Breyten Breytenbach - All One Horse

‘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.’

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.

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.