There are days here next to the Hart that the sky is impossibly blue and my toe forgets all about the gout. On such a morning I go riding until I reach a stretch of grassland, out of sight of the camp. I take off my shoes, so that the damned toe doesn’t chafe. I take off my breeches, so that the scuffed leather doesn’t tear. Shirt, underclothes. I jump up and down, limber up the limbs. Then I run.
I pant, the phlegm in my throat thwarts me, I spit out morsels of this morning’s pipe, strings of brown drool flutter in my wake. The earth races from under me. Knees creaking. My heart batters my breast to bits, eyes are watering, toes take hold, feet follow, strides stretch and stretch, hands flick like fins through the thick ooze of air. My head low, my eyes shut; head raised, the world appears, chest burning, suffocating. Then I no longer need breath. The whole body a lung and sweat, in, out, outside inside. Calves contract, spring open. Ankle tendons stretch and knot up into my loins. I am beautiful. I am perfect. My breastbone cleaves open the world. Every muscle contracts into a knot, stretches as far as it can and further. The wind sings through my bones, hollow as the bones of birds. Heels slap against my buttocks, a hand slaps at my ear. I am as wild as God himself; I outrun death, until I stumble and crash down.
The phlegm has been burnt away. A string of drool in my beard. I sit down, legs stretched out in front of me and long. I sit forward, touch my thighs, scrabble the sand out from between my buttocks. What is this thing they call Buys? In the running things were not so clear. I start getting up and twist my ankle. Back onto my arse I sink back into my body; I am a thing that feels its ankle throbbing. Back behind the impermeable prison walls of skin. The greasy burden of cast-off clothing here to one side. My own weight in water and bone – ever sinking under the weight of how I ended up in this body. Dropped from some heaven like a black horse, a bad horse. Did we think up the sky so that we could fall out of it?
See, me, Coenraad de Buys: naked. No marks other than scars. My body disjointed, not merged together with markings and tattoos. The hairy belly. The crumpled penis. The grey streaks in my eyes. The womanly ankles down there. My body is stranger than the body of anybody else. More at home with the least known body under any kaross than with this blinding bareness in the sand. I get to my feet, dust my backside. My body is as open as a plot of ground. I scratch at the mosquito bite. My bald spot scorches. I jam my hat onto my head firmly. The long grass; the sun blanches the sky. The white clamours in my ears. My hands touch and feel my sides. My skin scares me. All this skin. Pleated, folded again and again like a good blade. Unfolded. Skin, through and through and in every orifice: the mouth and ears, the nostrils and the arsehole. I fart. My jacket with smoking materials in its pocket is lying over there.
You are a free man if you can sit naked on a rock and light a pipe. This world, stretched out around me. I inhale the smoke. While I’m holding my breath, little waterfalls of smoke stream from my nose. Nothing remains inside. This world with its sun and universe, its rocks, its beehives, its beasts, its mirages.
When I was little, there was only a Buys-thing, the Buys-thing-playing-with-knucklebones-on-the-stoep-after-lunch-thing. That chunk of caterwauling back yard was the Buys-thing. The more my body gives up piecemeal, the more absolute the split: the idea of Coenraad de Buys, Omni-Buys; and an old man tottering into hostile territory. Two figures that never look each other in the eye.
These Buyses in this world: the fossils, the stripes of the zebra, the humanoid beasts, Maynier’s pretty waistcoats, the exact number of petals of that precise protea, the furrow of a bullet through a forehead, the ghosts of rainbows, printing presses. A time when I could run when I wanted to. The snakeskin of the other day, Nombini’s face while she’s breastfeeding, a blade of grass and the cow ruminating it. The eye that moves while you read what I recite. With my thumb and my index finger I remove a thread of tobacco from my tongue. I jump up, run until sight and sound are lost in fury. I put on my clothes and ride back to the camp on my horse with the back and the hooves, the bit and the mane.
