NO PETS.
I leave Benito with a group of bored children who, like dogs, are not allowed in the high-care wards. I follow streams of jubilant and sombre next-of-kins along corridors to all sorts of wards, mount a flight of stairs to ward E84. The other three beds are empty. Only Amazu is there, sitting at Desiree’s bedside, his eyes red from weeping. I greet him with pity and feel a sudden stir of emotions (his sobs of futile hope, his doomed protest against euthanasia). There is no doubting Amazu’s grief. The matter is not complicated: Desiree is alive, but also dead. I have never been good at comforting people, so I let him sob, whispering his futile prayers. Desiree is ignorant of her suffering. Her lips are dry and peeling, her complexion artificially polished by drips, and that sharp tongue, mute. Death circles her, taking its time, torturing the living. She has not opened her eyes in weeks, says Amazu. ‘It must be dreadful, hearing things you cannot respond to,’ he adds. In the greater scheme of things, Desiree is not much different from the ward furniture. She has put me through living hell, at some subtle level has enjoyed seeing me tortured. So I draw a measure of perspective from this living corpse of a beauty undecided whether to live or die. There is a certain comfort in knowing Desiree will never torment me again; not in the flesh. Maybe this is what love is – accepting the crudest possible treatment with the grace of a wise monk, the selflessness of a saint. It occurs to me she is, in her fifties, at the crossroads, the place where women outgrow the arrogance of youth and embrace the unpredictability of ageing.
How do I tell her what my life has become? That I have learnt to dodge Johannesburg winters by escaping to shopping-mall restrooms, to use the hand driers against the evil chills – also to blow-dry Benito, watch his fur part to reveal pink, shivering flesh. What will she make of this blow-drying of a dog? Will it be to her an act of supreme humanity, or a waste of compassion? Desiree will never understand that my adoration of her has always had a preordained basis, that it was in the greater scheme of the universe, never just some average emotion. She will never understand the nagging heartbreak of being separated from her, the trauma of the fall of Sophiatown, and of my imprisonment. But I, in my heart, still believe that, given enough time, I had in me sufficient poetry and resolve to pursue her until she finally gave in out of raging love – or as the only logical escape from my constant pleadings. It is true that Amazu and I are both suffering, but for sentiments and ponderings of different kinds.
13
Amazu insists I lodge with him, ‘until such time you are back on your feet’. Apart from possible pneumonia, he adds, it is morally unacceptable that I curl under freezing Johannesburg skies, while he has a spare room occupied by an ageing cat. ‘It will be summer in another few weeks,’ I tell him. ‘There is no need to rob your cat of his lodgings.’ Amazu murmurs something about my suicidal tendencies – tendencies confirmed by Desiree on several occasions.
I accompany Amazu to 184 Jan Smuts Avenue in Parkhurst, to the three-bedroom house he now shares with Algebra the cat. It is a chaotic house: a sink full of dirty dishes; lone shoes competing with mathematics textbooks on the floor; stained tea cups, banana peels and pizza boxes on the couches. Algebra sits on the couch between old newspapers and discarded yoghurt containers, the chaos completed by an assortment of toothbrushes, dish cloths, chicken bones and armies of ants. A thin veil of dust coats most of Amazu’s belongings, at which he, mildly embarrassed, protests: ‘From dust we come, to dust we shall return.’
The room I am led into is a small, sun-facing haven with roof-high windows hidden by rusting blinds. There is little in the way of furniture, except for a creaky bed and a defeated couch. There was some attempt at interior decor: sandy wooden floors, cream walls, dusty burgundy blinds, African sculptures and cream and brown bed sheets. A cat’s nest (a wooden box with a red blanket) and a wooden milk bowl are at the centre of the room – a peculiar shrine, blessed with cat fur and urine, in which Algebra engages in matters of cuisine, giving off a distinctive animal smell.
I make a special request: that Algebra the cat continues to live in his room (it is not my intention to displace anyone) as my room-mate. There is evident dislike between Algebra and Benito, with the temperamental dog often expelling the aged white cat.
