The handwriting on the letters is unmistakable: Mercedes. Gabriel, she tells me in the first short letter, has been in and out of hospital for a while now. He lost the sight in his left eye. He sits under a mulberry tree listening to a small transistor radio, sulking at everything and everyone. There are times when she feels wronged by his ingratitude, his aged cynicism. The second letter is no different from the first: hospital visits, the sulks under the tree, more hospital visits – culminating in a brief intensive-care stint resulting from a mild diabetic stroke. Gabriel is far from a saint, she says, goes on to describe the philandering ways of the younger Gabriel, a romantic whirlwind who charmed the hearts of female fellow journalists. It was well known that Gabriel used his desk at the newsroom as one indiscriminate bed. Colleagues caught him in compromising situations, whereby he, for years, claimed ‘journalistic research’ to mask his wayward ways. In truth, Rosaline Sanchez and Rafael Lopez were childhood friends, and if fate were fair, Rosaline should have married Rafael; were it not for Gabriel’s elaborate promises. In other words, if there were anyone most qualified to violate Gabriel’s marriage, it was none other than Rafael Lopez who, witnessing Rosaline’s drift into despair, availed a cushioned shoulder to cry on. The murder was more the result of blind rage than righteous anger, and the guilt that still chips away at Gabriel’s heart has its roots in belated regret. It was when confronted with the stiffening corpse of Rafael that Gabriel discovered he knew not who he was – a realisation that continues to plague him. ‘Why are you so quiet? Are you not getting my letters? Anyway, Dad has become something of a ghost, sitting under a tree poking the ground with his walking stick. He refuses to see any of his friends or family – just sits there, muttering to himself.’
Her third letter opens with a shock: ‘Dad died two weeks ago. We found him sitting under the tree with his radio as usual, his walking stick on his lap. It was a mongrel licking his fingers that alerted me that something was amiss. Ambulance staff confirmed he had been dead for several hours. We buried him with his reporter awards in a private family ceremony. All his siblings came, despite their fiery exchanges before his passing.
‘It was a moving ceremony – more so because Carlos, our local pastor, who is Rafael’s twin brother, officiated at the burial. That is all I have to say about my father. As for me? I am holding on. I have stopped music altogether. I now weave baskets at the local art centre, a hobby I started as a way to escape my father. The weaving hurts your fingers at first, but you soon get used to it. The baskets cost about fifty pesos each. We are a group of six women, two from Costa Rica, three from Las Tunas, the other from Santiago de Cuba. It’s a sisterhood. You should have come here. You would have loved Cuba and its contradictions – our outdated American cars, desperate people dying, drowning en route to becoming Cuban Americans. Fleeing from a revolution that yielded small things: aging sugar-cane plantations and rum distilleries. Socialism. Phew! Raúl Castro is rumoured to be next in line. Fidel is old and sickly. Our friend Benito is back here from New York. He is distant these days, indifferent. He returned home with a woman. Isabeau. A French girl.
‘I see some disturbing news about South Africa in the press. The pockets of greed. But that is the nature of revolutions. They all have discomforts. Disappointments. Anyway, I have to go, my poet. Please, please, please … write. Love, Mercedes.’
I raise my eyes from the letter to find Tony staring coldly at me: ‘Table 14 has been waiting for cutlery since the Dark Ages.’ But I am too distracted to take offence; I fold the letter and, with a nod, say: ‘Cutlery with the speed of light to Table 14.’
Amazu loves the food parcels I bring home: Mutton curry. Puddings. Fish dishes. He licks his fingers in the evenings, says God works in mysterious ways. Life continues at 184 Jan Smuts Avenue; Amazu, Algebra the cat and I.
I am nervous about writing to Mercedes. What if I sound dejected, desperate? What do I say, now that she has undergone such eerie transformation – a music teacher turned weaver of baskets? The photograph, enclosed in her last letter, screams the loudest change: a daughter frustrated by her father’s distance, finding solace in food, becoming a chubby weaver of baskets with expressionless eyes.
