Breyten Breytenbach - Mouroir

One evening — it wasn’t quite dark yet because there were still a few weak jerks of light coming from the sea — I was again half moved and tipsy. I guffawed in my fist and danced with limp shoes until Softly’s red cheeks were stretched and burning with laughter; even Roog’s moustache came close to a tremble at one point before rearranging itself in the apposite official crease. A woman dressed in yellow — maybe only a whore, I won’t know — came in the half-dusk to a window at the back of the building, looking for trouble. The apertures giving on to the rising hillside had bars in front of them, those in the front had glass panes only as it was too high to jump from there and break your neck. The woman, lustily moving her hips because she knew full well that I couldn’t reach her there except through the eye and the imagination — although no force is as ravishing as the imagination — the woman then apparently knew about me — I was reasonably well known at the time since I had once participated in the Olympic Games as yachtsman — and she ostensibly wanted my autograph. It was just tomfoolery and tom-teasing. With more of a to-do than necessary I accepted the strip of paper through the grill in answer to her demand because I really wanted to have her move in such a way as to permit me to peep up her legs inside the yellow dress. Her body was as brown and as blue as the twilight. All of a sudden I heard Meisie calling me to come quickly to the other row of windows above the town and the sea. From the window where she was watching we could look down into a narrow street climbing away from the seafront towards the prison, turning parallel to it just under the walls. In the final wreathing rays of the sun three people moved up the hill: the two brothers Giovanni, motor mechanics working here in Paname in a garage just around the corner from Lamourt’s house, and an old gentleman whom both Meisie and I love dearly. The two brothers — the smaller one with the posh swagger who had his manliness ripped away years back in an automobile accident, and the tall one with the crippled knees and the Bob Dylan reddish beard and the crossed blue eyes — were dressed in their khaki outfits, grease stains still clung like shiny bats to the overalls. The elderly gentleman wore dark clothes and his hat of every day. He walked with great difficulty but the other two only sniggered and didn’t assist him in anyway. The wind was big and thick and dark with colour. Meisie pulled open the window and shouted at him with an excited voice. When he looked up at us she waved and called: “Our best regards at home!” He acknowledged with a nod and struggled on. Wind furled the brim of his hat and slammed our window shut. And the window was dark and glistening as this one here tonight. They were directly below us at the corner of the street and would have been disappearing from our sight within a few seconds when I shouted “Oubaas!” (old master) and tried forcing the window open. But in vain. “Oubaas! Oubaas!” I don’t know if he could hear me. When they reached the level area in front of the gaol and started moving away from us, I could see through the glass that he was weeping — and all at once he became very small and old and grey and before my very own shocked eyes his head and shoulders disintegrated, cracked and utterly exploded in grey drops and dollops and splinters as big as seagull-chickens. “Oubaas!” I started bawling, filled with horror and dismay — “Oubaas! Oubaas. .!” In one dark corner of the room I could see Softly-Softly’s cheeks puffing red with laughter. .

My second experience. My second experience (yes, fill it up, please) must be fitted into a different time-slot, at other tangent points on earth, and was of a different kind. It was the time of autumn and what I have to relate took place here in Paname and not in Nomansland. Just like that, somewhere on the outskirts where the limits of the little hamlets which in their own time were quite independent and self-sufficient had long since been wiped out, but it was not yet a very densely built-up area and plots faded here into small farms and then in fallow lands bordering on rubbish dumps, streets degenerated into mud tracks, roads died in the rests of forests. Big City annexes, but cannot always digest. The rainy season was already at hand, the red earth all slush. We were visiting Eva and Noordhoek Hedge in the pavillon de banlieue which they had acquired not long before. The house was far from finished even though a local carpenter had been moving heaven and earth over the preceding days. The living room, around the fireplace, was done and had been painted: there was wood panelling against the walls, shelves everywhere with knick-knacks and books, easy chairs as for instance wicker seats imported from Thailand, goatskins spread over the floor.

We were due to leave for Burrlin that very same afternoon. To the best of my knowledge Noordhoek Hedge, Eva and Meisie were making all the necessary preparations for the journey; I myself was just pottering about in the wooden annexe to the house and when I started becoming conscious of smothered sounds and a feeble groaning. I at first couldn’t make out what was happening. Out of sheer curiosity I walked around the house with in my hand still the pickaxe handle that I had been planing down and with wood shavings clinging to my trouser legs. In the garden path I came across a terrible scene: my wife and my two friends were stretched out on the gravel, clearly dizzy and confused, and on top of them were three youngsters with leather jackets and armed with chains! The attackers knelt over their victims looking hard for soft places to bite and suck at neck and breast — there were blood smears on their teeth and their chins were wet. In the background their companions stood, also armed with chains and evidently just as bloodthirstily hungry. I instantly lost all control over my reactions and started hitting out with the stave. I heard the skulls cracking like dove eggs under my blows. The hangers-on — cabrones — turned tail and fled, and I after them as far as the mud and the ooze well past the last houses. There I stopped all out of breath and watched them scattering in all directions, trying to make it to the sanctuary of a copse or a few trees, with red earth on their shoes and their pants.

Back at the house I pulled the still throbbing corpses away from my friends. Noordhoek Hedge had already come to. Together we carried the two women to the living room and made them comfortable by the fireplace, trying to bring them round by wiping their lips and their foreheads and dabbing the blood of their wounds. Their clothes were of course all undone and when they finally regained consciousness they were both very dazed and frightened, but luckily neither of them was seriously injured. Noordhoek Hedge, he knows the surroundings rather well, afterwards told me that they had already during the early part of the afternoon noticed the loubards sauntering down the road (a certain Albert and his gang, it would seem), and that they tried protesting when the scoundrels wanted like starved predators to enter the garden, but that they were overwhelmed on the spot and probably only their empty bodies would have been left among the ants and the earthworms had it not been for my providential intervention. Lucky that I could still be there in time.

We summoned the local carpenter to come and knock together some coffins for the crushed assailants — the same guy who had fixed up the living room so nicely. In an incredibly short time he finished the boxes and while we laid out the corpses, each with his own blood-besmirched neckerchief over the face, casked on trestles, he gave the finishing touches to the lids — actually the only task which, in his capacity as craftsman, accorded him any real pleasure. This all took place in the one heated space of the house. Outside a piercing wind had risen up in the meantime — but at least it had the advantage that every single fly, which we were expecting by now around the broken dead flesh, was also blown off course for the time being. It is an ill wind that doesn’t blow away flies.