Beautiful Screaming of Pigs

by Damon Galgut

  When my father was at home all trace of her affection went underground. She became formal and even polite with me. She would sit in the study at night, in one of the leather armchairs, keeping her hands busy with tapestry or sewing or writing a letter. She murmured very softly when she spoke. Only by tiny signs – the brushing of fingers at the table, or a glance toward me in front of the television – was I assured of her continuing love for me, expressed so wholly when we were both alone.

  When I remember these scenes now it is a kind of emptiness I feel; and yet our lives were full. Full in the material sense, with objects and ornaments and opportunities for diversion. I had my own room, with a bathroom to myself. Our house was three stories tall, carpeted throughout, the walls covered in expensive paintings, every table laden with china or silver, all of it real. My father, that cultured boor, knew what to buy, though he took no pleasure in it; he was sending out coded signals of wealth and gentility. ‘I would rather go to India for the real thing,’ he told us, ‘than buy a perfect copy in South Africa.’ His possessions shored up his precarious high standing.

  He needed to advertise his sophistication, because it was entirely fake. His real love was for hunting. The walls downstairs were covered in animal heads. He had killed every one of them, he would tell his visitors proudly, as he showed his collection of guns and rifles. He never tired of handling them, taking them apart and cleaning them, his hands more loving on those hard bits of metal than they’d ever been on us. ‘With this,’ he would tell you, ‘I killed that,’ pointing to the head of a kudu above the fireplace. ‘And with this one, I took that.’ An impala near the door. ‘This little baby brought that one down.’ A warthog, its bristles shining.

  His proudest claim of all was the leopard in the entrance hall. Preserved in its entirety on an island of wood, teeth drawn back in a snarl.

  As a boy I was horrified and fascinated by the leopard. I would lie for hours on the cool tiles of the floor, trying to look down its throat into the darkness it contained. I imagined my father, down on one knee, holding steady while the leopard charged. It was a huge disappointment to learn later – from Malcolm, who had been there – that this wasn’t the way it had happened at all. ‘We chased it for miles in the Land Rover,’ he said. ‘It was wounded, it couldn’t run properly. Dad shot it in a tree when it tried to get away. He didn’t even get out.’

  My father, for all his ornaments and paintings, looked as if he belonged outdoors. He was a fat and sweaty man, with brown hair cropped short and a neat moustache, stained at the edge with nicotine. He had a heart problem, but he liked to smoke cigars and drink. He had blue eyes so pale as to be almost without colour. He would stare at me sometimes, with amazement or disapproval, from those eyes, rimmed with resin and short white hairs, like the bristles of the warthog on the wall.

  ‘Why are you so small?’ he demanded.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You must eat properly. Do you eat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ellen, does he eat?’

  ‘Yes, Howie, what are you talking about? You’ve seen him eating.’

  ‘Do you play sport, Patrick? At school?’

  ‘He doesn’t like sports, Howie, you know that.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he bellowed, surging up suddenly onto his short and slightly bowed legs. ‘Come with me,’ he commanded, taking me by the back of my neck.

  He took me, on that day and others, to the broad expanse of lawn outside. I would stand, trembling with a fear that I could smell in my nose, at the edge of the flowerbed. And wait. ‘You must watch,’ he told me. ‘Watch it all the way into your hands. You got me? Don’t blink.’

  And then he would hurl the ball: oval, dark, a dangerous shape of leather. It hissed toward me through the late afternoon, an embodiment of all that was most frightening to me, and all I could never do: I dropped the ball. I turned my head in fright and it would glance off my blunt hands, spinning away into the flowers. ‘Sorry,’ I cried. ‘Sorry, sorry... ’

  I ran to fetch it.

  ‘Give it up, Dad. Don’t even bother.’

  This from Malcolm, who would sit on the lowest step of the veranda. And laugh.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ I said, as much to my father as to him.

  ‘That’s enough, Malcolm,’ Dad said.

