Broken River Tent

by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

  Phila’s train of thought was broken by the sudden recall of his father’s death. He imagined his father’s visage: the weary disposition of his weather-beaten face, the compassionate eyes, the kind withdrawing silences. This tenderness towards his deceased father felt insincere, even hypocritical, as if he was attempting to flatter his own vanity and ego. The realisation introduced a lingering sensation of having just been punched in the stomach. Why must our heroes always lie in graves, Phila asked himself as he watched the river, his eyes tearfully clouding. His grandma had another saying: “You cannot beat a river into submission.” Phila grew to understand that this meant you must surrender to the power of nature if you want to use it. That we’re driven by instincts that transcend our own volition and understanding. That an all-encompassing reality shapes our rough-hewn lives.

  Enough philosophising for the day. Phila stood up. He decided to walk to the internet café on Russell Road. As always he admired the neat, stepped file houses of Donkin heritage. Say what you must about those colonialists, he thought to himself, they had some neat tricks and great building skills.

  The internet café was clammy and stuffy as usual.

  “What time?” shouted the Somali lady in the black burka. She was always in some contrived hurry.

  “One hour internet,” Phila answered back, feeling insulted without exactly knowing why. His peevishness had reached a stage where it concerned him, even if her lack of courtesy irritated him. Each time, he meant to call her aside, to find a way of correcting her, so as to break the paralysing mistrust. It was this sort of thing, he was certain, that developed into feelings of mutual resentment, festered, then turned into xenophobia. Now, though, since he had decided he was leaving PE, the time had run out to correct this. Things unsaid were again left to fester. He handed over his five rand coin with his irritation changing to empathy, because he, too, knew how it felt to be a migrant in a foreign land and not fit in. And the frantic expulsion that makes one break the ocean in half only to meet nothing that wants you – to paraphrase the African American poet Nayyirah Waheed.

  “Number 8!” the lady shouted without even looking at him.

  Phila proceeded to the cubicle he was pointed to.

  The Tower of Babel in his head was complemented by that of the internet café’s, a conglomeration of Somalis, Ghanaians, Nigerians, Congolese – sesquipedalian clamours, all competing in loud voices. Phila loved the cosmopolitan feel of the city here: the riot of colours in flummery dressing, the jingle of trinkets, the dance communication and the competing languages.

  He started sweating profusely the moment he sat down in the cubicle. The emails were mostly spam and adverts, nothing from the international publications he had been sending articles to. The green architectural proposals and competitions were now his major source of income. One email caught his eye, from Nandi, his former girlfriend-cum-friend-with-benefits confidante, who lived in Grahamstown, a drive of about an hour and a half away. Phila visited her on weekends now and then for friendship and an occasional booty call. He had to first re-read what he had sent her the previous week before he could fully make out what she was trying to say.

  She rambled and raved a lot, trying to explain herself. The gist of the matter was that she was becoming tired of waiting for him to “make something” of his life, and had decided to move on. “I cannot live my life permanently betrothed on hopes of fantasies.” The simplified and abridged version was: I’m fucking my colleague, “who, though married, is soon to be separated. We’re making plans to stay together next year.” Phila was hurt and relieved at the same time. There was something to be said about never, ever again having to deal with that flibbertigibbet. While he felt he had dodged a bullet, his ego was shattered. The bombardment of loss in his life at that moment was getting ridiculous.

  On the doorpost of the first building he passed as he left the café was written the single word Resurgam. It was an elegant building of ancient Greek composite architecture. Though the whitewashed walls had turned grey because of neglect, the simplicity and harmony of the structure was still intact, in fact even more pronounced now without the adorning colours. Phila walked with the acquired patience of the flâneur, feeling wide awake and seeing signs of rebirth everywhere. It felt as though he was emerging from himself into his real life. In this Bachelardian wonder he tried to conjure lyrical possibilities from reading the cultural memory from the building. You must always be able to find a metaphor for humans in a house or building. Until you do the scales will not fall from your eyes. He stopped to wonder if this, finally, was what Bachelard in his lectures, and Paul on regaining his sight meant about the scales falling from the eyes. Perhaps the scales are the unnecessary clutter we carry, the fingerprints of memory and imagination’s dream shelters. Wishing to be wherever he wasn’t, Phila walked on.

  Fiat justitia ruat caelum!

  The phrase smuggled itself into his mind. Indeed, let justice be done though heavens may fall! Though egos are shattered; though lives are disrupted; though brains misfire!

  Flower Chambers

  IT WAS AROUND TEN IN THE EVENING when Phila made a stop in Grahamstown on his way home to Queenstown. He rang the buzzer at Nandi’s flat with slight trepidation. Hesitantly, he announced himself on the intercom and waited for some form of reproach, but Nandi said nothing in buzzing him in. After fiddling with the latch for what felt like eternity, she opened the door. Phila missed his step on the threshold as he entered but managed to get hold of himself in time before falling. He scraped his feet on the doormat to allow for the awkward moment to pass. Nandi gave a fed-up snort before turning her back, leaving him to close and lock the door. The fluorescent light of the TV gave the lounge a soft ambience, its muted sound intensifying the church atmosphere.

