Breyten Breytenbach - Mouroir

He became a bum — nobody quite knows why or how. He met up with a woman, much older, a companion and an alter ego , a person like him dwelling in the dark mazes of the city. As much and as often as they could afford to they smoked and they drank. Nights they then slept in empty plots by smouldering rubbish heaps, or in condemned buildings due for demolition. Sometimes they lay in water furrows. They also danced.

The old woman tried to tempt drifters with her poor body — boozers, sailors, blokes ostensibly gentlemen with problems sneaking through the streets late at night (late in the blossoming of life, already in the dropping of death). She was the bait. He was the hook. Also the tackle, rod, gaff and cudgel. When she managed to seduce an unsuspecting customer with an obscene caricature of hip swaying and the slimy dark tongue as clotted bleeding between the more tropical red of the lips, the edges of the wound, leading him to a sheltered or deserted spot, then he jumped on the greedy or shaky one from behind. With a stick or a knife, sometimes with a length of piano wire twisted in a noose. Always the purpose was to break the subject open, to murder; three times at least it is known that he succeeded. Some victims were chopped up and chucked piecemeal in a sewer. Robbery, it would seem, was not the motive. Perhaps it was a perverse form of sexual satisfaction or the foreplay thereof. One night the prey was a blind jeweller, who could understand the facets of gems or the shivery internal working of watches with sensitive fingertips. It may also be that the jeweller’s blindness is an injury resulting from the assault.

Without too much trouble they are trapped by the police. During the subsequent trial they are both found guilty and sentenced: she with tearing mouth to an insane asylum, he to the death cell. The expression is: he got the rope. They would top him. His life was to be reeled in with a cord.

He is transferred to a cell in a building of red bricks in one of the ruling cities of the Heartland. His appeal against the death sentence is rejected. The request for mercy likewise. The long wake has started. Altogether a year and a half passed.

The Monday the hangman came to inform him that the next Tuesday would be it — hardly a week then. Together with him in the pot there were five more “condemns”, Unwhites, people with sallow hides and of diverse crimes. They would go up together but were not to swing simultaneously. Maybe the Unlife up there would make them equal. A folded sheet of paper with a black border, where his dying day is announced, is handed to him. The hangman weighs him, measures his height and the circumference of his neck. With these data the length of the rope et cetera are calculated in an approximately scientific approximation. It was a Monday during the summer and each day of that season the clouds were a thundering sea battle above the hard, cracked earth.

Some people are dead before they even come to die. When the Unwhites are informed (when the countdown starts), they directly open up in song, they break and let the words erupt. There is a pulsating urgency about the singing, as if one can hear how scorchingly alive their voices are. All the other prisoners — in any event only awaiting their turn — help them from that instant on: the basses, the tenors, the harmonizers, the choir. Every flight of the prospective voyagers’ voices is supported and sustained by those of the others. As if a stick is suddenly poked into an antheap. The sound of the voices is like that of cattle at the abattoir, the lowing of beasts smelling the blood and knowing that nothing can save them now. Perhaps the Jews too, had they been a singing people, would have hummed thus in the chambers where the gas was turned on. Maybe they did? This making of noises with the mouths continues day and night, erases night and day, till those who must depart go up in the morning, at seven o’clock. The best flying is done in the morning. For that last stretch those who leave will sing alone. Day in day out it continues and in the early hours it is a low mumbling, the murmuring sound of the sea which never sleeps but only turns on to the other hip. In this fashion, during the final week, that which is fear and pain and anguish and life is gradually pushed out of the mouth. A narcotic. And so they move with the ultimate daybreak through the corridor as if in a mirror, rhythmic but in a trance, not as a men alone but as a song in movement. They are no longer there; just the breaths flow unceasingly and warm and humid over the lips. (The opposite may be alleged too: that this delicious and fleeting life is purified and sharpened over the last week by song to a shriek of limpid knowing.)