The camp is just over the next rise when a large dappled stallion thunders past me. See, it bolted after its rider was shot. The Bastaard in the saddle is lying on his back with his feet still anchored in the stirrups, the flies a sticky black mass around the corpse and the horse. The stallion is crazed; the dead weight on its back won’t let go. I chase after it; try to corner it; it shakes its withers, rears up on its hind legs, tries to rid itself of its directionless rider. The eyes are empty, the mouth is foaming. It has seen too much of people ever to allow one on its back again. The horse runs off, comes to a halt some distance away. I grab hold of my powder horn; a large female leopard appears from the undergrowth, close to the dappled horse. I bridle in my horse’s fright, I load my gun. The leopard is not here for me. The rider dances furiously on the horse’s back. From how far away did she smell the horse’s weakness on the wind? The horse’s eyes show white, it leaps away. I shoot at the leopard and miss. The stallion’s frenzy lends it a last spark under the arse. When the leopard brings it down presently, the delirium will enclose him against the pain.
The Hartenaars remain sheep of my flock as long as I feed them guns. I am their contact with the Colony for whatever they want to barter. I am their missionary. They plunder with me and I with Danster. Our tents cover the plain like the pestilential sand.
Twenty months after I arrived in Griqualand their visits become less frequent. I am no longer accorded quite as warm a welcome to the Bastaard camps. They are damnwell managing without me. I ask a few wretches on their way to Griquatown to buy me munitions from the Reverend Anderson. The focking missionary laughs in their faces. The Hendrikses and the Goeymans, two families who cherish grudges against the missionaries like pearls, threaten – with a prod or two from me – the station itself, but that doesn’t put bullets into our barrels either. The news that De Kooker is on his way back was of course hogwash. For a while I hope that the message was wrong, that the misbegotten afterbirth Opperman is on his way; I’ll stuff that two-faced typhus-tool’s greased head up his fart-hole. Grietjie, De Kooker’s wife, needs to be consoled vigorously when the road remains empty. She is white as a porcelain saucer, with the body of a voluptuous young Caffre woman. She wets my shoulder with tears and I touch her bum. A week later news arrives that De Kooker has moved in with the field cornet. He waits until I’m out hunting and comes to snaffle Grietjie and her brood. So, too, that bum and that bastard disappear from my life. I send the two English deserters to the Colony for powder and bullets. We soon learn that all they achieved was to be transmuted into turds in the innards of a few hungry lions.
I myself trek to the Colony with a whole lot of cattle and looted Bushmen and barter them all along the border. By the end of June I’m back with a wagonload of guns and lead and powder. Early in July Danster and I trek to the Hartenaars. We clamber on the back of the wagon, I tear down the tent. Danster and I stand amidst the chests of munitions; we harangue them vigorously. We are on our way to the Barolong on the other side of Dithakong, we bellow. We are going to strip them bare. Every man who comes along gets a gun and ammunition. We all share in the loot. The lot of them mutter and mumble and meet. In the evenings Danster and I sit by our own fire. I take the wagon further up the Hart, to Makoon, the chief of a group of Koranas. They’re not yet as settled and staid as the slothful Hartenaars. Their shelters are temporary, their blades sharp. Their horses are better fed than their women. Robbers to the depth of their beings, especially in the pitch-black beads of their eyes. Makoon’s Koranas say they’re going along with me. When I ride into the Hartenaar camp with this lot, all of a sudden any number of Hartenaars want to come along. Perhaps. Perchance. Possibly. When by the end of August at long last all the talking runs dry and everybody is satisfied with how many heads of cattle he will possibly be able to loot, there is a feasting to be done first. A week later we hit the road with conviction, having drunk ourselves into valour and screwed ourselves into oblivion and all set for blood and riches. Three gangs are trekking together: Makoon’s Koranas and I, Danster and his Redcaffres and the Hartenaar heretics. Every single one with a Buys gun over the shoulder.