The Naturals
told at birth what he was not made for, he spent a life proving it true.
On the third day of his life Mbeki was told what he was for, and the second thing they told him was what he was not for, and it was the second thing that lasted.
The Office of Aptitudes sent its reader to every house, as it had since before anyone could remember a time it had not, and the reader sat with the new child a quiet hour, and read the grain of it — the way a man who knows wood reads a plank, finding which way it will split clean and which way it will only tear. This was not thought of as a prophecy. A prophecy guesses at the future; the reading merely stated the present, the fixed fact of a person, the same way one states a person's weight or the colour of their eyes. No one doubted it because no one had ever found it wrong, and no one had ever found it wrong because, though no one said this, no one ever tested it.
Mbeki's reading, set down in the long hand of the Office on the cream card that would follow him all his days, named several aptitudes of the useful, ordinary kind — figures, husbandry, the keeping of accounts — and then, in the lower portion of the card, under the heading the families always read first and last, it named the Unaptitudes. There was only one that mattered to him, though he would not know it mattered for years. It read: No aptitude for music.
His mother kept the card in the drawer with the certificates that rested on nothing, and took it out when he was old enough to be told, and told him, plainly, without cruelty, the way you tell a child the stove is hot so that he will not have to learn it by burning. You have no ear, she said. It is not a fault. Everyone is made for some things and not others. You are made for figures. And Mbeki, who was four, and who loved already the sound the rain made on the tin and the way the old man two doors down drew a slow ache out of a single string, took this in the way a child takes everything an adult says in a calm voice: as the shape of the world.
He proved it true his whole life, and he proved it the only way the thing could be proved, which was by never once trying.
This was so quiet a process that he never caught himself at it. When the other children were given the small reed pipes at the school, the master, consulting his own copy of the readings, set Mbeki instead to ruling lines in the ledger of attendance, because there was no sense wasting a pipe on a boy with no ear, and a use should be found for every pair of hands. Mbeki ruled the lines. He ruled them well. He did not think I am being kept from the pipe; he thought I am the one who rules the lines, and there was a small pride in it, the pride of the boy who is given the grown task while the others play, and the pride sealed the door more surely than any lock.
When, at the festivals, the singing went round the long tables and reached him, he passed it on. He did not open his mouth. To open his mouth would have been to test the card, and one does not test a fact; one does not stand on the scales hoping to weigh something other than one's weight. The person beside him sang, and Mbeki listened, and felt the thing the singing did in his chest, the lift and the ache of it, and understood this feeling as the special grief of the man shut out — the man who can hear the country he may not enter, who loves the music precisely because he is made to stand outside it. He thought this grief was the proof of his love. He never suspected it was the proof of his confinement. The two wore the same face.
Once, only once, he tried. He was perhaps nine, alone in the house, and the old man's string had been in him all morning, and he took down the small lute his uncle had left and that no one played, and he set his fingers where he had watched fingers go, and he drew out a sound. It was a poor sound. It was the sound of any nine-year-old's first hour with a string, which is to say it was a beginning, the ordinary ugly seed of every fine thing anyone has ever played. But Mbeki did not hear a beginning. He heard, through the card in the drawer, through the calm voice of his mother, through the master and the unwasted pipe, no aptitude, and the poor sound was not the poor sound of a first try but the confirmation of a verdict, the burn that proved the stove hot, and he put the lute back on its nail with the particular care of a man returning a thing to a shelf he has decided never to reach for again. He felt no bitterness. He felt the calm of a question settled. He had tested the fact, in the one weak moment of a life, and the fact had held, and there was a relief in it, the relief of not having to wonder.
He did not touch a string again for fifty years.
He kept accounts. He was good with figures, as the card had said, and he never asked whether he was good with figures because the card was right or right because he had spent on figures all the hours another life would have spent on the string. The loop did not show itself as a loop. It showed itself as a life, an ordinary good-enough life, a man made for some things and not others, settled rightly into the things he was made for, the card proven true on every page of every ledger and every silent festival, the verdict and the not-trying turning each other so smoothly and so long that no daylight ever got between them.
The card said no aptitude for music. The card was never wrong. That it was never wrong because he obeyed it, and that his obeying it was the whole of its never being wrong — this was a single closed thing, a ring with no end and no beginning, the verdict causing the silence and the silence confirming the verdict, and a man may live entirely inside such a ring and call it, with no sense of irony, simply knowing himself.
He was past sixty when the grandchild came to stay, the daughter's girl, four years old, the age he had been when he was told. There had been, in the girl's house, some falling-out with the Office over a delayed reading, so that the child arrived uncatalogued, ungraded, not yet told what she was for or what she was not — and she did the thing the uncatalogued do, which is everything, indiscriminately, with no card to tell her where the doors were.
She found the lute on its nail.
She could not reach it; he had to take it down for her, and he did, meaning to let her hold it a moment and then put it back, and she did not hold it a moment. She set it across her small lap the wrong way and pulled the strings with her whole fist and made a sound far worse than the sound he had made at nine, an ugly clamouring graceless sound, and she laughed at it, and did it again, worse, and laughed again, and did not stop. She had no card. No one had told her she had no ear. And so she did not hear, in her own poor noise, any verdict at all — she heard only a thing she was doing that she had not been able to do a minute ago, and then a thing she could do slightly less badly, and then, by the third afternoon, a small deliberate plucking that was going, unmistakably, somewhere.
Mbeki watched her cross in a week the threshold he had stood frozen at for fifty years, and he understood, all at once and without anger, that the threshold had never been a threshold. It had been a sentence, read to him in a calm voice on the third day of his life, and believed, and the believing had been the only wall. There had been no missing gift. He saw it whole now, the ring entire — that the card had not read the grain of him but cut it, that the no aptitude had not described a man with no music in him but made one, by the single sufficient means of telling him so before he was old enough to doubt; that the block had never been the absent thing but the present belief in its absence, the one weight that had kept him off the scales for sixty years.
He did not weep, and he was not bitter, because bitterness needs someone to blame and he could find no one — not his mother, who had told him the stove was hot to spare him, not the master, who had not wasted a pipe, not the Office, which had only stated, in good faith, a fact it then quietly arranged to be true. There was only the loop, seen at last from outside it, and the strange flat peace of seeing a thing clearly that one has been inside of all one's life.
He took the lute from the child's lap, and she protested, and he showed her — for he found, to his small astonishment, that fifty years of listening from the outside had taught his ear a great deal that his hands had never been let try — where the slow ache lived on the long string, the one the old man two doors down had drawn out when Mbeki was four. His fingers were stiff and stupid and the sound he made was poor. It was the poor sound of a first hour, sixty years late. He did not mistake it this time for a verdict.
And when the girl's own reading came, weeks on, and the reader sat the quiet hour and made ready to set down on the cream card the fixed fact of what she was for and what she was not, Mbeki sat in with them, which was not usual, and said nothing while it was done, and then, after the reader had gone and the card was in the drawer with the certificates that rested on nothing, he took the child onto his knee and told her the one thing he had, the only thing the whole long ring had finally taught him worth passing on — not that she had an aptitude, for he could not know that and would not lie, and not that the card was wrong, for it might be right; but only, quietly, the way you tell a child a thing you want to outlast you, that she should believe nothing it said about what she could not do, that no one had ever read the bottom of her and no card ever could, and that the only thing in the whole world with the power to make her unable was her own belief that she was, which she must put down, now, while she was young, while there was still all the rest of a life to find out in, and keep down, and never once, not even in the one weak hour, mistake for the truth.