Читать книгу Always Another Country - Sisonke Msimang - Страница 11

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S.E.X.

MY EARLIEST MEMORY of sex is bound up in pleasure and voyeurism. I was only six when I stumbled upon a man and a woman in flagrante, but I was old enough to know that she was having far too much fun. I knew this because I could hear it in the way she chuckled, which I knew she was not supposed to do because what she was doing was something only men were allowed to like. I knew it even though I wouldn’t have been able to tell you why. There was something off limits about the way men turned their heads whenever a plump-bummed woman passed them by. Women were supposed to pretend they hadn’t noticed, and other men were supposed to look as well.

I was very young when I realised men were supposed to like things to do with women’s bodies and women had to guard themselves against the things men liked. They had to not smile and pretend they didn’t notice. Men were fools over sex and women were silly about love.

The women around me must have talked about men and sex and pleasure but those discussions were never fit for children’s ears so I didn’t get to hear them in any detail. I heard only the talk about love and romance. I saw the looks exchanged, and sensed what it was they weren’t saying, but I never heard them talk about sex.

The men were different. They talked about everything in front of us: white settlers and ditched lovers and fallen women they had picked up. Often, they had drunk too much. They leered and laughed and didn’t mind their manners unless they were told by the women that there were children around and they should shush.

◆ ◆ ◆

My sisters and I spent a lot of time at Aunt Tutu’s house. Aunt Tutu was one of Mummy’s best friends. She had married a Zambian man, Uncle Ted, and they had three kids, the same ages as my sisters and me. We were a crew, a less raucous group than the Burley Court group, but only because we were fewer in number.

At seven, Masuzyo (Suzie) was a rotund dispenser of wisdom, a slit-eyed know-it-all whose spectacles made her seem far older than her meagre years. Wongani was five, only a year younger than me but she, too, seemed far older: she was her mother’s child. Tapelwa was only four, an age so inconsequential that he was relegated to shuffling around on his own, not small enough to be with the babies and not old enough to be with us big girls.

Mandla and Zeng were always toddling around in the background, oblivious to the ways in which they were being excluded, while Wongani, Suzie and I spent most of our time discussing the latest news, gossiping and arguing about episodes of Wonder Woman. Aunt Tutu was rarely home. She spent her days driving around town, visiting people so that she could remark upon the state of their houses, the quality of their biscuits and the cleanliness of their servants.

Despite its downsides, one of the best things about Suzie and Wongani’s house was the guest bedroom, which was just big enough to accommodate a beige couch and king-sized four-poster bedroom suite. As we played, we would listen out for the crunch of Aunt Tutu’s car coming down the driveway. We knew that if she caught us in there with our dusty feet, and our grimy nails, the consequences would be dire. Invariably, we would get carried away and the person assigned to keep their ears pricked would forget and it would be too late – she would be standing right there behind you. One minute you would be mid-jump, giggling and about to land on the plump mattress, and the next your arm would be pinned behind your back and Aunt Tutu’s voice would be an edgy vibrato, oddly sing-songy and menacing and urgent and hot in your ear:

‘Didn’t I tell you not to play in this room?’

During the school holidays before I turned seven, our enjoyment of the guest room was interrupted for two weeks. Aunt Tutu’s brother and his German girlfriend visited from Berlin. When they were in town, our de facto playroom was off limits. This meant our relationship with them was initially antagonistic. Long before they arrived at the gate, crammed into a rickety metered taxi in a dishevelled, cigarette-stained heap, we decided we didn’t like them. They weren’t our visitors. They weren’t in town to keep us company and make us laugh. No. They were just a two-week-long inconvenience. The Uncle and the Girlfriend turned out to be more than that, of course, mainly because they were nothing like the adults we were used to. They lit incense, which reminded me vaguely of the Indian restaurant in the centre of town we sometimes went to when there was something to celebrate.

Also, they dressed very strangely – the Girlfriend especially. Whereas Mummy and Aunt Tutu poured their still-trim figures into tight polyester trousers and white knee-high boots, the Girlfriend wore long, flowing skirts and gypsy-like tops. A sliver of her hollowed-out belly was almost always showing, which we found somewhat disgusting and alluring all at the same time. The women we knew would never have bared the flesh on their stomachs. Legs and arms were one thing, but among African women, even those who defied stereotypes, tummy skin was an altogether different story.

