Mouroir

The Collapse

In Paname we had the habit — Greg Somesome, Dan Espejuelo and Giovanna Cenami, K and his fiancée, Fagotini, Ganesh at times, Bricole le Tubard and myself — of gathering once a week at the house of Lamourt and his wife, Mooityd. It was no fixed rendezvous; it might have been on a Friday night and on other occasions again a Saturday afternoon or a Sunday when twilight comes shining. Each then brought a bottle of wine, pâté and a cut of cheese, or some or other exotic delicacy originating from a Greek island or the Far East — djalandji dolmas, almond cakes, currants — and Mooityd prepared her fine and nourishing and aromatic dishes. It is a time-slice I often think back on with much pleasure. Later, after Lamourt had practically vanished from the face of the earth and after some of us had become bridle-shy of any association with others (for association of whatever kind is by definition subversive), our little group also disbanded and we were scattered to the four winds of the mirror. In any event, we never formed a “salon” or anything along those lines. But in life, which already is not very long or cheerful, one should honour the good entr’actes as the ant would hide the haystalk in memory of summer, one should cherish them and lay them by as souvenirs the way earth-dwellers of earlier ages always walked with a fragrant fruit, a spice ball, a pomander in the hand — the orange full of cloves which allows it to shrink but prevents it from ever rotting and gives it a lovely odour: to parry the stench of primitive sanitation and decaying cadavers and pornographic manuscripts. Or the pot-pourri, a saucer of flower petals left on a table to ward off the pest-fumes and other plagues blown along by the warm winds from the south. But you must fully realize that this hiatus can only be of brief duration and you must not try and cling to it. You must especially know what I mean. That which is gratifying and civilized you should let run through your fingers just like the bad and the unpleasant. Bread for the fishes. Nothing can be retained. .

When it became autumn and winter, of an evening after the meal, we used to sit or recline on pouffes around the fireplace, our hands to the glasses of wine, cigars, coffee, prayer beads. Light from the flames danced over the warm colours of the living room which was entirely wood-panelled, and there were painted wooden shelves carrying Mooityd’s knick-knacks and Lasouris’s books. Lamourt sat sucking at a pipe in the big wicker chair and Mooityd positioned herself on the goatskin next to the chair, the head on her hands folded over his knees, the glow a darkness pooled in her eyes and her face framed by the long dark hair which had something, the secret something, of that which grows in the night. The night heavy with wind; it chased through the city’s streets, tucked at the roof ridges, swept down the façades, grabbed the breath from the chimney-pots — but you couldn’t see it: from inside the house the windows were dark mirrors. Sometimes the conversation would drag its silences from mouth to mouth — in fact it would be the mouthification of meagre sound-slips so that you sat listening rather to the smithereening of the flames and the wind than the poor pairing (and paring) of words. But sometimes it occurred that one of those present would half-shut his eyes so that they might glint like strips of silver foil, allow his fingers to fondle the stem of a glass, and then start uncovering. .

On one such late winter’s evening D.E. recounted to us the following event. It was sharply cold — snow had fallen during the day on the Morainian Mountains and wind had carried the pale freshness of it into the city. We laid another log on the embers to see how sparks shy away from the heat, and all moved closer. (I do not believe in the existence of a soul — yet there comes a time when something inside you moves, moves. .)

And D.E. started:

So often one hears a reference to chance or to fate. I wonder. I often ask myself what reality is and if it isn’t everything, you know, because we are inclined to consider reality with a capital R as a pole, part of a two-step wherein the Other is constituted by irreality. If everything — everything conceivable and inconceivable that ever happened and that can never take place — if it is all reality then it is equally true that it is unreal, or of both “conditions” simultaneously. It follows, not so? Then we can surely say — I’m not trying to put my speculations in a logical order — that all barriers have been lifted. We speak of chance and fate because we cling with constricted buttocks to the conception of time. We have made of time a measuring rod — and that because we experience time as consciousness instead of as a dimension or a thing for instance, or an atavistic instinct we have not yet been able to eliminate through breeding — as the small awareness of course, spinning like a moth around the stone of the self; it is a bodily consciousness and as flesh multiplies and ages and very quickly decays, consciousness clinging to that same body inevitably sees time as a passing instant — that is how psychocentric man is — sees it as a passage and a passing, a progression, and we refer to “earlier” and “later”. But isn’t the small consciousness just a dust mote in the air momentarily irradiated by light or a dance of little flames, “thinking” then that it itself contains and brings forth light? And when light falls elsewhere — does the dust stop existing? Just imagine it falling on a house knocked together of grey planks in another mourner’s story? Or on the trembling calves of someone being strung up — where? Woe, woe the old worderer. . I believe we shall remain entangled in the riddle’s knots until the temple’s veil be torn asunder, until we are piloted beyond death-birth — called “life” — and further than samsara. I mean — until the tatters of illusion give way before us — the Hindus refer to it as maya. Just ask Ganesh, he has Indian friends. It is after all an ancient Vedantaic conception that everything is created out of ignorance, avidya, both the goods of the spirit and the body, and indeed by the double process of veiling or avarana of the reality, and thence constructing precisely on the basis of that veiling by means of projection, vikshepa. . This eternal illusion of which we are part and which we always weave further with our consciousness. Until the scales are peeled from our eyes and without beginning or end or limitations we enter the void, sunyata. And nothing contains everything. As the old gentleman sighed: “Life is a chasing after fuck all.”

