My Only Story. Deon Wiggett
to dislodge memories, like an earthquake exposing a chest long buried on the ocean floor.
Sigmund Freud says the brain is an iceberg: the part that sticks above the water, the only part we see, is our conscious mind. Even though this is inconsistent with my own imagery of oceanic chests, I will allow Freud his useful metaphor; we both agree that something hidden can come to the surface. If you prefer Freud’s metaphor to mine, you are welcome to use that instead – we are all about free will here.
On the ocean floor, the chest’s lid starts to lift. First, my brain calls up every single memory I have of my dad, insisting I update his status to ‘dead’.
For instance: it is 1984, I am four, and Dadda tells me to follow him into our suburban garden. He makes me stand on a rock, he gets down on his haunches, and he says: ‘You’re four now, you’re a big boy, it’s time I teach you how to whistle.’
I try to take in his lesson. Purse your lips just so; put your tongue somewhere; exhale determinedly, or something. I try, and then I try harder, but no sound comes out. I am embarrassed, because I am disappointing Dadda, but after a while, he hugs me and says: ‘Don’t worry about it; we’ll try again another day.’ And then he never suggests it ever again; I realise, now, because he saw I was embarrassed.
It is decades later, and I still cannot whistle. And the man who tried to teach me is dead, and the memory re-filed under ‘Things I did with dead people’.
But memories are chain reactions. One thought leads to another – it is like you cannot remember one thing without remembering something else first. For instance: now I am thinking about a family holiday in my last year of high school. We are in the Kruger National Park. Foreigners would say we are on safari; South Africans would say we have come to the bush.
It is 1997 and we are in a very small camp called Punda Maria, way up north, where the baobabs are. On the afternoon now stuck in my mind, it is blazing hot. There are twenty or so people in the camp and, like my parents, they all seem to be napping. Not me. I am on the phone.
This is not my phone; it is a pay phone. It is the only telephone for miles around – cellphones are pretty new to South Africa, and even if you have one, there is no reception in the bush yet. Beyond the fence is savannah with lions and leopards and horrible adders. This one phone line is the camp’s only way to communicate with the outside world.
I am talking to someone. We talk for a long, long time.
Dadda is awake when I get back to our unit.
‘Where have you been?’ he asks, and he looks irritated – well, that is what I thought back then, now I think he looked concerned.
I cannot remember what I said to Dadda – exactly who I told him I was talking to on the phone – but it was a lie and he could tell. He was upset and I was a sulky teenager, and we proceeded to have a big fight.
Why is my brain serving up this memory? And who was I talking to on the phone?
Of course, now that I think about it, obviously I know who I was talking to. I have always known.
3
Willem has not crossed my mind in two decades, but now the memories of him bullet thick from the ocean floor. A few weeks after the death of Dadda – the late, great Mannie Wiggett – I am suddenly forced to think of a man who could not be more different from him.
It is time I introduced you to Willem Breytenbach, who is one of the men this story is about. Before I knew him, Willem was a teacher. An excellent teacher, most of his students will tell you.
‘If none of this had happened, and this was an interview about my school days, he is one of the teachers that really stood out,’ Anton Visser tells me. We are at the back of Table Mountain in a windy suburban park.
Willem was Anton’s debating coach at the famous Grey College, and was a teacher unlike anyone Grey had seen before.
Anton, who now directs TV ads, tells me about an afternoon in 1990, when Mr Breytenbach ran the debating society. Outside, it is conservative Bloemfontein in apartheid South Africa. Just a few weeks ago in Parliament, President F.W. de Klerk announced the unbanning of the African National Congress, signalling the dying days of white minority rule.
But in Bloem, nothing has changed yet. The whites-only boys of the debating society are sitting in Mr Breytenbach’s classroom. He is a teacher so creative, so unconventional, that you just never know what will happen.
For debate, Mr Breytenbach shows the boys something they were never supposed to read: the Freedom Charter, which states that ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it’ – including, appallingly, the nine-tenths of South Africans who are not white. But Mr Breytenbach is not done! He has also brought the lyrics to ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, the banned hymn that will become the national anthem. These are grave things to be discussing in Bloem.
‘At the time, as a white kid you were cut off from that kind of stuff, so we knew it was quite daring [of him],’ says Anton. ‘In a school where most of the teachers were cut from the same cloth, he brought a totally different energy to things. He was a big influence on a lot of people.’
Another ex-pupil, Victor Yazbek, talks to me about happy afternoons laying out the school newspaper with Mr Breytenbach, the teacher in charge. Home computers were still new, and Mr Breytenbach had started preaching the possibilities of tech.
Then Victor, who seems a bit prim, tells me a story about teenage hormones. In his year, some Afrikaans classes were split between Mr Breytenbach and one Mrs Hattingh. ‘Lots of boys wanted to be in Mrs Hattingh’s class for …’ he says, and then tries awkwardly to convey her chesty magnificence. ‘So the guys [in my class] were quite bummed when we got him.
‘I liked him, though. I was quite an academic student and I enjoyed the challenge of a really good teacher. He was funny, kind and jovial. Always happy and smiling.’
But for all the magic that he brought, there was something Willem could never shake: he is a deeply unattractive person. More than anything, I have always thought he looks like a bullfrog. He is a large, flabby man; he sweats by the gallon; and when he sits, he plonks.
And then there is the problem spit.
Due to an overactive gland, perhaps, Willem produces more saliva than he can swallow. A steady streamlet is always damming up in the corners of his mouth. When he speaks loudly, which is often, the volume of his speech propels the spit forward, and drops of it land on faces and on keyboards and in hair.
To an old friend, Willem might say: ‘Morné, it’s so good to see you!’ But this will dislodge some of the spit, and as Willem moves in for a big old bear hug, Morné’s neck may experience a localised spurt.
Combined with the sweating, it creates the impression of a man overfull of liquid. Like there is no way for Willem’s bulky mass to contain all the fluids it produces.
By the time my memory returns, Willem lives in the picture-pretty Cape Town neighbourhood of Three Anchor Bay. On the left-hand side is Devil’s Peak and Table Mountain; on the right, the Atlantic Ocean.
It is the nestled district where Willem shares a house with Danie van Rooyen, his life partner. They bought the property together in 2010 and have done it up nicely. The years since Willem left teaching have been good to him.
I do not know it yet, but it was an unfortunate affair that saw this natural-born teacher cast out of education. It was the same problem as always: Willem does what he does.
I know what he does, because I suddenly remember it all.
On a warm spring afternoon in Stellenbosch and a cool autumn morning in Minnesota, Dr Anna Salter talks to me on Skype. She is drinking coffee while an enormous black cat balances everywhere around her, demanding relentless petting.
I am at Nella’s house and we have been drinking white wine since lunchtime. My interview with Anna, who is seventy-three and an indefatigable expert on men like Willem, has crept up on me. I now