To All the Books I’ve Loved Before (Part 3)

I am in Cape Town now. It is late in the morning. Back in Pretoria, I have heard about the glitz and glittering V & A Waterfront. V & A Waterfront is one of Africa’s most visited destinations with almost 24 million visitors annually. It is named after Prince Alfred, who was the first member of the royal family to visit the Cape Colony in 1860, and his mother Queen Victoria. It is situated in the oldest working harbor in the southern hemisphere, with the iconic Table Mountain as its backdrop and extensive views of the ocean, city bowl and mountain peaks.

Today, I decide to visit the place and see for myself. I walk from the Central Station on Adderley Street, admiring the buildings, whilst inhaling the salty breeze from the sea. It is 25 minutes easy stroll. On the way, I have seen the unfinished freeway bridge (The Foreshore Freeway Bridge) that was intended to be the Eastern Boulevard Highway in the city bowl of Cape Town. They started building it in 1970s. Some people speculate that the funds ran out. And under it has become the beehive of the hobos.

Arriving at V & A Waterfront, I see a huge crowd of people (mostly white people) at the arena watching a man teetering on tight rope without a balancing stick. There are too many white people at one place, making us few blacks stand out and look like we’re profaning their amusement. But the man in the arena is our own. My curiosity pulls me like magnet to the arena. For me, I feel like the man is ridiculing himself and our race. The white people are enjoying his performance.  White people don’t really like real things. They like fantasy and speculation. In real life, no man can walk on a slack rope, dance, and sway. He seems like he is walking on a wash line. Money is flashing into his bowler hat like raindrops. Now, the man picks up a heavy steel chair with his mouth and balances it in the air. There are oohs and aahs from the audience. He is dark, tall and well built like young Muhammad Ali. He wears a bandana around his head, and is shirtless. After watching him for a while, I find it too extraordinary and surreal. I weave my way out and start window-shopping until I see the seals basking in the sun. I watch them for a while. Then an idea crosses my mind that I must take a long journey by train. Sight-seeing. A train to read and think. Somewhere far from the madding crowd.

I am walking back to the train station. I decide to take a train to Fish Hoek. I will take 01 train that leaves in the next fifteen minutes. I hurry to buy a Metro Plus ticket. I have a book I am reading. I cannot concentrate reading if I travel on an economy class coach. Too much noise in economy class coaches and I have never seen a white person in an economy class coach.

White people don’t like noise. They like silence and are quiet, and speak through their noises. Unlike us, we are loud and garrulous. They like silence to think deep thoughts while the opposite is true for us. We readily, with open hands accept what nature has bestowed on us; unlike the whites, when wind blows off the roof of his house, he asks why? Who? How? And try to find the answer. And they say no wind shall blow off our roof next time – they make plans. For us, we just stand bewildered, our hands behind our heads and utter solemnly: Only God Knows.

White folks like to do everything by the book. They raise children by Google. Unlike us, we raise each other’s children and some of our mothers raise their children as their housemaids; the children find comfort sleeping peacefully on their backs unlike in the prams.  And they like to live far away from hustle and bustle of the city. In the mountains and enjoy the fresh air and feel at peace, while we live behind the airport crammed in tin shacks and proudly proclaim to the world that; This is our beautiful country!

They say silence is gold and noise is silver. But we like noise – natural sounds. We find solace in it – so therapeutic to our sufferings. A day a mother finds her rowdy baby silent, she worries that he may be sick. So people who are very silent and withdrawn are somehow sick and dangerous; they conceal their emotions like a stammering man who cannot argue at length and resort to blows. We wear our hearts on our sleeves. White people live behind high walls in silence, unlike us the poor, who cannot afford high walls; hence we live crammed together like fingers of a hand, scratching each other’s backs. When one hand is hurt, the whole body (community) is hurt too; unlike living behind high fences, you can never know when your neighbor is hurting.

I step into the Metro Plus coach. Heads of white people turn at once and gawk at me as I take a seat. The seat is too fluffy and comfy unlike a train to Khayelitsha whose seat covers are ripped, windows forced out, and people sit on hard skeleton of seats and endure free rides. People swarm all over the train: on top, in front and others dangling their legs out of windows. I am a disturbance to their silence in this coach. However, there are glints of geniality in some, but I can still feel stabs of incivility projected at me by some. I swallow my brevity under the whim of free country and rainbow nation. I don’t blame them because I know that they are still learning that black people are human too, like them with same blood cruising through their veins. When I take out my book, I am about to read, my seatmate, a white middle-aged man with shining crown bald gazes at my book. I quickly put my palm over the title. His face grimaces in annoyance. He seems to be angry with me. He wants to read the title of my book while I cannot see the title of the book he is reading. I am reading O. Henry’s collection of short stories. Then suddenly the train jogs off into action.

Somewhere between Observatory and Mowbray station, I hear a huge bang as the door of our carriage is forced open. A tsunami of black people – men and women – stampede into our carriage. White people give a howl of shock and surprise. Ambushed in their comfort zone. The people are running away from ticket inspectors. They don’t have tickets. When the train stops at a station, they all sprint out back to the last carriage and hop in, outwitting the inspectors. It is like watching the hide and seek game. They carry on like this until they have reached their destination and get off. They like free rides.

I have just finished writing my first draft of my manuscript – Of Inscrutable Providence, on A4 paper.  There are about three hundred and twenty pages, almost ninety thousand words. It looks like it would be a huge book. But when finally, it would land in the hands of the surgeon (editor); he will dissect, mutilate and maim it and by the time it is return to me – it would be unrecognizable, unpleasant writing, like food eaten and puked out. Like a solder riddled with bullets, yet fighting for his life, just to live again. And if it were a man whom the surgeon has worked on, he would come back home with only his feet. The only person to recognize the feet would be either his wife or his mother.

