I started writing this to reach out to you, whoever you are, wherever you are. I needed to extend, I needed to push further. Simply dying, which I will soon do, and letting my eyes slip shut – leaving behind only what is in this house, these libraries, these rooms and rooms of computers and devices and failed connections, leaving that as my only message to you – I refuse.
I need to talk.
I need to tell you more – of myself and my time – and so I started, word by word, to explain, to tell my story, to leave a personal interpretation behind. For you. And of course – obviously – for me.
But now, after this word and this one, and then this one, after the thousands and thousands of I’s and ands and buts, I am deeper than I expected. I am wrestling with time itself, the snake of my life, the python. I am throttled by what I have forgotten, by the mists of story, ever rolling. I duck and push the hair out of my eyes, looking for the few things I know for sure will be there. I jump, pillar to pillar, and all else is lost, shrouded and vague, opaque.
I wish I had paid more attention.
I wish I had written it down at the time, because now there are only statues and monuments, presentations and experiences. Narratives. Design.
The furrow on Gerald’s brow.
Babalwa and her babies and her breeding maps. Kiddies at the knee, charts and cross-referencing red lines and genetic mixes. Her hand on their heads, guiding.
Fats’s fro, always modest yet strong, hard. Small, even. Bouncing. Firm.
The twins. Hand in hand.
Jabu’s body, so tiny, covered in blood, her neck literally pumping the red out, her red mixing with the cows’.
Entrails and tears.
The years of us. Our farm and our people. The children, from this distance now almost all completely interchangeable faces and forms, smiling and running and growing so easily into this other thing. So unfettered by time. So shaped by our story, yet somehow so completely untouched by any of it.
CHAPTER 45
Getting your shit together technically
It was the dream, Babalwa told me as we grew into our age. Right back at the beginning, the dream was complete and fully formed. She knew as she woke up, as soon as she met me, that the dream would always guide her. A rock, firm and flat-topped, solid in a terrible sea.
The baby farm allowed us to move. It was the only way to pick up momentum again. I see that now.
Now, also, I view Jabu’s death as the spark. As the shove in the back we needed to get serious. Of course, that’s my way of rationalising the horror of that soft thump, the sound I will never shake. Yes, it’s my method of layering some kind of sense into the incomprehensible.
Maybe.
Regardless, it’s the line I choose to take. It works for me.
The biggest miracle of all – as is meticulously detailed in the archives[6] – is that we did it as planned. We jerked off, we poured cold semen down, again and again. The couples made sure that in a world without people, in a world begging for children, contraception was used and accidents avoided. We calculated the baseline requirement of diversity. Wherever possible, we followed the maths.
When there was no maths, we stumbled on.
‘Roy, you know I can’t explain things properly any more,’ Fats said to me sometime around the winter of ’49. ‘I used to be so sure. It used to be so easy. Simple. Now I look at you and I feel this love for you and I can’t even put it into words. You know?’
I did know. He was very drunk at the time. It came from somewhere deep inside, and it was also booze-true. It rang raw and honest. I rubbed his fro and offered something similar in return. He held my hand.
I started to draw. I took lessons from Andile, who equipped me with a few charcoals, some watercolours and a box of acrylics. I drew trees and landscapes. Fruit and such. Most of it looked worse than stuff I had done in Grade 7 art class. Gradually she showed me how to create perspective, to give trees shape and cheeks blush. How impossible watercolours are to use and how much faster rewards arrive with acrylics.
Drawing and painting quickly began to feel like a way to capture Jabulani, to hold on to her fading form before she was erased altogether. That was my initial reaction, but more followed. A desire to catch her actual death, somehow. To remove that terrible thud. To blur that single moment when she fell out of us.
My vast, expanding library was simply unable to help me cope with the death. There were hundreds – thousands – of texts on the shelves, virtual and otherwise, that addressed the subject, directly and tangentially, but they all missed the hammer blow. The direct, metaphysical impact of my own context. None could handle the electricity still buzzing on the muscles of my heart. They were all just words on a page and almost all of them spoke of the writer rather than the world being written. None of the carefully structured arguments and plots were relevant to my world of seven adults and their calculated brood.
I had built the library, the archive, in self-defence. As if by gathering around me the better, more acknowledged works of man, I could protect myself against the echoes booming up at the gates. But for the biggest, most important sound of all there was no help. No buffer at all. Art, on the other hand, offered at least a sliver of what I craved.
And so I drew.
I also widened the range of the library to include art. I started at the university art departments, where students were learning to draw. In the paused classrooms there were definite flickers of life, of true moments being captured. A line drawing of the city. A man with a bag in his hand walking fast down the street. A nude girlfriend, sprawled yet guarded.
Once I was well into my lessons, the twins accompanied me and we targeted the museums and the corporate galleries. MTN, Standard Bank, Joburg Gallery, Everard Read, Goodman et al. Arts on Main.
‘Amazing,’ Andile said as we breezed through the collected works of our age – a post-1994 retrospective at the Goethe Project Space. ‘It’s so easy. It used to be so hard and now it’s so easy.’ She took a running kick at a coat-hanger installation.
‘I think I know what you mean,’ I said, grabbing a couple of the hangers, which were of the Woolworths variety, for my closet. ‘But enlighten me…’
‘Well, Roy, that picture there’ – Andile went into mock lecture mode as she pointed out a semi-abstract Kentridge, the usual man leaning/running – ‘at least has some kind of aesthetic value. It’s a not unpleasant image of a male moving. There’s some kind of flash that feels like something to me.
‘Whereas that’ – she pointed at the collapsed pile of coat hangers – ‘is just a bunch of fucking coat hangers. We all knew it at the time – I was at the opening of this show – but no one could say it out loud. Only whispers behind the hands.’
‘That’s why I fell in love with her,’ Javas jibed from his seat on top of a half tractor tire studded with gold pins entitled Means of Production III. ‘The power of her analysis.’
‘For real though.’ Andile kicked a hanger in Javas’s direction. ‘Now it’s simple. No brokers, no hustlers, no art slags or groupies, none of the PR chickies – just pictures on the wall. I look at some of it and I want to cry, it’s so beautiful. But there is just as much that is just… just…’ She took another skipping run up and hoofed a hanger at my head.
‘Depressing?’ I asked.
‘Irrelevant?’ Javas chipped in.
6
The baby-farm narrative in the archives is, unlike certain other sections, very close to objectively accurate. Of all the work we did, and I did, I am most proud of this portion of the main library.