Tuesday, 7 August 2012
A TALE OF EXTRA ORDINARY MADNESS - Chapters 1 - 4 (2nd Draft)
Chapter One
I’ve been teaching myself to breath. The air is stale. A pollutant
institutional smog deodorized with industrial-strength disinfectant and Jayes
Fluid.
A careless breathe defiles the body.
My mucoid follicles are awakened to their true purpose.
After a lifetime of dispossession I am a stranger to my own being; no
longer familiar with the function and purpose of something as simple as the
hair in my nose.
I practice all the time. Slow, shallow breaths; giving the hair in my
nostrils time to perform its function, to filter the pollutant toxins from the
air: the oxygen I eventually take in is cleaner; less loaded. In this way I am
able to prolong my life just a little bit with every inhalation: one breath at
a time.
Death won’t find me here.
I try not to move about much. I’ve discovered that it’s all about
economy of movement: I do what I have to do and no more. I write at night lying
on my bed in the strangely comforting orange glow of a security light.
Sometimes it takes whole nights to write a single word.
Painstaking!
I’ve even learned how to exercise without moving. I isolate muscles,
focus on certain body parts: envision the function and purpose, slowly tensing…
pause... relaxing, tensing… repeatedly: crown, forehead, ears, eyes, cheeks,
jaw, neck, shoulders… slow, methodical, relentless. Right down to my toes; each
and every one individually; and I breathe. I’ve never been in better physical
condition; primed and toned. Vital!
I’m a ward of the state; waiting out the days until… Well, until I no
longer need to wait in here; until I can wait wherever I choose for one.
I’ve forgotten how long I’ve been here. Many months and many years; I’ve
forgotten so many little things: important things I think. But at least I
remember that I have forgotten. At least I don’t think that the things that I
have forgotten didn’t exist. That much I can remember. I remember that so many
things did happen! It’s a pity memory is such an unreliable companion. So I
write.
**********
Where is ‘here’ you may wonder and the truth is that ‘here’ – right now
– is a reinforced concrete isolation-cell between the past and the prospect of
a future. The warder doctors insist that it’s not a cell: that this is not a
prison.
They refer to it as a private room, but I’m not falling for any of it.
If this is not a prison then I am genuinely insane.
I am an inmate in a prison and even though this place is a madhouse,
this is not an asylum.
They say I am a State President’s Patient in a psychiatric hospital.
Either way I am waiting out the days patiently: gradually becoming
acquainted with the person I suppose I was always becoming.
I write whatever is on my mind. Words about images and snippets of
visions that feel like it could be my memories. The history I’ve lived and the
history that my living is a part of. I consult with those who know. My
ancestors impart clarity and understanding.
Whenever I can I also read books. I try to only read the really good
ones. The books written by women and men who died or were killed long ago.
The same with music, give me Mingus or Monk any day; or even better,
Bheki Mseleku or Moses Mololekwa. Those guys soothe my soul.
My doctor says that it is because of my fixation with the past and my
ancestors that I cannot find my footing in the present. What is the present? I
know what my present is and I can only imagine what your present is; but what
is the present?
**********
I wasn’t always kept apart.
The last time they had me amongst the other inmates she said I had an
adverse effect on some of them. I like to think that I used to drive them
nuts...
And I also bit the preacher’s finger. He pointed it at me and called me
a madman. He said I was a child of Satan. I couldn’t let him get away with it.
No-one likes to be called names. Especially not by a feeble minded nobody who
spends time with prisoners and madmen to validate his own dismal lack of a
life. A raving lunatic of a Christian with the Bible and a gold cross on a gold
chain, and a nickel, made-in-China pendant of St. Christopher on a silver
chain. A modern missionary for the marginalized. He used to preach to us about
Jesus and forgiveness, and the error of our ways.
I stopped believing in that fairytale a long time ago.
Again they insisted. If I stayed away from their play-play church
service that was stored in a cupboard during the week, she denied me
privileges. No books. No newspaper. No radio. Sometimes she even took my paper
and pencils.
