— We have you down as an odd job man. This is a gardening job. The gardeners’ union would object. What did you say you used to be?
— A fortune-teller.
— Yes well, there’s no future in that, not nowadays.
The gesture is one of denial, palms up and vertical, paler, almost pink, and heavily lined. To live the gesture in immobility is to evoke it and therefore to have observed it. Or something like it, the palms being white perhaps, the head gardener’s, and the earth dark and damp, swallowing up all gestures as realised and rejected, leaving no trace of error in us.
— You won’t need the hose yet, at least not with water running through it, but you could practice with the dry hose. It’s best to identify with each of the plants one at a time. Then you will know exactly what its needs are on any one day during the dry season.
— Excuse me but how can I identify without the water?
— That’s a very good question. I congratulate you on having avoided the trap. What did you say your occupation was?
— Well at the moment –
— No, I mean, before the displacement.
— I used to be a welder.
— Oh, I see. Somebody told me you were a historian of sorts.
— That’s not true. Oh, no. Never.
— Oh well, it all comes to the same thing in the end. The important thing is in the holding and the applying of the instrument. At least you’ll be used to aiming correctly, whether it’s fire or water.
— It all comes to the same thing I suppose.
— Don’t be impertinent. We haven’t built you up yet. There will be a period of initiation. At the moment all the plants are shrivelled and blackened with the frost. But the leaf is in the seed. That is an article of faith. It is with the seed that you must identify. This will give time for the black and white image to percolate. We can add the colours later, when they crop up. The process is known as osmosis.
— What is the catch, though?
— Well, there might be an explosion. Too many to the square centimetre.
— The flowers a mass of red.
— I don’t know about red. In any case one type of explosion tends to cancel the other. The answer to the one is to fill the body’s reservoirs with minerals like potassium or carbohydrate complexes found in seaweed, so that radioactive minerals are absorbed and passed out. This of course tends to encourage the other type, the population explosion. However, it is a risk worth taking, and square centimetres can be enlarged.
— I thought you said that it’s best to identify with the plants one by one?
— That’s a very good question. But these are mere statistics in time. You must learn to identify with the flux.
— It’s an article of faith, I suppose … it is difficult to tell who’s talking in this type of dialogue.
— If you must have your schematisations the job can go to someone else. There are other candidates for initiation. But Mrs. Mgulu made a particular point of taking a special interest.
The number of the vehicle has no numerical significance. The gesture is of holding a conventional weapon. A flame-thrower for example, or an atomic machine-gun. Sooner or later some such interruption will be inevitable. Under the fig-tree, however, as in a brain, there is only immobility. The sky is entirely filled with long grey twigs that poke into the eyebrow line topping the field of vision. In the lower part, on either side of the nose, the branches that bear the twigs are thick and contorted. To the right of the nose, with the left eye closed, the thickest branch sweeps horizontally along the edge of the grass patch, underlining Mrs. Ned’s shack, as if the shack were built on it. To the left of the nose, with the right eye closed, it darkly cuts across Mrs. Ned’s dark shack, cancelling it almost. Close up, the fig-tree looks blasted, filling the sky with its metallic trellis.
— The gardeners’ union, however, would not object to your working overtime only. At overtime rates I’m afraid, which is quarter-pay at the moment.
— That’s all right. What are the overtime hours?
— In the dry season twelve to three. In winter seven to ten.
— But it’s dark at seven in winter.
— Yes well, as a matter of fact it’s rather a nominal concession anyway, because as you know in this time of severe unemployment overtime is almost universally disallowed. We’d have to get a special permit for you. Oh, but wait now, someone rang through about you. Mrs. Mgulu, that’s it. Oh well in that case the special permit might not be necessary.
The pinkness of the flower is its gesture. It is essential to hold on to that. The earth is dark with mould. As humus decays it yields carbon dioxide, which, dissolved in the soil water, attacks the mineral particles and makes available the phosphate and potash they contain.
In the white wall the glossy black door opens suddenly. The woman stands framed by the whiteness dressed in a black cotton overall. Pale eyes, pale hair, and the face is waxy. Have some Metabol. You dirty, you need washing. Behind the woman in the white frame the background is brown and cypress green.
— Good morning.
— Yes?
— I’ve come about the gardening job.
— Oh, yes. My husband’s somewhere about. Come in.
The path leads straight up to a small white cottage. On either side of the path the converging cypress hedges engulf the woman in the black overall, which may after all be a dress, or a black rectangle on two white pillars moving up the path. The cypress hedges are trimmed flat and square at eye-level. On the other side of the left-hand hedge is the field of tomato plants protected from the heat by straw wigwams that stretch out like a vast encampment. On the other side of the right-hand hedge the tall cob-corn grows higher than the hedge.
— Wait here, will you, I’ll go and call him.
The left foot, in its dirty canvas shoe, is in an elongated hexagonal tile like a benzene ring, or, for that matter, aminobenzoic acid. Benzoic acid given to an animal reacts with amino-acid glycine and is excreted as hippuric acid. The heel is on the atoms nitrogen hydrogen two, the toe on the atoms oxygen two hydrogen, or for that matter on the atoms sulphur oxygen two nitrogen hydrogen two, the ring of sulphanilamide being very similar in shape. The process is known as competitive inhibition. The shoe of the right foot is caked with dry mud, and looks dirtier than the shoe of the left foot, which is merely dusty. The big toe of the left foot is wearing out the canvas.
— Good morning.
— Good morning. I believe Mrs. Mgulu –
— Yes, she told me about it. You know Mrs. Mgulu well?
— Yes, I mean no. It’s my wife. She works –
— Oh, I see. Well I’m glad you’re punctual, there’s plenty to do. These old gladioli corms have to be lifted for one, and sorted for spawn which must be kept separately for saving. I suppose you know all about that. As a matter of fact they’ve been left there so long, owing to one thing and another, it may not be possible to keep the spawn this year, and it’ll soon be time to replant, from stock I mean. You’ll have to prepare the soil. I did think of just leaving them there, the winter’s been mild so far and the soil’s well drained, it would just have to be mulched with leaves. But the calochorti are going to be planted just in front of them at about the same time so it’s best to prepare the ground anyway. I suppose you know about celosia, do you? I’m trying a little experiment here.
Above the gesture are the two mauve flowers. The red network of veins is very fine. Mrs. Mgulu watches through the fine network of bare branches, from a window in the big house, made just discernible by the leaflessness. No, Mrs. Mgulu walks in the olive grove beyond the bougainvillaea, and in among the laurel trees, through the red poinsettia. Beyond the tall wrought-iron gates the mimosas are in bloom. Clay occurs mostly in colloid form which is not chemically inert, like sand, and this makes it indispensable to soil fertility. I suppose you know all about base exchange, for instance, with a salt solution like soil water, which releases the insoluble potassium and makes it available to the plant. The feeling is one of autotrophism. Mrs. Mgulu sits graciously at her dressing-table in the sand behind the large-leafed red poinsettia, having her hair brushed into sleekness. Mrs. Mgulu takes more than an interest.