He snores.
From the side of her shadow husband your mother writes, Forgive me if the picture offends you. One must love what is nearest. One must love what is to hand, as a dog loves.
Mrs V.
September 23, the equinox. Steady rain falling from a sky that has closed in tight against the mountain, so low that one could reach up with a broomstick and touch it. A soothing, muffling sound, like a great hand, a hand of water, folding over the house; the patter on the rooftiles, the ripple in the gutters ceasing to be noise, become a thickening, a liquefaction of the air.
'What is this?' asked Vercueil.
He had a little hinged rosewood case. Held open at a certain angle to the light, it reveals a young man with long hair in an old-fashioned suit. Change the angle, and the image decomposes into silver streaks behind a glass surface.
'It is a photograph from the olden days. From before photographs.'
'Who is it?'
'I am not sure. It may be one of my grandfather's brothers.'
'Your house is like a museum.'
(He has been poking around in the rooms the police broke into.)
'In a museum things have labels. This is a museum where the labels have fallen off. A museum in decay. A museum that ought to be in a museum.'
'You should sell these old things if you don't want them.'
'Sell them if you like. Sell me too.'
'For what?'
'For bones. For hair. Sell my teeth too. Unless you think I am worth nothing. It's a pity we don't have one of those carts that children used to wheel the Guy around in. You could wheel me down the Avenue with a letter pinned to my front. Then you could set fire to me. Or you could take me to some more obscure place, the rubbish dump for instance, and dispose of me there.'
He used to go out on to the balcony when he wanted to smoke. Now he smokes on the landing and the smoke drifts back into my room. I cannot stand it. But it is time to begin getting used to what I cannot stand.
He came upon me washing my underwear in the basin. I was in pain from the bending: no doubt I looked terrible. 'I will do that tor you,' he offered. I refused. But then I could not reach the line, so he had to hang it for me: an old woman's underwear, grey, listless.
When the pain bites deepest and I shudder and go pale and a cold sweat breaks out on me, he sometimes holds my hand. I twist in his grip like a hooked fish, I am aware of an ugly look on my face, the look people have when they are rapt in lovemaking: brutal, predatory. He does not like that look; he turns his eyes away. As for me, I think: let him see, let him learn what it is like!
He carries a knife in his pocket. Not a clasp knife but a menacing blade with a sharp point embedded in a cork. When, he gets into bed he puts it on the floor beside him, with his money.
So I am well, guarded. Death would think twice before trying to pass this dog, this man.
What is Latin? he asked.
A dead language, I replied, a language spoken by the dead. 'Really?' he said. The idea seemed to tickle him. 'Yes, really,' I said. 'You only hear it at funerals nowadays. Funerals and the odd wedding.' 'Can you speak it?' I recited some Virgil, Virgil on the unquiet dead:
nec ripas datur horrendas et rauca fluenta
transportare prius qaum sedibus ossa quierunt.
centum errant annos volitantque haec litora circum;
tum demum admissi stagna exoptata revisunt.
'What does it mean?' he said.
'It means that if you don't mail the letter to my daughter I will have a hundred years of misery.'
'It doesn't.'
'Yes, it does. Ossa: that is the word for a diary. Something on which the days of your life are inscribed.'
Later he came back. 'Say the Latin again,' he asked. I spoke the lines and watched his lips move as he listened. He is memorizing, I thought. But it was not so. It was the dactyl beating in him, with its power to move the pulse, the throat.
'Was that what you taught? Was that your job?'
'Yes, it was my job. I made a living from it. Giving voice to the dead.'
'And who paid you?'
'The taxpayers. The people of South Africa, both great and small'
'Could you teach me?'
'I could have taught you. I could have taught you most things Roman. I am not so sure about the Greek. I could still teach you, but: there would not be time for everything.'
He was flattered, I could see.
'You would find Latin easy,' I said. 'There would be much you remembered.'
Another challenge issued, another intimation that I know. I am like a woman with a husband who keeps a mistress on the sly, scolding him, coaxing him to come clean. But my hints pass him by. He is not 'hiding anything. His ignorance is real. His ignorance, his innocence.
'There is something that won't come, isn't there?' I said. 'Why don't you just speak, and see where the words take you?'
But he was at a threshold he could not cross. He stood baulked, wordless, hiding behind the cigarette smoke, narrowing his eyes so that I should not see in.
The dog circled him, came to me, drifted off again, restless.
Is it possible that the dog is the one sent, and not he?
You will never get to see him, I suppose. I would have liked to send you a picture, but my camera was taken in the last burglary. In any case, he is not the kind of person who photographs well. I have seen the picture on his identity card. He looks like a prisoner torn from the darkness of a cell, thrust into a room full of blinding lights, shoved against a wall, shouted at to stand still. His image raped from him, taken by force. He is like one of those half-mythical creatures that come out in photographs only as blurs, vague forms disappearing into the undergrowth that could be man or beast or merely a bad spot on the emulsion: unproved, unattested. Or disappearing over the edge of the picture, leaving behind in the shutter-trap an arm or a leg or the back of a head.
'Would you like to go to America?' I asked him.
'Why?'
'To take my letter. Instead of mailing it, you could take it in person: fly to America and fly back. It would be an adventure. Better than sailing. My daughter would meet you and take care of you. I would buy the ticket in advance. Would you go?'
He smiled bravely. But some of my jokes touch a sore spot, I know.
'I am serious,' I said.
But the truth is, it is not a serious suggestion. Vercueil with a haircut, In shop clothes, mooning about in your guest bedroom, desperate for a drink, too shy to ask; and you in the next room, the children asleep, your husband asleep, poring over this letter, this confession, this madness – it does not bear thinking of. I do not need this, you say to yourself through gritted teeth: this is what I came here to get away from, why does it have to follow me?
With time on my hands, I have been shuffling through the pictures you have sent from America over the years, looking at the backgrounds, at all the things that fell willy-nilly within the frame at the instant you pressed the button. In the picture you sent of the two boys In their canoe, for instance, my eye wanders from their faces to the ripples on the lake and the deep green of the fir-trees and then back to the orange lifejackets they wear, like waterwings of old. The dull, bland sheen of their surfaces quite hypnotizes me. Rubber or plastic or something in between: some substance coarse to the touch, tough. Why is It that this material, foreign to me, foreign perhaps to humankind, shaped, sealed, inflated, tied to the bodies of your children, signifies so intensely for me the world you now live in, and why does it make my spirit: sink? I have no idea. But since this writing has time and again taken me from where I have no idea to where I begin to have an idea, let me say, in all tentativeness, that perhaps It dispirits' me that your children will never drown. All those lakes, all that water: a land of lakes and rivers: yet if by some mischance they ever tip out of their canoe, they will bob safely in the water, supported by their bright orange wings, till a motor-boat comes to pick them up and bear them off and all is well again.