As for him, unlike our fathers, the Uncle looked dirty. Baba’s scraggly beard and afro had a certain air about them: a cultivated unkemptness that nodded to forethought and therefore to some form of guerrilla stylishness. Not the Uncle. The Uncle looked positively downtrodden. His hair was beginning to mat in some places like the madman who used to dance lewdly in town right next to the Playhouse, the one who cackled at any woman with a big bum who happened to walk past and who picked up newspapers as though he would be able to divine the future if he just collected enough of them.

In addition to their shaggy appearance, the Uncle and the Girlfriend spent much of their time engaged in what they called ‘jousting’. When an exhausted adult wished to end a heated debate with the Girlfriend, she would retort, in her guttural German accent, ‘You caaan’t be afraid of jousting. That fear of questions and questioning, it represents the death of curiosity, which is the beginning of the end of any society yearning to be free.’ The Uncle also liked the word. He would say things like, ‘What will Africa become if those entrusted with its empowerment aren’t capable of intellectual jousting?’ He shook his head and sighed a lot.

Suzie and Wongani’s father was Uncle Ted and he was very important because he worked for Zambia Airways. Instead of letting him rest when he got back from work, the Uncle and the Girlfriend insisted on talking to him about the Anti-Colonial Project. We all knew that once Uncle came home we were supposed to go outside and let him rest. The visitors did not know this. So, they badgered him with questions and ignored our wide-eyed looks. Uncle Ted would take on the baffled and exhausted countenance of a man who had been working too hard to have to worry about thinking after he had knocked off and he would try to steer the conversation towards safer, more intelligible territory. Uncle Ted was not particularly interested in social interaction. So, even at the best of times, he let Aunt Tutu do the talking, preferring to smile aimlessly into his beer.

The Uncle and the Girlfriend weren’t concerned about his baffled expression or his body language. So intent were they on making their own points that they simply couldn’t see his signals of distress. Every night they hounded him, peppering him with questions to which they already had answers, walking him through analyses to which they had subjected him already. Their favourite topic was Zambia Airways. It was a Vanity Project, a useless money-guzzling enterprise designed to appease the mighty Nationalist Ego. ‘How ironic,’ the Uncle would spit out, ‘that the great nationalist agenda has now been trampled by the forces of neocolonialism.’ They argued in forceful, spittle-inducing paragraphs, saying things like: ‘All these African presidents flying in and out of Jakarta to foster consensus amongst the non-aligned movement will do nothing to build basic infrastructure! They are just robbing the poor of the revenues that are rightfully theirs.’

Now Zambia Airways was the pride of the nation and it was well known that it only hired those who were enthusiastic about the project of African unity to work in its sales and marketing department. This meant that Uncle Ted had no idea what the Uncle and the Girlfriend were talking about with their critiques of nationalism and neocolonialism, which was lucky for everyone because it prevented hurt feelings all around. In fact, one of the best things about working for Zambia Airways was that its employees were not required to be anything other than patriotic and enthusiastic.

To most Africans in newly liberated countries, the national airline symbolised, in all the easy and trite ways, everything that was possible for a new nation. Airlines were the gleaming future. African pilots, resplendent in their uniforms, demonstrated the intellect and sobriety that colonialists had long accused Africans of lacking. However, their ground staff were something else entirely. They were sycophants, whose role was to burnish the reputations of their countries and herald the greatness that was yet to come.

Men like Uncle Ted, obsequious enough to have secured jobs with the national carrier, were elevated in society by mere association with the airline. His employment at Zambia Airways, and the fact that his office was physically at the airport, made Uncle Ted a big man in a small society. His position as a senior figure within Zambia Airways also made him singularly unqualified to critique the institution, certainly not in the way the Uncle and the Girlfriend were attempting.

In fact, it was quite the opposite. Uncle Ted’s role was dependent on his being a yes-man. Whenever President Kaunda returned from one of his whirlwind world trips, his arrival at the airport on a Zambia Airways plane would be marked with ululation and thanksgiving, but also with the awe befitting one who has just alighted from an aircraft. Uncle Ted was always there, on hand to greet him and to ensure everything functioned smoothly as the president made his way through the airport.

