Mouroir

Shadows Break through the Mind

In case there’s still any doubt in your mind, nothing

short of castration (which arrests hair loss straight away,

but does have other setbacks) can bring back what

nature has taken away.

In all probability it started that time, long hence (although perhaps earlier too) when he strained uphill against the mountain wind. Escorted by two guardians of the morals in camouflage, one at each elbow. They were on their way with him to a place of safekeeping (but that’s neither here nor there). And on top of the knob of the incline, behind their backs a promenade along a fretful sea, a rickety house throned. When out of breath but full of wind they swerved left there, here the road runs parallel to the building, he became aware of excited life-signs behind the cloud-mirroring panes of the second storey. This old house is an asylum for the catatonic retarded. Behind one glass panel was the face, a blur as pale as a bat who never sees the sun, of a female with long black hair and oriental cheekbones; and the mouth of the face was opened wide in an outcry, stretched around an exclamation, suffocating, in order to swallow a shout, to force it down. In the next window he saw from the corner of his eye a stocky Black male gesticulating. There was spittle on the Black’s chin. Wind crumples sounds. Through the glass, behind the wind, it is as if they were jeering at him. “Ou haas! Ou haas!” (Old rabbit! Old rabbit!) That’s the way it sounded. Suddenly all of this, the juxtaposition of place and dawn and emotions, suddenly it was all extremely funny and touching and exhilarating. He took off his hat and chucked it in the air so that it took height like a slovenly seagull, his hair exploded in the wind. He is an angel. Tears of exuberance made his cheeks shiny and wet. Lightheadedness took hold of him and he had to give way. He had to make a false step. The urgent realization of the immediate. Now and here for ever, always. (“Easy, easy now my old one”, the one conductor exhorted, tightening the grip on his elbow.) But the world is made to stand on its head. Come what may.

Mouse Minnaar one morning took up position in front of the mirror and combed his hair (although perhaps earlier too). He saw that after pulling the comb through his hair-do a tuft remained stuck to the teeth. Never before, as far as he can remember, did he lose as many in only a few movements of the arm. With his hand he smoothed back his quiff from the forehead and to his utmost dismay noticed how much the paler patches above the temples had gained on the hairline, how unexpectedly bat-like his scalp has become. Kindest God. Like ringworm. No doubt any more. (How one misses the doubt once it has disappeared.) He is getting to be big-faced, to lose his finishing touches, to grow past his hair. Une légère calvitie? No, a wasteland. It must be because of the worries, he thought. But, for pity’s sake, I have no more worries. I am safe. Is it the result then of melancholy? Something I must be doing wrong. That something. To have cares is to live inside and outside, to deflect life into reflection so that it is no longer open-minded. To make of life a stick. To stroke the self. Then there is no more life. I must think on nothing. I must find a focal point that I can burn white with undiluted attention. I must fondle the nothing. . And from that instant Mouse Minnaar watched his mirror every day: and started worrying so excessively about his diminishing head of hair that quite soon he became completely bald.