All One Horse

too late now

When you are all in prison, the walls are thick, the windows barred, it is too late now. Strange animals may be howling at night. When you are all dressed in tuxedos very smartly, it is essential to keep up appearances. Drinks are doing the rounds, bottoms up and mud in your eye, ‘For he’s a jolly good fe-hello and so say all of us!’ The walls of the cell are of an autochthonous yellow colour, plaster is flaking off, detainees have over the many years been urinating in the corners when they couldn’t hold it any longer and banging against the door brought no attention. Traces of saltpetre, of animal fear. You may be in a stable and you cannot see far enough. Far away the sea is eating the land. Along the blind wall of the prison Jean Genet lies buried in a clifftop koimeterion where the restlessness of the waves gather regularly to impart to the dead the illusion of hearing, but tides will undermine the rockface and his bones will end up in the wash of the waters, like a perfectly pigeoned word never to be pronounced.

I know the story. At the time of the revolt of the Buddhas in Urbos, when they ran through the streets like flames in their saffron robes, when the land was set on fire and later when the floods came because the dykes had been breached and the hedges burnt down, and when all the olive trees had been removed from the face of the earth — after that time, I also went looking for my grave. I came to the island where my father had lived his life and found that the grave had been effaced. I went to the prison where Charley, the caretaker, helped me consult the records. We found the corresponding number, signed and countersigned. Then he took me to the cell. The sea had been there well before us. He showed me the corpse with its caking of white mud, stuffed into a plastic bag together with another, older cadaver. ‘We are economizing space,’ Charley explained.

You may even be free to circulate within the blue-printed confines of the penitentiary. You can don your tuxedo and walk to the courtyard. If possible, if you have the time to do so, if the reaction provoked by fear is not too instantaneous — the freezing of the spine and the finger tightening around the trigger — if you could take a step backwards (let your face be eaten by shadows): you may realize that there’s no need to kill the animal. Admittedly the ‘foreignness’ of the beast is hard to stomach. You may have to clench your mind so as not to slide into a dark snarl, losing all control, that is, the observation of self. Keep the distances alive!

It is hunched against a distant wall of the courtyard, its back turned to you, its haunches big and awkward. Give it a chance. It will turn its big yellow head and the welling up of liquid in its eyes will make you think twice. Give it a free rein, give it time to learn the slow words. When the time is due it will have mastered the words of the script. It will become a better than average actor. Let it play the role of the valet in ‘The Blacks’.

‘Are you going to beat me? I cannot bear physical pain, you know, because I am an artist. In a certain way I was one of you, I too was a victim of the Governor-General and the nomenclatura. You aver that I venerated them? Yes and no. I was most unreverential. You fascinate me much more than they did. In any event, tonight I’m no longer that which I was yesterday because I too know how to betray. Should you want me to, without however my crossing over entirely to your camp, I could…’ Don’t you want to pass time? Keep an open house for angels?

Of course, this is a motion story, the history of mutation. But the narrator is absent. Indeed, the horse is an ancient form of writing. You ought to know the plot and it is better to wait for time to pass away, for the horse head to take on the shape of a big brush. It will be too big, more’s the pity, too heavy for a man to drag to his cell. There the walls will have become chalkier, whitened by age. Maybe, if you had the means, you could cover the spaces of your past with writing. ‘When you are all in prison, the walls are thick, the windows barred, it is too late now…’