HUMOUR
Ndumiso Ngcobo channels Greta Garbo: “I vant to be alone“
Hi. My name is Ndumiso and I am a hopeless and committed geek. (Fellow members of Nerds Anonymous say, “Hi Ndumiso” in unison.) What a lot of similarly disposed people understand is that one of the best friends of geekiness is solitude. One needs to spend a lot of time alone if one is going to know that the poison dart frog is one of the 427 species of frogs in the Amazon rainforest. You don’t get to know that sort of useless information by spending time with people.
The reason I’m sharing this titbit of pointless information is because I spent the first part of this week aimlessly wandering the Clarens area in the Free State. I went to the missus and said, “Look, I need some time off this whole working, husbanding and parenting thing for a week.” She has known me for long enough to see the signs when my tolerance for being around other human beings is wearing thin. So she said yes. But not before subjecting me to a weekend with her almost pathologically chatty cousins at a wine estate in Stellenbosch.
And this is how it came to be that I found myself turning onto the 87km stretch of the R712 from Harrismith towards Clarens. It is easily one of the most tranquil and picturesque stretches of road in South Africa. The deeper I drove into the Free State belly, the more alone I felt. I started playing a game called Spot Another Human
Soul. They were few and far between.
All was now very well with my own soul. Driving in that wilderness with only the sounds of Quincy Jones’s Secret Garden for company, I quietly thanked my ancestors for the gift of solitude.
You would be surprised at just how many people with my affinity for peace and quiet cannot afford to get away from the seas of humanity around them. I have been one of those people in the past. And I have learnt to spot them all around me. It’s that woman by the window seat of a minibus taxi with headphones plugged into her ears, staring into space at the corner of Jan Smuts and 7th in Parktown North. Half the time, the phone that the headphones are plugged in to is actually dead. But the headphones are a coded message: “Please do not talk to me”.
Sometimes it is that Uber driver into whose car you hop while in the throes of a virulent attack of verbal diarrhoea — the default condition of folks like myself who are phenotypically extroverted. We do it because we have been socialised into being adept at conversation to hide the fact that we don’t like talking to people. Within 30 seconds I saw the driver shift uncomfortably in his seat, so I stopped myself mid-sentence and asked, “You’d much rather we just drive in peace and quiet, wouldn’t you?” He glanced at me in the mirror, chuckled sheepishly and sighed, “Yes please. I really would.” It was one of the most serene and enjoyable Uber rides of my life.
When I was in boarding school in Vryheid, my dorm neighbour for the duration of my stay was one Mdu Ngcobo, the human being with the most fervent commitment to solitude I have ever encountered. And that is saying a lot, because my youngest brother, Nkalipho, is one of the most extreme hermits I know. I don’t think I’ve heard him say more than 200 words in any 365-day cycle of the past 20 years.
I didn’t realise how bad it was until my 13-year-old, Vumezitha, who was trying to tell me something about his uncle when he was about six years old, referred to him as “the other man in the house”. Let me tell you something, that is one happy native.
Anyway, back to Mdu Ngcobo. Because of his passionate dedication to speech avoidance, Mdu had become a skilled participant in a sport I call Wall Tennis. He would put on white tennis shorts, T-shirt, socks and tennis shoes, grab a container of tennis balls and his racquet and go play two competitive sets against a roughcast wall.
One day my other dorm neighbour, Mzinyane, and I are quietly watching this brilliant display when he says in a deeply philosophical voice, “You know, one day Mdu will feel the need to talk to someone. Oh, how I wish to be there when he starts talking. I bet his family will finally tell him to shut up after 12 days: ‘OK Mdu, that’s enough for now. We’ll continue with your stories from 1984 tomorrow. Hold that thought.’ ”
Tomorrow I’m going back to the hustle and bustle of work. I look forward to walking into that space where I’ll have to talk to at least 20 people before I even take a seat. Not. But I’m glad I’ve reminded myself of Mdu. From now on I’m playing a lot of mental Wall Tennis when I’m overwhelmed by humanity. ● L S.
Driving in that wilderness with only Quincy Jones’s Secret Garden for company, I quietly thanked my ancestors for the gift of solitude