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’ Vuyo 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.
I meet Esona when I close the door of the van behind me and take out a Stuyve to suck in with the beer. She’s on her own, the way Esona will always be on her own, and she has a canvas backpack sagging on her bright brown shoulders. When our eyes meet across the hoods of two busted-up Fords, each of us refuses to step down, to be the one who moves away, and so we stay like that for a while, feeling as close as forehead to forehead. Two laaities pick at discarded chicken bones on the tar between us, and Esona and I stare at each other over their backs for a while.
Eventually, she walks up to me and asks for a skyf. I exhale and stamp out the one I’ve got. Then the two of us light up a new Stuyve each.
I’ve decided to let my hair grow, and that’s the first thing she picks on. She points at her own head. You’re one of those guys, aren’t you, she says.
Esona’s smile is slight, showing only half of its bow behind the smoke.
You grow your hair out like a Rasta, she says, but stand first in line for meat at the bash. Okay, she tells me, I see.
Then she turns around and shows me the other half of her smile.
She says, so what’s your deal, my brother?
I’m not sure how to respond. Esona takes off her backpack and asks me for the time, but when I look down at my wrist, I realize I’ve left my wristwatch in Obs. This reminds me of what Cecelia used to say to me about my listening.
I don’t know, I tell Esona.
And I guess this is how she enters my life.
What’s your deal, my brother?
She’ll ask me that often.
These days, I don’t think about Last Life as much as I used to, but I think about the things I’ll remember when it’s time for me to go.
I think of Esona’s flesh a lot.
I think of the sticky underside of her breasts when I lift them to my face in the middle of summer, and I think of the smell of burning wood, and of Esona’s last name, Grootboom, and how her grandmother took it to pass them off as coloreds in ’78.
I think of our hair, too, the way the smell of coal still lingers on our necks and up our heads for a day after sitting on the dirty benches of a shisa nyama. I think of all the sticky vinyl under the J&B ashtrays we fill up at the local taverns.
I want you to fuck me like a new man, she tells me.
She’s standing behind me in the kitchen, looking for a lighter, and I’m on my feet, trying to tune a new station into their old set.