For him there is no such grace because his like — the fellow condemns in his section, in his part of the prison, the pale ones, the Uncoloureds, people from the ruling class — don’t sing easily. Nor can he, like the others in the pot, be put in a communal cell — of course there are far more Unwhite candidates than Uncoloured ones. He must pray death (or life) all the way out of himself. The pastor is there to assist and to show him the words, for words are holes in which you must stick death. He will die in another way before he is dead. He becomes his own ghost. The eyes are deep and bright in the sockets. It gives his head the appearance of a skull. His quiff falls lank over the forehead. He sneers without any fear of the warders. Like the other seasoned prisoners — those who know the ropes — he wears his shoes without socks.

All hope is lost

Of my reception into grace; what worse?

For where no hope is left, is left no fear!

(blind Milton)

The minister . In fact a chaplain, and with a rank in the service. He is a small chap with an absolutely naked scalp, dressed in a modish tailored suit and shirted in flowers branching out over ribs, belly and the small of the back. He has red puffy bags under the eyes and, so one imagines, folds of white flesh around the midriff and in the groin. It is his task to prepare the soul, to make it robust, to extract the soul and wash and iron it, and then to let it be acquiescent. It requires a fine ingenuity because the soul is like smoke and so easily slips through the fingers. He spends much time on his knees and it is not good for the pants. He prays and emits suffocated sounds. Some vowels are stretched beyond measure, are pronounced in a placatory way as when a little child tries to make a big animal change its mind. When he prays he closes his eyes and holds the hand of the convicted. With eyes closed, when talking aloud, you move on another level. That which is there is not there. That which isn’t there is there perchance. Heaven grows behind closed eyelids. His order is a tall one. During the last week something crystallizes from the doomed, surreptitiously, and comes to cleave to the clergyman. It is the soul wishing to remain among the familiar living when the soma comes to nothing. Like a snail it is searching for a new shell. So the body becomes lighter. .

The executioner (bailiff, hangman, topper, rope expert, death artist) is a tall man in the sombre weeds of pious neutrality and with a melancholy countenance. His post or position is private and part-time. When, through resignation or death, a vacancy occurs, anyone — a pensioner for instance, or the father of numerous sickly children who needs a little extra income — can submit his application to the magistrate. He then tenders for so much or so much per head (at present, before devaluation, it is seven rands) for he is remunerated by the head. He must see to it, together with his assistant (if any), that the gallows remain in good well-oiled working order, for they are often made use of. When the pot is pointed out it is his duty to be the announcer and to make the necessary preparations. He is the tailor who will fit you out in a new life. On the fateful morning he is there bright and early. He reposes his head on interlaced fingers against the bars as if he were praying or dozing off. When the candidates are brought in under escort he makes them take up their indicated positions — warders are keeping them upright — and adjusts the nooses around the necks below the ears until they fit just right. Then he closes the eye-flaps of their hoods and presses with a pale finger the button activating the trapdoor. They then plunge twice their own height. The complete procedure seldom takes more than seven seconds. Up to seven persons can thus be served simultaneously, standing in line like bridegrooms before an altar. After the thrashing about the corpses remain hanging for ten minutes in the well. What has not snapped will be throttled. Thereafter the still warm and very heavy (because deadweight) corpses are pulleyed in, the handcuffs taken off, they are undressed, and lowered again. If the correct results were not obtained the whole process is repeated. When shudders and convulsions are no longer observed the limp cadavers are deposited in washing troughs and the doctor on duty makes an incision in the neck to establish which vertebra was broken — this information must be entered in duplicate. Bloodstains have penetrated the metal of the wash-basins. Bloodstains, crud, snot splotches also on the ropes and the hoods, and the cupboard where the coiled ropes are kept stinks of stale effluence. The burial takes place within a few hours. The clothes of the deceased are brought back into circulation in the gaol. After all, it’s state property. If for some or other reason a dead body must be preserved, there are modern shiny iceboxes for that purpose in the autopsy room. As all of this happens during the fresh and innocent hours, the vocation of hangman need not interfere with any other job; your executioner could be a teacher, a psychiatrist, a politician, a chicken farmer, publisher, or unemployed.