I don’t know if it was just my age, predisposition or geography, but I seemed to be losing more loved ones each year. In this case it was another older friend who had died, another surrogate father, I suppose: Rob Amato. A friend called to give me the news the next morning – Ted Hughes was right: a dead body will fall out of your telephone – after which Butch and I went for a walk down to the park, passing a gaunt, wracking Mandla.
Rob had been the son of a Spanish Jew and I’d met him while in the careless ecstasy of student love with Alexandra. If this intense, compact man was shorter than me he felt much larger with his broad, powerful shoulders of a keen swimmer. He had burning black eyes behind his round silver frames and a curly mind as open and, paradoxically, sharp as the ocean. His father had been an industrialist in the Congo until that became too dangerous in the Sixties and the family moved to East London, where Rob had come into the orbit of black and white struggle royalty. When his father died Rob could have run the sunflower-oil factory, but he had other plans. He blew virtually his entire inheritance on funding a cultural magazine, which folded, and a theatre, which gave voice to the likes of Athol Fugard and Pieter-Dirk Uys. The theatre also later collapsed, but that wasn’t the point as far as Rob was concerned.
“What about your children?” I’d asked him.
“There’s enough for them to be educated,” he’d replied. “What more do you need to inherit?”
Not for him the yarmulke, ever, the shirt often skewly buttoned up, occasionally accompanied by a food stain. But always there was the matter of the domineering father, the man of action and industry, the provider. And, therefore, the questions. Was it really better to provide mental sustenance as opposed to food – and work – for people?
My only claim to fame was that I could spin a yarn with some persuasion and maybe that’s why we became friends. Like me, Rob had delighted in Alexandra and I had admired him for managing to stay so young and alert, even though he was a good fifteen years older than us and had three children back in Cape Town. He and his wife had separated and occasionally he’d miss his kids with a painful twist to his blackly bearded mouth, but there were also other problems to be solved – too many, we sometimes thought – and pleasures in which to delight. He had a great capacity for delight, did our Rob. And listening. You might toss off a casual line and he’d start interrogating you about it, black eyes boring into you, until you had to admit you’d just been flippant, Rob. His guts and shoulders would start shaking, and he’d push air out through his clenched teeth, eyes twinkling with mirth, building towards the next brilliant idea. That was the one kind of laughter.
One night we’d all been sitting around and heard there was a new local band coming to campus. By that time we were half paralysed on Western and African substances and too inert to go, but Rob got us all up and moving and we went to see an outfit called Juluka. Up on the stage there was a white and black man, which wasn’t allowed at the time, and they were making their own local music. Johnny Clegg had embraced and been accepted by Zulu culture without sacrificing his own. He was wearing African skins and dancing like a warrior, in unison with his friend, Sipho Mchunu. We shouted our heads off and danced ourselves into sweaty sobriety.
“This is so important,” Rob said afterwards, analysing every political and cultural nuance of the evening as we started smoking and drinking afresh. “What do you think Alex?”
“If I’d been wearing panties I would have thrown them at him,” she replied.
That time Rob didn’t laugh, he bellowed with Mediterranean joy.
After we’d finished varsity we had all gone our separate ways and he’d moved to another campus. About a year ago he’d called to say he’d migrated to Jozi, impressed with how dynamic it was. He was living in a cottage at the back of his ex-wife’s house, reading stuff like his good friend Don Maclennan’s poetry, had an influential column about the separation of powers (his father had always said he’d make a good lawyer) and we could continue our conversations as if decades hadn’t flown by in the interim. There was still that capacity for listening and laughter from this man who wanted to write a retort to Disgrace and call it Delight.
We had diametrically disagreed on where the country was going – he the political optimist, not I – and he had bought himself a Romeo-red, second-hand Alfa Junior. He had always wanted one and now he had it and came to visit me. There was a small painting of a mother and daughter he particularly liked, having lost a daughter in her infancy. So I gave it to him in the spirit that it had been given to me by my good friend, Dick Reineke.
