The Eternal Audience of One

by Rémy Ngamije

  The waitresses of The Good Night were uniformly svelte. Their waifish fashion was oxymoronically bespoke and when they brought tables their bills they would slip the paper into a tin can along with the slip of poetry or prose of the day. It was commonplace to find a line from Pound, Poe, Frost, Yeats, Keats, Orwell, or Hemingway. After noting the potential danger of being caught in an activist hashtag about literary under-representation Morrison, Angelou, Hughes, and Baldwin were conveniently rolled up next to the evening’s list of charges.

  The Good Night’s deep red, dark green, and brown walls were decorated with rotating exhibitions of local art, some of which was for sale, and booths provided a warm ambience. A passing waitress carrying a tray of empty glasses and crumb-strewn plates saw Séraphin standing in the entrance way and walked to him. “Hello. Would you like a table?”

  “Yes, please. For eight people. What about that one?” His chosen table was in a booth near the middle of the room.

  She nodded. “That’ll work. You can have a seat. I’ll come by.”

  Sans_Seraph—HiLos_Of_E: I’m here. Got us a table. How far are you guys?

  There was no immediate response. Séraphin put his phone on the table and leaned back in the booth, spreading his arms across the backrest.

  The waitress returned. She had dark hair tied in a tight bun, dark brown lipstick, tortoise-shell glasses, and a soft demeanour despite the sombre presentation. Her face, neck, and upper shoulders had freckles which reduced in their brownish concentration along the length of her arms. The rest of her was hidden in a black top and high-waisted black jeans. Her name was Fallon. “Would you like anything to drink while you wait for your friends?” she asked.

  “Just water for now,” said Séraphin.

  She returned with a glass of bracing cold water. As she put it down she bit her lower lip while her mind accessed her archived memory. “Have we met before?”

  “Maybe,” said Séraphin. “I come here often with my friends.” He did not recall ever meeting her. The Good Night’s waitress complement changed often. It seemed to have an endless supply of bookish beauties.

  “Possibly,” Fallon said. “Cape Town’s a small place.”

  Séraphin snorted. “Not that small.”

  “When you live here it can be.” Fallon tucked a rogue wisp of hair behind an ear.

  Séraphin said nothing in return. Residence and citizenship always trumped tourism. The transience of his stay in Cape Town never really permitted him to defy any sentiment which came from someone who had been there longer, even though at times he felt as though he had experienced the city more because of his impermanence, diving into its life with the haste of two transit lounge lovers with separate flights and divergent paths, experiencing the rushed joys over which long relationships would claim authoritative knowledge. “Seems large enough to me,” he said.

  “I know you,” Fallon said suddenly. “The Circle Jerk of Joseph Conrad Lecturers – second-year English seminar.”

  “Snap! You were in that class?”

  “I was. That was entertaining,” said Fallon. “You really went off.”

  “I feel a bit embarrassed now, actually.”

  “You had it in for that guy.”

  “I actually didn’t and don’t,” said Séraphin. “Heart of Darkness is okay. Things just fell apart in that seminar when they tried to shove Conrad and Naipaul down our throats. They sounded like they had group orgasms to their literature. I wasn’t buying it.”

  “V. S. Naai-poes, you called him. That last bit was what really got me.”

  “You have to believe my vocabulary became better after that incident.”

  “It seemed just fine to me.” Séraphin and Fallon smiled at each other for a while. Then Séraphin, politely, asked her what she was up to. The question seemed careless to him immediately. Remms graduates were notoriously sensitive about their post-university exploits and anything less than world domination, fame, and fortune seemed like a betrayal of their alma mater’s prestige. Séraphin felt as though he had put her on the spot by forcing her to tell him how she had wound up in her current employment. “I didn’t finish,” Fallon said. “Remms got too expensive.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” said Séraphin. It seemed like a factory line condolence. It also felt strange to have the roles of privilege reversed.

