Cinema Verité

There were a lot more white people than expected at the film night Keketso had been organising for a year. He had curated the night’s films so that they would draw in Basotho, like himself, and even though no film from Lesotho had been shown that night, he’d went to great lengths to show short films not only from South Africa, but from other countries on the continent as well, in other languages and dialects like Twi, Hausa, and Setswana. Jerome, who had run the film night before Keketso, had just been promoted, leaving the post of Cultural Officer open. The Alliance Franҫaise of Maseru had told Keketso that times were changing anyway, that it would be good to have a Mosotho as the ‘cultural liason’ between the Francophone world and Lesotho, so he had taken Jerome’s place. In the last couple of weeks, Keketso had learned that his situation with Jerome was at best, fleeting, and it would be sensible for both of them not to sink their teeth into it too tightly. It was enough to imagine them both clinging to a life raft to weather the tides of loneliness in their lives, but soon, the rush that had hurtled them forward the previous autumn would reach its end, and they would go their separate ways. They had slept with each other four times, and only once met for lunch in the city in what had constituted as a date. Keketso had been happy to live off  scraps of him; even with the promotion, Jerome would not be in Lesotho for long. The promotion was just the first in the many steps expats like Jerome would go through before they left the country for good. It didn’t matter how far up they progressed in their career ladders, the restlessness that had brought them to Lesotho would grip them once again, and they would go to some other corner of the earth chasing after the rustic glamour their compact European cities could never afford them. Keketso, like a dancer out of rhythm, would always feel a step behind, bound to the floor by the immobility of his own life.

 It would be foolish of Keketso to want more than tousled bed sheets on a Sunday morning, flashes of skin between the covers that if it were not for skin colour, wouldn’t be distinguishable as to which limb belonged to whom, Jerome whispering You like how I fuck you? in Keketso’s ear, Jerome throwing his head back in the pillow when it was Keketso’s turn to enter him. And yet, when they returned to the office, it was not the sex that Keketso would think of, but their lunch hour when they would sit at the café adjoining the Alliance Franҫaise, watching Maseru swell like a bull-frog around them, taxis hooting in street, the wind stealing needles from the trees and showering them to the ground in a dizzying rain.

That evening though, he had avoided Jerome, and instead, hung around his colleague, Mme Seliba, who he left from time to time as she sat in the dim glow of the film from the projector—to have a smoke outside. He knew that his superiors would be happy with the night regardless of what he thought of it. Not that he had disappointed himself exactly, but what was the point of showing Jean-Pierre Bekolo or Beverly Ditsie films, if it didn’t, in his view, cause the shift he had intended to cause, not only in the small bubble of the Alliance, but in Lesotho as a whole?  In one film, a mother instructed her daughter over the phone on how to knead traditional Setswana bread, which later turned to life lesson about, love, sex, and child-birth. In another, a son travelled to his father’s homeland in order to bury him, only to find the family land overrun with mining companies. He had hoped, foolishly, that he would be one of those ‘inside men’ who could cause ripples from the enclaves of a much larger system. Although there wasn’t any film culture to speak of in Lesotho, he had gone on radio, written press releases, and even invited people he personally knew on Facebook to attend the first of its kind ‘Noir Film Night’ at the Alliance Franҫaise. He had thought himself clever to coin the term ‘noir film’ as a play on the genre, film noir, but also, as a subtle suggestion that he was starting a black, artistic renaissance of sorts. 

None of that had happened, so Keketso had taken resolve for himself, then, not to engage in any of the films too deeply. How different it had been just a while ago when he was drawing up a list of the films, the feeling that he had won something! The night would pass by just like any other, and he would have to be okay with that. Seeing Jerome would just be a reminder of the disappointment, as if it was only him who could tease it out of his chest and leave it exposed to the night like some gnarled root. Though there was a short documentary he had been excited to show called ‘La Voyageuse’, about a teenager’s journey to terminate a pregnancy in war-torn DRC, he quickly forgot the excitement the film left him with upon watching it with other people, when he stepped outside. Amidst the people there, he saw the top of Jerome’s reddish hair bobbing in the crowd. When their eyes met, Jerome approached him. Keketso tried to figure out if this man was really someone he could allow himself to be agitated about. Someone to wait in empty restaurants for. Someone to wrap his entire hopes around.

