He went back to his old law practice and continued to play savior to those with eviction notices, and the tsotsis of Mkhumbane were overjoyed to have him back.
His insatiable longing for the affections of women caused many a catfight at his office. He had liaisons with several secretaries at the firm, who couldn’t resist the charms of a powerful lawyer. Such rendezvous don’t remain secret for long. Some of these young, wide-eyed secretaries thought he may be a ladder to better things in the firm; some were seduced by his charisma. He drank more than usual to try and forget Nonceba and the sting of rejection by Zola. He worked during the day, slept with the secretaries when the urge called, and drank at night with his friends in the shebeen.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sipho was nursing a humongous hangover when Joy, his personal secretary, showed up at his house looking like she was heavily drugged. It was mid-morning on a Saturday and her big eyes looked glazed and her lips were dry, as though she hadn’t eaten in days. It was only then that he noticed how much weight she had lost. A chill ran through his body as she took a seat next to him on his veranda. Then she dropped a bombshell that left him feeling dazed.
“I am pregnant with your child,” she sighed heavily. She wasn’t happy. She was much younger than Sipho and had been planning to study. She didn’t want to remain a secretary for the rest of her life. She felt stupid for falling for the charms of her boss.
Sipho’s ears rang. In the back of his mind, he had always known this day would come; he was reckless when it came to women. His sharp brain seemed to shrink and turn upside down when his lower regions inflated. To those like Nonceba, who insisted on a condom, he obliged. But he always seemed to assume that it was the responsibility of the woman to deal with prevention measures for pregnancies and, God forbid, diseases.
The stricken Joy made Sipho feel guilty. He knew that he was in the wrong. He was older, and she was in a subordinate position. He held her close. “Please don’t cry, baby, I am here. I am not going anywhere. Whatever you decide to do, I am here for you.”
Her body stiffened. “What do you mean, whatever I decide to do?” She extracted herself from his arms to look him in the eyes with guarded fury.
Sipho felt helpless. “I mean, if you want to keep the baby or not,” he said hesitantly, pointing to her stomach that seemed rather flat now.
“Oh no, I was not alone in this. You were there grunting sweet nothings when you planted your dirty little tadpoles. Now you want me to make this decision alone!”
She was angry at herself because she knew that she wasn’t the only woman in his life. But by the time she found out about the others, it was too late. She was hooked, in love beyond logic, and she couldn’t bring herself to dump him. She loved him and hated him at the same time. “I am telling you now that I am not getting rid of this baby, and I expect you to come home to my parents to explain yourself.”
The submissive Joy was gone. Sipho stood there, shocked by this transformation. His head was throbbing from the previous day’s whiskey. He simply nodded, wanting to get rid of her so that he could get some sleep.
After a month of tension and dirty looks from Joy, who spent considerable time heaving in the toilet, things turned south. She had gone for routine tests and her last visit to the clinic brought dark news. Not only was she pregnant, she was also HIV-positive. When she heard this, she fainted in the counselor’s office.
The counselor used the telephone number Joy wrote on the form to call Sipho. “Sir, we need you to please come to our rooms as soon as possible. Your girlfriend is having some complications.”
Sipho’s heart flipped, skipping beats as he felt fear spread throughout his body. Getting a call from this kind of clinic turns everyone’s knees into jelly. The ride to Addington Hospital seemed to be on automatic pilot. His legs became heavy, each step labored, like a slow motion scene in an action movie.
He never smoked, but at that moment he craved a long drag of a cigarette. He stood in front of the counselor’s door but didn’t knock. He had an overwhelming urge to turn around and run as fast as he could.
But the door opened before he could do that. The counselor had a kind face. She looked at him across the doorway, and smiled a sad little smile, recognizing his fear. She was familiar with it by now. She was trained to calm people down and shift their minds from doom to questions of how they could manage the disease in their bloodstream.