  It was commonplace for black students to disappear from the Remms’ rosters each year due to fee increases. The lines outside the financial aid office were sporadically peppered with white students. In these queues, the shame of family financial straits brought a certain egalitarianism to the form-fillers who patiently sat waiting for their applications to be evaluated. There was no queue-jumping, no shoving, no irritation. The atrium, on most occasions, was saved from silence by idle chatter, and the sound of rustling papers. However, there were unfortunate days when a wail would be heard from a consultant’s office and a student would emerge in tears, clutching the sheaf of their application papers. The hush that descended upon the waiting students was a fine mixture of embarrassment and fear as they waited for their turn to be called and, hopefully, be told that they fell within the ambit of Remms’ financial aid policy.

  Séraphin had sat in the queues, but he had a reason to be more relaxed than all of the other students sitting in the atrium. He was there to cash in on his Remms Undergraduate Scholarship. He had relished the look of envy his fellow queuers had lavished upon him the first time he visited the office. But when he saw one student completely break down in tears when his application was rejected Séraphin’s lofty position became a source of guilt. The student had cried and pleaded and then refused to leave the consultant’s office. Security guards were required to come and remove him and a brief scuffle had ensued before he was half-lifted, half-dragged, clawing onto anything he could hold onto, out of the financial aid office. Campus security guards became a necessity in the atrium after that.

  Fallon, he decided, was not a crier. She had a certain grace as she admitted her exclusion from Remms. “It happens, it happens,” she said. “Money is the one thing one should never be ashamed to be without.”

  “Who said that?” Séraphin asked.

  “I did. Don’t tell anyone, but I put some of my own writings onto the slips we hand out with the bills.”

  “Sneaky and clever,” said Séraphin, taking a sip from his glass.

  “Nobody ever notices, though. Nobody reads them, or nobody bothers to check if the authors they’re attributed to actually said them or existed.”

  “What’s your pen name?” asked Séraphin. “So I can look out for your work.”

  “I have a few. James Boston, Charles Bronten, Harry Martin. Sometimes I use Eli Gaskell.”

  Séraphin’s brow creased before he laughed lightly. “Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Martineau, and Elizabeth Gaskell?” he asked.

  “Well done,” said Fallon. “So you didn’t actually condemn the circle jerkers just for shits and giggles. You actually read.” She flashed a row of exquisite white teeth as she laughed.

  “You made them all male.”

  “There are some truths that’ll only be swallowed if they come from men.”

  “Touché.”

  Fallon was flagged by someone at another table and she excused herself. Séraphin found himself irritated by the sudden deprivation of her company. He waited for a few moments hoping she would return but she became preoccupied with her tables. He turned back to his phone.

  Sans_Seraph—HiLos_Of_E: Do you mofos plan on getting here in this lifetime?

  RichDick: Nearby, man. Coming with Addy. Be there in five-ish minutes.

  BeeEffGee: Also be there in a bit.

  JustSayYaz: Same.

  KimJohnUn: Still on campus, work suddenly got intense. Going to be a bit late.

  Richard’s and Adewale’s arrival brought a welcome end to the tedium that had followed Fallon’s departure. When they walked up to Séraphin’s booth there was an enthusiastic exchange of gree
tings before they sat down.

  “So despite the odds you survived the desert,” said Richard. His ruddy complexion glowed and his hair was closely cropped. He wore a faded Tusker Lager T-shirt, a memento from a bygone trip to Kenya, and slim-fit blue jeans which were tucked into the uppers of dusty coloured chukka boots. Adewale wore a fitted light grey lounge shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His shirt was tucked into a stylish dark blue pair of jeans with the legs neatly rolled up to expose finely chiselled ankles in white plimsoll sneakers. The label at the back of his jeans was as discreet as a customised numberplate on a new sports car. Adewale’s adoration of famous brands was eclipsed only by his adulation for his Christian faith. Richard and Adewale slid into the booth.

  “It wasn’t easy, I’ll tell you that,” Séraphin replied. “How’ve you been?”

  “All good, man,” said Richard. He had spent two weeks in Harare in the December holidays before returning to Cape Town just after New Year’s. “It was cool being there. But, eish, the place is struggling.”

