Sometimes There Is a Void

by Zakes Mda

  Adele returned from America. I was happy to welcome her back. I had stayed celibate all the time she was away, hoping that on her return we would start afresh and build a family. I was not going to give up on this marriage that easily. I resolved to have more patience and not be abrupt or brutally frank. I had to realise that my views, and indeed my values, were not sacrosanct; there were other views that might be opposed to mine but were just as important. I also had to learn not to respond to every little provocation, and accept the simple fact of life that things would not always go my way because I was not the alpha and the omega but a simple human being replete with flaws.

  When she was still in Vermont I had sent her information about a vacancy at Vista University and encouraged her to apply. When she returned there was a job waiting for her at the East Rand campus of the university.

  For a while she commuted by train from the Johannesburg station to Daveyton, Benoni, where the campus was located. It was very inconvenient because she had to take Melville 67, the metro bus, which had its bus stop across the street from our townhouse, to downtown Johannesburg, then walk to Park Station, as the Johannesburg station was known, for the train. She felt very unsafe. A month or so later she bought a brand new Toyota Tazz hatchback, which made her commuting easier. I was impressed by her resourcefulness so soon after she had arrived in Johannesburg – she just went to a Toyota dealership, selected the car she wanted, the dealership got a bank to finance her, and in a day she had a car. I had never thought it was that easy. I would have got a car for myself long before if I had just thought of doing what she did. Or if I had even thought of getting a car at all. So, I followed her example and got myself a new Mercedes Benz.

  Our life at the townhouse in Westdene was cordial, though one could feel the tensions bubbling beneath the surface. I tried very hard not to tread on her toes. Zukile was also happy to have his mother with him at last. But he was the only child who was pleased with her presence. Dini moved out and I heard he was staying with a group of gardeners his age who were employed by a neighbouring townhouse complex. He dropped out of the Roosevelt High School in Roosevelt Park where I had enrolled him after his return from the United States. He told me he was now working as a gardener as well. I tried hard to persuade him to come home and return to school. He told me he had been very much traumatised by our bickering when we were in Vermont, to the extent that he had moved out and gone to live with friends. He remembered vividly the names that Adele called me in his presence, referring to my genitalia in a degrading manner. He did not want to experience that again.

  ‘People can change,’ I pleaded. ‘Give us a chance.’

  He was not prepared to go along with that. This was a dilemma. I wanted to work things out with Adele, but in the process I was losing my son.

  The two older kids, Thandi and Neo, stayed however and continued with their schooling at FUBA Academy.

  I spotted an advertisement for the post of director of a non-governmental organisation called L-MAP in Bloemfontein. The organisation produced materials on language training methods and conducted workshops for language teachers. I advised Adele to apply and she got the post. This meant that she had to move to Bloemfontein, a city in the Free State Province, four hundred kilometres from Johannesburg. She rented herself a flat in the city centre.

  I often visited her there and we had a great time. Her brother Willie told me that now that we were living apart our marriage had a chance. But the harmony was not to last. When she visited our townhouse in Johannesburg she used to spread her files and work papers all over the dining room table and everywhere else in the house. The whole place looked very untidy when she was around and it made me very uncomfortable. I have always been a neatness freak. One day after she had been working at the table she just left everything there. I wouldn’t have minded if it was only for a day or so, but she was returning to Bloemfontein and would only be back after two or three weeks. This meant that the room would be in a mess for that long.

  In a situation like this my old self would have said, ‘Please remove this mess from the table. I am trying to keep the room clean.’ But, as I have already told you, I was trying to tread lightly to keep the peace. So, I said, ‘Do you mind if I take these papers and store them away in my drawers until you come back?’ She was at the door carrying her bags, about to get into her car. She turned around and exploded in a tirade about my reproductive organs that you wouldn’t want me to repeat here. I felt so small, more so because she said these things in the presence of my niece Limpho, who was visiting from Lesotho. I yelled back at her, telling her how peaceful it had been for everybody before she came back into my life.

  ‘You dare touch my papers, you’ll know me,’ she said.

  ‘I know you already,’ I said. ‘And I don’t like what I know.’

  She stormed out. I was so mad that I took all those papers and put them in a garbage bag. But I did not dump them. I put them under my desk in our bedroom; she would find them next time she came.

  The next time she fired the young girl we had hired from her village in Lesotho as Zukile’s nanny. Her crime? I had enrolled her at a dressmaking school in the city. The objective was that when Zukile was at pre-school she would not just be idling at home but would be learning a trade so that she would not have to spend her whole life working as other people’s maid.

  ‘Why would you be interested in sending this girl you don’t even know to school if you were not sleeping with her?’ she asked.

  There had to be some prurient reason for my charity. That was always the problem in our relationship – she assigned motives and in her mind they became fact even if there was glaring evidence to the contrary. She held to them firmly and refused to change her mind. The more sordid the motive she invented, the more stubbornly she held to it. I created one or two characters like that in my future novels as a way of trying to understand her.

  This new round of hostilities was followed by a period of truce. We were going to make it. For the sake of Zukile, we were going to make it.

