Now I want to tell you about Xmas. It is night and the streets are dark as they always are on Xmas night. I find the young couple embracing with locked breaths on the pavement outside the building where the hysterical lodger tried to pick up a drunken hobo. When they see me they must take me for a snooper, a voyeur or a life-sucker. F.A. scurries off into the room where the kitten promptly starts blubbering like a scalded cat. The boy furtively takes to his heels, rounds the corner, out of sight, never to return. Squatters run fast.
Now I wish to tell you this story which you already know, because it has been told on many a Xmas night. A poor couple go window-shopping during the festive season. People carrying plucked geese and Brahms recordings pass them by. The only possession of value he has is an old pocket-watch left to him by his grandfather. Her only wealth is the lovely long hair inherited from her grandmother. They look and look again at the riches in the jeweller’s window. For Xmas night each carefully prepares a surprise gift for the other. He has sold his watch to buy her a comb for her hair, she has sold her hair to buy him a chain for his watch.
dead at last
He had a head cramped with useless bits of knowledge and nothing else. Everything of no purpose, that which cannot be exploited to bring home the bacon, he knew. He would have made an excellent tourist, but there is not yet an agency for renting out tourists. He would be a retarded child’s dream uncle lodging in some cupboard of derelict colonial mansion in Bobo-Dioulasso. How many people knew up to a single digit the average number of hairs on an elephant? He could tell you exactly how many seconds would elapse before the amber traffic light jumps to red. He understood the foreign policy of the United States. He knew many riddles without answers. He could stop eating and drinking for ever if he wanted to because nobody cared about his existence. He would have made money by going into pubs and taking bets that he could bite his eye, then take out the glass-eye to put in between his teeth. And even more money by upping the bets of biting the other eye, then remove his dentures to fit them around the seeing orb. But he was a teetotaller. Because of the one eye he could cripple a gnat at ten yards in one shot. He knew the birth dates of all the members of the Central Committee of the Eritrean Liberation Movement. He knew what Haile Selassie’s thought was on the morning of his death and about his aching fear of losing his teeth. He has assimilated perfectly the root system of the virgin vine. He wrote books. He knew how many buttons there are on the uniform of a San Francisco policeman, not to be confused with those on the uniform of a California State Highway Patrolman. This is not to say that his knowledge was exclusive, but it was precise and arcane and utterly unwanted. He knew, for example, the answer to apartheid. He knew and could describe to you in detail that place in Heaven where only Latin American writers go. He knew every inch of the road leading from Uzbaq to White City and could draw you a map of the topography of Orbi. He was the last one to speak the language of the people of Wet Country, but he couldn’t spell. He understood down to the finest delirium what makes a woman unhappy and he never had a girlfriend. He knew the history of nails and could imitate the sounds made by snails when coupling. He also made imitation mirrors. He could formulate and utter very important unthoughts exactly like a politician. He’d learned by rote Volume One of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, in ancient Sanskrit. He knew the size of the underpants worn by Mfowethu, that is to say after Mfowethu was released from the alcatraz and allowed to let his appurtenances and swellings be cupped by underpants. He could walk like the ostrich, go into the female’s spread-eagled crouch to perfectly mime broodiness or vagina hunger, and would have made a very astute wild ostrich hunter were there any wild ostriches left to be hunted. He knew the songs of the Beatles. He even knew all the ins and outs of Ronald Reagan’s mind. Tampoco Reagan sabe mucho de nada. He knew what islands and creeks were used for hiding by the Thai pirates. He knew how to tell the time of day in Hebrew and in Yiddish and in English. He could translate parts of the Bible into Greek. He knew how to stand on one leg. He knew Zen. He could whistle like the wood pigeon and recite all the names of Picasso backwards. He knew the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson. He could make fire by rubbing two sticks together provided he could find the right wood which no longer existed. He knew that poetry was a secret way of capturing lost time.
Last night he had a dream. He was just outside this house, the barn behind his back. It was night. And a fire came raucously loping down the hill, snipping and puffing tree and undergrowth in its way. In no time fire entered the courtyard making an eery day of the surroundings by the fiery glow of its body, barging into the barn and then jumping right across onto the roof of the house. It tore through the tiles and started licking at the beams with any number of ashy black tongues. Thieves are so bold they sometimes steal your roof tiles while you are sitting down at supper. Sparks made a spray of fireworks and cinders rained down. The roof went and the floor popped. Everything erupted in smoke incredibly quickly — as always when the provisional is turned into eternity. He stood there petrified and as the front door exploded he saw himself inside the house trapped by fallen beams and the crackling inferno of a staircase. Each piece of furniture was a burning bush fierily breathing God’s smoky laughter. His mind was a melting ice-cube, all thoughts for ever scorched before they could take to the wing of water. His mouth was a hole where the fire had been. He dreamt that he was having a dream from which it would be impossible ever to wake up. He remembered that his memory had at last evaporated. So he gesticulated wildly for help, and so he did. Or was he exuberantly showing the signs of victory?
This morning he wakes up with a sense of tremendous relief. He says: ‘I’m so glad to be dead at last.’
‘brother’
He cannot be discreet even if he wants to. Sounds travel a long way up the valley. Sometimes when you see the spurt of a smoke tendril it comes as a surprise not to hear the reverberating smack of an explosion a fractured second later. I know this is a roundabout way of knowing about distance. I hear the put put put of his ancestral motorcycle from afar. You’d swear a heart is thumping away in the ravine. Then I catch a glimpse of the sun shooting off his goggles as he takes the turn from the departmental road into the narrow track snaking up to our hilltop settlement. He’ll be stopping soon at the store facing the crossing to rev the old cycle, thump his fat buttocks on the seat and howl like a wolf — he’s forever scaring the storekeeper out of her wits, my brother, and she already speaks the dialect with a slumberous tongue like a cucumber. Now the motorcycle is labouring up the incline, coming through the gate, stopping as it were with shuddering chest, here he is. I’ve always thought it jolly the way he has Pegasus painted in flowing white lines over the petrol tank.