by Will McGrath
I must now make a shameful confession. As I stand on the side of this mountain road staring at the dead, deflated donkey, I am reminded of the way in which I spent much of my time in high school and college, which was studying ancient Greek.
As I contemplate this airless beast, the Greek word for “wind” or “air” pops into my head: pneuma. This root shows up in any number of common English words, from pneumatic to pneumonia to pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. In an instant of linguaphilic delight, I realize that this deflated donkey truly has lost its pneuma, because in addition to meaning “air,” the word pneuma also means “soul.” And with a further nerdish trill, I remember that the word for “soul” in Latin is anima, which of course leads directly to the word animal, which again returns me to the side of the road, standing in a ditch in front of a corral for misplaced livestock.
In an attempt to save this from tumbling into some sort of pseudointellectual wankery, I will mention a final harmonious tidbit. In Sesotho—which shares absolutely no common linguistic or cultural origins with ancient Greek—the same exact concept applies. Moea is the Sesotho word for “wind” and “air,” and it is also the Sesotho word for “soul.”
I’m tempted to keep excavating for some half-baked ontological insight, but some things are best left untheorized. There is always the danger of thinking all the accidental beauty out of something. When stumbling upon one of life’s strange concinnities, maybe it’s best to appreciate it for a moment—dust it off, polish it—and then place it back where you found it, even if that is in a run-off ditch beside an animal carcass.
Beyond the corral, off behind the ma-China store, a ghostly moon is rising early over the mountains. Before I can manufacture any further poignancy for a scene that deserves none, the wind picks up—the moea, the pneuma—and drives me shivering home.
PAKELA THE GUARD
We are sitting outside our rondavel watching smoke rise from the fire pit. Reid coaxes the blaze to life, performing alchemical sleights of hand—it is something dull and dead and then it is not, crackling, scintillating, awake. Bridget sits with Ellen and me on discarded cinderblocks as we watch a gaudy sunset detonate across the mountains.
Ellen is telling us how she rode along with the outreach team today, out to the mortuary to retrieve the body of an eight-year-old girl. The child had passed through the safe home a few years back, before eventually returning to live with relatives. No one knew the exact cause of her death, some complications with meds maybe—the relatives had been accidentally doubling her dose—but maybe she just died, succumbed. Whatever the case, the relatives had no way to transport the girl’s body back to the village for burial.
At the mortuary, Ellen says, the staff had difficulty locating the girl’s body. They slid open drawer after drawer, the cool slide of steel carving the silent room. Some of the drawers had more than one body. When they found the girl, they wrapped her in a gray shepherd’s blanket and laid her in the back of the 4WD, then set out for the village. The roads were rough and Ellen tried to make sure the blanket didn’t come undone while they traveled, the truck tilting and rocking as they eased through the flat, shallow river.
In the village, the relatives had prepared a rondavel to receive her body. All the furniture was emptied and the floor had been swept clean. Even out front the women were sweeping with hand brooms made of bundled straw, leaving patterns in the dust, graceful semicircles arcing across the yard. They carried the girl’s body inside and placed her on the floor. In the next rondavel over, Ellen could hear the older sister keening and moaning, the sound of her grief drifting over the body and hanging like a mist in the room. Then they paid their respects to the family and left.
As Ellen talks, the sunset is gradually softening into amber and purple-orange. The mountains take on a hazy, blunted aspect. Now we are bathed in the kind of early evening light that reveals the hidden nature of all things, uncovering strange colors, plucking shades of lavender and green out of the red rocks.
Then the sounds come floating to us:
pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop
“Hey,” Ellen says, looking up. “Someone’s lighting off firecrackers over there.”
On Friday nights, we host a salon at the Senqu Hotel, a low compound of burnt umber buildings on the western edge of the camptown, nestled beneath an enormous red-and-white radio tower. We sit in the hotel’s frigid and empty dining room—one of Mokhotlong’s two restaurants—and we tell fantastic lies and teach Nthabeleng English curses and insults, which she deploys far more adroitly than any of us.
