Breyten Breytenbach - Mouroir

He and the woman shared a spacious room with another elderly lady. Quite spry this old lady was. There was the reminiscence of something enticing about her movements: perhaps, he reflected, she had been a voluptuary in her youth. The flesh, of course, tends to sag later on. She had white teeth, or a smile anyway. It was difficult imagining her in the act of osculation. The lips were spread as wide as a purse opened. Maybe the hairy enclosures were too shrivelled to cover the porcelain dentures. The aged female often had a big handbag standing open on the shiny floor. He couldn’t withhold himself — he mentioned this rather ruefully — he couldn’t refrain from scrabbling around in that handbag when the owner was absent in the shithouse. There were some chopped-up lengths of bamboo in there, short and useless, and many purplish beads. He considered that these constituted the elements of a primitive bead curtain such as one could see forever clacking in poorer houses. Like trying to capture the essence of wind. He also came upon a name tag during one of his secret searches. The old lady was called “Holy Spirit”. He said that was what he had read engraved upon the tag. Actually Santa Something or Other which when translated meant “Holy Spirit”. The grinning sparrow.

What the room was like? He looked up from the board and away through the barred windows giving on to the day outside. The sky was of the palest birdbreast, flecked with clouds which would absorb the night shortly. Of a similar blue as his eyes, bulging slightly from the sockets, screening the light, and obviously very poor. The pale face growing into the forehead where the light lies. And the freckles on his hands a kind of concentrated shivering. No, there was little enough to remark upon in the room. It was situated some distance away from the principal complex of buildings. The outside he seemed to remember was decorated down the façade with stucco scrolls and curls. Inside? He turned his wide eyes away from the patches of fading sky framed in the bars, stared down at the squares of the board, some of them occupied and others vibrating, a skein of tension and the many small decisions leading to a further involvement, fumbling. Where does it all lead to? The inside of the room was empty. There was the handbag naturally. Certainly also some scrawled graffiti pertaining to moths. And, it came to him, mirrors in ormolu frames. Also as the swathes of gleaming darkness. Enclaves really.

They had spent the first day flopped very still on the beach. Like seals beached and skinned. A little distance away his old man also reclined on the sand, just fixing him with dark lenses very open and staring and strong. The thing was really to try and trap more than the words only; also the decomposing spaces around them, and their relationships: for words are the husks of dead hindrances. His body was white then and the old man’s body was white and flabby in the same way. They had forgotten all about time. The shadows sailing through the sky. He had wanted to ensconce himself in the sand, completed in whiteness. Gulls flipped around the seam of expended wavelets. Eventually, he recounted, the owner of the hotel, a bustling lady of a vulpine appearance — but her hairstyle was too vulgar — had walked down to the beach in her apron and berated them for keeping the personnel in the kitchen waiting. She had used words like “tarde” and “tonto” and “también” upon them. So they had returned and showered until their bodies were tinted a deeper shade of white and then they had walked over to the main building housing the dining room.

There were, he said, trees with preposterously large green leaves making a crackling sound. And the keening of many sad voices singing their sad songs drifted out of the windows in the dusk. It had been a glorious day (with its splotches of darkness) and now it was red and fading. The head waiter with his gules-coloured waistcoat had received them at the door. They entered, he continued, over a polished floor. But inside they were immediately surrounded by a pack of mangy dogs, furiously snarling and barking, so that they were unable to reach their table or even to see the faces of the many diners peering at them through the gloom. All that they noticed in the room filled with shrill noises were the light areas, the clothes of those sitting at the tables. Moths perhaps. Or ashes. Or fingers.

“Naked like a Turkish saint.” Desperately mouthing an orison. Putting out the words not sure whether they will please, could bring relief. Like so many votive offerings to the voracious god of silence. A moanologue. Experiencing structure, exploring gaps, fingering strictures, strange wounds, finding the illusion of relationships, fumbling. Slip-finger. Outside the day was constantly falling (with consistency). Pink, and then the first sick mauve. Later even a moon will be fashioned from the ornamental clouds, distilling their brightness. Sucking. The quiver of pain around the mouth.

Yes, he said that at the outset he had been a greenhorn, inexperienced. Technique, as it were, still raw. And the whole set-up was bedevilled by the absolute darkness. He had, he stated, of course pulled his wire many a time before. Beating the meat briskly when it had become unavoidable. To relieve the tension and absorb the illusion. To hover for a brief instant, the duration of a spasm, over the lips of communication. As near as he could come to the Other. Which was the Self. Obscurely. Not much of a lover really. When he had met her and after having exposed himself, that is, after having built up the teetering idea that she might accept or incept him, he had confessed his ignorance of the usages of that proboscis, admitting to the skin of insensitivity preventing him from penetrating knowledge (ignorance is insensitivity at heart) and she had volunteered to put him wise. She was as a sister to him. She knew — had soaked up from previous experience — the knack of stretching the haunches.

But, he repeated, she was adamant that he should not come inside her and laid out to him why this was not to be. Obviously he promised not to. Isn’t the woman the all-wise teacher, initiator and priestess of eternity? And fumbled. She was skitterish. Rejected him with a vigorous kick of the hind legs. Eyes like moons. Moans.

Again and again the hand fluttering imperceptibly hung above the pieces. The flank of his attack had been turned, a bishop ( le fou ) sacrificed to no avail. White was in a predicament. The hand had to choose while the forehead caught the light through the barred windows. Stuttering. And becoming enmeshed, woven into the dislocation of parry and thrust and probe, of commitment finally.

So he had promised her that he would obtain some means of prevention. From a medical friend, an old man with white hair and smoked lenses, he managed to procure a contraceptive jelly. Something, apparently a spermicide, which would kill the seeds. Rather like an insect extermination. She, he said, had claimed to know all about the product and the method. And he had remembered about a farm in the North where they could enjoy the desired romantic isolation. It had been his grandfather’s, used for growing tobacco, but now it was run by his nephew. His grandfather had died, buried in the mirror. His grandfather had penetrated the soil. Was rotting (in) the dark earth. He recalled the fine tobacco the old man was fond of making for his own consumption: carving up the odd leaves, sprinkling the little curls with rum essence before exposing them in glass jars for three days to the sun.

They had driven to the farm. The nephew wasn’t at home. The main building — the master’s house — was closed up, but the barn they found unlocked. They went in there. It was utterly dark and she didn’t wish him to open any door, afraid that their intimacy might be observed. The empty barn had been used for the storing of tobacco — the enormous crackling leaves becoming wrinkled and veined with controlled decomposition. There was a fine layer of tobacco dust over the floor. He kneeled before her thinking about how his trousers were getting soiled, and she hitched her skirts above the hips. He was to insert the jelly using an instrument somewhat like a small pump with a nozzle. He couldn’t quite describe it. Didn’t know how to manipulate it. The knees were getting tired. Above all he was afraid of hurting her by introducing the spout too deeply. And didn’t dare strike a match for fear of embarrassing them both. Hesitated thus. Fumbled. A bird in the dark having to decide its movements.