Maybe nothing would have happened if he was an inmate like me, but he
was a free man – a man of the cloth with a collar – and because of him I had to
waste my Sunday morning in the company of lunatics and listening to one.
No more pointing from the pulpit for him. And I don’t have to go to
church.
You see, I was judged a long time ago to be clinically insane; unable to
stand trial for a crime they say I committed. It wasn’t me. I know who did it
and I told them but they didn’t believe me then and they still don’t believe me
now. That dog bit its own tale and when I chomped that priest’s digit, he had
no recourse because even he knew that I couldn’t be held responsible for my
actions and so I remain beyond reproach. Legally!
**********
I am kept in isolation though. In E-Section.
The days are marked by three tasteless, but smelly steamed, square meals
and a 40 minute reprieve from this cramped cell to shower and exercise in a
courtyard with eight foot high concrete walls topped with barbed wire and
overlooked by an armed watchtower. I seldom shower for longer that a few
minutes because by the time I get there the water is cold. Afterward when I'm
lucky, I get to warm my chilled bones by standing in the solitary splash of
sunlight or else I walk: round and round the twelve-step-square.
The official routine is soul numbing.
A piercing siren wails at a quarter-to-six, but I am seldom asleep
because I refuse to exist by their rules. I will not sleep when they say I
should!
Immediately in the distance, the sound of an oversized key, slammed with
a practiced clank into an oversized metal door; stilettoed-jackboot footsteps
echoing down the corridors; more doors.
Keclank-clank, creek. Bang.
The sound gradually gets louder, closer until the door beyond the gate
is flung open by an orderly accompanying a warder doctor and a nurse warder.
All with a similar institutionalized gait.
The orderly looks in, says “one”. The doctor nods his agreement and the
nurse records it on the print-out on her clipboard.
They leave the door open. Whispered greetings and conversations strike
up. The barred gate remains locked. The sound of the headcount gradually
recedes with its marching band precision and just before it disappears
completely a different oversized key is slams into another oversized lock along
a different passage and the food trolley squeaks into the isolation wing of the
maximum security section.
Its progress is slower, more menacing. Delivering its ration of lumpy
porridge which is rumoured to be laced with copper sulfate, and a spoon measure
of sugar which you could either have with your coffee, making it too sweet or
with the porridge which would remain bitter without any salt anyway. Squeak,
squeak, squeak pause. Breath.
Eventually the trolley arrives with its un-orderly-warder and two less
deranged inmates who have been around for so long that they could have been
employed by the state.
A shiny metal bowl with rounded edges and a spoon without any handle is
unceremoniously shoved through the barred gate with an expert twist that
happens so fast that the porridge doesn’t even realize that it should fall
before it is through and leveled once again. No eye contact, no greeting, no
thanks. Gravity defeated.
I just eat the sugar with some water to wash it down.
Squeak, squeak, squeak, pause: breath.
When they turn the corner I flip my bowl through the bars and pour the
coffee over the porridge before sliding it with a spin that prevents spillage,
across the corridor to my neighbor Reus.
A man so big that he always brings to mind a sort of bipedal Rhinoceros
without the horn on its head: like hanging out with a character from a
nightmare fairytale.
Pure menace and always mad as hell.
An ex-recce.
A parabat in one of the most notorious battalions in the old South
African Defense Force. In other words, a very good friend to be feeding in a
place like this.
**********
Minutes pass before another door opens with less threat and the
medication trolley rattles along with an almost gay jangle of bottles and
pills. Jingle-jangle, stop, silence; jingle-jangle stop, silence and as they
get closer the whispered consultation becomes audible: monosyllabic, clipped
enquiries dispensing another dose of numbing calm. A plastic thimble containing
a cocktail of drugs that is referenced and noted on a clipboard, and another
little plastic thimble filled with water. I’ve stopped trying to avoid taking
their daily dose of pretty pink and blue capsules of madness because their
response was to tie me down and inject the psychotic concoction into my
treacherously welcoming veins.
Instead I have learned to vomit without making a sound.
**********
By eight o’clock the Section settles.
