The Classifier
Page 24
Ruthie found us a place against the wall, about halfway back. ‘We’re closer than most people with seats,’ she whispered. As the lights went down, she turned her face to me. The eager little smile I already knew so well seemed to light up her dark eyes. Her hand squeezed mine. It felt like electricity being pumped into me.
There had been some squawking sounds from somewhere near the stage, but suddenly that had stopped and everyone applauded, Ruthie too. I saw that a man in a black suit had entered and was walking quickly to a sunken place in front of the stage, waving a little baton at waist height. He stepped onto a platform, tapped his baton against something, with a sharp tok-toktok, and, altogether unexpectedly, there was music.
The curtain was still down. Ruthie told me later that the piece they played before the curtain went up was called the overture. The audience was completely quiet. There was no clapping of hands to the music, such as I had experienced at pop concerts, no foot stamping, not even any coughing.
I found the overture to be altogether pleasant. The slow, gentle sounds and the long-drawn notes of the violins were lovely. When I looked at Ruthie, I saw that her eyes were closed and her lips slightly parted. Her head seemed to sway a little to Verdi’s rhythms.
When the overture was done, the curtains opened to reveal a crowd of coloured people dressed in the clothes of some long-passed period. There was singing now, different members of the cast singing little bits in Italian. I brought my lips to Ruthie’s ear. ‘But I can’t understand,’ I whispered.
The look she gave me was frantically urgent. ‘Don’t listen with your ears,’ she whispered. ‘Listen with your soul.’
I tried, but my soul also had difficulty understanding. I quite liked the little bits of music, but it was not to me the inspiring stuff Ruthie had led me to expect. None of it had much of a tune, I thought. But if I had hated every moment of it, I would still have wanted to be there with Ruthie.
Then, in a few beats of the music, everything changed. My soul did make contact with it. A new male voice was singing. At the end of the first act, Ruthie told me that you called that a tenor voice. He was holding his wine glass high and singing what I learnt later was the drinking song. When he paused, a female voice took over – the soprano, Ruthie said – then all of them were singing together. It was wonderful, any time as inspiring as Ruthie had said, and from that moment, I was sold on Italian opera and have been ever since.
The rest of the programme slipped by quickly. There were some flat bits that were less appealing to me, but in between wonderful melodies, all beautifully sung, took me into a world of music that, until that evening, I had not even known existed.
Between two of the acts there was a break when you could go into the foyer and buy drinks. Ruthie waited around a corner of the passage that circled the hall where we would not be seen by anyone who might know either of us, while I bought us glasses of champagne. The coloured lady, about Mama’s age, who was pouring the champagne, looked suspiciously at me when I placed my order. ‘I’m eighteen,’ I told her before she could ask. I doubt that she believed me, but she gave me the champagne.
‘Champagne,’ Ruthie said in wonder. ‘I’ve never had champagne.’ We drank it slowly, feeling enormously sophisticated. ‘The bubbles tickle my nose,’ she said.
An old Zulu man in overalls, probably a caretaker or a cleaner, shuffled past, paying no attention to us. We stood close together, sipping our champagne. I was looking into Ruthie’s eyes as if eyes were a new discovery to me. ‘Do you like it?’ she asked. ‘Do you like it very much?’ Her eyes were both excited and anxious. They were saying: please like it. If you’ve ever liked anything, please like this, and like it very much.
‘I love it,’ I said. ‘I haven’t heard it before and I love it.’
She bounced forward and kissed my cheek, a quick light touch that was as brief as it was unexpected. ‘I knew you would. I was certain you would like it.’ Before I could respond she was offering me a completely new idea. ‘Tomorrow night,’ she said. ‘Let’s do it again tomorrow night.’
‘Again? Will your mother let you?’
‘I’ll persuade her. I’ll explain to her that I’ll die if I can’t come. What about you?’
The idea of a second night had come as a complete surprise to me, but I knew I had to do it. ‘I’ll find a way,’ I said. ‘I’ll come.’
