Breyten Breytenbach

Intimate Stranger

for

Levedi,

Kanthaka

and my Brother

One has it in mind to put together a book which when completed, reaching (for) completion, will consist of twenty-seven minor pieces of writing accompanied by twenty-seven watercolours. Twenty-seven, because it is as good a number as any and better than most, it contains the eternal nine, and this mind, seeking the Wondrous Mind on soiled paper, is still inked in with superstitions. When one is a blind ass walking on ice it is as well to count the number of steps and to imbue these with a saving grace, if not some frozen significance.

The book is called All One Horse. If you really must know, the title is culled from a Chang Tzu saying: ‘Heaven and earth are one finger, all things are one horse.’ This, by the way, also precisely indicates the contents, made up of a structure wrapped in themes and motives. Arguments of course are informed and/or illustrated by imagery or texture, or both. Images, again, depend on how far the horse of association can travel, as do textures which would be blank were it not for imagination — and there the finger goes galloping over uncharted regions determined by the life from which they echo forth. And life, the translation in other words, is nothing if not severable. The horse needs no rider.

One thing is as clear as the lotus having its roots in mud: in due time, well prepared but unexpected, like the opening of one eye, one will see the horned rabbit and the furry turtle crossing the nowhere mountain. The citation is from Hakuin’s Kaian koku go.

A. Uthor

Girona, The Year of the Ass

Le pouvoir passe par l’organisation des idées des autres, de la culture des autres.

ALBERTO CAVALLARI

Otherness is a powerful factor of distraction, not only because it continually disturbs us and wrenches us from our intellectual thinking but also because the very possibility of its occurrence casts a hazy glow on the universe of objects that are situated at the edge of our attention but can at any moment become its centre.

MICHELTOURNIER, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique

C’est tellement facile d’en glisser un peu dans le vagin! Avec l’anus, c’est une partie qu’on n’a pas le droit de fouiller. Alors on regarde sous les bras, sous les pieds, on leur fait écarter les jambes et tousser. Il tombe parfois un couteau…

A. NONAME

Era necessario che il futuro esploratore di mondi si liberasse dalla paura dell’assulamente diverso, e dall’impulso di morte che questa paura si portava sempre dietro.

GIORGIO CELLI, Sfida ai volventi

We have absolutely no doubt in our minds that what we describe is happening and has been happening in the manner in which we describe it as happening.

CHARLES REDMAN

When a thought suddenly arises it is known as ignorance.

From Ta-ch’eng ch’i-hsun lun

Misschien kan een van de Disparates een illustratie zijn van deze omkering, waardoor het vermoede duister achter de uiterlijke dingen het zichtbare duister tussen hun geschonden brokstukken wordt. De ets toont een paard dat zijn hoofd omdraait om de berijder, een vrouw in een wit kleed, tussen zijn tanden te grijpen. Dat waarop je eens hebt gereden verneitigt je.

JOHN BERGER, Het Spaanse Binnenland

Ne craignez point, monsieur, la tortue…

Leibniz as quoted by P. MENARD in Les problèmes d’un problème

Who wonster live frevva?

QUEEN

~ ~ ~

between the legs

In the beginning there is God. Or Creative Principle. If we take it that there must be a start and a stop, then there should be some entity to begin with or who/which can make the beginning begin? But we are not there yet so there can be no if. If comes later. Let’s start all over again.

In the beginning there is the Word. (This is plagiarism.) Who writes the Word? Ah! Read for Word a synonym for creative act. You have to leave room for assumptions. If you don’t leave room nothing can be created, not even Nothing. If you leave room for synonyms you have a splitting of cells, procreation, multiplication, a filling of the Void. Where the Void comes from? It is in the nature of the Void neither to come nor to go. And I don’t know who you are. Not yet. Don’t leave the room!

(But if I am it must be because you are, my brother. And since there’s a consciousness conscious of its being in the act of searching for synonyms, it must be an I. If the looking is written down it must emanate from a First Person, even if anonymous, even if produced by the words. The unsayable must be hemmed in. Welcome to the Land of If!)

Now that we have filled some space we can deduce that there is Existence. It would thus be only logical to assume that in the beginning there is/was Potential. How else did we get to the filling of the page?

No Existence without Limitation. In the beginning there are instructions. (Read directives, imperatives, no-go areas, etc.) God is Word or Flesh or some such. It doesn’t really matter. However, since Word is God there will be a fleshing out as the word can only be in becoming. I mean that every word has a double being: the word as such and that which it brings word of. Another word at a pinch. And the sky is the limit.

This goes on for a long time. The sky goes on for a long time but not forever — due to feeble mindsight. The human mind starts all things without being able to see to the end of them. It is called spinning the mind.

Anyway, we shall jump ahead and take it that we already know what we mean when we say First and Day. So, in the beginning there is God who we take to be the Word and all the rest. God has the instructions in word form. Let’s hope he can read. (Who gave him the instructions? Let’s not start all over again!) On the first day he creates firstness and therefore two and the so ons followed by copulation, as also day which calls up night (since otherwise it could not be ‘day’), or the warm hollow for copulation. As the mirror creates the image. The image creates the mirror. Imagine Imago! Imagine I!

In the beginning I had the intention of writing you this so as to introduce you to Story. Do you still doubt? Are you not now reading these words? If you don’t I don’t exist which makes no difference and we have no argument to pursue with one another. If we have no argument we have no way or need to recognize each other and so on back to square none. No Story to sit on your lap, no Flesh to warm with the caresses of Existence. In that case I didn’t write and so there was no I to be manifested.

All of the above I started a long time ago and I now forget what purpose I had in mind. I do see nevertheless that I have just given you a concise explanation of the history of creation. It is because there is creation that I am God continually creating Itself.

God, the One I look at in the black mirror, the Other — is dead. (Creation doesn’t stop with consciousness.) He died of neglect and crass ignorance. People didn’t look after him. To the extent that he might have been no more than an image in People’s mind.

I berate People and tell him he can be had up for non-assistance to a species in danger of extinction. I ask People what he did with God’s corpse. We spirited it away into the earth so as to beef up the subsoil, he says. Does it make the plants grow, I ask. No, the ground in these parts has a weird white taste but there is a sweet-water fountain not far off. People is wont to come here to be reminded that there’s something he ought to remember. Then he has a sip of water and promptly forgets himself in the clear liquid. I tell People not to worry, that there is no sense in thinking about what has been forgotten, that there may have been Nothing to remember in the first place (which naturally sends the mind frantically fumbling for presence), and anyway that the subconscious is quite old enough to take care of itself. I also posit that water is the soul of the mirror.

It is not that easy to kill nor is it clear that you ever succeed. If there is successful Sonderbehandlüng there must be a you. I, God, cannot be dead without there being the knowledge of death, some instance to know I am dead. Therefore, if I, God, am killed, you exist. Welcome indeed!

There is the woman who tried to do away with her husband. First she poisoned him, then she strangled him, then she bashed him over the head, than she tried to slice him up with a buzz-saw and when she saw that the saw wouldn’t do it she dragged him into the car and drove him to the lake where she dumped him. But the lake was frozen. He died some time later of pneumonia and of blueness of the body. Through bloated lips he croaked: ‘I love you.’

Story tells the following — it takes place in White city: three young Matsetedi bucks out for an evening’s fun intercept a squatter with a funny hairdo. It is a dark and stormy night. They bundle him in to their car, two of them sit on him. Where to? They take him out to the cold lake near Clearwater Fountain. There they knife him repeatedly. Because there’s no end to his groaning they drive the car over him, risking hurting the tyres. Off they go for a late beer but after a distance they realize he must be hanging on to the back fender going wop-wop-wop over the night-tinted tarmac. So they stop again and it takes a lot of stomping before all breathing ceases. He died of overtiredness. Before the judge one young Shiny Face pleads innocent: ‘I did kick, your Honour, just for fun, but I couldn’t have done much harm, as I was wearing my soft poofter pumps.’

In the Bois de Boulogne there are persons soliciting passers-by for sexual panhandling. Most of them are Brazilian. On a dark night one of the skirted and rouged ones inadvertently steps out right into the spearing headlamps of an oncoming car and gets picked up by Sonderbehandlüng. (It had thought that the sex could be a purse or a roll of banknotes; it wasn’t intent upon meeting thus the foul breath of the Pimp.) During the course of the night twenty more cars on the look-out for a quick screw pass over the corpse without noticing it. With hardly a shudder of the body. Things that go bump in the night. Will you recognize Orgasm? In the early morning it takes a lot of piecing together to come to the conclusion that the defunct was in fact a transvestite. (Though who would ever know for sure or give a damn? No service, no money.)

God ‘is a Brazilian’. And all God is one Word. Also: freedom will come to him or her who lives the longest. And: some persons carry the cough between the legs.

the bobbing lights of the harbour

I had disappeared for a long time. Friends found me in this rainy city. During the past time I had grown to know the king and the princess of the land, or those accorded the roles, sometimes, the courtiers and the courtesans and the actors and the spies, the buffoons at court. I take my friends down a gentle green hillside to a vantage point overlooking the narrow mudwalled street penetrating the city. Dusk fell, a perpetual grey cloth of rain. The king was returning to town from an inspection of the districts with his entourage. He precedes the night. The cantering pace, the clinking hooves, the dark-hued fluttering panoplies, the burnished breastplates glowing dully in the half light. The princess comes by all in silver, rouged cheeks and glittering eyes, six ladies-in-waiting carrying the train of her dress. She must be wearing boots for the mud. I wave. She doesn’t respond. Nobody acknowledges me any more. Knights and hunters gallop by, pull up their chargers sharply to tumble over the necks of the steeds and perform summersaults on the ground. They slap their thighs with gloved hands. The street is lined with people bearing spluttering torches. Tomorrow the festivities are due to commence. Tomorrow the king will officially be within the gates. There will be popcorn and rattles and flowers to go to the sea. My friends accompany me to the inn where I had been staying for a long time. We must leave. I must fetch my robe. At the inn I inquire after Mustapha, my travelling companion. We have to go now to that distant place. The innkeeper looks at me down his brown nose. He indicates a small box made of tarnished silver on the mantelpiece. The box is filled to the lid with red soil. Did we not know that the trains no longer run? And that the last red boat had gone? Look at the rotting carcass, waterlogged among the bobbing lights of the harbour.

be sploshing over your seat

Flying north. Day swirling with cloud and fog. Craft trembling, can’t make out land at all. Friendly passengers. Some one starts up a song. Coming in to land at Copenhagen. Won-derful won-derful Co-penhagen. Approach so low down narrow street, that immense wings must sweep over rooftop terraces of the tall buildings on either side. Pilot must know his town like inside of hand. Yet just suppose somebody left a potted palm or his coffin cooling out there for the night! Stopover, leg stretch for those who so desire. Make nodding noises at fellow passengers in airport lounge. Exchange words with old bearded Indian philosopher and another person. Immediately excise other person from narrative. Ancient sage has gentle moist eyes, but with turban resembles some other Ayatollah Fannattick. Tell him about situation back home. Class analysis. Sorry, but Indians will never fit into Africa. Must evacuate. ‘I’m sorry to have to do this to you but it is all in the cause of self-knowledge.’ The elderly traveller’s headcloth trembles. Back to the plane. Long time in taking off. Travelling through landscape. Plane not quite fitted out completely. Work continued during stopover, left undone. Part of pilot’s cabin still in plywood. Old Indian sage strapped in back there whispering sadly to young woman to his right. He’s suffering from abdominal pains now. Long eyes and whiskers shivering. No time at present for young woman in this story. Pilot points out pictures rushing past: confused cemetery, rubbish heaps with disparate objects sticking out. The way it all goes, the blue-eyed pilot says, terrible, into the earth with no distinction: books, cartons, mouse-shit, corpses. But ah, you must answer, exactly why it’s wonderful; we all decompose similarly — corpses, mouse-shit, cartons, boots; couldn’t happen unless we all share same thought, life; couldn’t happen to a nicer guy; seamlessness! (All one horse.)And up. Day silvering with fog and cloud. No see nothing. Dangerous? Phantom ships bumping along in the void. One hostess starts handing out glasses of champagne, moving up and down aisle with her comfortable and friendly Tina Turner body. Is she forgetting you? Saving you for last? You to back, to toilet. In passing attract hostess’s attention with one-finger-raise. She will indeed serve you. Toilet uncompleted. No throne to sit on. You urinate. And now prick breaks off in your hand. Oh no! Asafoetida! You there with half the appurtenance lying in your palm, puckered, pinkish, perfectly shaped, long like palm. No bleeding. Try flushing it down. Won’t go — swimming sluggishly on grey-green surface like sickly goldfish among detritus. You think: this can’t be happening to me. You think: if this were a dream some fool would be sure to give it a Freudian reading. Zip up. No bleeding. Must matter-of-fact return to seat without raising eyebrows. Thought flaking through head: some unprimed passenger will by and by be sure to come screaming out of the head. Purser will have to cock an eye at all the company’s privates. Will have no handle on you, no way to point you out. No bleeding. Could be naturally smallish organ. Discreet charms of the bourgeoisie. Must return. The yellowish champagne will by now be sploshing over your seat.

how beautiful the mountain!

It is a country where the patterns have been set down a long time ago. Besides, if you were to look at it from the sky you would be struck, nay overwhelmed, by the undulating riffs, the delicate ribbing, the repetitive flow of waves, the unbroken lines of force — all to be ascribed to incessant wind action. You could perhaps say this country has the smoothness and the symmetry of the inside of a much-used mouth. I am the suckhole, the chewing and the cud; whosoever partakes of me shall die and be delivered of death forever.

During the twentieth century there arose in some peripheral parts of the globe an obsession with democracy and human rights. Don’t bother to read the rest, it is of no importance. These notions reflected a general paucity of generative enterprise urbi et orbi. Of little import, but the pounding propounding was disruptive, being so flagrantly out of step with the hallowed interests and everyday practice of the state. The artificial only then makes sense when it enhances the nitty-gritty; heaven should be at least an echo-chamber or else best left alone as a queer leftover, an obsolete secret lost in the obscurantist mass mind of a bygone humanist age. Like the glass eye buried under the rubble of the pyramid of Cheops.

