Taxi poets are admired, sliding-door men rule, professors and politicians strut and fret and connive in a society shaped by violence and ambition, love, and the unsettling power of the imagination.
MONDAY
“PROBLEM #1: THERE WAS A CAT, Marmalade, who was out of his mind. Plus, Solly Greenfields, the only friend I could bear, had been shot dead in his railway cottage near Woodstock Main Road. If you told me I was in for the most complicated week of my life, then I couldn’t contradict you on that. But I might try.
When I went to Solly’s funeral Monday, I thought nobody had a solid reason to do him in. He was an old man, which meant his adversaries were also getting on. The taxi companies had never forgiven him for starting the Road Safety Council. Yet that was years ago. I hadn’t heard about any new enemies. Solly would have been proud to mention them. He had been quiet recently, content with the trouble he earned over a lifetime as a great taxi poet. I was among the first of Solly’s interns, by the way, and maybe not the one who displeased him the most, and maybe that was the closest either of us came to a proper relationship.
Who would kill Solly? There were no obvious suspects. Two bullets had been found in the wall in the corridor of the house. They had to be dug out of the old plaster. The other bullets were in the victim, who was discovered in his dressing gown, lying on the couch with the scuffed purple buttons, which stood in the corner of the lounge. The bathtub was slopping full of cold water, and the needle of the record player was caught on a Dollar Brand album.
The tub would be full. It was the temple of Solly’s domestic existence, surrounded by the red and green hotel soaps left over from a rare period of formal employment. He got into the bath when visitors were around, especially his interns. He was so heavy that you expected the porcelain tub to rock back and forth on its iron feet. But that didn’t prevent him from removing his clothes at the drop of a hat. For a fat old man, he wasn’t ashamed to be naked and, in fact, he was finicky about the condition of his skin, from his freckled neck to his feet.
Solly’s neck got thinner and stronger and redder as he got older until it was the most vigorous thing about him. The crime rate meant you had to be tough to live in that area—Woodstock, Salt River, Observatory, and the warehouses interspersed with concrete blocks of flats between the railway line and the harbour. There was no waiting for the car from the security company to arrive. You had to be prepared for self-defence. When somebody crossed onto Solly’s property in the Woodstock way, on the way to somewhere else or just to check if there was anything on the premises worth taking, Solly pushed the offender out of the gate, flexing his neck like a dilapidated bull. He didn’t fear to get knifed. Right to the end there was this fearless quality which crackled out of him, like electricity, and which he provoked in his interns in the field of taxi poetry.
“For Solly, taxi poetry was a way of life. There was a code which he subscribed to. It was the only type of honour which made sense to me.”
In his seventies, Solly was crammed with projects, and thoughts, and burning pleasures, and hatreds which burned just as high, right to the top of his brown old head. He planned to expand the Road Safety Council, which had become little more than Solly himself, some students and the pamphlets they printed on their famous silk-screen machine borrowed from a government school during a teachers’ strike never to be returned. He also wanted to set out his objections to the whole existence of the Perreira Institute and its claim to produce taxi poets as if they were sausages. He had discussed a potential memoir on the inception of taxi poetry, judging his own contribution, Geromian’s, and the good old cause of the revolution which had never begun and would never therefore be concluded. He even said something about falling in love, but I wasn’t even sure there was someone.
For Solly, taxi poetry was a way of life. There was a code which he subscribed to. It was the only type of honour which made sense to me. I couldn’t imagine who would put three, or five, bullets into such an honourable man.
It was a point of honour for me, on Solly’s behalf, to take Marmalade, who had been discovered on the top shelf in the ironing cupboard after the body had been removed from the house. He had one scrappy orange ear, and an untorn white one which he sheared away from presenting to you.
Solly never composed a taxi poem without one or both of his hands on Marmalade and the bad ear which he reluctantly allowed you to touch. The cat wasn’t in good shape. His belly dragged on the carpet as he moved suspiciously around my flat. He shed his orange hair in vast quantities and hunted invisible insects. This Marmalade was out of his mind but I had a good understanding of how he saw things.
I happen to be a taxi poet—a former taxi poet according to some—in a city run by Croatian disco men from Zagreb and Malay gangsters from Pinelands, by publicity girls wearing long earrings, by dollar millionaires with business connections to the ruling Congress Party, by old Trotskyites and Bukharinites, and by cabinet ministers and dictators from elsewhere who reside along the Atlantic seaboard or on the wine estates inland.
Solly Greenfields—who had once been a taxi poet, and then a Buddhist, once a Muslim, once a Jew, once a lowly cook in a grease-sprayed apron in the room-service kitchen of the Mount Nelson, on other occasions a guest in the very same hotel—wasn’t the first to go. If he happened to be the last then it was only because the world was about to end.
Was there a pattern? I wasn’t sure. There wasn’t necessarily a plan to bump off taxi poets. In Cape Town nobody had a plan. We made arrangements one day at a time because the day after tomorrow was impossible to predict. It wasn’t certain there would be such a day.
So what can I tell you? So there happened to be a lot of lead flying around. So there happened to be a lot of taxi poets in the way.”
Extracted from The Institute for Taxi Poetry, out now.
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