Somehow I made it through the rest of that Sunday: driving to work, enduring Bob Black’s bigotry, the facts, the opinions, the endless opinions. I looked forward to one thing and one thing only: sleep. I collapsed into bed and it felt like five minutes had lapsed before Ms Motsepe almost broke the door down: I had forgotten to put the key out for her in my desire to sleep. She wouldn’t even bother to grace my apology with a reply, so I decided to get the hell out of that house. The last thing I felt like was Beauty’s pout as she sat at the kitchen table, eating her oats and drinking her over-sweet tea in staring silence.
So I got dressed and gave The Ex and my “love child” a look he knew as clearly as if I’d said “We are now going for a walk, Butch.” He started jumping about like an over-sized lamb until I managed to calm him sufficiently to get the choker around his neck. Thus we proceeded down Emfuleni, its leaves starting to turn and occasionally see-saw down to the tarmac, me holding him back or him dragging me along, I wasn’t sure. We were giving every locked-up canine a chance to exercise its jaws and lungs, barking up a storm.
Down in the park there was the usual crowd of dog lovers living out their controlling or nurturing fantasies through their hounds. Here was the literary grand dame with her bossed-about Dalmatian, there that intensely friendly man with his wild eyes, camouflage pants and two highly strung Dobermans. Now I passed that environmental hottie bossing her blood-thirsty white bull terrier with its pink, plasticky gonads, then that old fart with his equally half-dead Lab. Next up was that grim Afrikaans women with her Alsatian, this bore with his check shirt and over-energetic Border collie and, finally, the shrivelled German raisin with her troupe of terrifying Rottweilers.
Circling one or two of the small top dams, depending on my body’s mood, was more or less the sum total of my exercise, which nevertheless earned me praise from the quack in terms of that Barnardian pump, the heart. After I’d finished my circuit and Butch had luxuriated in an avian corpse by rolling in it, we passed the marsh separating the higher dams from the lower, larger public one. The marsh was drying out and its tall reeds would soon be control-burned for winter, adding to the hard, dry Highveld beauty of the Botanical Gardens.
At the entrance was Mandla, the car guard, a giant tub of a man in his forties who wore laceless army boots, faded jeans and an unravelling orange jersey beneath his filthy old khaki coat. He had somehow appropriated the dusty parking lot as his exclusive domain and made a point of greeting the animal lovers when they arrived in their dog-laden vehicles, the back seats often torn, curled up from the sun and half covered with smelly old blankets. When these people returned from their ball-throwing strolls he’d hover in their vicinity, rubbing his forehead with the knuckle of his thumb, and they would pay him for having been prepared to protect their cars with his very life. I could just see him pursuing youthful thieves down the road with his heavy frame, in those loose boots and coat, but never mind: these guilt-ridden contributions presumably kept him fed. I tried to find out whether he had dependants and where he lived, but he only spoke rural isiZulu (like the old man could), so we settled on just greeting each other.
When I got home Ms Motsepe was having her ten o’clock tea break, so I skulked upstairs and, instead of writing, made a list of requirements for the next exciting item on the day’s agenda to avoid her. I had been too nafi (no ambition, fuck all interest) to go shopping that Saturday and, once at the supermarket, started seeing the old man’s point when some white, probably long-haired idiot wailed that the object of his affection was “beeyatiful” – over and over. All right, I thought, I get the picture. She’s beautiful. Move on. More importantly, why was this junk being forced down my ears while shopping on a Monday morning? The singer was just about to have a castrato orgasm when he was interrupted by another one of those morons who has a deep and abiding affection for his own voice box, the supermarket DJ. He was telling us, no, loudly enthusing at breakneck speed that there was a bargain for spaghetti meatballs in tomato sauce and we should get ours now. Naturally I chose the customer queue that had a credit card hold-up as clients in other queues sailed by.
I went home and packed out my groceries during Ms Motsepe’s lunch break and wasn’t sure whether I wanted to burst out laughing or crying in that crinkling, thudding silence. Something had to give. A yellow leaf had inveigled its way in under the door and into the kitchen, Ms Motsepe’s efficient eye notwithstanding. Autumn had arrived in the city of gold like a mild-mannered man with a very sharp knife; pleasant during the day, ice cold at night.
My life, basically, was a mess. My job thrived off others’ misery. It seemed as if I was caught up in yet another unsatisfactory affair, an almost mirror image of my marriage to The Ex on the professional and sexual front. That is, I wasn’t getting a lot of sex, thanks to corporate imperatives, but when I did get some I wasn’t exactly inspired to write poetry or something. Talking of which, I had created an expectation that I was writing something of import when I didn’t even know where to start. I had thought I’d have something of value to offer my fellow citizens, a little pleasure amidst the resolute misery, but it didn’t seem to have turned out that way. Hopefully I hadn’t caused others too much distress, since everything in this country seemed to be measured in degrees of complicity in others’ pain. But what was I to do? I was too much of a coward or sensualist to commit suicide, and I had more or less outgrown drugs. Alcohol? Been there and still doing it. Religion? Did very little for me. Academe? Too disciplined and difficult.
You don’t have to write or pretend you’re writing, I told myself. Go for a drive in the country; you’re allowed to.
So I locked up, said goodbye to a puzzled Butch, drove down the road and got as far as the Gardens’ bigger dam, which had a road running along it and therefore had parking for scenic purposes. Water helped, but not much. A Chinese couple were teasing crabs from the muddy bank beneath a yellowing willow, probably for a restaurant. I looked at the radio and thought maybe I’d give the classical station a try, even though it usually gave me nothing but bombast from other centuries while I tried to negotiate the traffic and ignore beggar babies growing up on narrow islands next to increasing potholes. But not this time. The host – DJ wasn’t the word – said listen to how full the composer makes four simple string instruments sound. He had already mentioned the maestro’s name before I’d tuned in, but I was pretty confident I could work it out anyway. I couldn’t. But what I did hear was a thinking, feeling life in all its rich diversity. The piece was shorter and faster than a pop song, driven by an up-down sequence of rapidly building but logical argument, sparking with seriousness, defiance and discipline, then released by satire, laughter, freedom, before returning to seemingly improvised order, beauty and a no-nonsense stop.
The music was so unbearably beautiful that everything else was bearable again. I could carry on living. Others had religion, drugs, maths, motor cars and shopping lists to stay deluded, but I called the station, got the composer’s name – of course it was him! – and drove straight to a music shop, where I bought myself the entire collection of the man’s quartets. I had something coursing through my veins apart from blood, cholesterol and self-pity again. I no longer cared whether this genius was considered clichéd, overly emotional or out of date. As far as I was concerned the artist had done his work so well, over a hundred and fifty years ago, that he had saved my life right now.
I was listening, of course, to Ludwig van Beethoven.