Joy was sleeping peacefully on the office floor with her shoes off. By now a small bump was showing on her tummy, but her frame remained slender. “Joy came in for a test. I had to call you because I see that you are the father of the baby she is carrying. She will need your help to get home. She’s resting now. Let’s give her a little time and then you can take her home.”
“What tests? What were the results? Why did she faint?” Sipho asked all these questions without giving the counselor space to explain.
“Well, it is up to Joy to explain to you when she wakes.”
As if on cue, Joy woke up with a start, looking confused. When her eyes registered Sipho, she went for him, punching him in the face and screaming at him. “You are poison, you have killed me. I am dying of a disease I never thought would reach me.” She was spitting venom like a disturbed cobra. “I thought you were a clean, decent man, but you were whoring all over town. Look at us now. Don’t even deny it, I know it was you. I was fine before you came along.”
Then she collapsed on a chair and cried some more.
Her weave was disheveled. She looked like a demented woman. The counselor handed her a brown paper bag to breathe into to calm herself.
Sipho sat there, his face throbbing from her punches. Surrender, the voice in his head kept repeating. He had to surrender himself to the news. He calmly asked the counselor if he could take a test of his own. He knew it was a formality because every part of his being knew he had to have it. He didn’t have enough fingers and toes to count the women he had been with. Finally, he took exhausted Joy home with him.
After all her ranting, she simply shut down, and fell into a fitful sleep.
For Sipho, it was the longest night of his life as he waited till the next day for the results. Images of his numerous women flashed through his mind, but it was the thought of Zola that brought a lump in his throat.
By morning, his pillow was soaked with the salty tears of his regrets.
During the counseling, he could hear the words coming from the kind looking nurse in front of him, but he felt as if he was underwater. Although he expected the result to be positive, confirmation made him sob for the lives he had managed to ruin.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
When Sipho came to visit them, Mvelo was happy to see him as usual. But she was surprised when this time, instead of letting her see him off, he asked Zola to walk him to his car.
A dark cloud hung over their shack from that day onwards. Zola’s silence became intense again. She visited the clinic regularly, and her demands for attending church became urgent. She and Mvelo became exemplary devotees.
One day she sat Mvelo down and reminded her of the day Sipho came from America. With hot tears pouring from her eyes, she said she had exposed herself to HIV that day. She had never been the one to talk with Mvelo about sex openly, but that day she spoke to her about having not used protection with Sipho since his return. Ever since she had broken up with Sipho, she had not been friendly with men.
Mvelo felt a heavy stone take a seat in her heart. She hated Sipho for making Zola cry again. It seemed to her that her mother’s destiny revolved around Sipho. It took her time to be able to look him in the eye again.
Zola displayed the classic symptoms of someone who was confronting matters of life and death. She told Mvelo she better hurry up and get over her hate because life was leaving her behind. It was the fear of the disease that made Mvelo so angry. She hated Sipho for infecting her mother and for breaking up with Nonceba. She hated Joy because she wanted a scapegoat; she wanted to blame her for
the misery that had come into their lives.
The day that Zola told her about her HIV status, Mvelo took a long walk through the maze of shacks, without purpose, just trying to get away from her tears. A protruding, sharp piece of corrugated iron scratched her leg and she bled. But instead of pain, she felt a calming, warm sensation, and the sight of the blood gave her all sorts of thoughts about how to cure Zola. Under the moonlight, she stared at her blood rushing out of her body and she felt a release from the pressure that was building inside of her. She looked at her clean blood and thought it could be possible. Some clever doctor could drain out the infected blood from Zola and inject Mvelo’s blood into her.
Now, on some nights, after listening to Zola quietly crying herself to sleep, Mvelo would wake up and cut her flesh with a razor, to see the blood and feel that calming feeling again.
Two months after receiving the news, Joy swallowed Jeyes Fluid and was found in the fetal position in the office toilet. Her suicide note simply read: “Wolves in sheep’s clothing who pretend to be lovers… You might win some but you just lost one.”
