— Here is the Colourless Settlement. This, Mrs. Mgulu, is where I live. Look at the fig-tree, how it leans. No, it isn’t my fig-tree, it belongs to the State I suppose, but I love it nevertheless. That is my bungalow, there, well not mine exactly either, yes, we’re comfortable thank you, though I must admit the atmosphere was friendlier in the bidonville, where we lived before. That’s Mrs. Ned’s shack, next door, she’s the one I was mentally unfaithful to Lilly with, as you see she’s very close. There is also Mrs. Jim who despite her gallstones is pale pink and fleshy and bedworthy in a purely physical way, she lives in the present, you see, and has adapted to her environment. But she lives further away. I don’t know where Mrs. Jim lives.
Leaning against the horizontal branch it is possible to observe the shacks and yet remain hidden by the foliage of the fig-tree, the trousers of faded denim blending with the trunk no doubt, from far away. Look at the smooth grey bark, Mrs. Mgulu my love, how the lines run parallel down the length of the branches, but discontinuous, and interrupted by transverse cracks where the trunk curves. On the smaller branches the dotted lines are not immediately visible to the carelessly naked eye, but a microscope would certainly reveal a system of parallel highways along the branches in discontinuous black blobs like vehicles immobilised. How large do you suppose they seem to the ants, or to the neural impulses?
That is how the malady begins. The onset is insidious, well advanced before diagnosis. The fingers tap the smooth grey bark which remains firm on palpation and retains its characteristic notch. The imagination increases in size progressively and by no means painlessly until it fills most of the abdomen. Enlargement of the lymphatic glands may occur in the later stages of the disease, with a general deterioration to a fatal termination. The absolute knowledge that Mrs. Mgulu writes no notes and walks along no highway and does not nod and aches there by her absence, the absolute knowledge enters the body through the marrow bone, and up into the medullary centres, down the glosso-pharyngeal nerve no doubt or the pneumogastric, at any rate forward and down into the throat which tightens as the knowledge spreads into the chest and hurts. Sooner or later it will reach the spleen, which will increase in size until it fills the world. From ground-level on the dried-up yellow lawn the arch formed by the leaning trunk and the down-sweeping branch frames a whole landscape of descending olive groves beyond the road, which itself disappears behind the bank. The grey framework of the trunk and branch is further framed by the mass of deep green foliage. Inside the frame is Lilly’s white face aureoled in wispy hair. A telescope might perhaps reveal, from this position on the dried-up lawn, that the squint is less wide, less blue, hardly visible at all at this distance and in the luminosity of the midday sun.
— Careful, you’ll get sunstroke there. What have you been up to? Mrs. Jim came back from town and said you’d been in a fight. I got off early. You look awful. Why don’t you go inside, it’s cooler. Or at least lie in the shade of the fig-tree. Listen, would you like your gruel brought out here for a change?
Daily from 8 a.m. outside the Labour Exchange no dark blue face the size of a bungalow lies upside down, but a group of smooth, scaleless green monsters with green faces and the whites of black eyes bulging from strips of black skin like masks between the green below the eyes and the green skull caps above. The group surrounds another green monster recumbent with black snout. SO GRIPPING, SO HUMANE. The chief surgeon grips the knife. He is giving a lecture on recumbent humanity. Splenectomy is contra-indicated. The prognosis is poor. The disease is specially characterised by the peculiar greenish infiltrating subperiosteal masses in the bones of the skull, particularly in the orbits and sinuses. When in the marrow they lead to bone erosion. The green colour of the tumour masses fades rapidly in the air and light, being a protoporphyrin derivative. Symptoms, marked exophthalmos, diplopia, caecity, surdity, pyrexia, purpura. The doctors wear the masks of the humans, green is the colour of the biosphere, COME OVER INTO PATAGONIA AND HELP US.
The Governor’s vain Asswati face is cut diagonally by a shaft of light reflected in the glass, from left to right across the nose to the right ear, or, in his position, from right to left across his nose to his left ear. Beneath the shaft of light, the Governor juts his stalwart lips and stares fiercely out regardless from the far wall beyond the heads of the employment clerks at their grilled partitions. With his unbandaged ear the Governor listens to the shuffle of feet and the murmur of male voices and the calling out of names and the squeaking of hinges on metal cupboard doors and the banging of same, not to mention files and metal drawers, and he gazes benignly down. His dark eyes meet all eyes that meet his, but the meeting is not compulsory. The heads of the employment clerks are mere black silhouettes behind the small print of the grid partitions. The neighbour’s magnifying-glass moves away from the micronewscard which drops between the thighs on to the mottled floor.
— If no news is good news then news must be bad news.
The syllogism has a soft centre, firm nevertheless on palpation, retaining its characteristic notch.
The vibration of the voice has not been sufficient to carry the witticism into the neighbour’s left ear, and the syllogism evaporates, leaving no trace of error either in the air or in the mind, except perhaps a residue at the back of the brain, greenish in colour, to be dealt with by Dr. Fu Teng in his own good time, slow time. In the corner of the eye, the neighbour is Chinese, a refugee from Sino-America perhaps, or a renegade from Chinese Europe. The magnifying-glass recedes and then advances into his left trouser pocket, making a circular bulge on the thigh.
Underneath the eyelids the men continue to mill about the Labour Exchange but the whole scene goes grey. Nevertheless it bears a close resemblance to the real thing. The ceiling is pink and veined in white, and a long way away. The wall ahead is pink, above and all around a glossy and pale orange door. To the immediate right, close to the body, is a wall of pink veined marble, not very high, half a metre perhaps or a little more, edged by a two centimetre mud-coloured band where the marble has been removed. To the left of the body is another wall of pink veined marble, half a metre high or a little more, also edged with a mud-coloured band where the marble has been removed. Beyond this low wall, some distance away is a high pink marble wall joining the pink marble ceiling. The wall beyond the low wall to the right is mud-coloured, with some of the pink stripped off, the frontier between the pink and the mud being straight and vertical half-way up the wall, then zig-zagging to the ceiling. Good heavens, you look as if you were lying in a coffin. You’d better give me your hand and try to sit up. Look, I’ll sit down here with my feet in the bath and you lie alongside it with your head on my lap. Just relax. Close your eyes. Under the red networks of your eyelids in the sunlight the dark curves of my lips and nose seen from below my breasts that are ensilked in orange fill up your eyespace shimmering with yellow and black and pale and hectic red. Nevertheless it bears a close resemblance to the real thing, as a mere lifting of the eyelids could prove. The left nostril wears an alexandrite set in gold. In daylight the stone is blue. At dusk the stone is green. In the electric light the stone is mauve. At the moment it is possible to take one’s choice, daylight, for example, in the refracted orange of the summer sunset as it slants into the pink marble bathroom on the top floor of the big house. The bathroom, however, faces South. Beyond the flowering shrubs and trees the mimosas are over.