On the way home, we were as careful as we had been coming to the opera. The bus driver was the same tired-looking man and there were no more passengers than there had been earlier in the evening. It was only when we got off the bus that we looked at each other. Even that was only for a moment, then we turned away, she to walk up her hill into Greenwood Park and me to walk up mine into Red Hill. But I only pretended to go, stopping in the shadow of an office doorway after just a few steps to watch her until she disappeared into the darkness beyond the last street light. I knew that, beyond that point, there were another fifty or sixty metres for her to go and I hated that I could not watch over her all the way home.
Mama was surprised at my wanting to go to listen to Italian opera on a second night, but at a time when other parents had teenage children who were smoking, drinking and taking drugs, Italian opera must have seemed like a fairly innocuous addiction. She let me go. I never discovered whether she discussed it with my father.
We went on three nights that week. And on every night I discovered another piece of the opera that spoke to my soul. On the first, it had been the drinking song. On the second, it was the love duet from the first act and the tenor song that came a bit later. But the third and last night was most special of all. We had managed to go again on the Friday, the last night of the run. This time Ruthie was not satisfied with our standing-room tickets. She took me by the hand up the stairs to the level that led to the doors of the boxes. ‘I have an idea,’ she said. ‘There’s an empty box up here.’
The city hall had not been built as an opera house. The empty box was used for some of the stage lighting. Other people were coming in and out of their boxes. We waited until no one was looking and slipped into our lighting box, Ruthie leading the way. The only way we could see past the lights was to kneel in front of them, our chins resting on the padded rail. Before the start, I raised my head from the rail once and threw a shadow across the curtain. It would have been across the stage had the curtains been open. ‘No-o-o,’ came Ruthie’s whisper, her face a reflection of the terrified amusement she felt. ‘We can’t move.’
That was how we sat for the rest of the performance, our chins pressed down on the rail, unmoving. But now we were above the stage, looking straight down into the orchestra pit. We could follow every gesture of the conductor. The singers were so close we could see the sweat on their faces.
At one point the door of the box opened and voices reached us from the passage. Ruthie drew me into a corner, her eyes wide with the merriment that accompanies the sharing of a moment of minor panic. A man’s voice said, ‘You see, there’s no one here. This is the lighting box.’
We heard the door close. Ruthie was pressed tight against me. ‘We’d better go,’ I whispered.
‘No-o.’ The sound was long-drawn, but barely a murmur. I could feel her breath on my face. ‘We’ve got the best seats in the house.’
I would have stayed in that position all evening, but she drew away, her eyes alive with a glee that only she possessed. We stayed in our lighting box and enjoyed the best seats in the house. The part of the opera I discovered that night was the main baritone song, ‘Di Provenza il Mar’. What I have learnt since then leads me to believe that, had it not been for the laws of our country at the time, the Eoan Group’s baritone may have become a world-famous singer. I can see him in my memory still, just as he was that night, standing near the edge of the stage, right below us, his arms outstretched to the audience, singing the climax of the aria, his wonderful voice filling the hall. If the opera had been fascinating on the other nights, now it was magnificent.
When t
he last act was over and the singers had come out to take their bows, we could finally move. Ruthie and I turned to look at each other. The smile on her face held even more of the mischievous eagerness that had mesmerised me from the beginning. Without planning it or even an awareness that I might do it, I leant towards her and kissed her lightly on the lips. It was no more than a touch, a brushing of skin on skin, but it held within it far greater intimacy than many sexual acts since that day.
I pulled back and she opened her eyes slowly. Her face was almost scarlet and her eyes seemed covered by a film of moisture. I only waited a moment before bringing my face towards hers again, slowly, until it blurred in my vision, then our mouths were again touching. This time it felt as if we were melting together in a mixture that only reached complete ecstasy now that our faces were one.