The unfinished business began aggressively eating away at Sipho. He deteriorated quickly after Joy’s death. His legs refused to carry him. His weight dropped off, leaving his tall frame looking shockingly weak. Zola and a group of home-based care volunteers visited him where he was holed up in his house, feasting on self-pity. They cleaned the house together, but Zola insisted on preserving his dignity by being the only one who changed his clothes and sponge-bathed him.
Mvelo simply shut down. She wanted to erase him from her memory. She was angry with Zola and banned her from talking about him to her.
The rumor mill was spinning. People spoke in whispers. It was then that Mvelo dreamed of him crying and drowning. In the dream, she frantically tried to pull him out, but he let go of her hand. “If you ever believed anything about me, believe this, I love you,” he said and he let go, smiling. She woke up shaking and soaking wet. She had to see him at least one last time because, even deep in her rage, she knew that she still loved him as the only father she had ever had.
When she told Zola about the dream, Zola sat her down and said: “I know you think I am foolish for doing what I am doing but I tell you that if I hold a grudge against he who has done me wrong, I would die quickly and leave you behind. And I am not ready for that. And as for you carrying hate at such a young age, I am afraid it will weigh you down and you will let life pass you by. It is not for Sipho that I do the things that I do, it is for me. It is to keep me healthy and alive with a purpose. Besides, we both really did love him once; that love doesn’t just die. I think it is stifled deep in your little chest. That’s why you are dreaming things now.”
As Zola spoke, Mvelo saw that her mother had really shifted the way she thought about things. She seemed calmer and wiser.
Mvelo visited Sipho after months of avoiding him, and she gasped from shock. He was a shadow of his former self. His eyes filled with tears when he saw her, all grown-up and tall, a version of Zola. They didn’t say a word. Mvelo sat by his bed and they just looked at each other. They talked with their eyes and absorbed each other. At that moment, Mvelo shifted the protective stone she had in her heart and allowed the pain and frustration to scrub her clean and make her feel again.
Sipho became weaker physically, but his spirit remained. On good days, he still managed to make them laugh.
He gave the house to his brother, the river debris. Maybe if Mzokhona had a place to settle he would change, Sipho hoped. His practice was sold for next to nothing to his partners. Since he was not married, his affairs were handled by his mother with the help of his lawyer friends. He agreed to everything, but he stubbornly refused her offer to move him back home to eMpendle. He chose the hospice at Addington Hospital instead.
While he was there, he made the nurses laugh and gave comic relief to the other patients with his jokes. Some days were better; others unbearable. He sank in and out of melancholy, especially when the topic of Nonceba or Zola came up. Maybe it was guilt that ravaged him more than the illness itself.
The hospice was his last home. He never got to face Nonceba. One day they were all laughing, he was telling Zola a joke and the intensity of his laughter went up a notch, then his heart gave in. He died laughing.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Sipho’s life affirming jokes had a way of softening even the hardest of hearts. He had been a shining light in the middle of sickness and death at the hospice. The staff nicknamed him Patch Adams, even though he wasn’t a physician, because he seemed to want to cure with laughter.
When Zola realized he was gone, she walked slowly to the window. She wanted to see if anything had changed outside, if the world was mourning him. But the grey clouds stared back at her, unaffected. The ocean still playfully teased the tourists, as hawkers shouted the prices of their trinkets. The ladies of the night, now trading in broad daylight, took drags on their cigarettes and seduced the passers-by as always. Drug pushers exchanged Durban Poison for money with clean but frustrated citizens in suits. The blind man with the voice of an angel still sat on the corner singing “Summertime,” except the living wasn’t easy.
Zola began to rant incessantly at God and the ancestors. Then she made a selfless supplication for Sipho, giving God and the ancestors a list of things he liked, starting with the moon. “He loved the moon,” she said, “welcome him with the moon. And he loved women, ancient ones, make sure they are plentiful at his reception. Then the children. Let there be sounds of laughing children; that will make him happy. Oh yes, and music. Not the sad kind, but the drums and raw voices of African maidens. Send them with Mfaz’ Omnyama, the maskandi legend, strumming his guitar.”