The decision not to write to Mercedes bothers me. I confuse orders, forget basic waiter courtesies, sulk at justified patron protests. I am appalled by the speed of my aging: one day you stride along Sophiatown streets, confident in the abundance of life, the next you wake with a fast-greying head and deep question-mark furrows on the sides of your mouth. You acquire a permanent frown not consistent with the natural purpose of frowns – a reflex expressive of permanent inherent angst. You listen to drunken young women confessing atrocious tragedies at the hands of sugar daddies, weeping in your aging arms simply because they have nowhere else to go. You wake to a sudden loss of lust, confronted by polished and perfumed young things with hypnotic curves and see-through blouses (nipples like freshly picked strawberries) – while you continue with the routine of mopping floors, running around with vegetable soups and smoked salmon. You forget how to submit to urges. You are suddenly engrossed with remembering and misremembering things past, rearranging them in different sequence, in futile attempt to rid over-familiar tragedies of their sting.
I feel a rebellious impulse to rid Café Mesopotamia of its abusive sugar-daddy contingent – a resolve not appreciated by ungrateful female youth: ‘You are not my father!’ they protest. Suddenly, sadly, experience of the world means nothing. The message is clear: keep your knowledge to yourself. We will, if we so decide, come ask for your opinion, but not otherwise; for in these times, our times, there is no such thing as decency. So I mutter to myself, at the helplessness of it all: fifteen-year-olds blowing smoke rings on the laps of potbellied sugar daddies; wealthy spinsters on the prowl for lazy school-leaver boys with reliable erections; Comrade Q clones sipping imported whisky at the Café Mesopotamia bar. To think I buried paupers, dug potatoes with my bare hands, suffered haunting hallucinations, only to be dismissed with an old refrain: ‘This is Johannesburg.’
It is a hot afternoon. I decline to accompany Amazu to the hospital to see Desiree. I, when not ferrying pork ribs and salami salads, continue with my walks to the Nelson Mandela Bridge. I lean on the bridge railing, admire sun rays bouncing off railway lines. You can smell the greasy residue after each passing train, moving souls from one promise to the other, from one heartbreak to the next. There is, by late evening (except for moths waltzing in the evening light), a spooky calm that descends on the city; funeral-procession kind of calm. A stray cat crosses railway lines below, followed by a slowing train grinding to a halt, its lit windows like houses in motion. A group of young men approach from both ends of the bridge, sandwiching me between them. Hyenas. Hunting in packs. I sense trouble but shake off the feeling.
It is becoming increasingly tempting to jump off the bridge onto the approaching trains below – to be electrocuted to soot, roasted to a charred thing, unrecognisable even to pathologists. I have my reasons, estimations and convictions for wanting to end this nightmare, but I sense I am yet to discover something profound. Something small. That holds all the big things together. An aquarium of sorts, where I could look in, see meaning swimming around coral reeds, in pinks and fiery reds. An aquarium with a hole at the top, to allow a hand to plunge into the clear water, grab the meaning in a tight clasp, show it to all: Desiree, Amazu, Ms Tobin, Gabriel and Mercedes Sanchez – to everyone – and say: I did not suffer for nothing. Here, in the palm of my hand, is the reward! Here – see it? Touch it if you want, but be sure to put it back into the water.
Life, I think to myself, is held together by small things. Much like Amazu’s theorems, written on newspapers and fermenting milk cartons. The young men walk past. I eavesdrop, hear something about the booming abortion trade in Hillbrow and downtown Johannesburg: pills, wire, industrial detergents. One says something about Saddam Hussein fished from a hole in Tikrit.
Echoes
15
/> I, at the back of my mind, always knew I would one day walk away from Café Mesopotamia, away from Amazu, away from the once-radiant Desiree, now covered in bedsores. I will maybe dig a hole, a grave in which to wait for real dying – whenever it decides to come. A storm brews. I walk for days along Beyers Naudé Drive, in search of a mountainous retreat, past settlements and farms. I follow criss-crossing footpaths into the mountains, past chirping birds and the occasional lizard. I have few expectations: to find a desolate mountain, see what awaits there. An outline of the Johannesburg skyline can be seen in the distance, skyscrapers reaching out to the furious black clouds. I climb over boulders, dodge thorns and spider webs, until I reach a ravine, hidden at the foot of a mountain.
I arrive at a secluded cliff at midnight, amid a heavy, windy downpour. It is as if thousands of waterfalls have suddenly been let loose from some faraway planet. Below is a neglected caravan. The rainwater has washed the caravan, exposing rusted and stained windows (greased with child palm prints). The caravan door is ajar, the wind blowing water through the doorway. It stands askew, sinking further with each passing day, the rubber on its tyres exposing rusted wire, its walls used as chalkboards. Daring drawings. Done in soot. An old shoe, without a heel, is under the bed, amid wet cigarette butts. On the wall next to the cracked window is a crooked nail, on which hangs a stringless, unloved acoustic guitar. The wardrobe doors are off the hinges, their backs used as havens for the imagination.