Amazu’s own room is only slightly more orderly than the rest of the house – as orderly as a neglected horse stable: more mathematics textbooks, fused light bulbs, stray laundry. Yet there is, despite this overwhelming chaos, little complication in Amazu’s life. Eccentricities and abundant laziness maybe, but little turmoil. Conversations and host courtesies extended to me are marked by extreme humility; a mind that seems centuries ahead of our immediate surroundings. A precise mind that prepares tea as if solving for x – or determining puzzles in trigonometry. It is disarming how basic Amazu’s life is, how the muted radio sounds in the kitchen preside over an existence stripped to its bare bones. Objects are searched for and located on a needs basis. I cannot fathom how he knows where to look for things: particular toothbrushes, coffee mugs, nail clippers. But he does and, more than that, he also knows where to find unsolved mathematical problems, strewn across the house.
A hopeless cook, Amazu orders French fries and marinated chicken for dinner. I nibble something to stop myself from collapsing. My thoughts are still at the hospital. How is it possible that such fiery love goes to waste? If there was ever a point to life and living, how come homo sapiens sapiens continues to get most things so dreadfully wrong? As if reading my thoughts, Amazu unexpectedly lets loose: Desiree always wondered aloud why I insist on doing everything the hard way, he tells me. Why I think I can wrestle the universe into submission, my lone pursuit of non-existent perfect worlds. The reason for her withholding her love, he goes on, was that she was never sure what to make of my kind of love, a love that withstood her most brutal rebukes. Yet, at the same time, she confessed an admiration for my commitment. It was this contradiction, with a dash of guilt thrown in, that complicated matters of romantic privilege.
Lousy, callous reasoning – but reasoning nevertheless.
Life is painfully predictable in Amazu’s household. He catches a bus to the University of the Witwatersrand every morning. We live on take-aways. I write poetry and practise the trumpet between sleeping (more like hibernation) and our visits to the hospital. Tedious routine. I am often woken by Amazu singing in the shower, so well that it is hard to know who the real Andrea Bocelli is. I don’t like opera much myself. It always sounds to me as if the singers are trapped in torture chambers, desperately bellowing for help. No, says Amazu. The quivering voices are the closest one gets to the human soul, to stirring emotions, a weeping without name or form. Bullshit, I tell him. Why should anything ‘beautiful beyond measure’ be explained as ‘haunting’? ‘Culture, my good friend,’ says Amazu, ‘you are uncultured.’ Because I don’t like people bellowing from torture chambers? But Amazu is a good host, so I tolerate his defence of things operatic.
We don’t talk about much Desiree. Or maybe we do. Silently. There are times I admit to disliking her (hate is too strong a word), to acknowledging some of her sinister attributes. Only a single-minded cynic like her could manage to live without a display of emotions; in the same way a discarded shell says nothing of the snail that once dragged it around. I refuse to talk to Amazu about my imprisonment – about which he is most curious. He wants to know too many things: the meals, the effects of solitude, prison dreams, ways around erotic charges, how much of one’s memory one can mine before madness sets in. He wants to know how one survives feelings of longing, manages time crawling past, endures unpredictable interrogations, knowing how they often lead to one’s romance with the gallows. Which is worse: loss of freedom or fear of death? Which would I have chosen had I been granted a single wish? I have, of course, thought a lot about Amazu’s questions in my time. But as things stand, in this house (that seems to have survived a nuclear blast) littered with mathematical puzzles, I politely deflect his probing with ‘I have a lot on my m
ind’. But he is persistent. Do I have to now – I ask Amazu – reduce the charms and perils of existence to a single wish? Amazu laughs, says I would have done well as head of a school of philosophy some place, some time – only without the cynicism. I leave Amazu preparing to solve for x, his cogitations serenaded by a ‘Pavarotti and Friends’ recording.
Part of the problem, the reason for my unexpected, silent revolt, is my sudden awakening to the full gravity of Desiree’s heartlessness. Amazu is puzzled by my apparent indifference to her, my lack of visible compassion for her condition. But Amazu does not understand what over two decades of incessant rebuff and brutal rebuke does to a heart, the smudges it leaves on the soul. We ruminate on these things; upon which he gently asks: ‘What do brutal rebukes do to a heart, a soul?’ I am moody and dismissive of his question, impatient with his relentless probing – a probing without purpose or accountability. ‘Life is not mathematics,’ I tell him, to which he responds that everything under the sun has a mathematical basis. The Great Wall of China. Military rations. Birth control pills. Of course he is a fanatic, a slave to numbers and theorems; yet there is a degree of truth to his claims.
