by Fred Khumalo
Undeterred, Christine invited him to a dinner party at her new house, one she had acquired without a word to him. Unbeknownst to Pitso, the evening would change everything.
CHAPTER 16
‘This is my new home,’ Christine said as she welcomed Pitso to the address he’d been directed to. It was an elegant house, some distance from the school.
‘It’s nice,’ said Pitso, confused. He knew she’d moved to her own house, away from the staff quarters, but when he’d asked her why she’d just shrugged and muttered something about her independence. How could he complain, when it had been his idea to begin cutting down on the number of visits to her rooms?
Pitso was dressed carefully in long grey trousers with matching braces, a crisply ironed white shirt, and black shoes polished to a shine. His face was clean-shaven and he had on a dark-grey cap. Tufts of curly hair showed around his temples and smudged the lower back of his head.
Guests sitting in garden chairs under a jacaranda tree turned to look at Pitso as he walked with Christine up the path towards the house.
As Christine disappeared into the house ahead of him, a man called, ‘Hey, boy, get me an empty glass, will you?’
For a moment, Pitso didn’t move, bewildered. Then the realisation sank in: he was clearly mistaken in thinking he’d been invited as a guest.
‘Yes, baas,’ he said. ‘Coming right away.’ He walked around the house to the back entrance and found three servants in the kitchen. The three coloured women scowled at him. He greeted them in Afrikaans and asked for an empty glass, careful to explain that it was for the white baas outside. It was given to him on a tray and he took it out to the man, smiling as he held it out to him.
He went back to the house, using the same servants’ entrance. After years of railing against the system, he was finally bowing to society’s codes. He didn’t know what else to do; Christine had asked him to come here, to her home. Perhaps it was simply her way of trying to see him outside of school hours. He stood in the large pantry, talking to the servants. They were from Kimberley and spoke what seemed to him a strange brand of Afrikaans.
Christine entered the pantry accompanied by a white man. ‘Ah, found you,’ she said to Pitso. The man beside her was wearing an apron, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his hands glistening with cooking fat. He was fairly short with a head of thick, dark hair. His eyes sparkled with friendliness.
Christine turned to the man and said, ‘Darling, this is Roelof …’
‘Ah, the famous Roelof! Sorry, my hands are dirty; I prefer to prepare my own meat as many people do not know how to spice it properly.’ He winked at Christine jovially. ‘So, I can’t shake yours right now.’
‘Consider your hand shaken,’ said Pitso in good humour. But he was confused. Who was this man, and why was Christine calling him ‘darling’? Perhaps it was simply the way of the French.
‘Come with me,’ the man said, gesturing towards the kitchen.
As Pitso followed him, he couldn’t help noticing that Christine seemed agitated, her eyes darting nervously between the two men as she walked with them. She seemed to want to say something and opened her mouth to speak. ‘Eh, darling …’
But the man’s attention was focused on Roelof. ‘I believe you can sing up a storm,’ he said. He spoke perfect English, albeit with an accent. ‘And I hear you can play the accordion better than a Frenchman. That we’ll have to see. Once we’ve eaten, we’re going to have to check the veracity of that claim. By the way, back home in Brittany, they call me Napoleon, on account of my height. And you, what do they call you, what’s your nickname?’
‘Some people call me the Lion. It’s not exactly a nickname, but a praise name, derived from my surname.’
They moved outside, where coals on an open hearth glowed warmly. Pitso carried a tray of meat as requested. Napoleon started taking pieces from the tray and laid them on the grill.
As the meat sizzled, Pitso continued, ‘But the name of De la Rey has got nothing to do with lions. My true surname is Motaung, People of the Lion.’ Pitso proudly told him the history.
When the food was ready, the guests were invited to sit down at the beautifully laid dining-room table to eat. There was plenty of good wine. The three servants Pitso had encountered inside the house now hovered in the background, removing empty plates when required and bringing pitchers of water.