  And kicked the ball at me. This time I caught it: by some chance it found its way into my hands. I tossed it carelessly back again.

  ‘Well done,’ Dad said encouragingly.

  ‘That was lucky,’ Malcolm whispered.

  ‘Leave him, Mal.’

  I can still see my brother as he was on the step that day: sunburnt, sulky, his hair too long. He could catch any ball that was thrown at him. He was captain of his rugby team at school. He couldn’t spell or do sums, but he had a rebellious spirit that couldn’t be quashed. He kicked stones, with his tie pulled down and the top button on his school shirt undone. He carved his name into the wooden desk-tops in the classrooms and swore savagely and spat expertly sideways. He had a yellow mark on his first finger and thumb from smoking. He was my father’s son. I was the impostor, with my mother’s dark eyes; while Malcolm had Dad’s icy stare.

  The two of them played ball together on the lawn outside. It wasn’t an awkward exercise with them; it was truly a game. They practised passes and tackles, stitching lines of movement that tied them invisibly together. Malcolm could kick and catch the ball on the run. Sweating, grimacing with pleasure, they would come back indoors together afterwards, arms around each other, luminous with pride and effort.

  ‘Your heart,’ my mother warned, from above her sewing.

  ‘I know,’ my father gasped, one hand on his chest. ‘Where are my pills?’

  For myself, I don’t believe he had a heart at all, this swollen, implacable man with his shirts open to the belly, showing his gold chains and bracelets. Everything about him, even the most casual details, was expensive but somehow cheap. I don’t know what smallness he was trying to compensate for, but he gave off an endless energy and size: he was loudly generous and bullying and expansive. His voice seemed to come from some deep recess in him, always on the verge of insincere laughter, wreathed in the blue smoke of his Cuban cigars. He was full of tricks and trinkets and finery. I had never seen him naked. His hands gestured hugely on the air. He was, by nature more than by vocation, a millionaire.

  I have never understood exactly what my father’s business was. But it had something to do with the stock market and, more recently, with pieces of property all over the country. He owned plots of land here and there along the coast; he had entire blocks of flats in his name in Cape Town and Johannesburg. On the walls of his study, between the disembodied heads of animals that he had deprived of life, were cryptic certificates framed in gold. One of these – a big, ordinary looking bit of paper – was the deal that had started his career. ‘The one that made the difference,’ he told us, beaming. I knew I was supposed to be impressed, but it was just a boring sheet of jargon to me.

  Since that first big deal, my father had made a lot of money. As he never tired of explaining, he ‘worked to stop working’– by which he meant he was rich enough to retire. Not entirely: but aside from the few hours each day that he spent on the telephone or at his unseen office in town, he was usually somewhere around the house, cleaning his guns, or wallowing in the pool, pulling himself with huffing strokes through the water. But he didn’t look at ease in these long, idle hours. No, what he wanted more than anything was to be away, out of town, in the bush somewhere, and it was often that I came home from school to find the house all empty of his presence, streaming with light. On such occasions my mother would be happier than usual. ‘Your father is away in the swamps again,’ she would say, a small subversive smile flickering on her mouth.

  Or: ‘He’s gone to the Eastern Transvaal for some shooting.’

  Or fishing in the Transkei.

  She had long ago decided that these outdoor trips were too rough for
her and opted to stay at home, with me and a squadron of servants. So he went off with a bunch of men for company, loud and hairy and intense, like him. Most of them were people he did business with, for whom the savagery of nature was a metaphorical substitute for the world of money. They congregated at our home sometimes, before or after these trips, wearing designer outdoor gear, drinking beer and braaing steaks on the lawn. They were, and behaved like, people in no doubt of themselves, laughing unrestrainedly and slapping each other violently on the back. They had names that underlined their natures: they were Harry or Bruce or Ivan or Mike. There was Fanus, whom I had caught pissing in the roses once. I was afraid of them and went out the back door to avoid them.