  We bought a house in Weltevredenpark, a previously all-white and mostly Afrikaner suburb of Roodepoort, one of the satellite towns of Johannesburg. It was a big brick house roofed in brown tiles, with three garages, five bedrooms, three bathrooms, two living rooms, a big kitchen with modern gadgets and a small dining room. We were doing so well that we were able to furnish the whole house all at once and pay in cash. She, for instance, paid in full for a custom-made living room suite. She was a homemaker and didn’t hesitate to splash out on household items and even pay extra on the mortgage so that it would be fully paid long before the period stipulated by the bank.

  I enrolled Zukile at Popeye Nursery School in Weltevredenpark and Thandi at Allenby Film School, which was in Randburg.

  The truce did not last long. When she came home from Bloemfontein the bickering resumed. I wrote her a long letter expressing my grievances and suggesting divorce was the best solution. We were in Maseru on an outing to discuss an amicable divorce when Adele told me that she was pregnant with our second child. Neither of us seemed happy at the thought of another child when our marriage was so rocky that we were contemplating divorce.

  During the nine months that we were expecting this baby Adele was the sweetest person I have ever known. I looked forward to the weekends when I would be driving to Bloemfontein to be with her. Sometimes she drove to Johannesburg to see me and Zukile.

  I took her to Paris and we sailed on the River Seine and visited the Louvre and Musée D’Orsay and La Defence and the Eiffel Tower and did all the silly tourist things one does in France. We joked that this was our honeymoon, since we had never had one.

  The sweetness continued until our baby girl was born. I named her Zukiswa, which was a female version of Zukile. I also named her Moroesi, which was the name we had always said we’d use if we had a baby girl even when we were still at Roma in Lesotho. The name had actually become a joke among her friends. They would ask: ‘When is Moroesi
coming?’ I don’t know what the name means, but in Sesotho fairy tales Moroesi is always a very beautiful girl. I once wrote a play titled Moroesi, about a beautiful young lady who saved her village from foreign forces that were threatening to take it over and subjugate her people. Adele suggested we also name the child Zenzile after my grandfather – the one who was a chief of Goodwell, the present-day Bee Place. That’s the name that stuck and everyone called her Zenzi.

  Zenzi stayed with Adele in Bloemfontein and I stayed with Zukile in Johannesburg. I took Zukile with me on some of my travels abroad. We went to Barcelona, Spain, to visit Teresa Devant and her husband, Albio Gonzalez. Teresa had directed and produced a number of my plays in Barcelona. She had recently directed La Romántica Historia D’Una Monja, the Catalan version of my play The Nun’s Romantic Story, translated by a revered Catalan translator and writer, Carme Serrallonga and presented at the Sala Muntaner during the Grec 98 Festival by Associació d’Investigació I Experimentació Teatral.

  On this occasion I was there to give a lecture on Bertolt Brecht at the University of Barcelona and just to spend time hanging out with the family. Teresa’s two kids, Adrian and Sara, immediately fell in love with Zukile. I, on the other hand, became much captivated by an older woman, Julie Wark, who lived in the same building as our hosts. She was originally from Australia but had lived in Barcelona for years where she worked as a translator. I liked hanging out with her because she had wonderful stories to tell about her former lovers, one of whom was a great African poet and scholar who I knew very well but who shall remain nameless because the intention of my memoirs is not to gossip about others but about myself and those who were unwise enough to get involved with me. Some of Julie’s stories were about her association with guerrillas in East Timor and Papua New Guinea. She made those places come to life for me and I decided that one day I would go there to write a book. She really made revolution sound very romantic.

  At a restaurant in Barcelona people at neighbouring tables stared at Zukile as he struggled with a knife and fork and even with a spoon. He was sitting next to Albio and I was sitting at the opposite end of the table. He was four and a half years old yet his hands could not grasp anything. Back in Johannesburg I had been trying to correct that with the help of physical therapists. I was the cause of the problem. When I was bringing him up on my own, having never brought up a child by myself before, I became too protective of him. During meals I fed him instead of letting him eat by himself; I pushed him in a stroller at all times instead of letting him walk. I did everything for him instead of teaching him independence. Now Barcelonans were staring and giggling as he struggled to eat with his soft hands. I hated them for gawking so shamelessly. But I could do nothing to help him.

  At night we slept in one of the kids’ bedrooms under an original painting by Thami Myele, the South African artist who was murdered by the South African Defence Force in Botswana during the bad days of apartheid. The whole house, every wall, had paintings by various South African artists, including some of mine, which Albio had collected over the years. Zukile spent what seemed like hours gazing at Thami Myele’s painting. Even in the morning when we woke up his eyes were on the painting. He told me that it was an X-spray.

  ‘Do you know what an X-spray is, Daddy?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a man or woman who dies and becomes an alien.’

  I thought it was an interesting interpretation of Thami Myele’s painting.

  Zukile grew up surrounded by paintings. Not only mine, but those of my friends who were artists or art collectors. One artist I got to know during this period was Theo Gerber. He was the most awe-inspiring artist I had seen, whose paintings combined aspects of Surrealism and Lyrical Abstractionism. His work was breathtakingly sated with allusions and eroticism. He came originally from Basel in Switzerland, but lived in the south of France. He and his wife Susi came to South Africa quite often because they had been in solidarity with South African artists during apartheid. They worked with many of our artists, such as Nhlanhla Xaba and Matsemela Manaka, both in South Africa and in the south of France.

