Breyten Breytenbach - Mouroir

On the stoop some of the other guests are already at table. It is early yet. The square frames even now still show the fine yellow light of muffled electricity. We walk down the length of the stoop. In the corner is a Spanish couple — the hidalgo with the grey suit and the cigar and the crossed ankles. Wait for me here then. Let me first go and rinse my fingers because the night was long and my hands are unkempt and oily from all the writing, and the leaves shrill so, exactly like pens proceeding over paper in a scraping way. You order our breakfast meanwhile. I shall take a cappuccino with the croissants. Better to have attempted all things and found them empty than to have tried nothing and leave your life a blank. Did you know that the crescent-shaped early bread originated in Vienna where it is called a Kipfel in memory of the Turks who besieged that city? Soon it will be broad daylight.

I am in the tiled bathroom and I lift the hands to my face. The hands smelling vaguely of horse. Water is lapping in the wash-basin. All of this already so long ago. So many years since I’ve seen you last, since I finally lost you. Whom shall I ever tell my story to? I look in the mirror and am frightened. The long grey hair there, and the terrible thick white face, the blubbery blancmange of the dewlap and the mouth buried in folds, the rough pores of the hide. An ancient dismantling. From face to face. It awaits me.

Late that afternoon we went swimming for the last time in the sea at the bottom of the garden, the slanting rays. Shadows had started fumbling over the land and the sea was perceptibly growing more winy and deeper. The earth is its own impediment to light. In this very blue glow we plashed about until my wife’s hair was lank and sluggish like a shoe to the sloe-eyed face, and then we ran back up the garden in our pale bodies. Behind us the sea was churning the gravel, and quickly afterwards darkness.

It was the next day that we departed for our destination: the North. (“The Devil hath established his cities in the North” — St Augustine.) Father, Mother, my wife and I, our dead uncle Don Espejuelo and the warder. We were to drive to the city from where we could take the aeroplane — and onward in two legs, first to a halfway point and then beyond to the true North. Complicated! Cutting up the journey and using two tickets each somehow worked out cheaper. Away from the sea we thus sped, the road winding through the dry hills with the sparse scrub, and in the back of the car our dead uncle Don Espejuelo was coughing dust and shaking his head at the senselessness.

We found the city quite deserted and dark. Even the air terminal was enfolded in darkness as if by heavy drapery and we came upon no other prospective passengers there. Here we were to wait for a while before we picked up our tickets and all the necessary paraphernalia and papers with which to proceed past the customs barrier to the airstrip somewhere outside the limits of the agglomeration. That, I was convinced, would present major problems: the man of customs in his white shorts would leaf through our passports and then poke his head through the rolled-down window to scan the interior of the car and he might just ask a question of our dead uncle Don Espejuelo sitting there as big as life in his dust coat and his dark glasses and surely Don Espejuelo would open his mouth to utter his favourite silly argument — “He is two. Always he is together like wheat transformed. And what is it holds him together? Why, the sandwich spread of the soul to get her. Don’t open him up. One-sliced he’ll become crumbly and dead: just bread. . ” — whereupon the perplexed official (not programmed for this type of irregularity) may sharpen his glance and our uncle would vomit his cackling cough and his coat will probably even come awry or flap open to show that underneath it harbours merely dust and then we should be in trouble because it is surely illegal to be gallivanting along the State’s roads with a defunct member on the back seat, even though in presence of a warder. . “And anyway,” Don Espejuelo would compound the official’s ire with a bare-toothed grin, “it is anyway to pass from the hardly known to the hardly unknown.” Full of disjointed and inappropriate clichés he is, Don Espejuelo. “Point less, hah!”

But for now we went wandering through the murky halls of the air terminal. I thought of buying some reading matter for the flight. At the news stand a magazine named Times turned out to be a religious tract. I picked up a newspaper call The Jewish News but that proved to be several sheets of advertisements for furniture removers. And the pages were yellow and coated with dust. A little further along the vast mezzanine floor a young lady tried to tempt us with some souvenirs: she wanted to sell my wife a nose-ring of dull silver encrusted with several tiny green emeralds. At this my wife wrinkled her nose and sniffed disdainfully.

Yes, it was time to set out for the airfield. We walked out to the car parked by the kerb. But here Father stopped us. Don Espejuelo, he announced, has gone missing and would have to be found before we may continue. It is not done to discard one’s family en route . Nobody knows where he’s disappeared to, no, not a living soul. And with this he got into the car, adjusted his wide-brimmed hat and smoothed down his double-breasted suit, and drove off with a laugh.

The warder stood in the entrance hall looking down at his shoes with a sorry expression. One black shoe was snub-nosed and high, the other one — black too — was very long and limp and creased. He lifted his mournful gaze to us: no, he felt obliged to declare, Don Espejuelo will never be found, nor will he ever come back. Because he has absconded with the shoes. (Damn.)

1. He gets up after a restless night. Brigadier-General Murphy. Slicks down his yellow hair. Looks in the mirror, into his red-rimmed eyes. Worms the moustache around. He has a secure establishment in his care. All gates mastered, guards posted in watchtowers. Dead areas locked at both ends and key-carrier cooped up within. But safe enough? Those minds, those hearts. What if. .? Bastards!

So he has a high wall built around the no-go terrain, with TV-controlled steel-plated double gates the only egress. Now it is truly a maximum security. (Young deer let loose to roam over green lawns between wall and fort. He has a weakness for life.)

2. He gets up after the nightmares of half-sleep. What if? One never knows with these traitors and terrorists, these rapists and assassins. HQ was adamant about that: “Let one, just one bandit get away and you might as well run with him!” The perspiration is chilly on his back. They are always scheming, these dogs; they have visions of freedom; turn away and they start digging, climbing, feinting, thinking , corrupting the boere.

He has the roof torn from the prison to be replaced by a grid of steel, a catwalk permitting the armed guardians to keep a constant eye on their charges. Now, ah, this boop is break-proof.

3. He surfaces gagging from the tortures of sleep. The yellow hair all tousled. Brigadier-General Murphy. Small blood vessels darken his vision. The trembling of his legs. Careful, you may nick yourself with the razor. This damn stubble. My God, what if? It takes just one suicidal escape, one only, to have this whole magnificent impregnable maximum-security possy crumble to ridicule.

He has an electronic eye installed in every cell. We shall have surveillance twenty-five hours a day. Snoop lenses sweep the corridors, eliminate the blind angles. Tape recorders are connected to the toilet bowls. From the ramparts he goes to the catwalk. Squints down at the vestiges of humanity below. There’s a rash around his neck, just inside the collar, itching terribly. “I want those courtyards covered by wire netting im-me-diate-ly! You think the sly sonsabitches can’t scale four metres of sheer wall? And if a helicopter were to — Jesus Christ!”