Sizwe's Test: A Young Man's Journey Through Africa's AIDS Epidemic Page 8

  “Why do you come here?” he asked in English. His voice was surprisingly deep, his accent so thick I had trouble understanding him.

  “What?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m coming to visit Sizwe Magadla,” I said.

  “I know. But why? Are you the owner of his shop?”

  His eyes still glued to the path, there was in the tone of his questions a doggedness, a single-minded urgency.

  “No,” I replied. “I’m here doing research. I’m writing a book.”

  “But you are here to see that Sizwe is running your shop nice and proper,” he persisted.

  “No.”

  “So you do not own the shop?”

  “No.”

  He stopped dancing and fell in step with me, his neck bowed, his eyes watching his feet. We walked this way in silence for some time.

  “It’s not yours?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He veered off the path, turned around, and walked slowly back to where we had come from.

  WHEN I ARRIVED at his home, I told Sizwe of my encounter.

  “What did you say?” he asked eagerly. “Did you say it was your shop?”

  “I didn’t.”

  He smiled with resignation. His disappointment was as palpable as its expression was polite.

  “You like people to think the shop is mine?” I asked.

  “Of course I like. It means they think I’m not such a big man. They think I’m just a stupid someone working for the rich umlungu.”

  “I should have told them I pay you nine hundred rand a month,” I said.

  “You should have said seven hundred and fifty rand. Even less than the old-age pensioners.”

  “How long have you known about this rumor?”

  “A month, maybe. Three weeks. It is a big rumor.” He waved an arm in the direction from which I’d come. “Everybody from that part of the village, from where you park your car right up to the river, they are suspecting that I work for you.”

  LATER THAT WEEK, as I drove away from Ithanga in the early evening, Simlindile’s father, Charlie, flagged me down and asked me for a lift to the next village.

  I did not know how to deal with Charlie. I had met him just once before. He was not much younger than my father, yet he called me “baas” and cocked his head solicitously when I spoke. The manner of the high apartheid houseboy is bizarrely out of place here; I stared at him incredulously, made my excuses, and walked away.

  “Ninjane, Tata?” I asked now. “How are you, father?”

  “Not good, not good,” he replied in English. “Last month, we buried my nephew from East London. We buried him up there at his late father’s place.”

  “I heard,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “There were seven of them in that family: seven brothers and sisters. Now they are three. Three left out of seven. It is terrible. Three left out of seven.”

  I began to say something, but his volley of words was uninterruptible.

  “It was AIDS. And his wife is sick, also with AIDS. We will be burying her also, her also, not so long from now. With AIDS, you must talk early. Then they can help you. If you talk early. He did not. He said nothing. He should have known, if it is AIDS, you talk early, and then they can help you. But he said nothing. We could not help him.”

  Thandeka

  I arrive at Sizwe’s place early on a mid-December morning with a proposition. It is shortly before Christmas 2005, some six or seven months before Simlindile is to acquire his spaza shop. I have told Sizwe on the phone that I am coming, that I am making a special trip to Lusikisiki to ask something of him. When I arrive he is standing outside his front door waiting for me, his arms stiffly folded, his expression serious. He invites me inside, ushers me into a chair, sits opposite me, and waits for me to speak. The bed is freshly made, the room quiet. Once again, Nwabisa is not here; she left for work nearly an hour before I arrived.

  During the course of the next year, I plan to visit several of Lusikisiki’s clinics to write about Médecins Sans Frontières’s antiretroviral treatment program. I ask Sizwe to accompany me. I want to employ him as my interpreter. I could use someone else, I tell him, but I want him for a specific reason: he is, if he agrees to it, to be something of an interpreter-subject. He has already agreed that I write about him and the place of AIDS in his life. Now I am proposing that I write something of a travelogue, a story about him and me discovering the treatment program together. I tell him that I will pay him a daily rate for his time, and that we will be traveling together for about sixty days over the course of the year.

  “I don’t know if you can afford the time away from your business,” I say, “but I guess that’s something for you to judge.”

  He replies the instant I have finished speaking: “I will do it.”

  “That was quick. You’re sure you don’t…”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I will worry about my business when I am with you; my sister is not very good at looking after it alone. But the benefit to my business is greater. I will invest the money I get from working with you in the business. It will be good for my business.”

  “And how do you feel about the fact that you will be more than an interpreter, that I will be writing about the things you think and say about the treatment program?”

  “You are already writing about what I think about AIDS,” he replies.

  I am trying to grasp the source of his decisiveness. He watches me closely and appears to sense what I am thinking.

  “I have personal reasons for wanting to do this,” he says. “There is a cousin of my father’s from Durban. He is very sick.”

  “How will your going to the clinics with me help him?”

  He begins to say something, then stops. He is silent for a while.

  “There is a secret,” he says, “a secret most members of my family, including my father, do not know about. A few months ago, my niece Thandeka tested HIV-positive.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “In the next village. You have met her, but you don’t remember her.”

  “She is not yet sick?”

  “No.”

  “She tested here?”

  “Yes.”

