Though Desiree insists on calling me her Poodle, I never officially accepted the pet name. Poodle. Imagine! I simply grunt when she lumps me with the dog race. I have no pet name for her either; she is just plain old Desiree to me. She, for no reason, slaps my wandering hand whenever I try to coax her into pleasure rituals. One premeditated excuse after another: headaches; the summer heat; mourning for her departed grandfather, who passed on many years ago. She can read my thoughts, sense my intentions before I even have the time to formulate them. It is not unusual for her to say, out of the blue, when lights are switched off and bodies positioned in preparation for dozing: ‘My period has come unexpectedly.’
‘Do your periods just drop from the sky, unannounced?’
She fumes: ‘Have you no other things to think about?’
‘I realise I am courting a stone.’
‘You will wish for tender moments, moaning like a camel dying of thirst. Keep talking like someone demented and let’s see where that gets you!’ she snaps.
There are times when Desiree bursts into tears, without provocation. I blamed it erroneously on her midnight whisky binges; on grief in the wake of a breast cancer misdiagnosis. Not knowing the true cause, I was puzzled at the way Desiree’s world fell apart; by the moving eulogy she paid to our childhood yearnings, our sudden love that blossomed and peaked out of nowhere. I was moved by her suffering, her helplessness. My confusion turned to outrage when Desiree, her belly full of enough wine to floor nine pirates, later said: ‘I have never believed in love.’
Desiree’s temper borders on insanity. I suffer wounding accusations, haunting blackmail. She starts losing cases in court, argues with judges, storms out of courtrooms. She is in the papers – for giving a state prosecutor a bloody nose. The cause: a difference of opinion in the interpretation of law. She is temporarily suspended from the bench, for behaviour unbecoming to a legal mind. She languishes in despair, fuels my gloom with her ferocious rebukes. She leads the evidence: cross-questions me on mundane lapses, turns 144 Verona Estates into a perpetual courtroom. ‘I can argue ten reasons why your love of me is brittle,’ she says over breakfast. ‘Your obsession with me is tantamount to suicide.’ I suffer panic attacks these days, kick and toss in my sleep. Our mealtimes are accompanied by mountain ranges of legal papers, filed by myriad law firms. Legal arguments seeking to set rapists free. My Desiree is master at what she does: she plants confusion, engenders doubt in known and accepted things, cross-examines star witnesses until they forget their very names. ‘There is no such thing as an unwinnable case,’ she asserts. She has corpses exhumed to prove obscure arguments with penetrating precision. ‘The law,’ says my celebrity lawyer lover, who thrives on courtroom gasps, as she pages through graveyards of legal minefields, ‘does not need to be fair. Just as life isn’t fair. Everyone knows justice can be bought, that it is a sham. We use technical arguments to undermine truth, unfounded and indefensible probabilities to obscure reason, selective questions to draw inferences, cast doubt on innocent people. The law can prosper without truth. Just as life can exist without love.’ Words. A view of life. True, maybe. Detrimental to me, a sentimental soul with poetic ambitions.
Desiree is not a poet but a creature of law, a profession built of opposing and defending things.
6
I take countless bus rides between Rosebank and Newtown. There are times when I think about early separation. Yet I still play the role of lover, comforter. Aside from Desiree, my life is eventless, sombre even, far from spectacular. I listen to fellow commuters confuse current affairs; watch them chew gum, doze off: students, lonely housewives, dignified pensioners. A man, dressed in blue overalls, always nods at me. It is not long before we share a seat, handshakes, sandwiches and hugs. He is, for a seventy-year-old, reasonably athletic, handsome. We talk about automobiles, American presidents (Did Truman really have to drop that atom bomb? What lies in the classified Kennedy vault? What would we have done in Clinton’s shoes?); graduate from carnal temptations to marital problems and confided secrets. Days fold into months – years even – and the bus-ride conversations expand into regular exchanges, conducted over pasta dishes, passion fruit and lemonade.
