The Eternal Audience of One

by Rémy Ngamije

  The walk did not just happen by itself. Like most things it had a genesis. In Séraphin’s case, it commenced on a tiled kitchen floor in Kigali. He was an awkward bundle of clambering hands and dragged knees fuelled by a biological need to move, exploring the giant, incomprehensible world of Guillome and Therése’s young marriage. Affection and attention were abundant in the profuse quantities only firstborns can know and the curriculum of life was thin. Eat, sleep, and be adorable. He excelled at those.

  And silence. He excelled at silence, too.

  Séraphin was quiet for a baby. Guillome and Therése panicked often in his infancy, checking on him when he went hours without crying, waking up afraid at general witching and parental bitching hours to see if he was still alive. They would find him asleep. Sometimes he would be awake and regard them with inquisitive eyes. The same eyes would orientate him around the house, perpetually amazed by what lay just a bit ahead of him. In his early attempts at walking he stood like a tottering totem pole, ready to fall from the exertion of finally becoming a biped. Then, finally, after a few seconds of savouring the new mobility, he would fall backwards onto his bottom.

  Practice, as it always does, eventually delivered perfection. It was not long before he put one foot in front of the other, stuttering, falling, rising, and then repeating.

  With each step, the world became more complicated. Yves halved the attention and inflated the costs of achievement; Séraphin had to constantly up the ante on toddler activities to remain relevant. Soon, Yves and Éric would form a cartel of cuteness and alienate the elder brother to the challenging activities of learning how to tie his shoes, keeping quiet in adult company, and eating with cutlery.

  At some point, Séraphin learned how to run, and the world became a treadmill track beneath his feet. He would dash around the house in the quiet Parklands neighbourhood of Nairobi after they moved to Kenya to avoid beatings, become a blur in the primary schoolyard. In high school his speed helped him on the basketball court and on the athletics track.

  But before his physiology settled into its modern athletic form it was a gang of knees, an ambush of elbows, and a plague of pimples with a breaking voice which croaked along to pop and punk rock riffs on the radio. The war of hormones raging through his body would make itself known with some changes in temperament and tastes, shoes that no longer fit, rules which no longer applied to him, or a little more reach on the basketball court when he jumped for a rebound.

  It all happened so fast, as things do in retrospect. One moment he was crawling, the next he was walking. Then he was running. And then the world was running away with him. Grades slipped by at speed, the present day relinquishing its temporary conquests to the next unpredictable moment.

  Eventually the puberty storms broke and his physical form was cast, finally, into the hint of the shape of the man to come. By the end of high school Séraphin’s height was just one of the many reasons he looked down at most people. At the end of the Great Sulk, Séraphin was eager to be wherever his family was not. Remms University in Cape Town would help with that. The novelty and distance of both offered an exciting prospect.

  Séraphin’s first steps in Cape Town were hesitant ones. They were taken in the dingy, crowded, and noisy air of Cape Town station, where trains, buses, and taxis converged in the morning in a rare mixture of race, class, and privilege, as the city gobbled up its daily supply of labour. And again in the evening when it belched it back towards the surrounding suburbs.

  Séraphin hadn’t anticipated quite such a mixture in the station precinct. The rickety tables displaying counterfeit designer sunglasses, jackets, and perfumes were unexpected. Here were Congolese – Brazzaville and Kinshasa – belting out the prices of their goods. “Gucci belts for two hundred rands! Prada sunglasses for one hundred!” Coloured women and men with teeth missing selling bunches of grapes and downcast sunflowers. A whole bucket of the wilting sunflowers could be acquired for twenty. West African pidgin – extraction unknown – could be heard nearby from a stall that sold cellphone covers. A Pakistani-looking man was peddling pirated CDs and DVDs. A Somalian with a high, smooth forehead sat near a table laden with sweets, packets of crisps, and a cooler-box stuffed with ice and multicoloured cans of fizzy cool drinks.