“You’ve been avoiding me” Jerome said.   He didn’t know how to reply to this, so he remained silent.

“There’s someone I want to introduce you to” Jerome said. Curling his hand around Keketso’s, he led him to a corner of the café where a man in black clothing stood. In the darkness, Keketso could see the golden glint of his earrings and the duller shine of the many rings on his fingers.

“This is Ranko” Jerome said. The man stretched out his hand to Keketso and greeted him in Sesotho. “He’s a filmmaker” Jerome added, “So you guys should have a lot to talk about”. At first, Keketso felt uncomfortable carrying forth a conversation with him near Jerome in Sesotho, who wouldn’t be able to understand them, but he noticed Jerome ‘people watching’, his attention already coolly drifting away from the conversation to the people gathered in the courtyard.

“U popile—You’re moving up” Ranko said, lifting his glass of wine to his lips. Through the glass, Keketso noticed a flicker of a smile. Keketso didn’t know whether Ranko was commending him on the ‘success’ of the film night, or commending him for being with Jerome, a white man. It was the smirk; it undercut whatever innocence Ranko’s words might have had and replaced them with the condescending chumminess Basotho always exchanged between each other when they were around foreigners. Yet, there was something appealing in Ranko’s perception that he and Jerome were an item. Even under the weak light of the outdoor lamps, Keketso could see that Ranko was a beautiful man, a face with strong and angular features as if he was accustomed to hard labour like mining or cattle herding. He could have been an actor out of an American Western.

“Ho tla joang hore ha ke so utloe ka uena?—How come I haven’t heard about you?” Keketso said.

Ranko touched Jerome’s shoulder and said in his ear, “Your friend seems to doubt that I am the filmmaker you said I am”

Immediately, Jerome snapped back into the conversation, “Ranko? No, this is a genius you’re talking with. He made a film called Mookho’s Cairn. Winning big awards at festivals”

“Set in Lesotho?”

“Set in Lesotho” Jerome said, “In France we have this cinematic tradition called cinema verité—anyway, why am I speaking for him? Show him”

“I always like my work to speak for itself” Ranko said.

“Cinema Verité?” Keketso said, “I’ve never heard of it. But I’m sure if I did we would have had it in the programme”

“No, my film is called Mookho’s Cairn” Ranko said, “Cinema Verité is just the style that I used to shoot it. We shot it last year in Sehlabeng. Harrowing story”

It was Ranko’s scent that held Keketso’s attention first, as they huddled together to watch a video on Ranko’s phone. Camphor cream, an earthy smell that reminded Keketso not of the men he had had as lovers, but of his father. It was the smell his father came home with in the Christmas holidays from the mines in South Africa where he used to work. Keketso couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing; in a darkened hut, a woman shuffled about, placing a pot of water on a steel stove, shuffling to the other end of the room where she grabbed a straw broom and started sweeping dust off the mud floor. As she passed the screen, Keketso could see that her face, or at least, what was left of it, was but leathery skin stretched taut against her skull, eyes shut into tiny slits, her mouth pink and small like an infant’s. In the next shot, amidst the operatic music accompanying what now Keketso knew was the trailer of the film, she stood in a circle of men and women, engulfed by flames. She was screaming, running to and from the people gathered around her, who stepped back as the ball of flames approached them, and yet still maintained the circle around her.

“I can’t watch this” Keketso said, tearing himself  away from the video.

“It’s very hard for me to watch too” Ranko said, “Even all this time later”

“It looks good though” Keketso said, “Very real”

There was a silence.

