Broken River Tent

by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

  When the overriding flatness of these cursed waters invokes tragedy in my spirit I like to watch the behaviour of birds from early morning until evening. The coast disappears into a grey mist of sea and a stretch of fierce mountains that dominate the horizon. These flats are wind scrubbed. When the winds blow, the sliding drizzle makes it difficult to tell where the path ends and the void begins. All you hear is crashing bellows and the indecisive honks of birds. The air smells of rain; it has an odour of mustiness from guano. The sea boils when it rains here.

  Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night with a taste of bile in my mouth, not sure whether I’m dreaming or awake. I see leaping flames in the direction of the white man’s city. I sit morose, suspecting the flames are soon going to leap in our direction. Those distant fires have preternatural strength, and become as tall as mountains sometimes. Strange, strange things happen in this accursed place. If I don’t die soon I shall die of longing to die.

  I look at the chasm of my life and try to tell what I see and remember without glossing over the ugly parts. Anyone who listens to my words will see how the cruel rowels were dug into my flanks.

  I’ve lived long and hard enough to have my own view of things. I’ve no respect for men who use religion to avoid the truth of their failings; who take refuge in pious thoughts and feelings to avoid the real labours of love; who employ false images of holiness to avoid encounters with Dal’ubomi. I know it to be a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. I’ve been forsaken, completely cut off from those I love – and those I despise – in order to meditate on my life. I don’t know which group to thank; the one that brought me evil, or the one that brought me love. Often people come promising one thing, only to leave you with the other. The saddest thing is to be implicated in another man’s disorders and confusion. I thank them all, whatever their motives. This place has become like a desert where I can’t hide from the truth. I’ve been made to encounter my shadowy side; contradictions of my own age with the light of truth. If anything, this place has brought me to the condition of an inner peace that is open to the experience of truth, and the incomprehensible principle of life we adopt different names to refer to. As a result, I now understand the saying that the places of our haplessness are also where we become open to possibilities of our greater selves.

  Every ship I see on the shore uproots my hope, only to dash it when no news comes for me. The full force of my misery has overtaken me.

  When I think about those with whom I travelled this bitter earth of hard stones, tears fall from my eyes. There were also from the white race the likes of Khula. The founder of the white Afrikaner tribe in our land. Awu! The egret that came out of the sea when no one expected. The wild animal of the blue ocean. Sleep well, my friend, your memory vindicates your race in my eyes. Blind fortune, with your insatiable purse: Mhlaba uya fihla!

  Give ear, my people. The sun is descending on the limb of Phalo. The smoke is rising dimly in your desolate vales. Pick up your kerries and bucklers and charge! The gaunt hyenas are devouring your lambs with their ravenous maws. People were those of Nxele’s stature who preferred the belly of the hundred sea beasts than to serf for white people.

  Hark!

  Take your heads away from your knees. Shriek and squall, you women of our land, your sons are skulking like dogs. The lengthening shadows are drearily falling over the land of Phalo:

  For England hath spoken in her tyrannous mood,

  And the edict is written in African blood!

  When our history arrives at the present of our progeny, the horn of Africa shall rise again. Wake me then to watch the star of Phalo take its place around the skies of things human …

  Phila walked out to the balcony to soak up the sensual whore Hout Bay became during summer evenings: the élan dusk from the receding sun; the dazzling way the Sentinel, the tilting mountain, arrests, midway, its totter into the sea; the rosy dust of Chapman’s Peak Drive, all staring at the mirror surface of the bay. It made him feel wanted, part of something greater. He needed to be outdoors.

  He put on his takkies and went on the gad. The artificial strobe of the harbour lights made everything look staged. A whiff of salt air souped the fish stench the closer he got to the fish processing factory. By the time he got to the Fish-On-The-Rocks shop at the harbour his lungs were fluffed like the devil’s pillows. Shadows had stretched to the sea. The gaggle of gulls tormented the scavenging bergies at the dustbins of the rocky beach.

