirely getting ready to live. I had a paid-off bakkie and a wife who had asked me for one thing, really, one ordinary thing, for three decades, and I had kept saying one day as though days were something I had been issued in bulk.

The long drive north

So in the spring, once the cardiologist signed me off to travel and my stitches were a pale line instead of an angry one, I booked it. I did not tell her first. I am not a surprises man and this was the only surprise of my married life that landed properly. I put the printout of the booking on her side plate at supper and watched her read it twice, and then she put her hand flat over her mouth and her eyes went and I had to look at my food for a while.

We drove. Of course we drove, we are that generation, a flight felt like cheating and besides I wanted the road. Up through Mpumalanga, over the border at Lebombo with the heat already pressing on the windscreen, the queue, the forms, the man who stamped us through and said enjoy Mozambique as if he meant it. Then the long flat kilometres where the bush goes on forever and the roadside fills up with women selling cashews and reed baskets and oranges in neat little pyramids. I drove slower than I used to. The cardiologist had put that in my head, slower, and for once in my life I listened. Marietjie read the map on her lap even though her phone could have done it, tracing the coast road with her finger, saying the place names out loud like they were a prayer she had memorised long ago.

We had settled on a quiet stretch of coast rather than one of the busier towns. When I had sat at the kitchen table in June, still not able to lift anything heavier than a kettle, I had gone looking online at Mozambique beach resorts the way other men browse things they cannot have, scrolling pictures of thatch and white sand at two in the morning when my chest ached and sleep would not come. It had felt impossibly far from my life then. Now the real thing was arriving through the windscreen, palm by palm.

The sea was the first thing

We got there in the last of the light. I remember stepping out of the bakkie and standing still because the air had changed. It was thick and warm and it smelled of salt and something green, and underneath everything was a sound I had been driving toward for two days without quite admitting it, the sea turning over on itself, patient, enormous, completely indifferent to a man's arteries.

Marietjie walked straight down to the water in her travelling clothes. Did not even put her bag inside first. She stood at the edge with the last light on her face and let the warm water come over her feet, and she laughed, a short surprised laugh, and when she turned around and looked back up at me I saw something in her that I had not seen in a very long time. The tiredness had gone off her face. Just like that. Years of it, lifted by a bit of warm water on her ankles.

I did not sleep much that first night and for once it was not fear. I lay listening to the ocean and did the sum I had been avoiding. I was fifty-seven. My own father went at sixty-one. The surgeon had bought me time, real time, but he had been honest that he could not tell me how much. And here was the woman I had married at twenty-three, asleep for the first time in a year with her shoulders down, because I had finally done the one small thing.

Slowing all the way down

The days there taught me something my whole working life had refused to. How to do nothing on purpose. The first morning I woke early out of habit, ready to answer a phone that was eight hundred kilometres away, and there was simply nothing to do. Nothing. So I made coffee and took it down to the sand and sat. A fish eagle went over. The tide was out and the reef showed itself in long dark lines. Marietjie came and found me an hour later and did not ask why I was just sitting, because she understood it better than I did.

I was under strict instructions about the water. The doctor had not forbidden swimming but he had put the fear into me about overdoing it, about cold shocks and exertion and getting into trouble far from help. So I was careful in a way the younger me would have laughed at. We snorkelled, but gently, in the warm shallow water over the reef where I could stand up any time I wanted. Marietjie went first and I followed, breathing slow through the tube, and the first time a parrotfish went by under me, electric blue and green and entirely unbothered, I forgot for a moment that I had a heart at all. That is the gift of it. For whole minutes I was just a pair of eyes floating over another world, and the fear that had been sitting on my chest since March simply was not there.

I did not push it. I would snorkel for twenty minutes and then lie on the warm sand like a lizard and let the sun do its work on the scar. Marietjie would stay in longer, and I would prop myself up and watch her out there, a middle-aged woman in a faded costume turning circles in clear water, happy as a child, and I would think, I nearly did not see this. I nearly spent my last years saying one day.

Prawns, warm bread, and the long quiet

The food up there deserves its own paragraph because Marietjie's cousin had not exaggerated by a single centimetre. The prawns came grilled with lemon and garlic and a chilli sauce that made my eyes water, and warm bread to push through the butter and the juices, and we ate with our hands at a wooden table with the sea twenty metres off and said almost nothing to each other for an hour. I have eaten in good places in Johannesburg. Nothing has ever tasted like those prawns, eaten slowly, by a man who had been told to watch his salt and had decided that one evening would not kill what the surgeon had saved.

We fell into a rhythm. Early coffee on the sand. A gentle swim. The heat of the middle of the day spent reading in the shade, me working through a fat paperback I had been meaning to read since before the operation. In the late afternoon we would walk the beach as far as my legs felt honest about, and I measured my recovery not in the gym numbers the physio liked but in how far along that sand I could go before I needed to turn back. Each day it was a little further.

One evening the people who ran the place got to talking with us over a drink, and the husband mentioned, when I asked, that a lot of the newer, grander spots further up the coast had come and gone, that people were always asking him to compare his quiet patch to the fancier best hotels in Mozambique, and he just shrugged and said he would rather have the quiet. I understood him completely. I had spent my whole life chasing bigger and busier and look where it had landed me, on a table in Milpark. Out here the thing I had been missing was exactly the thing he was selling, which was less.

What I brought home

There was an afternoon near the end that I keep coming back to. A proper African storm built up out over the water, the sky going that bruised purple, the air gone still and heavy. We sat under the thatch and watched it come in across the ocean, the rain a grey curtain dragging toward us over the water, and Marietjie put her head on my shoulder and we did not talk. The lightning was far off and then not so far. It was one of the finest hours of my life and nothing happened in it at all. That is the part I would not have understood a year ago.

I know now why she had asked for so long. It was never really about Mozambique. It was about me stopping. About the two of us being in one place with nothing to fix and nowhere to be and no phone to answer, long enough to remember who we were to each other before the shop and the children and the mortgage ate all the ordinary days. The coast just happened to be the place that could finally make me do it.

We drove home slower than we came. Somewhere on that long road south Marietjie was reading on her phone, not to book anything, just dreaming, and she turned it to show me a picture of one of the quieter Mozambique luxury resorts further up the coast and said, next time, maybe there, and I said yes. But this time I did not mean one day. I meant it the way you mean a thing when you have learned exactly how much a day is worth, and how few of them you might have, and how little an excuse is worth measured against the sea and the woman beside you.

My chest still has its pale line down the middle. I touch it sometimes without thinking. It does not frighten me the way it did. It reminds me instead of the morning I sat on warm sand with a cup of coffee and did absolutely nothing, on purpose, next to the person I nearly ran out of time to be grateful for. The surgeon gave me the years. Mozambique showed me what to do with them.