“That’s just the thing, Keke” Jerome said, “It is real. Mookho’s Cairn is a documentary. That woman you saw was accused of being a witch, and they burned her”

“Oh no” Keketso said, and in the darkness, he could see Ranko grinning slightly.

“Is she alive?” Keketso said.

“Yes” Ranko said, “Though very disfigured. It’s crazy what people can do once they decide you’re the ‘condemned one’. You know, it’s just another way of othering. The elderly face many medical challenges like what we now know is dementia, but the truth of the matter is, in the villages some people still don’t understand any of these mental conditions. They see a woman talking to herself and immediately decide she’s a witch. I always say our treatment of elderly black women is symptomatic of our failure in black liberation. True liberation should protect its elderly, but we failed that project”

“Did she know she was being filmed?” Keketso said, “For this…movie?”

“What it’s really about is how she moves on from that incident” Ranko said, “Or tries to. She ends up actually practicing witchcraft herself in order to get revenge on the people that burned her. But her daughter comes from Maseru to help her heal. The daughter is Catholic, by the way. So you can imagine, it ends up being this tug of war, thematically at least, between revenge and this idea of forgiveness ensconced in her daughter’s religion. But here’s my challenge, and so far, no one who has written about the film has grasped this, what I’m really talking about, the true heart of this, is the inherent tension between our Basotho spirituality and colonization vis a vis  European Catechism”

As Ranko talked, Keketso noticed Jerome nodding softly to his words. It appalled him; the relative calm, the banal distance that Jerome and Ranko had managed to build in the short period from seeing the trailer, to now. But then of course, this was usual for Jerome, the same unaffected cool was what allowed them to sleep together without any obligation to brand their relationship as something deeper. It was usual too, for expats to partake in the suffering of Basotho on a superficial level, for in the end, Basotho were just objects to satisfy their fetish with the black impoverished. For Jerome, this was expected, but Ranko’s apathy infuriated him.

“I don’t understand” he said, cutting Ranko short, for the conversation had forked away already, Ranko laughing at some inane observation Jerome had made about superhero films, “You  watched them burn her, and didn’t stop them, just so you can film?”

“Sweetie, I’m an artist” Ranko said, “It doesn’t do to cast judgment, or intervene in whatever the camera records. The camera is a mirror, not some phantom hand you can cast your moral indignation towards to fix society’s ailing”

“I’m not trying to tell you what to do with your camera” Keketso said,” I just think as a human, when you see other humans burning another human, it’s common decency to stop them, no?”

He looked to Jerome for support, but saw that his brow was furrowed, facing the ground. In the night, Ranko seemed like a figure out of the Sesotho folktales Keketso’s grandmother used to whisper to him in the weak glow of candlelight, a kholumolumo or tau-moholo woven and animated from the rock of a mountain by his grandmother’s voice itself. He found that as much as he was repulsed by him, he was drawn to him too, or rather, driven by something close to a furious obsession to make Ranko agree with his indignation. Of course he cared for the woman, and of course mob justice was something that occurred regularly in Lesotho, and something that upset him terribly. With each story he heard about a woman being burned or stoned after being suspected of witchcraft, he couldn’t help but picture his grandmother in that place as well. But in Ranko, he saw his father too, someone to seek approval from.

“I’m just one man” Ranko said with a shrug, “ Even if I fought every single one of those people off, I wouldn’t have been able to change their minds. Ideas are impossible to change. She was doomed from the start”

In the following days, Keketso would spend hours after work with Ranko at his apartment on the edge of town, and on weekends, the whole day. What Keketso liked most about the time they had been spending together was that they could sit in silence, he on the bed, pretending to be reading a book, but really studying Ranko carefully as if he was some wild animal that had wandered into his space, even though it was Ranko’s apartment; Ranko on his computer writing a new script, or scouring the internet for obscure photographs that would inspire his next film. Ranko liked walking around shirtless,  and on his broad back, there was a tattoo of the god Ganesh that Keketso liked to picture alive and undulating whenever they had sex, ascribing a religiosity to the picture by imagining the tattoo faced upwards when Ranko was inside of him, not sanctifying their sex exactly, but something in its intricate design appealing to Keketso’s  fascination with aesthetic histories people carried on their bodies; new haircuts, tattoos, or clothes, that gained new meaning whenever they encountered new people, for in the moment Ranko had got it done (In India, he’d told Keketso), neither of them knew that they would one day meet, and that one day Keketso would look upon that very tattoo as what he liked most about Ranko, that they would spend a night together and come the daylight, decide they didn’t want to part.

