The Death of Rex Nhongo (15 page)

G
ilbert was working all the time, more or less, whether in the cab or at his sister's kitchen. He slept no more than three hours a night. Of course, he could catch forty winks here and there when on the taxi rank. But he was finding it increasingly difficult to sleep in the car because his mind was ever restless. In fact, when he witnessed the way other drivers cut their engines and dozed off in a matter of seconds, he determined this was a mark of their weakness: resignation to their lot, stuck in a routine that left them almost delirious with exhaustion and paid them barely enough to eat. Gilbert believed he was capable and deserving of more; and if more was what he wanted, he had to do something different.

The problem was the “something different” couldn't impinge upon his capacity to take a fare at a moment's notice. Consequently, he fell back on a familiar crutch and read avidly. He had always believed that time spent reading was never wasted. It was an idea drummed into him by his father and, though he currently couldn't see how it might happen, he held tight to the notion that books might save him.

There were several bookstalls at Avondale flea-market. For the most part they sold a mixture of tourist cast-offs (largely pulp thrillers), glossy self-help books of a more or less Christian bent, and dog-eared African adventures written by white people with double-barreled names featuring savages whose nobility was trumped only by that of an elephant. Gilbert read them all. Browsing one afternoon, he came across Kenneth, a wiry, colored man who chain-smoked Madisons, quoted Shakespeare in an impressive basso profundo and, on Fridays, appeared at the market carrying a suitcase brimming with an eclectic selection from the literary canon. And as Kenneth came to identify Gilbert as a “fellow intellectual,” he began to allow him to exchange whatever he'd taken the previous week at no charge and even thrust books upon him with a manic glint in his eye: “This is a fuckin' classic,
ek se!
A fuckin' classic!”

In the last month alone, Gilbert had read Dickens and Hardy, Eliot and Baldwin. He lost himself in worlds of which he knew nothing and found himself again in brief passages or even single phrases that spoke to his heart—he considered, for example, that he was paying for what he'd done, for what he'd allowed himself to become, and reflected on the best and worst of times with wisdom, foolishness, belief and incredulity.

Gilbert found an ineffable truth in these books that was almost like love. It was different, of course, from his love for Bessie, which had never been a thing of words. But if his feelings for Bessie were something he couldn't articulate—a grand passion of almost unbearable tenderness—this was love that declared itself openly, eloquently and without fear.

Currently he was reading
Candide
. He found the bizarre narrative alienating and entrancing in equal measure—perhaps not so different from his love for his wife after all. He hated the protagonist but wondered if he was only truly hating what he saw in himself. He would never have considered himself an optimist, yet wondered if his actions, his continuing hope in the face of apparently insurmountable challenges, spoke otherwise—the obstinacy of maintaining everything is best (or could at least be so) when it is…anything but.

When Kenneth handed him the book, he'd said, “This is a weird one, but it's some fucking funny shit: ‘Let us work without reasoning, it's the only way to make life endurable.' Satire. You know about satire?”

Of course Gilbert knew about satire and, defensively, he'd said as much. But he found little ridiculous in
Candide
—grotesque, certainly, but only in the way his own life seemed consistently verging on the grotesque.

It was after ten p.m. and Gilbert was parked outside the Infectious Diseases Hospital on Simon Mazorodze Road, reading by the cab's internal light. He was waiting for a Jeremiah, who'd called half an hour before and said he was one of Patson's regulars. Gilbert had never heard of Jeremiah and he was cautious about heading to Mbare for a stranger at this time of night. But the guy had his phone number and sounded genuine and, besides, the evening had been quiet so far and he needed the job. On arrival, he'd texted Jeremiah to say he was outside. “10 mns,” the man texted back.

Twenty minutes later, Gilbert glanced up from his book to check the time on his phone, considered the pitch dark of the hospital entrance (not even a security guard in sight) and decided he'd best head back into town. He started the engine and flicked on the headlights. They illuminated half a dozen men in front of the car who were armed variously with crowbars, timber and, in one case, a
sjambok
.