Do we live or are we lived? And if we are lived, can we then die? Aren’t we just forgotten? But is anything ever forgotten completely? Perhaps it does escape memory as it was at that time, the way light caught it then; but somewhere it slid over into something else, did it induce another it, is it at the same time result and cause. And thus the it did not go lost. Everything continues vibrating and existing simultaneously. If I tell you then that the event which I’m going to depict is taking place now in the tilting of these words! Or that it happened long ago but that you were all present then — you, Greg, with your light hair and your gaiters there by the mirror; you, Mooityd, with your big smooth eye and your flowered dress; you K, with the smell of spoilt horsemeat on your trouser legs; you, Lasouris, with your dressings and your ointments and your armpits; and you, Breytenbach, with your fancy ways; and you, Signora Cenami, with the hot nether parts; and you, Minnaar, old grey one. But that you will only realize it now? And if one of you should write down my words — or rather that which my words became in your memory and consciousness, the moth wriggles free and leaves a little hole in the cloth — and carry them forward and transplant them into others which will consume the words and so forth — wouldn’t you all have been present in that case? Was I then not, rather, am I then not among you? It is the ear-blinding of the worderer. The diffusion. And time — let’s forget for the time being about convention and conscience — where do we fix it? Isn’t it always actual? Those moments when all is said and done are present when I recount them, translate them, just as dot-dot to date as when they will be repeated years hence by one of you and so on et cetera.

Actually I want to describe two incidents for you and at first sight it may well seem that there is no relationship between the two. Yet, when you let your eye penetrate deeply enough, you will see the link somewhere. As you all know, I spent a long stretch in prison. You learn more about measuring there than may be good for your spiritual equilibrium. However it may be, much of that time passed me by. Our word agreements, as you will notice, constitute the structure for our way of seeing itself, so that I must speak of a time — like a thing or a dimension for instance — which moves, which is deployed; of an “earlier” and an “afterwards” and a “then”. Never mind. I remember that the gaol building was a low, oblong hut. The hut was against the incline of a hillside. At the front, from the side facing downhill, it was two storeys high; at the back of the building the terrain was very steep — higher than the shutters of the second floor where I was kept. It was a small prison, nothing to get excited about. On the ground floor — which received light only from the front — a corridor with rows of cells on either side, but the cells were empty. When Sergeant Roog wanted to talk seriously, to see me eye to eye, he took me to one of the empty cages and then talked long and hissingly right into my face so that I could smell his moustache reeking of onion and egg. Why he found it necessary to take me there I’ll never know, since the upper floor, which consisted of one long room, was also uninhabited except for Warder Softly-Softly and the already mentioned Roog (they had to stay with me at all times, day and night) and my wife, Meisie, who was allowed to share my time. We were in a small town on the ocean. The sun shone regularly and the skies above us were open unto infinity but a wind blew daily in large folds. And a haziness at the turning-points of the day, moving, moving. Here the wind blew so boisterously that you could hardly conceive of it blowing anywhere else also: this town with its surroundings must have been its habitat. Or its stoke-hole. From the second-floor windows one could see through gaps between the buildings the stormy sea tossing and turning — with white bonnets being whipped along by the waves as if a whole procession of pioneer women had come to grief there, the waterlogged blue corpses floating under the fluttering dresses.

Our life there wasn’t disagreeable. When I say this you can see that I was already. . free. Sometimes I even thought that the prison must be a holiday camp for warders and that we were there — I at least, for my wife had never been sentenced — just to justify the presence of the guardians: even when on leave there must be detainees to give continuity and steadiness and direction to their existence. And yet they never went walking or swimming or even just shopping or playing the pin-tables; they were loath to leave us alone, and they were at all times strictly according to regulations spit-smoothed and polished in their uniforms. They weren’t repressive. Warders will be warders. True, in terms of his arrested development and in order not to lose the grip on his sense of reality, Roog at regular intervals had to bluster and mete out punishment. Softly-Softly was more jovial, devil-may-care. Often we got drunk together, perhaps also to push back the moving fog of ennui.

