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The Bridegroom 3
The lilt of various kinds of small music began and died in the
dark; threads of notes, blown and plucked, that disappeared
under the voices. Presently a huge man whose thick black
body had strained apart every seam in his ragged pants and
shirt loped silently into the light and dropped just within it,
not too near the fire. His feet, intimately crossed, were cracked
and weathered like driftwood. He held to his mouth a one-stringed instrument shaped like a lyre, made out of a half-moon of bent wood with a ribbon of dried palm leaf tied from
tip to tip. His big lips rested gently on the strip and while he
blew, his one hand, by controlling the vibration of the palm
leaf, made of his breath a small, faint, perfect music. It was
caught by the very limits of the capacity of the human ear; it
was almost out of range. The first music men ever heard, when
they began to stand upright among the rushes at the river,
might have been like it. When it died away it was difficult to
notice at what point it really had gone.
'Play that other one,' said the young man, in Tswana. Only
the smoke from his pipe moved.
The pink-palmed hands settled down round the instrument. The thick, tender lips were wet once. The faint disolate
voice spoke again, so lonely a music that it came to the player
and listener as if they heard it inside themselves. This time the
player took a short stick in his other hand and, while he blew,
scratched it back and forth inside the curve of the lyre, where
the notches cut there produced a dry, shaking, slithering
sound, like the far-off movement of dancers' feet. There were
two or three figures with more substance than the shadows,
where the firelight merged with the darkness. They came and
squatted. One of them had half a paraffin tin, with a wooden
neck and other attachments of gut and wire. When the lyre-
player paused, lowering his piece of stick and leaf slowly, in
ebb, from his mouth, and wiping his lips on the back of his
hand, the other began to play. It was a thrumming, repetitive,
banjo tune. The young man's boot patted the sand in time to it
and he took it up with hand-claps once or twice. A thin,
yellowish man in an old hat pushed his way to the front past
sarcastic remarks and twittings and sat on his haunches with a
little clay bowl between his feet. Over its mouth there was a
keyboard of metal tongues. After some exchange, he played it and the others sang low and nasally, bringing a few more
strollers to the fire. The music came to an end, pleasantly, and
started up again, like a breath drawn. In one of the intervals
the young man said, 'Let's have a look at that contraption of
yours, isn't it a new one?' and the man to whom he signaled did not understand
what was being said to him but handed over his paraffin-tin
mandolin with pride and also with amusement at his own handiwork.
The young man turned it over, twanged it once, grinning
and shaking his head. Two bits of string and an old jam tin and
they'll make a whole band, man. He'd heard them playing
some crazy-looking things. The circle of faces watched him
with pleasure; they laughed and lazily remarked to each other;
it was a funny-looking thing, all right, but it worked. The
owner took it back and played it, clowning a little. The audience laughed and joked appreciatively; they were sitting close
in to the fire now, painted by it. 'Next week' the young man
raised his voice gaily -- 'next week when I come back, I bring
radio with me, plenty real music. All the big white bands play
over it. ..' Someone who had once worked in Johannesburg
said, 'Satchmo', and the others took it up, understanding that
this was the word for what the white man was going to bring
from town. Satchmo. Satch-mo. They tried it out, politely.
'Music, just like at a big white dance in town. Next week.' A
friendly, appreciative silence fell, with them all resting back in
the warmth of the fire and looking at him indulgently. A
strange thing happened to him. He felt hot, over first his neck,
then his ears and his face. It didn't matter, of course; by next
week they would have forgotten. They wouldn't expect it. He
shut down his mind on a picture of them, hanging round the
caravan to listen, and him coming out on the steps to tell
them...
He thought for a moment that he would give them the rest of
the bottle of brandy. Hell, no, man, it was mad. If they got the
taste for the stuff, they'd be pinching it all the time. He'd give Piet some sugar and yeast and things from the stores, for them
to make beer tomorrow when he was gone. He put his hands
deep in his pockets and stretched out to the fire with his head
sunk on his chest. The lyre-player picked up his flimsy piece of
wood again, and slowly what the young man was feeling inside himself seemed to find a voice; up into the night beyond
the fire, it went, uncoiling from his breast and bringing ease.
As if it had been made audible out of infinity and could be
returned to infinity at any point, the lonely voice of the lyre
went on and on. Nobody spoke, the barriers of tongues fell
with silence. The whole dirty tide of worry and planning had
gone out of the young man. The small, high moon, outshone
by a spiky spread of cold stars, repeated the shape of the lyre.
He sat for he was not aware how long, just as he had for so
many other nights, with the stars at his head and the fire at his
feet.
But at last the music stopped and time began again. There
was tonight; there was tomorrow, when he was going to drive
to Francistown. He stood up; the company fragmented. The
lyre-player blew his nose into his fingers. Dusty feet took their
accustomed weight. They went off to their tents and he went
off to his. Faint plangencies followed them. The young man gave a loud, ugly,
animal yawn, the sort of unashamed personal noise a man can make when he lives alone. He walked
very slowly across the sand; it was dark but he knew the way
more surely than with his eyes. 'Piet! Hey!' be bawled as he
reached his tent. 'You get up early tomorrow, eh? And I don't
want to hear the lorry won't start. You get it going and then
you call me. D'you hear?'
He was lighting the oil lamp that Piet had left ready on the
chest and as it came up softly it brought the whole interior of
the tent with it: the chest, the bed, the clock, and the coy
smiling face of the seventeen-year-old girl. He sat down on the
bed, sliding his palms through the silky fur of the kaross. He
drew a breath and held it for a moment, looking round
purposefully. And then he picked up the photograph, folded
the cardboard support back flat to the frame, and put it in the
chest with all his other things, ready for the journey.
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