All One Horse

letter to a mummy

I had disappeared for a long time. Friends found me in this rainy city. During the past papers I acquired knowledge of the king and the princess of the land — or those accorded the roles — the courtiers and the courtesans and the actors and the spies. A man with sores on his face and an ugly contusion all around the neck came to me and presented himself as my brother. I wanted to believe him. Together we tried to remember a mother and a father, but it was difficult: white clay covered the bodies. Birds had discovered the meagre meat. I became acquainted with Sobek, the tamer of crocodiles, who told me that one could not always be so sure of what was to be found below the clay. Feed will be feed — that was his wisdom — and some dreams have the contours and the cavities of skulls. I took my friends down a gentle green hillside to a vantage point overlooking the narrow mud-walled street penetrating the city. I wanted them to know where I came from, and I pointed out to them the square in the distance where the Trojan horse used to be kept. Hermes told me that when he was young little boys still came to climb on the steed’s back. They loved it and it was a tame animal. Eventually the wood had become mouldy and history passed it by. I asked Hermes whether he ever knew God. ‘In a way,’ he answered. ‘In a way. But God’s been buried for some time now because he was in the way. How else was one to invent landscapes?’ I then asked Hermes whether he still saw God. ‘From time to time,’ he said, ‘whenever I go down to look for the horses. He’s a thief, you know.’ I thereupon asked Hermes to please thank God on my behalf for not having made me black, that I was indeed grateful for having escaped that punishment. Should I also have let slip a word about exile? But it doesn’t exist! Those you think of as exiles are only people with shadows in their faces and when you suddenly open a door they will scurry away like cockroaches in a dark cupboard. At most, they dance differently. And the five or six members of a family all living with one legal identity card between them? How is one, anyway, to distinguish one black from another? By drawing. By drawing away from reality, away from the past. I may have established a gallery of ancestors and self portraits, but a drawing is always in the present tense. Friends had to dig me up in this rainy city. They had to put on boots because of the mud, and their robes were dirtied. We discuss the merits of uncovering and the usefulness of embroidering the find or the absence with words. Aesthetics, we agree, is a form of decadence of that art which constituted a means of communicating with the environment. I have to go now to that distant place. Will there still be boats on the lake? I have an appointment in the place of whispering, a report to make out, to write and hand over this letter to a mummy.