Gabriel Sanchez’s tale (for that is my friend’s name) begins in Cuba. Third in the line of thirteen siblings, he is the only journalist in an otherwise musical family. Many maestros, he says, countless musicians, from street-corner nobodies to musical saints of the Buena Vista Social Club, learnt their skills at his father’s feet. That was when Gabriel wrote articles, cutting opinion pieces for the Cuban Times, illuminating the Kennedy-Kruschev stalemate, often working through the night. A migraine prematurely ended one of his midnight liaisons with his typewriter.
The migraine led him home – to discover Rafael Lopez, a saxophonist for Cuba Burning (a popular but average quartet) picking pleasure fruit in his vineyard. Rosaline, Gabriel’s wayward wife, gasped in horror as Gabriel Sanchez choked Rafael Lopez until he lay still, turned purple. Death by strangulation. In the nude. Rosaline died a few months later on an operating table in Havana, from a mixture of guilt and shame (medically polished as a diabetic stroke). She is said to have, even on her deathbed, scolded Rafael Lopez’s ghost; a ghost rumoured to have broken typewriters at the Cuban Times newsroom, woken her at the crack of dawn with forlorn saxophone ballads.
And so it was that Gabriel Sanchez added murder to the family musical heritage. The glint in his eyes, his ready, guttural laughter mask a blot in his past: a migraine that exposed a worm that infested a twenty-year marriage (until then widely considered to be beyond earthly lapses). Devastated by the disappointment, on the run, he packed his bags and fled to South Africa, thousands of miles from Cuba, armed with the Spanish language and a broken heart.
Faced with evaporating finances, Gabriel turned to his dormant passion: motor mechanics. He established the Sanchez Connexion, a motor-repair workshop in Brixton, a factory-cum-residential area inhabited by a peculiar business community: fertilizer manufacturers, coffin makers, defunct abattoirs. Gabriel is drawn to broken things, feels an urge to fix them, pull them apart, get his mind around how they work … why they suddenly refuse to work. Apart from the many automobiles awaiting attention, the Sanchez Connexion is also full of all manner of other broken things: refrigerators, transistor radios, wrist watches and lawnmowers. It is amid broken things that I catch a fleeting glimpse of Mercedes, Gabriel’s daughter. Radiant. Curious. Most humble.
7
The Newtown Cultural Precinct is nestled below the M1 South Highway. Bree Street links the precinct to Brixton and its surrounds and cuts through congested taxi ranks and swarming city traffic to the east. The Market Theatre, museums and outdoor markets are popular with arty types. A bus depot, now known to all as The Hugh, has been converted into a music academy for unemployed youth. What remains of the depot is a defunct diesel pump and three rusty double-decker buses, converted into fast-food shops. The buses are used as graffiti walls – anything from Timon and Pumba cartoon drawings to weighty reflections declaring:
FUCK THE REVOLUTION. WE CAN’T EAT HISTORY.
I, to mend my soul, steal time from the tourism booth to visit Mercedes at The Hugh – the Hugh Masekela Music Academy, where she teaches trumpet. She speaks of ‘embouchure’, a word of poetic ambitions: lip positioning and firmness on the trumpet mouthpiece. The students have problems with breathing, holding and sustaining long notes, marrying set musical notes with improvisation. It is admirable how Mercedes listens to rehearsal tapes and knows which particular student fails to grasp what musical tips, and which is destined for greater heights in the realm of brass instrument maestros. She knows them and guides them by instinct … their mistakes … their heart-warming discoveries.
I dine at a window table and listen to student practice sessions at the academy’s cafeteria. The view is of a light drizzle, of Johannesburg’s capitalists chasing the remains of the day: people speaking into cellphones; courier motorbikes chasing delivery deadline
s; pricy automobiles emerging from underground parking into gridlocked peak-hour traffic. Things have been done to The Hugh: renovations, extensions, new paint shades. But most notable of all is the oval stage that hosts bland comedies and atrocious renditions of Shakespearean tragedies. These are on Monday and Wednesday nights. Mercedes tells me that Thursdays are the most interesting, with early evenings awarded to MC rappers spitting gut-wrenching insults, furiously waving their hands in the air, their over-size trousers hovering around their knees. The Rhyme and Reason sessions pull in a mixture of youthful and middle-aged patrons, who see nothing wrong in being commanded: ‘Throw your motherfucking hands in the air. Now say Oh Oh, say O!’, whereupon the performance hall blossoms with hands caught in a trance of stage lights, swaying like grass in a storm. I, upon Mercedes’s insistence, catch Quiet Storm, a jazz quartet from her class. While I wait, I thaw my soul with Russian and Latin American poets on sale at the second-hand bookshop on the second floor, competing with anything from Masai bead embroidery to Yoruba masks and sculptures. The view from The Hugh window is of a street suddenly swelling with the early evening crowd, attending to cellphones, exchanging hugs; one individual displaying admirable skills with a Michael Jackson moonwalk, to cheers from smitten young things, barely dressed. There is laughter, a youthful buzz, before the street clears. I leave my poets in the company of Guitar Lessons and Tennis for Beginners, and make my way to the ticket office. I speak into the intercom, behind which is a young girl chewing gum, with earrings the size of rear tractor wheels. A thick glass separates us.
