Borderline

by Marita van der Vyver

  Theresa grabs him from behind, tries to restrain his heavy body, one arm around his throat to strangle him, but he is like a steamroller. So much stronger than her, he shakes her off with a single stinging slap. She lands on her backside with a bounce. It becomes clear that he’s not at all interested in assaulting her. It’s his sister he will pulverise tonight if no one stops him.

  Theresa screams as loudly as she can until her father appears in the doorway, his legs skinny and hairy below the shorts of his ridiculous summer pyjamas. He hesitates for barely a second before his fist connects with Waldie’s chin. Theresa hears the terrible sound of something shattering, bone or tooth, perhaps even her father’s knuckles.

  Waldie collapses onto the floor and starts blubbering.

  Breathing hard, her dad looks at him with contempt, then at Lynette with concern. Her eye is already starting to swell and it looks as if there’s a front tooth missing from her bleeding mouth.

  By now there are far too many people in the cramped little room. The other three parents and the younger children, all in their pyjamas, are blinking against the bright light and gazing at the scene in shock. Lynette on the floor in one corner, Waldie in the other, like boxers in a ring. The blood, the tears, the vodka bottle, none of it makes sense.

  Theresa grabs her diary from the bed and hides it behind her back, but no one’s interested in that. Her little sister’s eyes are wide, her lip trembling. The two small Raubenheimer brothers have already started to cry.

  ‘Waldie?’ his mother’s voice quavers. ‘What is it now, my boy?’

  It’s the first time Theresa has seen Tannie Marlene without make-up, with curlers in her hair, her face pale and bewildered. So different from when she is looking down her nose at everyone.

  ‘Forget about him.’ Adriaan Marais grimaces as he rubs the knuckles of his right hand with his left. This is also the first time Theresa has seen her father use his fist against anyone. ‘Look at your daughter. If I hadn’t stopped him, she would’ve looked a lot worse.’

  Lynette struggles to her feet with a groan, runs a hand over her bloody mouth, feels for the gap where her tooth used to be. Theresa expects her to start screaming hysterically. After all, her appearance is a matter of grave importance to Lynette. Just look at all the trouble she goes to wrapping pantyhose around her head every night to keep her hair straight. But Lynette just raises her chin and looks at her parents defiantly – with her good eye – and says: ‘Our future war hero. Now that’s what you call courage!’

  And at this exact moment, when all the action is over, Jacques stumbles into the room, yawning and scratching his head. His mother always says he could sleep through an earthquake. Another future war hero. Theresa feels her stomach churn. He wouldn’t wake up if the entire Cuban army attacked him.

  That was the end of the two families’ joint holidaymaking. Lynette quite understandably refused to appear in public with a swollen black eye and minus a front tooth. Waldie also had a broken tooth, although no one except his mother really felt sorry for him. Two days later the Raubenheimers packed up to head back to Pretoria, to get the children to a good dentist, to forget about the ‘unfortunate event’ as quickly as possible. Theresa’s mother declared with evident relief that she never wanted to go on holiday with the Raubenheimers again: ‘I have really had enough of that Marlene with her stiff hair and high and mighty attitude.’

  ‘I thought you liked her?’ Adriaan seemed baffled.

  ‘We always pretended to like each other because our husbands were such old friends. What else could we do?’

  Adriaan stared at the woman he’d been married to for more than twenty years as if he didn’t know her at all.

  And perhaps he didn’t.

  But that was something Theresa would realise only years later, when she herself was married to a man she never really got to know.

  Afterwards the two families inevitably drifted apart. Theresa and Lynette lost contact. Lynette got married and had kids and seemed to disappear from the face of the earth. One of the younger brothers became briefly famous in the late eighties as a pop star who sang silly Afrikaans songs. Then he also disappeared.

  And Waldie did join the permanent force after he left school, against his father’s wishes, and did regular stints on the border. He was twenty-two years old when he died there. Apparently no hero’s death in a battle against the enemy, Theresa heard someone say, merely an accident with an army vehicle in which drunkenness had been involved. But perhaps that too was nothing more than a rumour. His family would certainly have preferred to remember him as a hero. The brave border soldier rather than the teenage bully who had knocked out his younger sister’s tooth.

