In the evening Anna stands me with my back to the herd and my face to the camera and asks me to talk about my childhood. I recount the loneliness of life without mother, brothers or sisters. I describe long days spent watching the herd. And short, happy days as a schoolboy at the college in paradise valley.
‘Talk of the freemartins,’ says Anna. ‘Are they sacred to the people here? What is the magic of their milk? Tell it in your own words. Tell us what you learned as a child.’
‘They’re not sacred,’ I say. ‘They upset the herds, that’s all. They’re eccentric. They’re licentious. They’re lunatic cows. People fear them. And where there is fear there is also superstition. It all began generations ago. Nobody can say how and why.’
‘Can you suggest how and why?’
‘People like to be reassured,’ I say. ‘They like to believe that solutions to problems can be bought by the jar.’
‘But when your father dies, you will follow the tradition of your family and take over the herd?’
I squint into the sun and shake my head. I stand, dear friends in the city, at the centre of my inheritance. Now, at last, you see it. Intangible. Incredible. Uncashable. Each year my father hands me bundles of banknotes from the safe and packs me off to the city and the university. He does not grasp the meaning of this money. All he understands is the ritual of transaction. All that he expects in return is that, when he is old, I will come back to his hollow of land and pummel these barren teats for local rewards. His is wealth at the expense of science. His are riches that exile freedom. What must I do, fellow students? Decay here by the light of a thousand oil lamps? Or cast off my inheritance, remain with you and your fathers, put my faith in science and modernity?
‘I will not accept the burden,’ I say to the camera and the people of Sweden. ‘My father is the last in line.’
YOUR FATHERS have been solicitous. Still I am invited to their tables at nightclubs and to their air-conditioned lounges at home. They serve freshly ground coffee from Colombia and delicate liqueurs from far-flung airport shops. Since the television transmission in Sweden I have become a bar-room celebrity. My photograph has appeared in local papers. One government minister condemns my people for their barbarous superstition. Another applauds them for their sense of tradition. A zoologist on the radio argues that the isolation of freemartins makes good sense as their presence unnerves the docility of cows. Another claims that they should be prized above all others as they are good beef cattle, putting on meat with eunuch ease. A scientific commission should be formed, he says, to investigate ways of breeding freemartins. Rival editorials in the newpapers call either for Government Help to Protect National Traditions or for A Battle Against Quackery. It is no longer possible for me, fellow students, to hide my inheritance from you. I abandon my reticence. Instead, I exaggerate my lofty manner and the precision of my dress. I have my hands manicured, and powder my forehead. I grow a moustache in the European fashion. I suppress my telltale ps and bs. Any enquiries about the herd I refer to my father. It is his business, not mine. My business is the mastery of Biology.
It is your father, Feni, who suggests the rationalization of my inheritance. ‘Don’t sniff at money, Lowdo,’ he tells me, ‘especially your own. Remain intimate with your wealth. You want to be a city boy with an office, a bank account, and a Peugeot. You admire scientific curiosity, business initiative, modern industriousness. But all our business fortunes are based as much as yours on superstition. What is superstition but misdirected reverence? Your clients overvalue bogus milk. Ours overvalue transistors, motor cars, fashionable clothes, travel. This is the key to business. Unearth what is overvalued, amass it and sell at inflated prices. Your forefathers were the first of the modern businessmen. They grasped this basic principle of trade. You should be boastful, not shamefaced. What will you do? Renounce your inheritance and its possibilities and live in modesty here? How will you survive? Where will you work? Who needs biologists in a city of trade?’ He points at my polished shoes, my expensive jacket, my jewellery, the weightless antique coffee cups on the glass-top table, at you, Feni, sitting quietly in your best silk dress in the courtyard with a Parisian magazine. ‘What will become of this?’
And so he advises me to modernize, to deputize, to expand. ‘When your father dies,’ he says, ‘keep the herd, but stay here in the city, a free man, at ease, comfortable, amongst your own kind, and run those freemartins, as a business.’
‘But the milk is no good!’
Your father laughs. ‘This coffee is no good,’ he says. ‘It makes my heart race. It tastes bitter. Why do I drink it? Habit and superstition. I believe it sobers me when I have been drinking. I believe it sharpens me up when I am tired. I believe that an offer of coffee to friends equals the hospitality of a thousand welcomes. You and science would tell me that coffee doesn’t sober, doesn’t relax, doesn’t revive, doesn’t welcome, that it shortens my life, costs a fortune, disrupts the economy of Brazil, and if left too long in the coffee pot will corrode the silver. But try to stop me drinking it! I don’t care for the dictatorship of science. Nor do your neighbours. Freedom of choice. Deceive yourself at will, that’s the motto of the nation. Harness superstition. Turn it to your advantage. Milk it dry!’
NOWADAYS I do not dream of the wide valley and the ragged heads of sunflowers but of a white, cool office with banks of telephones and the clatter of tills and typists. I see myself with friends in an anteroom. I rehearse long conversations with the fellow students of my own sons and daughters at the university. I am unhurried with them and gently inquisitive. They love so much to sit and talk with me about their studies or their trips to Europe.
I imagine, too, my homelands far off in the scrub. There, a salaried farm-manager minds my herd and sells measured jars of freemartin milk at fixed prices (cash only) to newly-weds and the childless. I see a lorry with my name on its side collecting supplies of milk each month and bringing it to my shop in the city. Freemartin milk and fresh mullein are now available to all. My best customers here are the tourists who, if they are too timid or cynical to invest in a sachet of dried milk, are eager to spend dollars and francs and marks on coloured postcards of the herd and ‘lucky’ scraps of freemartin hide. I have written and had printed an illustrated booklet on our family and its traditions. It sells well. My dream flowers and expands. My sons and daughters consider their inheritances with placid equanimity.
But in more sober moments I do not dream. I mark time. Each year I visit my father during the Harvest Vacation and contemplate our cattle, infertile and refractory, as they butt and low amongst the tough grasses and the stunted thorns. In the village now they call me Talking Skull. My neighbours are always keen to share my father’s jokes. They mean no harm. My father, rather than weakening and ageing, seems to grow stronger and more vigorous. Has he grown a little taller, even? He has no grey hairs. His back is square and straight. His teeth and eyesight have not deteriorated. I fancy that he fears his heirs and has determined to live for ever.
TWO. The World with One Eye Shut
THE SOLDIERS say that I am fortunate. I have the best cell in the block. Its window (if I stand on my bunk with my head pressed close to the outer wall and one eye shut) allows a view of the outside world, the medley, careless, trading town from which they have removed me. My open eye can follow an angle which cuts across the barracks yard and squeezes between the back of the regimental offices and the pinkstone building which faces on to the town. Beyond is my view, a thin, upright oblong topped by the sky with, once in a while, the ornament of a plane or helicopter or hawk. Diluted in the distance are the hilltop houses where the bigwigs and the lordlings live, the hotels of the bankside district, the trees of Deliverance Park, the river where all of this began.