Small Things

by Nthikeng Mohlele

  The days that follow are tender escapes. Mercedes, the trumpet and I take midnight walks. There are, with Mercedes, no beginner courtesies; she shares the technique, weeds out the mistakes, encourages long rehearsals. Back in Johannesburg, before we left, she had fished an LP from her elaborate music archives and said: ‘Basics. Learn the melody on number 6. Don’t worry too much about the little lapses. Focus on clean, round, textured notes.’ In Cape Town, Mercedes’s beach obsession is Rafael Méndez. From Miles I learn lyrical play, from Hugh intensity, from Méndez improvisation. Mercedes gently discourages my request to play with Quiet Storm: impatience is the ruin of many promising musicians, she warns. So: I blow ‘A Night in Tunisia’ with relish, a sense of obsessive commitment. I suddenly realise I don’t have to think about the notes when I point my horn skywards, I am possessed by the dictates of its unpredictable sensations. I mourn my Desiree (not dead but unloving); fill the trumpet with my every possible emotion, hoping for meaning to suddenly emerge. It never comes.

  Mercedes says true trumpet mastery is about getting lost. She listens to me practise, watches me wrestle with my trumpet, seduce it to mirror my soul. I take the trumpet everywhere, including on my solitary midnight walks to the beach. I lie on my back, let the ocean waves rinse my sandy soles, wet me up to my armpits. I whisper to the stars, become one with the raspy rumbles of the sea.

  When I was thirteen, toiling under the Sophiatown sun, I, between pulling weeds from flower gardens, dreamt of becoming an astronaut. I still, as I did then, find starry nights and moon phases enchanting. Bra Todd nicknamed me Galileo – who owned no telescope, but a pondering heart. When a full moon bathed Sophiatown in silver light, blanketing it under heavenly calm, I composed poetry and authored those inspired letters to Desiree – letters with imagined worlds lit by a trillion moons.

  The trumpet rests on my chest, glittering under the moon and purple beach lighting. I doze, succumb to foamy slumber, let the sea salt embalm my living corpse, wracked by Desiree’s soullessness. A separation. By all means. But how? How does one abandon a childhood love that snuffs your life away? It is love almost gained, but sanity lost. I shiver, hug my trumpet, listen to crabs and whales, to my soul urging me to live. To shed my skin. Like a serpent. Or wither away. Like rose petals in a stained vase. Forgotten. Unloved. Dying. I rise, admire the traces of ocean-wave foam in the moonlight, walk towards the lighthouse. All is suddenly still. I point my horn to the moon, steady my thoughts, blow. A brisk tempo that evolves into Mercedes’s other pet song: ‘I Talk to the Trees’, played by Chet Baker. A disjointed attempt, mine, but an attempt nevertheless.

  A sudden easterly blows. A figure walks towards me, indistinguishable under the moonlight. I strain my eyes, see Mercedes draw nearer, walking as if gliding on the sand. Such perfect movement, such grace. She hums ballads as she walks. We lie on the beach. My head rests on her tummy, rumbling with orange juice. It is not orange juice, she says, but the mysteries of life. Like the stars we have come here to see; cosmic fires, burning thousands of millions of kilometres away. Planets. Meteors. ‘Like us,’ say I, ‘do solar systems have wars? Moments of untold tranquillity and blinding confusion? I wonder,’ I say, ‘if love exists in yonder planets, where it would take zillions of lifetimes to reach. Where musical notes are blasting explosions and barbarous cosmic winds rearranging the universe.’

  ‘Yes, my poet. But come back to earth. The sun does not know there is a Desiree wrenching your soul whenever she pleases.’ We laugh. ‘And further more,’ she continues, ‘I don’t think scientists know what they are talking about.’

  ‘They have an idea,’ I say.

  ‘Really? I beg to differ. Just how many hidden planets are there, that have direct bearing on what we know? Do stars have cousins, funeral processions? Do they lust after other stars? It is not enough to say stars die; we have to know other things. Their secrets. Obsessions. Sorrows.’

  We keep still, listen to the waves battering rocks in the distance. ‘That is the Milky Way, above that flashing aeroplane.’

  ‘Yes, my tulip, it is. God spilt his milk powder.’

  Laughter. A beat.

  ‘You are the loneliest creature in the entire world, the loneliest creature I know. Let’s make a baby,’ she says calmly.

  ‘Yes. Three. We’ll give them Hispanic names: Conchita, Elvira, Carlos Fuentes.’

