She rarely acted the jilted lover, and when she did, it was more out of utter frustration than premeditated revenge. I, when the cotton wool blocked out the world, drawing me into a warm expansive void, sunk to the deepest ocean floors of feeling. Rusty never understood the solitude rituals and, feeling rejected, accused me of sadistic tendencies. She refused to accept that she deserved better than me, and hung on even when I could not sustain even simple conversations. I trained my ears to ignore the city ambience, to pick up the faintest sounds: mosquitoes wheezing overhead, water dripping into drainpipes, the wind whistling against twigs. A liberating silence soon descended on me. It lasted a few hours at first, but deepened with each passing day, until Rusty stopped coming. She returned a few weeks later, angry and remorseful. We sat in silence: ‘You are strange,’ she said, to which I answered, ‘I know,’ and drifted back into my void of silence.
My near silence was nothing complicated: one day I, unplanned, simply woke up with little or nothing to say. A few words, so sparse that I might as well have opted for complete silence. It was hard convincing Rusty that my sudden economy with words had nothing to do with her, that to some extent it also had little to do with Columbus’s selfless life, lived with humour and flair, concluded with the most beautiful and imaginative of funerals, a funeral that shunned grief, that illuminated the sensory secrets that make life more deserving than death. Columbus knew, in death, or in the anticipation of death, not to lose sight of the charms of quirky sensibilities. That is what I remembered him for: his belief in things off beat and obscure; how he dismissed a need for romantic love, yet fell hopelessly in love with CNN newsreaders, how he over-analysed breastfeeding literature even though he wanted no children, how he secretly meditated in solidarity with terminally ill strangers, how he found beauty and serenity in cemeteries.
I thought, people are conceived in all sorts of ways: LSD-induced intimacies after rock ’n’ roll concerts; a reckless, handsome rock star on the prowl for foreign thrills; weirdos conceived on boardroom tables from penises of anaemic bosses, accidental lusts at hotel poolsides, affairs ignited in hospital waiting rooms, births from player cousins with midnight tip-toeing gifts, humans created from carnal blackmail (I’m going tell your husband you had two abortions, and let’s see how you stay in that mansion); imbeciles conceived in an aircraft restroom at 30 000 feet, from the occasional skinny-dipping rituals; cripples born from sombre marriages, from the haze of narcotics, accidental conceptions from boredom and heartache, erotic privileges extended to colleagues for unknown reasons, karma punishing errant spouses, from one-night stands in foreign cities and beds; losers born from spiteful lovers bent on lifetime entrapments; saints born to pimpled adolescents discovering carnal surges in public restrooms; psychos conceived on the back seats of cars, in clubs; unwanted souls drifting around the earth in displeasure and angst. Which category, I thought to myself, best suited Columbus?
Eugene Wentzel
Columbus was nothing like his brother, Eugene, whom I erroneously dismissed as a mean-spirited toad. It soon dawned on me, though, that Eugene’s tantrums and outbursts hid a fragile snail, whose shell was slowly cracking, threatening to expose helpless tenderness, tenderness poisoned by frustrations of suspect artistic talents, his rusty marriage to Boni, which, as I could see, was hanging by a thread. Eugene’s rebellion against all things authoritarian had not earned him friends or peace, for he had somehow managed to live outside of existence, convinced himself that his marriage could still work, that it should work, even after Boni caught him at The Rembrandt, his painting studio at the Braamfontein Gallery, fondling Marcus Bruno, his sculptor lover.
The discovery wounded Boni, who, in her rage, swung a garden spade through the pride of Eugene’s art collection, his depressing smudges of green and yellow oils on canvas that could as well have been paint spill accidents. When Pete found out, reliably told by a sobbing Boni, Eugene’s shell was burst open, leaving him ill-mannered and temperamental. Boni told Pete that Eugene was a shadow, that all he lived for were the paint accidents he called paintings, that he was a ‘selfish goat’ with no notable achievements except his crude self-portraits and body odour.
