The Distance

by Ivan Vladislavic

  After major boxing matches, and nearly always after heavyweight title bouts, the newspapers carried a blow-by-blow account of the action. There are half a dozen in my archive. These detailed descriptions of every round allowed a reader who’d missed the radio broadcast to imagine the fight for themselves. Even someone who’d seen the action was able, in the absence of instant replays, highlights packages, podcasts, PVR recordings, websites and camera-phone images, to revisit the fight and refresh their memory or analyse the action. We’re unused to this kind of reporting now. After a few paragraphs the account begins to read like the choreography of an obsessive performance artist. How many lefts or rights can be dug, driven, sent, shot over, steamed in, pumped over, peppered, landed in a single boxing match? The text engine could be shuffling them at random with the targets: head and body.

  On the day after the Fight of the Century, the Pretoria News carried a round-by-round reconstruction. Each of the fifteen rounds is described in a paragraph of 150 words or so. Frazier is mentioned 94 times; on one of these occasions he is called ‘Joe’. His opponent is mentioned 107 times; he is called ‘Ali’ 80 times and ‘Clay’ 27 times. To put it another way, he is ‘Ali’ three quarters of the time and ‘Clay’ the remaining quarter.

  The effect of this ‘elegant variation’ is dazzling: as the fight unfolds, one of the boxers magically doubles into two persons, Clay and Ali, while the other, Frazier, is stuck with being himself.

  This is from round 4: Ali shot over two more lefts to the head followed by a good left hook and two left jabs to the head. Frazier manoeuvred Clay to the ropes once more but it was Ali who landed at long range. If you didn’t know the Queensberry Rules, you would think there were two men in the ring with Frazier, one called ‘Clay’ who could be cornered and one called ‘Ali’ who was getting in the telling blows.

  And here’s round 14, in which Frazier, smelling blood, goes after Clay, but Ali steps in to defend him: Frazier was puffy above both eyes. He walked into two light lefts and rights from Ali. It didn’t stop Frazier from going after Clay who again cuffed Frazier with a left and right to the head but took a hard left hook to the body in exchange. Ali shot over a series of lefts and rights to the head landed at long range.

  In the end there was no strength in numbers. Frazier won the fight on points.

  4

  Americans

  Knitting machines. Many well-known makes. Demonstration models as new. Guaranteed perfect condition. Very low price. Free lessons. Terms arranged. Knitter’s Friend, 25 Harvard Building (Cor. Joubert and Pritchard Street) JHB.

  – The World, September 1972

  Branko

  A single year brings two big changes: I become a man and my brother becomes an American. My new status is announced by Mrs Mitchell from over the road when she hears that my voice is breaking. My brother’s change of nationality is promoted by Jolyon Barlow, a new kid in the neighbourhood who has some experience in the matter. His father is a missionary, a Methodist, and the family has spent a few years in Illinois. When they come back to Pretoria they move into a house in the next block, a place that always looks strange to me because the facebrick walls have been painted white. (Dad agrees: Why would you paint a facebrick?) Kids are territorial – we become friends with the neighbours mainly, the kids we share fences with – and the next block is another country. On top of this, Jolyon goes to a private school in the city rather than the local government primary like most of the boys in Clubview. In time, though, he and Joe cross paths at Funchal Caffie and they become friends.

  Two lame ducks, you could say. Jolyon is a sad boy with a cheerful name. We call him ‘Jolly’ although he asks us not to. Some childhood illness kept him in a hospital bed for a year and a half, and although he and my brother are in the same standard, he’s older. Also smaller, with blue-black hair and wet sea-green eyes, and an impressive scar all the way down his breastbone. He was opened up, he says, unbuttoning his shirt to show us. When he touches the pale skin on his chest you can almost see through it. I think he’s a clot, but Joe needs friends.