‘Happily dissolved,’ says the ruler of the country serving as environment for this story. ‘Orgasmed. Man is animal. Why hang fishes from the highvoltage poles? Man’s life is to war, extract, uncover, torture, exile to Orbi or orbit. To be maimed is to have achieved the distinction of service. We too have incantation, certainly, but it is to bolster the rhythm. And all of this, in the epoch of the neutron chip and fast food and instant sex, we do exceptionally well. The sphinxes will be clairvoyant, the sphincters eloquent.’ This the ruler repeats daily on Radio Truespeak. ‘Do I hear it mentioned that man is animal? Perfectly, pure consciousness. But purity, or awareness if you want to call it by its hidden name, is the matter of sifting. In other words of structured recognition, the beat of the trance. The other margin, that of hypocrisy and nonsense, dear beloved listeners, is traced by archaic make-believe veins of democracy. Freedom is always here, never and nowhere else or other. No ways!’ To conclude: ‘Are we happy to be rid of the poisoned mind? Yes! We never fool with farces et attrapes!’ (You know that the trouble with history is exactly no wind.)

In such a land ritual is of the utmost importance. The national emblem is the bee and munching is much appreciated. Breaking wind, however, is a fine art reserved for the nobility. ‘No amount of ability creates nobility’ is a popular wisdom often heard in these regions. And: ‘Almost all people have tits but very few have grown titles.’ A soft wind whispers sweet nothings down the corridors of the prison that I return to. It will take the keepers a long while to learn again that I am the important timer who should be neutralized by special dispensation. Our legal system, having to dress the surface, is of necessity arcane. We have a Minister of Police, a Minister of Justice and Related Matters, a Minister of Law and Order, a Minister of Security, a Minister of State Security, a Minister of Counter-terrorism and a Minister of Culture. The ruler has own Secretariat and then there is the State Council of Security. Rights and propaganda, presided by him, to run the show. Thereupon we have attorneys, lawyers, barristers, advocates, procurators, magistrates, justices of the peace, judges and diverse orderlies, clerks, officials and functionaries and flunkeys of the court delegated to search and fetch the filth.

The walls are painted an aubergine colour. It promotes a sentiment of bliss and recitation. In each cell there is a white-clad figure down on the well honed knees, chanting: I SHALL NOT DEVIATE I SHALL NOT DEVIATE I SHALL NOT DEVIATE. They have years ahead of them.

Sometimes the outside working population must revolt because it gives us the chance to air and recapitulate old grievances. The male workers will gather in front of the ruler’s palace early in the morning when a thin fog still shrouds the public places. The strikers are young: labour is a question of virility. We show our discontent in a quaint but effective way — we unbutton our private parts to all masturbate together. The catch is to have the cum shoot straight into the mouth of the I. There we are quietly bending our minds to the ritual, hunched over our shaking meats as if paying allegiance or humbly thanking the deity for the back-breaking work. It normally takes us two and a half minutes to complete the cycle because we are well constituted and broken in to synchronization. People straighten up, wipe their members, and speak to one another in husky voices. Some may clear their throats. The sun also rises.

But when you go to be helped out of this life it is always very cold. Executions take place under a bridge not far from the capital. Steps lead down to the sandy bed of the naked river. We cling to one another like a cluster of atoms. A typical quota will include a few greybeards, some loose-bellied mothers, two or three men strong and mature with well muscled forearms, and at least three children. The latter must be big enough to walk by themselves. It is expected of the candidate executees to dress up in disguises for the occasion. We have false noses and conical hats, and tears painted on our cheeks. One or two of the weaker ones will sport shaven heads and be wearing striped pyjamas. We are the farces et attrapes. And the terrible wind plunging with a howl down the sheer rockface of the mountainside. When we get to the bottom we all start dancing, Jew and Gentile and Animist, slowly at first and then progressively more gaily, repeating the same simple steps circling closer livelier clinging to partners changing hands grips around waists and buttocks closer the heavy sand faster happier to where the oiled gallows loom. On the bridge above us the wind will be fluttering the trouser legs of Graf v. Dood, the Observer of Proceedings. How beautiful the mountain!

remnants of my story

We live deep in the country where it takes a long time to fashion a phrase to perfection. It rains incessantly, strands of hair cling to our foreheads, our hands are painted with water, our legs are browned to the thighs with mud. The trees submit to the ongoing gossiping of uncountable wet tongues.

(Let me open brackets here because sometimes it can get worse: the heavens have been known to cede and to flood our distant land with gurglegitation. People then perch in the trees, like so many inarticulate words, wrapped in wet cloth or, I say, like disastrous flowers sprung from some wrong season; a bloated cow bobs along for all the world a dislocated upside-down M; faces swim by the window and the moon is monstrously multiplied. Indoors I find myself trying to force the huge metallic ants back into the broken earth, I even use a hose on them, a full-throated stream, and the Minister of Justice rushes in to scream at me that these are his agents for God’s sake man you are destroying my agents! I have my differences with the Law.)

We are a large family. For a long time we have been living deep in the country where the rain comes down. We breed and we breathe. Some of us have been weakened by the strain and some are of dubious stock and questionable morals. There is, for instance, the Dook and the Douchess and their flashy accomplices wearing a chattering of diamonds on cheap fingers. Their big limousine lies sucked to the hubcaps in the quagmire. When the Dook and his entourage are to leave on a job entailing a quick getaway his fedora dripping silver drops, we have to scoop out the vehicle. Then there is our Young Sister, Oys. Her spirit is too limpid to accommodate reality. She has a thing about legs and about longing for a companion. We translate for her…

I go wandering in the forest, drenched in thoughts. And a strange man comes up to me, a mad look in his eyes, inchoate of mouth, he grabs me by the jacket and shakes me with broken questions. Eventually it dawns on me (please forgive the lapsus) that this apparition is looking for a small elephant gone astray. Maybe he is the trainer of a passing circus, or the monarch’s game-keeper, or the guardian of the idol. He is in any event a foreigner and quite beside himself with worry. Together we return to the family farm. The land is dark and asylum not easily found. One never knows. Dogs come at us in a mad run, their paws squelching in the mud, spittle threading their maws. They could be our dogs, the neighbours’ dogs, what does it matter. To keep them at bay I grab clods of wet earth to chuck at the snarls or the malevolent stares of their bulging eyes. They teeter on the edge of lurching for the kill.

And yes, huddled in the byre of the drowned cow we find an animal shivering darkly, hiding from the barking along the perimeter. I fetch the hose, we wash it down, a small elephant emerges.

Now my family tumbles through the slush to oink and to harrumph at the wonders of fate and haphazard hazard. Our Little Sister throws her arms around the small beast fondling his big little ears, his big little head, his trunk which is like a rough whisper. Tears of transportation run down her cheeks, coating the teeth with shininess, filling her mouth with a liquid smile.

But it is too good to last. When evening comes we send Oys off on some errand, we collar and lock up the growling dogs, and the man takes the small elephant away.

Thus we try to cheat time by pretending that nothing has happened. We carefully situate the pachyderm in our Young Sister’s mind. This is the secondary stage known to many foreigners, when writing comes into its own — even though written in mud: the missing is transformed into a delicious mixture of ache and ecstasy, changing shape and modifying its nature, until the very absence becomes presence.

And then one day the Prosecutor comes to us deep in the country where it takes a long time to migrate from imagination to transcendence. He comes with his files and his filthy underpants and his acolytes. They are investigating the disappearance of that which had disappeared, they say. Something happened, they say. Call it elephnapping if you wish. So it is only normal that they should piece it together again in terms of the need to un-derstand as defined by legal harrumph. Leading to the vital necessity of punishment as the only way to make what happened un-happen, they say. And they will have to interrogate our young Oys, they say. (De Law, the Dook snorts in disgust, fingering his tie-pin with a bejewelled hand.)

My mind darkens with primeval anger. I trumpet my rage. How dare you do it to her? Don’t you know that you will unhinge? Do you wish to confront her with the growth of emptiness? And what monster will be born from that? I grab the Prosecutor by his jacket and throw him over my head. One of his assistants, a black man in an expensive tweed suit, tries to intervene. I grasp his wrists and squeeze with all my might until I see his eyes bulge red. You keep out of this, Brother Blackman; this is none of your concern.

Ah, reader, I say, my mind darkens with an elephantine rage. Please excuse the lapsus. I shall have to return some other time to the missing remnants of my story.

like a whiplash

Like a whiplash. Since time immemorial this phrase has been there, written in the ancient script against the cliffs above our hillside village. Our village is a fortified one, steep and dark, with glistening foliage shadowing the season, and shafts opening up on the unknown. It passes in the land, by a subterranean knowledge, for being the place of poetry. The ground often shifts here, but we hang on. Myth or Ouïdire or Sayso has it that the truncated verse on the rockface was left there by the Original Poet himself, the founder of the fortress. And ever since, poets have been living here, staring at the mystery of the rock, tree and sky, trying to complete the poem. It is known that he or she who penetrates to the source, who uncovers the hidden parabola or equation — for the skyline is the conclusion and we must build back to the beginning — will be assured of immortality. Oh, sweet life.

I am a poet. Like the male of the species I have a beaked nose and a little brindled beard of which I’m inordinately proud. And as any poet worth his salt would, I too must write in the foreign tongue so as to have a translator. My translator is a crippled, blue-eyed young man called Horse. He is so close to me that he could be my brother in the word.

I am also in love. How could I be a poet striving for the unknown and not be in love? Is it not part of my poor human condition, my deathdream? The poet must have wings to fly — higher than the last words of the perfect verse, and wings can only sprout from the intimate communication with love. Love is a necessary discipline, part of the wordsmith’s métier. Ah, sweet love.

So I invite Love over for the evening. And hopefully for the night. She sits across the table from me, and Horse sits next to her with his impassive face and just the occasional tic, throbbing like an imitation of inspiration, under the eyelid. He’s not supposed to be subject to inspiration: he’s the translator! I keep my eye on him. I watch them both. That is, I look at them but my mortal eyes have become dim from peering at the untranslatable, at the inscrutable wall. When Love inclines her head to listen to Horse’s whispered nothings the shifting hair obliterates her shining countenance. How come they have so much to talk about? Must he translate my silences? How come they are so much at ease without having to talk to one another at all? My eyes do not see so well. Only too well… The tics of the heart, like those of a machine that will now never ever get off the ground.

I repair to the toilet to perch over nothingness. Like an angel sickening for take-off. And there I die inside out. The discretion of poetry, all the more polite for never being talked about, is the hiding of the bitterness of evacuation. Shall I spare you the description of wells and black walls, of stench and corruption — that death which is the underground of poetry? For though I know now that I shall never be immortal — and I had to die to have the mirror face of death — I have acquired at least some of the tics of being the poet. Suffice to say that there is a shift, a sickening lurch, an unexpected slope, a long twisting fall, so much like flying, through the bowels of the earth.

Now I was dead. The preceding sentence, I realize, is somewhat decayed, but what I mean is that I can see now from mirror to face, clearly. And I cannot help wanting to know what is happening to Love and to Horse. Are they happy? Are they sad? Love is good and death is bad.

I return. Love has her head inclined, the hair greening her shining face and the silver moisture of her mouth. Horse has a sheet of paper on the table before him. His finger is reading it line by line. The other hand strokes vainly over his little brindled beard, sometimes in passing touching the hooked nose. His yellow eyes are striving to read between the lines. They do not see me. I don’t exist. Apparently they are unaware of the black wind sucking (at) absence just behind the door. This is the way things fall apart. Poetry is always also elimination.

I come closer. I can now hear Horse reading with the soft wing-yearning voice of seduction. Mumble, mumble, mumble, I hear. And then: Mumble mumble mumble Mum mumble mumbo mumb/Like a whiplash.

this unmemorable memory exists!

I know D.E. You could say as well as I’d know my own brother. Years ago when I was in prison, he passed on to me a sheaf of notes which I tried to make into a story. If you read Mouroir you may come across it. It was a generous gesture. I owe him a favour. Today, 22 June 1986, here in Rotterdam, I have the chance to repay the debt. It is sunny but not hot. D.E. has given me a speech to read. Thirty-four people are standing in the shade along the banks of a canal. Maga is here and so are Taraxippos, Bert, Kure, Harpagos, Phlogée, Djaran… We are taking part in the ceremony of saluting the tree of poetry. I shall now read the notes, the inaugural remarks. Nobody knows D.E. Sometimes the noise of passing vehicles drowns out my voice. A small girl watches me intently, a finger in her mouth. The branches are decorated with ribbons of many colours. And these flutter in the wind.

It is with an immense sense of satisfaction that I stand here today. The word dreamt in the anonymity of prison has become sap and fibre. It will be tangible like a tree. The present word may be a noise, like a passing tram, but the absent one is space. It is resonance. We are here to consecrate absence.

It is with an equally enormous feeling of awe and humility that I stand under this tree. The tree is a creator of space and this one here particularly so, because it is ancient and indifferent to human foibles, but still intent upon drawing poets to it, as if poets were birds — to the awareness of absence, of earth-forces, and thus to infinity.

We are here to inaugurate the as yet non-existent memorial to the unknown or the anonymous poet. Were I to do it in the correct way I would have had to stand silent. But just as the tree must produce space to be tree, the poet must create words to encapsulate the silence.

Elsewhere, I have communicated the mysterious notes that came into my possession while I was living underground, probably during 1976. At that point I was just passing along an old need; perhaps I was merely the unwitting instrument in the bringing about of a place where oblivion could be predicated and practised endlessly. And now we stand here and I have, too, a real feeling of recognition. This is the right place; here are the right people; these are the requisite elements: tree, water, the stones to come.