Sometimes Reus will tell me about his past. Hoary tales about wholesale
murder that leaves me wondering whether peace can ever exist after war.
It was like being in hell. Being exposed to Reus human face.
It turns out that he never was a racist. Some of his closest and most
trusted comrades were black. He never condoned the Nationalist ideology. He was
simply living out his dream of being an Apache, straight off the pages of his
favourite childhood Louis L’Amore novels.
Pieter Smit was born and raised on a farm in the Baviaanskloof where his
childhood was spent learning how to live off the land: to grow and hunt and
forage and to survive the onslaughts of the elements with very little. His father
was a bounty hunter for the National Party government and he kept his family in
seclusion on the farm to ensure their safety from reprisal by the friends of
those whom he had to hunt and often kill.
The stories Reus told of his childhood conjured images of a young
Tarzan-like boy in an untamed landscape with wild carnivores and snakes and
bushes that were virtually impenetrable.
I’d stand or lie down without offering any response; but Reus didn’t
need me to say anything. I would exercise in silence.
Breathing, tensing, relaxing; listening.
Being transported into war zones or bars or lice invested beds far away
by a man whose primary contribution to existence it seemed was to murder
hundreds of people and fuck countless women and father unknown offspring.
He had endless supply of bone shattered and blood soaked stories: always
told with a chuckle. When he was conscripted it didn’t take his superiors long
before they realized that he possessed a rare talent for the brand of murder
called Patriotism that they were peddling. He became a professional killer
before he could piss straight. It is people like him and the lawmakers that
should be kept in places like this.
And while I listen I think and I wait. Patiently.
Constantly preparing for the day when I will be released from this aural
nightmare filled with the murmurs and groans and screams and the crying of
these traumatized men and women desperate to remember who they are: to
recognize themselves again.
**********
Everything is touched by a mildly disturbing unreality. Everyone seems
to be playing a role. Every word and action scripted and rehearsed. Sometimes
the only way for me to deal with this nightmarish acid trip of a reality-movie
is to at least switch off the sound seeing that I can’t pull the plug on this
cursed widescreen.
And the doctors just won’t let me.
They really are the worst. The offer the least understanding. They
remind me of kids playing at being doctors; or policemen. They posture and
sample and probe for little bits and bobs, fragments, clutching at straws when
they are offered. They inevitably draw their conclusions. They use big, clumsy
compound-words to describe the tiny boxes that they prescribe.
They are also not big on anyone else’s opinion. Unless of course you
happen to be one of their own: and then only if similar conclusions can be
drawn.
No room for any significant understanding within this state-subsidized
pharmaceutical psychiatry. Just the single, blind-eyed view and a capsule:
everything predictable.
Nice and neat teacher said.
Regular. Like an active bowel.
**********
Everywhere I look I see a reflection of that great straight-lie: a
straight nightmare where the only way to get out is to get in.
**********
There is one curve. Through that oversized keyhole that watches me.
Sometimes I stare back, fearless and challenging. I never blink first.
The days pass slowly. Lunch at eleven. My scheduled shower at two.
Dinner at three before being counted and safely locked up for the night by four
thirty. Only Thursday’s are different. On Thursday I spend an hour with my
doctor.
Chapter Two
My name is Marmaduke Miller and contrary to what may seem obvious to
some, I was not named after some stuck-up, brutish British colonizer: I was
named because of one.
My mother was born and raised on the family farm in the Overberg called
Verdwaaldraai which was nestled in the shadows of the Hantamskop Peak where the
Maanwater Spruit bubbled up from the earth, giving rise to the mystical
Maanwater River. Until fairly recently, the spring and much of the river had
been on the family property, but unfortunately the family land has gradually
been whittled away over the centuries and today there is just a small, but
significant plot where my sister still owns and runs the Maanwater Spring and
Eco Guest Farm. A mere fraction of what once was a noble and proud family
history, now buried there in the past beneath the stone and the dust.
**********
At the age of fifteen, my mother left home to work on a neighbouring
farm which had been bought by the Duke of Bedford.