  The dirtiness of the station was disappointing. Was this actually Cape Town? It was.

  This was Cape Town station before the World Cup, before the national need to stand on international ceremony smeared a veneer of cream-coloured, polished tiles across the its floor; before a helpful announcer came over the PA system to announce a delayed train or a changed platform. The way one normally found out about such things was by standing on a platform for twenty minutes, consulting a watch in frustration, and then, at the last minute, sprinting towards a departing train, the LED numbers of the train home pulling further away from punctuality. The arrival of the football spectacle was like the second landing of missionaries. The heathen food and sweets vendors were pushed out and the existing fast food chains were proselytised to newer, higher health standards. The new religion of customer service was hastily pressed upon the station. It was practised by rote, its tenets never really taken to heart. Beneath the propriety of the present lurked the pestilence of public service indifference which would flare out on days station cashiers were tired of being asked questions about late trains or shrugging security guards who huddled together and watched crowds of commuters suck in their tummies to squeeze past malfunctioning turnstiles.

  “It isn’t working, sissie. Use the next one. No, the next one. Thank you.”

  But when Séraphin first arrived in Cape Town the station was lit by a dirty second-hand light. The absence of elegance and the prevalence of ordinary sameness clung to the grey walls. He had expected glitzy stores, restaurants and cafés, or at least clear signs that might point him to a taxi rank where he could catch a ride to Remms. He found none of these things. The disappointment was stomached. The city would surely have other opportunities to impress. He dragged his suitcase behind him towards a security guard sitting next to a shoe repair shop. He asked where he could catch a taxi to his university.

  “Which one? UCT, Cape Tech, or Western Cape?” The guard was annoyed by having his bored staring at the crowd disturbed. Worse, it was being intruded upon by a lost university student. It was the season for them. They would descend upon the city like locusts, buzzing with questions.

  “Remms, sir,” Séraphin said. “Can you tell me where I can find a taxi, please?”

  The politeness in Séraphin’s voice softened the guard a little. He pointed Séraphin to a wide exit. “It should be eighty rands to Remms. If they charge you more, they’re cheating you.” An extra, unsolicited kindness.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Séraphin wheeled his suitcase towards the exit and the line of taxis outside. The drivers were huddled together, talking and laughing, and when they saw him approaching they called out to him, each keen to deliver him to his destination.

  “Where to, boss?”

  “Remms? This way, boetie!”

  “Brother, come to this one.”

  Séraphin asked what the fare was and they all shrank away from stating the cost in the open air. One said, “We’ll discuss it on the way there.”

  “Eighty rands,” said Séraphin.

  “Hayibo! At least one hundred rands!” said one.

  Séraphin stood for a while, uncertain whether he should pay the price they wanted. Just then, a driver at the end of the line waved a hand. Séraphin walked towards him.

  “Where are you going?” The accent was definitely francophone.

  “Remms.”

  “How much?”

  Séraphin hesitated and then said, firmly, “Eighty.”

  The driver winced visibly and took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s go.”

  The driver was from Benin, his name was Idriss. He was chatty, telling Séraphin about how new students in Cape Town loved to party and drink too much. “Sometimes the
y cannot even walk. Can you imagine?” He looked in the rearview mirror at Séraphin for confirmation of shock. Séraphin shrugged. He knew nothing of drinking into stupors, or lying drunk on pavements in Long Street. “You look like a sensible boy. No crazy partying for you, eh? You must study hard. Namibia? I have driven some Namibians. Some students. To UCT, to UWC. And Remms. They all look smart when they arrive. I say to them, ‘You must study hard.’ And then they say to me they are studying hard when I drop them off at the clubs. Sometimes three clubs in one night? Three! When I pick them up they are drunk. You know what they say to me? They say, ‘We work hard and we play hard.’ What is this nonsense? Work hard, play hard? There is only work. No time for playing.” Séraphin offered tidbits of agreement here and there.

