The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea

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In my mind, it happened in a dreamland of veld and thorn trees and endless horizons. A land of a thousand folds, all running together, splitting apart. In a landscape that will always call to me, the forever-roads to nowhere, forgotten places full of people who remember. Do you know what that’s like, I wonder? To have something writ into your bones so deep that it feels like every fold in your mind, every twist and turn of the mini-cosmos in your head has its analogue in some quiet river bend where fish gather in ways known only to them, repeating a dance which has not changed since we started the clocks, released the crocs to chase away youth and eat the sun. And to never really be a part of it, to see it from a comfortable window as but the passing of moments to be described later, when it suits you?

How sweet it is, how tempting, that life.

My home filled with hungry dreamers fed on the memories of a few great women and their men. It haunts me that I can’t click to its beat, can’t quite find the rhythm in these ossified lines of tainted English. Like some bad party song popular for a decade or two. Every time I talk about it, I set out to conquer the land again - those great battle clouds, mountains velvet with distance. My red-coated words once more walk across it all, looking for a home.

‘Autobiography has become one of the last refuges of the confused who find life stranger than fiction - we now use fictional elements to enable our facts to arrive at the truth’. Nicely put, don’t you think? I do. What does it matter that I really feel like it happened in a land of dreams, that many-folded home of mine, as if this world too were nil but light and dancing shadows?

No. What you want to hear about is the heedless young white boy. That’s the real story isn’t it? The one you know all too well already, like a hand-me-down from one speaker to the next that you can follow without listening because it rings within you, in formulas learnt by heart. That though life is strange, cut up, just one thing after another, disillusioned, absurd, you’re not alone with your thoughts. White people are guilty, black people are angry. It is how it has always been. So drive on, young white boy, into a sunset which makes your heart ache and eyes water. That’s right, flip the visor down so you can see where you’re going and who to avoid.

I live in a tiny village on a wild coast, nearly an hour from the closest town. It is unspeakably beautiful. The longest beach on the country, calving whales in the winter, wild dolphins year-round, more than few sharks to make you kak a bit and ponder the fragility of life. Every time I venture out behind the backline, it’s like going to meet myself for the first time. Diving under huge waves which crash and curl overhead and suck you into the murky backwash so that sometimes up is down and down is up and air, sand, water and salt know no difference. It is awe-inspiring, sublime. Terrifying. Addictive. The sun sets in rich golds and reds, like a falling stone beyond the horizon. Gone in sixty seconds. It’s how short the sunset is in Africa that makes it beautiful, don’t you think? An explosion of colour, then the quickening night filled with noises. And, when you’re lucky, the moon will rise red, then orange, then white, lighting a yellow-brick road down the Indian Ocean to god knows where, and beyond.

My love lies buried on that beach, waiting: heartspace and the danger of beauty all around. But summer always ends. Vaguely in headaches and worries this life leaks away. Time is a fantasy in Africa, but even fantasy forces its way in occasionally. I would get into the car my dad gave me - his old mercedes benz from his days as a banker - and drive back to university. Turn the music up, recline the seat a little, activate cruise control and watch the countryside slide by.

Two minutes from my house, I would pass over the dunes and catch sight of the squatter camp nestled into the valley below, partially hidden from sight so that all the nice people in the village don’t have to see the way their workers live. Space is still so segregated. It’s tragic. Really it is. What does fiction matter when it’s people spilling over borders and boundaries, an excess no longer to be bound by text or the apartheid architects’ best-laid plans. How can conscience survive in South Africa? Sometimes I’d want to be sick. Sometimes the music would just about drown it all out.

And so I would drive through the Eastern Cape, a landscape so beautiful it put my dreams to shame every night. It’s just so… vast. Beneath a dome of African sky that never seems to end, with wisps of clouds skirting it’s horizons, playing with distance and the hot thermals rising off plains below. My god, it is a heart-stopping place to drive through. Especially in a machine like a merc.

On days when I felt especially sick, caught between utter beauty and the people plodding home after a long day, heavy bundles balanced expertly on their heads, I would stop and give whoever happened to be waiting a lift to the nearest town. I would always look for women or old men though. Can’t be too careful you know. Plus I have the same, old, inbred fear in my heart that my volk have never been able to escape. It’s part of the words written into my bones. Along with fold and sky and veld, there it is: fear.

Most of the time, the women couldn’t speak English, and I could only greet in isiXhosa, so I’d just turn up the music again and drive to the next town. I think I drove faster than most of the clapped-out bakkies which generally pick up hitchhikers. That old merc could induce the odd sharp intake of breath or clutching at the door handle. I would smile blithely as if the whole situation were entirely normal. Reckless young mlungu, dodging potholes and cattle and herd-boys who no longer waved, but only stared sullenly at my knuckles, white from gripping the steering wheel so hard. I’d flash a smile at them too, as if it mattered.

