The Reactive Page 14

  We aren’t wealthy people, Nathi, he says, you know that.

  I nod that I do.

  We cross the road to the communal tap, which stands on a concrete square in a barren field. Goalposts made from carved branches have been erected at each end, but no one has any interest in playing games in Du Noon any more. Bhut’ Vuyo lets the water run into a bucket and we go back to the house and pour Omo washing powder over our palms. When we sit back down and face the street again, another woman has taken her place at the tap. She fills a yellow enamel basin without handles. Two small children hang on her legs and she keeps kicking them away. They laugh at her scolding and run towards the goalposts. The water feels cool in the heat. Bhut’ Vuyo says the Sunlight soap is only used for washing our bodies. We scoop up more washing powder for our palms.

  They should be burned, he repeats, before shifting on his crate. We aren’t wealthy, Nathi, but we aren’t prisoners, he says.

  I dry my hands against my pants. It smells like a clothesline under my fingernails.

  I know things can be worse, Bhut’ Vuyo says. In Khayelitsha? The toilets don’t have walls. This is a place a man’s wife must relieve herself. There, with men and children watching. He shakes his head and spits into the ground.

  In town, Cissie once told us about an artist named Adrian Blackwell. He’d created a portable toilet with a one-way mirror and installed it on a pavement in Toronto and Ottawa. While the door of the cube was reflective on the outside, the person on the bowl could see out into the traffic. I guess Cissie would’ve called this the collective unconscious. Adrian Blackwell never gave any indication of having heard of Khayelitsha, but in his way, he’d recreated it. I doubt Bhut’ Vuyo would find any of this of interest, however, so I decide to terminate the thought.

  I take a look around us instead.

  Despite the temperament of our conversation, Du Noon is filled with warmth and sunshine today. It’s a Saturday, which means the routine is mild and the commute is halved. Taxis play loud house music as they wheel about, picking up passengers dressed in their best Saturday clothes. The women’s figures are fit snugly into white slim jeans and some of them have sprayed their weaves, making them gleam in the morning light. Their lips are painted red and sometimes hot pink, and a strong air of confidence radiates from them. They stroll towards a taxi if it doesn’t stop at their feet. One woman walks by wearing a pair of hoop earrings. Each circle glimmers in the sunlight.

  I turn to Bhut’ Vuyo. I say, at least people are still alive, here.

  I must sound bored or unconvinced, because Bhut’ Vuyo just laughs in response. The laugh itself sounds sparse and cold. I can’t trace humor in the eyes or enjoyment around the mouth. Thankfully, it passes quickly. He claps his hands together.

  That’s not living, he says.

  Then he looks at my face and smiles. My uncle pats the side of my leg. Tell me about your studies, he says. Tell me about life at the university. One day you’re going to change all of this, aren’t you? He lets out another laugh and his smile stays on his face for a long time. You and your whites, he says.

  Sis’ Nosizi, Bhut’ Vuyo’s wife, is due to return to us in Du Noon on the Sunday, just a day after we finish up with the latrine, bringing the two younger children with her. In preparation for her arrival, we do what we can for the container. I put up more Daily Voice spreads on the walls, more shootings and tik dens, and replace the ones I wiped with and soaked in the pools of formaldehyde. For his part, Bhut’ Vuyo arrives back early from his work in Blouberg with two packs of beef shanks. He rips the plastic between his teeth and whistles as he rinses the meat in the water bucket. I cut a square of Holsum and watch it melt in the frying pan. The Primus stove is broken, parked outside by the crates, so we use a gas two-plate for our cooking. Bhut’ Vuyo busies himself with his specialty.

  There is a reason I called you here, Nathi, he says to me.

  I listen.

  My wife, he says. You mustn’t be scared.

  I nod. I’ve always known Sis’ Nosizi is a diviner. What she does for a living doesn’t intimidate me. I look forward to hearing her stories.

  Then Bhut’ Vuyo changes his tone and licks his fingers. He whistles over the pan and reaches for the salt shaker. Pass me the stock, he tells me. You know nothing, my boy.

  I pass it. We laugh and prepare just enough for us to eat.

  When Sis’ Nosizi returns, she looks at me for a long time. Then she embraces me and tears find their way down both our necks.

