Ingrid Winterbach - It Might Get Loud

In the second room is the hanged man. His body has been stuffed and his mouth is agape. Next to him is a small wire fetish. The clock on the wall has stopped at twenty to four. The hour of the ghoul and the grave-robber. The man’s mouth is forever fixed in a gruesome grimace. He’s hanging by his neck, his head droops at an angle, underneath his dangling feet is a high stool, covered with a ragged white kitchen cloth edged with five thin red stripes. Behind and above him is a small window with the figure 39 stencilled on it in black. Next to him a small tin pail is suspended from a nail. The wire fetish next to him has twigs for arms and legs, his feet are the dried berries of a withered branch, his body is a nest of tangled wire with bits of red thread in it.

Perhaps it was the Headman’s idea to suspend my soul-bereft, abused body in a like manner from a hook somewhere. Next to the martyr, perhaps, the woman with the dead face and the cloak of chains. On him and his henchmen I have declared war. For me it is a matter of the eradication of his entire evil empire. The demons will be driven from the swine and the strangulated souls will spew forth from the gullets of geese, birds and sheep. Peace will reign once again. Every object clogging the spaces from top to bottom will be hauled outside, and every single one put to the torch on a gigantic pyre.

Apart from my physical symptoms, of which I have made mention (my gullet feeling as if it were being lacerated, my lungs hurting when I breathed, the pain in my intestines), I suffered for months from the perturbation of my spirit and my emotions. As a consequence of this physical pain and emotional pressure I harboured distorted ideas and perceptions, as if my nerve endings were completely raw, and had no defence against the onslaught of impulses and impressions. My sense of proportion — of where my body starts and where it ends — my perception of time and space were disrupted. At times it felt as if I were being doused in hot water. At times I could not complete my sentences, so great was the suffering of my soul. I was terrified to go to sleep for fear of the hallucinations that the night might bring. In my ears there was a constant sound as of water boiling. I could hardly control my voice. I had onsets of suffocation that made me feel as if I were buried in sand. I was tired to death after a short walk. As if birds had struck their claws into my knees. And all the time there was the interminable shrill screaming — the interminable mocking of the birds. It was enough to drive you insane.

But the greatest abomination, the most hideous effigy, is that of the ruler over the domain, the pope of the underworld — the swine’s head, enshrined in the third room. One wall of the big room is adorned from top to bottom with wooden crosses, as in a cathedral of the underworld, an unholy sepulchre — wooden crosses of every size and kind: crosses of bigger and smaller planks, of crossbars, mouldy wood, sticks big and small, logs as thick as railway sleepers, crossbars hammered with nails into the vertical axis, the vertical and horizontal bars lashed together with rope, with wire, with nails, with red ribbon. Sometimes the crossbar is fashioned not from wood but from a large bone — like the femur of an animal. I never counted, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were in the vicinity of three hundred, four hundred crosses on the wall.

In the centre of the room, at approximately one-third distance from the back wall, is the swine’s head, mounted on a number of loose planks, higher than a man’s height, loosely bound with an orange rope and attached to a broad, fire-blackened piece of wood. Here and there some hide remains on the head, the skull visible in places beneath the skin. The ears are still there! The snout is still there! One of the tusks! The expression in the tiny, dead eyes I shall never ever forget. To peer into those eyes is to gaze into the soul of evil. The colour of the skin is off-white, dead-white, grey-white, the hue of lifeless skin, the texture coarse and porous.

Around its neck, as around the throat of a Spanish nobleman as painted by El Greco, is a frilly white ruff. Oh impropriety! Oh unholy apparition, oh prince of the underworld.

If only it were an hallucination, a chimera, but there it is, the thing is real, every bit as real as my hand, tangible — if I were to overcome my revulsion, step forward and touch it.

A grinning, grimacing effigy. The lord of the cloven-hoofed, of the underworld, ruler over the cloven-hoofed, of whom the Headman is the captain and the chief executive officer.

It is here, in full sight of henchman and grinning swine, that my body was repeatedly abased and subjected to bestial practices. Here it was, in this space, that my body was delivered up to the unbridled pleasure of all and sundry — like that of a harlot. It was here, under the lifeless gaze of the lord of the swine, that my body and my soul had near-irreparable damage inflicted upon them.

But the end is nigh! The end is nigh! The end is approaching from the four corners of this extensive yard. They shall not be spared, one and all, the die has been cast against them and against the Headman in particular, the wrath of God will be poured out over them, nothing will remain of them, or of their tormenting multitudes or their ceaseless blattering, and they shall no more be exalted. I have seen the chambers, the false shrines, I have seen the gods of ordure — the lady of chains, the hanged man, the lord of the swine. I have seen the images on the walls, the chambers crammed from top to bottom with signs, the writing on the wall, the stacked bones of animals, the heaps of limbs of dolls like the hacked limbs of people, the grimacing baboon skulls, the unidentifiable objects and the homunculi in great glass jars, pallid as pickled organs. The repulsive black-and-white renderings of victims of rape, murder and torture, with bruised flesh and mouths agape. I have seen it all, all.

My dear brother, Iggy concludes, I have seen it all, and it has filled me with loathing. But also with an unquenchable resolve. My suffering has come to an end, I am eagerly awaiting my imminent transfiguration.

AFTER HER MEETING WITH BENJY Maria Volschenk drives back to Stellenbosch. The mountains are oh so lovely. Late autumn — the vineyards are turning colour, the trees have lost almost all their leaves. Under different circumstances enchanting — but today it nauseates her. You can stomach only so much of this saccharine prettiness. She’s not in the mood for it today. Then rather Durban’s unpretentious industrial areas — the section between Sydney Street and the harbour; Edwin Swales Road on the way to the Bluff, with one container depot after the other on the left.

In Stellenbosch she has tea in a coffee shop that she normally likes, but today she finds offensively pretentious. She sits at the long, well-scrubbed table and pages in a desultory fashion through a magazine. It’s so typical of Benjy’s way of functioning in the world to decide that someone would want to wipe him out. She hopes that as so often he’s misinterpreting the situation. If he really is in mortal danger — what on God’s earth then? She wishes she didn’t have to deal with the situation on her own.

She tries to reach Andreas once more. No reply on his cell phone. When he’s working towards an exhibition he’s often incommunicado. Nobody to whom she can turn. She doesn’t fancy trying to explain the situation to Vera or Susanna.

She sends a text message to Jakobus — he is at least geographically close to her at present:

Crisis with Benjy. He thinks his life’s in danger. Andreas as always unavailable.

Jakobus messages back:

Benjy can always come and lie low here on the farm. Refuge for dodgers and drop-outs. Josias B a doughty champion of men on the run.