I remember our uncles, with their gold teeth and beer breath, and how they’d find the two of us at every family gathering, hoist us on their knees, and goad us about becoming men. I’d smile at them while my stomach sank. I’d learned early to be deceitful with older drunks. They got on the bottle and treated you like anyone else — not a Model C who didn’t know his clan name from his asshole.
I was scared to go home for circumcision. Most of us were. We’d grown up hearing stories about what could go wrong. There was the initiate who’d had the head fall off his shaft while he swam upstream in the Mthatha River, and the one who had to be rushed to hospital because his wound wasn’t properly dressed. Each winter, the Dispatch reported on guys like us dropping in droves. It wasn’t the pain: we knew that would pass. I’d just never pictured myself as one of the guys who’d come out the other side — someone who could get along up there.
I also knew that, really, I was scared of being close to LT. The rumors about him had spread and he’d been set apart. I didn’t want people to mix us up, to look at me the same way they did him. When the Mda house came under pressure to make a man out of its sissy son, I kept away — I crossed my arms in Cape Town.
LT was younger than me, and he didn’t believe in what they said — what you had to become to be a man — but he still called to ask me for my help. I told him to go in June, and that I would follow as soon as I handed in my assignments. Well, I never went back. I switched off my phone a week later and abandoned him up there. Later, they said LT fought them and that’s what killed him.
Often, I’ve thought about how I wouldn’t know if that was true; about how I was absent during his last hours, and about how, when he died, my arms were still crossed in Cape Town.
+ + +
One year after I graduated from Tech, and a week before the sixth anniversary of LT’s death, I infected myself with HIV in the laboratories. That’s how I became a reactive. I never had the reactions I needed for myself, and I couldn’t react when LT called to me for help, so I gave my own body something it couldn’t flee from. Now here’s your older brother and murderer, Luthando. His name is Lindanathi and his parents got it from a girl.
FIFTH PART
It takes the taxi less than an hour to reach Du Noon. Even with three children, Bhut’ Vuyo and his wife spend most of their lives making a home inside a shipping container. This isn’t an unusual way to live in Du Noon. The containers here have multiplied since my last stay, in ‘95, and I can see them from the taxi as we drive in: hair salons, eateries and phone shops, all of them packaged inside steel boxes like time capsules. Ta T-Man sticks in a CD full of house MP3s, and, as we push deeper into the township, I can’t help but peer into the dim insides of the crates. It feels the same as seeing regular poverty, but cut into sections and prepared for export. In front of the containers, lined up like mechanical sentries, portable toilets stoop under the slanting sunlight, four for every dozen containers. It’s supposedly a temporary measure, meant to tide the people over until after the upcoming local election.
The container I’m traveling to is red, corrugated and a source of concern for its owner. Even at a glance, you can tell it’s old and falling apart. Bhut’ Vuyo spends a few days each month extending it with sheets of discarded zinc, sometimes driving his lorry to Blouberg, where he scours the shore for bits of wood, planks, or anything he can find that isn’t too rotted from the ocean. He’s learned to make his way with what he finds, discarded by the hands of others. My uncle is a large and laughing man, but if you get close enough to him, it isn’t hard to tell that he’s walked into places that surprised him with bloodshed.
I arrive at the corner of Ingwe and Bhengu Streets just after three o’clock. It’s a weekday and quieter than usual. I spot a makeshift pit latrine, its walls made from corrugated iron and wood, leaning precariously at the side of Bhut’ Vuyo’s home. The clouds have allowed the sun free rein, and its light slams brilliantly into the ribbed metal, the earth still muddy at the base, with spikes of chopped plank exposed. Flies hover in a cloud around the structure. I find my uncle sitting on a crate in front of his container, observing his work with a quart between his ankles. His beer belly flows over his thighs, the sweat on his head sparkling as it catches the light. You can tell by the way he looks at the tin that it’s a fresh triumph. He’s sweaty and lively when he sees me. When he extends his hand, it isn’t to shake my own, but to draw me into an embrace. Welcome home, he says with warmth, and I smile, not knowing what else to do.
The first day at my uncle’s place comes and goes without consequence. He doesn’t mention his message to me. I help him with the pit latrine, which caves in shortly after my arrival, and for supper he fries us beef livers and onions, dished generously with pap and bread crusts. I wash the dishes in a yellow bucket, and afterwards I unroll umkhukhu on the vinyl tiles. We share a Courtleigh and he tells me how his wife has taken the children to visit her parents in Langa. Outside, the township comes to life with the sun having set. I watch the smoke hovering around the mountain of my uncle on his bed. There are indications that parts of him still belong out there. His forearms bear scars from stripping cars with their engines still hot, back when he worked as mechanic in a chop shop in Khwezi Park. His movements are quick, an instinct he’s retained from his days in the syndicate.
We’ll talk after her return, he says, and I nod.
I open the door to flick out the cigarette stub and stare with surprise at how close the moon looks. Inside, Bhut’ Vuyo blows out the candle and I coil myself inside a blanket and a towel. Soon, the container fills up with the sound of his labored breathing; I trip into unsettled dreams after he goes down.
The next two days pass just as quietly. Bhut’ Vuyo leaves for Blouberg while I sleep on his floor. I don’t see him until the early evening, when we cook and sit for our supper and a beer. He prepares dumplings and then samp. He promises to keep us chin-deep in meat this entire week, and, during meals, he keeps me abreast on who comes and goes in the community. I recognize Ta T-Man, the taxi driver, from one of his faster stories. He shows me a scar on his forearm. Ta T-Man and his men were trying to introduce a nyaope cartel in the neighborhood, he says, but the Cape took little interest in the drug. I get close to telling him about my ARVs, but I decide against it. I have an idea he still thinks I’m a student.
During the day, when Bhut’ Vuyo disappears, I take Industrial and lie on the floor to read. He buys the Daily Voice, which he uses to wallpaper the container, and on the walls I read about gangs spraying bullets across the streets of Lavender Hill, or I read about Delft, where the women have started to mark tik houses with large X’s on the garages. The rest of Cape Town starts to feel distant beyond these pages, surrounded by uncertainty and receding into memory. There are other times when I don’t read. I lie on the floor with my eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood. When I run out of airtime, I decide to go without it. Then I spend more time listening to what Du Noon might have to say to me.
On Saturday, Bhut’ Vuyo and I finish up with the latrine. He fetches a box of tools from Milnerton and this makes our job go faster. We work hastily, barely a word passing between us, and get done in just under three hours. Every time I lay a plank down, I feel myself filling up with relief and gratitude, thankful that I missed the spade work before I arrived. Digging the hole must’ve taken a fortnight, at the very least, and I’m careful not to bring this up with him, in case he finds more work for me to take up.