The Teacher

That night Theodore dreamed he was in Tandika. He had again met up
with the teacher, and was reacquainting himself with all his old
haunts. He then went to sit under a palm tree, where he watched the
deep green ocean water. There he fell asleep. When he woke, aroused
however gently by an indistinct noise, a soft spray, like rain, was
pelting him. But when he opened his eyes there were specks of blood on
the sand around him, and about his person and clothing.
When eventually he woke Bandwela was spooned against him, and he could
hear the mortar fire. This was the second night running he had heard
it. He listened with his eyes wide open in the dark room, hearing the
mortar fire against the soft purr of Bandwela's sleep.
And he thought about Tandika, and how in a few weeks he would be
there, and how all this would be behind him. Apart from his remaining
obligations to Bandwela, and the Continent, what separated him from the
one ambition he had ever had, was now a visa and a border
crossing.
Ten years, and now that close. And those ten years in between; a whole
life had been lived. It had seen him muddle through a marriage, fail as
a would-be academic, and by his own estimation, at just about
everything else that should have mattered to him, but didn't. The only
thing that made sense, even if slowly, inexorably, and unknowingly, he
had always been etching towards it from the day he left, was to return
to Tandika. His intentions now, unlike it was then, was no more than to
poke his toe in the water, so to speak, and to get on with whatever
kind of life he could now have. The whole thing had been a burdensome
promise he had made to himself, after all, the kind of promise he
imagined that only God could whisper back to you, the kind of promise
that makes you feel guility at the very thought of not keeping it. ,
and a little angry too for having made it in the first place. Not to
follow it through would be like lying to your mother, or worse, to
yourself.
But that, now, was no longer a question: and with his return now down
to a matter of days and weeks, if there were many things in life about
which he was as uncertain now than he was then, and nothing afterwards
would be more uncertain than the future, of one thing he was certain:
those ten years, if nothing else, had purged him of the fear of
failure. And yet it was a fear that had never really phased him until
all those years ago, when on that terrace over-looking the Tandika
Harbor, he met the Teacher.
He had never met a gadfly before, but he reckoned that's what the
teacher was.
Having come into an inheritance with the death of his mother, The
Teacher had packed up everything, namely a suitcase of cloths, the
precious books, and said goodbye to New Orleans, Louisiana, and
everything The Man had anything to do with, forever. He brought himself
to Tandika.
But the books that led him there, and from which he freely quoted with
near biblical reverence for the assumed truth they contained, he had
come to late in life. Such a man, no doubt, would always be
disappointed by the reality that could not be found on the printed
page, however truthful or inspiring it might appear. Hence, his
recourse as a gayfly, but one whose understanding of the African
revolution grew out of a 60's deluge of books that were dated well
before the ink was dry.
All he had to say people had heard many times over, after all, and
because they no longer listened, quite frequently his discourses
degenerated into ranting and raving.
This he took with a pinch of salt. After all, was it not in the nature
of a gadfly to be consumed with passion, a passion felt all the more
fervently by the assumed truth that lay behind it?
And beside, the teacher, with him, kept his passions more or less in
check.
Others spoke of the follies in which he had become involved since
arriving in Tandika, and of how his plans seemed always to have a large
element of folly written into them.
His inheritance money was quickly squandered away through ineptitude,
it was said, his final venture before succumbing to his calling as a
gadfly, was to buy a boat to ferry tourist and commuters across the
harbour. But not only could he not pilot a boat, and having sunk every
penny into buying it, nor now could he afford to hire someone to pilot
it for him. But worse, there was never a call for such a service as The
Teacher had planned. For the better part of a year, the boat had not
moved from it's moorings, and only the supreme optimist believed that
it ever would.
But if The Teacher's financial failings were his own business, though
well known, his great success, which he made everyone's business, was
that he had brought himself, as an old man, to Tandika, and hence into
the African future.
His own ideas then, such as the were, were untested, but The Teacher
at a glance appeared to be the very embodiment of them, for he seemed
to have lived the odyssey that he himself was driven to, his wife's
tears notwithstanding.
The Teacher, too, had married at an early age, and had grown to accept
that it was a mistake; for years he had spent time undoing it. He had
likewise embarked on an academic career, at least of sorts, but midway
through his course he found, as he himself was then discovering, it was
not at all to his liking.
It was then that Teacher embarked on what he saw as his real
education, just as Tandika was to be the beginning of his.
And he learned that much the same as he himself was thinking, his
education, before he found the books on the African revolution, had
come from simply bumming around in the life of hard knocks. He had done
just about everything, before finally, thanks to his inheritance, he
had come into his destiny, which was to live out the remainder of his
days in Tandika.