Pitso, who had been handed a plate of food by Napoleon, was not sure where he should sit, so he found a small outside table at the side of the house, hidden away from the guests. He sat down and began to eat. The servants nodded to him as they passed, but they still seemed uncomfortable in his presence, so they left him alone to his meal. He was focused on his food when Napoleon appeared with two glasses and a bottle of wine. ‘Ah, there you are. Look, man, I am from France. Back home we don’t do things this way, we don’t tuck some guests away. I am sorry …’ He shook his head and looked genuinely upset.
‘I understand that, sir. Thank you for the meal,’ Pitso said.
Napoleon sat down next to him and poured wine into the two glasses. ‘Well, Roelof, I’ve heard so much about you. Christine says you—’
‘Ah, there you are!’ A man appeared from around the corner. ‘Monsieur, you’re hiding from your guests.’ As his gaze settled on Pitso, he recoiled and said, ‘But it is the half-caste boy!’
Eyes blazing with anger, the Frenchman said to the man, ‘That’s a perfect display of the barbarism that I intend to fight against. Now, I’m going to ask you to apologise to my friend. Right now. Or leave this house.’
The man looked at the Frenchman, then at Pitso. He turned and walked away. When he reached the door to the dining room, he shouted over his shoulder, ‘You’re not going to bring your French ways here. You’re not going to spoil our kaffirs and hotnots. You are not!’
An uncomfortable silence settled over the table. Soon the guests were whispering animatedly into one another’s ears. Christine got up to play another record on the gramophone, but the atmosphere had been sullied.
One by one, people started leaving, although there were still mounds of food, and copious bottles of beer and wine.
‘Monsieur, my presence here has completely ruined your party,’ said Pitso. ‘I shouldn’t have come. The presence of one French visitor is not going to change the mentality of this town.’
‘Nonsense. I should be grateful for your presence. It has helped me set the tone, send a message to these people.’
Christine came out to the side of the house where the two of them were still sitting.
‘Ah, there you are, Roelof. Has my husband been taking good care of you?’ Although Christine tried to be casual, she was clearly anxious. Colour had risen in her cheeks. ‘He can be so garrulous it’s sometimes difficult to have a conversation with him. Grégoire, you do talk non-stop.’ Christine put her hand on Napoleon’s shoulder.
Pitso froze. His mouth went dry. Grégoire! The ‘friend’ who had sent her the gramophone. He looked at Christine wordlessly. Grégoire did not notice his new friend’s sudden change of expression and resumed speaking, ‘I’ve got a special liqueur that I want to share with my friend Roelof here. Excuse me while I go and get it,’ he said.
The minute Grégoire turned his back, Pitso whispered to Christine, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I was going to tell you. But this doesn’t change anything. I still love you …’
‘You can’t love me and him. It’s impossible.’ His heart told him to cry out and beg. But his mind strangled that thought. ‘You’re greedy, selfish. You accused me of seeing Saartjie, yet you have another man that you love.’
‘But Roelof, you knew I was married. I am Madame Clinquemeur, after all.’
‘Yes, I did, but you gave me the impression that, perhaps, your husband was far away and therefore did not matter. Or that you’d come here to get away from him, start a new life.’
Christine’s head dropped into her hands. ‘It was wrong of me to get involved
with you in the first place. You were a lonely, vulnerable young man, and I was lonely too. My husband was far away and he was not due to come for another year. But he changed his mind, decided to come early. I am sorry. I should never have allowed us to get into this mess.’
‘Why did you bring me here, in the first place? Why invite me to your house?’
‘Roelof, I’m so sorry. I brought you here out of guilt. I suppose I wanted to let you know about Grégoire … to show you that he is a good man, that we have to put a stop to what we have. Because it is dangerous. I have betrayed my husband and I have hurt you. I have behaved most despicably towards both of you, Roelof.’
Pitso’s lips trembled. He did not trust himself to say anything, so he kept quiet. He saw flies having a party on the table. They buzzed over remains of food, while others flitted about until they drowned themselves in the dregs of wine.
‘Christine … You can’t just end things like that. I want you to tell him about us. Right now. If you don’t, I will.’