What became Misty Manor is situated between what is now Paarl and
Franshoek in a Kloof at the foot of the Komietberg with a picturesque waterfall
cascading over a cliff just behind the farmhouse.
Even before the arrival of the new owners, the original farmhouse had
been demolished and a magnificent country manor was built befitting the
family’s stature. The Duke was not a farmer, but he managed over the course of
a few years to turn the farm into a flourishing concern growing apricots,
olives and Buchu.
My mother arrived at the manor in 1952 where one of her aunts had been
working as a cook since the family first arrived in South Africa four years
before. Back then my mother was an attractive, slim but buxom young girl with a
dimpled smile and bright, hazel eyes that twinkled invitingly when she was
excited.
I’ve seen the faded pictures and listened to her reminiscence.
She used to have kinky (red-brown) hair and high, soft rounded
cheekbones with a (golden-caramel) complexion that I imagine a lot of pale
Europeans would have found quite irresistible: and as it turned out, the Duke
was no different from most pale, Europeans with a dick.
Within days of her arrival the Duke would have felt the first stirrings
of an irrepressible desire in his loins as he set his sights on the attractive
new girl. He would have been an adventurous man to have come to Africa in the
first place: an adventurous man with adventurous appetites and he would not
have wasted time devising a plan to entice or force the delectable young woman
to share her ample charms with him in the privacy of the stables or even maybe
a secluded, open field: but what the unsuspecting Duke could never have
imagined was that my mother – for all of her unsophisticated naivety – was more
than a match for his carnal cravings.
Maybe the young Mary-Anne was experienced beyond her years with a lack
of inhibitions and an equally irrepressible sexual appetite that left the Duke
dazed and desperately wanting. What he might not have suspected was that even
though my mother had lived all of her life in virtual isolation in a small,
closed farming community, she had lost her virginity under the stars at the age
of thirteen with a cousin who was three years older who had visited from Beaufort
West.
Maybe after that first encounter when my mother realized the joy and
power of sex, she couldn’t get enough?
**********
The illicit liaison between the Duke and the young servant became
increasingly adventurous and while the Duchess and their children went to Cape
Town for their regular dose of culture and sophistication, the Duke would
invite Mary-Anne into his matrimonial bed for steamy nights of adulterous
passion that didn’t even begin to satisfy his recently unbridled lust.
Within weeks the rest of the staff had a new favourite topic to feed
their natural attraction for scandal, and rumours quickly spread about where it
would all end between the poor nymphomaniac servant and the sex-mad duke.
Many were openly jealous but many more secretly envied the always
friendly young girl who was constantly at the beck-and-call of the Duke who had
developed the habit of sending for her at all hours of the day and night.
Miraculously, word of their affair never reached the Duchess’s ears.
After two months however, my mother realized that she was pregnant and
in order to avoid the inevitable scandal, the Duke asked my mother to return
home with a handsome ‘little something’ to take care of the regretful
inconvenience and my mother agreed amicably knowing that the scandal would hurt
her family as much as it would tarnish what she assumed would be his immaculate
imperial reputation.
**********
Early in 1953, my mother gave birth to a beautiful baby girl whom she
named Penelope – after the Duchess – and she settled into her role as a single
mother with only an occasional longing for the steamy passion she had so
unrestrainedly shared with the Duke.
Eventually in 1955 she met and married Bartholomew Miller who had then
recently started teaching in Jakoebsdal and less than a year later they had a
second daughter whom they christened Elizabeth.
Bartholomew proved to be a diligent, hardworking teacher; a faithful,
God fearing husband and a solicitous, if somewhat distracted father to his two
young daughters.
Over the years he was steadily promoted until in 1969 when my mother was
expecting me, he had become the school principal.
At the end of September 1969 a series of earthquakes rocked South
Africa. My mother went into labour during the worst of these on the 29th.
It was a difficult birth and when she eventually held me in her arms after
almost sixteen hours, she exhaustedly exclaimed with a big smile on her face:
“Ah, Mama se Duke!” – Mommy’s Duke. The Duke of Bedford’s name was Percival.
