Sometimes There Is a Void (24 page)

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Authors: Zakes Mda

BOOK: Sometimes There Is a Void
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‘Psss
…
I have something to show you,' he whispered to the Afrikaner as he unrolled the rubber band that held the paintings together. He had to do all this under the counter so that the bartender and the waiters didn't see that he was peddling contraband to the patrons.
The woman knew Mr Dizzy's tricks and she pleaded with him in Sesotho, ‘Dizzy, please don't spoil my business.'
‘I've got to survive too, Liepollo,' said Mr Dizzy.
‘Then go and get your own white man,' said the woman.
‘I don't want to sleep with the guy,' said Mr Dizzy in Sesotho. ‘I just want to sell him a painting.'
‘Get lost, Sechele,' said the woman. She used Mr Dizzy's real name; she was certainly annoyed and had no time for nickname endearments. The john was also getting restless.
‘I don't want any paintings,' he said in Sesotho. ‘Please do what the lady is asking and leave us alone.'
I was listening to all this and I chuckled to myself; Mr Dizzy should have known better than to assume he could discuss the white man in his native tongue without the customer getting wise to what he was saying. He must have been one of those Afrikaners from the border farms in the Ficksburg, Ladybrand or Wepener districts who spoke Sesotho like they were born in a rondavel on the Maluti Mountains of Lesotho.
It was time to save the situation. I went to join them.
‘Liepollo,' I said in mock surprise, ‘what are you doing here?'
She sneered and looked at me in surprise. ‘And who are you?'
‘Is there a problem, Sweet Pea?' asked the Afrikaner, now getting agitated.
‘Sweet Pea?' I said. ‘This is my cousin, and now she pretends she does not know me because she's doing something naughty.'
The woman was adamant she did not know me, and the man threatened to call security if we didn't leave them alone. We knew this was a bluff. The rule against soliciting also applied to prostitution. They were sitting there pretending to be a happy couple and wouldn't have liked it if we exposed them as hooker and john.
I ignored the man and said to the woman, ‘I bet your mother doesn't know you are turning tricks at the Holiday Inn. I sing with her in the church choir, you know? I may casually mention it at our next rehearsal.'
I didn't sing in any church choir, but her mother did. Her soprano at the Lesotho Evangelical Church choral society was legendary. I didn't know her personally but as a keen follower of choral music, a love I inherited from my father, I had attended a few concerts where I was mesmerised by her voice.
I turned to the man and said, ‘You see, this poor man is an artist. He does something with his hands. He doesn't steal, he doesn't rob, he
doesn't cross the border to a foreign country to sleep with prostitutes. He's an artist. The least you can do after screwing my cousin is to buy his painting.'
‘Hey, I haven't done anything yet with your cousin,' he said.
The woman snapped at the john, ‘I am not his damn cousin!' And then she turned to me and asked pleadingly, ‘What do you want from me, heh? What do you want?'
‘Ask your boyfriend to buy just one painting and I'll say nothing to your mother,' I said.
‘This is robbery,' said the man. ‘I don't want no bloody painting.'
‘You know I can easily go to the reception and phone your mother,' I said.
‘How much? I'll buy the painting so that you leave us alone,' said the woman.
‘You'll buy no painting, Sweet Pea. I'll buy it for you.'
‘Thank you,' I said, and went back to my bar stool to resume nursing my glass of water.
‘Le masepa, lea tseba?'
the woman yelled after me. You're full of shit, you know that?
Mr Dizzy haggled with the man, and finally came back with a twenty rand note, which was quite a lot of money. Remember, those days the South African rand was worth one and a half times more than the American dollar.
We felt like millionaires. A scale of pineapple beer was five cents. We could get four hundred scales from this amount. We could drink this for days on end. But then we also had to buy Russian sausages and chips to sustain ourselves. Even then man did not live by beer alone. That evening we drank at the casino instead of our regular shebeens. With that kind of money we could even afford Scotch whisky. Though I hated the taste – I had always been a brandy or rum or beer or red wine man – it was good for impressing the rest of the patrons, especially the female ones. Soon I was drunk. I staggered home, which was less than thirty minutes' walk from the Holiday Inn.
Early the next morning Mr Dizzy came knocking at my cottage door. I didn't like it when he did that because I didn't think Mr Kolane
and my aunt would enjoy the sight of such a dodgy character in their immaculate garden. The way he looked they wouldn't have guessed that he came from a family that had an immaculate garden of their own. As soon as I let him in he told me that he had lost all the money at the slot machines and roulette tables. The fool had also lost the rest of the paintings.
The problem was not what we were going to eat. I could eat at the main house at the Kolanes, and he could eat all he wanted at his home at the other end of Maseru West. The problem was what we were going to drink.
Later in the day, after a long nap, I put a few sketches together and once more Mr Dizzy and I went to peddle them, this time among the commercial travellers and tourists at the Lancer's Inn. The Holiday Inn would have been a lost cause at that time of the day.
After many attempts without anyone showing interest, when we were about to give up and make for the shebeens with our trusty guitar, an old white woman who was standing outside the front entrance as if waiting for someone looked at the works with a beaming face. A black and white pencil portrait caught her eye – the only work of realism in the portfolio.
‘I'll buy this one,' she said.
‘Sorry, I am not selling this one,' I said.
It was a portrait of Sibongile Twala.
Mr Dizzy glared at me as if I had lost my mind. Or something worse.
‘He's just joking, ma'am,' he said. ‘We are selling everything here.'
‘Not this one, Mr Dizzy. I'll never sell Sibongile.'
‘You're not selling your fucking cousin, man. It's a picture and you'll draw another one.'
‘Yes, I'll draw another one. But even that one, I won't sell it.'
‘Then why did you bring it with you?'
‘For luck; she's my Muse. Plus it looks after the rest of my paintings.'
‘Muse? Are you crazy? Are you living in some stupid Greek mythology or what? What the fuck is a Muse for an African artist?'
‘We'd have money now if you had not gambled it away. I'm not parting with this one.'
All this time the old lady was peering at the two unkempt black kids arguing about a Muse. Finally she burst out laughing and said, ‘Okay, okay, I'll buy a different one.'
She only paid five rands for a charcoal sketch; it was better than nothing.
One couldn't stay mad at Mr Dizzy for too long. Soon we were laughing and walking up Kingsway to Lesotho High School to visit our friend Clement Kobo.
Clemoski, as we called him, was an English Literature teacher at the high school and lived in a six-roomed brick house on campus. The youthful elite of Maseru gathered at his house to listen to jazz and soul, and to drink brandy and beer and talk about the state of the world. It was a far cry from the home-brew dives that Mr Dizzy and I frequented. Here we had the more learned citizens – civil servants and teachers. My former English Literature teacher at Peka High School, Gordon Tube, was a frequent guest. It was great to sit down with him and talk about literature in this convivial atmosphere.
In the shebeens the habitués argued about soccer and women; at Clemoski's it was all about politics, jazz and boxing. Muhammad Ali was world heavyweight champion and his rhyming fervour was setting the world alight. Copies of
Ring
magazine were lying all over the living room alongside copies of
Down Beat
.
Sometimes the arguments got so heated that men almost came to blows. Like when Steve Belasco voiced an unpopular view that one of Hugh Masekela's Sesotho jazz numbers about herdboys who must be careful that the cattle they were driving to the veld did not catch cold was shit. Now, Hugh Masekela was our hero, a premier trumpet player who was making his name in the highest echelons of jazz in the United States after being exiled from South Africa. Some of Clemoski's friends took offence, but Steve Belasco stood his ground.
‘Shit is shit,' he said. ‘It doesn't matter who plays it.'
Two of the guys pushed Steve Belasco outside, but before we could see some fisticuffs Clemoski came between them and stopped the argument. One could smell the bad blood for a while after that.
Steve Belasco was a Peace Corps volunteer. But he was quite different
from the normal Peace Corps men and women we had come to know. For one thing, he was not scruffy; he was always fashionably dressed in clean jeans and well-ironed shirts. Also, he knew something about jazz, so we spoke the same language, which couldn't be said of the other Peace Corps volunteers who had never even heard of Dizzy Gillespie or Sarah Vaughn or a host of big-name jazz musicians. Steve Belasco knew them all. But I suppose as a white man from America he had no right not to like our music.
And our local jazz – by which we meant South African jazz – was going through a boom period. Some of the bands came to Lesotho and played at the National Stadium. After the show the musicians would congregate at Clemoski's place or at Tom Thabane's, one of Clemoski's friends who, many years later, held a number of cabinet posts in various Lesotho governments. I remember once sharing a
zol
of marijuana with Gabriel Thobejane in Tom Thabane's garden, after which Thobejane played the African drums like a man possessed by demons and Philip Tabane joined him with his guitar that wailed like a wandering spirit. These were the Malombo Jazzmen who had had a successful concert at the stadium the previous night when we danced ourselves to oblivion.
Thandi Klaasen was another South African jazz musician who would scat like nobody's business at the Holiday Inn. And we would all drink together at Clemoski's place before and after these shows. My prize memory was when the songstress was walking with Clemoski and one or two other hangers-on to her dressing room at the National Stadium, and I was following them carrying her sequinned dresses. The soft velvety and silky dresses were lying across my raised arms like an offering to some kinky deity. The crowd was roaring with anticipation as we worked our way among them to the back of the makeshift stage in the centre of the soccer pitch. I was proud that I was part of the history that was going to be made at that stadium, however minuscule my groupie role was.
 