‘No, please, Pitso! There is too much at stake.’ Her voice and eyes were pleading. ‘I know I’ve hurt you, but please don’t!’ Christine got up and poured herself some wine, her hand shaking. She took a sip as Pitso stared, unseeing, into his own half-empty glass.
‘My dear Roelof,’ Grégoire cried as he emerged from the house, ‘my dear Roelof, stop bothering yourself about those barbarians. It’s not your fault that the party came to such a disastrous end. Let’s just drink and be merry.’
Music had started playing again and the liquor flowed. But very little of this registered with Pitso. He had retreated to a corner of himself, that dark corner in which he used to seek refuge as a child, when his mother would cry herself silly and speak to his absent father, while Pitso would search in vain for words to comfort her, words to give meaning to the thoughts that were crowding in on him, suffocating him.
CHAPTER 17
On Pitso’s sixteenth birthday, his Uncle Disemba threw a huge party for him. As part of the proceedings, the man slaughtered three sheep. People came from far and near to celebrate this important event. The party, which started on Friday evening, went on until Sunday. On the last day, Pitso was asked to give a speech, words which his relatives would cherish and take home with them. He spoke eloquently, thanking his uncle for keeping the family together after the war, for opening up business and educational opportunities for members of the community. He then startled many when he declared that he was no longer Roelof Jacobus de la Rey. He had officially become Pitso Motaung.
‘If you ever call me a coloured person or a mixed-race person, I shall make you swallow your teeth. I am Pitso, the son of Motaung. The roaring cub of the Bataung people.’
Although many cheered and laughed, some of his relatives with straightened hair and artificially enhanced complexions were embarrassed at the young man publicly disavowing his mixed-race heritage, thereby giving the lie to the status they were aspiring to. Many of these relatives were much darker than Pitso. Unlike him, however, they refused to speak Sotho. Afrikaans was their first language, they declared to whoever wanted to know and to some who did not. Many felt Pitso’s white good looks and higher-than-average education were wasted on him.
As a result, Pitso’s speech left some of his relatives very angry, while others simply dismissed his speech as utterances of a drunken youth. After his disappointment with Christine, Pitso had been consuming huge volumes of alcohol – frequently and very publicly. Still wallowing in his loss, he moved like a sleepwalker. He bumped into things. He would not look people in the eye. He was always gazing into the distance, as if hoping that the love that he had lost would suddenly show its face on the horizon. As if his real Christine, not the one who had betrayed him, would come running towards him.
When it was time for him to be taken back to the centre for coloured children later that day, Pitso was nowhere to be found. He had simply disappeared sometime after his speech. Even the following day, nobody saw him. A messenger was sent to the centre, to check if he had perhaps returned there on his own. The messenger drew a blank.
Pitso was found four weeks later, hiding out at a distant relative’s farm – one of the relatives who had refused to buy into this racial conversion charade advocated by his uncle Paul Ontong.
Against his will, Pitso was dragged back to the centre. He was not the same person any more: he fought endlessly with his teachers and classmates. Avoiding Christine, he sank into a cocoon of petulance and aloofness. When he was not playing his accordion or the centre’s organ, he would have his nose buried in one book or another; English texts, old texts in Dutch and recent ones in Afrikaans. He even tinkered with some Latin texts.
Even though he tried his best not to think about Christine, he couldn’t help recalling the works that she had recommended. He threw himself at these as if he were battling against Christine herself, to show her that not only could he understand these texts, but he could appropriate them for his own purposes. He read the commentaries of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Plato and Socrates, and transplanted their thoughts to the South African situation – what these thinkers would have said about the application of justice in his country of birth. He read about the Atlantic slave trade, and his blood boiled with righteous indignation. Over and over, he read the story of Equiano, the famous slave. He thought he loved Equiano’s story more than any biography he had read thus far.
One weekend, Pitso visited his uncle Paul Ontong again. He was serious about obtaining a new birth certificate, under the name of Pitso Motaung, and thought his relative might help.
