Ingrid Winterbach - It Might Get Loud

Maria meets Benjy in a café in Cape Town. How her maternal heart warms to him when she embraces him! She is glad to see him. He’s always had something disarming about him, which wrings her heart and breaks down her defences. So plucky, so bravely on the make, and yet so vulnerable. He’s wearing a striped T-shirt, baggy, calf-length shorts and running shoes. (She hopes his underpants are clean — Benjy’s never maintained a particularly high standard of hygiene.) But this morning there’s something else about him. He’s changed since she saw him a few months ago. Whereas since his twenties she’s never seen him as a teenager but also not yet as a man — indeterminate, everything about him so indeterminate, as if he didn’t want to commit to adulthood — this morning his masculine embodiment strikes her as less ambivalent. He seems taller, his arms seem stronger and hairier. And it startles her slightly to see signs of dark chest-hair peering out above the neck of his shirt. When did that happen?! His father has no chest-hair (ambitious opportunist and fucking insufferable charmer that he is). The child has definitely acquired firmer sexual definition. That at least is gratifying. Whatever comes next.

But in spite of his physically less ambivalent embodiment, his talk is still frustratingly clumsy. How is it that an intelligent, articulate child can choose to make himself so hard to understand? There’s nothing wrong with his linguistic abilities. He was uttering full sentences at the age of eleven months. Now there is this linguistic regression, as if the coordination between his brain and tongue is malfunctioning. It must be a deliberate, strategic choice, this abysmal verbal projection of himself. (Possibly even an ideological choice.) Part of a strategy to disarm his opponent: frustrate him, confuse him, subvert his expectations. It’s not going to be of any use to upbraid him or to get impatient — he’s the most counter-impressionable person she knows. His hair is also darker, she notes. Good hair, thick and curly. And the appealing eyes, speckled like quail’s eggs. Is she concentrating on his best qualities, as if she’s weighing up the child’s chances on the relationship or marriage market? Does she want Benjy to come into his own in a constructive relationship? A good woman, man, whatever, somebody who will care for him body and soul? Apparently yes. So that she need stress about him less and live in peace and ultimately die in peace.

How are you? she asks. He is evasive. No, he’s okay. (No point in putting it off any longer.) What’s the matter, she asks him, what’s the problem?

He’s actually like in this business, this kind of venture that you can call a business but it’s not actually that either, anyway he and two other guys like sort of initiated it, he’ll take her there, the premises are shit great, it’s actually shit hot and the prospects are like massive, if they only, if only actually, if it wasn’t for, it’s like vast, the possibilities are endless, it’s just sort of these initial stumbling blocks, as in obstacles, just worse. But it’s actually sort of like an ideal opportunity.

From this she deduces, she says, that he’s started a kind of business, that he started it along with two other persons, that the premises are promising, that the prospects are good if only they can overcome a few initial stumbling blocks. (Stumbling blocks — to be expected when Benjy gets involved in anything.)

Where is this business and what is its nature? she asks him. It’s a warehouse in an industrial area, he says, sort of just south of the docks but actually like on the Foreshore if you just keep going on the main road, a warehouse that they’re renting and they actually deal in sort of recycled paper that they then want to distribute, they now have like the space they must just actually get a few other things in place.

Who is financing this? she asks. It was actually sort of fine but then the two other guys like pulled out. Now he has to on his own like shell out the money if they want to actually carry on with the project, he replies.

Benjy has once again, for the umpteenth time, been bamboozled by swindlers and sharpers and snake-oil salesmen. Or he’s acted on impulse without ensuring that he had the necessary indemnifying contracts.

What is the estimated loss? (No point in making a hullabaloo about it now. After all, it’s only money that’s at stake.)

‘But it’s sort of not all,’ he says suddenly.

‘What else?’

‘It’s sort of that there are guys after me. It’s that there are people who are as in out to wipe me out.’

‘What do you mean — wipe you out?’

‘Well. Sort of to take me out.’

‘What do you mean — take you out?’

‘Ma,’ says Benjy, ‘there are guys who are threatening to kill me. And they are sort of serious.’

THE DOMINION OF THE CLOVEN-HOOFED is the dominion of the Headman. And the swine’s head there is the effigy of his god. The Headman rules over this empire of the cloven-hoofed — those in human as well as in animal guise. The Headman is the deputy of the swine god and his chief executive officer. The swine god issues instructions and the Headman executes them. The Headman is without conscience, without pity, without mercy.

THAT AFTERNOON, SLIGHTLY GROGGY from painkillers, Karl thinks now he can no longer put it off. Now he has to read Iggy’s report all the way through. Whether he feels up to it or not. In spite of his lethargy, he takes the neatly typed pages and carries on reading with anxious foreboding.

There are pigs here: black ones and speckled ones, Iggy writes. Sows and boars. Little ones and big ones. There is a sheep and a cow or two. Goats. A few chickens. Geese. From my room I can see the mountain. When I stand outside my door, the city lies spread out before me: three towers to the right. In the beginning I found everything beautiful, everything here was interesting. I watched the animals with interest. There is a lot to look at in the yard. I thought this was a good place for me. But from the outset I felt a disquiet in some of the large spaces. Weapon storage areas. I should have known. I should at that stage already have sensed the unholy emanations of the walls. Now it feels as if every detail of every room has been branded on my memory — I’ll never escape it. There are the five principal spaces. Each with very high walls, a circular roof and white-washed walls. In each of the spaces a great variety of stuff — things, of every conceivable description — is stored. Also an effigy. Each of the large spaces houses an effigy. Call it a reproduction, a facsimile, a simulacrum. Call it what you will, it dominates that space. Each one is an incarnation of Beelzebub, a representation of him in a different guise.

In the first room is the woman in chains. Our Lady of the Chains, the Headman called her. Her face is like a death mask, set into a larger block of plaster of Paris, the upper part like a headdress with flowers of cement, or gypsum. This headdress is additionally adorned with dry twigs and flowers. The face looks veiled, ashen, tormented. A martyred corpse. Around her mouth is dried blood, staining the lower part of the plaster block. Her body is fashioned from a single white wooden block, of about a man’s height. Around this block a vast number of chains have been draped, some of them fitted with locks, so that the woman seems to be wearing a cloak of chains. Around the pedestal a very thick, rusty chain is wound. In front of her feet forty locks stand upright, and a short distance further, a small pile of locks and keys. Also little piles of nails. This effigy is hideous to behold. I must never think of it again.