Zakes Mda - The Madonna of Excelsior

The following day, Pule boarded the red railway bus back to Welkom. There to be drained by the gold that he extracted from the dust of the depths of the earth.

JOHANNES SMIT CONTINUED to be a slave to his secret desires. She shooed him away. His unrequited shadow dogged her path. It loomed large even when she got a job at Excelsior Slaghuis, Stephanus Cronje’s butchery. She was one of five women who kept the butchery clean, cut the meat, weighed it and generally served the customers. But, of course, none of them were allowed near the till. Cornelia Cronje herself — Madam Cornelia to Niki and the other “girls”—sat behind the till. Sometimes her husband, Stephanus Cronje, manned it. Niki’s special assignment involved acting as a nanny to young Tjaart Cronje, in addition to her work at the butchery.

Johannes Smit took to buying meat at odd times. And made a point of being served by Niki. When his deep freeze was full of meat, he took to visiting Stephanus Cronje at work, even though everyone knew that their politics had taken divergent routes. Stephanus Cronje was the secretary of the local branch of the ruling National Party and the mayor of Excelsior. Johannes Smit had recently abandoned the National Party to join the breakaway Her-stigte Nasionale Party, an ultra-conservative political grouping of those Afrikaners who felt that their formerly beloved National Party had become too soft and liberal towards blacks, and was beginning to relax some of the more stringent but God-given apartheid laws.

Stephanus Cronje thought Johannes Smit was beginning to regret the errors of his ways and wanted to return to the fold. He did not notice that during these visits Johannes Smit always tried to catch Niki’s eye, and would then furtively wave some bank notes at her. Niki would ignore him. She continued to ignore him when he followed her and the other women in his battered bakkie on their way back to Mahlatswetsa after knocking off work. These women, who sometimes included Mmampe and Maria, knew all about Hairy Buttocks and took his misery as something that enriched their lives with laughter.

Niki, on the other hand, found this attention irritating. Inside her another life was ticking. She wanted to think only of its expected kicks in a few months’ time, and not of things that reminded her of her humiliation.

BLUE AND RED dominate. Three women are surrounded by white light. White against a blue wall and a blue skewed window. One has a blue face and wears a blue doek on her head and a blue shawl over her shoulders. The second woman has a red face with tinges of grey. She wears red lipstick and a red and blue blanket. A blue woollen cap sits on her head. The third woman has a black face and red eyes from which flow red tears. She wears a red T-shirt and a red beret.

The three women are standing next to the bed on which recline the figures of a blue-faced woman and a newly-born baby. Both she and the baby wear blue woollen caps. Their heads rest peacefully on a fluffy white pillow. The mother is covered in a red and blue blanket and the baby is in white. Next to the bed is a side table on which rests a red clay pot and a white bottle. The mother and child are fast asleep while the three women stand guard over them.

The baby boy was Viliki, a product of whirlwinds and explosions.

SHE IS HOLDING the sun entwined in her arms. It is blazing red. With streaks of yellow. She is all impasto black and blue and yellow. The sun glows through her body, giving it patches of fluorescent red. She sits like a Buddha embracing the sun. She is wide awake, for night has passed. The whites of her eyes are milky white and the pupils are black like the night. Everything around her is fiery red. The sky is red. The ground is red. Rivers of white run on the red ground. Broad strokes. She is dark and sinister. And beautiful. Under her impasto sun, plants are wilting.

Johannes Smit was distracted by an infernal drought that was incinerating parts of the Free State. And the aphids that were having a field day on his spring wheat crop. These destructive partners were surely going to lessen the yield. An average of only four bags per hectare instead of the usual eight. Subterranean rivers were drying up, and the veld was turning into a smouldering desert. A westerly wind was blowing. A sure sign that the drought was in no hurry to go. To add to his woes, a freak hailstorm hit the area, causing further damage to his crop.

Like Johannes Smit, all the farmers in the district were crying. And when the farmers cried, the people of Mahlatswetsa cried too. Their livelihoods depended on the grace of weather. Perhaps in December the rains would come. A promise of a good maize harvest. In the meantime, farmers shed what they considered to be excess workforce. Johannes Smit focused on how he was going to repay the Land Bank loan and forgot about Niki.

Niki survived the scorching sun because Tjaart had grown addicted to her back. Viliki toddled by her side. Viliki wondered why he was not the one strapped on his mother’s back. Why the big white boy — five times his size — was the one riding his mother and shouting, “Horsey! Horsey!”

THERE IS NOTHING muted about these reds and yellows and blues. An impasto world glares at you noisily. But this is not the kind of noise that turns your insides. It is not discordant. It does not grate on the eye. It is a saintly noise.

People walk out of the skewed houses that form a circle. A blue church completes the circle. The houses are pink with cobalt blue doors. People are floating to the church. People with black faces, each holding a giant white flower. Blank faces. A man in a crimson jump suit, brown shoes and brown conical Basotho hat. A woman in a crimson dress and brown beret. She has no feet. A man in a pink jump suit and brown woollen cap. Footless women in blue skirts and red blouses. Their faces are just black blobs. A woman in a long white dress and white veil leads the procession into the church. The procession glides augustly on the raw sienna path. Blazing light surrounds the solemn procession. Absorbing the devout into a halo of yellowness.

Three giant white flowers grow in front of the church. The blue tower is capped by a black spire that pierces the purple sky into heaven. The sky has streaks of pink and yellow clouds. And a dull yellow ochre sun with a broad black outline.

We saw Niki walk past the church. Viliki was trudging behind her. Three-year-old Viliki. All spruced up in his black shorts and khaki shirt and shoeless feet that had acquired a pink colour after being freshly scrubbed to remove thick layers of black dirt.

Niki was well-scrubbed herself. At twenty-two, she drowned the hearts of Mahlatswetsa in a vortex of desire. But she was unreachable. She could not save them from certain death. She was Pule’s wife. Pule, whose very name spoke of many rains. Old Pule who had been married before. And was deserted. Or did he desert?

Shame. Niki was loved so much. You could see it even from the way she walked. Like someone who is loved. Shame. She had a husband who dressed her so well. She glowed in a red two-piece costume with blinding silver buttons and a Terylene cream-white blouse. Her face glowed from Super Rose skin lightening lotion. She had long discarded the cheaper Pandora matt. One of the perks of being married to a man who burrowed in the earth for the white man’s gold. Her hair gleamed with braids of very thin lines. A style known as essence because it was first seen on models that appeared in an African-American magazine called Essence . Shame. Pule spoilt his young beautiful wife. There was no way she could dress herself and braid her hair like that from her earnings at Excelsior Slaghuis. We all knew how tightfisted the Boers of Excelsior were.