His coupling with Ranko had happened organically. After the screenings, Ranko and Jerome had stayed behind to help Keketso with the cleanup. Though there wasn’t much to do, their conversation had kept them there longer than was necessary. It wasn’t long before Keketso admitted to himself that  he found Ranko’s blasé attitude towards the burning woman somewhat appealing, it seemed to signal a general arrogance Ranko wielded against the world. This was, of course, supplanted with what had been a recurring thought that had started that night, and extended to the later endless days they would spend together; that what Keketso intuited as nonchalance in Ranko was, in fact, a lack of intrigue to the kinds of protracted emotions Keketso could sometimes find himself falling into—the anger about the woman, the anger with how badly the film night had gone, or the anger against Jerome.

Keketso had known, and loved such men, men who could hold his beating heart in their hands and made whatever passions that spilled from it seem irrelevant to the bigger issues in the world—in Ranko’s case, art.  He had talked at length about how only lesser artists would use their work as preacher’s pulpits,  undercutting the ‘purity of form’ art  inherently came with, to obscure it with the human tendency to take ‘moral stances’.

“Take yourself for example” Ranko had said, and Jerome’s eyes had glittered between them as the intrigued audience of one, “You’re a virtue signaler”

“I always find analyses like that lazy” Keketso had said, “And presumptuous. You don’t know me at all”

“I know you’re Mosotho” he said, “And I know there is a difference between my generation and yours, a gaping chasm as big as this black sky over us. And the problem with your generation is that you’re ashamed of this place, whilst simultaneously wanting to claim it. You import all these terms like ‘exploitation’ and ‘the white gaze’ , but you’re scared of formulating any original thoughts from this country.  That’s something that Mookho understands, understands it even when her daughter comes with a bible and a preacher to cast out the ‘demon of witchcraft’ in her. People like her are the real heroes. Those are the people with real virtue”

Ranko, Keketso, and Jerome had drifted to a bar outside of town, and found it gripped with the drunken hysteria that overcame rural parties in the few hours between midnight and dawn. The accordion music was loud, as were the bodies around them—unemployed men and herders who had come from the surrounding villages to the bar some time around midday, and were now drinking in a manner that heralded a violent explosion that was to come soon. By the time the women came, some of the people had spilled outdoors, and as the music grew more frenetic, a few men had the women bent over, skirts above their heads, simulating sex to the beat of the music.  It was all Ranko, Keketso, and Jerome could do to watch, already drunk themselves, their conversation, while suspended, feeling like a quilt they could comfortably share amongst each other.

It was at Ranko’s apartment where Jerome had said he had a headache, and pleaded to be excused from the night as he had other obligations the next morning. As soon as Jerome’s car started outside, Ranko walked over to where Keketso was sitting, held out his hands, and pulled Keketso up for a kiss. On the way to the bedroom, Ranko had simultaneously managed to switch off the lights and hoist Keketso up to his waist, so that Keketso wrapped his legs around him. His tongue tasted exactly like how Keketso had imagined the camphor cream to taste earlier that night, a minty, leafy taste. The taste of his father. 

On the bed, Keketso had bounced slightly when Ranko threw him down. Taking off his own clothes, he had lifted his legs and placed them on Ranko’s shoulders, allowing Ranko to first enter him with his tongue. Throughout the act, Ranko would take swigs of whiskey from a glass at the bedside table, and stick his tongue inside Keketso again with a burning sensation. Keketso both retreated from the pain, and threw his entire body into the fire at the tip of Ranko’s tongue.