  Richard was busy with his Master’s degree in electrical engineering. After graduating at the end of the year he planned to return to Zimbabwe, foregoing the lucrative prospects of working in a country not crippled by sanctions. “I thought about staying in SA,” Richard said, “but I know I’d feel bad. Even though it’s tough there are people who’re trying to make it work over there. The country’s a mess right now, it’s barely functioning. Most professionals have already left. But there’re some who’re actually trying to keep enough of the country together for when he eventually goes. If he ever goes.”

  The man in question needed no naming. Richard’s family, through mismanagement and family squabbling, had managed to lose their extensive family farm. When the land grabs which crowned Robert Mugabe as the long-serving enemy of white land ownership across the continent were taking place his family were not subject to the violence that littered the front pages of international newspapers and made for scared and paranoid bedtime reading. Richard’s father was the headmaster at St. George’s, one of Harare’s private schools; his mother was the school’s secretary. When the country took the downward tumble they had bussed Richard to live with his cousins in Cape Town. His easy entry into South Africa was facilitated by his British passport. Soon after arriving at Remms, and after spending too much time with Zimbabwean nationalists and a fair number of socialist-leaning South Africans, Richard had renounced his British citizenship. He cast his lot in with the rest of the diaspora who remained tied to the country’s tumultuous present and foggy future. When Richard had told Séraphin and Adewale about the renunciation they had stared at him incredulously. Adewale had actually cursed. Séraphin could not comprehend choosing to walk through life with reduced national and international citizenship. When he asked Richard why he had done it he received nothing more than, “It’s home.”

  “I can’t explain,” Richard said as he stretched in the booth, “you have to see it for yourself. The place sucks right now. Nothing works. But given a choice, all of the Zimbabweans abroad would probably go back home. You’ll never understand how much Zimbos love Zim. When it’s all over they’ll all return.”

  Adewale shook his head. He had vehemently resisted calls from home to visit. “If I went back to Lagos I wouldn’t survive,” he said. “I’ve become too used to the pace of life here. You know how you can never really reintroduce an animal taken from the wild back into the wild? That’s me. If you leave Lagos for too long, you lose the ability to survive in it. It’d be like if you went back to Rwanda now, Séra. You left when you were, what, five or six, right? So you’ve been gone a long time. The dialect is probably different, the politics have definitely changed. And all of those changes have been taking place over a long time. But that’s a small country. Imagine Nigeria. It moves on every single day. With Lagos it’s every single minute. And I haven’t been back in, like, three years. There’s no way I’d make it. You leave and then you’re changed, and when you come back the place has changed too. And you don’t fit into the place, and the place doesn’t try to let you fit in. So you’re stranded. There’s no way I’m going back to Lagos. That place is too wild.”

  Adewale had spent that December working on the initial stages of his doctorate in microbiology, and posting pictures of his African dandy life to his social media networks. In each Adewale would be caught smiling, at a picnic, on a boat cruise, at a seaside restaurant, enjoying life to its sunniest. His captions would encourage the reader to place their faith in God, in His wisdom and in His endless benevolence. Séraphin found Adewale’s dual extravagance and humility amusing. The group often called him Pastor Addy when his reverend streak surfaced, which it tended to do when matters of sex cropped up. Adewale would listen to the group’s stories and then, from a high moral ground, talk about the need for celibacy, steadfastness, and adherence to the teachings of the Word even though he was as promiscuous as everyone else. If, said Séraphin, the group failed to make anything of themselves in their future professions then they ought to start a church with Pastor Addy at its head.

  Sans_Seraph—HiLos_Of_E: We’d cream it. Titties and tithes, guys. Roll up to church in a big Mercedes Benz with “BLE$$ED” on the numberplate.

  Adewale and Séraphin had met at the international students registration office just after Séraphin had been moved from Sobukwe House. Adewale had been standing behind him in the queue. Seeing the younger student shuffling his papers around, Adewale had kindly told Séraphin to arrange his papers in the necessary order.

  The registration officer who attended to Séraphin was a squat woman with short brown hair streaked with auburn highlights. Her lipstick was a thin red line and her hands were fat and stubby. The rings on her hands looked like they constricted the blood flow to her fingers. “You’re Rwandan?” she asked. Séraphin said he was. “But your application says you live in Namibia.” She turned to the officer next to her. “He says he’s from Rwanda, but he lives in Suid-Wes. What should we do with him?”

