We should die of that roar
A Basotho song builds slowly, like a mushroom cloud on the horizon. The tune typically commences with a soothing sound effect. Popular opening salvos include crying babies and distressed barnyard animals. Once the melodic lament of a dying cow has whetted your aural appetite, the accordions kick in. Basotho accordion riffs are distinctive, because the person wielding the instrument doesn't actually play it; he or she merely lets it breathe. This technique produces a sound reminiscent of a braying jackass or the creaking of the bellows that fan the flames of hell. After a few bars, the bass player jumps into the mix, a-rhythmically plucking two notes approximately an octave apart. Just when you think the sonic assault has reached its nadir, the vocalists strike up the chorus and the bottom really drops out. After several minutes of half-hearted chanting, the singers yield the floor to the most diligent chain-smoker among them. As the instrumental cacophony fades ever-so-slightly into the background, the vocal soloist/future tracheotomy patient begins yelling rapid fire gibberish. After several eternities, the song ends and eager listeners are forced to wait several seconds before a screaming goat heralds the beginning of another tune that inevitably sounds exactly like its predecessor.
I developed my mild aversion to Basotho music while spending 10-hours on a cramped bus with the radio turned to 11 and an obscenely large speaker mounted inches away from my ear hole. Somewhere along the way, as I was searching through my backpack for a sharp object with which to spill my entrails, I realized that the music's soul-destroying potency was greater than the sum of its parts. It goes without saying that the melding of the worst sounds in the world produced a god-awful din, but the "music" wasn't your garden variety aural irritation. What made the songs truly awful was the way they resisted reduction to white noise. Even jackhammers and rabid dogs can, over time, be muted to a dull hum that barely rattles the needle on the Richter scale of our consciousness. Not so with Basotho music. Even after ten hours, every note, every screamed syllable, opened a fresh wound in my mind. The bass-line barrage dammed all channels of cognition and rendered even incoherent thought impossible. The sweet sanctuary of distraction lay out of reach.
My desire to tune out Basotho music contrasts markedly with my stance on the rest of Basotho culture and Lesotho in general. As I struggle to understand this place and side-step my frequent faux pas, I grope at what James Joyce referred to as "street furniture;" the forgettable facets of life that may or may not be signposts of the indelibly important. Joyce once asked his brother:
"Do you see that man who has just skipped out of the way of that tram? Consider if he had been run over, how significant every act of his would at once become. I don't mean for the police inspector. I mean for anybody who knew him. And his thoughts for anybody that could know them. It is my idea of the significance of trivial things that I want to give the two or three unfortunate wretches who may eventually read me. (Gifford, xv)"
While it's only somewhat likely that one of the buses rumbling around St. Rods will shuffle me off the mortal coil, it's guaranteed that a bus will eventually arrive to shuttle me away from this tiny town. The grey-dawning realization that a year really is a finite amount of time has cast Lesotho in a new light. Suddenly, every speck of sensory input, from the pastel pink unfurling of peach blossoms to the tinny ring of cowbells, looks smells and sounds like a catalyst for insight. My hope is that, after I've repatriated, these stored stimuli will act as a trail of bread crumbs leading me back to a well-furnished Lesotho that I will vigorously dissect with clairvoyant retrospection. Short of that, I'd like to figure out why Simion stole my camera.
Like most annoyances, the theft occurred at the worst possible time. Our house swarmed with visitors, including my old man, and the unspeakable horror of end-of-semester grading loomed. When I returned home one day to find a fist-sized hole in our living room window and shards of glass on our sofa, I reacted with resignation rather than rage. My camera appeared to be AWOL, but I didn't feel like cleaning my room to confirm its absence, let alone dragging the feckless St. Rodrigue police force away from his billiards game to file a report. I accepted the theft, if in fact one had even occurred, as a fait accompli and got on with my marking.
I spent most of the following week rooted to the couch, adding red periods to the end of sentences. This task wasn't terribly exciting until one afternoon an arm reached through the hole in the window, past my face, and began fumbling with the latch. I turned around and saw my little buddy Simion's face contorted in concentration. Apparently the white lace curtains on our windows conspired with my white skin to render me invisible despite the broad daylight. I said "Hey!" half greeting, half admonishing the wee interloper. Simion jumped, locked eyes with me for a moment, and then took off running. The front door to our house doesn't open from the inside, so I bolted out the back, giving Simion just enough of a head start to make things interesting. The ensuing chase probably doesn't deserve dramatic recreation on "COPS." There were no pit bull attacks nor chain-link fence carve-ups. The only obstacle I had to overcome as I pursued my suspect was my own disbelief. Simion? Really?
