I have heard much, have read much more, of the Will to Live; stories of fantastic retreats from the brink of death at moments when all hope was lost. To the aid of certain personalities in the bleakest crises, spiritual resources seem to come forward from what? Character? Spirit? Soul? Or the Great Reprieve of a Spiritual Clemency—hoisting them back from the muddy slough of the Valley of the Shadow.
But the Will to Die has intrigued me more …
I have also heard that certain snakes can hypnotize their victim, a rat, a frog or a rabbit, not only so that it cannot flee to safety in the overwhelming urge for survival, but so that it is even attracted towards its destroyer, and appears to enjoy dancing towards its doom. I have often wondered if there is not some mesmeric power that Fate employs to engage some men deliberately, with macabre relishment, to seek their destruction and to plunge into it.
Take Foxy …
His real name was Philip Matauoane, but for some reason, I think from the excesses of his college days, everybody called him Foxy. He was a teacher in a small school in Barberton, South Africa. He had been to Fort Hare University College in the Cape Province, and had majored in English (with distinction) and Native Administration. Then he took the University Education Diploma (teaching) with Rhodes University, Grahamstown.
He used to say, ‘I'm the living exemplar of the modern, educated African's dilemma. I read English and trained to be a teacher—the standard profession for my class those days; but you never know which government department is going to expel you and pitchfork you into which other government department. So I also took Native Administration as a safety device.’
You would think that that labels the cautious, providential kind of human.
Foxy was a short fellow, the type that seems in youth to rush forward towards old age, but somewhere, around the eve of middle-age, stops dead and ages no further almost forever. He had wide, owlish eyes and a trick with his mouth that suggested withering contempt for all creation. He invariably wore clothes that swallowed him: the coat overflowed and drowned his arms, the trousers sat on his chest in front and billowed obscenely behind. He was a runt of a man.
But in that unlikely body resided a live, restless brain.
When Foxy first left college, he went to teach English at Barberton High School. He was twenty-five then, and those were the days when high school pupils were just ripe to provoke or prejudice a young man of indifferent morals. He fell in love with a young girl, Betty Kumalo, his own pupil.
I must explain this spurious phenomenon of ‘falling in love’. Neither Foxy nor Betty had the remotest sense of commitment to the irrelevance of marrying some day. The society of the times was such that affairs of this nature occurred easily. Parents did not mind much. Often they would invite a young teacher to the home, and as soon as he arrived, would eclipse themselves, leaving the daughter with stern but unmistakable injunctions to ‘be hospitable to the teacher’.
We tried to tell Foxy, we his fellow-teachers, that this arrangement was too nice to be safe, but these things had been written in the stars.
Foxy could not keep away from Betty's home. He could not be discreet. He went there every day, every unblessed day. He took her out during week-ends and they vanished into the country-side in his ancient Chevrolet.
On Mondays he would often say to me, ‘I don't know what's wrong with me. I know this game is dangerous. I know Betty will destroy me, but that seems to give tang to the adventure. Hopeless. Hopeless,’ and he would throw his arms out.
I had it out with him once.
‘Foxy,’ I said, ‘you must stop this nonsense. It'll ruin you.’
There came a glint of pleasure, real ecstasy it seemed to me, into his eyes. It was as if the prospect of ruin was hallelujah.
He said to me, ‘My intelligence tells me that it'll ruin me, but there's a magnetic force that draws me to that girl, and another part of me, much stronger than intelligence, just simply exults.’
‘Marry her, then, and get done with it.’
‘No!’ He said it so vehemently that I was quite alarmed. ‘Something in me wants that girl pregnant but not a wife.’
I thought it was a hysterical utterance.
You cannot go flinging wild oats all over a fertile field, not even wild weeds. It had to happen.
If you are a school-teacher, you can only get out of a situation like that if you marry the girl, that is if you value your job. Foxy promptly married—another girl! But he was smart enough to give Betty's parents £50. That, in the hideous system of lobola, the system of bride-price, made Betty his second wife. And no authority on earth could accuse him of seduction.
But when his wife found out about it, she battered him, as the Americans would say, ‘To hell and back.’
Foxy started drinking heavily.
Then another thing began to happen; Foxy got drunk during working hours. Hitherto, he had been meticulous about not cultivating one's iniquities in the teeth of one's job, but now he seemed to be splashing in the gutter with a will.
I will never forget the morning another teacher and I found him stinkingly drunk about half-an-hour before school was to start. We forced him into a shebeen and asked the queen to let him sleep it off. We promised to make the appropriate excuses to the headmaster on his behalf. Imagine our consternation when he came reeling into the assembly hall where we were saying morning prayers with all the staff and pupils. How I prayed that morning!
These things happen. Everybody noticed Foxy's condition, except, for some reason, the headmaster. We hid him in the Biology Laboratory for the better part of the day, but that did not make the whole business any more edifying. Happily, he made his appearance before we could perjure ourselves to the headmaster. Later, however, we learned that he had told the shebeen-queen that he would go to school perforce because we other teachers were trying to get him into trouble for absence from work and that we wished to ‘outshine’ him. Were we livid?
Every one of his colleagues gave him a dressing down. We told him that no more was he alone in this: it involved the dignity of us all. The whole location was beginning to talk nastily about us. Moreover, there was a violent, alcoholic concoction brewed in the location called Barberton. People just linked ‘Barberton’, ‘High’ and ‘School’ to make puns about us.
Superficially, it hurt him to cause us so much trouble, but something deep down in him did not allow him really to care. He went on drinking hard. His health was beginning to crack under it. Now, he met every problem with the gurgling answer of the bottle.
One night, I heard that he was very ill, so I went to see him at home. His wife had long since given him up for lost; they no more even shared a bedroom. I found him in his room. The scene was ghastly. He was lying in his underwear in bed linen which was stained with the blotches of murdered bugs. There was a plate of uneaten food that must have come the day before yesterday. He was breathing heavily. Now and then he tried to retch, but nothing came up. His bloodshot eyes rolled this way and that, and whenever some respite graciously came, he reached out for a bottle of gin and gulped at it until the fierce liquid poured over his stubbled chin.
He gibbered so that I thought he was going mad. Then he would retch violently again, that jolting, vomitless quake of a retch.
He needed a doctor but he would not have one. His wife carped, ‘Leave the pig to perish.’
I went to fetch the doctor, nevertheless. We took quite a while, and when we returned, his wife sneered at us, ‘You wouldn't like to see him now.’ We went into his room and found him lost in oblivion. A strange girl was lying by his side.
In his own house!
I did not see him for weeks, but I heard enough. They said that he was frequenting dangerous haunts. One drunken night he was beaten up and robbed. Another night he returned home stark naked, without a clue as to who had stripped him.
Liquor should have killed him, but some compulsive urge chose differently. After a binge one night, he wandered hopelessly about the darksome location streets, seeking his home. At last, he decided on a gate, a house, a door. He was sure that that was his home. He banged his way in, ignored the four or five men singing hymns in the sitting-room, and staggered into the bedroom. He flung himself on to the bed and hollered, ‘Woman, it's time that I sleep in your bed. I'm sick and tired of being a widower with a live wife.’
The men took up sticks and battered Foxy to a pulp. They got it into their heads that the woman of the house had been in the business all the time; that only now had her lover gone and got drunk enough to let the cat out of the bag. They beat the woman, too, within millimetres of her life. All of them landed in jail for long stretches.
But I keep having a stupid feeling that somehow, Philip ‘Foxy’ Matauoane would have felt: ‘This is as it should be.’
Some folks live the obsession of death.