One day, driving past Fish River, I saw a woman waving her hand just before the bridge at the bottom of the canyon. That, too, is a place deserving of more than mere words. Silent, stone cliffs rising above a mighty brown river, the silence of flowing water and drifting cloud. I often stopped to listen to it all. I decided to stop for her that time, and as I did, three other men appeared from nowhere. I had already pulled over. It was too late. All four came toward the car.

I was really shitting myself, you know, no rational judgement or anything, just the irrational terror that grips our hearts for obscure reasons we don’t ever really want to examine. There are too many stories in South Africa that start like this. Naive, arrogant youngster thinks he’s untouchable, immortal. Tragic that he got taken so early. And trying so hard to be good. Go and learn your lesson now youngster, unable to drive on. Learn it well.

The four surrounded the car and opened all the doors at the same time. I must have looked like a bobble-head, trying to eye each one. It embarrasses me to write that, but you want the truth don’t you? Then read it over, see my eyes out on stalks, trying to take this new situation in and decide how to handle everything happening so fast.

The woman got in front and the three men piled in the back. She greeted me in English and asked how I was. I could only stammer half an answer before looking at the three men in the back. They were all middle-aged, dressed in shabby overalls and worn shoes. They smelled like earth and sweat and a hundred other things I couldn’t identify. It was a strange smell, not unpleasant, but deeply unfamiliar, different to any way my body has ever smelled, even after rugby matches on hot and windless winter days. I’ll never forget wondering if my car smelled as strange to them as they did to me. Sanitised, scrubbed. All surface.

It turned out they were going to Pedi, which was about 50 kilometres away. The three men were all labourers on a farm nearby and the woman had come from East London to meet them and travel together to an ailing gogo living somewhere outside the sprawling town. The men didn’t speak much English, but the woman gave me a detailed history of each of them and their families and the ways they were all tied together through this cousin, or that uncle, or the runaway brother who had brought shame on his house, but then returned with a taxi he had bought and now gave lifts to all the children to the local school.

The men didn’t add much, but they listened closely to her, asking her questions in Xhosa every so often to make sure that she was getting the story right. Actually, how on earth do I know that? Perhaps they were asking her what she was revealing to this mlungu who clearly could not be trusted - just look how he drives! At one stage, there was a long sidebar between all four of them in rapid and strange sound, apparently to do with whether Petrus was actually Elias’s third cousin or second cousin once removed. I think they decided it was probably the first, but who can be sure?

What a story it was! A great rhapsody of family intrigue and love and betrayal and loss and prodigal sons who owned taxi operations and now walked around with funny hats, tilted at an angle. And, at the centre, the venerated old woman, keeper of all the family ties, who - finally loosening her iron grip on this world - had called her brood together one last time before she went to the ancestors with news of these dark times. It is a story I could never even wish to imagine, let alone write. It lasted for 50 kilometres and was only really beginning by the time we reached Pedi. But it was a whole chapter in the great African Epic, this I swear to you. Such characters, such detail, magic and witchcraft everywhere, intrigue hidden in every corner. I was transfixed.

As we pulled up to the taxi rank, all four began digging in their pockets and pooling the few coins they had earned that day to pay for the lift. My heart sank. I have never felt so sick in all my life. It gives me chills just to write about it now. These men, so much like the land they work every day, proud in their own way, wanted to pay a soft, scrubbed white boy for a lift he had given them in his mercedes benz. What did they see when they looked at him? What would they think if they read this? Ours is a fucked up country. There is no other way to say it in English.

Land of a broken heart, what will become of us?

You see, I knew the villains in her Epic far too well. Had sat with them behind high walls, laughed at their jokes and eaten their food because we are not bad people, after all. I had heard the siren’s song, on that isolated and dangerous isle, and I hadn’t been tied to the mast. I dived headfirst into the tempting blue sea, thinking I was finding myself. But wasn’t it just another escape?

I sometimes think about Nongqawuse while I’m out there, watching the sun rise over the swelling sea, waiting for the ancestors to return like they promised all those years ago.

On another holiday, I went walking far from anywhere, lost in the sea mist of a still day. Like strange wraiths, I saw an old bull leading a small group of cattle down to the water’s edge, acting as if they’d never seen it before. This world’s end and the blue horizon. They stood staring for a long time, some strange communion occurring between the depths and those dark black eyes. Wet noses raised tentatively to take in the salty air. Slowly, the bull walked out ahead, solemn. Alone. He stooped to touch the water. Each cow followed one by one, repeating the odd bow, then all turned tail and wandered down the beach.

I watched them walk away to the hidden places we all come from. Each humbly bearing its burden, beasts borne ceaselessly into the past.

 
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