‘Quiet Storm. Front row, centre,’ I say.
‘Cash or credit card?’
‘Cash.’
I pay; the ticket is printed and slid under the glass.
‘Show starts at 9:15 sharp. No smoking. Enjoy the show.’
Nine-fifteen comes, and final lighting changes and instrument tuning stops behind the curtain. I join Mercedes, on seat F16. A violin wails from behind the curtain, followed by a double-bass player running his fingers along the strings with practised skill; the way boys’ fingers locate eternity between the legs of women – and women do the same between the legs of men.
The rhythm section kicks in, the curtain slowly rising to reveal spectacular lighting. A trumpeter, who we cannot see yet, ignites another standing ovation with a note so long I fear his collapse from suffocation. The spotlight follows the trumpeter from behind a gauzy screen. My mouth dries, as the trumpeter torches our collective souls with an up-tempo melody, before blasting us with a combination of high and moderate notes, all the while goading the rhythm section to such a frenzy that I worry the band will burst into flames. The trumpeter, now bending low as if trying to kiss his own knees, sends shockwaves through the venue. The crowd erupts into another standing ovation – not without good reason. Quiet Storm is like travelling to the sun.
I sit. Weeping. Perspiring. The duration of the performance is marked by the eerie silence of patrons barely moving, only the stage lights tossing and turning. I sob, dry my cheeks in guarded embarrassment. The show ends at midnight. Mercedes says: ‘Tell me you are not touched, poet of mine.’
‘That was something.’
‘You liked it?’ asks she, curious.
‘Yes. It was intense.’
‘Well, good. That is Spike for you. Very talented.’
‘What is the name of that opening piece?’ I ask. Mercedes: ‘Oh, that: “Thoughts of Eternity”.’
Outside, at the parking lot, the band squeezes into their faded orange Volkswagen Beetle, spewing smoke, at the mercy of rust. All that dense, textured, billowing carbon monoxide. A perfect tool to commit suicide with. I catch a glimpse of Spike: young, calm and dangerously gifted.
I, to nurture a charged affair, press a bell at 803 Jubilee Road, where Mercedes Sanchez rents an abode in one of Houghton’s sought-after period apartments. Katie Melua and her ‘Nine Million Bicycles’ compete with a vacuum cleaner, a telephone conversation, and a whistling kettle, promising tea prospects. The vacuum cleaner retires, followed by sounds of tap water slowing then dripping to a halt. An eyeball inspects me from behind the kitchen curtain. The door opens, cautiously at first, then as if blasted by a gale-force wind. ‘My poet!’ says Mercedes, clutching her heart. Her embrace is firm yet gentle. Those beautiful hands, the radiant eyes. She wears a brown dress with cream polka dots, walks barefoot. Her playful smile warms the dimly lit living room, overflowing with books: famous composers competing for space with porcelain dolphins and Sean Penn films. I watch her stride to the bathroom, undress, ease herself into the bathtub. I wait. Twenty minutes. I cannot resist. I walk in, fish her leg from below the foamy water. She reads the look in my eyes, the gaze of need, pulls down a towel, dries herself with purpose while I wait in her bed. Mercedes slides in beside me, the bedside lamp catching the glow of her moist cheeks like jet fuel.