But what does the chemical composition of birth control pills have to do with the fact that Desiree is a sadistic sociopath with a penchant for bullying and scheming? A ruthless chameleon with a methodical mind and a heart of stone? ‘I don’t believe in love,’ she’d said, when what she really meant was she enjoyed teasing and baiting lovelorn souls; enjoyed watching how they writhed in tormented spasms of love, terrorised by her deliberate indecision. How do I explain all this to Amazu? How do I tell him that in a peculiar way, by a twisted kind of logic, it is better to have Desiree breathing through beeping machines than on her feet, brutalising souls?
But I, even when seething with helpless anger, know that none of my dim thoughts has any basis in lived reality. I also know that Amazu’s mathematics is a futile topic for polite conversation. So we continue to suffer, Amazu and I, in our own separate and idiosyncratic ways. He sings opera, sinks his mind into myriad mathematical probabilities, while I take long walks in the company of Benito and my trumpet. How useless it is, this brass horn, silently collecting my saliva while I rearrange my soul, while my mind deadlocks on where my next meal is going to come from, wracked by the guilt of being parasite in Amazu’s house. Not that Amazu ever complains; but I am assailed by the guilt nonetheless, driven to making up stories about why I cannot take meals with him, starve while food awaits. I invent excuses: imaginary stomach bugs, nausea, toothaches.
Still this does not stop me from imagining him secretly kicking cupboards and cursing under his breath, complaining to his humourless fellow mathematicians about the aspirant trumpeter-loafer in his house, who deprives the neighbours of sleep with his nocturnal ballads. Maybe he also tells them of my poetry recitals in the bath. Perhaps they laugh, choke on their peanut-butter sandwiches at his tales of how I loathe and love Desiree in equal measure. How I deny myself even the minutest satisfactions in life. How everything, for me, must come labelled: CONTAINS PURE MORAL INGREDIENTS. NO ARTIFICIAL COLOURANTS. Who is to say whether they, tired of solving mathematical puzzles, do not tell their wives and concubines about the drooling idiot who still believes in the triumph of the human spirit, in the rearrangement of ordained cosmic order? And if the wives and concubines don’t tell their friends about me; the former prisoner who, after years of confinement, still refuses to say for which belief, which idea, he endured such suffering? Some will mutter in whispered sympathy, saying: ‘Poor thing. Maybe deep down in his being he knows something we don’t.’ ‘Yes,’ their friends will mock them, ‘what earth-shattering truths could possibly come from an embittered cynic who until now slept in city parks and mall restrooms? What wisdom could come from a drifting soul dislocated from its deceptions, its embedded conspiracy theories? Most importantly,’ they would opine, ‘does he really matter?’
I continue with my walks to the Nelson Mandela Bridge, for a view of the cityscape, a glance into the faces of passing multitudes for whom freedom is a mockery of all things decent. A disease sweeps across the land. I cannot see an end to everyone wanting to be a Comrade Q. In certain ways, Comrade Q has ceased to be a mere ghost wielding influence, has become a force to be reckoned with. Eighteen years behind bars. For this? But how do I tell the multitudes that Comrade Q is, still, just a ghost, a shadow that lurks in overpriced private bars and exclusive hotels, in sprawling palatial homes and at fashionable funerals, in imported Mercedes Benzes with sonorous engine tones? And so, despairing, I watch from the side lines while the ghost wrecks our dreams. I call silently on the stars above to shake us from our heedless slumber, in beds soaked with the urine of orphans and the blood of slain men of goodwill. These musings, disturbing and draining, leave a bitter taste in my mouth.