Then one fine evening Rob went to a Cosatu meeting in his Junior, this man who took everybody’s ideas so intensely, generously seriously, and on his way home some moron had pulverised the Junior and him in a haze of Saturday-night auto testosterone.
I stopped the Civic outside the old man’s local Spar, got his groceries, resisted kicking the dog’s head off as I tried to carry all the bags simultaneously, helped the old man pack his goods away and told him we were going for a drive.
“No,” he said.
“Yes, Dad. We’re going out.”
“Can the dog come?”
“No, it stinks.”
“Well then I’m not going.”
“Dad, we’re going to be away for half an hour. It’ll do you good.”
“What if those bastards try to rob me again?”
“What bastards?”
“There was a break-in here.”
“This is news to me. Tell me more.”
Now he seemed to regret having told me and I had to drag it out of him. “They” had come onto the back stoep and forced the bathroom’s curly burglar bars back and taken some of his suits, Ma’s old radio and some food.
“Did you report it?”
There was no point in it, he said. The new police were useless. Uncle Vern had soldered the bars back into place and everything was fine again.
“If we leave the dog here he’ll protect the place.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing to me,” he said tearfully, the dog looking up at him with its soulful eyes.
Now the old man had to get dressed in his trousers, golf shirt, smart zip-up jersey and check jacket with his stiff shoulders, which took half an hour, whereafter he couldn’t find his goddamned keys – “shit!” – but it finally all came together like a film production. He shakily bade his bloody canine – with its soft brown eyes and long, aquiline nose – farewell, telling it he would soon be home again, “see, my dog?”
Thus we went for a spin on the highway and spoke about its cars, which he could barely see, and he came to the deeply profound, though regretful, conclusion that the Volkswagen Jetta was probably the best car ever made. I wasn’t even going to bother telling him about Rob, so I said a little cruelly, fishing, “I can’t believe you think that after the Chevy.”
“Don’t even talk about the Chev.”
“Why not?”
“Do you know it’s being used on a farm now?”
“No,” I lied, thinking the reason why my Civic was always dirty was probably a subconscious reaction to his deification of the Chev, then the Valiant. I also thought about the many, many near-heart attacks Ma had had with his tempestuous driving, especially in the Chevy, during our holiday drives down to the same small towns where his sisters lived, year after tedious, torpid year.
“Do you know what that Merc costs new?” I said.
“No?”
“Three-quarters of a million rand.”
“What?”
“I know. It’s criminal.”
“That’s probably what my house is worth,” he said as we passed the cemetery next to the highway.
“Do you want to go to Ma’s grave?”
But he still wasn’t in the right frame of mind, meaning he was probably worried about his dog, but did I know what? I didn’t.
“I’m really annoyed that we have to lie facing east.”
“Why?”
“How am I going to see the cars on the highway?”
As usual I couldn’t think of a retort to that and, when we got back to his house, the dog was sitting at the gates.
“He sleeps on the pillow next to my head.”
“Hmm?”
Pause.
“You mustn’t think I don’t appreciate this, hey.”
“Good,” I said, the Highveld light burning his house’s white walls.
“Don’t bother coming in,” he said. “You’ve wasted enough time already.”
“I’ll just see you in, Dad.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. We might catch more robbers in the act or something.”
“Leave well alone,” he said.
“No.”
I thought he might create a scene, but he seemed impressed, so we got out, looked for his keys for a while, finally found them and unlocked the gates.
“Hello, my dog,” the old man said, rubbing his loved one’s head, almost in tears again as he comforted his piddling pup and apologised to it for having gone away, saying he would never do so again, “ever!”
I couldn’t stomach the sop so I checked out the yard for any intruders, my hand in my pocket pathetically holding my Swiss army knife, without which I’d begun to feel naked of late. Then I checked the house thoroughly – behind doors, under beds, in cupboards – catching a glimpse of myself in the square mirror with the fake gold rim at the end of the passage, where the phone was, where the old man had begged his wife to come back to him, saying he had banished that woman from our house and that he would forgive her, Ma, for anything and everything.
“Look,” he’d said. “I’m on my knees!”
She can’t see you, I’d thought as my teen self lay listening in the suburban dark.