  Nandi and Phila grew up together during the tumultuous eighties, when the country was under the riotous fog of transformation. They had an affair that was truncated by Phila’s leaving to study in Germany. When he came back they drifted into being friends, with benefits. Something about it always felt like it was done for old times’ sake. They regarded themselves as moralists, just that their ethics were not derived from any particular religious code or ideology. With loss of innocence and, perhaps, the birth of deeper knowledge, the friends-with-benefits thing was also losing steam, leaving them stranded on the platform of nostalgia. Before Nandi’s email they had not yet figured out what they wanted to do or not do with each other. Nandi, with an enduring quality of casting a bright light on the experience of others, was always a convenient candle to Phila’s moth. He hadn’t been surprised when she’d chosen psychology as a profession because she possessed all the capacious qualities of goodness: resilience, kindness, empathy and good listening skills. Phila, with the typical psychological cannibalistic character, often abused these qualities, with her tacit encouragement. She was strict with herself but condoning of weakness in others.

  They sat on the sofa, each quiet for different reasons. Phila wished he could repair the shock of surprise, which in turn, he hoped, would bankrupt her growing asperity. Nandi, in her turn, was trying to control her annoyance.

  “Phila! You can’t keep showing up here during late hours; leaving with the crowing of the rooster when it pleases you.”

  Even her anger did not manage to suppress the kindness of her eyes. Phila knew he deserved the anger after the way he’d left the last time, without explanation.

  “I’m sorry. It’s late. I didn’t know where else to go. I lost track of time wandering around Fingo township. I think there are more shis’inyama places than people in that place. Egazini River has dried into a dirty streamlet. What is happening to our rivers?” Phila wanted to direct the topic away to other things but Nandi was having none of it.

  “You need to be more sensitive. What if I was with someone? I’ve a life too, you know. It might not be as carefree and rootless as yours, but you damn well will respect it.”

  “I’m sorry …”

  Sile
nce.

  “Would you like tea or something?” Nandi asked in a calmer voice after a few minutes.

  “Something stronger preferably,” Phila replied, feeling relief growing.

  “The vodka you left in the cupboard is still here.”

  While Nandi disappeared into the kitchenette, Phila plugged his iPod into her music system and selected Bright Eyes. Momentarily the moaning depths of Conor Oberst came on. Hearing the clatter from the kitchenette, a little louder than necessary, he concluded Nandi was still angry. She came back with a half-full bottle of Absolut, a glass filled with ice and lime cordial on a tray.

  “Otherwise, how have you been keeping?” she asked, sitting next to him, fitting her head under his chin after he finished pouring himself a drink.

  “To tell you the truth, not too good.” Phila was overwhelmed by her scent.

  “I’m sorry about your father. I was not even aware he was sick,” Nandi said, lifting her head to look him in the eyes. He tried to figure out how she knew about his father before remembering he’d answered her email with a sentence: “My father died yesterday.” He almost feigned literal prowess by imitating Camus but reined himself back because it felt kitsch, like chasing down a shallow sort of mimesis.

  “Most of us didn’t know. He kept it to himself. It was a colon ulcer that perforated or something, doctors even suspect cancer; there’s a family history of it.”

  “Didn’t they do a post-mortem?”

  “What would be the point? Ulcers are caused by stress, are they not?” Warm fuzz went through his head as the vodka settled in. The vodka, as usual, raised the intensity of his emotions, making him nostalgic and eager.

  “Mostly, but not always. Some ulcers are hereditary.”

  “I’m prone to stress.” He stopped talking. They looked at each other with loving familiarity before Phila wrestled her gaze to the ground. “I remember reading an article somewhere about some of the cruel things you people do in the name of science.” He wanted to occupy his mind with something other than his father’s death. “It said some psychologists in America put a mouse in a cage and gave it electric shocks. The poor thing became so stressed up with those shocks that at death it was found to have oversized adrenal glands and numerous stomach ulcers.”

  “I’ve heard of the experiment. It’s redirecting aggression. They enclose a wooden stick with other mice, so that each time the shock is administered the mouse bites into the stick, to redirect its pain. After death it is found that the mice with sticks had smaller adrenal glands and fewer ulcers. The clincher is that if you put two mice in the same cage they become aggressive and fight each other each time the shocks are administered. In the end those mice were found to have normal glands and no ulcers.”

  “You see? It helps to redirect your anger and pain. Shall we fight more?”

  They both chortled. Phila was relieved to feel Nandi’s annoyance dissipating. He got up to fix himself another drink.

  “The poor guy without a stick or someone to redirect his pain towards was found to have … what’s the word they use?” he asked, coming back to the sofa, feeling lighter.

  “Autopsied!”

  “Ja! Autopsied.”

  “I think I’m autopsied,” Phila said after a couple of moments’ silence between them.

  “What do you mean?” Nandi cautiously enquired.

  “I do not understand what’s happening to me.”

  “How do you mean?” Nandi showed more concern.