  “I live in Namibia, ma’am,” said Séraphin. The woman turned back to Séraphin. “It hasn’t been South-West Africa for a while now.” Séraphin’s shoulders had rolled up and then down. “Northern Rhodesia is Zambia, Southern Rhodesia is Zimbabwe, and Bechuanaland is Botswana. History kinda totally happened.”

  They stared at each other for a few seconds. Then her colleague hurriedly said, “Permanent residency means he will go through the SADC procedures.” The registration officer had stamped through all of his forms at speed, as though she wanted to avoid another lesson on modern political geography. As Séraphin was leaving Adewale stopped him at the door and said, “That was funny. You should have seen my registration officer blush. Man, you’re really new here.” He extended his hand.

  “Yes, I am,” said Séraphin, taking it. First Dale, then the registration officer. The year was not even a week old and he was finding himself playing the protagonist in altercations.

  After discovering that they were in the same residence Adewale and Séraphin walked home for lunch together. They had been friends in foreignness since. The quirks of nationality jointly amused and annoyed them. Like how they believed South Africa’s strict immigration and employment policies were just a way to ensure that there were many overqualified barbers and taxi drivers in Cape Town; or how they meticulously maintained files of police-certified copies of any official documents in their possession in case they were needed for an administrative procedure.

  Back in The Good Night, Adewale was still talking about Lagos. “I would die in the traffic,” he said. He paused, as if visualising the mile-long jams, then shook his head violently. “Worse, the hustle would kill me. Everyone in Lagos is on a hustle. If I told people I was working on a PhD project that would change the world the first thing I’d be asked would be if that was my only hustle. Nothing is ever enough in Lagos.”

  When Fallon came by the table Richard and Adewale ordered beer. Séraphin and Fallon smiled at each other without excha
nging words. The next person to arrive was Yasseen. His Liverpool shirt drew jeers from the table.

  “Yaz,” said Séraphin, “we’re at a restaurant with respectable people. How d’you wear that shit outside your house?”

  Yasseen was the most reserved of the group, rarely offering any contradictory additions to conversations, always a willing participant in whatever adventures the more boisterous personalities proposed. Yasseen, Séraphin, and, later, Bianca, sat next to each other in law lectures. It was Yasseen’s duty to shake Séraphin awake when criminal and civil procedure lectures came to an end. The subject matter was so soporific that only someone who could endure the strictures of Ramadan could remain alert throughout the forty-five minute segments of concentrated and overpowering boredom. Bianca had joined the two when the students of her under-represented colour had, one by one, dropped out of law school. Yasseen and Séraphin had welcomed her gladly. She was pretty, foulmouthed, and feisty in lectures that threatened to become whitewashed with ignorance.

  “So what’s been happening while I was away?” Séraphin asked.

  “Just chilling,” Yasseen said. “Not much else.”

  “What? No Muslim girls falling off the righteous bandwagon for you to prey upon? Yaz, I’m disappointed. I thought you were the hijab and hymen ranger, bro.” Yasseen’s toffee complexion heated up and he muttered something to the effect that he might have met a girl. “I knew it,” said Séraphin. “What’s her name? Or their names?”

  “Just one,” said Yasseen.

  “Good man,” said Séraphin. “You need to tell us all about it later. In great detail. You know how much Bianca likes details.”

  “And if you speak of the devil,” said Richard, “she shall appear.”

  Bianca walked to their booth. Olive-skinned and sultry, with long, black hair which fell down her back, eyebrows which were threaded into expressive and suggestive arches when she flicked them up or down in conversation, she commanded a few sly looks from nearby tables, especially in her white dress which strained to keep her curves in check. She hugged them one by one as they stood up and slid out of the booth to greet her. Séraphin hugged her the hardest. “Gotta get a real hug, with the titties mashed in,” he said. “Not these Addy things of hugging women like they’ll break or something.” He could smell the application of a hair straightener on the black curtain which flicked as she slid into the booth.