Africa39 (48 page)

‘Do you know what Yunior is?' asked Julio, the father.

‘Yeah, it's my name.'

‘No,' Julio laughed, ‘it's the name of a one-night stand. You know why?'

Yunior shook his head.

‘There are so many Yuniors, and they are very hard to trace – unless you know the full name. So, when a girl is asked out and her date says he's called Yunior, we assume he just wants a good time – there's no plan beyond one night, for how would she trace him?'

This is how, on Yunior's first visit to Aguana to play in a live band, he was able to tell the joke to the drummer, one of only two native Fumazero in the quintet, whose brother shared Yunior's name. Warming up absent-mindedly, his hardened fingertips skimming guitar strings, he overheard the man lamenting how his brother, resentful of the way Guerrero Rosario's policies had curtailed their wealthy family's influence, had decided to migrate to the USAs.

Yunior cut in with the joke and added, ‘At least over there his name may be less of a code for a one-night stand and more of an identity.' He extended his hand. ‘I'm also Yunior, by the way. By accident, but that's my name now.'

‘Marcos,' the drummer replied. ‘Manjate told me a lot about you, Yunior. You sing as well, yes? Like a Fumazero?'

‘I am Fumazero.'

Bana

Marcos was the reason Yunior started taking food from his farm to Aguana at the height of
half-time
. It was never planned; it just happened once and grew into something that could no longer be ignored.

The quintet Yunior played in with Marcos, Los Puntos Estelares, were offered a fortnightly slot at one of the leading salsa clubs, Verde, a place where, regardless of local conditions, foreigners still visited and spent good money on alcohol, cigars and the promise of love. Knowing the difficulty of getting good food in Aguana once supply from USSRs dried up, Yunior travelled to the two-night engagements of Los Puntos Estelares with some basic supplies – three carrots, a head of cabbage, a handful of frijoles Negros that swelled to three times their original size when soaked overnight, and two red onions. The first time he travelled east, mindful that Marcos had a young daughter, he harvested an identical mix of vegetables for him, making a mental note to add some frijoles from the sack he kept on his kitchen table. Then, surveying his half-acre plot, its boundary marked by a thigh-high chicken run that held six clucking red- and brown-feathered hens, Yunior shrugged and uprooted carrots and onions for his other band mates. Peopleist philosophy was now almost instinctive. In a break during rehearsals, he handed to drummer, trumpeter, pianist and bass player, roughly-cut sugar sacks sewn into quaint, small bags with visible spirals of twine.

Marcos, having opened his makeshift bag, stared at its contents almost without recognition, then he jumped up to fold Yunior in a bear hug. ‘I haven't seen cabbage for so long, brother. So long.'

The rest of the band converged on Yunior, mumbling their appreciation and light-heartedly describing the wonderful meals they were going to cook, until they heard Marcos's bass drum ringing with the beat of their first song. They still had to rehearse.

Yunior took his position at the front of the quintet and prepared to sing their signature song,
Vivimos Juntos
. He lifted his guitar strap over his head. As he lowered it on to his left shoulder, he noticed his shirt was wet with Marcos's tears. Yunior hadn't realised how bad
half-time
was until that evening; everyone was being stoic, managing their struggles in silence.

It was soon after he started adding eggs to the rations he packed for his band mates that he was approached by the owner of Verde about supplying produce to his brother's grocery store on a side street close by.

‘I don't produce much,' said Yunior. ‘Only a half-acre, and I only come here twice a month.'

‘It's OK. Even a little will be helpful to the locals.'

 

Gente had already lost the right to be called a grocery store. Its shelves swept bare by the lack of imports from USSRs and the direct-to-hotel trade of fresh produce, it only held a supply of locally-produced cigars in a cabinet to the right of the till. The shelves, painted in alternate greens and yellows, that appeared to have been borrowed from the same palette that created the Fumazero flag, looked like wings abandoned by small planes that had lost the desire to fly. Flor and Tomas, the owners, had kept it open by taking in laundry from the same hotels that had severed their lines of vegetable supply from the farmers. In fact, it was a launderette disguised as a place where one could go and find the means to end hunger, and it remained a launderette after Yunior arrived with his first delivery.

‘You won't display the vegetables?'

