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Butterfly Burning
Yvonne Vera
(First published 1998)
The room Fumbatha and Phephelaphi share is situated among some of those houses on Sidojiwe E2 made of asbestos sheets, all five walls, which includes the roof. These are shelters. Living is a matter of keeping everything intact, the mind together too because there is so much living to be done. One room. Four corners. These walls are borders. A retreat where one may be naked without shame, and touch another willingly without the obvious presence of prying and sympathetic eyes. Inside the walls are metal hooks where a trouser dangles inside out, the pockets flat and flared. A torn vest too. A heap of blankets on one end. Another naked body on the ground. Soft uncovered soil for the floor. Some cooking utensils are on a raised wooden pedestal which is lined with old copies of the Bulawayo Chronicle. The damp smell of worn-out wet shoes fills the room. A chamber pot. Melting candles and burnt-out matchsticks in a wooden tray. Egg shells.
Fumbatha has been inventive in making secure their shelter. He has wedged a crumpled old cloth within the cracks where the walls meet and leave gaps of daylight. The cloth blocks some of the rays so they have to climb up the sealed partition before they can fall down into the room. By late afternoon the darkness is thick like surrender. The roof is held down by ropes of thick bending wires tied down to the walls, and by heavy red bricks laid down like anchors above the roof. The walls creak in the wind and lean further sideways as though empty of belief. They remain standing, propped up by nothing more than the volatile will of the inhabitants. The walls dare not descend to the ground.
Together Fumbatha and Phephelaphi have placed pictures on the walls, mostly torn from old magazines. So inside their room they have carefully selected some pictures to making their living valid, pasted on the wall in this darkness with no possibility of vision. A newly formed football team stands beside a goal post sponsored by the Matabeleland Entertainment Society. A black and white ball held carefully under the foot. A group of girls in short skirts and Afro wigs and identical red-rimmed sunglasses stare at the camera, each with the same wry smile and same knowing gaze and absolutely no doubt in their eyes, just tight tops and sparkling silver necklaces dangling a message of stunned wonder into the hidden crevices of their blouses. The painting of a ship with a figure leaping into the ocean with bound hands. Underneath a caption says 'A Sower'. Living here said something about harvest, about the journey one travelled before time yielded its promise, about sowing seeds in water.
A few houses now have solid stoves made of iron, and the owners can cook their meal inside. The stoves have ovens where, after they have made a fire on its other side, the smell of baking bread wafts into the room. Usually, from one sheltering room to the next nestles a fire. It blazes smoke which accumulates over each wall, a thick and sooty soft paste which you can wipe off the asbestos with a finger.
Fumbatha and Phephelaphi find sudden joy on an evening when they walk down Sidojiwe E2, their hands joined together, and respond to the singing on the other side of the road where the people are gathered because as each of them went past, they heard a song clear the night of all its troubles and set the heart free, then they felt welcomed and offered their own voices too. Fumbatha and Phephelaphi are among them, glad to be part of something unplanned, something free like night.
They too gather in these small rooms which have no light at all, and sing past midnight about how deep the river is, how slow the movement of the hand that holds you back before you fall, how peaceful the places they have come from, and parting is fine if that is all that is left of loving because there is all this living to be done, some other loving more true to store, some stove top love not to be ignored at all but nurtured, a brief pardon over some future harm not yet known so why not grieve now and get it over with, strangers to whisper mercies to in the grey street light, a crushed black hat tipped against the noon day sun, train whistles rising high into the sky, the long handle of a pot held down with long loose sleeve, the cooking fires where the women hover and laughter tumbles in unlit passages, bicycle wheels roll past the neglected ditches in which broken needles fall from rusted sewing machines, and abandoned razors lie above cracked full length mirrors.
Broken scissors with plastic handles, nothing to do with these except insert two fingers into the handles and press the thumb down to test the hinge, its creak and rusty sound, below that sliding of metal upon metal is a hint of something larger; a train stops and steam rises like a calm cloud. Abandoned scissors with two broken ends and where are these tips, and when did they break and how. Somehow, this is too much to remember.
As the music soars, for Fumbatha, memory has dropped way down below the waistline like a tide, collapsed, and only the steam whistles rise up into the sky freer than birds. He holds tight to Phephelaphi knitting both their hands, as the people sing and their voices mingle with distant as well as instant needs now recalled, now forgotten. They sing of beautiful mountains encased in a bright vibrant mist, hills with sharp peaks whose tops only doves have witnessed and memory touched, hills with cobwebs pulling for miles and miles and glinting with rainbows from morning suns, noonday suns, moon night suns and finally, the whispered voices of butterflies. He holds her securely.
Butterfly valleys tapering gently into a wilderness of bloom where everything lingers, grows, and is watered with dew, where a swarm of leaves toss tender veins against the wind and a chorus of birds sinks into the horizon of a disappearing sun. Magnificent blue wings like an azure morning, flapping away and away. Time is inaudible.
Fumbatha and Phephelaphi long for an innocence they can touch; feet move smoothly over the ground as they follow the movements of a guitar at the back of the room and a wailing rending flute which sways way beyond memory and proud love. They dance with a joy that is free, that has no other urgency but the sheer truth of living, the-not-being-here of this here-place. They know their desire to be true. Fumbatha and Phephelaphi dance together in perfect harmony, they swing sideways and up and let all their hurt expand then watch in whispers as the men clap palm against palm against naked thigh.
The room explodes. Fumbatha and Phephelaphi stand back against the walls.
Two agile female dancers pull their white cotton skirts with blue dots high up and hold them way over their swinging waists then collide with the music, rounded hips twisting, the body rocks with one full spasm and the neck a pillar smoothed with the bright light, their eyes close in a free caress, an evocation, their slim bodies rock back and forth, and waiting lips tremble with the desire for unborn moments, and the music is a dream too true to enter so they enter it, enter with hope, with twirling raised skirts and sizzling armpits, their heels turned outward, spinning, pushing back and front in quick dizzying steps and they leap up and land with the thudding full weight of their bodies, the sound of it louder than the music which bends their knees forward and their chests down in a crawl, the neck held high, the body up then slowly down, the calves bend, the ground is too near, the harmony too beautiful, the ground too inviting so the song pulls the body up again and swings it sideways because the song swells a fine pitch where all is deep water, plain and clear, the shoulder leaning forward toward the partner in the dance, one woman and another, the left shoulder touching, yet another, and the chain grows round the room. Shoulder to shoulder.
One room. The number of people large to bursting. To Phephelaphi the roof higher and higher. The ground bottomless. She endures the long pause in which temples beat and each step is reconsidered and adjusted to meet a falling star. Suddenly a tune breaks and the skirt falls down, tosses a multitude of blue dots outward. The arms free to clap or click or just be. Arms hang down low pulsing to the ground and only the fingers make a sound. The song ends in laughter and joyful rest, dancers slide to some corner of the room. The women beckon and sing lilting body songs which splice the air with a coarse and comforting spasm and place their hands on their foreheads where the sun has been beating all afternoon like a drum. Longing for the decency of night and the foregiveness of stars, their lips repeat tunes from the guitar, its string snapping, its rhythm true.
Fumbatha and Phephelaphi move outside the room and from there they listen on as song tears off song from a worn-out handmade guitar. One broken string.
Already, they miss yesterday like a newly discovered ache.