At its core, our salon consists of just five—Reid and Bridget, Ellen and me, and Nthabeleng—but we are regularly joined by any combination of the following: Nthabeleng’s sister Kokonyana, who was with us at the marathon; an array of American doctors on rotation at the rural clinics; the Congolese and Zim physicians, who flirt ambitiously with Nthabeleng; and a cornucopia of drifting expats. Once we welcomed a vagabond Australian whose life goal was to visit every country on the planet—Lesotho put him at ninety-eight, cruising toward the century mark.
Tonight we are drinking whiskey at our usual roost in the corner, where we can observe the dining room in its entirety. There is not much to observe. It is just our core five tonight, and one lone patron eating on the other side of the room. Our long-suffering waitress ‘M’e Pulani intermittently wanders into the dining room. She has made the terrible mistake of giving us her phone number, and so we text her relentlessly throughout the evening, since a meal at the vacant Senqu Hotel dining room takes three hours to prepare. We send Pulani pressing communiqués like how r u? and luv u bb. Our salon, you see, turns on the sparkling and numinous interplay of great minds. Pulani rolls her eyes at us as she passes.
As we sip our drinks and tell tall tales, the lone diner across the room occasionally looks up from his meal to watch us. After fifteen minutes of pondering our idiocy, he gets up, plate in hand, and asks if he can join us.
“Of course,” we say. “Sit, sit.”
An imperceptible something flickers across Nthabeleng’s face; or maybe it doesn’t.
My first impression of this man is that he is thick, his body wide and dense like an overstuffed chest of drawers. He possesses a certain gravity, and I mean this less in the sense of his being serious—although he is undoubtedly a serious man—and more in the sense that light does not easily escape his ambit.
His name is Ntate Pakela, he tells us, and he is a guard at the jail.
“A guard,” I say. “That must be interesting.”
Pakela sends a high whistle through his teeth, seals it off with a snort, and looks over his shoulder to an imagined audience. This is his only response to my comment.
Pakela resumes eating, hunched over his food, his arms encircling his plate. He is grimly thorough about his business and his eyes dart from person to person as his jaws work. We realize suddenly how long three hours can seem, then try to remember what we were laughing about a moment ago.
After a brief silence, and at some internal and unknown stimulus, Pakela launches into what is clearly a premeditated monologue. This monologue is, generally, a commentary on gender politics; more specifically, it is a screed about how women are very, very dumb. He holds forth for several minutes, gesticulating with his silverware. But the finer points of Pakela’s discourse must remain lost to the historical record.
Eventually he stops to swallow. The pairing of Pakela’s bizarre misogynistic oration with my portion of whiskey has left me feeling giddy and disoriented. I watch the outline of a thick bolus of food make its way down his throat, and it feels like I am watching this happen in slow motion, in extreme close-up, like some perverse nature documentary. I am trying to suppress inappropriate laughter. For a moment, I wonder if his speech is some avant-garde stab at comedy, but then reject the notion. There is unhidden earnestness—fervency—in Pakela’s gaze.
I make a mild attempt at redirection. “Ntate Pakela, I am asking, how m
any people reside in Mokhotlong jail? Is it very busy?”
“I can’t tell you that,” he scoffs. “Classified.”
Nthabeleng—who has so far remained silent, contentedly smiling—interjects: “There are almost four hundred prisoners at the jail.”
Pakela’s jaw muscles gather themselves into tiny pulsing knots.
“It is a matter of the public record,” Nthabeleng continues, looking past him.
“Yes, thank you, mookameli,” I say to her.
Pakela’s eyes narrow. “It is impossible for a man to address a woman in that way,” he says.
He is referring to the Sesotho word I have used, mookameli, which means something like boss. It is dawning on Pakela that Nthabeleng is our superior.
“You must forgive Ntate Moshoeshoe,” Nthabeleng says to Pakela. Then she looks at me, the corners of her mouth rising just so. “He is not intelligent in the ways of Basotho people.”
I lower my eyes penitently. “Yes, what the mookameli says is true.”