When Ranko stood up again, Keketso angled his body away from him to put on lube. Ranko had walked into the bathroom, and remerged carrying a tripod and camera.

“We can’t record this” Keketso said.

His protest had come immediately, as if he had known this had been Ranko’s plan all along.

“This is more for me than it is for you” Ranko said, “It will be fun, I promise”

“I don’t care how fun it is” Keketso said, “As long as you’re recording, I’m not having sex with you”

“Okay, okay” Ranko said, putting the film gear down.

Ranko had entered him later that night, so forcefully that Keketso was out of breath for the first few minutes. But Keketso’s eyes never left the tripod and camera curled up in one corner of the room. He could tell that Ranko had sensed his withdrawal too, for he had descended into the kinds of theatrics Keketso had noticed in Jerome but had never made a comment upon—lifting up Keketso’s legs in odd angles and positions, telling Keketso how beautiful he was, and how good it felt to be inside him. He pictured the many other men and women who had agreed to film themselves having sex with Ranko. Why did Ranko think he would be okay with it too?

After they were done, Keketso sat on the edge of the bed and looked into the darkness.

“Did I offend you somehow?” Ranko said. When Keketso didn’t answer, Ranko said, “If this is about the camera, I’m sorry. I should have asked you first”

“Well, why didn’t you?”

“Would it have changed the outcome?”

Feeling cold, Keketso put his clothes on. He didn’t know if he would have gone through with the recording, had Ranko asked him first. And yet, he couldn’t tell Ranko that that the only reason he had managed to go through with their sex with any degree of arousal was by imagining a scenario where he had gone through filming. To see their bodies intertwining on camera. Ranko’s big tattoo laying a claim over Keketso’s body. Still, the betrayal that Ranko perceived him as someone who could go through with a thing like that stayed lodged in his throat.

“What do you do after you record them?” Keketso asked.

“Them?” Ranko said.

The night had deepened around them, so that even the distant cars on the road one could hear at this time sounded near. It felt like the whole world was made up of only this room with Ranko, the lamplight casting shadows across his face. This was a man with whom Keketso had known from the start he would have to negotiate his personhood around, like so many of his past lovers. He tried to figure out if later, he would hate himself for sleeping with him.

“Keke…” Ranko said, “You’re the only person I’ve felt comfortable enough around to propose this to. I mean, yes, it wasn’t really a proposition, not in that sense. It was stupid of me not to ask. It’s just that earlier….when we were having those conversations about art…about virtue, I couldn’t help but feel close to you somehow.  Like one of those people you meet and feel like you’ve always known. It was stupid of me to make these assumptions. I always get too excited, by life, beautiful boys….beauty in and of itself. It’s strange and frustrating. It’s a natural thing for me to want to record it”

Keketso couldn’t speak. He turned his body away from Ranko. Because at the end of it all, who was to say that Ranko was lying? Just hearing him speak about beauty  made Keketso hard, and it took everything in him to stop the erection. To tell himself that he didn’t find pleasure in, now, Ranko rubbing his back. In Ranko calling him a beautiful boy. In the idea of their bodies captured on camera and that tattoo as big as the world. He knew that once the daylight came, he would stay with Ranko. Stay in a way he never could with Jerome.

The next day at the café, Keketso had dreaded Jerome joining him for lunch.

Keketso happened to know that Jerome had taken a work trip to Leribe, two and half hours away from Maseru, and had counted on him still being there when their lunch hour came. They hadn’t had any contact since he’d left Ranko’s apartment that weekend, and didn’t know how much, if at all, Ranko had told him. What did it matter anyway? This was something, Keketso knew, Jerome had been subconsciously driving him towards, this unmooring from him. Perhaps it was also a kindness Jerome offered him to soften the blow of his leaving from Lesotho. So what if, in his isolation, Keketso had collided with Ranko?