‘No,' explained Flor, ‘we cannot sell like this. It is not official. We will tell the people at home and they will come.'

Boxes of onions, potatoes, carrots, cabbages, lettuce and tomatoes were packed in a back room, and before Yunior left, he was relieved to see a bare-chested boy walk in with a note for Flor, hand over a clutch of pesos, and leave with a bag of potatoes, onions and a head of cabbage.

Yunior charged Flor and Tomas no more for the vegetables than he made at government-backed produce markets in the Western Provinces. They only had to cover the extra cost of his transporting the hundred-kilo assortment of vegetables by horse and the converted military trucks that ferried hordes of people along the same route that Western Province traders and mercenaries of old, such as Diego Soñada Santos, used to build their empires of influence. When he arrived from Bana for performances with Los Puntos Estelares, Yunior always spent his spare hours lost in theses on crop rotation, subsidence and the long-term effects of fertiliser use; papers on efficient farm-layout, wild medicinal herbs that were threatened by large-scale agriculture and low-cost irrigation. He was still a student; he had no time to visit produce markets in Aguana, so he wasn't aware that vegetables, when available, fetched far higher prices there. When the locals, who still saw him delivering crates and sacks to Gente stopped waving at him, calling out
hermano
, he didn't notice. The growing, striped flamboyance of Tomas's shirts and the sparkle of Flor's new shoes when they visited Verde to dance, didn't catch his eyes. Yunior loved seeing them happy, embraced them with customary exuberance, shared in the laughter that lit their eyes like diamonds.

Flor often held his face and kissed him on the lips, ruffling his growing Afro. ‘Twenty-two. So hard-working, so good-looking. It's a pity we don't have a daughter for you.' Tomas punched his arm and they all laughed. He didn't know that Flor and Tomas had stopped selling vegetables to all but their closest friends, that they were taking deliveries from him and reselling the produce to the hotels that glowed like enemy posts in Aguana nights – hotels that paid ten times the price he charged them.

Leaving the club one evening, a dark woman with loose black curls that tumbled to the shoulder of the clinging red dress she wore, grasped his arm and followed him outside.

‘Hi, I'm Loretta.'

He was stunned, both by her radiance and her forwardness. ‘Yunior.'

‘Do you have something with that woman?' She jerked her head towards the door of Verde, still holding on to his left arm, her low heels keeping beat with his strides.

‘Flor? No.' He flashed an amused smile. ‘Were you jealous?'

‘You are her business partner?'

Yunior frowned at the turn the conversation had taken. ‘No. I sell vegetables to her store sometimes. She is a friend.'

Loretta stepped up to walk ahead of him and mumbled, ‘Come with me.'

Yunior's frown eased into a grimace of realisation. His first encounter with the secret police.

Following Loretta into a Spanish-style villa turned dull by night, Yunior was ushered into what must have once been a lavatory where a young man in tan trousers, a green T-shirt and a flat cap, informed him that they had been observing the counter-revolutionary activities of Flor and Tomas for five months. They had started in May 1991, nine months earlier, when Yunior first delivered vegetables to Gente, but stopped after a month having spoken to locals who said that they were able to get affordable produce from Flor and Tomas. In September, an old lady complained that vegetables were no longer available, although they still saw Yunior arriving with boxes twice a month.

‘We went to Bana and saw the good work you are doing there with the farmers. The Universidad say you are a brilliant student too.'

Yunior nodded, finally leaning back in the low chair he had been given.

‘We just had to be sure that you weren't involved in the black market trade with the hotels like Flor and Tomas.'

Yunior was to say nothing of his arrest as Loretta would be observing the Gente operation for another month to identify all the counter-revolutionaries. The Agriculture Minister was interested in his organic farming work in Bana and the smaller project he had started recently on a visit to Isla de la Inocencia.

It was on his way back home, the Agriculture Minister's long arm reaching across him to point, that he first saw the Soñada Santos rice estate in Asadon.

‘The owner is a good supporter of the Rosario revolution. The family gave half of their land to the local peasants after our liberation in 1959,' said the minister, pushing his sunglasses further up his nose.

‘It doesn't look very productive.'

‘True. I think their yield has been falling for years, but it doesn't matter. The rice from here is worth its weight in gold – it's the sweetest rice in Fumaz.'