**********
I was christened Marmaduke Miller.
I always used to hate my name and would often get into fights because I
insisted that people call me Duke – like Duke Ellington papa used to say – and
most people did except my parents and a few of the kids at school who soon stopped.
For some reason my parents were unable to understand that part of the
reason why I was such an angry little kid was because of the name they had
given me and which they were convinced was the cutest thing ever.
In fact it was my father who had suggested the name after my mother’s
initial exclamation.
Chapter Three
On most Thursday mornings at a quarter past nine two orderly warders
arrive outside my cell with a bag of chains. A flap in the barred gate is
unlocked and I stick my hands through the gap. My hands are shackled and I pull
my hands back through before the gate is unlocked. The chain is thread through
the loops of my pants in front and tied around my waist and then my ankles are
shackled. The slack in the chain is placed in my hands and I shuffle out to my
weekly interview with Doctor Cronje.
My gait is restricted to a madhouse shuffle that will make anyone look
insane.
Our progress is slow: I’ve never gotten over the habit of watching my
feet as I slide along wondering why I am considered a flight risk?
I hope their fears come true.
**********
The warders chat casually, sauntering along behind me while I recount
the 30 by 30 square linoleum floor tiles: an insipid institutional green that
reminds me of bird shit and squashed insects.
Three and a third tiles to the meter, ten tiles every three meters; four
corridors totaling one hundred and thirty six meters, five tiles wide; endless
straight lines until we enter the therapy block which is older, with wooden
floors; highly polished with lavender floor wax by inmates on their knees. The
smell threatens to take me back to my childhood, but I refuse: I hold my
breath.
As I turn the corner my pulse quickens.
There is an orderly sitting outside Doctor Cronje’s door.
She’s here.
The uniformed lackeys greet their colleague who is glad for the company.
I stare expectantly at the door to the office. In a minute it will open
and for a brief moment I will see her: a frail and fragile young woman whom I
have never met or spoken to, but who has taken up residence in my waking
dreams.
Every week she is here for her hour with the doctor before my own. Every
week I notice a different bandage, another scar; always the same haunted look
as she drops her gaze the instant before our eyes meet.
Every week she is led away walking without shackles but tied up in
chains I am unable to see and can hardly imagine.
In fact, I’ve stopped trying. I simply think of her now as my lady.
I watch the door handle without blinking, eager to take in every little
micro second and as the handle begins to turn I am prepared. My sphincter
contracts.
Her hair has been washed. No bandages I can see; she almost holds my
gaze for an infinitesimal instant, but.
I do think I notice the hint of a smile, but. But no, it can’t be.
Her eyes are bloodshot and puffy. She’s been crying. Definitely not a
smile; a grimace. She looks down and her hair falls forward covering her face;
she walks unbowed, with her head down. I wonder.
Desperate to know more of anything as I shuffle through the doctor’s
door; impatient to sit on the hard wooden chair where I know she has just been
seated, feeling the heat of her presence even as it becomes a part of my own.
I always wonder if she feels the same.
**********
Doctor Cronje’s head is bowed as she closes one folder and opens mine.
She writes something already.
I look at the crown of her head; thinning, gray roots dyed an
unnaturally bright orange-red that makes me think of a cartoon orange ape I
remember from some Disney story; or was it a synthetic ex-lover’s jersey; the
hair of a handy one-night stand, I can’t remember.
She stops writing and looks up with a professional smile; coated and
caked, orange lipstick that almost doesn’t match her hair.
And her eyes? I always wonder what those eyes are doing with that face.
Such a penetrating blue with intensely black pupils that makes her whites seem
even whiter.
Like a bird in her own special cage of flesh, unblinking.
Covered by a heavy layer of an ill-matched foundation unable to disguise
the unusually large pores. As if the skin is being stretched to breaking point
to contain the extent of that face; thick mascara’d lashes – like a scary
cartoon dragon – with blobs of black soot threatening to get stuck against her
puffy lids, over-painted greenish-blue. Dry thin lips stretched over nicotine
stained teeth alters the tone of the scratchy greeting: and her chins wobble in
unison, right down the front of her blouse, delayed each time by just a
fraction. Until my eyes involuntarily rest on her voluminous breasts.
