Masande Ntshanga - The Reactive

Sometimes, one of the guys will pocket the jackets and hang around the store for a while, waiting for me to get off my shift. We’ll dap an entjie outside the container and he’ll tell me to come around to the corner for quarts, and that it’s been a while since the ous saw me playing pool at Ta Ace’s. If I’m off the next day, I’ll tag along with him. I’ll drop the keys on the counter and ignore my boss’s glares, her warnings. We’ll take the main road, most of the time, and go past the inn, where the taxis crank their bass so high they could move the walls of a thousand houses backwards; and it’s at times like these, with the evening sky tinted the bright color of a new coal fire, that things seem possible, even for us down here.

Then one day, without any warning, I remember the man we once met on that cold night in Mowbray; I remember Monsieur Paré and the mask he wore on the day the three of us, Ruan, Cecelia and I, took our seats with him. It happens on a wet, gray morning, and when I think of him, I think of his daughter, Ethelia, as well.

Friday shifts are the longest at the shop, so I always make sure to take down two cigarettes on the way, just to keep the tar from rising up to my face. Today, I smoke the first one on Bhengu, and when I cross over to Eagle Street, passing by a pack of school children who climb, one after the other, into the doors of a peeling Hi-Ace, I hear the first noises from the mob. I nod at the driver as I pass, one of Ta T-Man’s new men, and when I take the corner into Nomzamo, my eyes smart and the wind stings when it flows into my throat. It’s cold and scented with motor oil; heavy with the smell of burning rubber. Maybe there’s been another strike, I think, but when I look around, no one seems torpid enough to be off the clock.

I keep walking.

I find the crowd a block away from my job; a small mob of around twenty people, and when I get closer, I hear them shouting over each other, hurling accusations about a pyramid scheme and talking about a man who’ll later remind me of Paré. In the crowd, a few people hold up election posters. They’ve ripped them down from the containers which fortify the front end of Du Noon, at the beginning of Dumani Street, and the faces of the politicians have been blanked out with white paint. In the center of the mob, they have the offender sprawled on the ground. He looks no older than eighteen. Two tires smolder behind him in a small stack, the cause of the heady stink in the air. Three women, standing to my right and in front of an old man in stained overalls, say the boy was trying to torch the neighborhood, and that only a month ago he’d stolen money from Du Noon’s pensioners, selling them a pyramid scheme called The Golden Fowl.

I nod, feeling I’ve got the gist of it.

Then I push myself deeper into the crowd and see him curled up on his side. He’s a small man, wearing nothing but a light-green vest — something they say he lifted from the clothesline behind him. Turning over on his side, he starts to laugh, spitting into the ground and turning a clot of it into mud under his chin. He addresses the crowd at the same time, shouting about the coming of a man without a face. The crowd falls silent and we listen. He sinks his nails into the earth, digs up a fistful of soil, and hurls it over his head. He says we’ll no longer be slaves, when the faceless man comes. Then he releases a stream of urine into the dust, and that’s when they drive the first shopping trolley into his flank, scraping him across the earth. The women in front of me tell the men to go easy on him: to only teach the boy a lesson. Ligeza eli, they say, a madman, and then they tell the men to dress him in clothes after they’re done. The men, themselves not much older than the offender, laugh, but agree to do so.

Then most of us turn back to our jobs. When I tell my boss what’s happened in the street outside, she just grunts. Her eyes remain unmoved, her reading glasses fixed on the numbers in her book.

Look at where you are, she says, waving a hand at me. Then tell me what you find surprising about this.

I don’t know how to respond, so I shrug. Then I crack my knuckles and take my place at her counter.

Not much, I say in the end, to her as well as myself.

I push an empty Kiwi shoe-polish tin under the stool to keep it from rocking. Through the doorway, I watch the rutted road die once more, before it comes back to life with our customers at lunchtime.

+ + +

Time manages to pass after that, but I can’t help thinking about it: all the things I heard and saw that day. Later, after they’d beaten up the offender — his name was Siseko — they told him to go home, but he hung around our neighborhood instead, walking the streets and taking long laps from Siya to Curry Street, holding conversations with himself about the man and his coming.

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.