It was after the Marcus incident that Boni went berserk: cursing and mocking him, hurling her stilettos in daring provocations, smashing through The Rembrandt with a garden spade whenever she pleased. Eugene seemed defenceless against Boni’s callous theatrics, her seething displays of anger that bordered on criminality: ‘You’re ugly anyway!’ she had exploded. ‘I don’t know what I ever saw in a leech like you, sharing my every cent, buying you anything and everything, from cigarettes to the clothes on your back!
‘Even The Rembrandt is not truly yours. You inherited it. You survive on rent from talented, proper artists, without whom you are broke. What would you have become if it were not for your father and me? And this is how you reward me? You fuck other people? Other men! You’re wrong if you think I care. Go on. Screw your pretty-boy Marcus. Romp until you both bleed and die. I trusted you, took you in when all you had was that ridiculous, mauve Mickey Mouse underwear with holes, you ungrateful swine of a fucking pig! I loved you, cherished your eyesores you call art, wasting paint and canvases with the offensive eyesores you call paintings. You conniving rattlesnake of a mediocre creature! Even I, a humble kindergarten teacher, have some purpose in life, some dignity.’
She would then pick up the garden spade, swinging it at everything in sight, leaving scattered debris: wooden fragments from painting frames, paint spurts from burst paint cans, Eugene’s cheese and tomato sandwiches, plastic bits from his adored radio. She even chopped the head off The Virgin Mary, a gift of passion given to him by Marcus, who, as Boni saw it, was Godless. I feared Boni was one day going to chop Eugene with that garden spade, how her weekly raids of The Rembrandt seemed like glances of horrors yet to come. Columbus and I were dumbstruck by it all, suspected nothing untoward about Marcus’s late-evening visits to The Rembrandt.
Not even I, the keen observer, sensed that Eugene’s borderline madness hid such explosive domestic turmoil, that what seemed like his permanent irritation masked suppressed rage against Boni’s equally determined attacks. It was impossible to determine where Eugene’s crimes began and ended: if it was because he lacked ambition, or the affair he had with Marcus, his being secretly gay, or simply being ugly (which should never be a crime), or because he had no artistic talent whatsoever.
So what if he dropped out of a Sports Management degree only a week into the first semester? So what if he decided after two long years of fanatical commitment that motor racing was too dangerous for him, or given up on three morose years as a long-faced barber in Orange Grove? Or the barren three years spent as a pliant, talentless student of the flute with the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra? Eugene quarrelled with everyone: with Columbus and Pete, his driving and flute instructors, agitated clients who insisted on particular haircuts and not what he thought suited them better. A brawl with such a client, protesting against too experimental a haircut, earned Eugene two years’ imprisonment, for which he was released early (one year and two months) for good behaviour.
It was at the Sun City penitentiary that the first artistic spark was ignited, him seeing breathtaking portraits and landscapes by rapists and fraudsters. It was after his release, aged 38, that he pleaded with Pete for permission to oversee the family art gallery. Pete declined to hear another word from Eugene, only relenting following Eugene’s unlikely but plausible suicide threats. It was more getting him off his back and avoiding Eugene’s embarrassing visits to Chris Hani High that he was given an early inheritance; a desperately needed lifeline, a small but sizeable portion from the Wentzel family cents invested over 37 years in Forge Ahead Capital. He renamed Braamfontein Art Gallery The Rembrandt, renting out the unused gallery space to promising artists – artists who had sold-out exhibitions, whose paintings adorned the boardrooms of Infinity Bank and Touchstone Attorneys. Eugene resented these artists, who –
renting a portion of his inheritance – outsold him at every turn. It saddened him that their success seemed so effortless, enjoyable even, while his crack-of-dawn and midnight toils yielded little by way of sales or anything resembling recognition.
So he turned to the bottle, painted while gulping red wine straight from the bottle. This annoyed me; I have no time for self-pitying drunkards. It was Boni who bought some of his paintings, which she saw as lifetime loans designed to fill Eugene’s financial craters, the gloomy weeks between the 15th and 30th of the month; when Eugene had exhausted his rent earnings from the previous month, some of which he later confessed to horse betting and showering Marcus with expensive French fragrances. Boni had her suspicions, but dismissed the gnawing angst of an absent-present husband-lover. She herself had unexploded mortars from her failed marriage to Armand, a promising pilot, who crashed his rented Mark II over restricted military space, lost his pilot licence, then developed a concerning taste for violence. God! I despaired at the time, why couldn’t I meet or hear of normal, functioning people? While I loved Columbus, our friendship somehow meant exposure to alarming things, tentacles to shady persons and their histories, tentacles that seemed to know no boundaries to their reach.