  Idriss reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a battered business card without a name, just a number. “If you ever need a taxi anywhere, you call me. Give my number to your friends too. I will drive you anywhere you need to go for cheap-cheap. Waterfront, Table Mountain, Camps Bay, Hout Bay, Cape Point – anywhere, I will take you. I charge you a good price.” Séraphin said he would be sure to give him a call. “Good. My brother, you are quiet. Cape Town is not scary. There are many Namibians here. You will see.” He let out a little laugh.

  “I’m actually from Rwanda. I live in Namibia.”

  “O-ho! Rwandan? Also many Rwandans here. You will see. Namibia, eh? That is a nice place, no? I have heard it is a good place. Maybe good for a little business, no?”

  Séraphin debated whether to engage in a full-blown debate about his reluctant hometown. He said it was nice.

  “Nice? My friend, for people like us anywhere but home is heaven.”

  Séraphin smiled at the us. Idriss dropped him off at Remms, and Séraphin handed over a crisp hundred rand note, telling him to keep the change, a generosity lost on the moment since Idriss made no effort to offer any. “You are clearly not from here, my brother. I can see. Anyone can see. Mais, merci beaucoup. And, remember, you call me whenever you need a taxi.”

  Idriss drove away, leaving Séraphin with his suitcase at the front of his university residence. The next time he took a taxi – from Remms to the Waterfront – he was charged what he later found out was the standard fare for tourists and other foreign personnel who did not know any better. Maybe it was something in his comportment that made the driver think he could be swindled. When Séraphin told Idriss about the incident a while later, he had laughed and said, “My brother, like I said, you don’t look like you’re from around here. We can always tell, us drivers. It is in the way you walk, maybe. Or the way you ask for a taxi. You must tell, you must never ask. I am not supposed to tell you these things, but we are from the same place, so I must help.” Idriss’s grouping of struggles amused Séraphin. He resolved from then on that when he needed a ride it would be Idriss he would call. He also resolved not to look like an out-of-towner. He would fix the walk. The only solution was evolution, and like many jumps forward, the real thrust came from further behind.

  To understand Australopithecus shuffling along, and Cro-Magnon striding into Homo habilis one has to go back to the swamp water or the ocean to find ground zero for change. Perhaps it is to avoid predation, or the thing is just curious, also desperate for new horizons. So out the water the thing comes, crawling up the sand, shambling off into the woods. The thing walks, and then it runs, and then time runs away with it … We catch up with it in Séraphin needing to fix the way he walks so he is not overcharged by Cape Town taxi drivers.

  For Séraphin, it started with violin strings, gentle at first, rising in volume as the introductory seconds of the song passed by. The crash of late nineties Brit rock was sublime. The song’s lyrics were largely misunderstood for years the same way a line from a nursery rhyme will appear silly at first and then become a comforting mantra when the veil of adulthood has been lifted. The nineties had freshly become nostalgia, looped in one or two-hour segments in VH1’s programming schedule, confirming, if there was ever any debate, that Richard Ashcroft knew how to walk down a crowded pavement. His gaunt frame put one long leg in front of the other. He yielded the pavement for no man, woman, pram, or car, and his steely eyes contemplated the near future with melancholic detachment, lamenting the bittersweetness of life. The message was clear: walk like Richard Ashcroft.

  The completed Séraphinic March of Progress was the walk he had now, the one where faces and bodies moved out of his way as he walked the streets of Cape Town, that bittersweet Mother City.

  Cape Town woke up early, ready to make some richer, eager to reward and at day’s end it was diplomatic in its disappoints. A new day would come tomorrow, the city said. The shops and the tourist traps, crowded with faces from overseas, were carefully removed from the crowded shopping centres where the lives lived therein and around would not make for good T-shirt slogans. The beaches, warmed from the sun, skirted freezing water so that it was impossible to get a two-for-one deal at the seaside. The plush hotels crowded together in town for safety, security, and exclusivity and turned their gaze away from the sprawling townships which looked like spilled porridge on a floor, nobody’s responsibility to clean up. The calm whiteness which soothed, like a massage, without really mending the torn, sore black muscle underneath.

