All One Horse

jade or alabaster

They lived on an estate as big as a park, once upon a time long ago it might have been some sort of citadel beyond the city enclosure, but it is many a memory since it became an integral part of the agglomeration, netted by streets, alleyways, small squares, the hubbub and the teeming of traffic. The park had nevertheless remained a stretch of pristine nature — even if planned, laid out and cultivated — in the midst of the grey city. There nested an old manor house built on a gentle incline with luxuriant gardens all around it. The building itself with its courtyards and the grounds bordering on it was divided in two. One half belonged to them and it was indeed in a dilapidated state but they had started restoring it, creating new spaces as they went along — dining halls, salons, pool rooms, bedrooms. The builders, the plumbers, the electricians were diligently at work and under the grey accumulation and decay brought about by generations of neglect the virile lines of a new deal could already be decried clearly. To gain access to their part of the house you had to pull at a rope outside the gate; it was attached to a bell cast in the shape of a female head which swung comically to and fro and there was the tinny sound of clapper against metal when you jerked the bell-rope. You would hear something, but not know the rights of it. The female bell was mounted on the protection wall just outside the dining-room window. Levedi’s brother had to oversee the alterations; he’d taken up lodgings in a smallish bathroom from where he could direct the activities and the white sheets of his unmade bed hard by the bath were still warm.

The other half had as inhabitant the retired curator of one of the city’s most prestigious art museums. He was a flabby old fellow with an international reputation, tender hands perfectly matching his white cuffs, and two thick wings of snow-white hair sticking out above the ears. His portion of the mansion and the terrain was beautifully manicured, ancient and rampant and soaked in tradition and care, but then he had helpers enough to keep it all in check. His garden was a labyrinth of glistening green lanes, an entanglement for the sun, the foliage in places twice as high as the crown of a man. A couple of ex-prisoners looked after the property — tried clearing the bosky corridor, polished the leaves to a shine, and they puffed at long hand-rolled cigarettes as they walked with a swivelling of the hips while muttering away in an argot which only God could understand. You also heard birds winging by very closely though you would never catch sight of them. The house was stuffed with antiques which the occupant himself would comment upon, and it might be that visitors discreetly paid an admittance fee to come and gape at all the riches, thus perhaps helping to defray the expenses of keeping up the maze.

From the very top floor a view could be had over the city. It was like a décor, layer upon layer, when the sun touched it with the dramatic goldtinted finger of death: chunky constructions with reflecting domes, smoking hills, slim dark red towers — all far off and suggesting perspective but with neither depth nor dimension — and, interspersed with the above, the grey and darkening scurry, the zones of uniformity. One of the narrow passages running along the shadows of a cathedral, an enormous cloister and the blind walls of other strongholds, could be followed by eye for quite some distance from up here. On Sundays few people trod the paving stones: now and then a person in a black robe lugging a rope-bag heavy with groceries and vegetables from the market, and that street had its own wind. Not very far from the estate one could see, looking down, a walled-in square which used to be frequented by Africans only, and then just over the week-ends. Some enterprising money-maker had horses and camels brought there. True, the mounts had shed their hair and the hipjoints jutted out and they were so tame that they must have been as deaf as stones, but the Africans from Mali and Togo and Cameroon and Chad and Mauritania closed their eyes to the alienation and the decadence and clambered on the backs of the docile animals to be thus transported to the larger, desert-deeper spaces of memory and nostalgia. There were swords also, with which you could gird yourself for a brief span, and those too poor to afford a riding-animal could still hire a weapon to handle, to fondle the grip and let the red blade slide from its sheath. Is there life before death? These people did not speak to one another; the dark bodies in the voluminous garbs were silent, under the caps with the sprinkling of sparkling beads the heads were bowed as each communicated with his own absence of mind. The emaciated animals too were immobile, carved from the light, the flared nostrils turned in the direction of a wished-for wind.

Sometimes when the chlorophyll shrubs flickered during a week-end with wind, and the gurgling of effluent water in the long street of shades imitated birdsong, and the beasts in the square without moving desultorily sniffed for dust, Levedi and Juan also went to visit their neighbour, the old curator, to be informed about the treasures of his house and of the clever ways in which to add to these. Then there was nothing macabre, no apostasy, the air was fresh, the city deployed in its eternal crépuscule, the future very beautiful and very close. The host smiled three or four times and caressed his wrists with sensitive fingertips as if to ascertain that neither fringe nor fimbria dangled from the pale flesh. He would then escort them through the halls over the mirror-floors and always end with the guided tour in the smallest room of all perched practically over the African square. The space — in fact it was a bathroom — they never entered, they just looked in from the outside. On the unmade bed next to the bath, among the warm sheets and as though protected by two pillows, lay the loveliest female head you ever could expect to behold, carved from a nearly transparent rosehued jade or alabaster.