255. The stones. Having failed to make my shouts heard (but am I sure they did not hear me? Perhaps they heard me but found me uninteresting, or perhaps it is not their wont to acknowledge communications), I turned to writing. For a week, toiling from dawn to sunset, I trundled wheelbarrows full of stones across the veld until I had a pile of two hundred, smooth, round, the size of small pumpkins, in the space behind the house. These I painted, one by one, with whitewash left over from the old days (like a good castaway I find a use for every odd and end, one day I must make a list of things I have not used and then, as an exercise, find uses for them). Forming the stones into letters twelve feet high I began to spell out messages to my saviours: CINDRLA ES MI; and the next day: VENE AL TERRA; and: QUIERO UN AUTR; and again: SON ISOLADO.
256. After weeks of building messages, weeks filled with rolling stones about, repainting scratches, climbing up and down the steps to the loft to make sure my lines were straight, it struck me that what I was spelling out were not, strictly speaking, responses to the words that came to me from the sky, but importunities. Would one be tempted to visit a spot on earth, I asked myself, to which one was being so clamorously invited by so miserably lonely a creature, to say nothing of her age and ugliness? Would one not rather shun it like the plague? Therefore I put on my wide-brimmed hat on the days the machines flew and began to build messages that were quieter, more cryptic, in the style of their messages to me, and thus perhaps more alluring. POEMAS CREPUSCLRS, I announced on the first day, intending CREPUSCULARIAS but running short of stones. (Afterwards I brought in two dozen new stones in the wheelbarrow, there has never been any shortage of stones in this part of the world, though what I am going to do with the painted stones when the machines stop flying I do not know, that is one anxiety I cannot dismiss, I may be driven to building a sepulchre outside the kitchen door, all ready to be crawled into when the great day comes, for I have not the heart to wheel them back into their native veld and disperse them, not after they have been brothers and sisters to each other so long, and participated in my messages.) SOMNOS DE LIBERTAD, I wrote on the second day; AMOR SIN TERROR on the fourth; DII SIN FUROR on the fifth; NOTTI DI AMITAD again on the first. Then I wrote a second poem, in six parts, responding to the various indictments of the voices: DESERTA MI OFRA – ELECTAS ELEMENTARIAS – DOMINE O SCLAVA – FEMM O FILIA – MA SEMPRE HA DESIDER – LA MEDIA ENTRE. The medium! Between! How I cursed my lot on the sixth of these days for denying me what of all things I needed most, a lexicon of the true Spanish language! To rack one’s innate store for a mere conjunction when the word lay sleeping in a book somewhere! Why will no one speak to me in the true language of the heart? The medium, the median – that is what I wanted to be! Neither master nor slave, neither parent nor child, but the bridge between, so that in me the contraries should be reconciled!
257. Yet, ever charitable, I asked myself: What, after all, do my poems, even if understood, offer the sky-creatures? If they can build flying machines the attractions of a stone-moving, word-building intelligence must seem paltry. How can I move them? FEMM, I wrote, FEMM – AMOR POR TU. And, descending to ideographs, I spent all my stones on a sketch of a woman lying on her back, her figure fuller than mine, her legs parted, younger than myself too, this was no time for scrupulosity. How vulgar, I thought to myself, surveying the picture from the head of the steps, yet how necessary! And I cackled. How like the witch of fable I have grown. One might fear for the skymen that, drawn to earth by my lure, they will find themselves metamorphosed into swine and reduced to eating slops. But perhaps they have felt this fear, and that is why they avoid me: perhaps on their travels over the rest of the world they pause in the treetops and converse with the groundsfolk, but when they pass over me soar high, dropping their cautionary messages.
258. I have also tried to ignore the nightly messages. One cannot pursue a hopeless infatuation, I have said to myself, without courting the fate of Narcissus. A blind man dancing seems not to observe his period of mourning, said the voices. Pooh! It is a world of words that creates a world of things. Pah!