  We giggle, chuckle, burst into laughter. Laughter in tune with a swelling sea, a cricket serenading night, our sighs as I cup her pulsating breasts, attempt to swallow them whole. We talk for what seems like eternity. Cuddle. Keep still. Make love under the stars, about whose secrets and sorrows we haven’t the faintest clue.

  Life with Mercedes is an infinite horizon of discovery: poetry readings, trumpet rehearsals. My Mercedes not only believes in, but lives for love. She knows how to measure the heart’s cravings, offer embraces that leave me giddy; like a newborn baby with a fragile, rubbery neck, indifferent to the horrors of the universe. I, in her company, feel bliss without form or limits; evenings of rowdy laughter and delicate whispers. It is as if her entire life is one seamless trumpet note, graceful, arousing deep-set feelings. Gabriel Sanchez’s radiant daughter, a musical charmer with a touch of erotic magic.

  We refrain from romantic showmanship when Gabriel is around, she out of respect, I from a fusion of mild embarrassment and gratitude. This man, who had to murder Rafael Lopez, abandon the country of his birth, to bring me closer to the fluttering beauty of love. I owe him some measure of decency. For though he is fully aware of our molten hearts, Gabriel Sanchez says nothing, merely nods his approval. There are minor slippages, unintentional blunders, to which Mr Sanchez turns a blind eye. He knows the story of my life, can tell it as well as I. His approval (body language) is not granted in haste, and not out of ignorance. He knows Mercedes is in good hands. But the heart is a funny creature, with memories, demands of its own. I am gnawed by guilt, recalling entombed murmurs, that brutal rebuke: ‘What do I have to do for you to leave me alone?’

  With the University of Cape Town music workshop finished, the weekend away is over. I know: sorrow awaits me in Johannesburg.

  An evening at The Hugh. Gabriel Sanchez is the only man who continues to make me laugh, share sea-deep secrets. He is the only soul who finishes my thoughts, who knows how to blunt my pain, offer measured advice, gentle encouragement. He knows about me and Mercedes but in his own generous way avoids public displays of his thoughts, wishes, objections. I am, to him, a son brutalised by life, who finds solace in the folds of his daughter’s heart. One needs only to see Gabriel and Mercedes together to understand the scale of his adoration of her, to imagine how difficult it would be for him to trust anyone with the happiness of his ‘Summer Breeze’.

  I see him battle his thoughts; a parent’s instinct to offer advice, point out life’s bitter lessons. He mostly retreats to the loneliness of the Sanchez Connexion, urges us to live, explore life and its varied puzzles. About Desiree, Gabriel does offer advice. Firm advice, cushioned by peripheral jokes, and by him refilling my teacup once in a while. Love, says Gabriel, is feeling in motion. It changes character, is full of dangerously deep swamps. It attracts all of life’s other feelings into a brutal cocktail of bliss beyond measure, suffering without limits. Desiree, he says, understands this; and it is up to me how much I am truly willing to lose, to do without. Obsession, the jealous little cousin of love, thrives on suffering, and has, over the centuries, mastered ways to masquerade as love. It is possible, he says, that Desiree is sincere in not believing in love – for it is not unusual for people to hold flammable opinions. It is how we respond to such opinions that sets our life’s routes; the measure of suffering we are willing to endure. It is not true that love shouldn’t hurt, he adds. It is too powerful an emotion to be comparable to a fleeting sneeze.

  ‘Love is greater than life; it feeds life, makes life worth living. Why do you think we mourn the dead, erect tombstones, are willing to lay down our very lives for thos
e we love? But be careful, young man. Love can easily be a slave to beauty. She is quite a flame, your Desiree. She probably knows it. Beautiful women do know, sense these things. Men tell them all the time, so often that some of them take life, people, for granted. On the other hand, there may be things you are doing wrong. Do some soul-searching. Find out what they are. Fix them. I killed a man. For love. But was it for love? If Rafael was alive, would I be happy, knowing what I now know?’ He pours me more tea, slides a saucer with his uneaten biscuit towards me. ‘In your heart,’ he concludes, ‘lie most of the answers. Others you will find as you go along. Some warning: it will hurt. It won’t make sense. You will have doubts. Be embittered. Cynical. Depressed. But love is not for the fainthearted – the most gifted of the world’s charmers have suffered untold humiliations, catastrophic heartbreak. Who says love has to follow known and accepted formulas for it to be love? Poets have endured torments reducing these things to rhyming verse.’