One evening — it wasn’t quite dark yet because there were still a few weak jerks of light coming from the sea — I was again half moved and tipsy. I guffawed in my fist and danced with limp shoes until Softly’s red cheeks were stretched and burning with laughter; even Roog’s moustache came close to a tremble at one point before rearranging itself in the apposite official crease. A woman dressed in yellow — maybe only a whore, I won’t know — came in the half-dusk to a window at the back of the building, looking for trouble. The apertures giving on to the rising hillside had bars in front of them, those in the front had glass panes only as it was too high to jump from there and break your neck. The woman, lustily moving her hips because she knew full well that I couldn’t reach her there except through the eye and the imagination — although no force is as ravishing as the imagination — the woman then apparently knew about me — I was reasonably well known at the time since I had once participated in the Olympic Games as yachtsman — and she ostensibly wanted my autograph. It was just tomfoolery and tom-teasing. With more of a to-do than necessary I accepted the strip of paper through the grill in answer to her demand because I really wanted to have her move in such a way as to permit me to peep up her legs inside the yellow dress. Her body was as brown and as blue as the twilight. All of a sudden I heard Meisie calling me to come quickly to the other row of windows above the town and the sea. From the window where she was watching we could look down into a narrow street climbing away from the seafront towards the prison, turning parallel to it just under the walls. In the final wreathing rays of the sun three people moved up the hill: the two brothers Giovanni, motor mechanics working here in Paname in a garage just around the corner from Lamourt’s house, and an old gentleman whom both Meisie and I love dearly. The two brothers — the smaller one with the posh swagger who had his manliness ripped away years back in an automobile accident, and the tall one with the crippled knees and the Bob Dylan reddish beard and the crossed blue eyes — were dressed in their khaki outfits, grease stains still clung like shiny bats to the overalls. The elderly gentleman wore dark clothes and his hat of every day. He walked with great difficulty but the other two only sniggered and didn’t assist him in anyway. The wind was big and thick and dark with colour. Meisie pulled open the window and shouted at him with an excited voice. When he looked up at us she waved and called: “Our best regards at home!” He acknowledged with a nod and struggled on. Wind furled the brim of his hat and slammed our window shut. And the window was dark and glistening as this one here tonight. They were directly below us at the corner of the street and would have been disappearing from our sight within a few seconds when I shouted “Oubaas!” (old master) and tried forcing the window open. But in vain. “Oubaas! Oubaas!” I don’t know if he could hear me. When they reached the level area in front of the gaol and started moving away from us, I could see through the glass that he was weeping — and all at once he became very small and old and grey and before my very own shocked eyes his head and shoulders disintegrated, cracked and utterly exploded in grey drops and dollops and splinters as big as seagull-chickens. “Oubaas!” I started bawling, filled with horror and dismay — “Oubaas! Oubaas. .!” In one dark corner of the room I could see Softly-Softly’s cheeks puffing red with laughter. .

My second experience. My second experience (yes, fill it up, please) must be fitted into a different time-slot, at other tangent points on earth, and was of a different kind. It was the time of autumn and what I have to relate took place here in Paname and not in Nomansland. Just like that, somewhere on the outskirts where the limits of the little hamlets which in their own time were quite independent and self-sufficient had long since been wiped out, but it was not yet a very densely built-up area and plots faded here into small farms and then in fallow lands bordering on rubbish dumps, streets degenerated into mud tracks, roads died in the rests of forests. Big City annexes, but cannot always digest. The rainy season was already at hand, the red earth all slush. We were visiting Eva and Noordhoek Hedge in the pavillon de banlieue which they had acquired not long before. The house was far from finished even though a local carpenter had been moving heaven and earth over the preceding days. The living room, around the fireplace, was done and had been painted: there was wood panelling against the walls, shelves everywhere with knick-knacks and books, easy chairs as for instance wicker seats imported from Thailand, goatskins spread over the floor.

We were due to leave for Burrlin that very same afternoon. To the best of my knowledge Noordhoek Hedge, Eva and Meisie were making all the necessary preparations for the journey; I myself was just pottering about in the wooden annexe to the house and when I started becoming conscious of smothered sounds and a feeble groaning. I at first couldn’t make out what was happening. Out of sheer curiosity I walked around the house with in my hand still the pickaxe handle that I had been planing down and with wood shavings clinging to my trouser legs. In the garden path I came across a terrible scene: my wife and my two friends were stretched out on the gravel, clearly dizzy and confused, and on top of them were three youngsters with leather jackets and armed with chains! The attackers knelt over their victims looking hard for soft places to bite and suck at neck and breast — there were blood smears on their teeth and their chins were wet. In the background their companions stood, also armed with chains and evidently just as bloodthirstily hungry. I instantly lost all control over my reactions and started hitting out with the stave. I heard the skulls cracking like dove eggs under my blows. The hangers-on — cabrones — turned tail and fled, and I after them as far as the mud and the ooze well past the last houses. There I stopped all out of breath and watched them scattering in all directions, trying to make it to the sanctuary of a copse or a few trees, with red earth on their shoes and their pants.