 
 
MR DIZZY HAS A
seizure and his hands are shaking violently. His eyes bulge out and then he shuts them tightly. I can see that he is struggling against the shake-shakes, as we used to call his condition. I am surprised to see that he still has it after all these years. It used to scare the hell out of me when it happened all of a sudden in the midst of our merrymaking. Come to think of it, except for the gaunt face, Mr Dizzy hasn't changed much.
His gambling partner just sits there as if nothing is happening. He gets bored watching the shake-shakes, stands up and leaves; perhaps back to the slot machines.
Gugu looks at Mr Dizzy intently. Perhaps she feels sorry for him. He is a pitiable sight. But who knows? Maybe Mr Dizzy feels sorry for me for having settled for the humdrum life of American suburbia while he continues unabated with the hustling that we were doing when we were boys more than forty years ago. Oh, for the carefree life, unconstrained by the shackles of convention and respectability! Although he doesn't look quite carefree now as he sits in the easy chair, eyes shut.
His shake-shakes subside until they stop. He doesn't make any effort to open his eyes now that the storm is over but just sits there and sleeps.
‘
Sies
, you let him kiss you!' says Gugu out of the blue.
‘Hey, are you ever going to forget that kiss?' I laugh.
A security guard shakes him awake and drags him out. It is his life. It was our life. Card counting at the casino. Entanglements with the police. Addiction to alcohol and gambling. Nothing has changed with him.
‘You know, that could have been me?' I tell Gugu. ‘It was just luck that I came to my senses and changed. It's mostly thanks to my father. He was the one who brought me back from the brink.'
 
 
 
MY FATHER GOT REPORTS
from such people as Nqabande Sidzamba, the PAC Lesotho representative, that I was living a wanton and reckless life in Maseru and he summoned me to Mafeteng immediately. Mr Kolane asked me to vacate my garden cottage. I think
he was relieved that my father had asked him to kick me out; he had tolerated me long enough.

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