  In the summer holidays, Jolly starts coming over to our place. Sometimes they ride their bikes through the veld to the old quarry or the fence around the airfield, although Jolly isn’t supposed to, he should always be near a telephone in case he collapses and someone has to call an ambulance. Mainly they wage war in the yard with machine guns made from tomato-box pine and spark plugs. Although it seals his fate, Joe agrees to be the Germans so he can use the lines he’s picked up in war comics and Alistair MacLean books. Maybe he feels sorry for Jolly too. Our yard makes a good battlefield because of the fruit trees and the crumbly bricks and rusty scaffolding piled up behind the servants’ quarters. Jolly’s yard is too neatly suburban for warfare, full of delicately flowered ground covers in wavy beds. In any case, it’s quiet as a hospital over there. His mother gets migraines and lies on her bed all afternoon with a damp cloth over her face. The rumour is that she’s stark naked: her head hurts so much she can’t bear to keep her clothes on. Peter Hendricks, who sits next to me in Biology, claims to have had a good look at her through a crack in the shutters. That’s another odd thing about the Barlows’ house: it has shutters instead of curtains. Something Mr Barlow picked up in America. In this climate? says Dad. He needs his head read.

  Now and then I go with my brother to visit Jolly, who’s nearly my age and could actually be my friend if he wasn’t such a tit. We never set foot in the yard and I never go near the shutters. We sit in his room listening to Elvis Presley records, no rock and roll, just hymns and Christmas carols, and reading comics. Some people think comics are bad for you because they stop you from reading books. Nonsense, Mom says, just look at Joe. We have as many comics as we like, so many we pack them in boxes and keep them under our beds. Jolly’s parents think comics are the work of the devil and he’s forbidden to read them. Naturally he has a huge collection, which he hides in jigsaw-puzzle boxes and under cricket pads. When we’re reading comics in his room, with the Monopoly board open on the rug just in case, it feels like we’re doing something daring. You’d think it was Scope instead of Little Lotta. Sometimes, after I’ve gone for a slash, I hang around in the darkened passage near the door to the master bedroom hoping to catch a glimpse of Mrs Barlow, imagining I can hear her stretching her naked limbs and smell the fruity perfume on her skin. In her birthday suit, Peter Hendricks said. The phrase gives me a hard-on.

  Now Joe comes back from the Barlows with a stack of Archie comics in a tartan togbag and an announcement. He and Jolly have decided to become Americans. They’ve made a pact. Eventually they plan to go and live in Chicago, which Mr Barlow says is the most American of cities, and they’ve made a start by changing their names. From now on Jolly will be known as Little Louis Carnovale and Joe as Nate Simms.

  At the kitchen table that evening, he tells us the plan and asks us to start using the new name. Nate Simms! Now I see that it smacks of simulation: it’s the half-real sort of name he would give a character in one of his novels. But then it could only sound preposterous.

  Carnovale, says Mom. Isn’t he that chap you played football with at the Italian Club, Bo? The one who went out with Dottie Fisher and broke her heart?

  What about the rest of us? says Dad. We’ll all have to change our names or people won’t know we’re related. The Simmses have to stick together.

  Joe is silent. He hasn’t thought this through.

  Let’s start with Branko, Dad goes on. Suggestions?

  Branko Simms, Mom says.

  No, no, that won’t do. It’s un-American. How about Harvey?

  Harvey Simms?

  Harv for short.

  Over my dead body, I say. And we all laugh like crazy.

  The idea of becoming an American grows on me, if I’m honest. I’ll never be a Harvey, forget it, but I’m happy to play along, using my American vocab and speaking with a twang. Nate and
I egg one another on. Howdy pardner. So long bub. At the supper table, Dad joins in. Pass me the ketchup, Harvey Wallbanger. When Mom asks how we’re doing, we say, Just swell. Nate tries to carry his library books strapped up in his school belt. It’s a stretchy elastic belt and the books keep falling out. Why do American kids do this? Don’t they have bags? Mom puts up with all this malarkey. It’s not the first time Joe has found a language between the covers of a book and it won’t be the last. There was a time when he’d always jis clumb a tree or half drownded hisself. That was the Huck Finn phase. You’s the orneriest, block-headedest boy I ever did meet! It was even worse after Philip Marlowe. Dad loses patience quickly, although he’s always been a bit of a Yank himself with his Buicks and Chevs and his toolboxes full of spanners made in Detroit.