Simion stands out from the other neighborhood kids due to his stoutness and silence. When the St. Rodrigue street urchins used to come over for story time or Frisbee lessons, Simion always hung near the back, smiling. He never echoed his pals' requests for money or candy. Simion is the proud owner of a really sweet toy car, and his vroom vroom engine noises used to give him away whenever he passed by our house. The car features wooden spool wheels and a body made out of carefully bent wire. A piece of pipe extends upwards and backwards from the car's front axle allowing Simion to maneuver his hot rod without hunching over. During my first month in Lesotho, I wiled away the dog days of summer reading on the porch and watching Simion's car race his belly up the hill.
As Simion and I raced down the hill, I wondered if maybe I had misinterpreted the whole arm-through the window bit. After all, why would Simion steal a camera that he could borrow anytime he asked? Long before the camera disappeared, my memory card had been filled, cleared, and refilled with photos of Simion and me striking muscle-man poses and engaging in pantomimed peach eating. Was I really chasing the same cherub who used to give me flexing lessons? It appeared so. When we got to the edge of his property, Simion darted around a row of rondavels and disappeared. I tried the nearest door and inside found Simion failing to fit under his bed. When Simion responded to my questions about the camera with a yarn about a rogue herdboy I decided to turn him over to Sister Armelina for interrogation. Standing outside the convent in the crisp winter wind, 'M'e Armelina quizzed Simion and expertly exposed the blatant lies linking his story together. Simion's recalcitrant refusal to fess up kept Sister Armelina hard at work and gave me time to notice the crack in Simion's composure. As Sister continued to corner him, iridescent beads of sweat swelled on Simion's nose. I tagged each one and catalogued it as street furniture.
Convinced that Simion had the camera and weary of facilitating further denial, Sister Armelina suggested that we turn the budding klepto over to one of the male teachers at the primary school who was "good with the boys." Ntate Letsie listened quietly to our synopsis of the investigation and replied that he would take care of it. Two days later I had my camera and a hope that Simion wouldn't become the town pariah. How could I harbor any ill-will towards a kid whose penchant for self portraits and extreme close-ups was preserved for posterity due to the camera's convoluted deleting mechanism? Besides, Simion had relinquished his prize just in time for the school trip to Durban and, as excited as I was to see the city, I was even more eager to document the students' responses to such an alien landscape. The only skyscrapers near St. Rodrigue are the twin peaks of Thabana Limela, the aptly named "Titty Mountain."
Our bus driver balked at the prospect of piloting an overloaded bus through the jagged Drakensberg Range in the dead of winter, so instead of heading due east, we circumnavigated the top half of Lesotho en route to Durban. Guess what we listened to for the duration of the overnight trip. When we finally arrived at the Downtown Inn in Durban, I noticed with dismay that the Inn's sign advertised rooms by the hour. After receiving my key and taking a quick survey of my room, I realized that rooms by the hour really meant rooms by the hour. A supremely stained blanket lay at the foot of the bed, and a complimentary condom filled the soap tray above the sink. I hurried down to the front desk to ask if the hotel featured any rooms reserved for all-nighters, or, failing that, any large vats of gasoline in which I could soak my sheets. This query was cut short, however, by the night watchmen who told me a story that I couldn't follow, because its narrator kept gesticulating towards my face with a pistol. With a heavy heart, I gave the girls their room keys.
You would have thought the students were checking into a presidential suite at the Four Seasons. They squealed with delight when their key really did unlock their door. They luxuriated under long showers and if a teacher came knocking, they took their time undoing the latch. As I strolled the halls, savoring the celebratory atmosphere, I wondered if there might be a connection between the girls' jubilation and Simion's desire for artistic autonomy. Maybe Simion felt like he needed space, a room of one's own in order for his photographic talents to flourish. Perhaps he had chafed under my tutelage and longed to be free to explore the kinetics of blurred bushes.
