Dreaming of Light. Jayne Bauling
“Sell direct to the buyers,” Mahlori says. “Regional buyers. They take the gold to Jozi and resell to the national guys. Selling direct, we’re our own men, not working for anyone. That’s the only difference from now. We get our own foreign fools, use them for the dangerous work.”
Mostly I don’t think anything about what they’re saying, but this time I have the thought that their dreaming talk is not so very different from Taiba Nhaca’s. Maybe men as well as boys need to believe that there will be a change, that their lives will get better. They’re fools, and I’m a fool to be thinking about them, letting myself be interested.
They’ve stopped talking because Faceman is coming. He gets angry when he hears such talk. He’s the syndicate’s main man underground, but he’s not underground all the time. A lot of the South Africans get to go up.
They’re on top another way too. They tell everyone what to do. Then men like Mahlori and Takunda assign the most dangerous work, in the really bad places, to the foreigners. They’re mostly Mozambican. When they first come, they don’t know anything much about the way it goes, so they only discover it’s the most dangerous work when they’re doing it, except when they don’t live long enough to learn that.
Next the work gets divided up again. Moreira and Juvenal and the other foreign men send us boy zama zamas into the worst places. Me and the recruits. Papa Mavuso says to go along with it, and that one day it will be us sending new recruits.
If we’re still alive.
Everyone is careful around Faceman. We stop talking when he comes among us and try to work harder, keeping our heads bent, not looking at him, everyone hoping his attention won’t fall on them.
Everyone except Taiba Nhaca.
“That one, he is not afraid of anything,” he says, breaking into English so I know he’s talking to me or else to some of the other recruits, the ones from Swaziland or the Zimbabwean boy.
Or maybe he doesn’t want his friend Aires to understand.
“At least you understand that,” I say, quick and low but rough with it. “Shut your mouth! Do you want another beating?”
“I tell you, Regile.” It’s as if Taiba doesn’t hear me. “He beat up that big man Takunda. Same way he beat us.”
“What’s the matter with you?” I’m fierce with him.
I don’t say any more, though. If he wants to bring trouble on himself, he can. I’m not sharing it with him.
“That old man, that Papa Mavuso? He know how Faceman and the other big men beat his boys? How they say no eating, no sleeping because we don’t dig enough? Last shift, Faceman, he beat us, me and Aires, and he take the water I have to drink –”
Taiba must be crazy talking and talking like this. Faceman is already here, standing over us.
I don’t know why they call him Faceman. We can never see his face properly. The lamp he wears shining from his forehead is bigger and brighter than any of ours. It puts his face, and especially the eyes, in shadow. If I make the mistake of looking up at him, all I see is the wet shine of his bottom lip, maybe a gleam from his teeth if he’s talking. Not smiling. Never smiling. Sometimes there’s a flicker of something where the eyes are, and then you know you’ve looked too long.
I keep my head down. Keep working at the rock. The muscles in my shoulders and back are on fire, but that fire is nothing next to the heat pressing in on us from all around. It’s the earth’s inner heat, too hot for humans. We shouldn’t be here.
Words are still coming out of Taiba, like it’s an illness he has suddenly got.
I send him a sideways look. I don’t know why. I don’t care about him. It could be that I want to see if the madness shows or if he still looks the same.
Not the same as before we came down here. That shining roundness of his face has no business in this place of boiling shadow that is only ever lit with the fever-glow of our lamps or the lighting the men sometimes rig up in the main tunnels.
Taiba’s mine-face is now the same as all the others: hollowed out and hungry.
He still smiles, though. I don’t understand that. I think his brain must be damaged or something.
I can’t see if he’s smiling now, because he’s looking at Faceman.
The thing I do see is that Taiba hasn’t been working close to Aires like he usually is.
That’s when I understand what he’s trying to do. He doesn’t want Faceman’s attention to fall on Aires, because if he sees how badly Aires is working, Faceman will give him another beating for sure. It won’t matter that the reason Aires can’t work properly now is because of the savage way he beat up both boys last shift. Aires is smaller than all the other boys anyway. I don’t think Aires will be coming underground a second time. He’ll stay down here this time unless someone troubles to take his corpse up.
I suppose Taiba might try.
I’ll always be one of the foreign fools, so I’ll never rise to have Faceman’s power, but if I survive long enough I could be like Moreira and Juvenal. Then I’ll remember that a bad beating will only make a slow worker even slower. I don’t understand why Faceman doesn’t get that.
As it is, I didn’t expect Aires to last this long. He wouldn’t have, if Taiba wasn’t helping him. I think it is about three months now that we’ve been down here, but it’s hard to be sure with no real day or night, just our shifts and rest times, every one the same as the one before. I heard one of the local men say it’s about four weeks since the shoot-out.
It must be nearly time to go up. One time, when I was in the other mine, Papa Mavuso didn’t have us brought out for six months, but usually we’re inside the earth for three or four.
It could happen that Taiba Nhaca is the first corpse we get from this time underground.
Something in my chest gives a big jump. Taiba isn’t even pretending to work, and he’s still talking. Talking directly to Faceman. No one does that.
“You want to beat me?” He is challenging him. “That Papa Mavuso –”
Faceman makes a sound that’s like roaring, and he’s charging at Taiba now, the way an angry kraal dog will go for another that’s come sniffing around its territory.
I have a moment of wanting to be deaf and blind, wanting the dense darkness of our rest times, which I mostly hate, so I don’t have to see.
“Mavuso! Don’t speak to me about that stupid old man. Useless foreign boys he send us.”
I have to look, even if I don’t want to. Faceman has grabbed Taiba with one hand, and the other is a fist, pumping like a machine, driving into Taiba faster than the angry words. If he wasn’t holding Taiba up to hit him, the kid would have fallen after the first punch.
“Spike Maphosa, he is going to come, make you to stop, you Faceman.” Taiba is panting, and grunting with every blow, so that he can hardly get the words out, but still he keeps on with his talking, true crazy talk now. “Spike Maphosa, he is saving the boys in this mine, and all the other boys –”
“I’ll cut your tongue out of your dirty foreign mouth. Inja!”
Faceman is blown up with the worst rage I’ve ever seen in him, banging Taiba back against the rock wall he was supposed to be working, and back again, and I think I’m going to see a person killed in front of my eyes. They say Faceman killed Januario in the other mine, but I was sent down a different tunnel that day so I didn’t see it.
“Spike . . .” It’s a thread of whistling sound from Taiba now, because he must be nearly unconscious.
“No person! No person!” Faceman is screaming, and I can hear he’s wanting to fall into siSwati except that he wants Taiba to understand. “Inja! No Spike. Thula!”
I