It was so hot that if you saw someone walking along
the road in the blazing sun as you whizzed past in your air-conditioned
vehicle, you would shake your head and think he must be crazy. There’s not much
shade when you head south out of Citrusdal. Parched fields stretch away on
either side to low mountains. The Olifants River is somewhere over on the
right, a thin smudge of grey-green alien vegetation in the distance.
That morning, the crazy guy walking along the road was
me. I headed into a warm wind, my eyes on the ground. A good opportunity to do
walking meditation, I told myself. Be mindful of each foot as it rises and
falls on the gravel verge. Be in the moment.
Try as one might to concentrate, one’s mind wanders.
A double-cab Toyota Hilux hurtled past. I knew what I’d be thinking if I was
that driver. “Look, another down-and-out white man trudging along a road in the
middle of nowhere. Doesn’t even have a backpack to his name. Probably an
ex-con.”
I see these losers often, and try not to catch their
eyes. When I am driving, and I see one hitching, I’m reluctant to stop; I don’t
want their misfortune to rub off on me. There’s an instinctive calculation: a
white man in South Africa; grew up in the apartheid years when all the odds
were stacked in his favour; yet he still managed to fuck up and end up here,
homeless. He’s either a hopeless alcoholic or demented, or both. I don’t want
to listen to his story.
The story is always the same, with a few minor
variations. I spent the night in Vredendal or Piketberg or Moorreesburg or
Trawal or wherever, and they robbed me. Took everything. All my money gone. Ag,
can’t you help me out with five rand, man?
It’s different with coloureds or blacks of course,
because we expect our poor and downtrodden to be black or coloured. If I see a
coloured hitchhiker or a black hitchhiker it looks normal and I feel something
that borders on compassion and stop without hesitation.
When I saw a coloured man walking towards me on the
road outside Citrusdal, I thought nothing of it. Coloured farmworkers have to
walk or hitch wherever they want to go; very, very few have cars.
Minutes before I saw him, I had decided that walking
for an hour in this heat was enough. I
had walked perhaps three kilometers, and passed two farms separated by long
distances of featureless road and harsh, empty landscape. I drank deeply from
my bottle of water and headed back towards Citrusdal.
After a few minutes I heard footsteps behind me; the
coloured farmworker must have caught up with me. He was obviously walking
faster than I was, so I expected we would exchange a brief greeting and he
would pass me by and continue on his way.
But it turned out he wanted company. “Meneer, hello
meneer,” he said to get my attention. I didn’t really want to strike up a
conversation. I was enjoying the solitude. I grunted an acknowledgement and
walked on, looking off into the distance.
He fell in beside me. He was more a youth than a
man, about 19 or 20 perhaps, with a floppy hat and scratched aviator-style
sunglasses that could have been very old Ray Bans. He had scuffed black leather
shoes with pointy toes. He was slightly built, and his eyes were about level
with my shoulders.
He launched into conversation. I couldn’t understand
all of what he said, because it was in colloquial Afrikaans and spoken very
fast. I sometimes couldn’t tell the difference between a statement and a
question.
He was going into Citrusdal with a bag of empty
bottles to get the money from the deposit. He lived further up the valley with
his grandmother. Nobody would give him a lift. Where did meneer live.
“Clanwilliam,” I said.
Was meneer a farmer there?
“No,” I said.
Did meneer run a guest house?
“No.”
Then I thought to myself, I can either continue to ignore
this guy all the way back to Citrusdal and be really irritated the whole time, or
I can be kind and friendly and perhaps find something enjoyable in his
companionship. So I elaborated. “I work in an office, with computers. I came to
Citrusdal today because my bakkie needed a service and I had to take it to the
dealer here. There’s no Chevy dealer in Clanwilliam.”
He said he was thirsty so I gave him my half-empty
bottle of water and told him to finish it.
“My name is Gerhardus,” he said.
I didn’t tell him mine.
He spoke some more in rapid-fire Afrikaans then
asked me if I had friends in Citrusdal.
“No, I don’t know anyone there,” I said. “That’s why
I decided to go for a walk while I was waiting for them to finish working on my
bakkie.”
“What’s your name?” he asked.
I told him.
“Meneer has nice hair,” he said. “Nice and straight
and fine.” He stretched to touch it.
I felt uneasy – I didn’t know where his hand had
been, and strangers don’t touch strangers’ hair at their first casual meeting.
But I thought that living on a farm in the middle of nowhere, Gerhardus might
not have been familiar with white middle-class etiquette.
Then his hand moved to the back of my neck and began
massaging it.
I stopped in my tracks and backed away.
“You go on walking,” I told him. “I’m stopping here
for a while.”
He walked on a few paces without saying anything,
and I turned and began walking back the way we had just come, trying to put
some distance between us.
After about 40 metres I glanced over my shoulder to
see how far he had gone. Not very far at all. He was squatting on the grass
verge, as if he had been seized by a
sudden need to defecate. I continued walking away from him, my sense of
irritation fully restored.
Footsteps from behind. “Meneer, meneer.”
I turned to him. He was no longer wearing his hat or
sunglasses.
“I’ll say this once,” I told him. “Fuck off and
leave me alone.”
I turned on my heel and strode off, still heading
away from town.
Gerhardus had no intention of fucking off and
leaving me alone. He stood in the middle of the road screaming at me: I had
insulted his mother, I had stolen his money, and lots more that I could not
understand.
I ignored him and carried on walking, more quickly.
Pebbles began dropping on the road. He was throwing stones at me. I became
slightly alarmed. He was still yelling incoherently, following me at a
distance. There was a collection of fruit-packing buildings near the road about
50 metres further. I would be safe there.
Stones kept hitting the dirt near me, small but
thrown with anger. Gerhardus’s sudden rage could only be explained by tik. When
I thought he was crouching by the side of the road to defecate, he must have
been smoking a pipe.
I felt a blow on the back of my right thigh, and a
dull pain. He had hit me with a rock the size of my fist, hard. I stopped and
turned to face him. He was less than 30
paces away, shouting in fury. I thought about throwing the rock back at him, or
going up to him and kicking him in the groin. It was as if the heat had warped
space and time; what was I doing here on a deserted road, being pursued by an
aggressive, deluded drug addict?
I turned and carried on walking, hoping I would
reach the buildings before physical confrontation became unavoidable. A group of coloured men were engaged in some
kind of construction project outside the packing sheds and saw what was
happening. Three of them walked towards the fence, calling to Gerhardus to come
and talk to them.
He thought better of it. He stopped yelling and
throwing rocks and headed back towards Citrusdal.
Thanks, I told the men.
Now I was stuck; I wasn’t about to start walking
back to Citrusdal in case Gerhardus was lying in wait for me somewhere along
the road. So I stood by the road with my thumb out. The first car driven by a
white farmer will stop, I thought. It didn’t. Where’s your racial solidarity, I
muttered as it disappeared in the distance. The second car didn’t stop, nor the third.
I was that aging white man by the side of the road
who must be an alcoholic or ex-con or both.
Seven vehicles raced past before one stopped. “My
bakkie’s in the garage in Citrusdal for a service,” I told the driver,
compelled to explain what I was doing hitchhiking like a poor-white loser. “I
live in Clanwilliam but there’s no Chevy dealer there so I have to bring it
here.”
I didn’t want him to think I didn’t have a vehicle
or a job. I had just gone for a walk to kill time, then had been forced by a
chance meeting with a deranged drug addict into the strange and embarrassing
position of begging for help from passing motorists.
I was rambling, like one of those hitchhikers who
don’t know when to shut up. The driver listened politely, but he didn’t seem
that interested.
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