Excerpt from Work in Progress

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

For Abednego, the sweats began the day he dreamt of Black Jesus and Farmer Thornton’s wife. The two always followed one another, a seductive sickness which had the effect of curing his erectile dysfunction, an infirmity that started the year he went to Lupane to see the Commission of Enquiry people, near the mass grave where Thandi and his mama lay.

Black Jesus began to afflict him after the Solomon incident. Solomon and his lofty idealism, which he had imported along with the Syrian woman he arrived with from Cuba in ’91. He had returned a haunted man, Solomon, lanky, with a Fidel Castro T-shirt, a beret worn to the side, and gaunt eyes which seemed to beckon a dismal future. He was sick, sick, sick in the head as much as in the body; hadn’t Abednego tried to tell the family that all that talk about land and revolution and Guantánamo City were the ramblings of a man who had lost his bearings? Well – he scratched his balls – no, he hadn’t, but he should have, because he had suspected it from the very beginning.

Solomon decided, as he lay dying on the mat in Aunt Po’s hut, to impose an impossible request: ‘Bury me where my ancestors lie.’

He knew two things, Solomon:

one
: to deny the request of a dying man was suicide

and

two
: his was an impractical request.

Everybody knew that the land in question was located in Farmer Thornton’s sprawling fields. Aunt Po, swamped by grief, sagged beneath her son’s request. And so it was left up to Abednego – he puffed – as were most important decisions in the family, to coax out one last shaft of reason; he grabbed his cousin’s hand.

‘Please, mzala, anything else.’

‘When my body lies in the ground, I want to be able to greet my ancestors on the other side.’

‘Anything else mzala. Please.’

‘I want to wake up in the spirit world of my clan across the Dongamuzi Mountain.’

‘Cousin, don’t say that, ngiyacela, please.’

‘It’s the grief of having to drive past the stolen land of my people which has killed me.’

‘Cousin, it is Aids which has killed you . . .’

Aunt Po let out an indignant shriek.

‘When they stole the land they stole our souls. Don’t let me wander in the spirit world without my soul.’

‘Cousin . . .’

‘Bury me in the land of my ancestors. Do you hear me? I will come back and haunt you if you don’t.’

Solomon chose this moment to draw his last breath; the pact was sealed.

The crime was committed in the dead of night. It was Abednego who led the excursion. Aunt Po insisted on a patch of land right in the middle of Farmer Thornton’s pumpkins. It was the farm workers who heard the
conk-conk
of the hoes against rock, and, loyal little mutts that they were, the little shits
1
, they alerted the farmer. And so, beneath the glower of the farmer’s flashlights, his rabid mongrels, his loaded shotgun and the local constabulary – who, fearful of spirits which when unfulfilled wandered the earth in search of vengeance, refused to help the farmer – Solomon Ndimande was buried. The family and what few friends had decided to brave the spectacle congratulated themselves on a job well done and went on their way.

And that was that.

Until.

Three years later, when, under the assistance of a court order from Judge Muponde – a drunk, a womaniser and a civil servant of the overzealous, irritating kind – Farmer Thornton and his band of latifundia thugs congregated to dig up Solomon. Aunt Po threw herself on to the grave and rolled and rolled, rolled and rolled, tearing at her tangle of frizzy hair. Abednego stood with his hands hanging awkwardly at his sides. It was Farmer Thornton’s son, a finely etched shadow of the father, who telephoned the police, and it was Black Jesus, who happened to be visiting the area, who arrived with a gang of terrified constabulary in tow. Before he knew it, Abednego was doubled over, retching; how could it be that after eleven whole years, the man was still disarming in all his magnificent ugliness? He had never been sure if the man had a frightful face simply because it was ghastly or because he was Black Jesus. For years, he had obsessed over photographs of the man on television and in newspapers, safe in the illusion that his rage was a weapon biding its time. Before him, this rage whimpered and died. Oh, not only was it unforgettable, that face, the colour of the rich black clay that could be found along the Gwayi River floodplain in Tsholotsho, near Lupane, but each twitch of those lips – the shape of a flat-bellied heart – and each contraction of those cheeks – protruding from either side of the columella in the distinguished silhouettes of smoking pipes – gave those loathsome eyes a savage sophistication that was at once dreadful and beguiling.