Holding space
Someone I met in Africa, who reminded me age is gift
Zodwa’s in a love bubble. I can see it through the sparkle in her rich brown eyes, hear it in her voice, an undercurrent of bubbles that add lightness to even the darkest comment, feel it when she walks past, as if her heart is so engorged with delight it beats hard enough to fill space around her. This is probably all in my imagination. Images I pull from wisps of nothing to explain, what is obvious if not tangible, Zodwa is in a love bubble.
Her sixteen-year-old son is learning to cook, sharing the daily task with Zodwa’s sixteen year old sister, who lives with them so she can attend a local school. Because Zodwa works; and often forgets to eat; her 16-year-old son learnt how to cook and look after the house. Zodwa has no intention of cooking for anyone ever again. Unless it’s about survival.
Zodwa works at a local steak house, positioned on the town’s tree-lined main road. Jacaranda and poinciana throw shade and colour against heat-sinks of concrete footpaths. There is a small bougainvillea in the steak restaurant’s garden. Giving a touch of privacy to the people on the tables standing on small concrete pads on the well-watered green lawn under the stars and café lights. A stoep holds another row of tables, each just big enough for two people, two plates and two slender wine glasses – I was sitting on the one at the far right when I met Zodwa. The restaurant proper sits behind the stoep, I never went into it but can guess at its white painted walls hung with a mix of water and oil paintings of the surrounding mountains and vineyards. Much like every other restaurant in town. This is a street where the ‘us and them’ of the country is pretending not to exist, but very badly, like a dog with it’s head behind a curtain and it’s thirty kilo body sticking like a black and red beacon into the room. Thinks it’s invisible and shows surprise when you give it a scratch.
Zodwa lives a forty-minute cramped bus ride away from this street in a house that is neat and clean, and the natural colour of the concrete, tin and timber used to build it. Like the concrete in down it is bleached by the sun and darkened by rain streaks. She has a fence of tangled old wire to keep the leopards out at night.
When Zodwa is in town, working days and nights, Zodwa’s sixteen-year-old sister and sometimes her son look, after Zodwa’s four-year-old daughter. Zodwa loved the father of her two children once but realised two years after their little girl was born, that they’d had the child to save a love that had already moved somewhere else.
Her new love wants to marry her, but Zodwa is no longer nineteen and easily swept away by the wave of hormonal bliss that comes in the first stages of love. She has done that before. Now, she has a life, children and family, and a sense of self that comes with the experiences of time. She is quite OK with her and her new partner loving each other as they are, together and apart. “Besides,” she tells me, “He says he’s ok with me not becoming a traditional wife, not cooking for him; but there’s something behind his words.” Zodwa knows he thinks his words are true, but she also knows he is a man of his country and expectations change when things are permanent. Zodwa, at thirty-six, knows there is impermanence in love. That promises are made that echo what we want to be rather than what we are. She also knows how rare love is and that this one she has, is worth holding onto. Zodwa is enjoying her love bubble.