'I have held on to that story all my life. If each of us has a story we tell to ourself about who we are and where we come from, then that Is my story. That is the story I choose, or the story that has chosen me. It Is there that I come from, it is there that I begin.
'You ask whether I want to go on driving. If it were practically possible, I would suggest that we drive to the Eastern Cape, to the Outeniqua Mountains, to that stopping-place at the top of Prince Alfred's Pass. I would even say, Leave maps behind, drive north and east by the sun, I will recognize It when we come to it: the stopping-place, the starting-place, the place of the navel, the place where I join the world. Drop me off there, at the top of the pass, and drive away, leaving me to wait for the night and the stars and the ghostly wagon to come rolling over.
'But the truth is, with or without maps, I can no longer find the place. Why? Because a certain desire has gone from me. A year ago or a month ago it would have been different. A desire, perhaps the deepest desire I am capable of, would have flowed from me toward that one spot of earth, guiding me. This is my mother, I would have said, kneeling there: this is what gives life to me. Holy ground, not as a grave but as a place of resurrection is holy: resurrection eternal out of the earth.
'Now that desire, which one may as well call love, is gone from me. I do not love this land any more. It Is as simple as that. I am like a man who has been castrated. Castrated in maturity, I try to imagine how life is for a man to whom that has been done. I imagine him seeing things he has loved before, knowing from memory that he ought still to love them, but able no longer to summon up the love itself. Love: what was that? he would say to himself, groping in memory for the old feeling. But about everything there would now be a flatness, a stillness, a calmness. Something I once had has been betrayed, he would think, and concentrate, trying to feel that betrayal in all its keenness. But there would be no keenness. Keenness would be what would be gone from everything. Instead he would feel a tug, light but continual, toward stupor, detachment. Detached, he would say to himself, pronouncing the sharp word, and he would reach out to test its sharpness. But there too a blurring, a blunting would have intervened. All is receding, he would think; in a week, In a month I will have forgotten everything, I will be among the lotus-eaters, separated, drifting. For a last time he would try to feel the pain of that separation, but all that would come to him would be a fleeting sadness.
'I don't know whether I am being plain enough, Mr Vercueil. I am talking about resolve, about trying to hold on to my resolve and failing. I confess, I am drowning, I am sitting here next to you and drowning.'
Vercueil slouched against the door. The dog whined softly. Standing with its paws on the front seat, it peered ahead, eager to get moving again. A minute passed.
Then from his jacket pocket he drew a box of matches and held it out to me. 'Do it now, ' he said. 'Do what?'
'It.'
'Is that what you want?'
'Do it now. I'll get out of the car. Do it, here, now.'
At the corner of his mouth a ball of spittle danced up and down. Let hirn be mad, I thought. Let it be possible to say that about him: that he is cruel, mad, a mad dog.
He shook the box of matches at me. 'Are you worried about him?' He gestured at the man with the firewood. 'He won't interfere.'
'Not here, ' I said.
'We can go to Chapman's Peak. You can drive over the edge if that's what you want.'
It was like being trapped in a car with a man trying to seduce you and getting cross when you did not give in. It was like being transported back to the worst days of girlhood.
'Can we go home?' I said.
'I thought you wanted to do it.'
'You don't understand.'
'I thought you wanted a push down the path. I'm giving you a push.'
Outside the hotel in Hout Bay he stopped the car again. 'Have you got some money for me?' he said.
I gave him a ten-rand note.
He went into the off-licence, returned with a bottle in a brown paper packet. 'Have a drink,' he said, and twisted off the cap.
'No, thank you. I don't like brandy.'
'It's not brandy, it's medicine.'
I took a sip, tried to swallow, choked and coughed; my teeth came loose.
'Hold it in your mouth,' he said.
I took another sip and held it in my mouth. My gums and palate burned, then grew dead. I swallowed and closed my eyes. Something began to lift inside me: a curtain, a cloud. Is this it, then, I thought? Is this all? Is this how Vercueil points the way?
He turned the car, drove back up the hill, and parked in a picnic area high above the bay. He' drank and offered, me the bottle. Cautiously I drank. The veil of greyness that had covered everything grew visibly lighter. Dubious, marvelling, I thought: Is it really so simple – not a matter of life and death at all?
'Let me tell you finally,' I said: 'What set me off was not my own condition, my sickness, but something quite different.'
The dog complained softly. Vercueil reached out a languid hand; it licked his fingers.
' Florence 's boy was shot on Tuesday.'
He nodded.
'I saw the body,' I went on, taking another sip, thinking: Shall I now grow loquacious? Lord preserve me! And as I grow loquacious will Vercueil grow loquacious too? He and I, under the influence, loquacious together in the little car?
'I was shaken,' I said. 'I won't say grieved because I have no right to the word, it belongs to his own people. But I am still – what? – disturbed. It has something to do with his deadness, his dead weight. It is as though in death he became very heavy, like lead or like that thick, airless mud you get at the bottoms of dams. As though in the act of dying he gave a last sigh and all the lightness went out of him. Now he is lying on top of me with all that weight. Not pressing, just lying.
'It was the same when that friend of his was bleeding in the street. There was the same heaviness, Heavy blood. I was trying to stop it from flowing down the gutters. So much blood! If I had caught it all I would not have been able to lift the bucket. Like trying to lift a bucket of lead.
'I have not seen black people in their death before, Mr Vercueil. They are dying all the time, I know, but always somewhere else. The people I have seen die have been white and have died in bed, growing rather dry and light there, rather papery, rather airy. They burned well, I am sure, leaving a minimum of ash to sweep up afterwards. Do you want to know why I set my mind on burning myself? Because I thought I would burn well.
'Whereas these people will not burn, Bheki and the other dead. It would be like trying to burn figures of pig-iron or lead. They might lose their sharpness of contour, but when the flames subsided they would still be there, heavy as ever. Leave them long enough and they may sink, millimetre by millimetre, till the earth closes over them. But then they would sink no further. They would stay there, bobbing just under the surface. If you so much as scuffled with your shoe you would uncover them: the faces, the dead eyes, open, full of sand.'
'Drink,' said Vercueil, holding out the bottle. His face was changing, the lips filling out, gorged, wet, the eyes growing vague. Like the woman he had brought home. I took the bottle and wiped it on my sleeve.
'You must understand, it is not just a personal thing, this disturbance I am telling you about,' I pursued. 'In fact it is not personal at all. I was fond of Bheki, certainly, when he was still a child, but: 1 was not happy with the way he turned out. I had hoped for something else. He and his comrades say they have put childhood behind them. Well, they may have ceased being children, but what have they become? Dour little puritans, despising laughter, despising play.