When Eugene had met Boni at an art shop in Killarney Mall, Johannesburg, neither of them could have possibly known they would end up sharing a flat in the seedy suburb of Orange Grove. Neither would have predicted that Eugene would live on the edge, become a rebellious cynic living on his father’s handouts, his pity, his parental obligations. Neither would have known their hesitant courtship in Orange Grove would wholly be funded by his father’s irritation, his desire to contain Eugene’s lack of ambition, his remorseless abuse of his father’s goodwill. The last straw came when Eugene missed Kate’s funeral. Boni said she had reported him missing, only for Eugene to crawl out of an ancient Volkswagen Passat, drunk as a bat, his eyes bloodshot from a week of touring Johannesburg clubs with The Grenades, his newfound fellow drunks masquerading as musicians, a ‘band’. When he finally made it to Dr Coetzee’s palace of a house in Houghton – in Boni’s temperamental Mazda, an old birthday present that choked them with petrol fumes, blurred their vision with its yellowing windshield, woke them at ungodly hours with its unreliable alarm – Eugene was shown a Chinese vase, inside which were Kate’s ashes.
Eugene knew of his mother’s obsession with plastic surgery, of the many times she raided the Internet for case studies, but instead his rebellion led him to The Grenades the day Kate made the fatal decision to defy a paunchy stomach, assaulted by two pregnancies, leaving it flabby and sensually repulsive. Eugene was the only person we knew who could shrug off grief, who could with shoulders raised and hands thrown in the air, conclude: ‘People die. Even mothers. Sucks. But, hey, it’s life.’ Then tears. More tears. Hisses. Snot. Deep sighs. Wounded chuckles. Then silence.
Columbus Wentzel
The university sat on a hill, a deceptively elevated Braamfontein point hidden by jacarandas and haphazard city architecture, an ambience swarming with Campus Tribes: The Niggers with their phoney American accents, The Nerds with their antisocial ways, The Sporty Types with their sweaty toils, The Social Misfits accused of being underwear thieves, the Biblical Types dripping with biblical cautions, The Spoilt Brats dropped off in BMWs the size of ocean liners, The Campus Sluts with their promiscuous cathedrals, The Arty Souls with their dreadlocks and peculiar body ornaments, The Thinkers with their Plato and Aristotle quotations, esteemed members of Alcoholics Anonymous, The Party Animals with their eternal celebrations, Pseudo Politicians with their stillborn revolutions, The Drifters belonging to none of the others, Church Choirs and Bible Study mobs: Herolds and Monicas who aspired for high political office, Margarets and Zoës who would one day own psychiatric practices, Thembas and Xoliswas who would become fund managers, Cocos and Elizabeths who would someday rewrite constitutions of republics, Amandas and Williams destined to find cures to dread disease. There were also Franks and Patricks who were ordained to tumultuous marriages and dishonest lives.
The Pseudo Politicians in the Political Tribe staged Bad Food Marches and protests, but were persuaded by the realities of hunger to ‘fight the revolution from within the dining hall’, thus succumbing to, like the rest of us, the watery yellow paste that was supposed to be eggs, jaw-breaking steak that often tasted like an old shoe dipped in sauce, and coffee meant to service campus hordes rather than fine percolation concerns of baristas.
Because he stayed off campus, with his tortured brother Eugene and Eugene’s sweetheart Boni, in Orange Grove, Columbus missed out on happenings on campus, the lightning bolt that was Rusty Bell. Few things compared to the little pleasures of secretly observing her busy with mundane things: clipping toenails, drying clothes in the laundry room, peeling an orange. She never said a word to anyone, which made her magical, surreal even. Not that it was completely impossible to probe, to, from a position of anonymity, silently establish the four-digit extension number allocated to Room 308 at David Webster Hall.