  My brother’s game gets to me because I understand his longing. I also want to do American things and own American stuff. Eat hotdogs and drink root beer, hang out at the soda fountain and go to the ball game, live in a suburb where there are no fences between the yards and the kids blaze their own trails across the blocks like frontiersmen. I want a pogo stick, a baseball cap, a fishbowl full of sea-monkeys with little crowns, just add water. Most of all I want a television set. I want to watch TV so badly it hurts.

  This surfaces in my mind now: two little boys, two naughty little bastards, one black and one white, climb into a washing machine and are whirled around in the suds.

  Where does it come from? Maybe it’s Our Gang, a black-and-white flicker on the screen before the main attraction. What else is left in my memory? A boy tilting a slat in a wooden fence, passing through the gap, ghosting across the neighbour’s yard like a cat. Huck Finn? No, that would be Joe’s story. Let’s say Dennis the Menace. It’s a fantasy of knowing the territory expressed in a borrowed register. We belong exactly where we find ourselves. We swing over fences as if they’re hurdles for our amusement, play kleilat down at Sesmylspruit, come home with pine resin stuck to our shirts, blackjacks in our socks and the new hairs on our calves, we are smeared with the brown dust of our own world. And still we wish we were somewhere else.

  America doesn’t last. In the new year, the accent fades away, as Mom knew it would, and Nate Simms is forgotten. But I’m reminded of this American boy a few years later when my brother starts with Muhammad Ali. Falls in love? I prefer not to think of it that way.

  Then again, my brother’s need to be someone else never goes away. He becomes a writer. You can see the catastrophe coming down the pike.

  Joe

  Without the boxing writers, my love for Muhammad Ali would not have bloomed. You could say I fell in love with the writing rather than the boxing. After all, I never saw Ali box. Everything I knew about him came down the wire; it was all at second hand, on the page.

  I loved the boxing writers for their bluster, their bombast, their purple patches as livid as bruises. They were full of rhetoric and hyperbole, grandiose circumlocutions and cock-eyed similes. There was something grand, I decided, about saying ‘the busted-beak fraternity’ or ‘the fistic arts’ when you could just have said ‘boxing’. Or saying ‘a fight-minded individual’ when you meant a fan of the sport. Or referring to your fellow hacks as ‘the scribes of the fistic kingdom’.

  Perhaps the brutality of the ‘sport’, which some people were putting in quotes even then, encouraged the scribes to reach for figures of speech. Or did the crude repetitions of the fights, the rounds as repetitious as chewing gum, drive the search for new turns of phrase? Every boxing match, every sporting contest, is an original arrangement of the same basic moves. The boxer throws lefts, rights, hooks, straights, jabs in an endless improvisation, trying to impose his own plan on proceedings, but also responding to his opponent’s. He bobs and weaves and ducks. The evasive actions are orchestrated with the offensive combinations in a unique sequence and rhythm. The real artists of the ring imbue these moves with their own style. But in the end, two men are hitting one another and avoiding being hit, trying to land their own punches and ride the other man’s. How many ways are there to say this? The writer wants to find out. His great tool is metaphor.

  Whenever I page through the Ali scrapbooks, in search of a book that always eludes me, I remember reading these reports for the first time and the thrill comes back to me. There must be something in the spectacle of boxing that brings out this ornate yet loose-jointed lingo, where rhetoric is like ringcraft, where you work your sentences like well-oiled combinations and try to land a punchy metaphor on the reader’s jaw like a straight left.

  For the boxing writers, Ali was a godsend. His extravagance and theatricality fuelled their own, just as his antics in the ring brought out the clown in his opponents. You can see them trying to beat him at his own game. Here is Alan Hubbard describing how Joe Frazier knocked Ali down in the fifteenth round of the Fight of the Century: Clay collapsed in a corner, his legs flying first into the air and then falling grotesquely, like a splintered twin mast of a sinking ship. It’s that last-gasp tweak – twin mast – that holes the sentence and saves the day.

