We sicken before we die so that we will be weaned from our body. The milk that nourished us grows thin and sour; turning away from the breast, we begin to be restless for a separate life. Yet this first life, this life on earth, on the body of earth – will there, can there ever be a better? Despite all the glooms and despairs and rages, I have not let go of my love of it.
In pain, I took two of Dr Syfret's pills and lay down on the sofa. Hours later I woke befuddled and cold, fumbled my way upstairs, got into bed without undressing.
In the middle of the night I became aware of a presence in the room that could only have been his. A presence or a smell. It was there, then it went away.
From the landing came a creak. Now he is entering the study, I thought; now he is switching on the light. I tried to recall whether, among the papers on the desk, any were private, but there was too much confusion in my head. Now he sees the books, shelf upon shelf, I thought, trying to bring back order, and the piles of old journals. Now he looks at the pictures on the walclass="underline" Sophie Schliemann decked out in Agamemnon's treasure hoard; the robed Demeter from the British Museum. Now, quietly, he slides out the drawers of the desk. The top drawer, full of letters, accounts, torn-off stamps, photographs, does not interest him. But in the bottom drawer there is a cigar-box full of coins: pennies, drachmas, centimes, schillings. The hand with the curled fingers dips into it, takes out two five-peseta pieces big enough to pass for rands, pockets them. Not an angel, certainly. An insect, rather, emerging from behind the skirting-boards when the house is in darkness to forage for crumbs.
I heard him at the far end of the landing, trying the two locked doors. Only rubbish, I wanted to whisper to him – rubbish and dead memories; but the fog in my head closed in again.
Spent the day in bed. No energy, no appetite. Read Tolstoy – not the famous cancer story, which I know all too well, but the story of the angel who takes up residence with the shoemaker. What chance is there, if I take a walk down to Mill Street, of finding my own angel to bring home and succour? None, I think. Perhaps in the countryside there are still one or two sitting against milestones in the heat of the sun, dozing, waiting for what chance will bring. Perhaps in the squatter camps. But not in Mill Street, not in the suburbs. The suburbs, deserted by the angels. When a ragged stranger comes knocking at the door he is never anything but a derelict, an alcoholic, a lost soul. Yet how, in our hearts, we long for these sedate homes of ours to tremble, as in the story, with angelic chanting!
This house is tired of waiting for the day, tired of holding itself together. The floorboards have lost their spring. The insulation of the wiring is dry, friable, the pipes clogged with grit. The gutters sag where screws have rusted away or pulled loose from the rotten wood. The rooftiles are heavy with moss. A house built solidly but without love, cold, inert now, ready to die. Whose walls the sun, even the African sun, has never succeeded in warming, as though the very bricks, made by the hands of convicts, radiate an intractable sullenness.
Last summer, when the workmen were re-laying the drains, I watched, them dig out the old pipes. Two metres down into the earth they went, bringing up mouldering brick, rusty iron, even a solitary horseshoe. But no bones. A site without a human past; to spirits, as to angels, of no interest.
This letter is not a baring of my heart. It is a baring of something, but not of my heart.
Since the car would not start this morning, I had to ask him, this man, this lodger to push. He pushed me down the driveway. 'Now!' he shouted, slapping the roof. The engine caught. I swung into the road, drove a few yards, then, on an impulse, stopped. 'I have to go to Fish Hoek,' I called from a cloud of smoke: 'Do you want to come along?'
So we set off, the dog on the back seat, In the green Hillman of your childhood. For a long while no word passed between us. Past the hospital, past the University, past Bishopscourt we drove, the dog leaning over my shoulder to feel the wind on its face. Up Wynberg Hill we toiled. On the long downhill swoop on the other side I switched off the engine and coasted. Faster and faster we went, till the wheel shuddered in my hands and the dog whined with excitement. I was smiling, I believe; my eyes may even, have been shut.
At the foot of the hill, as we began to slow down, I cast him a glance. He sat relaxed, imperturbable. Good man! I thought.
'When I was a child,' I said, 'I used to do downhills on a bicycle with no brakes to speak of. It belonged to my elder brother. He would dare me. I was completely without fear. Children cannot conceive of what if is to die. It never crosses their minds that they may not be immortal.'
'I would ride my brother's bicycle down hills even steeper than this one. The faster I went, the more alive I would feel. I would quiver with life as if I were about to burst through my skin. As a butterfly must feel when it is being born, or bearing itself.
'In an old car like this you still have the freedom to coast. With a modern car, when you switch off the engine the steering wheel locks. I am sure you know that. But people sometimes make a mistake or forget, and then can't keep the car on the road. Sometimes they go over the side and into the sea.'
Into the sea. Tussling with a locked wheel while you soar in a bubble of glass over the sun-glinting sea. Does it really happen? Do many do it? If I stood on Chapman's Peak on a Saturday afternoon, would I see them, men and women, thick in the air as midges taking off on their last flight?
'There Is a story I want to tell you,' I said. 'When my mother was still a child, in the early years of the century, the family used to go to the seaside for Christmas. This was still in the age of ox-wagons. They would travel by ox-wagon all the way from Uniondale in the Eastern Cape to Plettenberg Bay at the mouth of the Piesangs River, a journey of a hundred miles taking I don't know how many days. Along the way they would camp at the roadside.
'One of their stopping-places was at the top of a mountain pass. My grandparents would spend the nights In the wagon itself while my mother and the other children had their bed underneath it. So – here the story begins – nay mother lay at the top of the pass in the stillness of the night, snug in her blankets with her brothers and sisters sleeping beside her, watching the stars through the spokes of the wheels. As she watched it began to seem that the stars were moving: the stars were moving or else the wheels were moving, slowly, very slowly. She thought: What shall I do? What if the wagon is beginning to roll? Shall I call out a warning? What if I lie silent and the wagon gathers speed and rolls all the way down the mountainside with my parents inside? But what if I am imagining it all?
'Choking with fear, her heart pounding, she lay there watching the stars, watching them move, thinking, 'Shall I? Shall I?,' listening for the creak, the first creak. At last she fell asleep, and her sleep was full of dreams of death. But in the morning, when she re-emerged, it was into light and peace. And the wagon re-emerged with her, and her parents re-emerged, and all was well, as it had been before.'
It was time for him to say something now, about hills or cars or bicycles or about himself or his childhood. But he was stubbornly silent.