For just a fraction of a second.
“How are you feeling today?” And every week she looks down at the folder
before adding: “Marmaduke.”
What am I supposed to say?
I have a constant dilemma about what to tell this woman in whose hands my
fate has rested for the longest time. The truth – my truth, my reality – is
something which she believes is a product of my overactive imagination.
She reports it as being delusional.
My silence is ‘uncommunicative and troubled; taciturn and withdrawn’.
I am loath to lie. But maybe it’s the only way to get out of here.
“I’m okay” I say.
She stares at me with her hands folded beneath her chins, leaning
forward expecting more: the cold blue eyes staring. I look back wondering what
her late husband saw in her; what her children think of her, what they feel
when they have to kiss those lifeless lips. I wonder what she thinks if she
still looks at herself in the mirror? I wonder who she sees.
“My friend sent me new slippers” I add in conclusion looking down at my
feet beneath the chains.
“I’ve been told that you’re still not eating breakfast” the dead stare:
“You have to eat in the morning so that the medication can work properly.”
I like my new slippers.
“There’s no salt in the porridge.”
“Too much salt is not good for you.”
She picks up her pen and I see a fraction of cleavage before she begins
to write again.
I sit in silence watching her stubby fingers bulging around the rings,
more gaudy-coloured nail polish inexpertly coating the cuticles in places or
chipped close to the skin. Around her wrist an African bracelet with an
elephant design enfolded by blotchy, pale skin that in turn makes my skin
crawl. I shiver involuntarily.
“Your sister Penelope wants to visit” I am alert: “She’s requested a
contact visit for your birthday.”
I am at the edge of my seat and she smiles as she notices. She knows
that I am aware that it is her decision that will ultimately influence the
granting or denying of the request.
“Please Doctor, please say yes?” I blurt out pleading, before I can stop
myself and I am disgusted by how simply I am able to be manipulated; I watch
her enjoying watching me squirm but I don’t care.
“It’s not that simple, you know that.”
She stops writing and looks me in the eye, enjoying the moment too much.
Stripped of my usual poise and calm I cover my genitals beneath the
desk.
She knows that at that moment I would do anything to have my sister’s
request granted.
“Maybe if you decide to rejoin the group therapy sessions…” she leaves
it hanging.
“Yes anything. I promise” and I pinch my thighs brutally as a
counterpoint to my pathetic submission. At least my otherwise impotent,
shackled hands can inflict some pain hidden away beneath the desk in my lap.
“I have to make my decision in two weeks so we’ll see” and she makes
another note.
All I can think of is how I will have to toe the line over the next two
weeks. I cannot afford even a whisper of dissent.
The visit, seeing my sister is too important!
“I promise” I pinch harder: “I won’t be any trouble.”
**********
Eventually the hour is up and so is my self-inflicted torture.
I agree that I will be ready for group therapy on Monday morning and
that I will contribute this time.
Reus is waiting outside the door with an extra orderly warder as I exit
but my thighs feel as if they are bleeding and I shuffle ahead of my orderlies,
hurrying to get back to my cell where I can at least spend the rest of the day
contemplating the possibility of seeing my sister; my beloved Penny who never
turned her back on me.
The tiles underfoot pass by unnoticed as my mind is filled with thoughts
of how it will be; what will she say, how will she be looking, what will she
wear, will anyone accompany her?
At times like these I sometimes wish that there was a god I could
believe in who could grant wishes and make dreams come true.
Shuffle, shuffle – clink, clank.
**********
Back in my cell, free of the shackles and chains I have to slow my
breathing. I get angry when I breathe too hard.
Angry at how eagerly I stuck my tongue up Doctor Cronje’s ass, but most
of all I was angry at myself because I knew that I would do it again and again
if it meant spending fifty minutes with Penny.