My broodings continue at the Nelson Mandela Bridge; nothing in particular, just a collection of criss-crossing longings in no particular sequence or pattern. I am gnawed by a biting loneliness so severe that I wish, at times, I were dead. I know I am beyond feminine company – that no amount of romantic giggling and fleeting small talk will alter the path I have chosen: a winding one-way road to neurosis. I have resolved to play my trumpet, not for money, but as an honouring of my fledgling gift. It now makes no difference if coins are thrown at my feet, whether I am cursed, praised or loathed; for I have, in my trumpet-playing, touched the furthest nerve that holds what remains of my soul in place. That nerve, the appreciation of things both heart-warming and profane, is what makes bearable my time here. But I also know this sudden surrender to what is, this embracing of life’s plagues, is more reluctant defeat than revelation of the meaning of existence; to which Amazu, when I share the thought, protests: ‘Who says life has to mean something? What is a meaningful, exemplary life?’ I have no answer, except to plead with him to accept sweaty coins earned from my trumpet sessions. My humble contribution to my upkeep.
Amazu returns home with a page of faded ink. A notice-board advertisement: ‘Jazz trumpeter wanted, R2 000 per week. Must read and write music.’ It is a generous offer, says Amazu. ‘Plus, you get to do what you love. All you have to do is pick up the phone.’ The prospect of being in the company of other musicians propels me to the phone on the kitchen wall. I dial: 011 307 0060. A hung-over, raspy voice contradicts everything written on the advert. It is a sort-of campus band, managed by session musicians off campus, he tells me. Yes, he is the band leader, and no, he cannot guarantee I will get paid. It all depends on the door takings. He adds, with an evil chuckle, that there are plenty of fringe benefits in being with the Lightning Bolts – the best Johannesburg band by far. I have never heard of the Lightning Bolts, I tell him. He is suddenly irritable; the judgement is immediate: ‘You move in the wrong circles,’ he says, and curtly adds: ‘Are you in or out?’ Music is a leap of faith, he tells me. ‘There is no fucking around with decisions, my man, the clock is ticking.’ ‘What’s your name?’ I ask him, at which he sighs: ‘Bradley fucking Jones; now are you in or out?’ I am in, I tell him, but what are the fringe benefits? ‘We are the resident gig at Club Rebel, so tits and free booze, dude; welcome to paradise.’ Why would I want to be in a strip-club band, prostituting my art to horny soulless people? I would rather starve, I tell him, than sell my soul for money. To which he calmly says: ‘Fuck you very much then and get starving,’ and slams the phone down.
‘And?’ asks Amazu.
‘Not a chance in hell. The guy is a nut case.’
‘Sorry. Something better will come along,’ says the ever-assuring Amazu.
Two nightmares continue to haunt me: I see myself walking up a rocky mountain tip, below which there is a raging sea. I slip on a loose rock and plunge head-first towards protruding rocks in the foamy waters below. I must have fallen hundreds of times off that same cliff, never cracking my skull open; just this sustained, eerie, sinking fall that leaves me drenched in sweat, my voice hoarse from screaming. Not that Amazu ever hears
anything. He sleeps like a log. When not falling from cliffs, I dream I am walking across a vast desert, up and down treacherous sand dunes. I follow a caravan of naked nomads (old bearded men, young athletic boys) battling to outpace an approaching sandstorm. I grit the sand in my teeth, yell at the top of my voice after the convoy. No one looks back. They lead their camels on, oblivious to my fading screams, until the sandstorm swallows everything in sight.
Someone from the hospital phones. The message, delivered to a sleepy Amazu, is brief and devastating. I have never seen such consuming grief, so searing and paralysing that Amazu, telephone in hand, just freezes. He begins to tremble uncontrollably in shock and disbelief. He confirms what I already know: Desiree has died. My own grief is less immediate. It is that lingering, numb, silent type – repressed yet exploding in hidden minute detonations. Amazu says he will take a shower, as if to cleanse himself of the death news. I have not encountered many mourning people, so I find myself out of my depth in consoling him; the more so because I have as yet not fully put logic and feeling to the news just received. I go over to him, place my hand on his shoulder. He does not acknowledge the hand, moves away like someone about to walk to the end of the universe yet too drained to manage even the first step. In the shower he sings; such captivating and mesmerising vocal variations, the skill of which leaves me humbled. Spurred by the tempo of shower water, soothed by steam, the singing rises and falls with precision – a driving urge to give a voice to pain. He must have emptied the whole geyser, cold water and all, for he emerges ashy and shivering. Strange. We were at the hospital less than a day ago. Desiree, though evidently not of this world, gave no indication of deciding to become a permanent corpse. We expected that day would come – but knew little how sudden and catastrophic it would be.
Small Things Page 8
