Breyten Breytenbach - Intimate Stranger

When you wake you may still have echoing in the deep ear a last shout of the night’s trip. Immediately the images fade, coherence crumples as in a photo negative turning glasse-yed and glossy with whiteness in the fire of exposure. That whiteness which is totally dark. Similarly, when slipping into sleep, the jumble of images coagulate, cohere, rising from an exposed negative being dipped in the acid bath of what you always knew without knowing it. And you dream away.

This is why your notebook is important. It is a portable keyboard for exercising the fingers of the eye, ear and nose. You jot down the impressions, note the riffs, run the words until you can see the sinews and the curve of muscles oiling the light. You draw instant portraits. You encapsulate a whole novel in one clear vision of fifty words; it will be obscure by the time you re-read it. A notebook is not a place of drafts, but of draughts. It is a seedbed. Of course, many seeds just die and others are eaten by birds, but birds are not bad at being dream messengers with night-colored wings. You could do worse. (You could be an Afghani waiting for the terrible birds of destruction to rain over your land at night. .)

The notebook is a word-camera. You move through the city and gather the pickings of the senses. Extremes come together on a page. A pavement of fugacious feet has inscribed in the cement a timeless relic of love in the shape of crude initials carving up (and caving) a heart. Or you see inscribed in one such stone: I love Chicago . This is New York. You will become aware not only of the visual collage of impressions but also the auditory, all those throwaway phrases of raw indiscretion on the wind. The tiny and the extravagant blend: your eye tries to spell the infinitesimal squashed insects pretending to be numbers on a phone card, and you look up to have skyscraper-high electronic Times Square letters in blaring colors smash your retinas. In Mulberry Street, a discarded door on a rubble pile has scrawled over it: So long, Scheck, you won’t be missed . A young lady pushes her fully clothed cello before her down the street. From time to time she stops to wait patiently, holding the bloated-bellied instrument now sagging over its one small wheel. Then she bends down to carefully collect the droppings in a plastic bag. As you cross her path you hear the cavernous groans; she must have a bag full of dark notes by now. When it is the annual festival of San Gennaro you will wend your way through the dense crowd of sausage-gobbling bulky humans and off the main thoroughfare find a side-show proposing the smallest woman in the world, Little Lena, twenty-nine inches high with hands barely two inches across and wearing size two shoes, and a billboard announcing: West Indies cultural export . Don’t you see there’s a miniaturized world to be peeped at in there? In the Metropolitan the Ingres drawings are an afternoon’s worth of eternity scribbles snared in one sitting. On Union Square market where one can buy a minuscule tot of snake-green cat grass juice guaranteed to make you meow, you see a hand-scribbled note: If you get to it and you can’t do it — there you jolly well are! Lord Buckley . In a run-down rotting area of the ‘Loaisaida’ an outer lives with all his junk in a battered ‘Oldsmobooger’ splattered with stickers: Never play leapfrog with a Unicorn; We don’t give a damn how you did it up north; Out of my way! My kids need to pee; A clear conscience is nothing else than poor memory; If you’re not calling Dr. Kevordian, keep smiling. .

Writing is life in progress. And your notebook is there to remember it.

This in-between season when it is not clear whether one is still in autumn or already in winter, but already it is dark, can be bitter. Some days are balmy, the late afternoons in the park may be warm with an orange glow staining the brick facades of the buildings around. But the sun dies earlier, the nights are longer, they may even seem endless when one is poor and homeless. Often, there’s a dirty wetness in the air billowing from the two rivers on either side of the city and from the opaque ocean further out. The tops of buildings are obscured, swathed in ragged fog. Everything is hard. The sidewalk under one’s feet is hard and cold.

Bernard’s only hope is to last out another year. By now he doesn’t remember how long he’s been in this city. He came here many years ago to pursue a career as a writer. He knew he had his twin brother Simon somewhere in one of the boroughs, they’d lost contact long ago when they still wanted to study medicine and both dropped out, mostly because they couldn’t afford the tuition and had nothing against which to borrow. They went their different ways. Bernard already had this problem with drink. It made him smell bad and caused him to be sour company. Once, in the shop of a man framing prints, he heard it said that Simon was married and living somewhere in the anthill; he wouldn’t know where to start if he wanted to find him. He did not linger to ask for further information because the framer’s vicious dog attacked him, ripping a wound in his leg, maybe because he smelt of dirty streets and old vomit. He didn’t particularly wish to find his brother either. By now, if they crossed one another in the street, they wouldn’t recognize each other. And if they did, what would they have to talk about? It is a city filled with strangers, some of them mumbling, each with her or his own anger or despair or illness. People are nicer to dogs than to one another. When they come upon a pooch on a leash they go down on their hunkers and purse their lips to baby-talk to the animal. They cannot help but fondle the animal’s ears to show what clean lives they’re living.

In earlier years Bernard managed to find lodging with other bohemians, people with bright but dirty shirts — and in the beginning there was a woman, older than him and with rolls of puckered cellulite around her thighs, the relationship did not weather well — but since many seasons now he has been shuffling from cheap boarding house to asylum to vacant lot or the porch of a derelict building. He knows some of the other vagrants — the little old Chinese woman in baggy clothes transporting a mountain of collected empty cans, the mysterious lady with the long overcoat reaching to the ground, the gloves, the dark glasses and the broad hat pulled deep over her face, pushing a pram with all her earthly belongings, the old men with their stiff movements and their hand-printed cardboard signs imploring help — but he seldom speaks to any of them. In a duffel bag slung over his shoulder he has some clothes and a wad of manuscripts. Lately, particularly now with the cold coming, a cold wind blows from hell, he has started using a push-carriage to keep two blankets and some unfolded boxes upon which he sleeps at night. He will be an isolated animal entering its burrow, safe in its own smell.

Tonight he has returned to a sidewalk on the Lower East Side where weeds grow from the cracks. A broken awning offers some protection against the inclement weather. The police don’t patrol here too often and mostly they let him be. It is going to be a long night and he knows already that his leg will be aching again.

He lays the cardboard strips flat on the cement and then wraps himself in the blankets before lying down. He has covered his head but is not yet asleep when he feels somebody or something, it could be a stray dog, gently nuzzling or prodding him. He folds the blanket away from his face and looks up with a disgruntled squint. A very old man is bending awkwardly over him.

It is immediately clear to Bernard that this old-timer is a bum. The clothes are reasonably clean and a soft cap partially shadows his features but the air of indigence is unmistakable. When one is at the end of the road you always recognize the fellow travelers. You mutter a curse and you look away, but you can’t help seeing them.