She, without warning, asks: ‘When is love a burden? How can we tell if its qualities are pure, not contaminated?’ She slides her hand under the sheets. It journeys from my ribs onto my chest, before u-turning and gliding down past my belly button. Meandering cautiously, it locates my rod of creation, swollen with gentle fury, ablaze with myriad sensations – enough to brighten the stars. Mercedes is good with her hands; she is the closest thing to travelling light, in the way it demands and directs attention.
‘You can melt railway lines with those hands of yours,’ I say. Mercedes looks unsettled and blushes at the generous, but deserved, compliment. We make love to the sound of polished masters: Wynton Marsalis; Dizzy Gillespie; Hugh Masekela. The key to sex, says Mercedes, is music: rhythm, breathing, unpredictable melodies. We rarely succumb to orchestral arrangements and when we do, I am reborn countless times over by the subtle purity of her nocturnal gasps, as pleasure drowns speech and time. I slowly let go – of the guilt that Mercedes has done nothing to deserve incomplete love, for leading her to a vineyard of love, yet refusing her full entry. Why must she suffer for Desiree’s indiscretions, her stone heart?
I gaze at Mercedes’s beautiful ears, her lovely neck, her maple-leaf birthmark. ‘You would have made a perfect Canadian,’ I tease her. Her perfection fills me with fleeting shivers, leaving me thirsty and floating. I grace her neck with hot, uneven breaths, nibble her earlobes with relentless passion. I blow air into her navel, her armpits, chew the backs of her knees, feel her spine catch fire. I disrobe her, watch her burn and curl as my quivering palm walks the Road to Damascus, to her fruit of existence. We make love again. A giggly beauty with sensual neck and deep-throated pleasure yelps. She mocks me: ‘There should be a difference between loving and declaring war.’ ‘I know,’ I say, ‘but this, my tulip, is paradise, a drink from your well of fire.’ Mercedes dozes off, her face aglow with passion. I, when with Mercedes, this radiant being, feel all of life’s brutal scars fade and that volcanic love (last felt when washing high-school windows) return; like rain-drop patterns in swimming pools. Sustained. Effortless. Beautiful.
Mercedes saw my tears at The Hugh student performance. Her knowledge of and exposure to many types of music drives her to explain to me that part of musical mastery is learning by repetition; technique, perfecting and later breaking set rules. It pains her, she says, that I have such easy tears, that I am so deeply moved by trumpet solos (which, these days, means all the time). My tears, says Mercedes, are not to be taken lightly – for anyone who is so affected by art is a priceless gift to the universe. Money pays for music tuition fees, practice instruments, study material – but not all the mineral riches in the world will buy a single tear, shed when a fusion of instincts overwhelms the senses, ending in unexplainable sobs. This evidence of my hidden talents, she says, is what music teachers chase all their lives – that one student who is beyond musical scales, the one who plays hard to contain raging fires within, who sometimes has to walk off stage to shed a few tears.
‘Easy tears, the involuntary knotting of the throat, that gasp for breath in response to music, is a treasure, my
poet, and no amount of rehearsal ever lifts you to that feeling of light-hearted intensity, to that trance of sweaty palms. What, in God’s universe, are you, with such a gift, doing wasting your life on tourism sites, on stained hospital sheets?’
8
Osama bin Laden (well, his comrades) flies aeroplanes into the Twin Towers, filling newspapers with images of devastation. Osama: a soft-spoken, bearded, skinny man with bedroom eyes. When does he dream up such destruction? Before him was Oklahoma, that Timothy what’s-his-name. Yes, him. McVeigh. An American.
I watch the 9/11 anniversary with Mercedes at my side, the night of my birthday. Desiree forgets my birthday, like many others in recent times. Mercedes corrects the omission with a brand-new Dizzie Gillespie trumpet, complete with twelve red roses and a trip to Cape Town, where she is on her way for a music workshop. We fly over Johannesburg, towards a gold-plated horizon beckoning in the distance. Below is a view of clouds in many shapes and sizes: impressions of unkempt hair; dolphins without tails; some like congregants of numerous churches, floating in soapsuds. Far below are desolate farm houses, muddy swamps, meandering rivers and rocky mountain ranges. Then the coastline, with its busy highways and, finally, the airport, with its flashing lights and thundering aircraft.
Small Things Page 4