I breathe: slow, shallow breaths again. Inhale… Pause… Exhale…
My heart rate doesn’t slow though; my thoughts run wild as I clean the
blood from my thighs with spit and toilet paper. I try hard not to think too
much. Not about me or Penny or the Doctor. Relax. Breathe.
I need to cut my nails.
Chapter Four
There was a time long ago. Both of my grandparents were still alive and
I remember being on the farm with them. I just remember the moment, or at least
what fragments remain. We were at the spring. I think I remember.
They sat side by side on their rocks as they always did.
Mamma with her eyes narrowed, face lined, staring into the distance.
Pappa with his stern calm; less expressive, staring too but at the
eternal, bubbling spring.
The Maanwater Spring that was given to my ancestors by the river Goddess
Herself at that time when She still roamed the land: unfettered and strong were
her nourishing veins.
“The land is dying” she said. “It’s being killed, murdered.”
I looked at Pappa who cast his eyes towards a flock of sparrows weaving
toward the horizon. He said nothing.
“You will be the last of the children to know enough to be able to
imagine what this home once was.”
I didn’t know what she meant but she persisted patiently.
“But even you will forget because you never knew. You only hear stories,
but you don’t know.”
She picked up a fistful of soil.
“This.” It strained from her hand which she opened before she spread her
arms, lifting her gaze to encompass everything and the universe.
“All of this. This is the mother. This is the Goddess. The soil and the
rock and the sun and the moon and the seasons and the tides and the wind. And
us; all of us. The animals and the insects and the birds and the fishes and the
plants and the trees. All of it is dying. Humanity is killing everything. It’s
just a matter of time. Humanity is dead.”
“The spring is still strong” said Pappa and we were silent.
**********
I remember something like that happening because I remember asking Mamma
about it afterwards and she smiled and wrapped my small boy hands in her strong
age-gnarled, gentle paws.
“Sometimes time plays tricks with me” she said but the smile didn’t
reach her sad eyes. “Sometimes I see things that don’t belong to this moment.
Sometimes I am in a time that is gone and other times I am in a time that is
still coming. I see things in the past and I see things in the future and I can
say things only now.”
She placed her hand on my head and drew me to her and we sat like that
for a moment and she rocked.
“Maybe one day you will remember and then maybe you will understand.”
I do remember and now finally I do understand. At least I think I do.
I’ve done the research: I’ve read up and travelled dusty roads to
consult and conduct interviews. I’ve spoken to my ancestors. I’ve heard what
they have to say. In fact, right now I am quite angry with some of them: pissed
off in fact. Big time.
But that’s another story.
**********
I am the last member of the family to be born in Jakoebsdal. A small
little nothing place, not quite a town or a village or anything. Just one of
those places where people happen to live.
There was a general-dealer whose shelves were filled with one kind of everything
and which doubled as the post office. There was an off-sales that had
pretensions of being a motel with two ill kept rooms for rent to anyone
unfortunate enough to be stuck there overnight; and a total population of
one-hundred-and-seventy-three permanent residents made up of mostly
grandparents looking after their grandchildren with every able bodied man and
woman of even close to working age off looking for better prospects in the
bigger towns or – for the more adventurous – the cities.
There was only a primary school where my father was the principal and
the only available ‘paying’ work was on one of the few productive farms in the
area where wages were more often than not substituted for wine and dry stores
and where working conditions were deplorable.
As it still is.
The story tells of the Goddess’s daughter during a time before
reckoning. A powerful Matriarch and free even as a child, who roamed the earth
with the winds and the wild animals. One night as she was traveling by the
light of the full moon it is said, she was struck by a bolt of lightning and
fell from the sky. Where she landed the earth immediately began to cry for the
child of the Goddess who had fallen to the ground to become mortal. That place
is the Maanwater Spring and I am descendent of that fallen child of the
Goddess, the Matriarch.
The story continues and tells how the Matriarch had awoken with the
first sunrise. How at first she didn’t recognize herself in her mortal form and
how she ranted and raged at the Gods for conspiring to make her mortal. She
pleaded with her mother but to no avail. She had to accept her fate. And as a
tribute to – a tributary of – her divine being: the eternal spring.