  13. RUM AND CIGARS

  She can’t remember when last she spent such an enjoyable evening among strangers. Not because she’s the only woman among five men at Ruben’s round table. At least not only because she’s the only woman.

  Theresa isn’t the sort of woman who would cancel a date with a close female friend for the sake of an evening with a male stranger. She knows a few women like that and secretly thinks of them as traitors. Traitors of what exactly, she doesn’t know. Perhaps just a sentimental notion of what sisterhood is supposed to mean. But this much male attention in one evening is certainly not to be sneezed at. Especially not at her age.

  Ruben lives with his adult son Amado in a chaotically untidy and yet congenial apartment in the barrio Cayo Hueso. No trace of any female presence. Amado is as tall as his father, but with a much leaner physique. Both he and his father tower over Oreste who is about the same age as his cousin. It’s Oreste who introduces Amado to Theresa as ‘another musician in the family’.

  ‘But he is a real musician,’ says Ruben, who is carrying pots of food to the table. ‘Not a part-timer like me who blows on the trumpet just for fun. Amado plays in an orchestra that performs classical music. They have even toured in other countries.’

  Theresa smiles, amused at the silent Ruben becoming so unexpectedly garrulous when boasting about his son. He notices her smile and announces sheepishly that they can start eating. It’s a simple meal – flavourful rice and black beans and fresh fried fish – that Theresa tucks into as if she has been starved for days. She has basically lived on empanadas and snacks since arriving in Havana. Washed down with black coffee and mojitos.

  ‘Beans and rice is one of our national dishes,’ Oreste explains, his cheeks stuffed with food. ‘We call it Los Moros y Cristianos, Moors and Christians, because the beans are as black as the Moors and the rice white like Christians used to be.’

  ‘But we like to mix black and white, so we eat everything together,’ says Ruben’s friend Lazaro from his wheelchair. ‘Not like where you come from, where everyone was kept apart for so long.’ He says it in good English, without rancour, with a wide, white smile that lights up his pitch-black face like a half-moon. His skin is blue-black rather than brown-black, his shoulders broad and his arms muscular. He was wounded in Angola in 1976, so badly that no one thought he would make it, but like the Biblical Lazarus for whom his devout mother named him, he all but rose from the dead.

  ‘Except of course I did not rise.’ Another flash of that smile. ‘When I came back from being dead, and I tried to get out of my hospital bed, I fell flat on the floor. That was when I realised my legs were no longer working. I have been in this wheelchair forty years.’ He swigs beer from a bottle while he eats, shrugs and shakes his head when he notices Theresa’s look of concern. ‘Do not feel sorry for me, mi corazón. It is very bad for the fragile male ego when a beautiful woman feels sorry for him. I want to believe that I can seduce them with my smile and my incredible sex appeal.’

  ‘And he did seduce many of them in his younger days. Wheelchair and all,’ adds Ruben’s other guest, Miles, also in excellent English. His mother evidently listened to jazz more than she went to church, because he was named after Miles Davis. A thin man with an attractive angular face and skin the colour of milky coffee, who al
so went to fight in Angola, a decade after Lazaro.

  Despite the age gap ten years, they have that blood-brother connection between men who have fought in the same war. They met each other through an organisation that provided aid to wounded former soldiers, Miles explains, and soon became close friends.

  ‘Were you also … wounded?’ Theresa asks hesitantly, unsure of what they’d be prepared to tell her.

  ‘Not in a way you can see. But you know, no one comes out of war without wounds. My head was fucked up by what I experienced there. That is the reason I went to study psychology after I came back from Angola. You know what they say about psychologists who become psychologists because they themselves need the help of a psychologist?’

  ‘So you work as a psychologist now?’

  ‘Among other things. There is a lot of work for psychologists in this country.’

  ‘In my country too,’ says Theresa, more to herself than to the company, although Ruben, who is sitting next to her, glances at her as if he understands what she means.

  ‘But we do not get paid enough to make a decent living,’ Miles adds. ‘That is why I also do other things for money. Like nearly everyone I know.’

  ‘Hay que inventar?’ Theresa says with such a dreadful Spanish accent that everyone laughs.