  Then Gabriel, without warning, his face fatigued, asks: ‘What are you doing with my daughter?’ I am about to answer but he hushes me, pours me more tea, says: ‘All I am saying is, be aware what you two are up to. Life is too short for wrong steps.’ It must be that I wore my heart on my sleeve, for Gabriel, who is fond of me, adds: ‘Mercedes is all I have. Make your intentions clear.’

  I go home numbed of all feeling, my belly bloated with tea.

  9

  Mercedes and I enjoy a curious ritual. We read each other’s letters, answer each other’s telephone calls. Not that anyone ever calls or writes to me. There are no known secrets between the two of us. A letter arrives from New York. It must be that Mercedes recognises the handwriting, the clumsy capital letters. I, upon her request, tear the envelope open, choke at the salutation: ‘My May Flower Mercedes.’ I stumble over sentence after sentence, thought after thought, as Benito, now a struggling actor with Broadway illusions, living on bananas and coupons, spills his entrails. The letter rambles on, with its hints of once-fiery moments with Mercedes, its attempts to recapture the magic of times past. The letter was felt in Cuba, thought in Central Park, drafted on subway trains and cabs en route to hopeless auditions, posted at a Wall Street post office.

  Aside from the atrocious poetic fumbling, the puzzling baring of the soul, Benito’s plight is unmistakable. He wants his May Flower back. A shiver runs down my spine, my heartbeat is unsteady. ‘Not all the divine women in the world, molten and moulded into one, will compare to a single hair thread on your head.’ He ends the letter with a return address. A single hair thread on your head. What was Benito smoking, to churn out such illogical images? Worse, why did Mercedes not warn me that there is a starving actor, convinced he was born to ‘reinvent’ Othello (‘because people don’t get Shakespeare’), lurking in the shadows? I have a devastating wish: that Benito be run over by a million yellow cabs, never to ‘live in the ambience of your soul’.

  Mercedes smiles: ‘Benito – still insane as ever.’

  I am agitated: ‘Why keep Benito a secret from me?’

  ‘Because. He is the past.’

  ‘Where does he get your address then?’

  ‘His father is friends with Dad.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Family dinners, church; then one day we held hands. We were kids, maybe thirteen. Now the difficult questions: yes, he deflowered me at eighteen, and no, I don’t have feelings for him anymore.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Benito does not exist in the real world. He is kind but delusional. He also has no appreciation for music.’

  I fold the letter, hand it to Mercedes. She is calm, searches my eyes for signs of displeasure. She finds them: barbed wires of disappointment. My mind grinds to a furious halt. Mercedes rubs my back gently, says: ‘Benito is not fit to sneeze in your presence, my poet. Steady your thoughts. The universe awaits us.’

  She reaches for my forehead, plants kisses. I smell coffee on her breath.

  ‘Good night, my poet.’

  I nod.

  But there is a problem. Benito does not end his love expedition with a single letter but jams the post box with an assortment of confessions and hallucinations – in rambling romantic verse, accompanied by suggestive gifts. It rains letters – mirrors of a mind under siege; a bloodhound on a love trail.

  Judging by the frequency of the gifts, the cards, the nine-page poems, I can see why Mercedes declared Benito to be delusional. But there is something else: evidence of obsessive tendencies, traces of a fragile heart easily broken. The lack of response from Mercedes only sets Benito’s soul on fire; spurs him to experiment with sending bits of his clothes and eyebrows in purple envelopes. A daring prophesy stands out: ‘I sense I will one day disembowel myself for you.’ Which, says Mercedes, is quite possible, given Benito’s unpredictable excesses.

  I dismiss Benito as a raving lunatic, advise Mercedes to burn the letters on receipt. She doesn’t. Her refusal, her reluctance, to free herself from Benito’s insanity, his obsession with melodrama, casts a shadow on our passion. I want something else: not only for Benito to be run over by a million yellow cabs, but to be thrown down a volcano, immersed in molten lava and turned to stone. Crude. The stuff for geologists. But useless people are also the luckiest in the universe – not only do they live long, but existence seems to pander to their every whim. I brace myself to be buried in Benito’s love letters, his eyebrows. Of my discomforts, I say little. The brutality of Benito’s letters is in seeing Mercedes fidget with drawers, being drawn to Benito’s mad chants, her gnawing preoccupation disrupting our trumpet rehearsals. To hell with Benito, I think. If he has such an excess of energy, overflowing passion, let him donate a pound of flesh, chase Desdemonas in Central Park, prove he was indeed born to ‘illuminate Shakespeare’.