Pulani arrives with our food at this moment, perhaps forestalling an outbreak of physical violence. Pakela takes this opportunity to tell Pulani that his chips are cold, that he should be brought another serving. While Pakela’s attention is occupied with a litany of complaints, Bridget starts to tell us a story about one of the children at the safe home. But Pakela will not have this.
“Is it not wonderful—” he interrupts, addressing Reid and me. “Is there not something wonderful in being a man?” He delivers this last word with emphasis, hitting the table lightly with his palm. Something about this gesture makes clear what I should have realized immediately: Pakela is tremendously drunk.
“Is that not how things must be,” he continues, “to have bo-‘m’e care for our needs?” He locks eyes with Reid, then with me. “Is this not the job of the woman—to attend to the wishes of the man?”
Then, showing forth a smile of the greatest benevolence, he swivels to look at Ellen and Bridget. He seems unsure what to make of Nthabeleng, but he is clearly daring the white girls to speak out of turn. Ellen and Bridget look at each other, amused, then at Nthabeleng, then at Reid and me. I can tell they are both suppressing the urge to laugh in Pakela’s face, to sneer, to snipe at this man who has overplayed his hand in such buffoonish fashion. But there is really no profit in it. They remain nobly silent.
Pakela looks around the table, apparently awaiting an answer to his question. Nthabeleng lets out a politic laugh, shrugs, and gives no further reply—a gesture that to Pakela means What could these makhooa possibly know about the respect that a woman must show to a man? and to us means Look at this asshole.
“Indeed it is a great gift,” I answer after a moment. “It is truly a gift that we have these bo-‘m’e to heed our commands.”
Pakela sits up.
“Just today, I chastised my wife for doing the washing. Does she not understand that washing and cooking are tasks that only men can do properly? Things that require a man’s delicate touch?”
Reid nods sagely. “And you must not forget the rearing of children, which is also the responsibility of men.”
Pakela stares at us. He is silent.
He is silent for the rest of the meal, sulking. For a moment I feel a twinge of guilt. The power dynamic has shifted so abruptly—Pakela knows we are mocking him, understands that he is alone, that even his fellow Mosotho carries only scorn behind her polite silent smile. He has made his brute, bullish charge at our enclave and has been rebuffed through goofiness.
At some point, the check comes, but we have long resumed our stupid gags, our nonsense texts to Pulani, our abstract riffing. We ice him out, occasionally directing a pity comment his way, rarely waiting for a response.
In the parking lot, he is walking a few steps behind us, then asks if we can give him a ride home. “Of course,” we say.
Nthabeleng takes us all in the pickup. Pakela joins her up front and we four makhooa ride in the open back, thrilled by the dark rushing air, the silent profile of the mountains, the glinting eyes of the devil dogs that prowl the hills. She drops him along some black road and the five of us watch as Pakela disappears into the frigid night.
After a moment, Nthabeleng pokes her head out the window.
“Kannete, that guy was a douche bag.”
Of course, this is not the last we hear of Pakela. In Lesotho, this country that is the smallest of small towns, paths cross and re-cross in strange ways. Nthabeleng hears the story a few weeks later, because Nthabeleng hears all stories.
“That man, Pakela the guard?” she tells us. “He’s dead. And he had just been married.”
That twinge of guilt again, as if we are somehow complicit.
“In addition to his new wife,” Nthabeleng says, “Pakela had a girlfriend. But after the wedding, this girlfriend said she could no longer be with him, that she would not violate the marriage. This made Pakela very angry.”
Pakela left his house in a drunken fog and walked across town to the jail, she tells us. Whoever was on duty that evening gave Pakela his pistol, which he was required to keep on site. Then Pakela walked back across town to the girlfriend’s house and opened fire.
This girlfriend, she and her family huddled inside. Surely they were very scared; there were young children present. Eventually the girlfriend decided that—in order to draw attention away from her family—she would face Pakela. It didn’t seem that anyone was coming to help them.
She went outside to calm him, but Pakela shot her to death. He shot her five times. Then he went inside to beg the family’s forgiveness. Then he killed himself in front of them.