Back at the house I pulled the still throbbing corpses away from my friends. Noordhoek Hedge had already come to. Together we carried the two women to the living room and made them comfortable by the fireplace, trying to bring them round by wiping their lips and their foreheads and dabbing the blood of their wounds. Their clothes were of course all undone and when they finally regained consciousness they were both very dazed and frightened, but luckily neither of them was seriously injured. Noordhoek Hedge, he knows the surroundings rather well, afterwards told me that they had already during the early part of the afternoon noticed the loubards sauntering down the road (a certain Albert and his gang, it would seem), and that they tried protesting when the scoundrels wanted like starved predators to enter the garden, but that they were overwhelmed on the spot and probably only their empty bodies would have been left among the ants and the earthworms had it not been for my providential intervention. Lucky that I could still be there in time.

We summoned the local carpenter to come and knock together some coffins for the crushed assailants — the same guy who had fixed up the living room so nicely. In an incredibly short time he finished the boxes and while we laid out the corpses, each with his own blood-besmirched neckerchief over the face, casked on trestles, he gave the finishing touches to the lids — actually the only task which, in his capacity as craftsman, accorded him any real pleasure. This all took place in the one heated space of the house. Outside a piercing wind had risen up in the meantime — but at least it had the advantage that every single fly, which we were expecting by now around the broken dead flesh, was also blown off course for the time being. It is an ill wind that doesn’t blow away flies.

Noordhoek Hedge was showing me his latest masterpiece, a book which he had just finished — for he made it his vocation to take published works (on any subject, but he was particularly fascinated by ontology) and modify them with a fine pen and black ink, sometimes word for word, till a completely new book was created, and always far better than the “original” or the “rough material” as he considered it to be. He was, you might say, stripping the cloak of petrifaction and convention off the work so that the little bones may glisten afresh. I was leafing through this most recent transfiguration and in places I had to catch my breath at the riskiness of some of his ideas — when quite unexpectedly there was the squeaking of the telephone. Very surprised we all looked up — Eva who was busy arranging her little hat (hardly bigger than an apple), because we were expecting to leave a while later, Eva literally remained standing just like that with her hands in her hair — since no one as far as we could tell could have known this number. The apparatus was only recently installed and as far as we were concerned not even connected yet; besides, the intention was to have it registered in the name of Dr Righton Ajax Foroek⁶ exactly to preserve the anonymity and to fool nuisance callers. Noordhoek Hedge got up with the heart’s flutter-dance over the brown skin of his skull (under the soft down some crusted blood still pointed a warning finger) and lifted the earpiece off its hook with a long stiff arm as if expecting at any moment to be bitten in the ear. Everyone held their breath; even the carpenter stopped chewing the nails in his mouth and expectantly turned his button-fat eyes to the telephone, hammer and chisel held high in the air.

In this silence we could clearly hear a female voice with a brackish American accent coming over the line — you surely know the sound: like someone playing the cornet without a mouthpiece. “Now y’all jest tell Dawn Espohwaylo that ah know he’s leavin’ with y’all this afte’noon for Bahlane to attend the Olympic Games. . ” I just could not believe the unearthly scratching. Who was this woman? How on earth did she know I — we — would be here? Why was she calling about me? How could she know that we’d be leaving that same afternoon for Burrlin (if wind and mud did not render the roads impassable) and indeed because we wanted to attend the regattas of the Games? “An’ ah know you’re there — you lissen to me, Deedah,” the blue-toned voice carried on, “Ah don’t an’ ah jest couldn’t give a. . a push for it!” There was a click followed by everyone’s speechless amazement. My wife, Meisie, turned her eyes with the dark fine targets so suddenly on me that the long black hair moved like a shadow-stain over the lilac-coloured scarf wrapped around the wounds of her neck. Damn! “Who is this woman?” she wanted to know as if she’d taken me red-handed. “Where do you know her from? Why don’t you admit that you know her? Was it perhaps an autograph she wanted?” One after another the staccato questions exploded like grapeshot around my ears and my defensive and disclaiming gestures apparently didn’t carry the slightest conviction. Wind started huffing stronger outside the dark window panes. In places it was wiping all along the walls but despite the pressure one could see the floppy wings and the little sucking paws of the first flies searching outside over the glass. And soon, led on by the fresh odour, they would find a crack somewhere. Firelight jumped in a reddish glow over the three neckerchiefs so that it looked as if underneath there might be something moving, moving. I could feel the black stuttering in the veins of my neck, and the clamminess between torso and shirt. Around me there was an erosion of light and over a long sad and long distance (behind the wind and behind the present) I heard my tight voice calling: “Oubaas! Ouba-á-á-á-ás!”