All One Horse

the thieves and the word

This happens once upon a time. In the past which we now evoke, there lives a man leading what passes for a normal life, neither good nor bad, smoking moderately and only occasionally drinking down to his knees. He has a cat, mice behind the wainscotting, the average gnawl of worries and a small stock of smiles to swap with those — neighbours and bureaucrats and retired army colonels now breeding rabbits — who come and go on the staircase. It is winter and the streets have the cold greyness of stone. He is on his way. He arrives at the cabaret with wind in his pockets and three words in the memory chamber when he suddenly plunges through a trap-door. What does it mean, ‘plunging through a trap-door’? Simply that with suddenness he sees a lady in that place of ambiguity and questionable reputation, a lady so exquisite, so sumptuous, that she must be a princess from a distant kingdom, that he dare not look at her. She does not see him at first, lost as she probably is in an ancient landscape of her own. He does not look at her but the corners of his eyes keep noticing her movements, like lightning in Africa. He cannot stop looking at her. ‘What is this, then?’ the man asks himself. ‘Did I fall upwards into paradise?’ It should be pointed out that the place is nondescript, neither big nor cramped nor frankly evil — why should it be? — with some smoke adrift near the ceiling and drinks to be had in the sad foyer. A black cape of shiny hair throws a shadow over the glitter and glance in the lady’s eyes. Then the miracle happens: the two protagonists actually come to exchange thirty-two words, eighteen by her and fourteen by him (eleven of which he borrows from her). And butterflies are blooming in the hands of the man. The lady’s hands, on the other hand, are small and reddish, and her hips must be as white as lips in the night. Her mouth moves with elegant desirability so that the man aches for the touch of her tongue. Too soon, too soon. Then she leaves with her entourage. The man follows her into the street, urgently, to catch a glimpse of the beauty of her buttocks-walk, and when he turns back everything is gone — no more lights, no smoke, no painted signboard, no office-box, even the one-eyed Lebanese frontman is gone with the wind — just the grey façade of a wintery street in a quarter where wee-pensioned concierges and minstrels and illegal guest workers come to die of tuberculosis and the misery of homesickness.

‘Alack,’ the man sighs. And ‘oh fie’. But life and sentences will go on. The man is looking high and low for the exit into the entrance. Passers-by pause when they notice him with fingers murmuringly sensitive like lips, tracing the slightest crack or slip in the walls of the capital, but then they continue, assuming him to be part of the recurrent measuring needed to intensify city life-control. The writing of unfreedom on the walls. God’s rod. Man buries his past until negligence makes him forget where the traps are laid and he stumbles down a hole into oblivion. But this errant pilgrim will not despair. Why not? Because he has three reasons which may hold water. The first one is that he now finds in one of his empty pockets a stone which has the temperature of his body having been brooded upon, pulsating weakly; actually it is the heart and if she has made this organ visible and brought it into touch, the man thinks, if she has made it to happen, as it were, the man thinks, then she has done something implying existence and I’m not making up stories. The second one comes to him when he opens a notebook which he fortuitously seems to have had on him, to find pressed there between the pages a very pretty butterfly, or a reference scribbled briefly as beautifully as a butterfly fluttering away with white liplike whispering when he cracks the book open to look for her name, that will be her address then, he says. The third one is that one fine day he is hailed in a watering place by an old gentleman, an unacquaintance. Listen. The old gentleman has a rose-petal pate, washed-out eyes where a silvery sparkle still surfaces at times, and the long teeth of a wolf from the steppe. ‘Sit,’ the old man orders. ‘And listen. We have existed for so long that people have forgotten us. We are the dust of the mind — not even a memory, but a mythology! Yes, I’m talking of the primitive deities. Don’t you think it is a lonely state? Of course we go on and people take us for bankers or forgers or retired colonels or, as you see, Trotskyite puppet-masters, antediluvian revolutionaries trying to manipulate one freedom struggle after the other (has been lost). Your century has been one of utter alienation. Human filthiness. Let it be. But if a god doesn’t do his godthing-a-meding-dong, from time to time at least, stir the dust, as I say, he stops existing. A god is that only in what he does. Which is why I have to intervene. You will find her (he pulls back his head and chuckles a soft spittle-laugh behind the golden fillings in his mouth), buster. And through her you will come into existence. How? On one condition. You must gather the words to create the absences. You will write, you the pauper, you will write for her ten composite landscapes bequeathed to the lady of the heart. Let us not die. You will meet her in the ninth verse. Naturally, she will not appropriate the gift. A landscape is only the condition of dying after all. By the way, allow me to present myself. I am Hermes, he of the doorways, the thieves and the word.’