Scarcely two days passed before their paths crossed, and more often
than not, it was the Teacher who would turn up at whatever part of town
he might find himself, and they would drink beer and sometimes eat
together. He looked forward to these meetings, for they had become a
regular part of his routine. But one day the teacher said something
that was quite unsettling. At first it was not, but soon became so.
Caught up in the heat of argument, instead of addressing him by name,
The Teacher addressed him as Panky.
It was an obvious slip of the tongue, he thought at the time, and
thinking that the teacher was probably associating him with someone
from his own youth, he did not much mind. In fact, he was quite
flattered. But when again the teacher used the name in conversation,
though not addressing him directly, he found that it was not as he
thought. The name did not belong to anyone from his youth. It was a
nickname his mother had given to him. The teacher was in the process of
naming him after himself.

It was then that his attitude towards the teacher changed. Where once
he could see little differences in the things they believed, though
many in the way they lived them, now he lauded the differences he could
find between them. All he had had to do was look and listen. Where the
teacher's arguments grew flat, he now took pride in his ability to
resurrect them and bring them to conclusions the teacher never
considered. In subtle ways he began to say this for some time, that the
teacher, in spite of his sincerity, didn't know very much, and he knew
he was lobbing balls at the teacher from left field in that he was
never above board in what he was saying. It was a relief when at last
The Teacher called him on it.
"Before you start changing your spots, Panky, make sure you're a
leopard."
What did it mean, he asked. Was there some profound message in what he
was saying?
The teacher gave him the crossed-eyed impassioned look of true
boredom, and disappointment, a look that came over him when his words
and meaning, obvious to him, naturally, were not entirely
understood.
"What does it mean?" he mimicked him. Certainly he knew as well as he
did.
"It means I can see what you're doing, that's what. I'm reading you
like book, Panky."
He asked then why did he call him Panky. Was it, he wondered, because
he reminded him of himself at an earlier age?
"Not a bit, said the teacher, ""not "'just"' when I was a young man.
You remind me of myself as I was as a young man, and as I am now, as an
old man. You can't get cigarette paper between us. Thetas how much you
remind me myself."
One day it occurred to him that he hadn't seen The Teacher in several
days, and then he learned that the old man was in the hospital. He had
suffered a severe asthma attack. He went to see him, but as he was in
no condition to talk, he did not stay very long. He left thinking about
his arc, and suddenly how far he was from finding it. But more
profoundly, believing the Teacher was more seriously ill than he was,
he thought what a sad thing it would be to die in a foreign
country.
He was making plans for a second visit when to his surprise he learned
the Teacher was now back at home, and he made inquiries as to where he
might live.
It was in a part of town with which he was only passingly familiar.
The hotels here were more rundown than those on the main streets. Only
once or twice had he come here in an attempt to escape his fellow
countrymen, those whose conversation, unlike The Teacher's, often made
him feel as though he had never left home, or created in him a kind of
nostalgia for things he was not ready to remember.
The door to the Teacher's room, which was two flights up, was open and
he entered without knocking. The old man lay on the bed with his mouth
open, as he still couldn't breathe properly, and it seemed to him that
he was in no better condition than when he had visited him in hospital.
The old man moved his hand a little, in a kind of feeble wave, when
asked about his health. Now he could barely talk, and perhaps he wanted
to sleep, and it was clear that he was suffering terribly from the
heat.
Yet it was not the old man's illness alone that he found unbearable,
and more than a little unsettling. It was the contents of the room, it
cavernous emptiness, and the fact that the whole of the old man's life
should surround him there, the whole of it, apart that precious handful
of books, contained in a few bulging boxes.
Before he had never imagined him in any setting, apart from the hotel
terraces where they met. There he was part of the scenery. He was a
likeable old character who had done what he himself was setting out to
do. He had seen it as admirable that the teacher could exist "out
there" in the world in the way he was. But now he saw it as so much
nonsense, romantic nonsense. Of all the things he had talked about, of
all the places he had seen, a life by his own admission that was one of
wandering and learning, a life spent coming to an understanding of the
world and his place in it, in search, in essence, of his own personal
arc, it had brought him to this terminus, the result: this room, dingy
and smelling of illness and perhaps death, its creature comforts, a bed
and a chair, piled high with dirty washing. He would die with his life
still packed in the boxes, the well-thumbed books that were history,
even as they were written, piled on the floor.
Had he asked the old man whether or not he had succeeded in life, he
was in no doubt what his answer would have been, even though such a
question he could never have asked. But deep down he was sure the old
man had no doubt that he had in some way failed, that in fact the
destination at which he had arrived was not the triumph he wanted to
believe it was, but a haphazard beaching he had come to in old age,
steered there the same as he had been, by a hand full of books from the
canon of Garvey and pan African socialism.