The wind over the café that day was brutal, sending serviettes flying and making Keketso’s nose runny. He was just about to leave when Jerome showed up, entering through the small gate that led to the city street. His hair was redder than usual. They remained standing opposite each other for a while, two bodies unsure of how to behave around each other, but then, Jerome backed Keketso into the café chair, a smirk on his face.

“You were about to leave without me?” Jerome said.

“I thought you weren’t coming”

He placed a cold hand over Keketso’s, “And leave my darling all alone?”

Jerome ordered a tramezzini. He asked Keketso what he would be eating, but Keketso declined. He had eaten already.

“So….” Jerome said, “Ranko, right?”

Keketso’s only answer came in the form of a shrug.

“We should actually watch Mookho’s Cairn together” Jerome said, “In Bloemfontein”

“Sure” Keketso said.

“I could barely get a word in between you guys” Jerome said, “It was like watching a tennis match, khak-khak-khak-khak! Of course, it didn’t help that you were practically clinging to him all night like a lost puppy. I had half a mind to go up there and rescue him. Mon petit chien”

“Fuck you” Keketso said, the heat in his body rising.

“Yes, fuck me, fuck you, fuck everyone. Did you fuck?”

Jerome’s tramezzini arrived. Keketso ordered a glass of water. When the waiter left, a silence came over them. Keketso readjusted his position on the chair, looking out at the noise of the city around them, that alone giving Jerome his answer. He saw a glint in Jerome’s eyes, Jerome leaning forward as if he was about to share confidential information, “You know, for your information, I don’t mind if you fucked. I know better than you think I do”

“So what?” Keketso said, his voice rising. It was the first explosion of anger that he had allowed himself to feel that day.

“So, nothing” Jerome said, settling back into his seat. There was a silence. He took a few bites out of his tramezzini and swallowed. He wiped the crumbs off his face with a serviette, and shifted his attention to the city street.

“You’re a violent person, you know that?”

Keketso could feel the heat returning to his body. He grew tense with it.

“Yeah, you are” Jerome said, “You remind me of those people Freud talks about, people with repressed desires. Society tells them what they truly want is anti-social so they clam up with all this pent-up repression as a result. So one day, or a series of days, they finally lose their shit and commit all these violent acts.”

“I’m not ashamed of wanting anything though” Keketso said.

“I think you’re wrong”

Keketso had never thought himself violent; at least, not in the way that Jerome accused. Not in the way that he had been a victim of violence himself. Two years ago, Keketso had been involved with a man called Thapelo, who had recently divorced his wife and told Keketso that he wasn’t ready to ‘do the whole gay thing’ yet. But Keketso and Thapelo had exchanged ‘I love yous’. One day as they were arguing, Thapelo had shoved Keketso into the kitchen counter, his hip hitting its corner and leaving a purplish bruise there that lasted for two weeks. It wasn’t long before the punching began. What had made Keketso stay longer than he should was a promise he made to himself to not leave the relationship before he could cause as much damage to Thapelo, as Thapelo had caused to him. But Keketso was physically weaker than him, spindly. Though he had never harmed him physically in revenge. He had never thought of himself as violent.

“My question is” Jerome said, “What do you think is going to happen to you once I leave? I’m not even speaking from the perspective of the scorned lover like you think I am, though the question of whether we were lovers or not is quite interesting to me”

“You could never be capable of something like that” Keketso said, taking a sip of his water. His hand had started shaking, the winter sun entering his eyes like a knife, “I don’t think you know what it means to love someone”

“You think I don’t love you?’

An earnestness had overcome Jerome’s face, “Or care about you? Love, care, it’s the same thing I think. Since coming to Lesotho, I have spent almost every day with you. You think I’m so cold as not to get attached to you in some profound way?”

“I do think you care about me” Keketso said, looking down at his fingers, “I just think you see me as some sort of anthropological project. How original do you think you are, coming to Lesotho , making yourself feel good about bringing ‘culture’ to black people? Why not do that where you come from? Who said we needed your help?”

