The Man
When the man arrived, Sophiatown was still fossilized in ghostly
aura unshaken after decades on unforgetting walls. His brother's precarious
breath was very sickly, arid skin yellowing in rejuvenation of illness,
undiagnosed as yet of a gut ulcer.
This brother has recently severed ties with loved one, and
all hate was crowding his person, more for himself than any other; his failing
for a woman engulfing him like flames upon a helpless dreamer.
Yet, Sophiatowm watched, undead among dead memories of many
who aspired to live eternally in the spirit of this place.
The house his brother was renting on a final straw of
brokeness and nearing destitution, was in disarray when the man arrived.
The man been an obsessive compulsive freak managed to bring
semblance of honour to home he kept warm with love for years.
It was on 2nd Avenue, with an eviction notice hanging over
the brother's frail shoulders, an anathema of history's rerun in an age of
monetary castration of black men by a system of debt and desire.
It seemed the city was sipping his marrow dry, his forceful
ardor now beginning to fade into denialist tirades that scorned rebuke and
advice.
A hard soul; preferring solitude the following days after
the man's unannounced visit - a solitary withering among walls peeling recollections
of a sand castle he had built for love.
Impenetrable his shields had become, but through him the man
saw the bare nakedness of urban soldiers enduring old chronicles, and counting
on a new dawn.
Scribbling their nameless dreams, poets cramped pubs under
sodden drifts of early winter rains, and the brother was always among them,
hands stuffed in worn and leaking pockets.
Pulling on an unkempt goaty, solemn and sinking into music
and gin - you would watch the wonder of immersion; he was a frozen frame of
shebeen intellectuals of yesteryears.
And here he was
ushering the man into the muck and jozi debris, after a short exile -
shedding despondencies of my own and
wrecked by chronic joblessness.
It was sometime in May, a dull and soggy clime, inner city
streets fashioned in usual sweeps of sodden pedestrians and muddy pools
stagnated on broken tarmac.
Whirling storms of taxi engines and husky hooters from a
brazen metal tomb of a city; somnambulist prowlers and dazed hawkers in
disarray always were sure to brave it all for either work, or hustle.
The brother always had his hustle, though at this point in
his life, no much choice was left in the cult of hustles; and the city hailed
its ancient misspelled billboards advertising rags and glass windows staring at
one another with daring and permanence.
Jozi, at anytime was whining with a sinister hum of life,
reflected on puddles and clogged drains.
Cheap supermarkets will always stand bargaining for lusty eyes
of the living while bins stand scavenged by children facing cold spells in derelict
passageways of high-jacked building.
But, Sophiatown, by some serendipitous coincidences and
events familiar in a place of transit lives, was still a leafy village of lost
roots; rotten trunks and branches clawing their stare at time's slow trudge.
Pleasures past remained as tales lamented in books we held
dear; each street still writing its dirge, its psalms of the newly dying hordes
of revelling scholars.
***
A job prospect had dredged from the bowls of oblivion; an
oblivion I very well cherished under circumstances of my own making, but
nevertheless an oblivion, yes.
Why dis I return at such an inopportune time, when the
brother is so irrevocably tormented and downtrodden? Or was it a perfectly
synchronized incidence ordained to guide and saddle him through my turmoil?
The initial shock that later subsided was when he smiled;
his neck ligaments painfully taut from beneath the chin.
Veins, green and exposed looking like freeways of
infestation - I realized that a change had to be made; one has to take care of
one's body, or else dying young would be a truly fast death.
What a disheartening sight, but a joy in the hope that new
strength can spring from dried rocks piling our his frame.
Our first night under the same roof was troubled with
nothingness; resolved to a numb shroud of darkness slightly illuminated by
distant neon constellations and lightning.
How night bears witness to the heaviest of toils; those
churned in silence by minds fearing hunger for their unborn.
On days that followed we brooded with nostalgia, nursing
bruised egos with swabs of bitter truths, and visits to museums, liquor stores
and nearby jazz booths.
There we'd meet friends unrecalled, acquaintances and former
lovers; spend the last peels of our used fruit and bartered tales for other
gifts.
Much of the substance of conversations waning, recoiling to
recesses of lost allegiances - peers pass handshakes from armloads of failures.
Shimmering days were soon never forgotten as more friends
begun to visit; the emptiness the brother so miserly kept dissipating and being
brushed away by noisy feet of dancers.
A spark began rising in his eyes, trousers started to hold
at the waist and as his prison diet grew, so did his spirit.
But, nights after all jubilation were often coldly grave,
the man's thoughts wrung off oily residues and tears; I knew I a novice to
older pain even though my own scarred deeper with age.
The man had come to Sophiatown dreading to face his past on
the other side of the wretched city, and he new that facing it all all was as
inevitable as smoke from smouldering embers.
Wind from a stale lake, keeping the man shivering most of
the time; a torment and a nag of blatant emasculation by a white landlord
wanting the brother own on the street like the rest of the menials.
Only two months worth of rent was owed, but be lividly made
sure every security force around the neighbourhood knew that the freeloader had
to vacate the premises by nightfall.
That never happened of course, the first night of these
confrontations being mildly amusing for the man who mused that one African
should be evicted on Africa Month.
Not in a continent of the dispossessed, from a suburb
infamous for the forced removals of black people.
But the landlord had other plans like the thriving student
residence conversions that saw many owners raking millions from over-crowded
houses.
We would watch is slovenly age turn his ruby face crimson,
awash with spite and bile, and sweating bullets over suburbanite debts.
The man could empathize sometimes, but while mesmerized by
he white man's indifference towards black destitution; the man knew his mercy
was misplaced.
These events became simulcra of a vile episode once felt by
the brother's mother and grandmother who had lived in Sophiatown during those
turbulent times.
His mother, only a toddler being bundled off like wayfarer's
luggage to unknown destinations - the nerve of white privilege.
The treachery of it
all, boiling maniacally about shielded wealth usurped from coal black souls who
flowered gardens and painted guilds and fences for their mansions.
What had become astoundingly purgatorial was his disregard
of the knowledge of the brother's recent stint in hospital; yet in an ungodly
calm we ate the white man's cake filled with razor blades.
But having raffled his feathers, we decided after his one of
his customary departures that we won't move; anthemic of antique struggles of
fallen figures we now resembled.
