All One Horse

over the eyes

Old Lady is approaching death. That is why she doesn’t want to walk any more anywhere and if she has to it is with short reluctant steps using a sturdy cane, sitting down often to let time pass by. When Old Lady is young she is a spoilt child pampered, cooed at, servants whisking fans and agitating small bells. Birds flitting through the green green trees of the Wet Country. Old Lady has a labyrinthine mind in which many ghosts dwell deceased ancestors robbers and other dangers two-headed pigs fixed ideas mortal fear of the night of not-knowing and of darkness and of serpents and the inner reaches of the sea or rather the minor estuaries and demons and forests love of money and power vanity self-interest bad faith pride a face never to lose before others all without commas. Light does not penetrate there often although the maze is in ruins. Old Lady knows how to manipulate meekness and how to exploit the innate attributes of femininity. She immediately corrupts the contact she has with the powerful and the weak. When Old Lady grows up she leaves Orbi she goes to live in the capital which is on another continent that way. She is more stubborn than a mule and she is self-indulgent. It is an inappropriate metaphor for where she hails from there are no horses. She brings up her many children to suit her whims and her need for justification and revenge. A revenge on life. She runs their lives by terror. She runs their lives by her sacrifices and her suffering. Her jealousy. Old Lady lives by extremes. She is either indigent as an immigrant chambermaid when they all live in a shoe or as rich as an émigrée landowner. She pities the poor and she exploits them. She belongs to a party of the revolution. When she believes that something is good for her she takes so much of it that she falls ill. Old Lady is master at the dialectics and the foibles and pretensions of the Whites. And they cannot corner her because she will tactically fall back on the Others — the Wet Country — the Old Culture. She is modern and ancient. She will lie about her condition and her religion and her accounts and her history. She ruthlessly renounces one religion for another holding out more promise of reincarnation but she retains the benefits and the securities of the first so that she has many blessed bits of wood and sacred phials of muddied liquid. Old Lady is very clever. But now she is old and she doesn’t want to die. She tries to act as if she were very very old. She subdues her offspring with her old woman’s ailments. She is imperious and makes them serve her hand and foot. She has a rash on one foot that needs ointment and docile fingers. She ridicules their time by tying them down to a day-long airing of well marinated grievances not so much to ease a load but in order to shift the buttocks more comfortably into a position of command and attention. And she competes with them insisting upon the same favours and privileges. She is again a sibling squabbling with others for her food. Old Lady is haunted by the knife in the back and defenestration. She says she may die next year but she doesn’t believe it for one single moment. She fights a war of attrition against death. Death doesn’t have a snowball’s hope in hell. It is an inappropriate metaphor because where she hails from there is no snow. She also says she intends to buy a mountain or maybe return to the Wet Country to go squelching in the mud. Infirmity has at last vindicated her laziness. But now she is old and afraid and frail and selfish and determined to hang on. She is at death’s door trying every trick in the book not to find out how it opens. The simple instructions are there for all to read and understand but she throws away her eyeglasses. She buys ten pairs of shoes and ten boxes of toilet rolls of the strongest kind. She takes pills ground root powders philtres phials tonics and fortifiers. ‘Because it makes one live a long time.’ She is not interested in the quality of life, just to continue at all costs. She plays at being pious. She has a make-believe interest in piety. She is shoring up good deeds with the intention of presenting a bill. Now she is utterly self-absorbed. Life and all living beings constitute a conspiracy that must be outwitted. She doesn’t want to go down into the cold clammy labyrinthine vaults of the soil. Maybe it reminds her too much of Wet Country. Something will happen to make it unnecessary. A medical breakthrough. A miracle. An atom war. A presidential decree. A medieval mistake. A visitation of the gods. An eruption of changes. A wake-up. A recognition by the world that she must be made to live on and on over the dim horizon. She is residing in a dry country. Her toes feel the dust. She worries about her bladder her skin. She wants to change her teeth and wreak havoc on the ungrateful. Everybody will know her worth. She watches the old fig tree which is like an elephant. This is only half an inappropriate metaphor because although there are no fig trees where she hails from there are elephants crashing through the forests of rain. A bullfrog croaks. Old Lady smiles a deprecating grimace. Death is approaching with creaking joints tinkling a bell decrepit ceremonial hat slid over the eyes.