Breyten Breytenbach - All One Horse

‘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.’

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.’