  ‘Hay que inventar,’ Lazaro confirms, the lower half of his face splitting into another white half-moon.

  ‘And you?’ she asks him. ‘How do you stay alive?’

  ‘By drinking far too much,’ says Lazaro and swallows greedily from the beer bottle in his hand. ‘My only vice now I am too old to seduce women from my wheelchair.’

  ‘No, I mean—’

  ‘I know what you mean, mi corazón. I inherited a cafe bar from my mother. I have a special ascensor … elevator chair on wheels behind the counter. I lift myself out of the wheelchair and onto the chair and then I crank it up high enough so I can see over the counter. Without the chair, I would have to saw down the counter. Like for enanos … midgets.’

  He laughs so exuberantly that she can’t help laughing too.

  ‘We are all grateful to the mother of Lazaro for this bar.’ Miles takes a bite of fish and spits out a few bones, washes it down with beer. ‘Ruben and I also help out there some days for an extra income.’

  ‘So Lazaro is your boss?’ Now she understands why Ruben was able to extricate himself from his bar work so easily to drive her and Oreste around in his taxi.

  ‘The big black boss,’ Lazaro concurs. ‘Every time I order them to do something, I take revenge for my ancestors who were brought to this island as slaves.’

  ‘Hey, I also have slave blood in me,’ Miles fires back. ‘Anyone can tell I’m not pure white.’

  ‘No one in this country is pure white any more,’ says Amado, who nevertheless looks whiter than anyone else at the table, even including Theresa.

  ‘The only reason why Amado looks like a vampire,’ Oreste says, ‘is because he is all day between four walls practising music. Instead of taking his trumpet to the beach and blowing it there.’

  Amado smiles good-naturedly at his cousin’s teasing. He is an exceptionally attractive young man, long slender face with a dimple in his chin, long smooth black hair hanging down to his shoulders, black T-shirt and black jeans. Clearly not what you would call a carefree beachcomber. Even on a tropical island there appear to be people who flourish indoors like pot plants.

  ‘There’s more rice and beans left,’ Ruben says with the serving spoon in his hand. ‘You would like some more, Theresa?’

  It’s the first time he has called her by her name. Theresa sounds unexpectedly Spanish when pronounced by that deep voice.

  ‘I’ve had more than enough, thank you. Did you make it all yourself?’

  ‘He is very good cook!’ Oreste exclaims.

  ‘Not very good,’ Ruben mumbles in his beard. ‘I like cooking, but my experience is made small by what I can get my hands on. And sometimes that isn’t much.’

  ‘He can make a meal out of anything,’ Amado says. ‘Give him three yuccas and a bag of nails and he will make you the most delicious yucca-and-nail soup you will ever taste.’

  The look of mutual admiration between father and son touches Theresa. She will never have such a good relationship – or for that matter a terrible relationship – with a child of her own. She extinguishes the thought right away, the way you might put out a candle flame between your fingertips.

  ‘I didn’t have much of a choice,’ Ruben says as Lazaro leans forward to scrape the last of the rice from the pot and spoon the last of the beans on top of the rice. ‘When his mother left me I have to learn very quickly how to cook and clean the house and do all those things I always thought my wife would do.’

  ‘And, as you can tell, he never really learned how to clean the house.’ Oreste looks around the room pointedly.

  The living and dining room where they are sitting is a den of chaos. Books and newspapers and envelopes and papers are spread out across chairs and tables and shelves, in fact across any available surface except the floor. On the floor are wooden crates and plastic bags with empty bottles and glass jars that will probably be recycled rather than thrown away. Elsewhere, and sometimes on top of books and newspapers, are power cables and wall plugs and light bulbs, maybe still in working condition and maybe not. More things that could be repaired or recycled. And old vinyl records are strewn everywhere, some still in their cardboard sleeves, others out in the open, black and shiny, as if they are being played all the time. In a corner near the tiny kitchen a record is spinning on an old turntable, but the company is so loud that Theresa can hardly hear the music, just a few notes from a trumpet or saxophone here and there that vaguely remind her of jazz from the fifties or sixties.