  My circumcision is discussed only once. We set a date for late December. It’s decided that I’ll go in with their eldest son, Luvuyo. He arrives in Du Noon a week early. I let him greet his parents and siblings for about an hour, and then we walk down to Magasela’s to buy a crate of quarts. We drink until we turn half-blind, and then we roar our way home. We’ll have a small ceremony, they’ve told us, and the next morning our hair is shaved off by our neighbor. Ta Kader lives in a blue container opposite Bhut’ Vuyo’s. He crosses the road with a bowl of water and a pack of Lion razor blades. Taking sips from a warm Black Label dumpy, he tells us jokes under the blinding sun.

  We head out to Cape Town Station after that. Outside the bus terminal, Luvuyo and I prepare to board a coach heading to eMthatha. Bhut’ Vuyo has business in town, he tells us, looking out of place in front of the station’s modern blue signage. We had a moment to talk just before we left Du Noon. He asked me to pass his gratitude on to my family back home, and I said to him that I would. His family had worn too thin to carry Luvuyo through initiation, he explained, and I nodded to indicate my understanding of their circumstances.

  Now I get ready to leave Cape Town. I think of my friends as Luvuyo and I board the beeping Intercape bus outside. I think about where Ruan and Cecelia could be on a day like today—a day in which I finally take my leave of this city. We never made it out to the Eastern Cape to grow khat in our idyll like we wanted to; but we still have many years left before the end of our paths. I board the bus before I get ensnared in the thought, finding an empty seat near the back. Then I shrug and wish the two of them the best.

  There’s a young couple dozing under a blanket to my right. They have their hands buried between each other’s thighs and are breathing heavily. Luvuyo nudges me as he walks past and points at them with a grin. Naaiers, he says, sitting down in the seat behind me.

  I grin. I guess I wish myself the best, too. I wish Luvuyo the same. Leaning back, I close my eyes before we start moving. The trip is fifteen hours long, they say, and our journey will push us across a thousand kilometers of our country. Luvuyo and I have been told everything we need to know. We’ll return from this journey as new men, they said.

  We do. Three weeks later my family has a small celebration for us back home, in eMthatha, and after umgidi wethu, we make it back to Du Noon in early January. For a while, Luvuyo and I hang around the neighborhood, wearing our uniform and doing the rounds to meet with other guys who’ve just come out. It isn’t the way it used to be, everyone complains. You get men as young as fourteen, now, and they bring guns into the circles we open to greet one another, pressing amakrwala for buttons and brandy. We give it two weeks before we decide it isn’t worth the hassle, or maybe even the risk. I change out of my blazer and newsboy cap and wonder how much I could hawk them for.

  Towards the end of the month Luvuyo takes a taxi out of Du Noon, but I decide to stick around for a while. I take Industrial when everyone’s out, and then I start walking the neighborhood on my own, asking around for anyone who might have work. In the end, I take a job at a spaza. It’s in a double container just around the corner from Bhut’ Vuyo’s, a place popular for pushing out cigarettes and five-rand airtime. It isn’t anything serious. It keeps my shoulders above water when we reach the end of the month. I split myself between the cleaning and the selling, and sometimes I’ll go behind the counter and take a look at my boss’s books; I’ll do a few numbers for her.

  There’s a lot of kids who pass by
the shop. Most of them get sent from home to buy bread, airtime, or bleach—household items for their overworked mothers. These laaities like to act smooth if you let them. They’ll bring a half-loaf down to a quarter and then burn the change on entjies and rolling paper. Sometimes I serve them and other times I don’t. It depends on the kind of day I’m having when I get on my shift. I serve their older brothers, too—guys who come from my block and the ones next to ours. They lope up to my container with a million-rand scheme burning out of their eyes, each with a plan to turn Du Noon on its head. They ask me for deodorant and cigarettes, mostly, and I slide them packets of free condoms too. My boss used to be a school teacher; she makes us do that if we have them around.

