horse gallops on post-haste
A horse gallops on post-haste. The horse, a mare, has huge muscled hindquarters. Vapour burbles from her mouth past the bit and her chest and flanks are streaked with nitrous froth. The metal rings and clasps in saddle, girth, stirrup-leather and reins jingle and the harness chafing against the saddle-tree makes a moaning rhythm. On her back, leaning forward, standing in a sitting position in the stirrup cups, a rider dressed in a pinstriped grey suit. He wears black patent leather shoes and reddish socks, a tie tongueing the wind, on his head a knitted woollen cap with two long flaps tied under the chin. Slung low on his back is a well-worn mountaineer’s rucksack.
Rider and horse travel over a pampa where the grass has been chomped grey and bare by the winter. Here and there fitfully little fistfuls of snow — dirty, dead — like nasty similes or sour smiles expectorated.
Next to one such blob of snow an infantryman lies resting very stiffly on his back under a tree. His uniform is khaki. His trousers are tucked right up to the knees in long khaki-coloured woollen stockings, and around these dressings of leather are swathed, the thongs attached to the boots. His boots are soaked. Down his right leg a big bottlely fly drags its disjointed body on the way from kneecap to shin. Next to the soldier his cap, an apple, an old-fashioned barber’s razor. Mud to the knife-blade.
Wind ruffles the soldier’s hair. His arms are stretched straight from the shoulders and bent at the elbows so that the hands fit over the eyes. The fingers of those hands are tightly entwined, twigged as dense as a nest, so rigid that the observing eye involuntarily starts looking for down and feathers. There are no feathers. And through that handmask it is as if — but only as if — the warrior is staring hard at white clouds piled high in the sky above the tree.
White clouds, naturally fattened on water, sailing depressingly low over the landscape. It even augments the countryside’s appearance of infinity. The soil is black and a slim grey in places. A sizeable crowd of people, mostly aged and barefoot with their vestments in rags and tatters, squosh uphill through the mud. The heads, those of the womenfolk too, were recently shaved and are now covered with stubble. Each pilgrim with a crutch under the armpit. At times they mark the pace in one spot, lift the crutches to gesticulate towards the upright old mansion lording it over them from up high, half-hidden behind the trees. Then they open wide their mouths and close them again.
But the man on the other side of the window-panes of the room on the third storey doesn’t pay heed, barely notices them. He is standing off to one side in such a manner that light entering by the window only illuminated one shoulder and its upper arm, and in a sidelong glance his profile. The windows are anyway hermetically closed. The room filled with the buzzing of enormous flies (sequestered in a bird-trap?) scrabbling somewhere against glass. It will be a monotonous hum like that produced by a sizeable crowd.
Thereupon the man abruptly opens the big window frames. Sudden cold. And a deafening clamour rises up from the valley, wave upon wave, to fill the cavity of the room. A veritable din. The bleating of numerous sheep — ponderous and viscuous like that of old wethers, fluted and desolate as of lambs crying on and again, broken hoarseness as that of ewes.
But there is also the wheezing of somebody climbing up the stairway of the three floors as rapidly as his gammy leg permits him to. The door across from the window is flung open and a man enters hobbling horribly, stops in his tracks — momentarily blinded by the sharpness of the window’s flood after the stairwell’s penumbra. He turns on his heel to the bed close by the door, strips the cover off the bed in one fell movement. The bed’s heart is a wet wound, a pulsing broken sore, just about circular, with the hint of whiteness under folds of black and ruddy blood oozing to besmirch the sheets. The man curses repulsively and grabs his injured knee. Stumbles towards a door in the wall right. Pulls the door towards him.
The door gives on to a park with green patriarchal trees. The trees sizzle with the rain and puddles over the stony yellowish brown earth mirror the bruised blue sky. Then rain once more comes down in grey strips to destroy the reflection in the water-plashes. About twenty metres on there’s a bench in a glade, out from under the painting of trees. On the bench a middleaged naked man sits, blissfully unaware of the rain. In his red lap he has an open book, but the pages of the book are too soggy to be turned over. The man lifts both his feet simultaneously. Under his feet are written, big letters as if furrowed in the soiclass="underline" PASSION. (In a previous story all the above was described as Efflata/Ejectamenta: a suite for pen and paper.)
The man hollers, and frightened birds flap from the trees. A horse gallops on post-haste.
a chain for his watch
This is what I want to tell you about Xmas. Down my street there lives a woman with bleeding legs and a beard. The beard doesn’t bleed. Her husband is handicapped. Only one half of his body, taken down the middle, is alive. He drags the dead part after him. The two of them are the caretakers of an apartment block where people eat geese and listen to Brahms. One night the cripple is woken by yells coming from the stair-well. The man hobbles up the stairs to the fourth floor where he finds a lady lodger having a fit through clenched fists because a tipsy hobo is lying tipped over holding tight to her door-mat so that she cannot enter the flat. Our man stoops to finger the bum’s shoulder with a hey-hey now and the snorer rises, pulls a knife on him and gouges out an eye. There is much blood and confusion and henceforth our man will have on his forehead a livid scar in the shape of a cross and one live eye only, but that is another story. The couple are given two orphans from the Depot of Abandoned Children to bring up. One will be a fat boy with no bones who has to be pushed in a pram. The other is a little girl, perfectly formed, as high as two apples. This is what I want to tell you about the girl. She lives for many years in the one room with the bearded woman of the bleeding legs, the one-eye hobbler, the pramridden fat boy. But she never gets any taller than four apples. Her name is Four Apples. F.A. marries a Squatter boy who must have been prowling the streets stealing apples to survive. The boy is dark and that probably permits him to sneak into our city by night. He goes into hiding in the same room in the house down my Street where the bloody lady, her lame husband, the fat boy and F.A. live. Sometimes when evening has swirled its moth-eaten cloak over the town the young couple will rush out on the pavement where they kiss passionately. He has to bend his black countenance low and she has to stand on tip-toe hanging onto his buttocks. The street lamp shines on her glistening upturned forehead. Perhaps he is breathing down her to help her grow up. But F.A. rather starts putting on girth. She gets fatter and fatter and after a time she goes thin again. This is the story about my imagination, give me a kiss to build a dream on. Is it my imagination or do I hear a thin mewing as from a small kitten coming from the one room in the building down my street? The Squatter disappears for a while and then he re-appears with a new hair-do. We are living in the White City during the eighties where policemen club or stomp or burn people to death only if they are Squatters or Foreigners. It is a story about dismembering and sometimes of re-membering. Maybe the boy with the hair-do is a sanspapiers or a fin-de-droits, but these are the niceties of a legal categorization best to be taken in hand by another story. The boy shows his black face ever more rarely in our street. Now is the time of passing time. My imagination imagines for me that the kitten has started to talk. When the lady with the bleeding legs pushes her fat boy in the pram to market, she points to a second smaller wrapped bundle, strokes her beard and says: ‘The Depot has done well by us and my better half no longer sees double.’