The day has been long and tonight this old body is nothing but aches and pains. I lie watching Elizabeth slowly peeling off her layers of dresses. My wife, this lady of the wilderness. She still dresses up every day, in dresses that refuse to get threadbare like Maria’s.
All three my wives cost me dearly. For Maria I gave up my white family. For Nombini I gave up Maria. After that thunderstorm where Nombini sat playing with the porcelain dish, Maria was never again really my wife. And Nombini never grew closer to me than that night. She remains the stolen one, the prisoner of war; the one who turns over tortoises, who plaits birdcages. For Elizabeth I had to give up my children – with the four that she and I were to line up I was at home more often, sometimes played along, plucked a decent clay-stick, even plaited a straw doll or two. The children by other women were left behind. I was never there; I was a prick and a progenitor, never a father. My fire-haired Bettie who is now a woman herself. What will become of her in this bedlam? For Elizabeth I’ll renounce everything; she is my mate. And have I mentioned her mouth? To the devil with the past and to hell with the future: see, my wife is unlacing her bodice.
We laugh too much to get much kissing done. I chase her around the two small rooms; she flutters away ahead of me. I can hardly get hold of the hem of her dress. In the front room the brood are lying in a heap pretending to be asleep. In the bedroom I press her against the wall. Her face in my hands. I can but look at this person. She polishes my flabby and hairy belly as if it’s the most precious copper. My prick shrinks into itself, my toe starts throbbing. She kisses my bald patches. I let go of her.
Come on, my old ox. Come and lie by me. Just hold me.
Our legs twine together. I press her to me until her eyes say it’s hurting. I rub across her dear wrinkled buttocks, the skin hanging loose around her chin. I ask how one person can be so soft.
It’s you who knead me, Mijnheer.
She touches my crotch; still nothing. We kiss. She licks over my closed eyes. She sings softly while like a female baboon she forages in my chest hair for fleas. I scratch her back while she’s telling how she tied Baba and Jan to each other with a thong today when they hit each other. After the two of them had to put up with each other all afternoon with three legs and no arms they are once again great friends. Besides, they learnt about slipknots, she says. She plaits my beard with the selfsame thong in three thick strands, with soup bones at the lower end:
Now the ancestors will quail before your countenance, my wild white warrior.
She hunkers on my chest and starts undoing the soup bones from the red-and-grey beard. I say, Let it be for a while. Her arms shoot out above her head; an unearthly cooing and clucking and growling emanates from under her ribs. She falls on me and kisses me all over on my peeled cheeks and forehead. I erupt and grab her and turn her over and then everything functions as it should. My wife and I, we are a series of eruptions. I explode, I vibrate on my own, like a sound that’s lost its tune. I stir, buffet, calm down, come back, vanish, with no more pattern than the flight of mosquitoes.
My old and raddled body is no longer mine; if she touches me there, if I touch here, our bodies become a single thing, more absolute, more separate than ever. Our bodies become a place, a place of touch, a smooth place of a thousand bodies. We are one and we become many. We fold until only skin remains. Nothing remains of man and woman. Everything is real and useless. The one thing and the other touch and swerve here on the verge of the inside-out, the I-you, the verge where one skin touches the other, where pain winks with pleasure, where the whole body becomes hide, no deeper organs; nothing is penetrated. We are invulnerable, we are for ever. I love her. There is no love without making love. And every hard shaft demands an infinitesimally small measure of love. Here where everything that can open and shut in our bodies folds open and slides shut, here the frontier of what I am and where I am trembles, before I transmute into something else.
A few thrusts, then I spurt, an eternity later. It is as if my heart contracts, my blood pours out and fills up again. I am still Buys, I become Buys, without returning to Buys. I overflow. She smears my seed over her stomach and pulls me down on top of her.
See, Buys clambers off her, gets up to get rid of a cramp. He sits down in front of her, grabs her feet and opens her legs, sidles closer, the little hairs on her calves against his old man’s saddlebags. He rubs over her thighs and gazes at the folds of her sheath. He stares and stares and sees an exact and absolute vision of death, a perfect yearning that cannot be fulfilled without blasting bodies apart and with that this vision. His eye cannot settle; it slides along the swerves and lines and niches and follows the farewells and retreats. She wants to cover herself, awkward with being examined like this. He wrestles her hands away, says what he has to say to calm her down. He gazes and gazes. He sees how she smells, how she tastes, how she sounds. There is nothing here to understand. Everything is exactly what it is and unstable. She does not move, but it feels as if what he sees vanishes between two blinkings of his eye.
Listen to me carrying on. Please pardon this old varmint. She is the first woman who can talk to my body, the first one who can cajole this convulsing carcase and patiently invite it to talk back. All my life I’ve been blindly pursuing my prick, until at long last the here and now of her. But see, tomorrow I’ll see a bobbing pair of never-seen-before buttocks, and believe me, then I’ll butt in again, searching for something I’ve found already.
Can’t get to the bottom of this business. And it’s then, as old Kemp said, that the long lists ensue: poking pairing pushing mating, frigging, banging, coupling, covering, fertilising. Loving. Hunching humping jumping bumping banging bonking. Sleeping with, making love. Flipping binding bundling screwing scrubbing shagging shtupping; penetration fornication copulation, coitus congress carnal knowledge; deflowering, dallying; tupping treading shafting nailing ramming ramping rumping pumping rooting rogering. Oh, what the hell.
Gunpowder and clothing run out if you’re in hiding. The Colony, after all, is closed to me till the goddam Second Coming. I lift up mine eyes unto the kopjes in the east, from whence cometh my help if not from the Portuguese. Arend and I talk and draw maps in the sand. I decide that Arend and Coenraad Wilhelm will go and look for gunpowder in Delagoa Bay. They’ll cross the Drakensberg at the Olifantsvallei and they’ll find the Portuguese town of Inhambane that I’ve been looking for for such a long time and they’ll return with gunpowder and clothing and riches. I and a few men travel with them as far as the Molopo River and somewhere in March 1819 I shake the hands of my son and Arend and trek on to the Hurutshe capital Karechuenya in the Tshwenyane hills. The Bastaards with me say that Karechuenya is at least as large as the Cape and much cleaner. They say Karechuenya is the richest of all the Caffre kraals. If a portion of their riches could find their way into my pocket, that wouldn’t come amiss. Sefunelo isn’t going to make me rich. Perhaps my horsemen and guns, my name, could be worth more at Karechuenya than at Thabeng.