‘Uncle, I am not going to throw away my old certificate,’ he assured the older man. ‘It’s a promise. I just want to have an African certificate as well. One never knows what the future holds in store.’
Paul thought he could see himself in the young man: a person with a long-term view of the future, a person with vision, a person with a mission. He decided to humour the young man. Over the next few days, he pulled a few strings, and Pitso, in due course, obtained a new birth certificate. As per the young man’s request, the age on the certificate had been inflated by three years. Pitso could not stop thanking his uncle; he was now officially Pitso Motaung. How easy it was to shrug off the other identity, Roelof de la Rey, one that did not anchor him or make him feel complete.
During his spare time, he would also unfurl his father’s sketches from the war. Sometimes he would just look at them until tears came to his eyes; other times, he would start copying what he was seeing in front of him, on his own sketchpad, trying to imitate his father’s strokes. Drawing soon became a passion. He drew things he had never seen in real life: buses and trains he had seen only in books. He conjured soldiers lying on their stomachs, their guns cradled confidently over their shoulders, the muzzles pointing into the distance. He brought to life a group of Zulu warriors armed with assegais and shields, clouds of dust boiling at their feet as they danced in a public square. He drew big, bright flowers; aloes standing guard at the top of a hillock; faces of old, wrinkled women smoking traditional African pipes, wisps of smoke curling to their eyes; scenes of men sitting under trees, drinking beer from huge calabashes, women dancing in the middle of the yard, and dogs fighting over bones strewn near the drinking men.
He drew a likeness of himself playing an accordion; a woman who looked like his mother, riding a horse. He drew endlessly, energetically. At the end of most of these sessions, he would study his efforts for a long time. He would speak to the characters in each drawing: ‘Just what do you think you’re doing? Tell me what you’re thinking right now. Any plans for tomorrow?’ He would laugh at his own futile questions, then tear up the drawing and throw the pieces into a rubbish bin.
Rummaging through his father’s belongings, he stumbled upon a sketch showing an African woman resplendent in flowing robe, with a Bible in one hand and a spear in the other. His eyes widened when he recognised his own mother. His lips trembled, and he started laughing maniacally. Then he shout
ed, ‘Mme waka! Mme waka!’ My mother, my mother! Tears flowed in torrents. He cradled the sketch against his chest and swayed sideways, weeping bitterly. ‘Mme waka! Okae mme waka? Okae?’ My mother. Where’s my mother? Where?
Soon, after that, it became his ritual to start his day by looking at the sketch, tracing his finger slowly along the lines of the drawing.
When the war broke out in Europe in 1914, Pitso followed it through the newspapers that were kept at the library. The newspapers were meant for teachers, but there were no regulations preventing pupils from sitting at the newspaper-reading desk. Besides, the newspapers were mostly outdated, meaning the staff at the centre did not place much importance on their contents. But to a young, inquisitive mind, what was happening in Europe was always intriguing, even if one could do nothing about it.
By the time the war entered its second year, local interest in it waned. The war was in stalemate. No one was winning. Pitso knew that, as part of the British Empire, the Union of South Africa had sent men over there – white men mostly. Which made sense, seeing as this was a white man’s war: the German Kaiser and his friends on the one side, Britain, France and their friends on the other. What intrigued Pitso was that there were some black men from his own country also fighting over there. What did they stand to gain, fighting on the side of an empire that had taken their land, an empire that, not so long ago, had burned down their farms and taken their families to concentration camps?
Pitso was then already a big man, with a boulder-like build that resembled his father’s. His face was the colour of vanilla and chocolate swirled together, complemented by a proud shock of black, curly hair. Although he had the sharp nose of a white person, this was offset by his thick lips. But he still could easily pass for white. That’s what his mother had always said to him back then: ‘You are the son of a white man – be proud of that. You are not a simple kaffir like your mother; you are going to get a good education and be like the white man, or even better than him, because you also have the genes of a Motaung, and we are a proud people. We can be wily in our own way, let me tell you that. We can outwit the white man. We are the Bataung, Children of the Lion.’