Since he was the president and there was no paperwork to be done, and since the chief of protocol, the minister of foreign affairs and most of Cabinet were also always present to welcome the president home, there was technically very little for a Zambia Airways manager to do on these frenetic days, but this never occurred to Uncle Ted.

As the spouse of a senior Zambia Airways manager, there was even less for Aunt Tutu to do at the airport when the president arrived, but this never occurred to her either. Indeed, sometimes, if the trip had been an especially important one – say to Moscow or Beijing – Uncle and Aunty dressed up Suzie and Wongani in their frilliest, whitest dresses, as though they were going to be christened, and they would shroud Tapelwa in a charcoal-coloured suit that was three sizes too large. Thus appointed, they would drive to the airport to stand in the VIP section on the runway in the hope that senior members of Cabinet would note their loyalty to ruler and country as they sweated in the glare of the concrete.

On those days, my sisters and I would watch on TV, hoping for a glimpse of Uncle Ted and Aunt Tutu and the kids. When he landed, the president always stood at the top of the stairs of the plane with his white hanky in his hand, waving to the crowds and officials gathered to greet him before he descended. There were always busloads of supporters dressed in UNIP colours – women wearing green for the land and orange for the copper that lies beneath the land and schoolchildren in checked uniforms sweating in the sun.

After waving and smiling, the president would make his way, in a slow-moving convoy, all the way to the stadium. There, he would shout in a voice quivering with patriotism, ‘One Zambia?’ It always sounded like a declarative statement blended into a question, the first part of a trademark call and response that all Zambians knew. In our tiny living room, my sisters and I would scream back along with the crowd, ‘One Nation!’

Having been raised in a one-party state, we understood that our role was to respond in the affirmative when the great leader called upon us to do so. Although we never saw Aunty or the children, more than once the back of Uncle Ted’s bald head was beamed into our living room in Burley Court. The fact of his having been on TV made him seem larger than life. To us, Uncle Ted seemed a little bit like Clark Kent. He appeared to be a mere mortal, an ordinary man who went to work every morning, but, in an instant, there he was, standing within spitting distance of the President of the Republic of Zambia.

Uncle Ted wasn’t someone you questioned about whether the airline could be viewed as an expensive monument to the ego of the president. Had he understood the nuance and complexity of the argument, Uncle Ted might have booted out his guests. But he didn’t get it. Uncle Ted could not have fathomed that anyone might suggest Zambia Airways was a waste of taxpayers’ money and so he simply looked at them quizzically across the dining room table and made no comment. It was as though they were speaking a different language, as though they had come from a distant planet where words were a form of nourishment rather than a set of sounds used for the purposes of communication. He simply ate his nsima and smiled in exasperation, content in the knowledge that they would soon be gone, and that in the meantime they would make their funny eating words and he would ignore them and pretend that they were making sense.

While the ANC comrades who gathered at our house every weekend may have appreciated the robustness of the arguments made by the Girlfriend and the Uncle, they were also beneficiaries of President Kaunda’s largesse and were unlikely to be so direct as to suggest that their free flights should be stopped in the interests of the common man and woman on the street. They were so deeply invested in the Zambian nationalist project that pooh-poohing the idea of a national carrier would have felt counter-revolutionary even if its logic was sound.

The hippie lovers, on the other hand, didn’t care. They weren’t tied up in Africa as an idea – they were only interested in The People as an idea and, although that had its own problems, it allowed them to be more critical than many others. When they weren’t debating the post-colonial condition, the Girlfriend and the Uncle spent a lot of time looking deeply into each other’s eyes, smoking cigarettes and holding each other’s faces: often simultaneously. They also complained that they were tired a lot and often they had to retire to their room to sleep off their fatigue.

They developed a pattern. They would get up late and join us kids for the midday meal. For lunch each day the maid fed us a steaming plate of nsima with greens and tomato relish. We gobbled it up and giggled as the two of them stared at each other dreamily over our heads. The Girlfriend struggled to eat the food but liked the fact that she was eating in the same manner as The People and so she persevered. We were amused by the awkward way she used her hands to scoop up the relish and in a way this endeared her to us. She may have had strange clothes and odd manners but she was sort of childlike in her attempts to act like she was one of us.

