All One Horse

the body quivers with the word

First of all there should be no wind. Wind is a bother because it dries out the soil and makes digging so much more difficult. Wind is upsetting for the ceremony, you will see anon when it rocks the boats and rustles the clothes of the elect. A feather of unasked-for breath may bring the transients to come crashing down in the dust. Dust to dust and so on. More, much more: wind is nefarious because it evokes memories of far-away experiences, moods of transcendency, slivers of childhood, imagined languages enunciated by trees and clouds — and if all this does not add up to life, what then does? No, dead must be dead and life off to one side. By all means let there be wind, but in abeyance, dusting its hindquarters beyond the hill where the Squatters live.

This side of the hill, yes. It always takes place this side of the hill. Here exactly the lines of history and the earth cross: that there must be a hill or mound or tumulus between Masetedi (they of the shining countenance) and Squatters. A line of cypresses traces the route winding downwards, like crosses waiting to be put to use, like solemn unshaven gladiators holding up green shields in the matutinal glitter. The procession must start during the early hours from the crest down. (Or beyond?) For two reasons: in the beginning to benefit from cool shadows of the odiferous morning muting sound and masking smell, and then to be timed so as to reach its apotheosis in midday glory. Then there can be no veiling, no hidden intentions, no softening of lines!

Long ago we knew the sea. Heretics aver that we all, Masetedi as well as Squatters, emerged from the waters. But we resolutely foreswear the abomination of oneness. We believe that memories ought to be left untouched, a sea of deadness, but we do not always succeed in cutting off the feedlines between death and life, in severing the process between root and fruit. Thus we continue referring to our coffins as boats. Thus too our rejection of wind. Does it not bring to water the illusion of life? Does it not invest the sea with incestuous caresses? But movement. Movement is our way around the dichotomy. The dead must move, although not too much and never of their own free will. Our boats are whitened mirrors bobbing on the liquid surface of unsoundable nothingness.

Ah, we need this ceremony to deaden the past. Keep it down! Lie there and don’t move! Increase what came before, feed it, fatten it, pork it; pare life down to an even thinner slice; but paradox, all the more the past is dead or the dead is past — and death is by the way a matter of more volume — all the more life grows to be enhanced by the absence of the other. If you divide a thing in half you will never come to the end of it. The moon also grows from the night.

And so we extend the sea. We know where it is because it doesn’t exist for us. Purity, my brother. Only chasteness can permit us to pass unnoticed! We are the Masetedi. Even if our lives were disastrous, a fumbling of frontiers, a cack of compromising, our passing at least should at last go unobtrusively.

Therefore the select ones are painted. They are propped up on the biers, blanched, pasty-face, each fixed in the white position of seated authority. Down in the valley the tombs are ready. Our need is so great that we sometimes have to go far into the earth. There are generations of graves, stretching back to oblivion. The diggers have prepared the holes, but diggers also come and go: they cannot pass on their knowledge of holes and they do not always remember which ones have been crossed out. So they kneel when in doubt and holler down: ‘Halloooo. . Lie there and don’t move…’ waiting, perhaps, for a distant echoing sigh like that of the sea lamenting the land. And they are worried. How long before we transpierce the hill and let through the wind? And the dissolute Squatters then, committing life as if it were something to be lived!

There is no wind. Slowly slowly the bearers bring down the boats. Stiff upright the painted ones sit, no wind giving tongue or lip to the festive garments, or tilting the ceremonial hats. Maybe just a curt nod here and there where a foot encounters a stone. Soon the sun will hit the roof. All the actors are standing by: the unmemorable diggers having dug, the carriers bustling now like agitated ants burying the future before the storm, the elect travelling dead with glinting white faces, and Mfowethu the Brother who must pronounce the oration.

We come to a stop. The shadows shrink to minor and obsolete annotations attempting to hide from the sun in the protection of our shadows. This is the difficult moment. Now is not the time to make the eye do like a bat or to emit an afterthought of life through the anus. I am proud to be of the chosen and sit as quiet as may be under the dead weight of pigment and burial clothes. Now is the time for all patriots to come to the aid of their country.

Slowly, ever so slowly — I recall hearing that in the old days the traveller journeyed so leisurely that he was no longer a foreigner upon arrival — slowly I move my eyes to focus on Mfowethu perorating.

‘Here we are,’ he says, motioning to the soil hacked open. I see rivulets of sweat cracking his visage. Am I mistaken or does he use a foundation? One is not supposed to remember. ‘Or rather, here we go. This here is our collective unmemory, our subconscious. Let us put it to one side, it is separate from us and in it we can hide that which we neither want nor need. Those who died did so that we may live, and since we painted them to blend with us we do not know them and death shall have no dominion. Were they to tumble or bloat or float it would have been a different kettle of fish. I tell you, the young lion may be pulling his hindquarters up into the spine every few minutes when in rut, but the old lion knows about yawning and the delicious sucking of shades. He knows how to bide his time and how to mount a memory.’

(Do I detect a crack in his voice too? It is unimportant really, since we shall immediately have forgotten his anguish, even his heresy; it is the cadence of the prayer that counts.)

‘Let my people go,’ Mfowethu says. ‘Let us now close our eyes and fold our hands. Oh, life triumphant! I am! See how the body quivers with the word.’