In parts of Africa — in Senegal, Mali and Niger, for instance — when a griot dies, and please remember that the griot constitutes the wordweaving memory of his people, his fellows will take the mortal remains to be hidden in the hollow trunk of a baobab. It is a way of positioning him for ever where heaven and earth meet and merge. Perhaps this tree here, the subject of our meeting — hanging tree, burial platform, labyrinth of budding life — could also be a place where poets will come ultimately to be consumed by the flames of forgetting.

And in Delphi, I am told, there is a tree just like this one, a plane tree also (maybe it is the very same one; what do we really know about the deep run of roots?), shading the Castalian waters. There, people went to be purified before going up to consult the oracle. There the Pythian maids, or the prophetesses, drank the water and munched the laurel leaves that would lead them into the dark-seeing trance. That, after all, was why poets were crowned with the poisonous wreaths. Delphi, the navel of the world where the young Apollo, son of heaven, was to slay the python guarding the entrance to the earth — thus inheriting the chthonian strength, the subterranean force, the hidden word. Thus is heaven and earth united. And we know that there by the water of Ga spouting from Parnassus,Apollo always spoke obliquely, in the form of verse, the way we too are condemned or chosen to do…

By all means, let us not be distracted from the horrors of our everyday realities; let us continue denouncing and combatting the killing and the maiming and the slow indifference and death of memory. But to be a poet — that is, to aspire to the grace of pain — however obscurely, means not to lie. Let us, therefore, then also validate that other reality, the blacker one of primordial poetry. Let us be where water flows and a tree grows, where there’s no conflict, where snakes make us dream and touch the deeper layers of integration. We must be intimate with ourselves, we must uncover the earth in us, the icy wall of eternal ecstasy, where stones live out their colours like washed-up petrified breaths of whales.

We want to express the secret vote of unquestioned belonging, to mesh consciousness and matter — and matter is awareness. We have to concretize the need not to make public. Here is our place of no name. The roof of the flame. No selfishness — just the purity of creation. It will be the bottomless hole which, for once, will have no function — except that, the most important one, of distilling a shared crucible.

I hereby declare that this tree, this unknownness, this unmemorable memory exists!

the thieves and the word

This happens once upon a time. In the past which we now evoke, there lives a man leading what passes for a normal life, neither good nor bad, smoking moderately and only occasionally drinking down to his knees. He has a cat, mice behind the wainscotting, the average gnawl of worries and a small stock of smiles to swap with those — neighbours and bureaucrats and retired army colonels now breeding rabbits — who come and go on the staircase. It is winter and the streets have the cold greyness of stone. He is on his way. He arrives at the cabaret with wind in his pockets and three words in the memory chamber when he suddenly plunges through a trap-door. What does it mean, ‘plunging through a trap-door’? Simply that with suddenness he sees a lady in that place of ambiguity and questionable reputation, a lady so exquisite, so sumptuous, that she must be a princess from a distant kingdom, that he dare not look at her. She does not see him at first, lost as she probably is in an ancient landscape of her own. He does not look at her but the corners of his eyes keep noticing her movements, like lightning in Africa. He cannot stop looking at her. ‘What is this, then?’ the man asks himself. ‘Did I fall upwards into paradise?’ It should be pointed out that the place is nondescript, neither big nor cramped nor frankly evil — why should it be? — with some smoke adrift near the ceiling and drinks to be had in the sad foyer. A black cape of shiny hair throws a shadow over the glitter and glance in the lady’s eyes. Then the miracle happens: the two protagonists actually come to exchange thirty-two words, eighteen by her and fourteen by him (eleven of which he borrows from her). And butterflies are blooming in the hands of the man. The lady’s hands, on the other hand, are small and reddish, and her hips must be as white as lips in the night. Her mouth moves with elegant desirability so that the man aches for the touch of her tongue. Too soon, too soon. Then she leaves with her entourage. The man follows her into the street, urgently, to catch a glimpse of the beauty of her buttocks-walk, and when he turns back everything is gone — no more lights, no smoke, no painted signboard, no office-box, even the one-eyed Lebanese frontman is gone with the wind — just the grey façade of a wintery street in a quarter where wee-pensioned concierges and minstrels and illegal guest workers come to die of tuberculosis and the misery of homesickness.

‘Alack,’ the man sighs. And ‘oh fie’. But life and sentences will go on. The man is looking high and low for the exit into the entrance. Passers-by pause when they notice him with fingers murmuringly sensitive like lips, tracing the slightest crack or slip in the walls of the capital, but then they continue, assuming him to be part of the recurrent measuring needed to intensify city life-control. The writing of unfreedom on the walls. God’s rod. Man buries his past until negligence makes him forget where the traps are laid and he stumbles down a hole into oblivion. But this errant pilgrim will not despair. Why not? Because he has three reasons which may hold water. The first one is that he now finds in one of his empty pockets a stone which has the temperature of his body having been brooded upon, pulsating weakly; actually it is the heart and if she has made this organ visible and brought it into touch, the man thinks, if she has made it to happen, as it were, the man thinks, then she has done something implying existence and I’m not making up stories. The second one comes to him when he opens a notebook which he fortuitously seems to have had on him, to find pressed there between the pages a very pretty butterfly, or a reference scribbled briefly as beautifully as a butterfly fluttering away with white liplike whispering when he cracks the book open to look for her name, that will be her address then, he says. The third one is that one fine day he is hailed in a watering place by an old gentleman, an unacquaintance. Listen. The old gentleman has a rose-petal pate, washed-out eyes where a silvery sparkle still surfaces at times, and the long teeth of a wolf from the steppe. ‘Sit,’ the old man orders. ‘And listen. We have existed for so long that people have forgotten us. We are the dust of the mind — not even a memory, but a mythology! Yes, I’m talking of the primitive deities. Don’t you think it is a lonely state? Of course we go on and people take us for bankers or forgers or retired colonels or, as you see, Trotskyite puppet-masters, antediluvian revolutionaries trying to manipulate one freedom struggle after the other (has been lost). Your century has been one of utter alienation. Human filthiness. Let it be. But if a god doesn’t do his godthing-a-meding-dong, from time to time at least, stir the dust, as I say, he stops existing. A god is that only in what he does. Which is why I have to intervene. You will find her (he pulls back his head and chuckles a soft spittle-laugh behind the golden fillings in his mouth), buster. And through her you will come into existence. How? On one condition. You must gather the words to create the absences. You will write, you the pauper, you will write for her ten composite landscapes bequeathed to the lady of the heart. Let us not die. You will meet her in the ninth verse. Naturally, she will not appropriate the gift. A landscape is only the condition of dying after all. By the way, allow me to present myself. I am Hermes, he of the doorways, the thieves and the word.’

to be the flash

Then she teaches me a new, intriguing game. We would sit cross-legged on the floor facing one another, each with a tray of fine white sand. Or flour. The important aspect is to have a smooth surface to write on. She would rapidly trace some lines in the sand — a complicated formula, and equation, a hypothesis, a grave accusation, a rule — and as quickly efface it with a sweep of her palm before I can stretch my neck to read the upside down. Then it is my turn. I write nervously, and promptly do away with it. The game becomes complex and tense. It goes on for a long time. But her mind is too sharp for mine. She always wins. She has a face with the texture of rice paper.

She came to me from a distant land. One day I arrive home to find her in the parlour all dressed for travelling. She is leaving me, she says. No, she’s not leaving, only going away on a very long trip, to a distant land, from which she will return in time. Tears still blur my vision. My friend the plumber with the red cap will take her there. (He lifts his shoulders apologetically. That is what life is like.) Her face is flat. She has her travelling hat on. She is brushing her teeth with lots of foam whitening the lips and then she uses the same foam and brush to scrub away at her ear. So the specialist advised her, to counter deafness. With the red-hatted plumber she has cleared the floor of the house. They have attached all the furniture halfway up the walls or left it dangling from the ceilings of the rooms. The parlour floor is as bare and as pale as the unwritten womb of sand of a virgin. I bump my brow against the refrigerator. I hear a dripping sound. There she leaves now. She will send me a postcard from Ceylon, she says. Or Borneo. Or the distant land where the specialist lives. I run over the rooftops, to try and see the road they’ll be taking. Small cats and dogs live on the roofs, under the eaves, in the gutters, in the lee of chimneypots. Far below me in the narrow passageway I see her pasty head bobbing in the rear window of the vehicle which takes her away away.

My heart is heavy with anguish. I jog along a road which threads together the mountaintops. I have lost my breath here. The road is like an old mirror. It is clogged with ice. The ice-chunks are transparent with brown rinds, like the shattered memory of an old mirror. The feet of the runner must slip and slide out of control so that his run will be erratic and executed with great concentration. Only very rich families can afford to come here since one is certain to lose at least one child to the void. Behind me one such three-member family trots and the boy with the expensive snub-nosed shoes loses his footing to slither beyond all help over the lip of the chasm. For a long time I can hear his dark cry, going down and down into the swirling fog.

When I return my house is filled to the beams with water. The plumber must have torn loose the fitting and the pipes when he helped her to tie the things to the ceilings. I remove some of the tiles, but it doesn’t help, the house cannot be emptied. A small dog is paddling after his shadow in the parlour. People come to visit me when it is hot. They sit with me on the roof. When a child has to go to the toilet I have to help her hold her breath and plunge down into the murky interior. We cannot see under the water. Sometimes she slits herself open on a knife or the cutting edge of a cupboard door when looking for a towel. At other times a severed head floats in what used to be the pantry or the television sanctuary, trailing wisps of red smoke in the water.

Then one day the big white engine of destruction arrives. The sun has broken through and now glints on the peaks of the distant land. I sit on the roof-ridge and I watch it come to our world. It is enormous, bigger even than an ocean-going liner, the big one, the white sun-refracting one, the mythical rumen, and it slowly tumbles through the blue sky. It seems to move leisurely down the valley, accompanied by a distant booming which expands in ever-widening circles of rumbling, shaking the mountain walls. The blooming of white silence. Soon there is to be the flash.

bones of god

We are trying so hard to get this place ready in time, to make it empty. We scrub the floor, whitewash the walls, clean the windows, polish the mirrors. We know we must clear the space, make it sane, if we wish to entice and to trap the presence of the Supernatural. And we wish it so. Had there been furniture we would even have roped these to the ceiling. The state of expectation is always preceded by the process of cleaning, and both devolve from the condition of emptiness. We are waiting for the fullness of time. When this thing is suddenly there.

Lord Alone knows from where. It is horrible, huge, green, objectionable, obstructive, flailing around because it seems to be maimed or incomplete, lacking a mandible or a few limbs, like an enormous broken intromittent organ, outsize ma non troppo. It must be of the locusta species, though not loquacious, but bigger than either lobster or locust, with a head reminiscent of the size and shape of the horse’s. This one is glass-like and eyeless. Is it a visitation? It is only too real. An iconoclast then? A defacer, eraser, barbarian? Can it be a parasite? An insect by figure of speech? The imago? Bug? Louse? Nit? Maggot? Earwig? Mite? Weevil? Ant? Termite? Horse? Pest? Groping grasshopper? Cicada? Cricket? A guzzler in other words? A gormandizer? Vulture? Hog? Trencherman? Pantophagist? A belly-god? Limbless Lucullus? Or is it on the other hand? A mantis? A kind of orthopterous heirophant, munshi, initiator, mystagogue? A sort of monstrous coryphaeus which will devour the inmate hard after the joyride?

Ah, we break our heads but we can come to no understanding except that it is horrendous, of another intelligence because of no intelligence perceivable by us, perhaps a computer in wild screaming revolt, and in the way. We must get it out of the way if we wish to continue. And we so wish it.

So, with great trouble, using sharp pens, we manage to bundle it into the broom-locker. We bar and lock the door: from behind the partition or the page we can hear the thumping and the sounds of shivering. How very tiring.

By the way, that night we dream. We dream that some One has come to our Place to explain. In our dream we shed tears of humble understanding.

How can we believe our eyes when we wake up? In the mirrors there are many grey drawings of the mantis explaining all, divulging the sequences, showing where the Word comes from and whence the Silence. There are no secrets, ever; only their intimate reflections. The sun is so bright that it must refract all light. A drawing is always in the present tense.

Then we comprehend that we didn’t comprehend, that is all. It is quiet behind the door, no more scratching or other life or lifelike ness. And we are in heaven. So glad, so glad. We now know we have the sacred Hompus lompus in the cupboard. We shall make of the cell a sanctuary. From far and wide, pilgrims will come to prostrate themselves before the absent bones of God.

the body quivers with the word

First of all there should be no wind. Wind is a bother because it dries out the soil and makes digging so much more difficult. Wind is upsetting for the ceremony, you will see anon when it rocks the boats and rustles the clothes of the elect. A feather of unasked-for breath may bring the transients to come crashing down in the dust. Dust to dust and so on. More, much more: wind is nefarious because it evokes memories of far-away experiences, moods of transcendency, slivers of childhood, imagined languages enunciated by trees and clouds — and if all this does not add up to life, what then does? No, dead must be dead and life off to one side. By all means let there be wind, but in abeyance, dusting its hindquarters beyond the hill where the Squatters live.

This side of the hill, yes. It always takes place this side of the hill. Here exactly the lines of history and the earth cross: that there must be a hill or mound or tumulus between Masetedi (they of the shining countenance) and Squatters. A line of cypresses traces the route winding downwards, like crosses waiting to be put to use, like solemn unshaven gladiators holding up green shields in the matutinal glitter. The procession must start during the early hours from the crest down. (Or beyond?) For two reasons: in the beginning to benefit from cool shadows of the odiferous morning muting sound and masking smell, and then to be timed so as to reach its apotheosis in midday glory. Then there can be no veiling, no hidden intentions, no softening of lines!