  Phila placed his order of fish and chips before proceeding to sit at an outside table, carefully nodding to a young coloured lady – that peculiar pinpoint between black and white that apartheid insisted existed to drive division between black South Africans. He thought to encourage camaraderie with the gesture, but was ignored with unspoken emphasis. She hunched her shoulders before snorting her nose. Phila, feeling embarrassed, cleared his throat to repress emotions before turning his eyes away to fake indifference. The background of billowing waves and the brumous pewter light took care of the rest.

  Grasping our lives inseparably separate!

  He caught sight of his face in the window. He rubbed the shine off it, turning to the distance to avoid the need of agreeing with the young lady’s disinterest. She must have been twenty-four or something. Phila was on the older side of forty. His sister had sent him flowers the previous day, and a virtual birthday message, the stuff you get from the internet about useless facts. This one said his birth month had five Fridays, five Saturdays and five Sundays that year, something that apparently only occurs once in eight hundred and twenty years. The Chinese called it the year of a ‘money bag’, something to do with feng shui. Phila liked feng shui, because it was about the arrangement of things in space. But his sister spoilt the whole thing by instructing him to pass the birthday message on to eight more people if he wanted the luck, and to avoid misfortune. Of course he didn’t pass the bloody message on.

  His number had to be called three times before he realised it was his, and that his order was ready. The eyes of the lady cashier were trained on him with unspoken irritation as he collected his order.

  “Here we go, sir, fried yellowtail with chips, no salt or vinegar.” The waitress was professional in hiding her irritation.

  “Thank you,” Phila reciprocated, using his customary politeness as both armour and weapon.

  Outside the gulls were still screaming – I miss you like rain, or such things poets tell about. Phila turned his back to the clapping sea as he sat down to eat. He now wished he had ordered grilled fish with salad, to make himself more interesting and sophisticated. It would have taken longer too, giving him time for his musings. Everyone interesting is supposed to be a vegan these days, he thought to himself. Apparently it’s a sign one has a conscience. He had discovered this on a date one of his colleagues had set up for him with a Cameroonian palaeoanthropologist. She had spent the entire evening dissing the stupidity and ignorance of black South Africans, correcting his pronunciation of French, English and even Xhosa words. She had talked incessantly and impatiently. And had a habit of uttering a long disinterested “Indeeeeed!” to show disinterest whenever Phila said anything beyond two sentences.

  “Even hominids knew it was barbaric to eat flesh,” she’d said, crinkling her brow, making it clear with a termagant tone what she thought of Phila’s pork ribs order.

  “Indeeeed!” answered Phila in a failed attempt at ironic parody. She took it as an invitation to explain.

  “We discovered that at least two of their species ate only bark, palm, fruit, shrubs and herbs.”

  “How do you discover what hominids ate if they are extinct?” Phila interjected sarcastically.

  “From the stuff we scraped from their teeth, silly. You can tell a lot by examining the plaque deposited on one’s teeth.” She asked if she could examine Phila’s plaque deposits sometime. “That would tell me a lot about your diet, and how you can change it to improve your health.” Phila lost his appetite after tha
t. He also discovered that his only interest in her now was the fact that she was born in Yaoundé where his people were supposedly to have originated in the eighth century. Somehow the association was not worth the remote ancestral connections. When she again went on her diatribe about how black South Africans had a violent contempt for other Africans – making it clear that she was only interested in white men, “British preferably” – Phila went Dutch on her with a rude departure. He wondered why she had agreed to the date. Perhaps as a favour to a friend; or, worse, not to pass up the opportunity to spite a black South African, seeing that she regarded them all as lazy, ignorant, gluttonous, unclean, and barbarously cruel and xenophobic. This had amused Phila, because these were some of the words and phrases, almost word for word, the white settlers had used to describe the Xhosas when they called them kaffirs more than a century ago.

  No one imagined us.

