We are a large family. For a long time we have been living deep in the country where the rain comes down. We breed and we breathe. Some of us have been weakened by the strain and some are of dubious stock and questionable morals. There is, for instance, the Dook and the Douchess and their flashy accomplices wearing a chattering of diamonds on cheap fingers. Their big limousine lies sucked to the hubcaps in the quagmire. When the Dook and his entourage are to leave on a job entailing a quick getaway his fedora dripping silver drops, we have to scoop out the vehicle. Then there is our Young Sister, Oys. Her spirit is too limpid to accommodate reality. She has a thing about legs and about longing for a companion. We translate for her…
I go wandering in the forest, drenched in thoughts. And a strange man comes up to me, a mad look in his eyes, inchoate of mouth, he grabs me by the jacket and shakes me with broken questions. Eventually it dawns on me (please forgive the lapsus) that this apparition is looking for a small elephant gone astray. Maybe he is the trainer of a passing circus, or the monarch’s game-keeper, or the guardian of the idol. He is in any event a foreigner and quite beside himself with worry. Together we return to the family farm. The land is dark and asylum not easily found. One never knows. Dogs come at us in a mad run, their paws squelching in the mud, spittle threading their maws. They could be our dogs, the neighbours’ dogs, what does it matter. To keep them at bay I grab clods of wet earth to chuck at the snarls or the malevolent stares of their bulging eyes. They teeter on the edge of lurching for the kill.
And yes, huddled in the byre of the drowned cow we find an animal shivering darkly, hiding from the barking along the perimeter. I fetch the hose, we wash it down, a small elephant emerges.
Now my family tumbles through the slush to oink and to harrumph at the wonders of fate and haphazard hazard. Our Little Sister throws her arms around the small beast fondling his big little ears, his big little head, his trunk which is like a rough whisper. Tears of transportation run down her cheeks, coating the teeth with shininess, filling her mouth with a liquid smile.
But it is too good to last. When evening comes we send Oys off on some errand, we collar and lock up the growling dogs, and the man takes the small elephant away.
Thus we try to cheat time by pretending that nothing has happened. We carefully situate the pachyderm in our Young Sister’s mind. This is the secondary stage known to many foreigners, when writing comes into its own — even though written in mud: the missing is transformed into a delicious mixture of ache and ecstasy, changing shape and modifying its nature, until the very absence becomes presence.
And then one day the Prosecutor comes to us deep in the country where it takes a long time to migrate from imagination to transcendence. He comes with his files and his filthy underpants and his acolytes. They are investigating the disappearance of that which had disappeared, they say. Something happened, they say. Call it elephnapping if you wish. So it is only normal that they should piece it together again in terms of the need to un-derstand as defined by legal harrumph. Leading to the vital necessity of punishment as the only way to make what happened un-happen, they say. And they will have to interrogate our young Oys, they say. (De Law, the Dook snorts in disgust, fingering his tie-pin with a bejewelled hand.)
My mind darkens with primeval anger. I trumpet my rage. How dare you do it to her? Don’t you know that you will unhinge? Do you wish to confront her with the growth of emptiness? And what monster will be born from that? I grab the Prosecutor by his jacket and throw him over my head. One of his assistants, a black man in an expensive tweed suit, tries to intervene. I grasp his wrists and squeeze with all my might until I see his eyes bulge red. You keep out of this, Brother Blackman; this is none of your concern.
Ah, reader, I say, my mind darkens with an elephantine rage. Please excuse the lapsus. I shall have to return some other time to the missing remnants of my story.
like a whiplash
Like a whiplash. Since time immemorial this phrase has been there, written in the ancient script against the cliffs above our hillside village. Our village is a fortified one, steep and dark, with glistening foliage shadowing the season, and shafts opening up on the unknown. It passes in the land, by a subterranean knowledge, for being the place of poetry. The ground often shifts here, but we hang on. Myth or Ouïdire or Sayso has it that the truncated verse on the rockface was left there by the Original Poet himself, the founder of the fortress. And ever since, poets have been living here, staring at the mystery of the rock, tree and sky, trying to complete the poem. It is known that he or she who penetrates to the source, who uncovers the hidden parabola or equation — for the skyline is the conclusion and we must build back to the beginning — will be assured of immortality. Oh, sweet life.
I am a poet. Like the male of the species I have a beaked nose and a little brindled beard of which I’m inordinately proud. And as any poet worth his salt would, I too must write in the foreign tongue so as to have a translator. My translator is a crippled, blue-eyed young man called Horse. He is so close to me that he could be my brother in the word.
I am also in love. How could I be a poet striving for the unknown and not be in love? Is it not part of my poor human condition, my deathdream? The poet must have wings to fly — higher than the last words of the perfect verse, and wings can only sprout from the intimate communication with love. Love is a necessary discipline, part of the wordsmith’s métier. Ah, sweet love.
So I invite Love over for the evening. And hopefully for the night. She sits across the table from me, and Horse sits next to her with his impassive face and just the occasional tic, throbbing like an imitation of inspiration, under the eyelid. He’s not supposed to be subject to inspiration: he’s the translator! I keep my eye on him. I watch them both. That is, I look at them but my mortal eyes have become dim from peering at the untranslatable, at the inscrutable wall. When Love inclines her head to listen to Horse’s whispered nothings the shifting hair obliterates her shining countenance. How come they have so much to talk about? Must he translate my silences? How come they are so much at ease without having to talk to one another at all? My eyes do not see so well. Only too well… The tics of the heart, like those of a machine that will now never ever get off the ground.
I repair to the toilet to perch over nothingness. Like an angel sickening for take-off. And there I die inside out. The discretion of poetry, all the more polite for never being talked about, is the hiding of the bitterness of evacuation. Shall I spare you the description of wells and black walls, of stench and corruption — that death which is the underground of poetry? For though I know now that I shall never be immortal — and I had to die to have the mirror face of death — I have acquired at least some of the tics of being the poet. Suffice to say that there is a shift, a sickening lurch, an unexpected slope, a long twisting fall, so much like flying, through the bowels of the earth.
Now I was dead. The preceding sentence, I realize, is somewhat decayed, but what I mean is that I can see now from mirror to face, clearly. And I cannot help wanting to know what is happening to Love and to Horse. Are they happy? Are they sad? Love is good and death is bad.