All One Horse

bathed in tears

My mother has been dead for a long time. When she returns her eyesight is not what it used to be and her memory has become erratic. There are loopholes now, and mushy areas of approximation. She returns because she wants to visit with my brother. She has lost her teeth. She has also lost all contact, she says, and she feels it incumbent on her to pick up the threads. She has become finicky, querulous, hard of hearing.

I go to fetch her at the airport. She brings her earthly belongings packed in a cardboard box tied up with rough twine. One becomes very poor in death. It is slightly embarrassing.

I go to fetch her at the airport to take her to my brother’s. I had lost sight of him. It is funny how you can go on living in the same town and yet the world shifts. Youth recedes and no longer bothers you, your pate is polished, you stop visiting certain areas or frequenting the prostitutes and the politicians. They become so dim in the mind’s eye that you end up believing you invented them. You end up forgetting that this is a seaside town with abrupt hills, with dead zones, with botanical gardens, with statues for unknown statesmen, with a wind. You become attached to your attaché-case.

When we arrive at my brother’s place my mother has already forgotten why she came in the first place. It does not really matter. We ride up in the lift. ‘Where are you taking me?’ she asks in an irritated voice. ‘Shall I sing for you? Why can’t you let me be?’ But she doesn’t hear my answer and this angers her so that she decides not to pay any attention.

On the last floor the partitions between the many cubicles, as also the outside walls, are made of glass. My brother resides in a small glass cage. Out there one can see the moon riding stately like a ship coming into harbour after having discovered an unknown continent. ‘Each to his own,’ my brother says. ‘I must have a view on the moon. See how she bobs.’

‘Leave me alone,’ my mother grumbles. She unties her cardboard box, takes out her odds and ends, makes a nest for herself in one corner of the cage. My brother sits stiffly behind his table, his hands rigid like those of some emblematic figure, a pork-pie hat perched on his head. He is thin to the point of emaciation, the dark skin stretched taut over the bones of his face, the ears smaller and more intricate than sea-shells.

We live like this for a long time. My mother spends her days asleep on her pile of rags in the corner. At night, by the light of the moon, I sometimes wake at the feel of her eyes on me, angry like those of an unhappy child. ‘ Who are you?’ she hisses. ‘Keep away from me!’

Day after day I become more fed up. Why should I be subjected to these uncertainties? Why is it so imperative to remember? To remain integrated with oneself must surely imply to become stultified beyond recognition. In our family we all have blue eyes and smooth cheeks. We have linen-white ears. I look at the mummy at the table. True, we have travelled a long history, but this cannot be my brother!

I look at him from all angles. It is not he. True again, I have been absent for a long sequence of arguments, but could that possibly account for the depredation? I approach him and start shaking him by the arm. ‘Impostor!’ I shout. ‘ Where is my brother? What have you done to B? Who are you?’

I am very upset. I knock his hat off and see his tightly curled hair. I pick up the hat, return it to his head, ram it down over his eyes. ‘You should not obliterate the moon,’ he whispers. I interrogate him. (Where did I learn about interrogation?) ‘Where? When? Why? What? With whom?’ He is implacable. ‘I am your brother,’ he assures me. I find a knife among the old manuscripts over which the mice have pissed in my mother’s box, and try to strip the skin off his hands. Blood stains the table-top. ‘But I am your brother,’ the bewildered man insists. And in a thin voice my mother suddenly starts to wail: ‘Help! Help! They’re killing me!’

I run out. At the end of the corridor in a glassed-in compartment of his own sits a fat man with grey hair. He’s wearing a broad colourful tie. I grab him by the tie. ‘Charley,’ I implore, ‘please, you must help me. You have known the family for a long time. What happened to B? Where is my brother?’

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he sighs. ‘No, you couldn’t have known, could you? Where were you during all this book? We tried to keep it hidden so as not to besmirch the family’s name. He went mad, the poor fellow. Was taken to That Place on the hill — you remember?’ Yes, I do remember. Memory is imagination.

Blood on the table, blood on the moon. I pull my mother to her feet. She has wetted her old overcoat. I stuff her belongings back in the cardboard box and down we go in the lift. Down there we shall take the tram going up the hill. ‘Don’t you dare touch me!’ my mother shouts. ‘Rapist!’

It is like going back to the concavities of my youth. How could I ever have forgotten? I must have grown up here. Here on the corner, surely, here our old house stood. I remember that it used to be filled with the groaning of the sea wafted up the heights at night by the wind. From the windows we would watch the birds — as big as humans with useless shoulders. Imagine picking your nose when you have only wings for arms. There was a big tree then, full of these many-coloured birds. And sometimes a hunter came by early in the morning: he would harpoon one of the huge ones, the others would squawk and flap their heavy feathers, the harpoon was attached to a long nylon line, the hunter could never dislodge the big bird, he would pull and pull trying to reel in his catch, and eventually the entire tree with its colony of violently vituperating birds would budge, shudder, start moving; the hunter would heave and ho the tree as far as the market square down there, then he would stand a ladder against the trunk, we a gaggle of kids would be clustered around, ‘watch out for falling birds,’ he would jest as he climbed up the rungs to knock down his quarry. We then thought that each bird wore a differently patched coat. And here too under the windows we watched the procession of musicians snaking down the street the morning after the revolution. There were not enough instruments to go around so that most of the participants — so young and so vulnerable but so enthusiastic in their patched clothes — carried candles only. Candles make soft noises. In the dawn of the new day we could barely discern the flames of the candles. Each troop had at its head an old exiled agitator or a tired greyhaired gladiator playing a violin or blowing down a dented saxophone. They wore extravagant ties. Ours was a revolution marked by poverty.

And there is That Place among the dying and the mentally destroyed and the basket cases drooling at the mouth and the vagabonds with their amputated legs and the debilitated jobless ones who have used up all their rights — there we find B. His hair is white. His eyes are still blue. His cheeks are slack. He sits on the ground studying a block of black ebony wood. From the minute grains, the discoloured patches and the whorls, he can read the past and predict the future. It is all written down. What has been will be again and so on forever. He is living below a given horizon. He keeps his eyes lowered. No, he does not recognize us, but at the level of his gaze he remembers very well. ‘I like your tie,’ he mumbles; ‘it is still the same.’ And: ‘When you listen to the shell you can hear the moon moaning.’ I kiss his hands. There is nothing to be done.

We go back to the building of glass coops. I have a life waiting for me, my mother must catch her plane. Charley is waiting for us on the top floor. He smoothes down his tie. ‘I know, know it all,’ he says. ‘Don’t forget that I’m the caretaker. Your brother used to work for us, the police. He was an extraordinary physionomist. Yes, we would let him look at the photos of the suspects and he would read and interpret the profiles for us. Nothing escaped his mind. Maybe that is the reason. Maybe there is a threshold of saturation. A point of no return.’

My mother clutches her cardboard box with gnarled birdlike hands. I return to the glass room of the thin man. The blood has dried on the dark wood. No moon will shine or slime in the liquid. I adjust his hat, bandage his mutilated hands. I bend down low to kiss the wounds and say: ‘You are my brother, you are my brother.’

We leave. We go to the airport. There is an old wind in the empty trees. The flight is announced. ‘Oohh…’ my mother moans. ‘Bebebebe… Don’t leave me…’ But she doesn’t recognize me. Her old black face is bathed in tears.