The Death of Rex Nhongo by C.B. George

Author:C.B. George
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-07-12T04:00:00+00:00

35

Gilbert 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.

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