Until then nothing had seemed more important to him than discovering
his arc, that thing whereby he could know with some certainly, that his
life had come into a sense of meaning and purpose.
But the Teacher's life said it was not necessarily so, and that
failure was as much on the cards as success. And maybe it was no more
than a toss of the dice as to what number would turn up.
So he realized for the first time that he was afraid of something, for
he saw now how the Teacher's life had run, and as he walked back to his
hotel, it was not the teacher he saw whose life was spent in search of
something he never found, and nor was it the Teacher he saw lying alone
in a crummy hotel room, where ultimately he "'would"' die. Instead, he
saw himself. And suddenly pitted against his wife's dreams for the two
of them, he wondered how much his arc was worth. And what if, like the
teacher, he never found it? What then would there be to say for his
life? It was enough to make him believe, whether he could comprehend
them or not, that he could do worse than to live through his wife's
dreams -- dreams that said, in contradiction to his arc, that you must
not reach out for things you can not name or justify -- not like a
child, or a mortgage, a dog or a stationwagon. And when he was all but
poised to acquire those thing that were justifiable, , beginning with
that first tepid nod towards the suburbs, he sought its counterbalance
in the lure of the streets as a side life, and in women whose future
was not invested in his or any ambition he dared to speak of.
Before he knew it, the streets had become life and a habit, a call of
the wild to a beast in him that had tasted blood. And when it was most
expected that at last he was tamed, said yes, he would do better, for
the tears were beginning to make her ill, it was then that his arc
reared it's head. And he understood at last the riddle The Teacher had
posed to him about leopards and spots.
Maybe if his favorite bar hadn't closed down, he would have had a few
beers and called it quits for the night. He might even have returned
home in time to do more work of the lame duck called his thesis.
Instead, Richard Goodwill, a friend with whom he occasionally drank,
but hardly knew, said he knew a bar at the opposite end of the same
street. But here the street turned into sex shops and peep shows, the
sidewalk crowded over with creepy encounters and hawk-eyed looking
people. Richard Goodwill was someone he didn't know here; he seemed
suddenly to have become an octopus, it's gangling tentacles pawing into
the girth of the street's underbelly. Words aimed at a woman outside a
club, who may or may not have been there for the purpose he assumed,
had barely reached her when he caught the man's aspect in the flashing
lightbulbs that rimmed the doorway, and the gleam of the pistol that
seemed to precede him.
He imagined some prank in the making, the gleam of the pistol
notwithstanding, and looked to see who or what might be the object of
his attention, when to his amazement it turned out to be Richard. He
flashed some sort of ID, poked the pistol into Richard's side, and
ushered him around the corner into a darkened doorway.
He followed urgently, still not completely comprehending. But now he
found himself riding a peculiar wave. Seeing the pistol pushed to
Richard's throat, the pocket knife, which he had never before used for
a purpose more serious than peeling an apple, and which he carried
around for no more discernible purpose than that it was a carry-over
from his more reckless days as a teenager, and had since become his own
version of a rabbit's foot, came crazily into his hand. And no less
crazily did he flick it open. He felt his heart beat then like a
ticking bomb, and it seemed that the whole of him was concentrated on
the tip end of the pocket-knife, and all that held him back was the
shot that never came. It was all in a day's work. Perhaps he had never
perceived the menace that hovered behind him as he ordered them from
the street.
There was nothing then but a moment that seemed to happen on the dark
side of the moon. What loomed larger than life, larger than anything,
was the blood he was going to shed because of the idiotic situation in
which he had found himself.
He drove Richard home and never saw him again. Its one saving grace,
as he thought of it now, was to free him from the responsibility for
his wife's tears, and of any hope of embracing the substance of any
kind of dream that was not his.
In another city and yet another, and yet another, he went in search of
a life he could live, believing then that the arc was formed out of a
reckless moment that had ended in near murder.
And then it happened. When the country had become one long runway
along the southeastern seaboard that stretched finally to Manhattan,
the ditteria of his life lay before him. There, like the component
parts of a machine, it simply dismantled and fell apart. No wonder that
in the end Tandika should have loomed so large, and seemed so
necessary. But now that he was this close to being there, when compared
to other ambitions he might have had, it struck him, as far as
ambitions go, how very thin it was, and what thin dividends it was
actually going to yield. After all, what more had it been than an
accumulation of miles and places before, finally, Tandika lay at the
end of the line? It was as if . . . Well, he didn't know what it
was.
He listened to the mortar fire, and to Bandwela's sleeping, and tried
not to think anymore.