  “They would have taken her CD4 count, to know how soon to start with the drugs.”

  He shrugs.

  “Has she been back to the clinic?” I ask.

  “No. I don’t know. She has told me and my mom, and no one else. Now I must help her decide what to do. I am trying to urge her to tell her mother. She does not want to. I must respect her. I must help them both decide what to do.”

  “Why did she test?”

  “She went to the clinic for other reasons. When she got to the clinic, she was encouraged to test. But now it is for me to help her to decide what to do. So I am happy to come with you to the clinic. It will help me.”

  “Are you close to Thandeka?”

  “Very close. I describe her to you as my niece, but really she is more like a daughter, or a young sister. I am the one who has been caring for her. Until just before I met you, she lived at my place.”

  “Why?” I ask. “What is her story?”

  “She is the daughter of my older sister, Nosipho. When Nosipho was seventeen, maybe eighteen, she married a man near here. They split up after two, maybe three years. I am not sure what was the cause. Nosipho now had no husband’s home, and her own father’s home was very poor, so she went up to KwaZulu-Natal to look for work. Instead of work, she found a Zulu man. That is the story of many women from around here. They go to Durban or Pietermaritzburg to look for work. There is no work; they only find a man who will pay for them.

  “This man’s house was next to his parents’ homestead. I do not remember exactly where in Natal it is: somewhere north of Durban. This man of Nosipho’s, he had another girlfriend when Nosipho arrived. There was tension between the two women. The old girlfriend had to leave, and she left her baby behind. Her baby was Than
deka. Nosipho became Thandeka’s mother.

  “That boyfriend of hers was a tyrant. He beat her. He did not allow her to travel back to Ithanga to visit her parents. She was a prisoner in her own home.

  “After she had been there some time, my father decided to perform the initiation ceremony for all of his daughters. Somebody sent word to Nosipho that she was needed at home. She escaped. She came home. The boyfriend chased after her and arrived in Ithanga. My father was very angry with him. He instructed that man to go home and fetch Thandeka; he said Nosipho and Thandeka would be living here with us.

  “They have now been here three years. Nosipho is married to a man from Ithanga. Thandeka, she is meant to live with my father, because a child born out of wedlock is the responsibility of her mother’s homestead. But my father is a very difficult man to live with, so she came to live with me and Nwabisa. She is not my blood but it is the same as if she was my daughter, or my young sister. I paid her school fees. I put food on her plate every day. She left my place because she found work in the next village. She is staying with family there.”

  In the coming months, I will meet Thandeka two or three times. But my encounters with her are frustrating. She is not to know that I know of the virus in her blood, and I can ask her nothing. She is shy. I struggle to get more than a greeting out of her.

  “You want to come with me to the clinics because you must assess the options,” I say to Sizwe. “What are the other options?”

  “There is a lady near Mthatha,” Sizwe replies. “My father had a patient with AIDS. He went to get muthi from this lady near Mthatha. He got better. Then he tested again for HIV and he was negative.”

  I have heard a great deal about the lady from Mthatha. She is spoken of in every Lusikisiki village I have visited. She is, in fact, a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old girl, and she is said to possess extraordinary healing powers. Her practice is managed by her mother; one buys medicines from the mother, not the girl; very rarely do people get to see the girl herself. It is said that her mother is sheltering her from the world, wants her to have a normal adolescence, wants to protect her gift from corruption and misuse.

  “She is your first option,” I suggest. “The clinics is your last option.”

  He nods. “A cure is better.”

  “Is that the problem with the clinics? They don’t offer a cure?”

  “I have three problems with antiretrovirals,” he replies crisply. “First, people do not know about them. We don’t know them here. Second, it seems you must get sick before they give you the antiretrovirals. You must wait until you are sick. I do not like that. Why must you get sick first?”

  He has been staring at his hands as he speaks. Now he lifts his head and looks me in the face.

  “The third reason is the biggest reason. I feel terrible for the people living with this disease inside of them. It is there for their whole lives. I think of Thandeka living with this disease inside her for the rest of her life, and I feel so sorry for her, I wonder whether she can cope with that, whether anyone can cope with that. A cure is much better.”

  “We will go together,” I say, “to the girl from Mthatha and to the clinics. At the clinics you will meet the doctor who runs the ARV program. You will ask him everything you want to know. His name is Hermann Reuter.”

  His head jolts as if he has been slapped. It is momentary. He recovers his composure in an instant.

  “You know Dr. Hermann?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “He has given me permission to come with him when he visits the clinics. You seem to know him, too.”

  “No,” he replies. He is calm now, nonchalant. “I just saw his name somewhere. Maybe in a pamphlet I picked up. It was written by him. I read his name.”

  He will not tell me what it is I saw in his face when I mentioned Hermann Reuter, and I do not press it further. But there is clearly a story to tell.

  We talk about other things, mainly Thandeka. She has a three-year-old child, Sizwe tells me. He was conceived back in Natal. The father was a trainee sangoma. He came to Thandeka’s village to stay with a training sangoma, and while he was there, he had an affair with Thandeka. Her Zulu family was very angry. The trainee sangoma was banished in shame.

