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by Mputhumi Ntabeni

G21 AFRICA Staff Writer

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Mputhumi
Ntabeni

Queenstown, SOUTH AFRICA -

Our hearts build precious shrines for the ashes of our dead hopes -- Bertrand Russell

I'm sitting before my computer, blank and empty, looking through the window to the wind blowing the fallen leaves. It's autumn on the Southern tip of Africa. Fall, as Americans call it, gives me an idea of being naked against the elements.

From my computer Leonard Cohen is softly serenading a song, 'Chelsea Hotel', which he said he wrote at a bar in a Polynesian restaurant in Miami in 1971 and finished in Asmara, Ethiopia, just before the throne was overturned. Asmara now is part of Eritrea and its dispute goes on with Ethiopia.

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
you were famous your heart was a legend
you told me again you preferred handsome men
but for me you would make an exception.

My heart rasps with rustling leaves. My mind travels back about a decade. A woman friend from varsity days is visiting, stopping over to say "Hi "on her way to a water project eighty kilometres from PE (Port Elizabeth) where I'm residing. Little did I know her phreatic studies would start in my apartment when I decided she could stay with my girlfriend and I instead of some tent in some God-forsaken forest.

She became friendly, too friendly as it turned out, with my girlfriend. My girlfriend reciprocated her attention, started telling her personal stories that were ostensibly told only to me. The versions she gave my friend were rich with artistic inventions. She made more effort to please her. Whenever I said something it was compared and ridiculed against our visitor's. This humiliated and reduced my stature. Afterdinner time was ritually spent in the visitor's room holding hands and laughing out loud, talking about muddleheaded-hand me down Dalai Alami's maxims and such. I felt irrelevant.

And clenching your fist for the ones like us
who are oppressed by the figures of beauty
You fixed yourself you said never mind
we are ugly but we have the music.

The last straw was on the night we went out clubbing. On the return taxi ride, they sat together on the back seat fondling and kissing. I confronted my lover about it when we got home. She said they were only teasing me with an attitude of irritation. She told me get over my "scruff jealousy." I still cannot get over her curling lip and mocking laugh as she said that.

When my friend was going she invited my lover to a weekend in Johannesburg. They left together without consulting me. My male ego was shattered. I still believe in freedom even when people choose to be free of me.

The funny thing is that I myself was once drawn to my bisexual friend's sophisticated attitude, libertine brazenness, sublime impertinence, but was discouraged by her restlessness. There was always that anarchic glorification of licence she calls freedom I distrusted about her. The tendency to snatch at truisms, generalisations and received cleverness.

And then you got away didn't you baby
you just turned your back from the crowd
You got away I never heard you say
I need you, I don't need you
I need you I don't need you
and all that jiving around.

There's a fort of stolid calmness in PE called Fort Fredrick. Its high point overlooks the Baakens River where it enters the embrace of the sea. I like standing on that point, amazed at the mystical calmness of river water surrendering to the sea. The mist rising from the river in early hours and evenings endows it with a quality of ritual significance, the coming and goings of ships, their foghorns, bustle and all.

Whenever a black shadow stood in my way, I would go to that spot to measure my heartbeats against the footsteps of God. There must always be peace between the Big House and I.

The river broadcasts soft things, whispering willows and frogs lamenting the sins of Pharaoh. Its green waters with their glowing tint of the sinking sun behind the mountain scars reflect the peaceful atmosphere of the region.

That day all I could see was Sappho, naked and triumphant, spewing seawater from the wreck of her life. Her honey smile, cool molten words and insatiable erotic impulses shattering my hopes of making a home.

Soft things, like love, die slowly in my heart. But as Elizabeth Barret Browning put it:

We walked too straight for fortune's end,
We loved too true to keep a friend;
At last we're tired, my heart and I.

I'm still standing at the window looking out over the city. Cars travel at lightning speed to stop as traffic lights turn red. Lights twinkle green and off they go. People going about their daily routines. The hum of the highway reaches me in a beehive drone. The bees have collected enough nectar for the day to make honey for the queens. The same procedure the following day. They'll die in approximately thirty-five days hardly ever tasting the honey they've toiled so much making.

... strained, time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time -- (T.S. Elliot)

Do I still believe I can build the world that I choose and escape the general destiny of futility?

A jet-plane whizzes at the sky leaving double tracks of white smoke behind for trees to sort out at night, immobile trees like myself with limbs supporting stained coffee mugs. My friend enters the gate wearing a t-shirt with a portrait of Che Guevara -- a man of action reduced to a fashion symbol; political project to a personal gesture. An ability to transform personal disgruntlement into political stances would render politics relevant to most people. The question that politicians need to ask themselves is why it is that political ideas fail to bridge the gap between politics and society.

It is now autumn in my heart where silence reigns supreme even as I live through the tedium of these wearisome times. The iron has been transformed into gold. The wind is scrapping dead autumn leaves of my past life on the pavement. I take a last look at the window of a room where my lover and I have lain. "Come Sancho, it is enough for me to think her beautiful and virtuous . . . I paint her in my imagination as I desire her." (Don Quixote by Cervantes)