Zola had always known that she loved Sipho, even with all the hardship and hurt he had caused her. She couldn’t stand his women, but on that day she gave him up freely and selflessly.
Mvelo just broke down and cried; she was relieved. Finally, it was the day of his forgiveness.
His grumpy old hag of a mother was mortified when she heard his final wish that he had conveyed to Zola. It was just like Sipho, a joker till the last. He had asked for all the women at his funeral to remove their undergarments and place them on his coffin. Under no circumstances was his mother willing to announce this, of course, but it did give Zola a laugh. Both Sipho’s request and his mother’s reaction. Zola had often wondered how it was that Sipho came from this prune-faced woman.
His mother was determined that Zola would not get to smell a cent of the money that he had wanted to leave her. The old woman was not going to tell her that he had pleaded and begged that his money and the house should go to Zola and Mvelo, but she would not hear of it. “Under the tail of the donkey,” is what she said to herself. She was fuming that her son had chosen this young, unmarried city girl to inherit his money over her. His words were like a spear to her heart. It reminded her of Sipho’s father who was swallowed by Ndongazibovu, the red walls of Johannesburg, and its young girls with curves she did not have.
When they all gathered in the hall to bid him farewell, the men were bewildered. “uSipho ubeyisoka lamanyala.” He was a man who had a way with women. How does one man have so many women loving him?
“Eish, my bro, I mean all his yesterdays are here,” his drunkard brother said out loud, causing laughter among the somber men. “What is it that he had that we don’t have?”
They scratched their heads, knowing that their yesterdays wouldn’t even speak to them alive, let alone come to their funerals. Some stood in a stupor. Others drooled openly at the sight and smell of Sipho’s yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows: tall and short, young and old, fat and thin, they were beautiful in their collective sadness.
The sun was out and the sky was clear, the bluest blue. It was serene like the clarity of his mind at the end of his life. After they had viewed his body, the sky collapsed on them. It rained fiercely, large refreshing drops. The earth and the women soaked it up. The soil smelled d
elicious. Women stood in it and stretched out their arms for it to kiss them. They kicked off their high heels and, barefooted, they laughed and cried as the men carefully lowered him down into his final resting place, the greedy earth.
Mvelo desperately said a prayer, hoping it would spare her mother, this insatiable earth that continues to swallow without chewing and greedily gorges itself.
And just as Sipho would have wished it, like the screech of an old-fashioned record with a needle being pulled across it, a cacophony of sirens interrupted the sad music that had accompanied the coffin into the earth, and disturbed the ceremony. The bikes of four traffic cops escorted a distinguished-looking, black Mercedes that came to a standstill in the parking lot. The music stopped as everyone turned to watch, and Sipho’s mother let out a surprised cry as a lady about her age but taller, well-groomed, and fitter, stepped out. She was wearing a bright red dress and a hat with a long shiny black feather of some exotic bird; expensive pearls adorned her ears and neck.
A chauffeur in black stood to attention alongside the car. She shooed away the traffic cops on motorbikes that had been clearing traffic for her. They touched their hats, nodded, and were off. Then she glided towards everyone assembled there, chest out, back straight, shoulders steady and each step precise. She looked as though she had been a ballet dancer in her youth.
The crowd was silent as she got closer. She went straight to Sipho’s mother and demanded: “Harriet, what do you think you are doing? How can you bury Danny without telling me? After everything I have done for you, you decide to cut me out like this?” She was so angry, she was shaking. She spoke perfect isiZulu and there were murmurs of surprise from the crowd.
What came next shocked everyone. MaMdletshe squared up to her. “His name is Sipho, not Danny, Julia, and I don’t owe you anything. But before you accuse me of being ungrateful, you should know that I did come to your house to notify you and your security guards chased me away.”
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