Compared to Durban, St. Rodrigue seems pre-Cambrian, and even within Lesotho St. Rodrigue students are regarded as country bumpkins and picked on for their provincialism. These prejudices proved baseless, however, as our girls had no trouble acquitting themselves to the bustle and flash of the big city. The only incident when I felt like one of the Bundrens come down from the hills to make a spectacle of ourselves was when a teacher, 'M'e Moleboheng, got inquisitive at the aquarium. Even though we arrived at UShaka Marine World on Basotho time, we still received a warm welcome particularly from our tour guide who immediately began shuttling us past all sorts of amazing exhibits. Awesome aquatic animals under-whelmed our entourage until the tour guide deposited us in front of a massive empty tank. Just as a chorus of girls began to ask where are all the fish, an enormous manta ray flapped past our faces. We stood transfixed in the Ray's undulating shadow until Moleboheng yelled, "What is that animal?"
The guide dutifully identified the critter, prompting Moleboheng to ask, "Can it eat me whole?"
A cheerful negative from the guide. Molebo persisted.
"Can it die?"
This query short-circuited our guide's robo-friendly demeanor. "Yes, of course it can die," he breathed in open-mouthed exasperation. "It will die. All living things die. It's a living thing like you and me. One day we will die, right?"
'M'e Moleboheng chewed on this response, no doubt taking note of its patronizing tone and mulling options for saving face after such an inane inquiry.
"Can I have a jellyfish?" she asked.
The only aspect of Durban that the girls didn't take in stride was the preponderance of homeless people. A few minutes before our bus was due to depart for the long haul back to Lesotho, I led a group on a mission to find a water fountain. En route we passed the crumpled form of a boy sleeping on the sidewalk. Street furniture.
"Why is he sleeping there?" one of the girls asked me.
"He must feel like he has nowhere else to go."
"Why doesn't he stay with someone?"
"Maybe there's no one."
The girls all squinted at this answer. "We don't understand."
I'm sure at one point I could have conceived of a multitude of misfortunes and misunderstandings that could propel a kid to the pavement. Now, however, I'd lived in a society where AIDS orphans abound and yet everyone still seems to have someone to look after them.
"I don't understand, either," I said. "Let's go home."
Sixteen ear-shattering hours later, I was trudging up the hill to our house, wishing I had a toy car to push. Our room had just come into view when Paballo, one of my primary school playmates, sprinted to the side of the road and yelled hello. I reciprocated and kept walking, assuming that our usual exchange of pleasantries would be the extent of the conversation.
"Where is Simion?" Paballo asked.
I asserted my ignorance.
"Simion took your camera and then we ran."
The "we" didn't even give me pause. Paballo was confusing her pronouns, a common mistake among fledgling English speakers.
"Yeah, he sure did," I corrected.
"Yes!" Paballo exclaimed. "We watched and Simion took your camera and then we ran."
The fruits of my cognition concerning Simion's kleptomania vanished instantly, like farts in the wind. The same breeze carried me back to the dog days of a Kansas summer when I was six years old. One sun-bleached afternoon my friends and I had filled our idle hands with tomatoes from a neighbor's garden. Knowing full well that once you have a tomato in hand you've got to throw it at something, we honed in on my next-door neighbors' garage. Unfortunately for me and my merry band of miscreants, my neighbor was in his garage when our missiles hit their mark. Moments later my shorts got snagged on the top of my family's backyard fence, making my attempted getaway even less graceful than Simion's. I had felt no malice towards my neighbors, their daughter was one of my best friends, and I certainly didn't re-decorate their siding as a means of artistic expression. In the battle against boredom, rationality is always relegated to the role of spectator. I proved this fact definitively the following weekend when I received parole from being grounded for the tomato incident. Less than two hours into my newfound freedom, I got caught crab-appling my own garage.
So, a gang of restless little rascals and not a rogue artist had orchestrated the camera heist. I had stared so long and so hard at the hole in our window that the hole filled up with the motives of my own making. In reality, the hole was just a hole, a gap, a lapse in judgment. I should have known. Ulysses annotator Don Gifford warns the not-so-unfortunate wretches referring to his text that, although Joyce's street furniture occasionally has a "suggestive dimension beyond the factual⦠in most cases it is factual and inert, as in life most such furniture inevitably is" (xvi). Given that our front lawn often resembles the deck of Noah's ark, it's comforting to believe that some things are simply and completely inert. But how universal are "facts," anyways?
St. Rodrigue has been without electricity for the past two months and at night it gets dark. I sit in the belly of the undying leviathan that has swallowed me whole, trying not to strain my ears as I listen to the silence.
Gifford, Don. Ulysses Annotated. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. pp. xv-xvi