  Sometimes, one of the guys will pocket the jackets and hang around the store for a while, waiting for me to get off my shift. We’ll dap an entjie outside the container and he’ll tell me to come around to the corner for quarts, and that it’s been a while since the ous saw me playing pool at Ta Ace’s. If I’m off the next day, I’ll tag along with him. I’ll drop the keys on the counter and ignore my boss’s glares, her warnings. We’ll take the main road, most of the time, and go past the inn, where the taxis crank their bass so high they could move the walls of a thousand houses backwards; and it’s at times like these, with the evening sky tinted the bright color of a new coal fire, that things seem possible, even for us down here.

  Then one day, without any warning, I remember the man we once met on that cold night in Mowbray; I remember Monsieur Paré and the mask he wore on the day the three of us, Ruan, Cecelia and I, took our seats with him. It happens on a wet, gray morning, and when I think of him, I think of his daughter, Ethelia, as well.

  Friday shifts are the longest at the shop, so I always make sure to take down two cigarettes on the way, just to keep the tar from rising up to my face. Today, I smoke the first one on Bhengu, and when I cross over to Eagle Street, passing by a pack of school children who climb, one after the other, into the doors of a peeling Hi-Ace, I hear the first noises from the mob. I nod at the driver as I pass, one of Ta T-Man’s new men, and when I take the corner into Nomzamo, my eyes smart and the wind stings when it flows into my throat. It’s cold and scented with motor oil; heavy with the smell of burning rubber. Maybe there’s been another strike, I think, but when I look around, no one seems torpid enough to be off the clock.

  I keep walking.

  I find the crowd a block away from my job; a small mob of around twenty people, and when I get closer, I hear them shouting over each other, hurling accusations about a pyramid scheme and talking about a man who’ll later remind me of Paré. In the crowd, a few people hold up election posters. They’ve ripped them down from the containers which fortify the front end of Du Noon, at the beginning of Dumani Street, and the faces of the politicians have been blanked out with white paint. In the center of the mob, they have the offender sprawled on the ground. He looks no older than eighteen. Two tires smolder behind him in a small stack, the cause of the heady stink in the air. Three women, standing to my right and in front of an old man in stained overalls, say the boy was trying to torch the neighborhood, and that only a month ago he’d stolen money from Du Noon’s pensioners, selling them a pyramid scheme called The Golden Fowl.

  I nod, feeling I’ve got the gist of it.

  Then I push myself deeper into the crowd and see him curled up on his side. He’s a small man, wearing nothing but a light-green vest—something they say he lifted from the clothesline behind him. Turning over on his side, he starts to laugh, spitting into the ground and turning a clot of it into mud under his chin. He addresses the crowd at the same time, shouting about the coming of a man without a face. The crowd falls silent and we listen. He sinks his nails into the earth, digs up a fistful of soil, and hurls it over his head. He says we’ll no longer be slaves, when the faceless man comes. Then he releases a stream of urine into the dust, and that’s when they drive the first shopping trolley into his flank, scraping him across the earth. The women in front of me tell the men to go easy on him: to only teach the boy a lesson. Ligeza eli, they say, a madman, and then they tell the men to dress him in clothes after they’re done. The men, themselves not much older than the offender, laugh, but agree to do so.

  Then most of us turn back to our jobs. When I tell my boss what’s happened in the street outside, she just grunts. Her eyes remain unmoved, her reading glasses fixed on the numbers in her book.

  Look at where you are, she says, waving a hand at me. Then tell me what you find surprising about this.

  I don’t know how to respond, so I shrug. Then I crack my knuckles and take my place at her counter.

  Not much, I say in the end, to her as well as myself.

  I push an empty Kiwi shoe-polish tin under the stool to keep it from rocking. Through the doorway, I watch the rutted road die once more, before it comes back to life with our customers at lunchtime.

  + + +

  Time manages to pass after that, but I can’t help thinking about it: all the things I heard and saw that day. Later, after they’d beaten up the offender—his name was Siseko—they told him to go home, but he hung around our neighborhood instead, walking the streets and taking long laps from Siya to Curry Street, holding conversations with himself about the man and his coming.

  I drew a mask for him, once. He’d come over to buy an entjie for the doorman at Ta Ace’s, where he’d started cleaning tables and floors. We went behind the container, and when I showed him the face I’d drawn on a piece of paper, he said I had the key. It was a sketch of Ambroise Paré—as I remembered him, at least—and Siseko laughed and called me the white man from Sis’ Thoko’s spaza. He said I had the key that would save all of us, and I guess I must’ve laughed too, since I didn’t want to think any more than I had to about it. To me, Monsieur Paré had only been a parent, and Ethelia his daughter: a father.