As we ate, the Girlfriend peppered us with questions. In these moments, we saw that she wasn’t like us at all, nor would she ever be like our parents. ‘How do you feel about the way the teacher teaches you at school? Aren’t you tired of being told what to learn?’ The Uncle chimed in, ‘Wouldn’t it be more fun if you could learn what you want to learn rather than what The System,’ (here he would grow more vehement) ‘what some strange people in a distant land, decide you should learn?’ We could understand the words, but it all sounded like gibberish.

◆ ◆ ◆

On the fourth day of their visit, the Girlfriend and the Uncle disappeared as usual into the guest bedroom to ‘take a nap’. Suzie, the oldest and bossiest, explained that they still had Jet Lag. ‘That happened to me when we went to London,’ she said authoritatively, dragging out the word London the way I imagined Londoners would. ‘I couldn’t sleep for weeks because my body clock was ticking all night and the tocks kept me awake.’ I wasn’t sure whether ticks and tocks worked in this way. Still, I rarely questioned Suzie on matters of international import. Instead, I whispered to myself in a Benny Hill voice, ‘Let me hold my bloody tongue since I’ve never been to mother England.’

Her sister did not show Suzie the same courtesy. Suspicious by nature, Wongani was not convinced by the jet-lag theory. ‘They are doing something naughty in there,’ she declared. Half a decade into her life, she already had an air of resignation about the state of the world. She was prone to sighing and referred to everyone as ‘that one’. For example, apropos Daphne, the maid, one morning Wongani suggested, ‘Hmmn, that one thinks we haven’t noticed she’s visiting her boyfriend at the kiosk? How can we need to buy milk so many times a day?’

Having surmised that Uncle and his guest were up to no good, Wongani decided to undertake an investigation. Once she had asked the crucial question, ‘What exactly are they doing with the door shut in the middle of the day when normal people are busy?’ – it was impossible for any of us to ignore the possibility that they could be up to no good.

It was on the basis of this question, and this question alone, that we found ourselves standing in front of their bedroom door, peeping through a slight crack. Inside the room, the mad visitors were wriggling under the sheets. Their legs were intertwined; their fingers and lips and hands and hips grinding ever so slowly. We got an eyeful and, for our sins, we were struck dumb and momentarily paralysed. We watched the contortions with our heads cocked to the side. We were caught flat-footed, our mouths agape. After a few minutes, we began to move, our grubby fingers clutching one another for balance as we strained on our tippy toes and struggled to take in everything that was happening under the covers.

Then reality hit.

‘They’re gonna see us,’ I whispered. ‘Let’s go!’

‘No,’ Wongani and Suzie hissed. They were mesmerised.

We watched for a few more minutes until we heard someone coming down the hall. Petrified that it might be Aunt Tutu, we scampered away. We ran outside and stood in the dusty yard. We looked at one another and then looked away, flushed and embarrassed and aware that we had just witnessed something that was Absolutely None of Our Business.

For weeks after this we could talk of nothing else. We discussed the Girlfriend and the Uncle long after they had gone. They had disappeared as abruptly as they had come, leaving Aunt Tutu a vegetarian cookbook and pressing a ceramic hand-painted bird whistle from Hungary into the palms of a startled-looking Uncle Ted.

We agreed that we had actually seen them having S.E.X. We always spelled it out when we said it, in case the babies heard us, and we always, always, whispered it.

Until this incident, I had only had a vague sense of what sex was. I knew that it was something private and forbidden but now – thanks to my astute companions – I was also aware that it was simultaneously bad and pleasurable. Wongani was clear that people who liked doing it were dirty. Given that the two people we had witnessed in flagrante delicto were not exactly models of hygiene, it was hard to disagree with her on this score.

We weren’t just fascinated with what we had seen, though. We were especially fascinated with her. We spent inordinate amounts of time talking about her. In part it was because, as we peeped into the room that afternoon, she was the one who was sighing and moaning and generally carrying on, while he whispered and grunted a bit but generally kept his cool.