Gilbert cursed. He checked the rearview mirror and saw at least as many men behind the car. He put the Raum in “drive” just as a crowbar smashed the passenger side headlight. The car lurched forward and hit something, or rather someone. He heard a pained scream. He instinctively hit the brakes and the car lost traction on the sandy verge and stalled.

There was tapping on the driver's window. Gilbert, terrified, turned to see nothing but a knuckle. Now a face bent to join the knuckle and, illuminated by a cigarette lighter, revealed itself as that of Castro, the ringleader of the Chipangano cadre. Gilbert tried to restart the car but, in his panic, forgot that it wouldn't start in “drive” and the key turned dead. He hit the central locking. Castro lit his cigarette and, face pressed to the window, eyes wide, made a winding gesture with his right hand.

Gilbert got the engine going and the one remaining headlight was bright enough for him to see a large youth behind Castro, with a piece of two-by-four raised over the windscreen. His eyes darted back to Castro. He buzzed the driver's window down an inch. Castro was calmness itself. “Hello, country boy,” he said, with a smile that expressed some simulacrum of sympathy. “If you get out of the car now, we will probably not kill you. If you don't, we will kill you and we will torch the car. There we are. Your choice. Make it fast-fast.”

Gilbert cut the engine. His fear dissipated just like that—this was what it was. He recalled one of the self-help books he'd read:
Angry Men, Happy Husbands
. Its central tenet was that anger came from fear: fear that the desire to fight or flee would not ultimately be productive. Gilbert knew he could neither fight nor flee and was surprised to find exactly the “acceptance” the book had suggested was just around the corner for all “adult men.”

He moved for the door and noticed that
Candide
was still open on his lap. He thought that, if he was still alive after this was over, he would want to read on. He remembered Kenneth saying he couldn't return a book with dog-eared pages. He took his time, therefore, to mark his page with a receipt. He almost enjoyed the absurdity of this action. He got out of the car.

Castro took a step back. Gilbert was aware of the others circ­ling around him, but he kept his eyes on the ringleader. Castro said, “How much money have you got?”

Gilbert took out his wallet. He counted out the single bills. He said, “Six dollars.” Castro gestured for the money. Gilbert handed it to him. Castro said, “Thank you,” then punched him square in the face. Gilbert heard his nose break with a crack that echoed in his ears.

Having decided he wasn't going to die, Gilbert gave up his body as a punch-bag. He covered his head and accepted kick after kick to his back and guts. His mouth was full of a thick liquid and he thought he was choking. But he managed to gulp down his own blood and it tasted metallic and soupy. Now he felt a searing pain like fire, first on his buttocks, then across his back. He was being whipped with something that cracked the air with each stroke, a coat-hanger perhaps. He began to cry and scream, but it wasn't long before he passed out.

G
ilbert came round with a start and a sharp intake of breath that sucked in a whole lot of dust and made him choke. He pushed himself up on his hands and coughed until the coughing turned to retching and he vomited. Vomiting hurt a lot, squeezing his battered ribs and stretching every welt on his back. He gingerly lifted himself to his feet and carefully flexed his joints. As far as he could tell, there was nothing broken except his nose, which was simultaneously numb and extraordinarily painful, sending sharp, stabbing messages directly to his brain and making his eyes water. He tried to clear his vision, but every time he wiped his eyes, they seemed to fill again immediately.

He wasn't wearing any shoes. He checked his pockets. His wallet was there, his car keys and phone, though the screen was cracked. He looked at the time. It was just after eleven. He slowly circumnavigated the Raum. Apart from the smashed headlight, it appeared undamaged. Castro was true to his word—he hadn't killed him and he hadn't torched the car. This had been, Gilbert realized, no grand show of force, no personal vendetta, just business as usual for Chipangano. The thought riled him—the ruthlessness, the easy violence. When he'd seen Castro standing at the driver's window, he'd assumed he'd got under his skin that day at the kitchen, threatened his standing. But the evident truth was that he'd simply given Castro a job to do, which he'd carried out with efficiency and little expense of energy, thought or emotion. And somehow that was worse.