Long ago we knew the sea. Heretics aver that we all, Masetedi as well as Squatters, emerged from the waters. But we resolutely foreswear the abomination of oneness. We believe that memories ought to be left untouched, a sea of deadness, but we do not always succeed in cutting off the feedlines between death and life, in severing the process between root and fruit. Thus we continue referring to our coffins as boats. Thus too our rejection of wind. Does it not bring to water the illusion of life? Does it not invest the sea with incestuous caresses? But movement. Movement is our way around the dichotomy. The dead must move, although not too much and never of their own free will. Our boats are whitened mirrors bobbing on the liquid surface of unsoundable nothingness.

Ah, we need this ceremony to deaden the past. Keep it down! Lie there and don’t move! Increase what came before, feed it, fatten it, pork it; pare life down to an even thinner slice; but paradox, all the more the past is dead or the dead is past — and death is by the way a matter of more volume — all the more life grows to be enhanced by the absence of the other. If you divide a thing in half you will never come to the end of it. The moon also grows from the night.

And so we extend the sea. We know where it is because it doesn’t exist for us. Purity, my brother. Only chasteness can permit us to pass unnoticed! We are the Masetedi. Even if our lives were disastrous, a fumbling of frontiers, a cack of compromising, our passing at least should at last go unobtrusively.

Therefore the select ones are painted. They are propped up on the biers, blanched, pasty-face, each fixed in the white position of seated authority. Down in the valley the tombs are ready. Our need is so great that we sometimes have to go far into the earth. There are generations of graves, stretching back to oblivion. The diggers have prepared the holes, but diggers also come and go: they cannot pass on their knowledge of holes and they do not always remember which ones have been crossed out. So they kneel when in doubt and holler down: ‘Halloooo. . Lie there and don’t move…’ waiting, perhaps, for a distant echoing sigh like that of the sea lamenting the land. And they are worried. How long before we transpierce the hill and let through the wind? And the dissolute Squatters then, committing life as if it were something to be lived!

There is no wind. Slowly slowly the bearers bring down the boats. Stiff upright the painted ones sit, no wind giving tongue or lip to the festive garments, or tilting the ceremonial hats. Maybe just a curt nod here and there where a foot encounters a stone. Soon the sun will hit the roof. All the actors are standing by: the unmemorable diggers having dug, the carriers bustling now like agitated ants burying the future before the storm, the elect travelling dead with glinting white faces, and Mfowethu the Brother who must pronounce the oration.

We come to a stop. The shadows shrink to minor and obsolete annotations attempting to hide from the sun in the protection of our shadows. This is the difficult moment. Now is not the time to make the eye do like a bat or to emit an afterthought of life through the anus. I am proud to be of the chosen and sit as quiet as may be under the dead weight of pigment and burial clothes. Now is the time for all patriots to come to the aid of their country.

Slowly, ever so slowly — I recall hearing that in the old days the traveller journeyed so leisurely that he was no longer a foreigner upon arrival — slowly I move my eyes to focus on Mfowethu perorating.

‘Here we are,’ he says, motioning to the soil hacked open. I see rivulets of sweat cracking his visage. Am I mistaken or does he use a foundation? One is not supposed to remember. ‘Or rather, here we go. This here is our collective unmemory, our subconscious. Let us put it to one side, it is separate from us and in it we can hide that which we neither want nor need. Those who died did so that we may live, and since we painted them to blend with us we do not know them and death shall have no dominion. Were they to tumble or bloat or float it would have been a different kettle of fish. I tell you, the young lion may be pulling his hindquarters up into the spine every few minutes when in rut, but the old lion knows about yawning and the delicious sucking of shades. He knows how to bide his time and how to mount a memory.’

(Do I detect a crack in his voice too? It is unimportant really, since we shall immediately have forgotten his anguish, even his heresy; it is the cadence of the prayer that counts.)

‘Let my people go,’ Mfowethu says. ‘Let us now close our eyes and fold our hands. Oh, life triumphant! I am! See how the body quivers with the word.’

spider to the fly

Nessuno is shaped in a tacky way. He is smallish, with uncut greying hair, small round eyeglasses, and the careful mouth of the ageing intellectual. His fingers are not much to look at, particularly the nails. Could be my brother.

‘Your country,’ Nessuno says by way of cautious dissent, running a black-rimmed finger through the coffee-stains on the table-top, ‘is not really racist. Racism I have always associated with Anglo-Saxon mores. Like drug addiction it has to do with the calcification of society stemming from Puritan restrictions. Repression.’

‘Stone the crows,’ Galaska chuckles. ‘Stone the crows and paint the feathers. But actually there is racism now in White City too. Or something so identical you could be excused for bashing its brains out. We are not a homogenous lot like you people here; we have large components of Squatters living among us, down our streets even. In the old days of Empire we could make Europeans of the Barbarians under our rule. They duly became Black Europeans, Yellow Europeans, Brown and Red ones too. Now, in the name of a ridiculously utopian socialism and a sickly post-colonial Weltschmerz we have lost the centralized cultural control. No longer do the immigrants want to be integrated or assimilated. They don’t want to lose their tongues, they say. They don’t seem to realize, stone the technicoloured crows, that it’s an honour to become a Masetedi. Sometimes they hail from Orbi, where the metropolitan power was thrashed on the battlefields, damn them, and they now know/show it only too arrogantly. They want to benefit from being European, yes — some have been here anyway for three generations, you know, whitened by labour — and not only are they allowed to pay taxes but they want to vote and yet, adding insult to injury, they refuse to relinquish their smug Barbarian ways. Maybe they don’t have sympathy with the blotches on our pants. This in turn awakens old demons in the breast of our society because we do have an ancient and honourable tradition of Rightism. Never forget that we are the Masters, right? Oh, it has become so fashionable to be anti-racist, our ears are washed out with the shrill humanist propaganda, that it was natural for racism to re-emerge. We always strive for a balanced community. For democracy.

‘Furthermore,’ Galaska says, ‘two wrongs make only one right. And although we may have no national consciousness of equating pleasure with sin, we nevertheless also sport our deaths in dingy apartments, filthy old foetuses found on mattresses on the floor, the needle still quivering in the target. And the frenzied tearing out of eyes.’

‘But no, no, no, you are babbling in the old way along dead lines,’ Nessuno warns. ‘ These are bygone concerns. You are old, of the generation of the beatniks or the farts. A vagabond/rogue/rascal/scamp/knave/varlet/ miscreant/vagrant/drifter/tramp/hobo. In Urbi they’d call you a babacool. The young look down on you. They must. They wear round glasses and short hair and limp hands. They have by now biologically integrated the knack of communicating with computed intelligence. These are the spirits they have a line to, the outlines of god. Their cultural codes are different from yours. They are post-modernist. They are of another race. The young master exploiters of Alternative Lifestyle. You, you are surplus people. They already genetically engineer the improvements, the mutants, the clones. You with your regrettably archaic references to critical faculties are instantly redundant, though they may still find a use for a clown like you, sometimes, to warm the seat of a vacant chair on a podium. They are chemically adapted. They eat waste and suck the neon to give birth by proxy to electric babies. You have the deadweight of centuries like a hump of ethics on your back whereas they have already integrated the continuous death. Naturally they will exert on you a zwang to conform to their cool, attitudinal, packaging ways. It is all the shape. Old guilt mechanisms have been transformed into the need to be seen as part of the treadmill. Don’t you understand that the thing is to communicate as universally as possible, that there has been a watershed between old fascists and new with-its, that you must be accepted as member of the tribe through invisible signals, slight shifts of the shoulders, a certain taste in ice-cream and an earnest hedonism? That it is imperative to kill off easily and cleanly? To be an ant with wide trousers, sexually open to front and rear moving with rubbergloved orifices and protuberances under steam and sail and with a mind tuned to no-end music? To live the excitement of the White Plague? To give Aids to Africa? To deface death? To be defecating noise? You, the previous models, are still excited by the gratings of the Gramsci or by dreams of the twists and turns of Tina Turner bodies… You have darkened minds, your minds hang like indigestible potatoes in your skulls, sprouting and soggy, you have minds. You confuse instrument and peevishness. They are part of the ripple on the water flowing through the reactor.’

Galaska slumps in his chair. ‘Knit no sweater from the hippopotamus,’ he retorts. ‘And let sleeping dogs lie. Will you show me your theoretical construct? Will you justify why we must be submerged in radioactive shit?’

Nessuno wipes his glasses and asks for more coffee. His fingers are like crowned sardines. ‘You cannot grasp the essential. Why do you stay with superannuated cares? The day of the newclear holocaust will dawn, I tell you. It will not be a haphazard occurrence but the end result of many deals entered on beforehand, the ultimate it in packaging. Some off-hand young whelp, you’ll see, will put together the Universal Show. On both sides the responsible Democratic and Red generals — being but agents, style is the protagonist — will have Swissbanked their royalties well in advance. They will have been arse-kissed by the arms industrialists and blessed by the ay-men of religion. Millions of T-shirts sold on playgrounds will bear the message: WE THE WORLD/WE WERE IN AT THE END/SEE LIFE AND DIE SATISFIED. There will be a world-wide phone-in hook-up, direct contact through home computers. See it! See it now beamed directly at you in your dream den. Be part of the biggest get-together ever. Live it live as if it were happening to you. Our wonderful one-time orgasmic destruction… No shitsofrenia ever again. Ever and never forever resolved… Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly.’

horse gallops on post-haste

A horse gallops on post-haste. The horse, a mare, has huge muscled hindquarters. Vapour burbles from her mouth past the bit and her chest and flanks are streaked with nitrous froth. The metal rings and clasps in saddle, girth, stirrup-leather and reins jingle and the harness chafing against the saddle-tree makes a moaning rhythm. On her back, leaning forward, standing in a sitting position in the stirrup cups, a rider dressed in a pinstriped grey suit. He wears black patent leather shoes and reddish socks, a tie tongueing the wind, on his head a knitted woollen cap with two long flaps tied under the chin. Slung low on his back is a well-worn mountaineer’s rucksack.

Rider and horse travel over a pampa where the grass has been chomped grey and bare by the winter. Here and there fitfully little fistfuls of snow — dirty, dead — like nasty similes or sour smiles expectorated.

Next to one such blob of snow an infantryman lies resting very stiffly on his back under a tree. His uniform is khaki. His trousers are tucked right up to the knees in long khaki-coloured woollen stockings, and around these dressings of leather are swathed, the thongs attached to the boots. His boots are soaked. Down his right leg a big bottlely fly drags its disjointed body on the way from kneecap to shin. Next to the soldier his cap, an apple, an old-fashioned barber’s razor. Mud to the knife-blade.

Wind ruffles the soldier’s hair. His arms are stretched straight from the shoulders and bent at the elbows so that the hands fit over the eyes. The fingers of those hands are tightly entwined, twigged as dense as a nest, so rigid that the observing eye involuntarily starts looking for down and feathers. There are no feathers. And through that handmask it is as if — but only as if — the warrior is staring hard at white clouds piled high in the sky above the tree.

White clouds, naturally fattened on water, sailing depressingly low over the landscape. It even augments the countryside’s appearance of infinity. The soil is black and a slim grey in places. A sizeable crowd of people, mostly aged and barefoot with their vestments in rags and tatters, squosh uphill through the mud. The heads, those of the womenfolk too, were recently shaved and are now covered with stubble. Each pilgrim with a crutch under the armpit. At times they mark the pace in one spot, lift the crutches to gesticulate towards the upright old mansion lording it over them from up high, half-hidden behind the trees. Then they open wide their mouths and close them again.

But the man on the other side of the window-panes of the room on the third storey doesn’t pay heed, barely notices them. He is standing off to one side in such a manner that light entering by the window only illuminated one shoulder and its upper arm, and in a sidelong glance his profile. The windows are anyway hermetically closed. The room filled with the buzzing of enormous flies (sequestered in a bird-trap?) scrabbling somewhere against glass. It will be a monotonous hum like that produced by a sizeable crowd.

Thereupon the man abruptly opens the big window frames. Sudden cold. And a deafening clamour rises up from the valley, wave upon wave, to fill the cavity of the room. A veritable din. The bleating of numerous sheep — ponderous and viscuous like that of old wethers, fluted and desolate as of lambs crying on and again, broken hoarseness as that of ewes.

But there is also the wheezing of somebody climbing up the stairway of the three floors as rapidly as his gammy leg permits him to. The door across from the window is flung open and a man enters hobbling horribly, stops in his tracks — momentarily blinded by the sharpness of the window’s flood after the stairwell’s penumbra. He turns on his heel to the bed close by the door, strips the cover off the bed in one fell movement. The bed’s heart is a wet wound, a pulsing broken sore, just about circular, with the hint of whiteness under folds of black and ruddy blood oozing to besmirch the sheets. The man curses repulsively and grabs his injured knee. Stumbles towards a door in the wall right. Pulls the door towards him.

The door gives on to a park with green patriarchal trees. The trees sizzle with the rain and puddles over the stony yellowish brown earth mirror the bruised blue sky. Then rain once more comes down in grey strips to destroy the reflection in the water-plashes. About twenty metres on there’s a bench in a glade, out from under the painting of trees. On the bench a middleaged naked man sits, blissfully unaware of the rain. In his red lap he has an open book, but the pages of the book are too soggy to be turned over. The man lifts both his feet simultaneously. Under his feet are written, big letters as if furrowed in the soil: PASSION. (In a previous story all the above was described as Efflata/Ejectamenta: a suite for pen and paper.)