  The jog up Chapman’s Peak was arduous, as usual, and made impossible by the rudeness of lycra-clad cyclists who acted as if they owned the road. After finishing the Old Fireman House hill Phila decided to sit on the public bench, overlooking the plunging coastline, the hulking rocky cliffs and the bay. The departing day, with crimson light, left behind a trembling brown air. The ocean had three colour rings, turquoise towards the shore with dirty milk scrim on the edge, blue and then deeper blue into the deep.

  After a while, seated on the bench he felt the symptoms by then he understood very well, was even egging them on because it had been a very long time – a decade or so – since he had heard Maqoma’s voice and he had missed him.

  ‘The glory of the one who moves all things, penetrates the universe, and glows in one region more, in another less …’

  ‘Camagu!’ Phila interjected with the Xhosa phrase of respectful granting permission in humility, what the Christians would call Mary’s fiat.

  ‘My, my! How have we grown?’ Maqoma exclaimed in satisfaction as he sat next to Phila on the bench, handing him some of the apricots he was eating. ‘I thought you’d love these. They’re ripe as the sun.’ They kept quiet while Phila processed if their mutual love for apricots was coincidental or preordained. ‘I came to see if you remember it is our meeting anniversary from lands far away from here.’

  ‘Indeed I do, although I would be lying to claim credit for the similar setting I’ve just now noticed.’ Phila was unable to hide his excitement in seeing Maqoma.

  ‘That was my doing …’

  ‘A shoe of my own stitching …’

  They spoke in unison, which prompted their laughter. After a while Phila spoke.

  ‘In fact, even the ring of mountains reminds me of your area also, except here, unlike Nkonkobe, the mountains gird the sea instead of the valleys like the Winterberg do to your Kat River valleys. And the sighs of the sea, singing on its chains, if the Welsh poet is to be believed, is something my soul will never tire of in a hundred lifetimes.’

  ‘Was it not you who once told me that there’s nothing like the love of a woman to make a poet out of all of us?’ teased Maqoma.

  ‘I’m not sure I understand you?’ Phila played hard fuss.

  ‘Is not your Polish woman coming next moon?’

  ‘I thought you said you were gonna quit spying on me?’

  ‘I did. I came along it when reading something I thought was about me.’ They both kept silence, which Maqoma broke after a minute. ‘Were you not supposed to write a book or something?’

  ‘Well, life got to me. But I’m on it.’

  ‘I knew you would once you knew she was coming.’

  ‘Wait a minute? Are you responsible for that?’

  ‘Not really. I told you we can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do anyway. But I’ve met your beautiful daughters who are yearning to be born.’

  Both men fell silent. Then, before Phila could formulate in words what he wanted to say, Maqoma changed the topic. ‘I see you’ve managed to turn your exile here into a pilgrimage?’ he said with a warm smile.

  ‘I learnt from the best. You’re not the only who has been hanging out with ancient bards, druids and healers.’ Silence hung between them again.

  Then, ‘Is your journey complete?’ Phila asked. ‘Have you reunited with your loved –’

  ‘The journey I am on does not end, not even with eschaton. For it is learning to see through the eye of divine reality. Not even eternity is enough for that lesson. But please, continue reading my friend Dante. From him you’ll gain a spark of things to come in your journey towards Paradiso. It’ll be good practice for you to see things through the divine reality also. Whatever I say at this stage will be inadequate to gain you further understanding; the next task is now yours, it must come from within you. But I understand what you’re trying to ask.’ Maqoma trained his eye on the ocean before continuing. ‘You can almost see the island from here, the home of my mortal remains.’

  ‘I thought your remains were transferred to Ntab’ kaNdoda?’

  ‘You thought that? I wanted you to take me to the land once familiar to me. My remains are still here, surrounded by the pounding ocean. Not that it matters, but they dug up the wrong bones. Perhaps had I had you then I could have asked you to tell them that – maybe they would have believed you.’