259. Then last night the voice would not be stilled, but spoke on and on, no longer in tight little epigrams but in flowing periods, such that I wondered whether it were not a new god speaking, riding over my protesting clamour. “Leave me, I want to sleep!” I shouted, drumming my heels. It is in order that we shall not fall victim to the assassin, said the voice, that we consent to die if we ourselves turn assassin. Every man born in slavery is born for slavery. The slave loses everything in his chains, even the desire to escape from them. God loves no one, it went on, and hates no one, for God is free from passions and feels no pleasure or pain. Therefore one who loves God cannot endeavour to bring it about that God should love him in return; for, in desiring this, he would desire that God should not be God. God is hidden, and every religion that does not affirm that God is hidden is not true. “Go away,” I shouted, “Spanish filth!” Desire is a question that has no answer, went on the voice – I know now for sure that they do not hear me – The feeling of solitude is a longing for a place. That place is the centre of the world, the navel of the universe. Less than all cannot satisfy man. Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained. When God accomplishes through the wicked what he has decreed in his secret counsels, the wicked are not thereby excusable. Those whom God leaves out of his election he is also reproving, and for no other reason than that he wills to exclude them.
260. All day I have gone around with these words dinning in my ears, nagged by their air of significance, irritated by their lack of coherence. What assassin can be said to threaten me? How can one possibly consent to die? The flesh loves itself and cannot consent in its extinction. If I were truly a slave resigned to my chains would I not have learned the word Yes long ago? Yet where in my speech can Yes be pointed to? If my speech is not rebellious from beginning to end, what is it? As for the absence of God from the stone desert, there is nothing I can be told about this subject that I do not know. Everything is permitted here. Nothing is punished. Everything is forgotten in perpetuity. God has forgotten us and we have forgotten God. There is no love from us toward God nor any wish that God should turn his mind to us. The flow has ceased. We are the castaways of God as we are the castaways of history. That is the origin of our feeling of solitude. I for one do not wish to be at the centre of the world, I wish only to be at home in the world as the merest beast is at home. Much, much less than all would satisfy me: to begin with, a life unmediated by words: these stones, these bushes, this sky experienced and known without question; and a quiet return to the dust. Surely that is not too much. Are not all these dicta from above blind to the source of our disease, which is that we have no one to speak with, that our desires stream out of us chaotically, without aim, without response, like our words, whoever we may be, perhaps I should speak only for myself?
261. But I have other cares besides quarrelling with my voices. Sometimes when the weather is fine, as it is today, sunny but not too warm, I carry my father out of his room and seat him on the stoep, propped up with cushions in his old armchair, so that he can once again face out over the old acres, which he no longer sees, and be exposed to the birdsong, which he no longer hears. He sees and hears nothing, for all I know he tastes and smells nothing, and who can imagine what the touch of my skin on his is like? For he has retreated far, far into himself. In the very chambers of his heart he crouches, wrapped in the pulsing of his faint blood, the far-off hiss of his breath. Of me he knows nothing. I pick him up without difficulty, a mannikin of dry bones held together by cobwebs, so neat that I could fold him up and pack him away in a suitcase.
262. I sit on the stoep by my father’s side watching the world go by, the birds busy again with their nest-building, the breeze cool on my cheeks and perhaps on his too. “Do you remember,” I say, “how we used to go to the seaside, in the old days? How we packed a basket full of sandwiches and fruit and drove to
the station in the trap and caught the evening train? How we slept on the train, rocked by the song of the wheels, waking drowsily at the water-stops, hearing the trainmen murmur far away, sleeping again; and how the next day we arrived at the seaside and went down to the beach and took off our shoes and paddled, you holding my hands and lifting me over the waves? Do you remember the hermit crab that pinched my toe, and how I cried and cried, and how you pulled faces to comfort me? Do you remember the boarding-house we stayed in? How tasteless the food was, and how one evening you pushed your plate aside and announced that you would not eat offal and stood up and left the dining-room?; and how I pushed my plate aside and followed you? And do you remember how happy the dogs were to see us back? There was one time when old Jakob forgot to feed them, and you swore terribly and took away his meat ration for a week. Do you remember Jakob and Hendrik and Ou-Anna and Klein-Anna? Do you remember that son of Ou-Anna’s who was killed in an accident and brought back to the farm to be buried, and how Ou-Anna wanted to throw herself into the grave?