  ‘Well, he did not learn really to cook until I came to live with him,’ Amado joins in with his cousin’s teasing.

  ‘That is true. Before that, I drank more than I cooked,’ Ruben shrugs, a resigned gesture, before explaining to Theresa: ‘His mother left me – and took him with her – when he was still very small. Because I drank too much. When I stayed behind on my own, of course I just drank even more.’ He shakes his head slowly, as if he can’t believe what he’s saying. ‘And then his mother died. When he was eleven. Her parents thought I would not be a good father, so I had to fight hard for him to come live with me. Most of the fighting was with myself. That was when I stopped drinking. And became a taxi driver to earn more money. It is a good job for someone who does not drink.’

  ‘So you drink no alcohol at all?’ Only now Theresa realises that he doesn’t have a beer bottle in front of him like the rest of the men at the table.

  ‘I am an alcoholic who has been sober since sixteen years. But I am still an alcoholic. It’s not something you ever get better from.’

  ‘Like war,’ Miles says darkly.

  ‘Por Dios, now the company is becoming too deprimente!’ Lazaro exclaims. ‘What will our guest think of us? Cubans must be cheerful and hedonistas!’

  ‘We can take her to the Malecón later on this evening,’ Miles suggests. ‘Then she will be able to see the cheerful hedonism of the Cubans in action.’

  ‘You mean that long wall right next to the sea?’ Theresa asks, intrigued. ‘I’ve heard that is where people hang out at night and drink and party. But I thought it was only for young people …’

  ‘But we are young!’ Lazaro reaches for the beer bottle in front of him, drains it in a single gulp and bangs it back onto the table. ‘Are we not?’

  ‘It will be an interesting experience on your last night in Havana,’ Oreste says, slipping back into his role of tour guide. ‘It is the middle of the week, so it will not be as busy as on weekends, but the weather is good and there is a full moon, so I think there will be enough, ah, action to make it worth your while.’

  ‘Hanging out at the Malecón is always worth your while,’ Lazaro observes. ‘Especially for me, now that I no longer have so many oportunidades for
hanging out.’

  He swings his wheelchair away from the table and spins it around, closing his eyes and shaking his head as if he’s dancing, and suddenly Theresa sees him not as a sixty-year-old paralysed ex-soldier, but as a dancing young man full of vitality and hope. The young man he must have been before he was sent to Angola.

  ‘Well,’ Ruben says, ‘there is room for everyone in the Plymouth. We can put Lazaro’s wheelchair in the boot. Who is coming?’

  ‘Ah no, I don’t want to spoil your young people’s fun,’ Amado says. ‘I am going to have an early night instead.’

  ‘He is worried we will disgrace him,’ Miles grins. ‘You have raised him well, Ruben, my brother.’

  ‘No, he just worries that if there are pretty young girls they will be more interested in me than in him,’ Lazaro laughs. ‘And there are always pretty young girls on the Malecón.’

  ‘So I will be the only old person among these, ah, juvenile delinquents?’ Oreste wants to know.

  ‘You do not have to come,’ Ruben says, starting to clear the table. ‘We make sure she gets back safely to her hotel.’

  ‘I am her official guide,’ Oreste says. ‘I am worried that you lead my client into temptation.’

  Theresa gets up to help Ruben and Amado clear the table. ‘It’s okay, Oreste. It’s been so long since I was led into any kind of temptation that it sounds rather fun.’

  Thanks to the full moon hanging low over Old Havana, the Malecón is busier than usual on a weeknight. But not nearly as lively as on a Saturday night in the high summer, Lazaro assures her as they saunter along the sea wall. Ruben is pushing the wheelchair, while Miles and Theresa walk on either side of him, eastwards in the direction of the harbour. They parked the Plymouth close to the Hotel Nacional, where the Rampa joins the Avenue Antonio Maceo, because it’s one of the most popular sections of the route. And it makes it easier for Theresa to return to her hotel, Ruben adds politely, in case their company starts to bore her.

  The plan is to walk some distance to let their dinner settle – ‘get rid of all the Moors and Christians,’ Lazaro quips – and then sit on the wall at the Rampa and drink rum. From a bottle that Miles has brought along in a rucksack.