The man hollers, and frightened birds flap from the trees. A horse gallops on post-haste.

a chain for his watch

This is what I want to tell you about Xmas. Down my street there lives a woman with bleeding legs and a beard. The beard doesn’t bleed. Her husband is handicapped. Only one half of his body, taken down the middle, is alive. He drags the dead part after him. The two of them are the caretakers of an apartment block where people eat geese and listen to Brahms. One night the cripple is woken by yells coming from the stair-well. The man hobbles up the stairs to the fourth floor where he finds a lady lodger having a fit through clenched fists because a tipsy hobo is lying tipped over holding tight to her door-mat so that she cannot enter the flat. Our man stoops to finger the bum’s shoulder with a hey-hey now and the snorer rises, pulls a knife on him and gouges out an eye. There is much blood and confusion and henceforth our man will have on his forehead a livid scar in the shape of a cross and one live eye only, but that is another story. The couple are given two orphans from the Depot of Abandoned Children to bring up. One will be a fat boy with no bones who has to be pushed in a pram. The other is a little girl, perfectly formed, as high as two apples. This is what I want to tell you about the girl. She lives for many years in the one room with the bearded woman of the bleeding legs, the one-eye hobbler, the pramridden fat boy. But she never gets any taller than four apples. Her name is Four Apples. F.A. marries a Squatter boy who must have been prowling the streets stealing apples to survive. The boy is dark and that probably permits him to sneak into our city by night. He goes into hiding in the same room in the house down my Street where the bloody lady, her lame husband, the fat boy and F.A. live. Sometimes when evening has swirled its moth-eaten cloak over the town the young couple will rush out on the pavement where they kiss passionately. He has to bend his black countenance low and she has to stand on tip-toe hanging onto his buttocks. The street lamp shines on her glistening upturned forehead. Perhaps he is breathing down her to help her grow up. But F.A. rather starts putting on girth. She gets fatter and fatter and after a time she goes thin again. This is the story about my imagination, give me a kiss to build a dream on. Is it my imagination or do I hear a thin mewing as from a small kitten coming from the one room in the building down my street? The Squatter disappears for a while and then he re-appears with a new hair-do. We are living in the White City during the eighties where policemen club or stomp or burn people to death only if they are Squatters or Foreigners. It is a story about dismembering and sometimes of re-membering. Maybe the boy with the hair-do is a sanspapiers or a fin-de-droits, but these are the niceties of a legal categorization best to be taken in hand by another story. The boy shows his black face ever more rarely in our street. Now is the time of passing time. My imagination imagines for me that the kitten has started to talk. When the lady with the bleeding legs pushes her fat boy in the pram to market, she points to a second smaller wrapped bundle, strokes her beard and says: ‘The Depot has done well by us and my better half no longer sees double.’

Now I want to tell you about Xmas. It is night and the streets are dark as they always are on Xmas night. I find the young couple embracing with locked breaths on the pavement outside the building where the hysterical lodger tried to pick up a drunken hobo. When they see me they must take me for a snooper, a voyeur or a life-sucker. F.A. scurries off into the room where the kitten promptly starts blubbering like a scalded cat. The boy furtively takes to his heels, rounds the corner, out of sight, never to return. Squatters run fast.

Now I wish to tell you this story which you already know, because it has been told on many a Xmas night. A poor couple go window-shopping during the festive season. People carrying plucked geese and Brahms recordings pass them by. The only possession of value he has is an old pocket-watch left to him by his grandfather. Her only wealth is the lovely long hair inherited from her grandmother. They look and look again at the riches in the jeweller’s window. For Xmas night each carefully prepares a surprise gift for the other. He has sold his watch to buy her a comb for her hair, she has sold her hair to buy him a chain for his watch.

dead at last

He had a head cramped with useless bits of knowledge and nothing else. Everything of no purpose, that which cannot be exploited to bring home the bacon, he knew. He would have made an excellent tourist, but there is not yet an agency for renting out tourists. He would be a retarded child’s dream uncle lodging in some cupboard of derelict colonial mansion in Bobo-Dioulasso. How many people knew up to a single digit the average number of hairs on an elephant? He could tell you exactly how many seconds would elapse before the amber traffic light jumps to red. He understood the foreign policy of the United States. He knew many riddles without answers. He could stop eating and drinking for ever if he wanted to because nobody cared about his existence. He would have made money by going into pubs and taking bets that he could bite his eye, then take out the glass-eye to put in between his teeth. And even more money by upping the bets of biting the other eye, then remove his dentures to fit them around the seeing orb. But he was a teetotaller. Because of the one eye he could cripple a gnat at ten yards in one shot. He knew the birth dates of all the members of the Central Committee of the Eritrean Liberation Movement. He knew what Haile Selassie’s thought was on the morning of his death and about his aching fear of losing his teeth. He has assimilated perfectly the root system of the virgin vine. He wrote books. He knew how many buttons there are on the uniform of a San Francisco policeman, not to be confused with those on the uniform of a California State Highway Patrolman. This is not to say that his knowledge was exclusive, but it was precise and arcane and utterly unwanted. He knew, for example, the answer to apartheid. He knew and could describe to you in detail that place in Heaven where only Latin American writers go. He knew every inch of the road leading from Uzbaq to White City and could draw you a map of the topography of Orbi. He was the last one to speak the language of the people of Wet Country, but he couldn’t spell. He understood down to the finest delirium what makes a woman unhappy and he never had a girlfriend. He knew the history of nails and could imitate the sounds made by snails when coupling. He also made imitation mirrors. He could formulate and utter very important unthoughts exactly like a politician. He’d learned by rote Volume One of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, in ancient Sanskrit. He knew the size of the underpants worn by Mfowethu, that is to say after Mfowethu was released from the alcatraz and allowed to let his appurtenances and swellings be cupped by underpants. He could walk like the ostrich, go into the female’s spread-eagled crouch to perfectly mime broodiness or vagina hunger, and would have made a very astute wild ostrich hunter were there any wild ostriches left to be hunted. He knew the songs of the Beatles. He even knew all the ins and outs of Ronald Reagan’s mind. Tampoco Reagan sabe mucho de nada. He knew what islands and creeks were used for hiding by the Thai pirates. He knew how to tell the time of day in Hebrew and in Yiddish and in English. He could translate parts of the Bible into Greek. He knew how to stand on one leg. He knew Zen. He could whistle like the wood pigeon and recite all the names of Picasso backwards. He knew the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson. He could make fire by rubbing two sticks together provided he could find the right wood which no longer existed. He knew that poetry was a secret way of capturing lost time.

Last night he had a dream. He was just outside this house, the barn behind his back. It was night. And a fire came raucously loping down the hill, snipping and puffing tree and undergrowth in its way. In no time fire entered the courtyard making an eery day of the surroundings by the fiery glow of its body, barging into the barn and then jumping right across onto the roof of the house. It tore through the tiles and started licking at the beams with any number of ashy black tongues. Thieves are so bold they sometimes steal your roof tiles while you are sitting down at supper. Sparks made a spray of fireworks and cinders rained down. The roof went and the floor popped. Everything erupted in smoke incredibly quickly — as always when the provisional is turned into eternity. He stood there petrified and as the front door exploded he saw himself inside the house trapped by fallen beams and the crackling inferno of a staircase. Each piece of furniture was a burning bush fierily breathing God’s smoky laughter. His mind was a melting ice-cube, all thoughts for ever scorched before they could take to the wing of water. His mouth was a hole where the fire had been. He dreamt that he was having a dream from which it would be impossible ever to wake up. He remembered that his memory had at last evaporated. So he gesticulated wildly for help, and so he did. Or was he exuberantly showing the signs of victory?

This morning he wakes up with a sense of tremendous relief. He says: ‘I’m so glad to be dead at last.’

‘brother’

He cannot be discreet even if he wants to. Sounds travel a long way up the valley. Sometimes when you see the spurt of a smoke tendril it comes as a surprise not to hear the reverberating smack of an explosion a fractured second later. I know this is a roundabout way of knowing about distance. I hear the put put put of his ancestral motorcycle from afar. You’d swear a heart is thumping away in the ravine. Then I catch a glimpse of the sun shooting off his goggles as he takes the turn from the departmental road into the narrow track snaking up to our hilltop settlement. He’ll be stopping soon at the store facing the crossing to rev the old cycle, thump his fat buttocks on the seat and howl like a wolf — he’s forever scaring the storekeeper out of her wits, my brother, and she already speaks the dialect with a slumberous tongue like a cucumber. Now the motorcycle is labouring up the incline, coming through the gate, stopping as it were with shuddering chest, here he is. I’ve always thought it jolly the way he has Pegasus painted in flowing white lines over the petrol tank.

I must go back a little but it will not be an afterthought. I sense that I am to be the fleeting forethought, an eyelid moving. It could not have been the sun mirroring his goggles; it must have been my inflamed vision spotting darts where there was but conditioned expectation, the premonition that some welder was coming to solder my soul. Not a bad image — I should tell my brother about it. Better still: ‘soldering the soldier’s spoiled spirit!’ I remember now that it is a cool brooding day like this one. I must experience the present as if it were a memory. Memory of snow and of dust. Sun hidden face. Swallows swooping low with an unzipping of wings, ants feverishly dragging pale snippets down holes into the earth. There is a cold wind from the mountaintop. Storms building up just beyond the border, so Radio Truespeak announced this morning, and maybe some showers will blow over to break our drought too. ‘I’ve never understood how the authorities could permit you to paint a nickname on your official transport,’ I say by way of greeting. He pushes the goggled eyes up on his forehead, wipes a glove over his lips. ‘Damnation! You have no idea what a bitch this job can be. Bloody road between Uzbaq and the capital is blocked. Chaos, I tell you. The Squatters are on the march again. Flags and drums and fifes and those damn kids cartwheeling and ullulating. I had to come the Garg way. God knows what is taking the Law so long.’ He sighs. ‘And then just look at all this, will you? Work, work, work.’ He has unclasped the worn satchel on the back of the bike and is now riffling the content, the pig-eared files. Extracts a slim red one. ‘Here we are.’ He is looking into the file with furrowed forehead.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I say, do you carry your drink in that thing too?’

‘Here we are,’ he says. He is taking off a glove, wetting an index finger, solemnly clearing his throat. ‘Now lessee… your name, sir?’

‘Bullshit,’ I say, ‘Do you want to come inside?’

‘Don’t you bullshit me, fuckhead. Look I’m sorry, this is for real. Forget the rest. It’s, ah, official, I tell you. Damn. Lessee,A,A. B, B. C, Celli. D, van Dood Graf, nobleman, fat help. E, Eklô, so young still, would you believe it? F. G, Galien, Garbman Abdul, de Graaf Reinier, Gräfenberg Ernst. H, Hakuin, Hermes, Horse… It never stops.’

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘J, Jagger Mick. K, Ka’afir, Koff. L. M, mumble Mfowethu, I’m sure that guy was not all white, an infiltrator from the other side, touch of sin among the forebears there. N, Nessuno Jan. O. P. Q. Q, Queen. R, Redman Charlie Truespeak. S, Story. T. U. V. W here we go, Watsenaam. Watsenaam Abe, Watsenaam Babe, Watsenaam Brother, Watsenaam Chuck Huntingdon, Watsenaam Nascimento. Are you Nascimento Watsenaam?’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I am. Piss off.’

‘I am now giving you notification. Ah, the permit.’

He hands me a sheet of paper. All printed, just the name and first names and dates completed by hand, same somewhat blurred. This is to inform you that Council has decided that blank blank will be executed at the place of public death on the blank of blank in accordance with Decree 27 alinea 17 and 5. DO NOT RESIST THE LAW. WE SHALL OVERCOME. Dated, stamped, signed, countersigned or scrawled, illegible, stamped.

‘Sign here,’ he says, holding out a filthy register.

‘The language is not very ceremonious,’ I say.

‘Streamlined, don’t you know? But some of us still have to bruise our backsides on the same ancient bikes. Sloppy organisation. In ten days’ time, you got that? You must keep the notice, don’t foul up the works.’

‘Yes,’ I say.

I must go back a little. Loop the loop. Give my regards to the mirror. I look up the slope behind the house. Soon the leaves will change their hue. After the first rains the sheep will come on down from their summer grazing. There’s wood to be chopped, winter crops to be prepared over at the new fields. Words to be welded. If only it were to rain I could be ploughing. It’s been a dry summer. Ten days?

‘Look, I say,’ he says. ‘You’re best out of it. Today white, tomorrow black, so what’re the odds? I certainly don’t know. Let the ants make pigs of themselves with all that godflesh in the soil. It’s not our baby. That’s history for you!’

‘Yes,’ I say.

He has put the glove back on again and behind the goggles his eyes have an anxious stare. He touches my shoulder awkwardly. How much does one feel through leather, I wonder. He will now kick the bike to life. It’s not easy.

‘It’s been a dry summer, hey?’ he says. ‘If only it would rain. Watch it now, ah. Don’t go make things difficult for, ah, others. Don’t let the family down. You’ll be fetched and so forth. And don’t go trying what Mfowethu did, you know, stringing himself up, jumping the gun, what? Gives the country a foul smell, hah-hah! Fool, what?’