  On one occasion I was on a literary visit to Aix-en-Provence in France with a number of South African writers like Njabulo Ndebele, Mandla Langa, André Brink, J M Coetzee, Antjie Krog, Gcina Mhlophe, Sindiwe Magona and Ivan Vladislavi. I decided to take my family with me, so I was there with Adele, Zukile and Zenzi. Zenzi used to have tantrums in those days – you wouldn’t believe it if you saw her now because she’s the sweetest girl you’ll ever meet – and she made a lot of noise both in the plane and at the hotel where we were staying. I started to regret having taken her along.

  After my reading sessions at the Cité du Livre I decided to take my family to visit Theo Gerber. I had heard from Susi that he was not well, but I wanted to introduce him to my wife and kids because on the occasions that he had visited me in South Africa only Zukile was there. Theo lived in a castle in a small village in the south of France. Susi came to pick us up in her car from our hotel in Aix-en-Provence. That ancient castle, which at one time was a monastery and then a convent, had seen many of our artists work there. Some of the great works of Matsemela Manaka and of Pitika Ntuli were created in that castle. But it had also seen some wonderful theatre performances by such doyennes of the South African stage as Sibongile Khumalo.

  ‘He’ll be happy to see you,’ said Susi. ‘These are his final moments.’

  He lay on his bed surrounded by his giant paintings and a rooster. And by me and my wife and my children and Susi. The mistral was blowing outside, ruffling the feathers of his pet emu. And Theo Gerber was dying in his castle. I held his hand as his breath slowly slipped away. He looked at me and smiled.

  When I returned to South Africa I wrote about that experience in the Sunday Independent.

  Theo haunted me for a long time. Many months later I was at a beachfront restaurant in Durban sharing paella with Yvonne Vera. We were participating in a literary festival called Time of the Writer with, among others, Wole Soyinka, Abdourahman Ali Waberi and Breyten Breytenbach. Though I had long known and loved her work, I met Yvonne for the first time at that festival and we hit it off immediately. We went swimming in the sea at dawn. I introduced her to paella which had been introduced to me by my friends in Barcelona. She couldn’t have enough of it, although for me it was inferior to the paella that Teresa had cooked in Barcelona.

  So, we were sitting there, stuffing ourselves and looking at the sea when I pointed at the waves.

  ‘You see those waves with the surf,’ I said. ‘They look like a Theo Gerber painting. Look, look, they actually form an image of a human head. It looks like Theo Gerber. And it is smiling.’

  She didn’t understand what I was talking about. Her full-time job was managing an art gallery in Bulawayo, so she was keen to know more about Theo Gerber.

  ‘You see him over there,’ I said. ‘Right there!’

  But other waves came and swept the image away. I hope Yvonne didn’t think I was crazy. I was just being haunted by Theo Gerber.

  As I was preparing to write this chapter my eyes popped out of my head when I discovered that Theo Gerber was alive and living in South Africa. Could I have dreamt his death? No. That was just a coincidence. The two were not related in any way. The South African Theo Gerber I saw on the Internet was a much younger man who painted ordinary still life.

  DEBE MORRIS IS A gorgeous film director from Toronto. Brown, tall and slender with a hint of a Caribbean accent. She came to my house in Weltevredenpark to negotiate for the rights of And the Girls in Their Sunday Dresses for performance by the AfriCan Theatre Ensemble in Canada. Now I am on the N1 South freeway in my metallic grey car driving her to Lesotho to visit the Royal Family. She has been corresponding with the Queen Mother, ’Mamohato, for some time since the death of the Queen’s daughter, Princess ’Maseeiso, who had been a close friend of Debe’s when the princess lived in Canada.

  We hit it off wi
th Debe immediately and I offer to take her to Lesotho. I’ll leave her there and proceed to the Bee Place in the Eastern Cape. Then I’ll pick her up a day or two later and drive her back to Johannesburg.

  On the road I pick up some hitch-hikers – my dangerous habit that you already know about. It is a white couple and they are on their way to Cape Town. They have been on the road for days, they say, and hope with the kindness of strangers like me they will ultimately reach their destination. They look scruffy, which can be expected of anyone who has had no access to a shower and clean clothes for an extended period.

  ‘We are hoping in Cape Town life will be better for us,’ says the man.

  ‘What is your line of work?’ I ask.

  ‘I fix things. I can do anything. I am a handyman.’

  ‘Jobs are scarce, are they?’

  ‘It’s this affirmative action of the new South Africa. It has no place for us poor whites.’

  I let that go. I could have told him it has no place for me either, black as I am. These folks had sheltered employment during apartheid by virtue of being white and, most importantly, Afrikaner. I turn to Debe and we talk about her experiences with Princess ’Maseeiso. They used to have wonderfully wild times together. From the high jinks Debe tells me about, which are none of your business, she must have been a fun person to be with.