All One Horse

remnants of my story

We live deep in the country where it takes a long time to fashion a phrase to perfection. It rains incessantly, strands of hair cling to our foreheads, our hands are painted with water, our legs are browned to the thighs with mud. The trees submit to the ongoing gossiping of uncountable wet tongues.

(Let me open brackets here because sometimes it can get worse: the heavens have been known to cede and to flood our distant land with gurglegitation. People then perch in the trees, like so many inarticulate words, wrapped in wet cloth or, I say, like disastrous flowers sprung from some wrong season; a bloated cow bobs along for all the world a dislocated upside-down M; faces swim by the window and the moon is monstrously multiplied. Indoors I find myself trying to force the huge metallic ants back into the broken earth, I even use a hose on them, a full-throated stream, and the Minister of Justice rushes in to scream at me that these are his agents for God’s sake man you are destroying my agents! I have my differences with the Law.)

We are a large family. For a long time we have been living deep in the country where the rain comes down. We breed and we breathe. Some of us have been weakened by the strain and some are of dubious stock and questionable morals. There is, for instance, the Dook and the Douchess and their flashy accomplices wearing a chattering of diamonds on cheap fingers. Their big limousine lies sucked to the hubcaps in the quagmire. When the Dook and his entourage are to leave on a job entailing a quick getaway his fedora dripping silver drops, we have to scoop out the vehicle. Then there is our Young Sister, Oys. Her spirit is too limpid to accommodate reality. She has a thing about legs and about longing for a companion. We translate for her…

I go wandering in the forest, drenched in thoughts. And a strange man comes up to me, a mad look in his eyes, inchoate of mouth, he grabs me by the jacket and shakes me with broken questions. Eventually it dawns on me (please forgive the lapsus) that this apparition is looking for a small elephant gone astray. Maybe he is the trainer of a passing circus, or the monarch’s game-keeper, or the guardian of the idol. He is in any event a foreigner and quite beside himself with worry. Together we return to the family farm. The land is dark and asylum not easily found. One never knows. Dogs come at us in a mad run, their paws squelching in the mud, spittle threading their maws. They could be our dogs, the neighbours’ dogs, what does it matter. To keep them at bay I grab clods of wet earth to chuck at the snarls or the malevolent stares of their bulging eyes. They teeter on the edge of lurching for the kill.

And yes, huddled in the byre of the drowned cow we find an animal shivering darkly, hiding from the barking along the perimeter. I fetch the hose, we wash it down, a small elephant emerges.

Now my family tumbles through the slush to oink and to harrumph at the wonders of fate and haphazard hazard. Our Little Sister throws her arms around the small beast fondling his big little ears, his big little head, his trunk which is like a rough whisper. Tears of transportation run down her cheeks, coating the teeth with shininess, filling her mouth with a liquid smile.

But it is too good to last. When evening comes we send Oys off on some errand, we collar and lock up the growling dogs, and the man takes the small elephant away.

Thus we try to cheat time by pretending that nothing has happened. We carefully situate the pachyderm in our Young Sister’s mind. This is the secondary stage known to many foreigners, when writing comes into its own — even though written in mud: the missing is transformed into a delicious mixture of ache and ecstasy, changing shape and modifying its nature, until the very absence becomes presence.

And then one day the Prosecutor comes to us deep in the country where it takes a long time to migrate from imagination to transcendence. He comes with his files and his filthy underpants and his acolytes. They are investigating the disappearance of that which had disappeared, they say. Something happened, they say. Call it elephnapping if you wish. So it is only normal that they should piece it together again in terms of the need to un-derstand as defined by legal harrumph. Leading to the vital necessity of punishment as the only way to make what happened un-happen, they say. And they will have to interrogate our young Oys, they say. (De Law, the Dook snorts in disgust, fingering his tie-pin with a bejewelled hand.)

My mind darkens with primeval anger. I trumpet my rage. How dare you do it to her? Don’t you know that you will unhinge? Do you wish to confront her with the growth of emptiness? And what monster will be born from that? I grab the Prosecutor by his jacket and throw him over my head. One of his assistants, a black man in an expensive tweed suit, tries to intervene. I grasp his wrists and squeeze with all my might until I see his eyes bulge red. You keep out of this, Brother Blackman; this is none of your concern.

Ah, reader, I say, my mind darkens with an elephantine rage. Please excuse the lapsus. I shall have to return some other time to the missing remnants of my story.