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘Well, then,’ he says. The motorcycle’s stuttering.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘Brother.’

over the eyes

Old Lady is approaching death. That is why she doesn’t want to walk any more anywhere and if she has to it is with short reluctant steps using a sturdy cane, sitting down often to let time pass by. When Old Lady is young she is a spoilt child pampered, cooed at, servants whisking fans and agitating small bells. Birds flitting through the green green trees of the Wet Country. Old Lady has a labyrinthine mind in which many ghosts dwell deceased ancestors robbers and other dangers two-headed pigs fixed ideas mortal fear of the night of not-knowing and of darkness and of serpents and the inner reaches of the sea or rather the minor estuaries and demons and forests love of money and power vanity self-interest bad faith pride a face never to lose before others all without commas. Light does not penetrate there often although the maze is in ruins. Old Lady knows how to manipulate meekness and how to exploit the innate attributes of femininity. She immediately corrupts the contact she has with the powerful and the weak. When Old Lady grows up she leaves Orbi she goes to live in the capital which is on another continent that way. She is more stubborn than a mule and she is self-indulgent. It is an inappropriate metaphor for where she hails from there are no horses. She brings up her many children to suit her whims and her need for justification and revenge. A revenge on life. She runs their lives by terror. She runs their lives by her sacrifices and her suffering. Her jealousy. Old Lady lives by extremes. She is either indigent as an immigrant chambermaid when they all live in a shoe or as rich as an émigrée landowner. She pities the poor and she exploits them. She belongs to a party of the revolution. When she believes that something is good for her she takes so much of it that she falls ill. Old Lady is master at the dialectics and the foibles and pretensions of the Whites. And they cannot corner her because she will tactically fall back on the Others — the Wet Country — the Old Culture. She is modern and ancient. She will lie about her condition and her religion and her accounts and her history. She ruthlessly renounces one religion for another holding out more promise of reincarnation but she retains the benefits and the securities of the first so that she has many blessed bits of wood and sacred phials of muddied liquid. Old Lady is very clever. But now she is old and she doesn’t want to die. She tries to act as if she were very very old. She subdues her offspring with her old woman’s ailments. She is imperious and makes them serve her hand and foot. She has a rash on one foot that needs ointment and docile fingers. She ridicules their time by tying them down to a day-long airing of well marinated grievances not so much to ease a load but in order to shift the buttocks more comfortably into a position of command and attention. And she competes with them insisting upon the same favours and privileges. She is again a sibling squabbling with others for her food. Old Lady is haunted by the knife in the back and defenestration. She says she may die next year but she doesn’t believe it for one single moment. She fights a war of attrition against death. Death doesn’t have a snowball’s hope in hell. It is an inappropriate metaphor because where she hails from there is no snow. She also says she intends to buy a mountain or maybe return to the Wet Country to go squelching in the mud. Infirmity has at last vindicated her laziness. But now she is old and afraid and frail and selfish and determined to hang on. She is at death’s door trying every trick in the book not to find out how it opens. The simple instructions are there for all to read and understand but she throws away her eyeglasses. She buys ten pairs of shoes and ten boxes of toilet rolls of the strongest kind. She takes pills ground root powders philtres phials tonics and fortifiers. ‘Because it makes one live a long time.’ She is not interested in the quality of life, just to continue at all costs. She plays at being pious. She has a make-believe interest in piety. She is shoring up good deeds with the intention of presenting a bill. Now she is utterly self-absorbed. Life and all living beings constitute a conspiracy that must be outwitted. She doesn’t want to go down into the cold clammy labyrinthine vaults of the soil. Maybe it reminds her too much of Wet Country. Something will happen to make it unnecessary. A medical breakthrough. A miracle. An atom war. A presidential decree. A medieval mistake. A visitation of the gods. An eruption of changes. A wake-up. A recognition by the world that she must be made to live on and on over the dim horizon. She is residing in a dry country. Her toes feel the dust. She worries about her bladder her skin. She wants to change her teeth and wreak havoc on the ungrateful. Everybody will know her worth. She watches the old fig tree which is like an elephant. This is only half an inappropriate metaphor because although there are no fig trees where she hails from there are elephants crashing through the forests of rain. A bullfrog croaks. Old Lady smiles a deprecating grimace. Death is approaching with creaking joints tinkling a bell decrepit ceremonial hat slid over the eyes.

and this mirror

I wish to introduce you to my twin brother. If I haven’t spoken of him any earlier it is only because he has been until now quite content to live in my shadow. He doesn’t eat very much. Now that he is to appear in broad daylight, I should like to give him a helping hand. Perhaps I should say ‘re-emerge’ like a shadow from the night, because this brother in fact set foot in Urbos long before me and he still has here a network of friends unknown to me. Since that time immemorial, it is true, I had eclipsed him. And as this is a feudal state where success is a story of pulling strings and drawing straws, that is to say of having an obsequious spine and a ready dirk, I ought at least to try and light him on his way.

When we were born my parents were right short on originality which is why they named him simply Brother.

Physically he is my spitting image. To the extent that when he does a self portrait I often wonder whether he’s not trying to picture me. (I forgot to specify that he’s a painter.)

Let me tell you about his favourite painting. It is the Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda as some people think they know it.

‘Why do you like that one best?’ I ask.

‘Because it is a self portrait,’ he answers. ‘More precisely; because it is a painting of myself. I mean it. You smile? Look at my smile and then try to remember. Isn’t it exactly the same? And the trees and rocks in the background, the dead fish light all over — are they not elements of my mind? Some people claim that the thing was done by Leonardo painting himself without a beard. Bullshit! Did you see him do it? And anyway, Leonardo is a figment of the communal imagination. When I die I shall leave my portrait to the king. Of course one can no longer see the painting as it has become invisible. Too many people with framed expectations have looked at it. When a thing is looked at too often it loses its reality. Too many eyes kill the light and fade the pigment. But that suits me fine. In this way it has become a mirror. The original black mirror. Bring it to your face! Can’t you see the self portrait?’

We have been around the world together. We share and share alike the same experiences, or so very nearly so that you may be fooled, but you will never believe it since we have reacted in such totally different ways. Perhaps it is due to his being so much younger than I. Or is it a matter of language? Each tongue is its own boat looking for its own sea. Sometimes it sinks under the dead weight of memories.

I find him a little primitive still. Primary, you may say. He is a hunter of images. I never know what he thinks and it is hard for me to pinpoint his Africanness. I do know that he is dying to die in a tree like an unfolding of blossoms, that he loves the deserted streets of night and the dead fish light of this town. My wife quite likes him. He may not be the most handsome man or woman on earth, but at least he’s not intelligent. He in turn probably considers me already too smoothed by the life of a Shiny Face in the distant land where you have to explain yourself to be understood, where it is fashionable to be à la mode, where images must be codifiable and digestible. He doesn’t eat very much.

I sincerely doubt if my displaced brother will succeed in being inserted among you, or that he will enter your mind, but I shall nevertheless try and give him his chance. With these words of presentation. And this mirror.

jade or alabaster

They lived on an estate as big as a park, once upon a time long ago it might have been some sort of citadel beyond the city enclosure, but it is many a memory since it became an integral part of the agglomeration, netted by streets, alleyways, small squares, the hubbub and the teeming of traffic. The park had nevertheless remained a stretch of pristine nature — even if planned, laid out and cultivated — in the midst of the grey city. There nested an old manor house built on a gentle incline with luxuriant gardens all around it. The building itself with its courtyards and the grounds bordering on it was divided in two. One half belonged to them and it was indeed in a dilapidated state but they had started restoring it, creating new spaces as they went along — dining halls, salons, pool rooms, bedrooms. The builders, the plumbers, the electricians were diligently at work and under the grey accumulation and decay brought about by generations of neglect the virile lines of a new deal could already be decried clearly. To gain access to their part of the house you had to pull at a rope outside the gate; it was attached to a bell cast in the shape of a female head which swung comically to and fro and there was the tinny sound of clapper against metal when you jerked the bell-rope. You would hear something, but not know the rights of it. The female bell was mounted on the protection wall just outside the dining-room window. Levedi’s brother had to oversee the alterations; he’d taken up lodgings in a smallish bathroom from where he could direct the activities and the white sheets of his unmade bed hard by the bath were still warm.

The other half had as inhabitant the retired curator of one of the city’s most prestigious art museums. He was a flabby old fellow with an international reputation, tender hands perfectly matching his white cuffs, and two thick wings of snow-white hair sticking out above the ears. His portion of the mansion and the terrain was beautifully manicured, ancient and rampant and soaked in tradition and care, but then he had helpers enough to keep it all in check. His garden was a labyrinth of glistening green lanes, an entanglement for the sun, the foliage in places twice as high as the crown of a man. A couple of ex-prisoners looked after the property — tried clearing the bosky corridor, polished the leaves to a shine, and they puffed at long hand-rolled cigarettes as they walked with a swivelling of the hips while muttering away in an argot which only God could understand. You also heard birds winging by very closely though you would never catch sight of them. The house was stuffed with antiques which the occupant himself would comment upon, and it might be that visitors discreetly paid an admittance fee to come and gape at all the riches, thus perhaps helping to defray the expenses of keeping up the maze.

From the very top floor a view could be had over the city. It was like a décor, layer upon layer, when the sun touched it with the dramatic goldtinted finger of death: chunky constructions with reflecting domes, smoking hills, slim dark red towers — all far off and suggesting perspective but with neither depth nor dimension — and, interspersed with the above, the grey and darkening scurry, the zones of uniformity. One of the narrow passages running along the shadows of a cathedral, an enormous cloister and the blind walls of other strongholds, could be followed by eye for quite some distance from up here. On Sundays few people trod the paving stones: now and then a person in a black robe lugging a rope-bag heavy with groceries and vegetables from the market, and that street had its own wind. Not very far from the estate one could see, looking down, a walled-in square which used to be frequented by Africans only, and then just over the week-ends. Some enterprising money-maker had horses and camels brought there. True, the mounts had shed their hair and the hipjoints jutted out and they were so tame that they must have been as deaf as stones, but the Africans from Mali and Togo and Cameroon and Chad and Mauritania closed their eyes to the alienation and the decadence and clambered on the backs of the docile animals to be thus transported to the larger, desert-deeper spaces of memory and nostalgia. There were swords also, with which you could gird yourself for a brief span, and those too poor to afford a riding-animal could still hire a weapon to handle, to fondle the grip and let the red blade slide from its sheath. Is there life before death? These people did not speak to one another; the dark bodies in the voluminous garbs were silent, under the caps with the sprinkling of sparkling beads the heads were bowed as each communicated with his own absence of mind. The emaciated animals too were immobile, carved from the light, the flared nostrils turned in the direction of a wished-for wind.

Sometimes when the chlorophyll shrubs flickered during a week-end with wind, and the gurgling of effluent water in the long street of shades imitated birdsong, and the beasts in the square without moving desultorily sniffed for dust, Levedi and Juan also went to visit their neighbour, the old curator, to be informed about the treasures of his house and of the clever ways in which to add to these. Then there was nothing macabre, no apostasy, the air was fresh, the city deployed in its eternal crépuscule, the future very beautiful and very close. The host smiled three or four times and caressed his wrists with sensitive fingertips as if to ascertain that neither fringe nor fimbria dangled from the pale flesh. He would then escort them through the halls over the mirror-floors and always end with the guided tour in the smallest room of all perched practically over the African square. The space — in fact it was a bathroom — they never entered, they just looked in from the outside. On the unmade bed next to the bath, among the warm sheets and as though protected by two pillows, lay the loveliest female head you ever could expect to behold, carved from a nearly transparent rosehued jade or alabaster.

ye-ah-ah-ee…

We sailed for long distances in boats on subterranean rivers. We leaned over the deck-railings and saw the corpses drifting by, their loose white clothing nearly filling the baskets. We saw the baskets languidly bobbing in the stream and how some of them became enmeshed in the bulrushes along the banks. Through funnels we hoisted ourselves upward to the light of day. In enormous buildings whose function has become greyed over with time we queued up for food and the dishes were handed out to us through hatches set low in the doors so that we had to go down on our haunches to receive our rations. We stood on a balcony high above the street and watched the procession coming by, sluggish, gloomy, the sluggish and gloomy black banners, and when the shuffling crowd started clapping hands heavily and rhythmically we lifted the arms with open palms to the sky in a solemn salute. Now we are sitting in the narrow room draped in black crêpe. The plates with the greasy grey rests of food were next to our shoes on the carpet. No sunlight illuminated the carpet. Through the french doors giving onto the balcony an oblong strip of blue heaven could be seen. And sometimes clouds like the reflection of the shadows in the street. The bald-headed man rose without letting go of a single word and walked to the lady in the grey dress. His own wife, the spouse of the bald-headed man, looked up from the litter of fingers in her lap and followed her husband’s movements expressionlessly. She never once lowered her gaze. Before the armchair of the lady in grey the bald husband stopped, stooped, propped his hands on the armrests, came even closer, and started rubbing his slightly damp bald dome in a soft caress against the chin, the nose and the forehead of the lady dressed in grey. Without a word. But we could hear the silence growing. After a while the lady pushed him away gently (they had never been introduced, after all) and got up. She preceded him through a slide door to an adjoining room entirely ensconced in twilight — not even the relief of dissipating cloud-floats could bring a glimmer of light this far. The man with the bald head, the pinstriped trousers and the outmoded black jacket followed her without letting slip a word. They did not close the door. The man’s wife remained in her chair, the soiled plate with the crumpled napkin traced with lipstick by her feet, and she continued staring at the spot where the grey lady had been seated just a short moment ago. Only the pale hands in the lap started tightening jerkily as if spasmed by some sort of ecstasy. We experienced the prickly presence of perspiration between shirt and skin. From the neighbouring room the sounds emanated. First the rustling of material being stroked. Thereupon a gasp, or a sigh, or the slow suck of teeth being bared. And then the murmurous monologue of the lady in the grey dress. Was she still wearing her grey dress? We couldn’t see anything. Not what we wanted to. Our eyes were averted to the carpet which was too dark ever again to capture the sun. The wife of the man with the damp baldness softly started to sing-talk. We sat there thinking about our thoughts, listening to the contrapuntal voices of the two women. (The man uttered not a sound.) The streets were once again deserted. People had left for the underground harbours to exchange their black banners for white clothing, to be divided in groups of observers and corpses.