  “I hear and see things other people do not,” Phila said. He glanced down to see if she thought him freakish.

  “Like what?”

  “Like people that are not there, or other people do not see.”

  “You mean you hear things in a schizophrenic way?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way. Just visits from historical characters, mostly people I’m reading about. I think sometimes I cross the divide. I don’t know how, it just happens. When I least expect it.”

  Nandi looked thoughtful. “Would you like to come to the office tomorrow?” she suggested. “I have class, but we can talk after, in a more professional manner?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I have to go and bury my father. Besides, with all due respect, I know what your profession has to say about this sort of thing. I’ve read some stuff.”

  “Reading stuff does not beat the understanding ear of a professional, and a friend.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Famished.”

  “I have leftover pasta from my supper. You can help yourself while I take a shower.”

  Phila always thought there was something Quakerish about Nandi, the emphasis on integrity, quietness, peace and all. He had always felt protective when it came to her, more like a brother; well, a brother she sometimes fucked. He plotted ways to protect her against him, his ambiguous vanity, emotional opaqueness, cruel detachment … His thoughts galloped to things he was not yet prepared to admit about himself.

  To avoid the turn his thoughts were taking, he stood up to investigate the bookshelf. He looked through the books, hoping to spy on Nandi’s reading habits. There was a lot of psychology material, Freud, Jung, Lacan, Marcel, and the rest of the brood from that nest and its academic work. She had some literature also, Penguin Classics mostly. He looked to see which book he could borrow. His eyes hesitated on Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart but passed when he recalled he had read it a couple of times, and rested on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He wondered if it was time he tackled the book again. The last time he’d tried he hadn’t been able to get beyond the third chapter. In his deliberations his eyes wandered to another row of books, where his attention was caught by James Joyce’s Ulysses. Tolstoy, in his view, was too intrusive as a narrator, and thus didn’t fit with his current mood of looking to let things be in resigned ignorance. Joyce’s Ulysses? All that topographic confusion would make him dizzy now, he thought, but he was enticed by the considered vividness and subtlety of Joyce he’d loved in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. His eyes moved along the row. Proust, perhaps, something with memory as a neurological thread and parallel consciousness as an organising principle. But then his eye fell on Kafka’s The Castle. He immediately knew it was the book most suitable for his current mood. He had been feeling strange and exotic to himself lately.

  Nandi came back, smelling of womanly scents.

  “Had a good shower?”

  “Invigorating. Do you wanna watch a movie or something?”

  “Too tired.” He sat back down on the sofa, where Nandi was now applying nail polish to her toes. He held up the book. “May I borrow this?”

  She looked up. “Sure, why not?”

  “Remember that film we watched when I was here last, The Sixth Sense, I think it was called?”

  “About the boy who saw dead people, and his psychologist? Great twist in the end?”

  “Exactly!”

  “What about it?” She handed the nail polish bottle to him to close while she carefully inserted the last of the cotton balls between her toes.

  “I sometimes feel like him.”

  “You mean in your mind?”

  “I mean – what the fuck is the difference if it’s real or in my mind?”

  “Calm down.” She looked up, frowning.

  “I’m sorry. I mean, if I cannot be sure of the reality of what my senses portray to me I have no claim over my sanity. I don’t want to …” He stood to walk towards the balcony in an attempt to bottle his temper.

  “I’ll get you something to calm you down.”

  “I don’t want pills …” He stopped in the middle of his sentence before continuing again, more calmly. “What I want is my freedom back, not serotonin drugs or tranquillisers. I want freedom from dependency. I want things to firmly establish their objective reality in my head, but I can’t do that if the stuff of my imagination conscript themselves as objective reality in my mind. Surely this means something is clearly loos
e in my faculty of comprehension?”

  “It’s all right. You don’t need to be melodramatic.”

  “I’m just trying to put this in a language you would understand. You don’t seem to understand my plight. I feel I am soon gonna lose my capacity to distinguish between reality and fiction, memory and presence.”

  “I do understand,” Nandi said. “But I can’t help you when you erect a firewall between us.”

  “I have to deal with these things in my own way. I came here because I feel calm around you.” He fell quiet for a moment before saying, “May I take a shower too?”

  “Of course.”

  Phila’s bag was still lying in the passage. He picked it up and took it to the bathroom. Nandi went out onto the balcony to dry her nails. By the time she came back inside Phila was done with his shower and on his third vodka and a plate of warmed up pasta. The vodka was elevating his vitality and plumbing his vigour.

  “So what about that session tomorrow?” Nandi asked.

  “We’ll see.”

  “Is that a yes?” She tickled him as she sat on the sofa next to him.

  “Stop it. You know I don’t like that. You people explain everything as neurosis; and you favour the descriptive over depth. I don’t like it.”

  Nandi got up and went to the kitchenette. “I just want to establish the uniform modus of your symptoms, so as to outline the procedure, in order to give a diagnosis.”

  “In short, you want to fuck with my unconscious mind,” Phila raised his voice to reach her. He could hear the kettle boiling.

  She popped her head round the door. “If you wanna look at it that way.”

  “I don’t think so.”