'I'll take out the windscreen. It's just glass, you don't need it.'
Why did I give in? Perhaps what won me in the end was the new attention he was paying me. He was like a boy in a state of excitement, sexual excitement, and I was his object. I was flattered; in a distant way, despite all, I was even amused. Obscurely I may have felt something unsavoury in it, as in the excitement of a dog digging for carrion not buried deep enough. But I was in no condition to draw lines. What did I want, after all? I wanted a suspension. To be suspended without thought, without pain, without doubt, without apprehension, till noon came. Till the noonday gun boomed on Signal Hill and, with a bottle of petrol on the seat beside me, I either drove or did not drive past the chain and down the Avenue. But to be thoughtless till then; to hear birds sing, to feel the air on my skin, to see the sky. To live.
So I yielded, Vercueil wrapped a towel around his hand and broke out more of the glass till the hole was big enough for a child to climb through. I gave him the key. A push, and we were away.
Like lovers revisiting the scenes of their first declarations, we took the mountainside drive above Muizenberg. (Lovers!
What had I ever declared to Vercueil? That he should stop drinking. What had he declared to me? Nothing: perhaps not even his true name.) We parked at the same spot as before.
Now: feast a last time on these sights, I told myself, digging my nails into my palms, staring out over False Bay, bay of false hope, and southward over the bleak winter-waters of the most neglected of oceans.
'If we had a boat you could take me out to sea,' I murmured.
Southward: Vercueil and I alone, sailing till we reached the latitudes where albatrosses fly. Where he could lash me to a barrel or a plank, it did not matter which, and leave me bobbing on the waves under the great white wings.
Vercueil reversed on to the road. Was I wrong, or did the engine throb more sweetly in his hands than in mine?
'I am sorry if I am not making sense,' I said. 'I am trying my best not to lose direction. I am trying to keep up a sense of urgency. A sense of urgency is what keeps deserting me. Sitting here among all this beauty, or even sitting at home among my own things, it seems hardly possible to believe there is a zone of killing and degradation all around me. It seems like a bad dream. Something presses, nudges inside me. I try to take no notice, but it insists. I yield an inch; it presses harder. With relief I give in, and life is suddenly ordinary again. With relief I give myself back to the ordinary. I wallow in it. I lose my sense of shame, become shameless as a child. The shamefulness of that shamelessness: that is what I cannot forget, that is what I cannot bear afterwards. That is why I must take hold, of myself, point myself down the path. Otherwise I am lost. Do you understand?'
Vercueil crouched over the wheel like someone with poor eyesight. He of the hawk's-eye. Did it matter if he did not understand?
'It is like trying to give up alcohol,' I persisted. 'Trying and trying, always trying, but knowing in your bones from the beginning that you are going to slide back. There is a, shame to that private knowledge, a shame so warm, so intimate, so comforting that it brings more shame flooding with it. There seems to be no limit to the shame a human being can feel.
'But how hard it is to kill oneself! One clings so tight to life! It seems to me that something other than the will must come into play at the last instant, something foreign, something thoughtless, to sweep you over the brink. You have to become someone other than yourself. But who? Who is it that waits for me to step into his shadow? Where do I find him?'
My watch said 10.20. 'We have to go back,' I said.
Vercueil slowed down. 'If that Is what you want, I'll take you back,' he said. 'Or, if you like, we can go on driving. We can drive all the way round the Peninsula. It's a nice day.'
I should have answered: No, take me back at once. But I hesitated, and in that moment of hesitation the words died within me.
'Stop here,' I said.
Vercueil drew off the road and parked.
'I have a favour to ask of you,' I said. 'Please don't make fun of me.'
'Is that the favour?'
'Yes. Now or In the future.'
He shrugged.
On the far side of the road a man in tattered clothes sat beside a pyramid of firewood for sale. He looked us over, looked away.
'Time passed.
'I told you a story once about my mother,' I said at last, trying to speak more softly. 'About how when she was a little girl she lay in the dark not knowing what was rolling over her, the wagon-wheels or the stars.
'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?'