I am thinking of taking my manuscript to Kwela Books but I am a bit scared to face the editor. I feel he or she might spit on my manuscript as work of an amateur. However, I feel contented with it. It must go and test the knife like a troublesome bull.

Davie has joined me in Cape Town. He too got tired of mundane life in Pretoria. He says he missed me a lot. Davie is like a brother to me. He is three years younger than me. We are looking for a room to rent in Grassy Park. There are very few blacks in Grassy Park and we can count ourselves on the fingers of one man. There are no backyard rooms to rent here. Davie and I decide to take a chance around and ask for a room to rent. In Fourth Avenue, we see an elderly woman struggling to push out the wheelie bin. I run to give her a hand. She thanks us and asks us where we are living. I tell her we are temporarily hiding at the mosque and we are looking for a room to rent.

‘Come inside,’ she says.

Davie and I follow her into the yard. There is an old van rusting; its tyres sink into the ground. I have never seen a van like this one. It looks like an archaeologist has excavated it. We walk past it.

‘Do one of you know how to drive?’

There is a white Ford Escort XR3 standing in front of the garage door.

‘Yes, I can,’ says Davie.

 And the old woman whom later we’ll learn her name to be Aunt Yusrah toddled into the house to fetch the keys. In a moment, she comes with the car keys and hand them to Davie to move the car. Davie reverses the car and perfectly parks it alongside the old van. And she points her index finger at the garage door.

‘Open it,’ she says.

I struggle to lift up the heavy wooden door. Davie helps me to open. It squeaks on its dry hinges. The door has not been opened for some time. There is an old Mercedes Benz 280 inside standing on full pumped tyres. She asks us to move it out and make ourselves a room to stay. The car is caked with dust accumulated over years. We wipe off the dust with old newspapers littered around. The dust chokes us, I cough, and Davie coughs too. Luckily, there is a window, I open it, and the dust whooshes out. Davie shoves his hand through the window and grapples with the steering wheel as I push at the back. Surprisingly, the tyres are still hard and the car races smoothly out. We park it next to the old van. We clean the room until noon and Aunt Yusrah offers us biriyani rice and Double O cold drink for lunch.

After everything, we leave to fetch our stuff at the mosque. We do not have many possessions. I haul out my box of books and a Shangani bag. Davie too got one bag and few utensils, which he parks in the cardboard box.  We carry our Shangani bags on our heads to a new place. Our friends at the mosque envy us. It is very distressing hiding at the mosque.

As we do not have a bed, Aunt Yusrah offers us an old rope bed and a mattress. She says the mattress belonged to her deceased brother. The ropes of the bed are so slack from overuse and weight of the previous slumberer. When two of us lay on it, it drops down in the middle and we look like we’re sleeping on a hammock. And it is difficult to get up, you have to lever up yourself by grabbing the edge of the bed and lift up yourself. The rent is generously very low. We pay her three hundred rand a month.

Davie is working at a take-way fast food shop. He does not fail to bring me a packet of warm chips every night. I am working at Eezy Fitment Centre. I have nothing to bring him. Now I am doing a bit of mechanical work: suspension repairs, tyre fitting and exhaust fitting. Am getting four hundred and fifty rand a week, working Sunday to Sunday. Not that bad though, although it sounds unjust to magnanimous eyes. But I am a foreigner, I cannot complain.

One Wednesday morning I am off and I decide to go to a secondhand bookshop in Mowbray. The bookshop is in the second floor. I have to trek a flight of steps before landing in the world of books. The shelves are tightly packed with books. Books are everywhere, on the floor, tables and stools. The classical music is sizzling in the background. There is an old lady with big reading glasses perched on her nose sitting behind the counter drinking coffee and a tome opened before her. Her head tilts to the left as if the weight of the words from the books were putting a strain on her neck. She flushes a smile at me. I head to the classic section, my work boots thunking the wooden floor. There is wide selection of books from great classic writers. I rush to the counter to get a shopping basket. I haul out Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky and drop it into the basket. Understanding Poetry Third Edition by Cleanth Brooks & Robert Warren, Confession by Jean Jacques Rousseau, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Time Machine by H.G. Wells and Voss by Patrick White follows.

I get off the taxi in Claremont, opposite the Arderne Gardens, cross the Main Road and walk in. I walk deep into the garden and find an empty bench under a leafy bough. I deposit my bag of books on the bench and sit down facing a pond. I get up to look into the pond. There are fish and ducks playing around. Two women dressed in mini-skirts and white T-shirts; their faces heavily groomed ogle me as they pass by. I go back to the bench and pick up a book that I started reading in the taxi.

I am reading Confession. The very first page has hooked me with these words from Narcissus. “Let the last trump sound when it will, I shall come forward with this work in my hand, to present myself before my Sovereign judge, and proclaim aloud: “Here is what I have done, and if by chance I have used some immaterial embellishment it has been only to fill a void due to a defect of memory.”

The two women distract me. They stop nearby. One pulls up her mini-skirt and reveals her tightly packed pudenda in red panties. I look away. Even though it has been three years now since I kissed a boob of a woman; I am not tempted.

‘Just fifty rand, quick, quick,’ says the other, making an obscene letter O with her left index finger and thumb, and repeatedly thrusting her right index finger into the O sign.

I pick up my books and trudge out of the park and at the bus stop; hop onto the Wynberg bound taxi.