Gilbert wondered what had happened to his shoes. He imagined himself lying unconscious when Castro had given the signal—
Enough
. And, as the gang moved off, one of them had thought, I want a pair of shoes. And he'd taken them. There was something so petty about it that it only fueled Gilbert's anger. If they'd wanted his car, they'd have taken it. If they'd wanted his life, they'd have taken that too. But they'd wanted nothing from him except pain and shoes.

He opened the driver's door. He slowly eased himself behind the wheel. Sitting down was excruciating. It was the whipping that had really fucked him up and he couldn't begin to think about how his back and buttocks must look. However much his siblings insisted he'd had it easy from their father, he'd had his share of hidings to the snap of Obert's belt, and on a few occasions they'd drawn blood. But those beatings had been nothing compared to this. Every time Gilbert shifted in his seat to turn the wheel or indicate or simply try to find a more comfortable position, the material of his shirt or underpants or jeans tugged away from a raw wound and sent his head reeling.

He drove back to Sunningdale very slowly, partly because he had only one headlight, partly because his vision was still misty and partly because he was scared he might pass out from the pain. At one point, he began to cough and, finding that he was snorting blood over his shirt, he had to stop the car. He opened the door, swung his legs into the road and spent five minutes gobbing into the dirt before he dissolved into tears of pain, self-pity and fury.

He reached the house around midnight. He turned off the engine. He sat for a moment, trying to gather his strength for the effort to drag himself inside. He was sweating profusely, but shivering with cold. He was experiencing waves of nausea. He blacked out. He came to in time to open the car door and throw up. This made him feel a little better and he thought he should grasp the opportunity to try to move. He hauled himself out of the car, lugging his limbs like a laborer lugging sacks of cement. He stood for a moment, slumped forward over the roof. He saw the door of the house open and a figure emerge. A match sparked and Patson lit his cigarette and sat down on the veranda. He looked directly at Gilbert and raised a slow hand in greeting. Gilbert summoned all his energy and stumbled in the direction of the house.

“I heard the car,” Patson said. “It's early to call it a night.”

Gilbert couldn't answer. He felt the faint coming and his eyes blackened before his legs gave out. He lurched forward and his knees buckled. Patson exclaimed but Gilbert no longer understood language.

He drifted in and out of consciousness. On the floor of the main room. His clothes being removed. His sister's voice, barking commands at the children. Gilbert was delirious and thought she was his mother. Candlelight. Face down on the marital bed. Fadzai dabbing at his wounds with a cloth. Every touch like fire and ice. Coughing and vomiting. Apologizing. Aware of his nakedness. Apologizing. Fadzai kneeling next to him, kissing his cheek. Patson's hovering presence: weighty, restless, impotent. The cold light of daybreak gave rise to a bout of violent shivering. Fadzai tried to cover him, but even the weight of a light sheet was unbearable. Fitful sleep. Vivid nightmares. Morning sun, waking up slowly, stuck to the mattress in a sticky mess of sweat, spit and blood. He opened his eyes. He was desperately thirsty. His sister was asleep on the floor next to him. But her eyes now snapped open, sensitized to any shift in his condition. She blinked. She touched his face. She said, “What happened, Gilbert?”

He said, “Chipangano.” Then, “Water.” She nodded, stood up and left the room. His fever had passed. All that was left was the pain, which was raw and precise and bewilderingly inalienable.

He heard low voices in animated discussion—Fadzai and Patson. He imagined them considering the possible repercussions: whether to go to the police or take more personal revenge. But as his ear attuned to their whispering, he realized it was actually a mundane conversation about who should stay at home to keep an eye on him, the urgent need to fix the headlight and the potential lost income if the kitchen was closed with the car off the road.

Gilbert found himself staring at the small chest of drawers. He knew this was where Patson kept the Cee-ten's gun. He pictured Castro's face at the car window and he wondered whether, if he'd had the gun, he'd have shot him right there and then. Gilbert knew himself well enough to admit that last night he'd have done no such thing. But after what they'd done to him? Today everything was different.