To my surprise, when I thought about it later, it had been nothing like kissing Jill. My education with Jill had been experimental, technical rather than emotional. She had shown me how to do it, and her lessons had seemed to suggest that this was the right way and that all other girls would expect to be kissed that way. Kissing Ruthie, it seemed that neither of us would ever kiss anyone else again. No skill was necessary. It was perfect, even without technical expertise, and it would always be perfect.
Down below, the audience was shuffling along the aisles as the hall emptied. Above us, the lights had come on bright. I found Ruthie looking into my eyes in a different way. This was clearly as new for her as it was for me. ‘That was something, boy,’ she said.
‘Chrissie,’ I mumbled.
‘I meant Chrissie,’ she whispered through a hoarseness in her throat. The little gleeful smile was back now. ‘That was something, Chrissie.’
This time we left the hall together, walked to the bus terminus together and, without planning it, sat together on the bus, holding hands. I had gone into the back of the bus with her. At least a small part of my mind was still reasoning. For her to sit in the front was looking for unnecessary trouble.
None of the other passengers seemed to be interested in us, but I did see the driver more than once looking at us in his rear-view mirror. As we got off at our stop, he called me back. ‘You, kid.’
Ruthie stayed on the pavement as I went back to the open door. ‘Yes?’
‘I saw what you were up to. You get onto my bus again with your coon girlfriend and I’ll throw you both off.’ I stepped away from the bus, but he was not yet finished. ‘You hear me?’ I turned away without answering. ‘You hear me? I’ll throw you and your coon girlfriend off next time.’
The bus roared away up the road to the north, leaving us looking after it. The pavement was deserted. A single car came up the road from town and turned towards the Red Hill side. Ruthie had heard it all and she seemed to have shrunken and taken a step away from me. Her hands were kneading each other. ‘We can’t take chances like this,’ she said. ‘What will happen if people find out?’
‘Will you come to the cane tomorrow?’
She looked at me, making no attempt to hide the panic she was feeling, nodded quickly and turned to go. This time I followed her, keeping a good distance between us, until she turned into the front gate of her home. Then I turned and ran down the hill out of Greenwood Park, making for Red Hill and my own home.
thirty-one
It was about that time that Mister Brown, the man who was officially my father’s senior, decided to hold a braaivleis for all his staff and their families. Naturally cleaners, drivers and the like were not invited. ‘He says it’s for team building,’ my father grumbled. ‘He’s read some American book about team building. I don’t know why we have to do it. If everyone does his job, you don’t need team building.’
Being second in command in the province, my father could hardly refuse to go. Mama made a big salad filled with all sorts of good things – dried figs, strawberries, three kinds of cheese, rocket, bacon bits – and my father bought half a sheep, cut up by the butcher who sold it. Oupa would have been appalled, had he known. ‘A boer cuts up his own meat,’ he would have said.
Everyone was expected to bring something. Some wives made puddings or baked cakes. One of the other senior men brought a parcel of boerewors so heavy that I saw one of the ladies stagger under its weight. A junior passport-control officer came from his car carrying a case of beer on one shoulder. Only Snake Wilson was not seized by the spirit of generosity. He bought a small packet of sausage rolls. ‘But what can you expect from him?’ Mama said.
Mister Brown and his wife lived in a townhouse that had almost no garden. So he had asked Snake Wilson if his house could be used for the occasion. Apparently Snake had seen it as an honour. He lived alone in a house on an acre of land that he had inherited and was eager to seize any opportunity to be treated as an equal by men with families.
That night, some twenty employees of the department with their families, close to a hundred people in all, descended on Snake’s home in Westville. The braaivleis fires were made in three half forty-four-gallon fuel drums. A hard, slow-burning bushveld wood, like the stuff that grew on Oupa’s farm, was used. It made excellent coals that retained their heat long after the fire had died.