  When he turned fifteen, Malcolm would go with my father on some of these trips: from time to time there was a double absence when I returned from school. And though I was deeply relieved that I had never been called on to go too, I was jealous of my brother. He would return from these odysseys flushed and voluble, so eager to boast that he would even lower himself to talk to me. He would come to my room sometimes, late at night when the light was off, and tell me stories about things that I could only imagine. ‘I drank red wine,’ he said once, ‘till I vomited out the window of the Land Rover. Dad wouldn’t stop, he just laughed at me.’

  And somewhere deep down in myself I longed to vomit out of windows too, to earn the laughter of my father.

  Or the time he shot his first impala. ‘It wasn’t dead, it was lying on the ground, kicking. Dad killed it with a knife.’

  I nodded solemnly, entranced and appalled. The knife was at my throat.

  In the end I asked my father if I could go too. It was a rash, impulsive request, and after he agreed happily, swelling with pleasure, I was filled with bitter regret. But somehow the next occasion came and went, and I stayed behind at home. I was learning the taste of relief and jealousy mixed together, a taste like ash. It was a taste that sprang quickly to my tongue whenever my brother was around.

  Malcolm was strong and splendid and mean. He behaved as though he was immortal. So his sudden death wasn’t just painful and tragic, but somehow against the natural order of things. He died in 1986, when I was seventeen years old, in my second to last year at school. Malcolm had failed matric and gone straight into the army.

  He was made for that uniform. He looked casually handsome, capable of heroism and brutality. And if he had died a soldier’s death, in a hail of bullets, or a purifying baptism of fire, it might have been less terrible and terminal. But he died in an ordinary traffic accident, in an army jeep somewhere on a nameless stretch of road. A burst tyre, a skid, a ditch at the edge of the tar.

  He was given a military funeral. I stood between my parents – my father rigid with grief, my mother sedated – as the coffin, vividly draped with the South African flag, was lowered into the ground. I jumped when the rifles fired. And the next week at school there was a special assembly in honour of my brother, after which the other boys came to shake my hand in grim commiseration.

  What I myself was feeling at that time I have no idea. I see events, and myself in them, from a distance. It is a story told by dolls or puppets, on a strange, unreal set. I do remember seeing my father cry for the first time in my life – shaking, soundless sobs unleashed into his hands as he sat drinking whisky at his desk – and the feeling, though perhaps that came at a different moment, that it would have been better if it had been me that died. There was the knowledge, too, that I was carrying a heavier cargo now, of guilt or transplanted hopes. And the dread of failure.

  I thought that the heaviness was mine alone, but none of us was the same. Malcolm’s absence left a larger void behind, which drew us ineluctably into its dark. In whatever secret place it is that human lives are welded together, joints and seams had been pulled out of place. All the unhappiness that had been squashed down under a lid suddenly boiled over into open view.

  Within four months my parents were divorced. My father kept his house and I moved out with my mother. I visited my father over weekends sometimes. Almost immediately he started to shack up with a series of girlfriends, the first one being his secretary. It had never occurred to me that he might have lovers, not even on those long trips out of town, and I was shocked. But none of them ever stayed long; some of them were replaced between one of my visits and the next. I don’t think he was especially attached to any of them and it took me a while to work out that it was a form of mourning for my mother. They were all substitutes, each temporarily, glossily, inhabiting her space. At the same time he became over-solicitous and concerned about me – another kind of substitution.

  My mother also changed, radically and suddenly, but in the opposite direction to my father. She, who had been so devoted and submissive, threw off the role of wife as if it had been weighing her down. ‘I feel like myself for the first time, Patrick,’ she confided in me a few days after we had moved out from my father. ‘It’s all been an act till now.’ And I saw that she had undergone three very different incarnations in her life. The first was that of the photo on the wall at Ouma’s place: a little Afrikaans girl on the farm, with pigtails and a missing tooth. Then came the young, pale wife, shorn of her past, eddying in a beautiful vacuum. The third, which started when my brother died, was the one that possessed her now.