Perhaps we talked about her because we were girls and she was the girl, and we knew from previous sources of knowledge that she shouldn’t have let him do those things to her in the first place. We had known this from before we suckled our mothers’ breasts. Every girl knows this. The rules are different for us than they are for boys and any girl who pretends that she doesn’t know this, or who momentarily forgets, will find out sooner or later. As different as we were from one another in temperament, the three of us could agree on this. There are some things you just know.

A few days after the peep show, I was sitting outside in the barren yard next to Suzie and Wongani. Their heads had just been shaved and Aunt Tutu had slathered a liberal dose of Vaseline onto their scalps to ward off lice. She had ordered Daphne to ensure that they sat in the sun the whole morning to burn off any vestiges of the bugs. Given her relationship with Wongani, Daphne relished the opportunity to enforce Aunty’s instructions. I sat next to them and drew a line in the ground as Vaseline dripped down their necks and onto their shoulders. Every time one of them tried to move, Daphne ran out of the house and said, ‘Your mother said three hours. You stay there. It’s not yet time, not yet.’

Aunt Tutu may have known the burning sun would do nothing but bake her children’s heads, but the shame of having lice in her house had most likely driven her to administer this particular cruelty. Aunt Tutu did not want it said that she had known about the lice and done nothing to prevent their return.

So we sat and sweated together in the grassless yard – a sacrifice to appease other mothers who would ask where the girls’ hair had gone. Aunt Tutu would say, ‘They had lice so I shaved it and made them sit in the sun to burn the germs,’ and the other mothers would respect her in that fearful way and inflict the same on their own children next time, repeating both the unnecessary punishment and the boastful pretence of motherly sternness. Suzie wiped a trickle of runny Vaseline, preventing it from seeping into her eye, then picked up the conversation where we had left it when Mummy had come to take us home the day before.

‘As I was saying,’ she began.

Wongani and I swivelled our heads to face her and she continued, ‘They aren’t even married.’

‘Yes,’ her sister agreed, ‘which is a pity because they are going to burn in eternal shame.’

‘Straight to hell,’ I sighed, ‘especially her since she’s the lady.’ I was surprised by how nonchalant and worldly I sounded.

We nodded and then shook our heads in resigned consternation.

In the coming weeks, we went into overdrive, spreading the story far and wide. My friends at Burley Court could have told you what happened as if they had seen it with their own eyes, as could my other set of friends at Uncle Stan and Aunt Angela’s house, which was where I spent most of my weekday afternoons when school was in session.

Once the juicy details were shared, and on every street where they had been disseminated, there was almost unanimous agreement that the Girlfriend must have been A Lady Of The Night, brought to Lusaka specifically for the purposes of Doing Sex.

Again and again we returned to the scene in feigned horror. Suzie was especially good at recounting the most salacious details. She always seemed to circle back to the one point: ‘Did you hear her saying “Yes, yes, yes!”?’ She would pant in a lurid pseudoGermanic imitation of the Girlfriend’s voice. We would giggle, and shift uncomfortably. Invariably one of us would wind up the conversation by saying, ‘Everyone knows, it’s only Street Walkers who like S.E.X.’

I felt increasingly uncomfortable when the subject came up. The Girlfriend had actually been nice to us. It had only been for two weeks, but she had lived with us. She had shared our nsima and made us laugh. She had even made us think about school and about President Kaunda. With her questions and her wispy shirts and lowhanging skirts, she hadn’t been a monster – she had just been a girl. She had given me a fragrance stick that smelled like vanilla, and she had given Suzie an empty matchbox with a picture of a dragon on it, and had left a tiny little square of magenta-coloured felt for Wongani. The Uncle had not even bothered, yet here we were saying nothing about him and telling every kid within a fivekilometre radius about her moans and groans.

The Girlfriend’s mistake was not that we had caught her; it was that she liked it. We may have been little, but we knew enough to forgive him and call her the sinner. We were big enough to see that she was not ashamed and this seemed deliciously wrong and also it seemed to explain everything that was off kilter about her. The Girlfriend said what she liked and did what she pleased and, because of this, and because I was a girl just like her, I wondered what it might be like one day to lie as she had, legs spread and arms held high; heavy-lidded, slack-jawed, writhing and unashamed.