  We smoked in silence after that, and I remember feeling a sense of peace rushing into me as I watched him walking away with the mask. I knew I wouldn’t be the only one to do him a favor that day, to make sure he sometimes landed on his feet. The community had taken him in, like it had done with me, and there was no need to be fearful of everything we didn’t know.

  Sometimes I still hear from Sis’ Thobeka. I finally gave her that CD4-count sheet, believe it or not. They say the virus is arrested in my blood.

  I took a taxi to town and wrote an email to Le Roi about it. It was a Tuesday. I walked up Long Street and made my way to the basement level of the African Women’s Craft Market, just a block down from the Palm Tree Mosque, where I paid a five rand to the Rasta who manned the café counter.

  Le Roi wrote back to me fast, telling me how he’d moved to the south of France. I was in luck, he said, since he’d taken my condition as a focus, restricting his research to non-progressors and a handful of immunes. It was a small lab in a middling college, however, and the only way he stayed afloat was by no longer having his South African wife to worry over. I didn’t ask him about that, and he said nothing about the job she’d got me. In the end, we exchanged emails for about half an hour, and concluded that I wasn’t a modern miracle. I was still reactive, just slow to develop the syndrome. I have a large number of antibodies, for reasons the two of us couldn’t fathom.

  It was the last time I ever spoke to André, and I suppose he was right in his diagnosis.

  Still, before I left, I gave another five-rand coin to the Rasta and sat down to send one last message to Le Roi. I left the body of this email empty—the two of us had said everything there was to say—and linked him to a news article about the government’s new Operational Plan. Dated the first of September, the government was reported as having finally relented, ending a five-year struggle: under increased pressure from a civil disobedience suit, the South African cabinet had ruled to provide free ARVs to the country’s citizens. Most of us were still in disbelief. Sis’ Thobeka, whom I’d called from a pay phone close to work, had held back tears, and Bhut’ Vuy
o had slapped a copy of the Voice against his thigh. The article said that the government planned to provide treatment for a hundred thousand of us by March the following year. Who knew? I thought. It was enough to believe them for now.

  I left the café and took a taxi west from the station deck. Passing the Atlantic Seaboard, I thought about how many times I’d taken this same route, my backpack filled with pills that were meant to preserve my life and the lives of those who could afford it. How many of us were affected inside this taxi? Inside the metropolis? I looked at the assortment of heads in front of me and wondered who I would’ve sold to. Then I thought of my old clients. I thought of Ronny and Leonardo. I thought of Millicent, and I thought of Ta Lloyd and his wife.

  Soon, the taxi approached Du Noon.

  I felt relieved to be close to home, and later, as I settled down to sleep, I thought about our country’s infection rate. I wondered if we’d been selected in particular for this trial. Perhaps HIV was a purge, I imagined, a brutal transition on the other side of which might lie a newer, stronger human species, one resistant to a thousand more ailments and vital enough to survive all the trials that were still germinating in the future. It was just an idea, but I thought that when the time came, those who knew might be looked upon to lead.

  The following week, there was an article written about us slow progressors in the City Press. Sis’ Thobeka, who called, encouraged me to go in for tests, and one of these days, I told her, I might surprise myself and do just that.

  Just pull me away from Esona first. I know I haven’t mentioned a single thing about her, but this is how all of that goes. The two of us meet on a clear, hot Saturday towards the end of my first November in Du Noon, before Luvuyo and I head up to eMthatha. I’ve just borrowed my uncle’s lorry and driven it out to a park jam in Khayelitsha: a new hip-hop festival that goes on for half a day on a stage outside Mandela Park, on the corner of Oscar Mpetha and Govan Mbeki Roads. That morning, I turn a corner and spot the white Pick n Pay shopping bags which clutch the barbed wire like the flags of a different country, twisting their bodies to the tune of rap music and neglect. Closer, I start to feel the bass coming off the PA system, the thump murmuring against my windows. I pull in, shift down a gear and park close to the gathering. Then I walk to a nearby spaza for a warm pack of Amstels. I open a can and stash the rest in the van.