Breyten Breytenbach - All One Horse

‘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…’

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.

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.