“That is quite spiteful” Jerome said.

“You called me violent” Keketso said.

“I’m sorry I did that” Jerome said, “And I would hate to have you think that I don’t care about you. Keke, you’re one of the smartest, most beautiful people. Kindest too.  If you ever felt that I was hesitant in some way when it came to you, to us….it’s because I’m underserving of you. You deserve better than me”

Keketso smiled. Not because he accepted the compliment, but because he was aware of the condescension men always hid compliments like that with; I am undeserving of you, you are better than me. Words like that allowed for a sly retreat whilst also placating the other person after turning their emotions into rubble. But in retrospect, this was how his relationship had always been like with Jerome. When they weren’t fucking, they were angry at each other. Or rather, Keketso was angry at him—because even anger Jerome couldn’t reciprocate.

When it was clear they had reached an impasse, Jerome stood up and walked to Keketso’s side of the table. He planted a kiss on Keketso’s lips, long and deep enough to make sure the people around them stared. Keketso knew that Jerome was making a statement, but wasn’t sure against what. Against Keketso accusing him of being an anthropologist? Against Keketso saying he didn’t care about him?

Jerome left, and Keketso remained sitting at the table. He watched the winter bristle around him, unable to shake the feeling, not for the first time, that this season in particular singled him out as an aberration. Every hooting car and every leaf torn from its branch seemed to be a deliberate attack on his person. So much so that his first instinct was to dissolve into tears. Perhaps this was the violence Jerome had been speaking about, the texture of winter alive and thorny inside him, exposed for everyone to see.

After a while, he noticed that some of the people at the café were still staring at him, even though it had been quite some time since Jerome had left, his serviette from the tramezzini flapping in the light breeze. And would it be violent, then, to perform some remonstration against these people, to overturn the table and cuss at them, to play the part of the angry, black man? But he had never felt the fealty that many people his age had towards the social causes of the day, especially as a gay man as well. Perhaps he had been at The Alliance Franҫaise too long, and around white people too long, who had insulated him in their bubble of ‘goodwill’ and wanting to help the third world stand on its own feet.

Though, that morning, after Ranko had left the house to meet with some artist friends, there was a frenzied violence in the hurried manner Keketso had opened his phone and searched online for any videos of Ranko having sex with other people. He had used Ranko’s real name, and found only articles and interviews concerning Mookho’s Cairn. He later assured himself that if there were any videos of Ranko online, they would have either been deleted, or resurfaced prior to the film being released. And what could be so hard in believing that he was the only person Ranko had wanted to record himself having sex with?  He had seemed earnest enough when he made that confession. Only, on the drive to the office that morning, Keketso  had somehow convinced himself that Ranko had set up the tripod and camera after all, and recorded them having sex without his knowledge.

He brought his mind back to Ranko’s movements that night, but couldn’t find any place in his memories where Ranko would have had enough time, much less the space, to hide a recording device; because the room was quite bare. Even more violent was the idea, so strong that he immediately knew that in the following days with Ranko, it would supersede the joy of simply sitting around and doing nothing with him—of actually wanting to be captured on camera having sex. He would never be brave enough to ask Ranko to do it, especially after expressing his shock at seeing the camera and tripod in the first place. After that day, Ranko had never mentioned the camera again, and Keketso was just as happy to cover it up as one of the things they could never bring up to each other. But there was another reality where Keketso had gone through with filming, and on days like this, when he felt completely alone on a winter’s day, he could pull out his phone and find a video of him and Ranko. There would be sterility, and perhaps, poetry, to the camera’s cold glare against their bodies. No theatrics. None of the kitschy verbalizations that were so characteristic of porn videos. Just a sunlit room and two men fucking. It unnerved Keketso that some of the people around him were still staring, and he put on his jacket, about to leave, but changed his mind midway. He stayed sitting there until the winter sun turned warm on his skin.