Читать книгу The Caruso of Colleen Bawn and Other Short Writings - John Eppel - Страница 7

The Caruso of Colleen Bawn

Hearing all this talk of the Three Tenors put me in mind of a barrelchested fitter and turner who answered to the curious name of Sigford Bong. We children called him Uncle Siggie, but he was known throughout the South-Western districts as ‘The Caruso of Colleen Bawn’.

We children spent much of our school holidays around the swimming pool up at the club: the boys on their tummies so as to conceal erections; the girls self-conscious in their revealing swim-suits, or ‘cossies’ as we called them. When he was on night duty, which was every other week, Uncle Siggie would join us at the pool and regale us with stories of the adult world: how Kudu White had killed an Aberdeen Angus bull (called Wellington) by punching it on the nose; how Mrs Van Dwap would have won the 1947 Matabeleland Ballroom Dancing championship if she had been wearing panties - the judges lost concentration every time her frock billowed - how so and so (name given) had been caught ‘doing it’ in the compound! Sex across the colour bar was seen by the white community of Colleen Bawn as a crime worse than serial killing. But his favourite topic of conversation was Caruso...

“Robinson Caruso?”

“No, you idiot, Enrico: the greatest tenor in recording history.”

We were much more interested in Pat Boone and Jim Reeves but, like all solipsists, Sigford Bong was highly sensitive, so we humoured him, and listened for the umpteenth time to his no doubt apocryphal anecdotes about Caruso. He had a chest expansion of seventeen inches; he could hit a D-flat in full voice; he could hold a note for so long that crystal chandeliers would tinkle, and, once, his voice shattered a wine glass.

“Uncle Siggie, tell us how Crusoe died?”

“Caruso, not Crusoe! I’ve told you already.”

“Please tell it again? Rosie hasn’t heard it.”

The emulous fitter and turner, with forced reluctance, his voice dropping almost to a whisper, would recall that fateful night when Caruso, in the middle of a glorious and unexpected obbligato, which set up a tingling sensation in the bones of the thousand strong audience, burst a blood vessel in his throat and sprayed blood all over the conductor, the first violinist, and several other players in the orchestra. That unsurpassed note collapsed into a gurgle just below middle C, thence to a sigh of arterial bubbles, and the greatest tenor the world had ever known was no more. “The amazing thing,” Uncle Siggie continued, “was that his actual death took place exactly when his theatrical death was to take place. So, for quite a while, the audience were unaware that they had witnessed his real death; rather, they took it as a brilliantly executed stage death. Isn’t that sad?”

Yes, it is sad, particularly when I recall Siggie’s own death, one of the first of the Colleen Bawn crowd to be killed by guerillas, in the Chimurenga.

After chatting with us for a while, Sigford would stroll over to the gents’ change room, which was situated next to the ladies’ change room, underneath the club balcony, site of many a romantic moonlit moment for the tiny white and whitish community of Colleen Bawn. While changing into his swimming trunks, Sigford would take advantage of the superb acoustics in that chlorine and foreskin scented chamber to regale us, a troop of baboons on the number nine fairway, and the world at large, with a rendering of one of his favourite songs: ‘Torn Arse Surrender’. Uncle Siggie never knew more than one or two words of the ten or so songs and arias in his repertoire, but he filled in the gaps with bits of fanakalo, Afrikaans and gibberish, and pronounced them in an Italianate way, which we and, presumably, the baboons, not to mention the world at large, found reasonably convincing. The song referred to above came out something like this:

Video Marie’s kuntebelo!

mina funa sentimento,

kom too itchy peperoni,

enza lo roast o baaie sunny.

Guava guava shitso intu,

siente sis aikona hamba;

nu profuma, mandyricedavies,

ini wena funa lapa?

vut seh yay ifarto, addio....

No one really cared about the words when we listened to Sigford Bong’s magnificent organ woofing and tweeting through the concrete walls of that acoustical wonder, the gents’ change room. Years later, more out of curiosity than genuine interest, I purchased, at a flea market in Bulawayo, a long-playing record entitled ‘Caruso in Song’. I listened to the first side and wondered what all the fuss was about: he couldn’t hold a candle to old Siggie. Then I poured myself a Vicks Medi-nite and coke and turned the record over. I barely listened to the first song, which was entitled ‘Manella Mia’ and which Caruso recorded on January 21, 1914. But the second song took me back, instantly, to my childhood in Colleen Bawn, and I felt tears gather in my eyes. I saw again the mopane scrub after the first rains in late October; saw how the bark darkened and the new leaves opened like butterfly wings smelling faintly of turpentine. The incessant din of Christmas beetles came back to me, lazily interspersed by the distant factory hooter calling the men to work or to knock off. And the baking heat! It was one of Uncle Siggie’s songs. I was amazed to see that it was called ‘I m’arricordo e Napule’ because, out of Sigford Bong’s mouth it sounded more like ‘A merry turd o yeh nipple-ee’. It took me back to the Colleen Bawn club, our social centre where we fell in and out of love almost as frequently as we jumped in and out of the swimming pool. The penultimate song on side two confirmed at least one of Uncle Siggie’s boasts about Caruso: he could hit a D-flat straight from the chest. I poured myself another Vicks Medi-nite and toasted, in absentia, the Caruso of Colleen Bawn.

It was in 1974, I believe, when Sigford Bong joined the Police Reserve in order to help defend his beloved Rhodesia from the Communist menace. He was soon in demand, giving unaccompanied recitals in the many pubs and ‘watering holes’ that were patronised by the Police Reserve and other Territorials. Of necessity his repertoire grew and he condescended to sing Irish and Scottish songs, still making up most of the words, but holding true to the melodies.

Possibly because he had never received any training, Sigford could not sustain the quality and volume of his voice beyond four or five numbers. After that, especially when he was in his cups, he shouted rather than sang - not that his fellow pub crawlers, shouters themselves, noticed any difference.

When Sigford Bong hit a D-sharp for the first and only time in his life he wasn’t in the gents’ change room of the Colleen Bawn club, nor was he in the bar of Tod’s Hotel, his favourite wartime haunt: he was in the back of a grey Mazda bakkie riding shotgun, dressed in his navy blue Police Reserve uniform. There must have been at least a hundred cars in that convoy heading for South African coastal resorts (it was school holidays). We were in the very front of the convoy immediately behind the machine-gun mounted bakkie. We children kept distracting Mr Bong by pulling faces at him and making incomprehensible signs with our hands. He responded by taking his eyes off the menacing bush, his hands off the machine-gun, and his mind off his duty.

It happened so quickly. My father, who was driving our Peugeot 404, stuck his head out of the car window and shouted, “Give us a song, Caruso!” Mr Bong obliged. He crawled away from his position behind the machine-gun all the way to the back of the truck, the better to be heard by us. He managed to shout “Video Marie’s...” before the bullets of an AK-47 turned his body into a dancing puppet. Out of his expanding gape came a very high, very pure note, accompanied by a spray of frothy blood, which went all over our windscreen. My father turned on the wipers as if this act would somehow negate the fact that the Caruso of Colleen Bawn was no more.