  ‘What?’ asked Phila. ‘What are you telling me? Is that why you didn’t join me on what all these years I have believed to be your gravesite?’

  Maqoma gave Phila a mischievous look, but said nothing.

  ‘They’ve even built a monument to you there recently!’

  ‘Nothing wrong with that. After all, it is part of the land I grew up on.’

  ‘Well, anyway, I didn’t even like the monument …’ Phila said, prompting another burst of laughter from both of them. ‘And it has serious structural problems. In all likelihood it won’t be long before it collapses.’

  ‘Perhaps we can hasten its destruction?’ said Maqoma with another mischievous smile.

  After a while, with the return of solemnity Phila outed what they both knew was the reason for the visit.

  ‘I have to go to Robben Island, don’t I?’ he said.

  ‘Is that why you came back?’

  ‘Not entirely – but partly.’

  ‘A dead man would be here had you not showed up on the bus that day in Port Elizabeth, the day I got the news of my father’s death,’ Phila said. ‘Is something else bad about to happen to me?’

  ‘I don’t believe so, but we had to take caution. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Kabbalistic concept of Gilgul?’

  ‘As in reincarnation?’

  ‘It is not reincarnation per se. You’re thinking of Bardo, which is Buddhist. Sometimes a soul, fresh from purgatorial purification, discovers a neglected duty. If this is crucial to the historical course of those still on earth the soul is allowed passage back to earth. They can then attach themselves to the living soul that would best serve their purpose of correcting the neglect, especially if this is also a soul feeling unequal to the task of their own journey. The process must be mutually beneficial. The Kabbalah religion calls this process “making a Tikkun”, a ratification.’ Maqoma stopped to assess Phila’s reaction.

  ‘I think your spirit had already explained this to mine. I am glad anyway to have a vocabulary for it.’

  ‘Of course, I am giving you a simplified version. One day, when we both sit with our ancestors we shall talk some more. For now, I need also to show you my actual grave on the island.’

  ‘I think I am gonna be uncontrollably angry if I go there. It has, in my mind, become a symbol of everything wrong with the political history of this country.’

  ‘I’ll be there with you. In fact, I’ll organise a cloud of witnesses for you as my parting gift, a party of martyrs whose blood irrigated your freedom. Then you shall see that you’re not on your own. Perhaps then you’ll understand why we need to linger a while in these lands. There’s more work to be done here, more lost souls wandering about seeking their rest, who died a
bhorrent slave deaths toiling these vineyards, felling trees from these woods and such things your generation has now forgotten. Keep listening to the land. The landscapes retain the memory of the departed. Beside your blood it is what you have in common with ages that came before you. The landscapes retain the ghost of the disposed and silently sing out their grief. This is why in the sigh of the sea you taste the breath of ghosts. And the mountains are like unmarked graves. Do not be afraid to take plunge on the depth of the abyss, because sooner or later you shall emerge on the side where you meet anew the stranger that is yourself.’

  After a momentary silence Phila looked around but Maqoma had disappeared again. He felt rather sad the visit was so short after so many years. He stood up to continue his jog. He hated the jog downhill more because of its demands on his knees. As he jogged his mind turned back to his university years. Lecturers at the school of architecture had told them to expect a future filled with creativity since they were training to be God’s assistants in wasting space, “sculpturing space to create a sense of surprise”, they termed it. Things never really turned out that glossy for Phila. He’d been living in Cape Town for over a decade and for the most part he’d found himself designing government schools and clinics, or dull community halls in townships, whose facades needed to merge with their matchbox houses; now and again he designed a township church, with an extremely low budget. Nearly always, though, the emphasis had been on utility over aesthetics. If things got interesting it would be to redesign old industrial towship buildings into shopping centres. On these, the emphasis was on durability, since the developers took for granted that they would be vandalised. Or making them functional to the client’s needs for conference, workshop and warehouse or parking garage facilities.