  Insane Benito: ‘I enclose my eyebrows, my floral shirt and my scent.’ We, to avoid drowning in this love-Mussolini’s madness, which we pity within limits, rehearse long hours. Mercedes does not compliment my haunting solos, but I, from the corner of my eye, see her eyes water. Her tears, the way she averts her head in modest and guarded embarrassment, fills me with such profound breath, such sensual light-headedness, as to blow a dozen trumpets.

  I play ‘I Talk to the Trees’ in the mornings, ‘Johannesburg’ at midday, and ‘Woza Mntwana’ after midnight. Chet Baker. Hugh Masekela. Abdullah Ibrahim. But all is not well. There are times when Benito’s insanity lurks around us, polluting our thoughts, loosening our embraces, cornering us into silences. My silences are not completely without purpose. I know Gabriel has profound expectations of me: ‘What are you doing with my daughter?’ I, a few months ago, knew the answer – knew, without the slightest doubt, that Mercedes was my sun, without whose rays I would wither and die. But somewhere between the sun’s rays, their blinding mystery, Benito’s madness hid, fuelled by fierce delusions. How do I ignore Benito, who sees nothing wrong in committing his eyebrows through the American postal services – onto jumbo jets, over snow-capped mountains and oceans? It can only be madness, the way Benito is so reckless with his love. Our silences confirm one thing: Benito is worse than mad. He needs not love, he needs God.

  Things have changed. A choking irony stands out: Zacharia, a former fellow prisoner, a radical poet, now heads the Ministry of Tourism – and is, by implication, ‘The Big Chief’. He offers me numerous plush jobs, ‘to advance our revolution’. My answer is always the same: ‘I don’t want to be important.’ This offends him greatly – for he realises that his power, to make things happen, has unforeseen limitations. I ensure that I plan my flu and tummy bugs well in advance, to avoid the pompous ceremonies when he visits, quoting visitor statistics, grinning at photographers.

  Life at the Tourism Information Centre continues to be uninspiring. I, during lunch breaks, take solace in my horn. Apart from directing visitors to cemeteries and zoos, I am expected to keep records of the most visited and popular sites: cultural villages, museums, dining spots. I wonder: is there value to be found in bleak
things, in a world devoid of beauty for all but the chosen few? I live in my head, in a reality that rewards club deejays more than it does midwives and neurological surgeons; a Johannesburg where suffering has no meaning.

  I have, in all my days under the sun, never seen a neck as beautiful as Mercedes’s – fragile yet firm; an accomplished neck, of generous warmth and minute twitches. I cannot tell which love, which beauty, is greater: Mercedes or Desiree. Desiree does not believe in love, which renders any measurement of feeling impossible. I am, when with Mercedes, incapable of any other emotion than gushes of tenderness, ticklish sensations that prompt giddy feelings beyond measure. ‘What are you doing with my daughter?’ asks Gabriel Sanchez. I have no answer for him, for I naturally expected such profound bliss to come from Qunu, from the rolling hills of the Eastern Cape – those Xhosa gazelles with clay-dotted faces and resolves of steel. I expected that Desiree, bred in Sophiatown, with roots in Port Elizabeth, would yield to my forlorn whispers of passion. But Cuba? I could never have anticipated, never imagined that murder would, like an ocean wave, grant me a love so great as to almost cure my mad heart. I am haunted by Benito’s convictions – his refusal to give in, to accept that Mercedes and her glorious neck are beyond him.

  What is Gabriel Sanchez asking, exactly? What answer is he seeking to ensure he sleeps, come nightfall? If Gabriel nudges me to make my intentions clear, given the fact that Mercedes is all he has, how much room is there for mistakes, for disappointments? Does Gabriel know that we live through a hailstorm of Benito’s letters, his raging heart, his eulogies? Gabriel’s question cannot be answered, for intentions point to the future, so hopelessly anchored in rusting and rotting docks of memory. I see in Mercedes’s eyes the memories of holding Benito’s hand that led to other, less discreet, things. How do I tell Gabriel: I have never seen so many letters, so many poems in my life; that though I find the desperation distasteful, a grain of me admires such unwavering baring of the soul without heed for audience or reward?