  And now, in his final year of study, for Séraphin it was bittersweet indeed. Sweet that had experienced this city, bitter that he might eventually leave it all behind.

  The bus had arrived at the station in the early afternoon, unprecedentedly ahead of schedule. Séraphin helped Annika find a taxi that would drop her off at her UCT residence, passing a favour on through time by telling her not to pay more than a hundred rand. Idriss hadn’t been available to fetch him from the station today as he had done for the past six years, but he’d sent a younger driver, Jean, in his place. Jean was maybe a few years older than Séraphin. He was from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Séraphin told Jean he was Namibian. To most foreigners, Séraphin would call himself Rwandan so he could sigh about troubles of immigration, the memory of native food, music, and culture; the strangeness of white Capetonians who complained when everything could be distinctly worse; or the meekness of black South Africans who seemed to complain but never take meaningful action against the forces of history which sought to keep them living beneath their dignity. In such instances, the difference of citizenship provided community and immunity from ostracism. Séraphin was Namibian only when it facilitated easy geographic understanding of where he lived, especially when it was clear from some prior remark or comment in a conversation that the speaker would have no inkling of where Rwanda was. Lying to Jean about his origins, though, seemed unnecessary and Séraphin felt guilty about not telling him he was Rwandan, especially since Jean seemed in awe of him having Remms as his travel destination.

  “You study at Remms? That is a good university. I would like to go there too.” Jean said he was interested in studying engineering as soon as he could scrape the money together. Séraphin looked for some opening in the conversation to tell him that he was actually Rwandan, that they shared, in some way, more than a taxi ride through Cape Town. But the moment failed to materialise and the truth slipped away. “What are you studying?” Jean asked.

  “Law.”

  “Maybe one day I will need a lawyer, eh? I can give you a call.”

  In the rear-view mirror Jean gave him a smile but Séraphin found it hard to return it. Instead, he looked out of the window at the clear skies which told of a fine January day. The talk turned to the future, a thing which reached out in front of him and dragged him behind it. Jean drove out of the city centre and up through Vredehoek, with the bulk of Table Mountain looming up in front of them, and pulled up outside the Remms postgraduate residence. Séraphin paid his fare and added a generous tip to make up for the nationality lie.

  Séraphin made his way to his room on the top floor, enjoying the commanding view of the Cape Town city centre spread below him when he drew the curtains a
side: the blueness of the water, the cranes lining the shore, the ships floating in the harbour, and the ant-like cars scurrying on the streets and highways. He leaned out of the window as though to thrust himself into the picture of industry, to become one with the activity. Unpacking his suitcase and arranging his room was quick work, done in a few minutes, leaving him with enough time to walk down to the cluster of grocery stores which supplied the campus with accessible shopping.

  Richard Ashcroft led the way, Séraphin followed.

  In the aisles he browsed for food and toiletries. As a last-minute thought, he got condoms. As he pulled the packet of twelve off the shelf he could not help smiling at a memory of a particular day in his first year when, after the initial shock and pleasure of arriving in Cape Town had lowered his financial inhibitions, he found himself having to choose between buying baked beans and condoms.

  He had gone for the condoms.

  “You can fuck on an empty stomach, trust me, but you can’t go to war without a helmet.”

  The wisdom was pronounced much later, of course, and to his core audience who, at the time were squashed around a table in a crowded café. Everyone laughed, but some averted their eyes. Richard and Godwin were the only ones who admitted to numerous slip-ups in the deliberate absence of slip-ons.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t lie. There’ve been moments—many moments—when I just went in raw.” Godwin shook his head as he narrated his follies. Richard nodded along like a parishioner hearing a preacher deliver a sermon which addressed a soreness in his soul. “I know it was dumb but, eish, I just had to,” said Godwin.