The
Caruso of Colleen Bawn
and
Other Short Writings
John Eppel
’amaBooks
ISBN 978-0-7974-9377-3
© John Eppel, 2004
Published by ’amaBooks
P.O. Box AC1066, Ascot, Bulawayo
email: [email protected]
Cover painting by Anne Simone Hutton
This book is a work of fiction: any characters, organisations and situations mentioned bear no relation to any real person, organisation or actual happening.
White Man Walking was previously published in Short Writings from Bulawayo; Rain in Winter in Short Writings from Bulawayo and Carapace; Potsherds. 1975 in Four Voices; Loveliest of Girls, The Fannied Man, The Victim and Coming Home to Tea in Scrutiny II. On First Dipping into Keats’s Sonnets appeared as After Reading Keats in Four Voices. Versions of Who Really Built Great Zimbabwe? and Hallowe’en appeared in Scrutiny II and Four Voices respectively.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Contents
The Very High Ranking Soldier’s Wife
‘No Entry Below Dam Wall’
White Man Walking
Black Woman Bleeding
In The Stilly Night
The Workshop
Juvenilia: The Lily and the Rose
The Toad and the Tadpoles
A Full Stomach
With Sore Knees
Profile of a School Teacher
An Umpire’s Day-Dream in Collapsing Form
Profile of a Civil Servant
Plaster Crawl
The Weight Loser
Garden-Consciousness
Notes for a Free - Verse Poem on Doves
The Case of the Red Ball Point Pen
Pod Mahogany
Rose
Who Really Built Great Zimbabwe?
Potsherds. 1975
Dullstroom
Tmesis
Taking the Waters
Hallowe’en
The Fannied Man
Triangles
On First Dipping into Keats’s Sonnets
The Victim
Coming Home to Tea
To be, or not to be:
that is the question.
To be, and not to be: that is the answer.
John Eppel was born in Lydenburg, South Africa, in 1947 and moved to Colleen Bawn in Zimbabwe at the age of four. He now lives in Bulawayo, where he writes and teaches English. He was awarded the Ingrid Jonker Prize for his first poetry book, Spoils of War, and the M-Net Prize for his first novel, D G G Berry’s The Great North Road.
Spoils of War, Carrefour (1989)
D G G Berry’s The Great North Road, Carrefour/Hippogriff (1989)
Hatchings, Carrefour (1993), ’amaBooks (2008)
The Giraffe Man, Quellerie (1994)
Sonata for Matabeleland, Snailpress/Baobab Books (1995)
Selected Poems 1965-1995, Childline (2001)
The Curse of the Ripe Tomato, ’amaBooks (2001)
The Holy Innocents, ’amaBooks (2002)
Songs My Country Taught Me, Weaver Press (2005)
White Man Crawling, ’amaBooks (2007)
Absent, The English Teacher, Weaver Press (2009)
Together (with Julius Chingono),’amaBooks (2011)
Hearing all this talk of the Three Tenors put me in mind of a barrelchested fitter and turner who answered to the curious name of Sigford Bong. We children called him Uncle Siggie, but he was known throughout the South-Western districts as ‘The Caruso of Colleen Bawn’.
We children spent much of our school holidays around the swimming pool up at the club: the boys on their tummies so as to conceal erections; the girls self-conscious in their revealing swim-suits, or ‘cossies’ as we called them. When he was on night duty, which was every other week, Uncle Siggie would join us at the pool and regale us with stories of the adult world: how Kudu White had killed an Aberdeen Angus bull (called Wellington) by punching it on the nose; how Mrs Van Dwap would have won the 1947 Matabeleland Ballroom Dancing championship if she had been wearing panties - the judges lost concentration every time her frock billowed - how so and so (name given) had been caught ‘doing it’ in the compound! Sex across the colour bar was seen by the white community of Colleen Bawn as a crime worse than serial killing. But his favourite topic of conversation was Caruso...
“Robinson Caruso?”
“No, you idiot, Enrico: the greatest tenor in recording history.”
We were much more interested in Pat Boone and Jim Reeves but, like all solipsists, Sigford Bong was highly sensitive, so we humoured him, and listened for the umpteenth time to his no doubt apocryphal anecdotes about Caruso. He had a chest expansion of seventeen inches; he could hit a D-flat in full voice; he could hold a note for so long that crystal chandeliers would tinkle, and, once, his voice shattered a wine glass.
“Uncle Siggie, tell us how Crusoe died?”
“Caruso, not Crusoe! I’ve told you already.”
“Please tell it again? Rosie hasn’t heard it.”
The emulous fitter and turner, with forced reluctance, his voice dropping almost to a whisper, would recall that fateful night when Caruso, in the middle of a glorious and unexpected obbligato, which set up a tingling sensation in the bones of the