A child’s hand has, in purple ink, drawn a wheelless car; trees floating over sea or river water; a plate stacked with food. One of the wardrobe drawers hides an abandoned comb, a child’s milk bottle (with faded measurements), a broken typewriter. On the bed are old steelwool-like blankets, a rock-hard pillow, punctuated with bread crumbs. The rain continues to pour with determined fury, the wind howls past. The trees beam with each lightning bolt. I am thirsty. I extend the baby’s milk bottle, rinse it, wait for it to fill. The water is cold, settles my edgy mood. The window is stuck in rust and dirt, stays open to winds and flying sand. I lower myself onto the soaked bed, lying on my back. Someone lives here. But who?
The view is of expansive landscape, untouched by greedy developers, where plants still tease the nostrils with their natural scents. There are times when I get nervous, edgy, when my senses warn me of fast-advancing danger … which never comes. There is the lurking risk of snake and scorpion bites. Just above the abandoned caravan are boulders surrounded by shrubs, next to which is a cave. There is no freer feeling than sitting on the highest stone ledge overlooking the valley and blowing the trumpet amid startled lizards and cautious birds. I point the trumpet into the valley below, play meditative tunes – to heart-warming response from echoes that seem to emerge from God Himself. There is a peculiar harmony in listening to the valley mimic my horn, an overwhelming sense of existence in the company of rabbits and falcons.
Gushes of rainwater have carved a well on one of the stones inside the small cave. Crawling in on all fours, I am able to reach the cool water protected from dust and other pollutants. The water doubles as a mirror. I cringe at my unkempt hair, my biblical-prophet beard. Hunger pangs have taught me to stone small game with admirable precision; to bury my meat (covered in leaves) deep in the river sand (a stream, really) next to the caravan, ensure it stays there by rolling a boulder over it. The cave is also a sanctuary for keeping the remains of fire going (to avoid resorting to caveman ways every time fire is needed). I, when not searching for stray fish in shallow swamps, when not practising the trumpet, when not searching for guinea fowl eggs, when not hiding from helicopters roaring past, when not spellbound by the various moon phases, not twisted into an agonised ball from suspect meat, not filing my nails on rocks, not mistaking rock stains for San rock art, not waking from a dream wherein I lowered the panties of a charming stranger, not designing fishing and hunting tools, steaming or freezing from fevers, overwhelmed by sudden waves of raging anger, rolling with bursts of rib-bending laughter at odd things, or writing poetry on mud, still think Desiree is the only soul for whom my heart throbbed.
There is no telling how all this will end, if someone will one day stumble upon a decomposing corpse, or whitened bones licked clean by rain and jackals. There is no telling what hikers will make of the abandoned caravan, my hammock designed from reeds and grass, the eternal silence only death can bring. They will maybe kick the rusted trumpet, frown at how it got here in the first place. They will never know, not in the truest sense, that the greasy corpse or the white bones belonged to a dreamer, an average man overtaken by fate. They will make nothing of the caravan, never know that yet another recluse preceded me, leaving behind a one-string guitar. They will photograph the setting sun in passing, and never get to befriend the pleasing moon that hangs over the valley like a giant orange, never stay long enough to tell the moon their thoughts, their discoveries, their secrets. They will rush back, to the trappings of Johannesburg, to Café Mesopotamia, to pork ribs on decorated plates ferried by wounded souls. I will not be there to tell them: this rusty trumpet, you fools, is freedom. To certain inconclusive degrees, I would tell them, these whitened bones, charred by the sun, are as close as you are ever going to get to meaning. As for my story – from the dusty streets of Sophiatown to the rusty trumpet at your feet – it is the story of a life of loss. Everything. But that is not the sad part. The bewildering thing about it all is how many stories, some worse than mine, lurk in the shadows. Bees, I would tell them. Not a gunshot. Not a hangman’s noose. Not double pneumonia. Not hunger nor a brutalised heart. I was killed by bees. Small things.
One last thing: I forgot to tell you my name. On second thoughts, never mind.
Small Things Page 10