  Branko

  My brother has a screw loose. When we first move to Clubview, he sinks into the deep end of the new house. For a while he’s nowhere to be found, until we remember that he’s underfoot. Like a mechanic on a creeper in the workshop, he’s taken to scooting around on his back, propelling himself head first along the shiny wooden floors. He’ll go all the way down the passage, in and out of rooms, passing under the beds, butting aside Dad’s cardboard suitcase full of receipts and expired licence papers, Mom’s slippers, Uncle Eddie’s bugle from when he was in the Transvaal Scottish. He barges through the bicycle parts under my bed like an icebreaker. Only the barricade of shoes under Sylvie’s bed repels him. Elsewhere it’s a free run. He can make an entire circuit of the lounge, sliding beneath one armchair and then the sofa and then another chair on the narrow channel of gleaming parquet between the rug and the skirting boards. What’s he doing down there? Examining the undersides of things, discovering what holds the furniture together, finding a new perspective from the bottom of the world.

  The lounge suite is ball-and-claw with cushions that are red on one side and green on the other. Dad must have chosen this robotic colour scheme (we say) because Mom never learnt to drive. Something to do with her nerves. Now Joe surfaces to reveal the signs we can’t see: the carpenter’s code of numbers and arrows on the unvarnished struts of the chairs.

  Mom tries to break the backsliding habit because he gets polish on the back of his shirt and the seat of his pants. Dad just thinks it’s wrong to be hanging around in the shallows like a sea creature. One of those sand sharks with eyes in the top of its head. He’s helping Mom with the housework, I say. It’s a joke, but he does lend her a hand during the school holidays, running the chrome-plated polisher with its hammerhead and wheezing canvas lung over the floors. Would a normal boy enjoy such a thing?

  After a few years, Dad has wall-to-wall laid over the parquet and that puts an end to the polishing. The wooden suite goes too, replaced by a softer one covered in old-gold velveteen with buttons and fringes, better suited to our modern life in the suburbs.

  When Mom acquires a knitting machine, Joe can make himself useful again. The machine is set up in the dining room, which is seldom used for dining or anything else, because the dresser beside the table makes it impossible to pull out a chair. The machine has a long bed of needles and two wire feelers that the wool’s threaded through to keep the tension. There’s a sliding carriage with a handle that must be swept up and down over the needles. That’s how the knitting happens. We’re used to Mom’s knitting needles and crochet hooks, but she looks odd at the machine, hunched over like the driver of a front-end loader. There’s craft in this machine work too, she’s figured out how to thread the needles and set the buttons and dials that make the pattern, but mainly it’s a way of eking out the household income. Dad went in over his head moving us out to the su
burbs, but it had to be done. The economy is booming and we’d damn well better boom with it. White people have never had it so good. Mom sits at the machine for eight hours a day. When we leave for school in the morning she’s headed to the knitting room with the transistor radio and a mug of coffee, and when we get back in the afternoon she’s still there, with an empty mug and an ashtray full of stompies, and the front or back of a jersey hanging down from the needles. The machine can be set up to make pictures, so there might be a snowman or a Model T Ford inching out of it, row by row.

  She knits until she rubs the skin off her fingertips and drips blood on a new cardigan. Then she makes thimbles of Elastoplast for her fingers. When Sylvie wants a pair of boots from Foschini, when I want a saddle for my bike, Dad says: Can’t you see your mother is working her fingers to the bone?

  The machine is supposed to be perfect but it’s not. There isn’t enough play in the tension arms and the wool snares on the needles. Stitches are dropped and rows unravel. One mistake spoils an hour’s work. Dad keeps tinkering with the mechanism, adding loops of insulation tape like Band-Aids and guy lines of copper wire and gut threaded with lead sinkers from his tackle box, until Joe solves the problem. In the afternoons, after he’s done his homework, he perches on a bar stool between the spools and the feelers, with the yarn looped around his forefingers. His fingers waggle as if he’s an insect, letting out some yarn here, taking up the slack there, holding the balance. Now there’s scarcely a stoppage. Mother’s little worker ant, annoyingly busy and obliging.