— Yes, said the voice of the lady in the room, softly. What? What? But my lord, you may not… Oh…What are you doing there now… I don’t know you. Don’t you think it will be better if we… Oh… Oh… It will be too… Don’t, please don’t… You, oh, you’ll make that I… Oh, it’s, it’s so… It’s so… Here, a little lower. What are we doing? My lord, but it’s unheard of! Are you taking me for a.. I am, oh I am!… Can it be?… So… More! Again! Don’t… Do! Do! Now! Now! Go! Now! Go! Now! No-oh-ohaah…

— No, the woman in her chair muttered quietly. Can it be?… It is so… Oh… Oh… There?… But I don’t know you… My lord, but it’s unheard of! You will make that I… You, oh you… Are you taking me for.. What? What? Don’t… Oh, what are you doing there now… So?… So… It will be too… Don’t, please don’t… I am, oh I am!… You are!… Don’t you think it will be better if we… Oh, but my lord, you may not… What are we doing?. . Now? What? What? Oh, it’s so… It’s such… There, a little lower. So… Again! More!… Oh… Do! Do! Now! Now! Go! Now! Go! Now! Ye-ah-ah-ee…

the essence of his teaching

We all know Nascimento Watsenaam, the man who doesn’t dare laugh in public. For reasons of correct behaviour, no doubt, or decorum, or selfesteem, or having to satisfy the tax inspector. He holds it back, he keeps it bottled up until the darkest movement of the night. Then he betakes himself to a secluded spot where he can place both hands on the knees, pull his back in a knot, and vomit up the hot laugh like a jet of undigested mirth. Tears are squeezed through tightly closed eyelids, his facial muscles hurt, his earthly body heaves and shakes. He travels all over the world — from Spain to Rome to Lusaka to Canberra to Bombay. Everywhere the man has to go looking for dark alleys or uncultivated fields or the secret places in the lee of buildings — away from the geometry of the moon — where the penumbra is turgid. We hear him. People are broken from their sleep with shudders and with shivers. Hands fumble for eyeglasses, false teeth, pistols and alarm clocks. ‘What? What was that? Ooohhh…’

On his way from Nomansland to Wet Country, Nascimento Watsenaam stops over in Australia. He goes for a run along very high cliffs, down a brown cracked-mirror path, where only very rich people who can afford to lose a child come jogging in the dew. He is looking for the solitude of unconstrained laughter. He so much wants to see his gurgles writhing on the spear of the sun. The cliff-face is red. He sees carved there in even a deeper red: Now whitefellow has made of the Dreamtime a nightmare. Night can not be trusted. It is too distant.

In Bombay it is difficult to find an unfrequented votive sanctuary. There is much poverty there — people resting their aching bones for the night in lane and entrepôt, other people under the veil of darkness scrounging in refuse bags for sustenance. Animals too, having to outwit the humans. Animals imitating the sounds of human intercourse. ‘Don’t go shitting there,’ we tell the man, ‘you will find the turd filched from your underpants. And be on the lookout for where you laugh!’ In Bombay there are also grey-vested crows with impertinent stares and evil claws and beaks which they use for tearing apart the human corpses put out for the gods on the Towers of Silence. Gods seldom laugh. That is what distinguishes the man from the gods.

The man has no choice. Man cannot smile without having laughter in reserve. The one abbreviates the other. The one is the flag of the other’s manoeuvres and surrenders. Only politicians can ply a smile with their lips without having anything up the sleeve to back it up with. If man can no longer smile, reflecting the lack and the decadence, bile accumulates in the lower hollows, draining him to bitter despondency, slackening all self-respect. His coffee will have the taste of a fat female thigh. No, man is hooked on the absolute of cackling. How else is he to dog and to dig his death?

We all know how the man, Nascimento Watsenaam, goes erring through the streets until in desperation, sick to his stomach with the need to let his laugh out soon before it becomes a cyst or a cestode or a festering cesspool for small cetaceans, he clambers over a wall into the park on Mulabar Hall where the Towers of Silence try to entice heaven with their fruit of a counter-order. The art is to move away from the sad stench of decomposition and the rigorously patterned flitter of skeletons in moonlight, and yet to find an eddy of obscurity.

He finds it. Or thinks so. There must have been other animals also feeding on the night. Hardly does the laugh protrude when he hears a furtive coming or going. And deeply imbued by etiquette the man gets the fright of his life. Had he but coughed, grabbed the wet laugh and ran! A flash. Too late!

We all see him perish in a figure of speech: glum and deflated, the face gaunt, sunken eyes, not even the most minute uplift of mouth-corners to suggest a whiff of redemption. The man disappears from our knowledge, cursed maybe for ever to move from joke to joke in search of lost levity or levitation. But jokes are placebos for those bitten by the dog of death. We all see him no more.

We all know the thin old cat with the bloated stomach who sometimes burps, licks its whiskers, and cannot repress a sly grin. In exactly this same way does Gautama transmit the essence of his teaching.

bathed in tears

My mother has been dead for a long time. When she returns her eyesight is not what it used to be and her memory has become erratic. There are loopholes now, and mushy areas of approximation. She returns because she wants to visit with my brother. She has lost her teeth. She has also lost all contact, she says, and she feels it incumbent on her to pick up the threads. She has become finicky, querulous, hard of hearing.

I go to fetch her at the airport. She brings her earthly belongings packed in a cardboard box tied up with rough twine. One becomes very poor in death. It is slightly embarrassing.

I go to fetch her at the airport to take her to my brother’s. I had lost sight of him. It is funny how you can go on living in the same town and yet the world shifts. Youth recedes and no longer bothers you, your pate is polished, you stop visiting certain areas or frequenting the prostitutes and the politicians. They become so dim in the mind’s eye that you end up believing you invented them. You end up forgetting that this is a seaside town with abrupt hills, with dead zones, with botanical gardens, with statues for unknown statesmen, with a wind. You become attached to your attaché-case.

When we arrive at my brother’s place my mother has already forgotten why she came in the first place. It does not really matter. We ride up in the lift. ‘Where are you taking me?’ she asks in an irritated voice. ‘Shall I sing for you? Why can’t you let me be?’ But she doesn’t hear my answer and this angers her so that she decides not to pay any attention.

On the last floor the partitions between the many cubicles, as also the outside walls, are made of glass. My brother resides in a small glass cage. Out there one can see the moon riding stately like a ship coming into harbour after having discovered an unknown continent. ‘Each to his own,’ my brother says. ‘I must have a view on the moon. See how she bobs.’

‘Leave me alone,’ my mother grumbles. She unties her cardboard box, takes out her odds and ends, makes a nest for herself in one corner of the cage. My brother sits stiffly behind his table, his hands rigid like those of some emblematic figure, a pork-pie hat perched on his head. He is thin to the point of emaciation, the dark skin stretched taut over the bones of his face, the ears smaller and more intricate than sea-shells.

We live like this for a long time. My mother spends her days asleep on her pile of rags in the corner. At night, by the light of the moon, I sometimes wake at the feel of her eyes on me, angry like those of an unhappy child. ‘ Who are you?’ she hisses. ‘Keep away from me!’

Day after day I become more fed up. Why should I be subjected to these uncertainties? Why is it so imperative to remember? To remain integrated with oneself must surely imply to become stultified beyond recognition. In our family we all have blue eyes and smooth cheeks. We have linen-white ears. I look at the mummy at the table. True, we have travelled a long history, but this cannot be my brother!

I look at him from all angles. It is not he. True again, I have been absent for a long sequence of arguments, but could that possibly account for the depredation? I approach him and start shaking him by the arm. ‘Impostor!’ I shout. ‘ Where is my brother? What have you done to B? Who are you?’

I am very upset. I knock his hat off and see his tightly curled hair. I pick up the hat, return it to his head, ram it down over his eyes. ‘You should not obliterate the moon,’ he whispers. I interrogate him. (Where did I learn about interrogation?) ‘Where? When? Why? What? With whom?’ He is implacable. ‘I am your brother,’ he assures me. I find a knife among the old manuscripts over which the mice have pissed in my mother’s box, and try to strip the skin off his hands. Blood stains the table-top. ‘But I am your brother,’ the bewildered man insists. And in a thin voice my mother suddenly starts to wail: ‘Help! Help! They’re killing me!’

I run out. At the end of the corridor in a glassed-in compartment of his own sits a fat man with grey hair. He’s wearing a broad colourful tie. I grab him by the tie. ‘Charley,’ I implore, ‘please, you must help me. You have known the family for a long time. What happened to B? Where is my brother?’

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he sighs. ‘No, you couldn’t have known, could you? Where were you during all this book? We tried to keep it hidden so as not to besmirch the family’s name. He went mad, the poor fellow. Was taken to That Place on the hill — you remember?’ Yes, I do remember. Memory is imagination.

Blood on the table, blood on the moon. I pull my mother to her feet. She has wetted her old overcoat. I stuff her belongings back in the cardboard box and down we go in the lift. Down there we shall take the tram going up the hill. ‘Don’t you dare touch me!’ my mother shouts. ‘Rapist!’

It is like going back to the concavities of my youth. How could I ever have forgotten? I must have grown up here. Here on the corner, surely, here our old house stood. I remember that it used to be filled with the groaning of the sea wafted up the heights at night by the wind. From the windows we would watch the birds — as big as humans with useless shoulders. Imagine picking your nose when you have only wings for arms. There was a big tree then, full of these many-coloured birds. And sometimes a hunter came by early in the morning: he would harpoon one of the huge ones, the others would squawk and flap their heavy feathers, the harpoon was attached to a long nylon line, the hunter could never dislodge the big bird, he would pull and pull trying to reel in his catch, and eventually the entire tree with its colony of violently vituperating birds would budge, shudder, start moving; the hunter would heave and ho the tree as far as the market square down there, then he would stand a ladder against the trunk, we a gaggle of kids would be clustered around, ‘watch out for falling birds,’ he would jest as he climbed up the rungs to knock down his quarry. We then thought that each bird wore a differently patched coat. And here too under the windows we watched the procession of musicians snaking down the street the morning after the revolution. There were not enough instruments to go around so that most of the participants — so young and so vulnerable but so enthusiastic in their patched clothes — carried candles only. Candles make soft noises. In the dawn of the new day we could barely discern the flames of the candles. Each troop had at its head an old exiled agitator or a tired greyhaired gladiator playing a violin or blowing down a dented saxophone. They wore extravagant ties. Ours was a revolution marked by poverty.

And there is That Place among the dying and the mentally destroyed and the basket cases drooling at the mouth and the vagabonds with their amputated legs and the debilitated jobless ones who have used up all their rights — there we find B. His hair is white. His eyes are still blue. His cheeks are slack. He sits on the ground studying a block of black ebony wood. From the minute grains, the discoloured patches and the whorls, he can read the past and predict the future. It is all written down. What has been will be again and so on forever. He is living below a given horizon. He keeps his eyes lowered. No, he does not recognize us, but at the level of his gaze he remembers very well. ‘I like your tie,’ he mumbles; ‘it is still the same.’ And: ‘When you listen to the shell you can hear the moon moaning.’ I kiss his hands. There is nothing to be done.

We go back to the building of glass coops. I have a life waiting for me, my mother must catch her plane. Charley is waiting for us on the top floor. He smoothes down his tie. ‘I know, know it all,’ he says. ‘Don’t forget that I’m the caretaker. Your brother used to work for us, the police. He was an extraordinary physionomist. Yes, we would let him look at the photos of the suspects and he would read and interpret the profiles for us. Nothing escaped his mind. Maybe that is the reason. Maybe there is a threshold of saturation. A point of no return.’

My mother clutches her cardboard box with gnarled birdlike hands. I return to the glass room of the thin man. The blood has dried on the dark wood. No moon will shine or slime in the liquid. I adjust his hat, bandage his mutilated hands. I bend down low to kiss the wounds and say: ‘You are my brother, you are my brother.’

We leave. We go to the airport. There is an old wind in the empty trees. The flight is announced. ‘Oohh…’ my mother moans. ‘Bebebebe… Don’t leave me…’ But she doesn’t recognize me. Her old black face is bathed in tears.

another woman?

She washes up in her dinghy on the shore, she has no oars, she clings to the sides of the boat, the sea is insurrectional like a Japanese woodblock print depicting the engulfment of coastline and small human figures, waves sough and smooch on the shale of the beach, sprays give the air a glisten and a sparkle. Flotsam and jetsam. The dowdy dress clings to her shapeless body, grey locks plastered to her forehead, her eyes lie low and sullen in their sodden coffins. She gets out of the dinghy, the dinghy is rolled over by the crashing rollers and smashed to smithereens and rolling planks in the sud and the suck. Unsteady, difficult to keep the footing, slithering through loose pebbles smacked at by the foam-laced water. She goes to hide in the darkest retreat under the jetty, puts her back to a mouldy wooden pillar, turns upon her tormentor, now she is cornered, a snarl on the lips, she is brandishing a pistol. ‘I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him!’ she screeches above the slough and the slosh, the boom of the breakers, spittle flecking her chin. ‘If he comes near me I’ll shoot him like a dog. Imagine, good people, imagine. Why is he after me? Hew says I murdered his wife. Imagine! Why would I do so? I know them from nowhere, never saw them in all my life. Me shoot his whaif? Why ever? She’s exactly my age, I hear. I hear she has the same eyes. I hear without listening. What was there to gain? I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him!’

‘Indeed,’ an onlooker murmurs. ‘I knew the couple. Man and wife. This one here is the spitting image. Same dress. It is passing strange.’

‘Ah, yes,’ the second onlooker sighs. ‘I witnessed the shoot-out this morning. On the other side of the island. On the terrace of the hotel. A man came storming out screaming streams of curses at the mouth. Of his wife having been killed by his jealous mistress. People were knifing their breakfasts. The man was shooting at the air and the earth. People shouted hey hey there! This woman shouted and shot back. Six people died with red flowers in their hair. She ran off screaming to the marina where the boats are kept like mistresses. I saw it with my own eyes.’

‘Indeed,’ a third onlooker murmurs. ‘Ah, yes,’ a fourth one sighs. What makes you think there ever was another woman?

no longer

Ka’afir, the brother, the Other, wrote a work called The First Book Of Slow Gestures. (Some refer to is as The Papers Of Guilt.) It is recommended there that one should cut up in small morsels this entity known as Life. If not, how is one going to digest it? And unless one digests it entirely, how is one ever going to die? These are the ordinary thoughts grazing through the mind of an ordinary guy. The state of death is probably very gentle: a rusting car with wheels gone, resting in a dislocated garden. All things are reduced to the skull of a horse. It is also said that in this garden was found the skeleton of the tallest dwarf ever unearthed. Seven feet tall. The earth is rich.