“Do you remember the years of the great drought, when the sheep had all to be sold because there was no grazing within two hundred miles, and how we had to struggle to build the farm up again? Do you remember the great old mulberry tree that stood on the other side of the chicken-run, and how one summer the trunk cracked down the middle under the weight of all the fruit? Do you remember how the earth around it would be stained purple with the juice of fallen berries? Do you remember the lovers’ bench we used to have under the sering-tree, where you could sit all afternoon listening to the hum of the carpenter bees? Do you remember Vlek, who was such a good sheepdog that she and Jakob alone could drive a whole flock past you at the counting-post? Do you remember how Vlek grew old and sickly and could not hold down her food, and how there was no one to shoot her but you, and how you went for a walk afterwards because you did not want anyone to see you cry? Do you remember,” I say, “those beautiful speckled hens we used to have, and the bantam cock with the five wives who used to roost in the trees? Do you remember them all?”
263. My father sits, if you can call it sitting, in his old leather armchair with the cool breeze on his skin. His eyes are sightless, two glassy blue walls rimmed with pink. He hears nothing but what goes on inside him, unless I am mistaken all this time and he hears all my chatter but chooses to ignore it. He has had his outing for the day; it is time to carry him in so that he can rest.
264. I lay my father out on his bed, unbutton his nightshirt, and unpin his napkin. Sometimes it is spotless; but today there is the faintest of stains, proving that somewhere inside him juices still dribble, muscles still execute their faint peristalses. I drop the old napkin in the bucket and pin on a new one.
265. I feed my father his broth and weak tea. Then I press my lips to his forehead and fold him away for the night. Once upon a time I used to think that I would be the last one to die. But now I think that for some days after my death he will still lie here breathing, waiting for his nourishment.
266. For the present, however, it appears that nothing is going to happen, that I may have long to wait before it is time to creep into my mausoleum and pull the door shut behind me, always assuming that I can find a pair of hinges in the loft, and drift into a sleep in which there are finally no voices teasing or berating me. At moments like the present, filled with lugubrious thoughts, one is tempted to add up one’s reckoning, tie up the loose ends. Will I find the courage to die a crazy old queen in the middle of nowhere, unexplained by and inexplicable to the archaeologists, her tomb full of naif whitewash paintings of sky-gods; or am I going to yield to the spectre of reason and explain myself to myself in the only kind of confession we protestants know? To die an enigma with a full soul or to die emptied of my secrets, that is how I picturesquely put the question to myself. For instance: Have I ever fully explained to myself why I do not run away from the farm and die in civilization in one of the asylums I am sure must abound there, with picture-books at my bedside and a stack of empty coffins in the basement and a trained nurse to put the obol on my tongue? Have I ever explained or even understood what I have been doing here in a district outside the law, where the bar against incest is often down, where we pass our days in savage torpor – I who plainly had the makings of a clever girl who might have atoned for physical shortcomings with ten nimble fingers on the pianoforte keys and an album full of sonnets, who might have made a good wife, industrious, frugal, self-sacrificing, faithful, and even on occasion passionate? What have I been doing on this barbarous frontier? I have no doubt, since these are not idle questions, that somewhere there is a whole literature waiting to answer them for me. Unfortunately I am not acquainted with it; and besides, I have always felt easier spinning my answers out of my own bowels. There are poems, I am sure, about the heart that aches for Verlore Vlakte, about the melancholy of the sunset over the koppies, the sheep beginning to huddle against the first evening chill, the faraway boom of the windmill, the first chirrup of the first cricket, the last twitterings of the birds in the thorn-trees, the stones of the farmhouse wall still holding the sun’s warmth, the kitchen lamp glowing steady. They are poems I could write myself. It takes generations of life in the cities to drive that nostalgia for country ways from the heart. I will never live it down, nor do I want to. I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world. If the truth be told, I never wanted to fly away with the sky-gods. My hope was always that they would descend and live with me here in paradise, making up with their ambrosial breath for all that I lost when the ghostly brown figures of the last people I knew crept away from me in the night. I have never felt myself to be another man’s creature (here they come, how sweet the closing plangencies), I have uttered my life in my own voice throughout (what a consolation that is), I have chosen at every moment my own destiny, which is to die here in the petrified garden, behind locked gates, near my father’s bones, in a space echoing with hymns I could have written but did not because (I thought) it was too easy.
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In the Heart of the Country Page 16
