Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

16

I eventually lost my virginity in the early summer of my senior year.

I don’t know how important these pieces are, should you want to piece together the jigsaw of my life. I didn’t develop an unquenchable passion for older women. But at least it was the beginning of Mozart and food and poetry and perhaps a general departure from the Louis L’Amour stage of my life. It was a start.

All I knew about poetry in those years was what they taught us in school. And as you can imagine, Betta Wandrag’s poetry wasn’t prescribed reading by the Education Department. Because so many of my mother’s friends were well known, I had no concrete awareness of her fame. In any case, it was only when she published her third volume of verse, Body Language, that the Sunday papers created such a furor. But by then I had finished my training at the Police College.

She was, at the time of the Great Event, somewhere in her late thirties, tall, her body no longer young, her hips broad, legs strong, her breasts ample, her hair long and thick and black and her eyes almost eastern, the corners downturned, her skin a dark, immaculate, faultless firmament. But it was only later that I stored these details in my memory bank, because for years she was just another weekend visitor from Johannesburg, another member of the adult circle of friends.

A Friday evening. In Stilfontein. When something was released. The collective sigh of relief of ten thousand miners was almost tangible, giving a certain atmosphere to the town, a sense of expectation, a total discharge of tension, an energy focused, deliberately, on the hard work of enjoying oneself.

My mother was in Cape Town and I was on the dark back veranda considering my dateless Friday evening. I just sat there, the way teenagers sometimes do, sat in a deck chair and stared at the dark, vaguely and uninterestedly aware of noises in the kitchen because Betta Wandrag, the visitor, was one of the people who, over weekends, balanced the scales of my mother’s lack of interest in the culinary arts. I can’t remember what the time was. It was dark, however. Somewhere, the deep bass boom of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” sounded on a radiogram, competing with Radio South Africa’s Concertina Club from another decibel-loaded direction. Most certainly there were the sounds of cars and insects, the exuberant appeal of young children playing cricket under the streetlights further down the road, a rubbish bin their wicket.

I just sat.

Until a new sound, furtive and almost inaudible, reached me, startlingly soft, and slow at first.

“Aaa…aaa…aaa…aaa…aaa.”

The first awareness of it was unidentifiable, a sound I deliberately had to separate from all the other instruments of the early-evening symphony, a musical question mark, a sonic puzzle that teased my ears and stimulated a primitive brain cell somewhere.

It grew gradually louder.

“Aaa…aaa…aaa…aaa…aaa.”

Short, fitful cries, no, exclamations, rhythmic and carnal and deeply pleasurable. Until I caught it, until the sounds became a mental image, until a wonderful insight swept over me. Baby Marnewick. In her backyard. Fucking. Alfresco.

Understanding came slowly and dramatically. With a complexity of perspectives. Someone was doing to the object of my many fantasies what I had yearned to do for so long. There was jealousy, envy, hate. She was cheating on me. But there was also the magical, bewitching rapture of her total bliss and the complete abandonment to what she was doing. The tempo and the pitch of each “aaa” rose slightly, a bolero of love, a dance of pure, silver lust, on and on in flawless rhythm, a woman totally lost in the intensity of her body.

I don’t know for how long Betta Wandrag stood in the kitchen doorway. I was completely unaware of her. My hand was in my shorts, mindlessly, instinctively massaging my body’s urgent reaction to the sexual symphony, my ears wide open to the sounds repeated over and over again beyond the wooden fence, “Aaa…aaa…aaa…” and then, rhythmically, a new sound crept into the cries, in the beginning contrapuntal to the end of an “aaa” stanza, later an integral part of Baby Marnewick’s love lyric. “Aaa…aaa…uh…aaa…aaa…aaa…uh,” now loudly and unabashed.

Something happened in my head, a new peak of randiness, an unknown summit of desire, so that I, with closed eyes, masturbated quite openly on the back veranda, carried away, lost, and focused.

Later Betta Wandrag told me that it was one of the most erotic scenes she had ever experienced. She added that she should beg my forgiveness, she hadn’t had the right to invade my privacy, but that she was incapable of stopping herself, the sounds and scene in front of her on the veranda – with a wooden spoon in one hand and wearing an apron, she knelt next to my chair, moved my hand gently away, and took me into her mouth.

It would be arrogant to think that mere words can describe the surprise, the shock, and the pleasure. It is unnecessary to relive, in detail, what followed. Let me keep to the salient features of this watershed in my life.

That night (and the whole of Saturday and most of the Sunday) Betta Wandrag initiated me with patience and compassion into the world of hedonism.

First there was sex. Slowly she transformed my youthful urgency and unquenchable lust to patience and control. She revealed the secrets of a woman’s body to me like a gospel, educated me in the minor and major pleasures of women, gently corrected my mistakes, richly rewarded my successes. Somewhere in the middle of the Saturday night, after a long lesson in oral satisfaction, she got up and fetched writing materials, shamelessly sat cross-legged on the bed while I looked at her, and wrote the poem “For Z,” which would later form part of that notorious volume:

Cunnilingua Franca

Your teeth and your tongue,

Soft sibilants flung,

Fricative.

Your breath and your lips,

Body language slips

Flutter.

Stutter.

Plosive.

In between there was Mozart. On that first night she played the Second Violin Concerto and sometimes, shuddering, with hips straining upward, would hum the theme in perfect harmony. There was the Bassoon Concerto as well, and one of the Horn Concertos (about which she made a double-edged remark and then gave her deep, self-satisfied laugh), the Violin Concerto N°5, and the Piano Concerto N°27.

In the hours of recovery between orgasm and the next arousal, she told me about Wolfgang Amadeus, about the small genius with the dirty mouth and the beautiful music, the intrigue behind each concerto, the perfection of each note. During that weekend she connected the music to pleasure and ecstasy in my mind for all time, associated it with the highest level of existence, the human potential to try to achieve perfection, even if it was beyond the reach of most of us.

She also cooked. Wearing only an apron. Naturally we had our Postman session on the kitchen table, but she brought other dimensions to the erotica of food. Between it all she spoke about things culinary, about eating, about the sensuality, the art. “It is the cradle of our civilization. Our culture started around the cooking fires of our prehistoric ancestors. That was where we learned to socialize and to communicate. And when only the embers of the dying fire remained, the pleasure of a filled belly made them lie down for love in the weak, flickering shadows,” she told me while we consumed her creations by candlelight with a compelling hunger.

Ah, she was clever. The first poem she introduced me to was Van Wyk Louw’s “Ballad of the Nightly Hours,” with its evocation of a few hours of drunken passion and its erotic yet sad details of such a passion. Until daybreak, when the morning spills the man over the edge of its glass, “in the hour of the dark thirst.” While I was lying on top of her, empty and sweating after another climax, she whispered it into my ear, so softly that I had to concentrate. And when I heard it, another world opened for me, the words acquired meaning, and I probably realized for the first time what art really meant.

She told me that sex would always be like that: postcoital depression was the curse of men. She told me about the French, who called orgasm “the small death,” but that sex with the love of your life was the one exception, the cure, the escape hatch. It made a great impression on me. I carried her words with me as another guide in my search for that single great love that my parents’ romance and now Betta Wandrag’s philosophies forecast and promised and that I later believed life owed me.

I hadn’t realized that the Dark Thirst would become the crystal ball of my life. I didn’t know how finally, how dramatically, the morning of my life would spill me over the edge like so much flotsam.

But that lay in the future.

Much closer, far more immediate, was the last great event of my youth that fate so casually created as a detour.

Because barely a week later Baby Marnewick was gruesomely and sensationally murdered.