  She said that she had finally become a real person, but who she really was remained a mystery out of reach, even to herself. As if through the years of her marriage she had been holding herself painfully static, my mother gave in to motion. This was obvious on a physical level: she was constantly restless, looking around her, moving about. But her condition ran deeper than this. She threw herself with wild abandon into different fads and movements, and then discarded them for others. She took up diets, she played with different styles of clothing, she joined clubs and societies for two weeks at a time. She ate only red meat for a while, then became vegetarian. She joined Greenpeace. She campaigned for animal rights, standing in the rain on street corners with placards and grisly photographs. And from animals she moved on to human beings: for the first time in her life she became passionate about politics. One of the things she held against my father was his patriarchal brand of capitalism. She joined the Black Sash, the End Conscription Campaign, the Detainees’ Parents’ Support Committee. She became rabid and incoherent on the subject of the Crossroads carnage. I listened – at first with amazement, later with resignation – to the rhetoric of liberation.

  I realised quite soon who the real victim was. Taking on the cause of this group or that, being vocal at meetings at rallies, she was actually making a plea for herself. Look at me, she was saying, I’m here, notice me. And as time went by she began to look like one of the dispossessed and vanquished on whose behalf she was supposed to be fighting. Gone were the dresses and makeup of her wifely years. In their place came jeans and takkies and T-shirts emblazoned with slogans and patches and dirt. I had never seen the skin of her face before, with its subtle blotches and mottlings. She didn’t shave her legs and armpits anymore. She put on weight, then lost it again. In the end she came to resemble, uncannily, the staring, maimed dog in the anti-vivisection poster above her bed.

  Along with these changes, of course, there were lovers. A lot of them, not all of them male. She changed partners almost as often as my father did, but her motivation was entirely different: while he was genuinely in mourning for her, my mother never looked back. There were hippies and solemn accountants, radicals and students. The only type that never passed through her bed again was the slick businessman that might have reminded her of her ex-husband. No, that was the past; and the future was defined purely by how enthusiastically she could give herself to everything she had never done before.

  It wasn’t long before drugs entered the picture too. I was too alarmed by now to follow the development of this scenario. It started with marijuana, the smell of which filtered out of her room from first thing in the morning, but rapidly progressed to all sorts of other, more da
ngerous chemicals. Usually these were taken in the company of her friends, the odd, transient characters that were always drifting in and out of the house in those days, like a kind of vapour. But on one occasion I came home to find her alone, lying naked in a comatose trance on the floor. I shook her and shook her, but it was a long time before her bony face stirred and lifted, whorls of shadow clinging around her eyes. In that moment our roles reversed: she became the lost child, holding on to me, desperate for consolation and meaning. I could only cradle her in revulsion and pity.

  In the morning she was better. She squeezed my wrist at the table and said, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘What we both went through last night. Thank you, Patrick.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said, though it wasn’t.

  ‘I’m glad, actually. It’s brought us together. Pulled the walls down a little. We need to get all the inhibitions and bullshit out the way. We don’t need secrets from each other.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, but I wondered then whether people don’t need their secrets. Lives are meant to be separate and apart; when the borders break and we overflow into one another, it only leads to trouble and sadness.

  My father, who had never been so separate and apart from her before, was watching all this from a distance. He questioned me about her whenever I saw him. He did this in a cautious, roundabout way, not wanting to seem too interested. ‘And your mother,’ he would say, after he’d asked me at laborious length about myself. ‘How’s she doing?’

  ‘She’s all right, I suppose.’

  ‘She doesn’t look all right to me. She looks unhealthy.’

  ‘Really,’ I said. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

  He stared at me for a moment, then down into his whisky. He poked reflectively at his ice with one finger. ‘That guy she was with when I dropped you,’ he said. ‘Is she seeing him?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I answered, and probably it was true: by then she would have chucked him for somebody else.