The problem was never securing Rusty Bell’s number, but what to say the moment she picked up the phone. There were confirmed rumours that she never answered internal calls, only scheduled calls from home. The only other option was anonymous notes slid under her door. She saw them, and tossed them into the corridor garbage bin after reading. The bin became a fishing spot for rejected love overtures, heaped amid discarded shampoo bottles, lecture notes and stale bread.
I befriended Columbus on condition that he refrain from cannabis, to which he, tongue-in-cheek, answered, ‘You cheeky little shit. Not a chance in hell.’ It was a daring insult, executed with breathtaking composure. I told Columbus of my predicament: Rusty Bell. That is how we became friends, how Columbus got to know of my aborted attempts to phone her. Columbus, in his cerebral manner, said, ‘A whole residence full of idiots. Can’t you Einsteins figure out that the girl unplugs her phone? That none of your traumas get to her? A girl like you describe is clever. You have to always think five steps ahead. Evoke the unexpected. Accuse her of things, unsettle her, make her want to defend herself. Corner her with unexpected admonishing, but include some open-ended compliments.
‘She has to want to hear, to know more. Not an avalanche of desperate phone calls. That’s too predictable, too ordinary. Be a sophisticated nuisance: that way you learn her boundaries; measure the range of her defences. Slow things down. See and understand details. That is how you will get her attention – but not necessarily her affections, of course. Wars are won one battle at a time. Say she hates pitiful characters. Won’t all your grovelling nauseate her? One more thing … Girls like that know what they’re about, so you have to somehow make her believe you’re seeing the world as she would, that you’re worthy of her attention. That you’ll complement her. You have to be willing to fail. Courage. Pretend you know what you’re doing. Oh, and by the way, Rusty, whoever she is, already knows all you bastards want her. She can smell you, hopeless hunters, from hundreds of miles away.’
He was sympathetic, said it is coded in nature that courting is fraught with rebukes, even bruises. There are hundreds of examples on the National Geographic channel. It’s all laid bare: zebras tolerating kicks, polar bears walking for hundreds of kilometres, lions tearing each other to shreds. In other words, Rusty was merely following the rules of nature. I took Columbus’s advice: slowed everything down. A pattern soon crystallised. Rusty walked from late lectures on her lonesome on Mondays and Thursdays. I imagined it would be tedious learning about incisors and root canals – knew I had to conceive an intricate ‘surprise and capture’ (Columbus’s words) manoeuvre. It sounded to me like I had to be some kind of mounted cattle ranger, that romance was squeezed out of the whole saga. So I abandoned my plot as too risky. I knew that a hundred other plots were being thought and refined – for Rusty somehow, like a cowboy, rode us through deep rivers, jabbed her spurs into our collective ribs. How we neighed and purred to her silent commands. Poor horse
s.
I dialled Rusty’s extension number: 0448 – and braced myself for all manner of abuse. It rang for a long time, until a sleepy, faint voice said: ‘Hello, Rusty. Please call in five hours.’ ‘Sure. It’s Michael in Room GO77,’ said I. I heard a faint yawn, and gently hung up. Five hours meant midnight. I set every alarm within reach to wake me at ten, for a shower. But the plan fell apart. My phone rang at 11:55 pm, and an obviously drunk Kerusha (a veteran of the History of Art class, who changed courses every semester) on the other side of the line said she was not wearing any panties. ‘There is absolutely nothing wrong with fresh air, Kerusha Maharaj,’ I answered. ‘But what does that have to do with me?’ Kerusha burst into tears, at exactly the same time someone knocked at my door, rendering my poetic verse, my earlier composure, redundant.
I opened the door expecting to see some fool in underpants in pursuit of sugar or tea bags, not Rusty Bell in person. It was terrifying. Disarming. Over whelming. ‘I thought I was going to call you at midnight?’ I said offering her a seat. ‘I am all ears,’ she said sitting, a posture of a seasoned diplomat rather than a dental student. ‘You wanted to talk to me?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about?’
That was the moment I wanted to say: ‘Tell me something, Rusty Bell, what colour are your nipples?’ Instead, I said, ‘Have you heard of a gentleman called Jon Bon Jovi?’
‘Jovi who? You are not serious?’
‘I am. He …’
Rusty Bell Page 5