At the outset of this second paragraph there is indeed a garden. Around the garden there is a city which on certain nights of the month will bear a moon like a Solanum sodomaeum. The city has streets with apartment buildings and insurance offices, also other gardens and then hills with winding gravel paths, umbrella pines, oleander bushes in bloom. Brides go there to be photographed in their white veils. Where the hill falls away, overlooking other gardens, a marble statue stands, dreaming death. Around the shoulders it wears the remnants of a cloak. Its nose is missing. On the pedestal is carved:

COMODOR

NAERATIVS

CE REALISVC

CONS ORD

CONDITOR

BALNEARVM

CENSVIT

Comodor was the son of Marcus Aurelius. He didn’t want to be a philosopher like his father, it was his wish to be a gladiator. To hack with the axe and to chop with the broadsword. All the statues of the city have mutilated faces. Somewhere an ancient Hungarian wanders through the streets with two plastic bags filled with chopped-off noses. Sometimes he goes to hide from the sun in another green reverie where there are marble slabs set in the soil and the nosy shadow of a pyramid. He considers it his duty to bring modest bites of food for the dead. But he can’t stand birds. He tries to give them the evil eyes. He believes them to be the uncontrolled thoughts of the deceased. He throws marble noses at them, trying to kill them. What is the sense of death if thoughts can continue?

In Ka’afir’s book there is the description of the life of a masterful sculptor. The apotheosis of his work was to be his own grave. It was of imposing dimensions as he was seven feet tall. For many years he carved and moulded — fashioning the friezes, twining the limbs, sculpting the horses, situating the snakes. It was to embody the eternity of life bearing the kernel of death. He often used to snigger up his sleeve and because he had a long nose his nickname was Horse. He completed the tomb, died, was laid away, the earth grew over it as if to heal a scar, nobody remembers its position. Death is on the side of awakening. It lies on its side next to awakening. It is awakening’s love-partner. When they make love, horses pull back their lips, flare their nostrils and paw the air; all time is effaced.

Dead birds litter the streets. Ants, small and black like words, are busy deconstructing the bodies mouthful by mouthful, remembering through dismemberment. In Ka’afir’s book there is the numbering of the thoughts of a man. Impressions and images litter the ancient capital of the man’s mind. He never wanted to be a thinker, he didn’t want to have a long nose. It was his wish to be happy, like a radio playing all to itself on the beach. The spy and the actor are after all in the same line of work, they occupy similar fields of entertainment, they paint the birds white. On balconies old women are sunning their varicose veins, old men are picking dead leaves from pot plants. The sun is so bright it must be refracting all available light. Young women arch their backs: they wear wee panties with just a touch of fur sown to the cleft, or a live butterfly. It will be good to sit on the roof, to follow the sun’s labours by nose, to think or to dream of T’ai chi, of slow tongue-gestures, of beheaded statesmen in the grip of stone, of marble slabs in grass greened by a pyramid’s shade, of killing birds as food for the dead gods, of the earth munching the light and integrating all dreams, of mirrors and of Horse. Consciousness drags thoughts behind it, as the jumper his billowing parachute along the ground. One must jump.

Then there is also the description of the man and his image. The man has a mirror in which he tries to locate and capture the sun. It is the Other. The mirror is black, but as the man leans forward to think he imagines seeing in its depths the mythical beast always at the back of his mind. The white horse. He emits a shuddering sigh. ‘He whose horse is the first to whinny at dawn will be king.’ Those who come to visit death first of all see the head of the horse. I don’t need a master, the man says. Does one have to have one to go for a shit? The man says: I shall write you down and I shall give it the title of All One Horse. You are black. You could be my brother. When the sun goes down the man shoots the mirror. There is a shuddering sigh. One must jump.

Then, in the seventh paragraph, there is the man. Name: Wormfood, though some know him as Bird-dream. Appearance: Hair like wool which has gathered dust. One cheek curving carved from the sun. Dried blood from one ear. The weal on the neck still fresh, angry, red. Lips drawn back so that the blue tongue protrudes. Eyelids half closed but eyes are looking at the back of the mind. Throat swollen with silence, stuck in the gullet a raucous word as purple as congealed blood. Soiled collar. Cheap jacket. Nothing in the pockets except an ear of paper with the words: I am your brother. Pants, a frayed hem. Underpants stained by ejaculated seed, traces of excretion. No socks. One shoe missing. Body smooth, shoulders drooped, belly slumped, sphincter relaxed, veins on hands swollen, feet loose at ankles, toes with corns, some dirt between toes, about seventeen inches between black toes and floor. Purpose: truth. Truth: no longer.

too late now

When you are all in prison, the walls are thick, the windows barred, it is too late now. Strange animals may be howling at night. When you are all dressed in tuxedos very smartly, it is essential to keep up appearances. Drinks are doing the rounds, bottoms up and mud in your eye, ‘For he’s a jolly good fe-hello and so say all of us!’ The walls of the cell are of an autochthonous yellow colour, plaster is flaking off, detainees have over the many years been urinating in the corners when they couldn’t hold it any longer and banging against the door brought no attention. Traces of saltpetre, of animal fear. You may be in a stable and you cannot see far enough. Far away the sea is eating the land. Along the blind wall of the prison Jean Genet lies buried in a clifftop koimeterion where the restlessness of the waves gather regularly to impart to the dead the illusion of hearing, but tides will undermine the rockface and his bones will end up in the wash of the waters, like a perfectly pigeoned word never to be pronounced.

I know the story. At the time of the revolt of the Buddhas in Urbos, when they ran through the streets like flames in their saffron robes, when the land was set on fire and later when the floods came because the dykes had been breached and the hedges burnt down, and when all the olive trees had been removed from the face of the earth — after that time, I also went looking for my grave. I came to the island where my father had lived his life and found that the grave had been effaced. I went to the prison where Charley, the caretaker, helped me consult the records. We found the corresponding number, signed and countersigned. Then he took me to the cell. The sea had been there well before us. He showed me the corpse with its caking of white mud, stuffed into a plastic bag together with another, older cadaver. ‘We are economizing space,’ Charley explained.

You may even be free to circulate within the blue-printed confines of the penitentiary. You can don your tuxedo and walk to the courtyard. If possible, if you have the time to do so, if the reaction provoked by fear is not too instantaneous — the freezing of the spine and the finger tightening around the trigger — if you could take a step backwards (let your face be eaten by shadows): you may realize that there’s no need to kill the animal. Admittedly the ‘foreignness’ of the beast is hard to stomach. You may have to clench your mind so as not to slide into a dark snarl, losing all control, that is, the observation of self. Keep the distances alive!

It is hunched against a distant wall of the courtyard, its back turned to you, its haunches big and awkward. Give it a chance. It will turn its big yellow head and the welling up of liquid in its eyes will make you think twice. Give it a free rein, give it time to learn the slow words. When the time is due it will have mastered the words of the script. It will become a better than average actor. Let it play the role of the valet in ‘The Blacks’.

‘Are you going to beat me? I cannot bear physical pain, you know, because I am an artist. In a certain way I was one of you, I too was a victim of the Governor-General and the nomenclatura. You aver that I venerated them? Yes and no. I was most unreverential. You fascinate me much more than they did. In any event, tonight I’m no longer that which I was yesterday because I too know how to betray. Should you want me to, without however my crossing over entirely to your camp, I could…’ Don’t you want to pass time? Keep an open house for angels?

Of course, this is a motion story, the history of mutation. But the narrator is absent. Indeed, the horse is an ancient form of writing. You ought to know the plot and it is better to wait for time to pass away, for the horse head to take on the shape of a big brush. It will be too big, more’s the pity, too heavy for a man to drag to his cell. There the walls will have become chalkier, whitened by age. Maybe, if you had the means, you could cover the spaces of your past with writing. ‘When you are all in prison, the walls are thick, the windows barred, it is too late now…’

the corrupted poem: fsk

We step out of the hotel; the sky is clear, a clean blue crack, pinch of autumn you might say; slight shiver of what’s to come like the rapid wriggle of a fish in cold liquid; gloom lurking beyond the horizon, the half-heard mournful hoot of the ferry-boat glimpsing its own reflection through the morning fog over the water, the madness in the mind, the poem behind the words you might say. But for now the air is bracing — a whiff of sal volatile. The city has a patina in tones of yellow, the tree leaves crusted by a sun which has lost its warmth but accumulated its glow: a gold-leafed city you might say. (You may say whatever comes to mind and it won’t change much. I is I. Then I am also the writer, the saltimbanco paraded in foreign parts, the sambo, the African, the saltigrade tumbler, the side-show. That makes two of us and we are so invigorated by the shimmering surroundings that we sometimes break into a saltarello. And then I’m writing this as we skip along from sound to sense to full stop, according my pen the saltatory movements of the fish. And that makes three of us.)

So we step out — Kråka, Nep, Tüne, Björn — hands in pockets, bloom on cheeks, deodorant under armpits, wind in hair, tinkle of salty laughter on lips, ripple of silver slivers and shards on water. Sightseeing. Get to the point, you might say. Yes, we are on our way there. Over the bridge, along the banks of a rush of water. Many bridges, much water, locks, weirs, levels, dappled light, skimming images, a tidal swelling and sough, lake and inland sea. Fishermen are wetting their lines. Kråka laughs. Björn tells of how once a year the authorities empty buckets of little fish in the waterways, like silver digits, like spittle-smoothed syllables. Thus do they stir up the surface to entice the populace. These fingers must be writing away somewhere and by and by the syllables must be putting on sense, but they regularly vanish for ever, as if to sea. Does the fist remember the fingers? What remains is blank intensity.

For Nep it is timely for us to be reminded that we are in a romantic city. Have we quite forgotten how many poets hide here? Do we not on the blurred screen of our mind’s eye see the slumped silhouettes, their slurring gait? Ah, and ever since forever, since time and time and half a time at least, the bleeders have slunk here on dark nights, shattered by love and other demons of misery, to lean over the parapets and pour their poor poems into the sombre flood. These verses were to clods of secret soul-eruptions still warm and wet, at times consisting solely of an oath or an aah. They would watch the undigested truths hit the black mirror like so many sobs, to sink into eternal oblivion, leaving neither phosphorous wake nor echoing ripple nor flip of fin. In effect, joining the other disappearances.

Maybe this explains that. Was Nep Tüne demonstrating to us how a fish partakes of water the way a poem turns words into flesh? Ingurgitating the flesh in other words?

Kråka laughs. What about? Wait! Come closer and lend us your eyes. Please allow us to clear up past errors. Look, one old gentleman is pulling a flash from the water. Would you believe it? There is this thing finally flopping at the end of his line.

And now cheers go up. Hats trace surprised eyebrows in the air. There comes the fracas of a band up Strömgat, horsemen with wide buttocks preceded by a banner ruffling the wind, men in plumed hats crashing cymbals, a hoarse shouter of hup-hup-hup.

The fisherman scoops up his catch. Waits for it to die from alienation. Up on his hind legs and off to the nearest news stand, where he grabs a scandal sheet to wrap around his find, some bladet or posten or nyheter, other-world news intimately against inked meaning, to carry same home as if on a salver.

And quick now. After all, our time is up. Please excuse the saltus. The man warms the pan. After some time he opens the paper. And weeps over the tarnished phonemes — like dull scales — of the corrupted poem: Fsk.

letter to a mummy

I had disappeared for a long time. Friends found me in this rainy city. During the past papers I acquired knowledge of the king and the princess of the land — or those accorded the roles — the courtiers and the courtesans and the actors and the spies. A man with sores on his face and an ugly contusion all around the neck came to me and presented himself as my brother. I wanted to believe him. Together we tried to remember a mother and a father, but it was difficult: white clay covered the bodies. Birds had discovered the meagre meat. I became acquainted with Sobek, the tamer of crocodiles, who told me that one could not always be so sure of what was to be found below the clay. Feed will be feed — that was his wisdom — and some dreams have the contours and the cavities of skulls. I took my friends down a gentle green hillside to a vantage point overlooking the narrow mud-walled street penetrating the city. I wanted them to know where I came from, and I pointed out to them the square in the distance where the Trojan horse used to be kept. Hermes told me that when he was young little boys still came to climb on the steed’s back. They loved it and it was a tame animal. Eventually the wood had become mouldy and history passed it by. I asked Hermes whether he ever knew God. ‘In a way,’ he answered. ‘In a way. But God’s been buried for some time now because he was in the way. How else was one to invent landscapes?’ I then asked Hermes whether he still saw God. ‘From time to time,’ he said, ‘whenever I go down to look for the horses. He’s a thief, you know.’ I thereupon asked Hermes to please thank God on my behalf for not having made me black, that I was indeed grateful for having escaped that punishment. Should I also have let slip a word about exile? But it doesn’t exist! Those you think of as exiles are only people with shadows in their faces and when you suddenly open a door they will scurry away like cockroaches in a dark cupboard. At most, they dance differently. And the five or six members of a family all living with one legal identity card between them? How is one, anyway, to distinguish one black from another? By drawing. By drawing away from reality, away from the past. I may have established a gallery of ancestors and self portraits, but a drawing is always in the present tense. Friends had to dig me up in this rainy city. They had to put on boots because of the mud, and their robes were dirtied. We discuss the merits of uncovering and the usefulness of embroidering the find or the absence with words. Aesthetics, we agree, is a form of decadence of that art which constituted a means of communicating with the environment. I have to go now to that distant place. Will there still be boats on the lake? I have an appointment in the place of whispering, a report to make out, to write and hand over this letter to a mummy.

Content

Breyten Breytenbach
Intimate Stranger

~ ~ ~

between the legs

the bobbing lights of the harbour

be sploshing over your seat

how beautiful the mountain!

remnants of my story

like a whiplash

this unmemorable memory exists!

the thieves and the word

to be the flash

bones of god

the body quivers with the word

spider to the fly

horse gallops on post-haste

a chain for his watch

dead at last

‘brother’

over the eyes

and this mirror

jade or alabaster

ye-ah-ah-ee…

the essence of his teaching

bathed in tears

another woman?

no longer

too late now

the corrupted poem: fsk

letter to a mummy