It was strange, later, when we realized that we had heard all this transpire. We were sitting around the fire pit—taking in the gorgeous sunset, watching the color of the land transform while Ellen told us about returning the body of that small girl to her family—when the sounds came floating to us:
pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop
A PARTIAL DICTIONARY OF VEHICULAR MOTION
Bus: In Mokhotlong, a massive coach bus occasionally makes runs down through the mountains, heading for the capital. It departs at dawn and arrives in the Maseru dusk. As the bus embarks in icy darkness, breath steams out into the aisles as passengers vigorously fend off hypothermia. By the end of the day—having descended several climate strata—travelers strip off clothing and the well-past-capacity vehicle is now more Turkish bath than not.
On one trip out of town, I am huddled down into my seat, burrowed in layers of jacket. The TV monitors overhead are blasting famo music videos where teams of topless preteen girls cavort in fringed skirts with fantails of white plumage. Their tail feathers pop and beckon as they do the shimmy-hop and the peacock-strut over the bass line. In the back of the bus, women and men are drinking rowdily in the predawn, which is just one of the ways to stave off death by freezing.
Later we make a stop alongside a small mountain village. I watch as a man stuffs a trussed goat into the luggage hold of the bus. The goat is alive and squirming against its bondage, but the driver does not object to this living luggage. However, when the man tries to stow his unfettered dog in the luggage hold too, the driver says it cannot be. The man becomes upset, gesticulating angrily. He seems to be arguing that he has done this many times before. But the driver holds firm and eventually the man gives up, heading back toward his village with the small goat slung around his shoulders and the dog scampering beside him.
At a later alpine junction, a man is waiting with just a goat. He loads his caprine cargo without incident and the bus churns down the mountain, heading for Maseru.
Hitchhiking: Is awesome. It is practiced frequently in Lesotho and—since most vehicles are some type of pickup truck—it is relatively easy to do. Just hop in the back. Unlike in America, the recognized “please pick me up” signal is not a thumbs-up gesture but something more like a paddling motion, where both hands are extended, palms down, and waved in unison like flippers. Also different from hitch
hiking in America: you will not get murdered by a serial killer.
Motorcycle: The Sesotho word for “motorcycle” is the brilliant onomatopoetic term setututu—literally, “the thing that goes tu tu tu.” Ellen’s setututu, a necessity for her work in some of the remote villages, is similar to one of the low-cc dirt bikes that she, in her Canadian childhood, was raised on, since she was raised by wolves. As Ellen zips off in the morning, helmeted and visored and padded in fleece-lined Carhartts, the men and boys look on in envy.
So when we arrive at the wedding of my teaching colleague Ntate Katleho, held in a mountain village across the gorge, it is unsurprising that a crowd of children has gathered, drawn by the call of the setututu. When we come to a stop, they cheer and begin to swarm around us. And then—as we remove our helmets and the amassed local children finally get a look at which one of us is driving and which one of us is clinging so femininely to the back of his kamikaze bombardier wife—the children start to laugh, slowly at first, then building gradually, the laughter coming in waves that knock them to the ground. They are roaring now, rolling on the ground in piles, pounding their fists against the dirt as they beg relief from this great joke, staggering and slumping over in hilarity—It cannot be!—devastated, ruined, the children in tangles on the ground like they’ve been hit with nerve gas—No, no, no, it cannot be!
Taxi: In Lesotho, the term “taxi” usually refers to a VW-style minibus, modded out with a third bench; it is intended for sixteen compact riders and often carries close to twenty.
In this particular instance, we have twenty-two. As best I can tell, twenty-two is the physical limit of a minibus designed for sixteen passengers and their luggage, which is piled in laps and in some cases reaches the ceiling. We are a dense cube of humanity. We are supersaturated. Then the taxi stops for a man who is waiting along the road. Ah no, I think, no, it cannot be. The driver—who is a very small man—hops out, and the man who has been waiting on the road takes his spot. A driver switch, I conclude optimistically. Our driver must have reached the end of his shift. This man must be another experienced driver.