Snake’s big yard was ideal for the occasion. The fires were made under the mango trees near the house. The adult men gathered round them to braai the meat when the fires were ready. Most of the women were in the kitchen, doing things to the salads and desserts. This is not to say that the men and women did not mix at these gatherings but, when they did, husbands and wives were usually together. The small children ran around Snake’s big lawns like mad things, playing a game that involved hiding in the shrubbery. That left the teenagers, five or six of us, besides my sisters, doing our best not to look spare. There should have been more teenagers, but some must have persuaded their parents to let them stay home or go to the movies or something. I envied them.
Having attended many such occasions with my parents, I knew that the way to get into the company of the adult men was to be helpful around the fire. If you were bringing wood, stoking the coals, turning the meat, opening beer bottles or anything of the sort, no one chased you away. You were seen as a good kid and eventually you sort of faded into the scenery so that, if one of the men told a dirty joke that your mother may not have wanted you to hear, no one even noticed you. Even my father did not seem to be aware of my presence. I learnt a lot that way, I told myself. After all the time that has passed since then, I cannot say what useful information I gathered, but I believed I was receiving an education into the world of men.
I was busy piling wood in readiness for the fires when I heard someone asking, ‘Shouldn’t we put some more wood on the fire?’ and Sergeant van der Vyfer, the security policeman, replying, ‘You can leave it to Chris, he knows what to do.’ And they did leave it to me. That was exactly the sort of position in the group I had been aiming at. I quickly packed more wood on the fire.
A provincial rugby final was coming up. That was a major topic of conversation, men on both sides explaining at length why their teams were going to win. The fishing off St Lucia, where one of the men had recently spent a weekend and big ones had been biting, also drew a lot of interest. He had even hauled in a one-and-a-half-metre Zambezi shark. Another member of the party had been hunting in northern Zululand, which was good as long as you could stay clear of the conservation authorities.
Stimulated by the beer, the talk grew louder with each bottle. Everyone wanted his story told and his opinions heard, preferably before he had to listen to those of anyone else. My father said little but, beer in hand, he was trying to look as jovial as anyone else.
It was into this that Snake Wilson tried to inject a more serious note. In one of the rare pauses in conversation, he asked if anyone had seen the report on what a certain liberal politician had said to a newspaper about our government destabilising the newly independent Mozambique. Before he had finished, Sergeant van der Vyfer had him in a bear-like headlock. ‘No, old Snake,’ he
said. ‘This is not the time for that sort of talk.’
To the amusement of all, Snake tried to continue, despite the arm clamped round his neck. ‘I just wanted to make the point about the need for added vigilance—’
Van der Vyfer shook him roughly enough almost to throw him off his feet. ‘No, old Snake. Tomorrow we will all be vigilant. Tonight, we’re talking rugby, drinking beer and eating braaivleis.’
At this, everyone laughed, even my father. Despite being in his home, most of the men did not take Snake seriously. The security policeman released Snake, who stumbled away from the laughing circle of men. My next action was not planned, but it helped to expand the knowledge I was always seeking. I went across to Snake and asked if he would help me with the fires. ‘Of course, Chris,’ he mumbled, more to himself than to me. ‘They can be such a bunch of buffoons,’ he added. ‘Nothing is serious to them.’
‘I was interested in what you were saying,’ I said. Out of earshot of the main group I confided in Snake that I too could see the need for added vigilance.
His eyes brightened at that. Here at last was someone who, like himself, had broader interests than beer and rugby. ‘Things are up to us, the younger generation,’ he said earnestly. ‘The older generation have had their day. Look at them there, drinking beer and making jokes.’ It was said with real disgust. Snake was a man who believed in what men like him and my father were doing. In his view, no one appreciated that they were saving the country. He leant towards me like a comic book caricature of a conspirator. ‘But you are like me. I could see that when you worked in your father’s office for those few weeks. You were serious about your work. I liked that.’
The group of men had moved a few steps away from the fire. I started laying the meat out on the grills. Snake followed me. ‘I learnt to spot suspicious characteristics with every shade of colour,’ I said.