  I ask if she has a current boyfriend. Yes, he replies. Her boyfriend is from here. He lives at the bottom of the valley. They have been together two years.

  “Did she tell him about her test?”

  “She told him, and he was very angry. He shouted at her, and then he refused to talk to her for a long time. He said he does not want to know about these things.

  “He is angry, and he does not want to know, but he is sick. Every second day, he is coming to my shop to buy painkillers for his stomach and his chest and his head.”

  I struggle to concentrate on his words, for my mind keeps drifting; I am wondering what it is he has chosen to conceal about Hermann Reuter.

  PART TWO

  Garden and Home

  Can I ask you a personal question?” inquires Dr. Hermann Reuter, head of the Médecins Sans Frontières project in Lusikisiki.

  “You can ask what you like,” I reply.

  “Have you had sex with women ever?”

  We are sitting in a garden outside a house; it is not clear from what he has said whether the house is his, but it appears that it might be. It stands on high ground, about a mile and a quarter from the center of Lusikisiki, and we are looking across a valley onto a straggle of dusk-lit hilltops.

  I consider his question and begin to answer it, but he interrupts me.

  “I’m not interested,” he giggles. “I am asking because I want to know how do you understand the word impotence.”

  I hesitate, fearing that I am about to answer a trick question: “To the best of my knowledge,” I say cautiously, “it refers to a man’s inability to have or sustain an erection during a sexual encounter.”

  “That’s my understanding also. But it is not the understanding of many young men in Lusikisiki.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You know, when I first arrived here, I used to do things like talk to groups of young people about sexuality. I stopped doing it because I’m shy. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I should be doing it still. But I don’t.”

  It takes me a while to understand that he is no longer talking about impotence, or not yet, anyhow. I will learn over time that he has a habit of beginning with an unannounced aside, sometimes several.

  “Anyway,” he continues, “young men sometimes come to me and tell me they have a problem: there is something wrong with my penis, they say; it isn’t working properly…I ask them what do they mean it’s not working properly, and they say they can’t give a girl an orgasm. And I say to them, ‘Hold on, hold on: can I ask you something? How many times a night do you ejaculate?’ And they say, ‘Maybe six times.’ And I say, ‘Six times! I’ve never done that in my life. Can I explain to you something about the female orgasm maybe?’”

  He pauses and laughs. “This is why I ask if you have slept with women ever.”

  I nod, a little exasperated at the route he has chosen to arrive at this point. But I am appreciative. In his bluffing, elaborately opaque manner, he has assembled an image that imprints itself vividly in the mind: so much invested in sexual performance, in potency, and yet the performance itself so fraughtly autistic, so swallowed up in itself, that it must fail.

  It is a refreshing antidote to the careless proposition that in poor communities young people fuck each other all the time because there is nothing else to do. As if desire is a function of boredom. On the contrary, Hermann seems to suggest, when there is nothing else to do, when, for instance, one cannot give expression to one’s manhood by becoming a household patriarch or careerist, the whole of manhood becomes endowed in sexual performance. It is made to do too much work; it is a source of anxiety.

  “Yes,” I say. “Sexual morality—”

  “Something I have noticed,” he interrupts, “is that for poor
people sexual morality is Father Christmas mostly.”

  He says nothing more, and I sigh deeply, preparing for the volley of questions it will take to tease his thoughts from him.

  He senses my irritation and continues. “For the poor, it is difficult for sex to be a private thing. Too many people live in one household. It is something that is seen and heard, by children, by the household. So this severe sexual morality people preach, it is like Father Christmas. It is something it is nice to believe. Or maybe a better way of putting it, it is like the starch poor people put on their clothes. Everyone knows the shirt is old and worn. But you must still put the starch on it, it is still very important, even though it does not hide very much usually.”

  Earlier in the day, Hermann had taken me around the garden next to the house that may or may not be his. He has planted several indigenous trees during his two-and-a-half-year stay in Lusikisiki. He took me from one sapling to another, pronouncing the name of each very slowly and asking if I knew of it. I shook my head every time.

  “I know little about trees,” I said apologetically. “I can recognize a willow, an oak, or a poplar, maybe a baobab. But that’s about it. And bluegums and wattles, of course.”

  He ignored me. At each new sapling, he asked again whether I knew the name of the tree. I shrugged.

  He was explaining to me which trees would grow tall and which were mere shrubs, which would die in a few years and which would live the span of countless human generations. In midsentence he stopped, shouted with delight, plunged into the tall grass next to his trees, and emerged holding what seemed to be a locust or a grasshopper.

  “Food for my snakes,” he said, showing it to me carefully. “Please help me look for some more. My snakes need food.”

  And so I imitated him, putting my eyes to the ground, scanning for insects. It had never dawned on me before that snakes might eat insects. Perhaps they don’t. We slowly drifted to opposite ends of his garden.

  “So,” I shouted across the saplings and the tall grass, “is this or isn’t this your house?”