Breyten Breytenbach - Mouroir

A while further we came to an opening in the ground down which we clambered, first K and then I. It is cool inside this labyrinth but very dangerous too because in places the passage is not only more restricted than the waist of a man but furthermore with a swivel or a crinkle in the narrowest section. It is not entirely in obscurity however and sometimes there’s a little more space so that one can stand bent over to remove the powder and the bits of wood from your knees and sleeves and then there are stalactites and stalagmites of a pearlgrey or a moth-white colour. The sides of the tunnel glimmer and are smooth as coral to the touch of the hand. The hand-palms are unsociable like toothless parliamentarians. Glass, you think, glass and alabaster; sweetness and thrashing. Often it was too alarming to breathe. Higher we crawled on our stomachs through the bowels and the belly of the hill — it is inevitable that I should use this image which is entirely symbolic of course — until we arrived again in a larger hall, spacious enough, and hewn from the living rock itself.

Here we could hear water flowing. One wall of this space is blocked off by a curtain hanging from the vaulted roof to the floor. The curtain is suspended by rings from a curtain rod which stretches from one end of the hall to the other so that one can easily slip the cloth open. From behind the partition we hear the lamenting of several pale voices, how they rise and disappear. In the hall, on a chair behind a desk sits a woman. When we enter she gets up. Her hair is as grey as sweet water in a dirty glass and the fire-resistant plastic frame of her spectacles is blue like that of an American tourist. It will be far-fetched and unreal and indecent to think that her breasts too might long ago have been blossoms (the firefree plastic), for now there is an ungainly bosom, an enormous goitre, a monstrous soft fruit, and adipose. Stains show under the arms. The lady invites us to return for a conducted tour of her catacombic domain whenever it may suit us. Outside the hall we found ourselves once again against the opposite slope of the traversed hill, in the parking lot under the coolness-trees of the flaking tower. Our wives and K’s children were there waiting for us. High in the tower, through a half-closed shutter, one sees fleetingly the visage of an aged person with a morose expression and a lighter-coloured fungus or spot — nearly luminous — slightly higher than the eyebrow; against the wall or the ceiling of the room behind the shutter one suspects the ruddy wash of glass-like or burning reflections; but the perceived person is immersed in old thoughts of his own, staring in another direction, towards the interior of the country, perhaps over a sudden depression in the earth where accumulated junk and discarded contracts turn in the wind, where farmers squat to scratch with twigs the encrusted cow dung from their gaiters, where women with thick lower limbs lie in the cool protection of a shrub, naked from the knee to the hip and the skin of the buttocks all puckered. We can smell the sea. It smells of rotten eggs.

The lady with the bosom which hangs twitching from her neck and shoulders, like a calf just born, too weak still to climb to its legs but already alive with awkward movements, sweet, thrashing — the lady, our guide — pulls aside the curtain covering one wall of the hall of stones. The space between curtain and wall is divided in separate cells. The grey curtain’s folds glisten with a phosphorescent sliminess where the eyes of moths watered, it brings to mind the veins in old glass, and the guide moves it to one side. In the first section there is a trough or a manger and in this crib lies an old woman. Her hair is curly and her face wrinkled and red and humid like that of an infant who has just been writhing and crying. She wears a home-knitted sweater, buttoned to just below the chin. Her gown is pushed up to above the hips. Her bare thighs like the skin of an old naked hen. On her one foot, the right one, there is a silk stocking. Through the stocking one may see that the foot is dark, as if exceptionally contused. But it is also shiny and smooth and from close up it is clear then that the foot, up to the ankle, is entirely covered (overgrown) with long, rough, thick, black hairs. The woman lay on her back, the eyes closed and her hands balled to fists, and she kept on repeating in a weeping voice: “Look at my foot, my foot. It’s all hairy. It’s the hair of the fairy. Look at my foot, my foot. . ”

In the other units, separated by wooden partitions, there was a bed here and a cradle there. And in each of these, under grey covers there were human figures stuffed into the rags of blankets and counterpanes, everyone wailing or lamenting with particular intensity at his or her own pitch. Watch out! They were all old, sometimes grey, sometimes without clothes. The eyes were either shut tight or staring blindly (staring at blindness) or else veiled by glassy tears — and a white matter in the corners of the eyes, around the lids. Where some of them have kicked away the bedcovers, as writhing babies sometimes do, you can see how smudged the thickly applied make-up has become, how fudged are the rouge and the corpse-white powder and the black accentuations. You will also notice the clown clothes, the costumes of fools, of augusts, of pierrots — blocked, striped, with dots, patched, too voluminous or too tight. Under the blankets, on the mattresses, there was sawdust — humid, mouldy, with insects. They were the weak of mind, those who have become children, the droolers, the Irish terrorists, the moribund members of a dismantled circus who washed up here, the orphan people, those who were rendered anonymous by war, gypsies without a fatherland, earlier clients of the eating tower which is now spoilt, retired police spies — all of them now in the care (or safekeeping? under observation?) of the lady with the glasses of fireproof blue plastic. Or were these tatters and folds the standard outfit for all admitted to this institution?

We continue inspecting and then decide to go down the maze again, to crawl on our bellies to the other exit, to the live burial ground of the horses. It is still autumn. I notice how the person crawling ahead of me gets stuck in a narrowing of the pipe and how she can neither advance nor retreat. I can look down her dress further than the hips. And I thought: by means of our bones the flesh clings to life, or, by means of the skeleton does the flesh adhere to life.

Nobody knew the origin of his history, of how he happened to be there. One could only speculate. Perhaps — so the theories went — he had been abandoned by some passing fugitives. It could be that he was the offspring of pioneers who had moved through these barren regions, tried to settle, and perished, overcome by the hostile environment. Or else that he had been kidnapped while still very young and then left for dead somewhere among the dun-coloured dunes by gangsters who’d lost their gamble and fallen out with one another. It would be tempting to think that he was a young prince, illegitimate for sure, left to die there because of palace intrigues. It would be even more tempting to imagine that he’d had some choice in the matter, that he had escaped to this paradise — the paradise of neither knowing nor questioning. What if — sacrilegious thought! — he were some weird mutation, dropped by one of the creatures among which he now lived? But nobody really knew and no one would ever know how to solve the riddle. (And even so he could never be lost. Is it not written in the Book that He is closer to us than the artery in the neck?)

Neither was it ever made clear how his presence among the wandering herd of gazelles was first observed. People later claimed that an old tramp, or a schnorrer crossing the desert to a far-off marketplace to flog his trinkets and his rags, first saw him. Others maintained that it must have been nomads. Or explorers. (Though we do not read that either Livingstone or von Humboldt or Burton or Speke or Scott or Saint-Exupéry or Münchhausen ever passed over these wastes.) Or tax collectors then. Or ash-tongued missionaries with embers in the eye sockets. Or mapmakers. Or American tourists. Or game-thieves. . The first inkling of his existence became as obscure as his very origins. Time is a desert. The minds of men sift away with the sand. Winds flow over the sands, erasing tracks. Factors are obfuscated. But in this expanse, white and treacherous as a page slowly being eroded by words, facts serve no function in any event. Horizons are too abstract here. It is recounted that some clan leader in the dusty past had moved his eyes above the fluttering veil over the illimitable nothingness, that he had squinted at various points along the edge of his vision and that he had named these, rather lyrically, Abd el Kadel, Mesrour, Ahmed Madrali, Israfel, Al Sirat, Nour ed Deen.