For a long while the Matriarch made her home right there, beneath an
overhang a short distance from the spring. And she walked the land and became
acquainted with the beasts from whom she learned how to forage. She walked the
land and tasted the fruits and met the seasons and she learned how to sow and
when to harvest.
She would always share the spring’s bounty with other travelers and
tribes; other mortals whom she came to know and who came to know her as the
mystic healer of the Maanwater Spring from whom the Goddess’s love always
flowed.
The story speaks of a time when the soft pale men were only ever found
alone on the beach or in the company of corpses and almost always with their
heads in Death’s lap, his bony hand stroking lovingly caressing.
There was a time when the Matriarch was at the shore and she found such
a man, maybe a once proud man, but reduced to a bit of scabrous jetsam washed
up by the tide.
She took pity on him while he still had life and carried him back to the
spring where she nursed him back to health. He could have been from anywhere.
Portugal, Holland, just up the coast, China: a slave, a master?
She nursed him back to health beneath an overhang of rock that sheltered
him from the harsh, relentless sun and the driving rain. At night he stared at
the stars thinking of another home lost forever, and he knew that here he was
at home again in a land he had only ever gazed upon from the deck of a ship out
at sea forever passing and always praying for another day’s strength and to
stay afloat within the tempest.
He decided that he was done with praying. His prayers had been answered
and he was truly saved. He stayed with the Matriarch and they were happy.
Then one night by the light of another fool moon they conceived a child
and so the tentacled path to my past was forged.
Some time beyond. There where history and memory are no more and maybe
never was. There where my roots lie twisted and wasted: detached from the tree
and lifeless, just a piece of gnarled wood; with a rotten bark.
I have sat in the hall of silence where my ancestors dwell and I have laid
my eyes upon them all. Dwelling.
Traces of everywhere there: and everything and everyone; all silent,
watching, waiting to be reunited with time. No not waiting, just being but not
that either. Not being; maybe just removed from this time. Certainly not dead.
I have sat in their hall of silence and have heard the story. I have met
the Matriarch. I heard the story told, of a time when the soft pale men arrived
in boats and traveled in gangs on horseback and on foot trying to impose their
will on everything and everyone. Wanting to determine the terms of their visit
as if they intended to stay and they did. Always demanding and wanting and
scheming: always crooked.
Smiling at the back of their funny, sun burnt pink-raw faces.
The story tells of the cruel and ugly, civility carved into the hard
heal of their unsuitable-ungainly, heavy-crushing boots: of the tyranny and
malice, of the fighting and the brigands who enjoyed it and the guileless
legends who won favour and fortune with murderous expedience.
I’ve met Jakoeb after whom Jakoebsdal is named. He had been a lieutenant
in the Cape Corps or more accurately, the Corps of Bastard Hottentots. He was a
slave orphan. A bastard Hottentot. The son of a Dutch soldier and a Khoi
prostitute who died or was killed. Some say that when he eventually met his
father, he ripped his heart out and fed it to his dog.
When the Cape Corps was disbanded in 1782 Jakoeb was given the farm
Verdwaaldraai as payment for his services to the Dutch but he knew that he
would never be a farmer so instead, with some of his comrades from the corps he
set about becoming the biggest livestock thief to ever lay siege to the
Overberg.
It is told that Jakoeb and his gang were conducting some business close
to the coast when news reached them that the Dutch ship, the Nicobar was
wrecked nearby off Quoin Point.
They immediately went to supervise the salvage operations and when they
returned home just more than a month later Jakoeb was several wagon loads of
valuables richer and he never looked back.
Eventually he was known with no small measure of bitterness as de Kapitalistische after
buying up every available piece of land and then systematicaally reducing
neighbouring farms to unproductive wastes before annexing it with ingenious
negotiations and devious contracts that in effect amounted to large scale
larceny.
But Jakoeb was good looking and charming, a man of
the world. An officer and he struck fear into the hearts of men who knew when
they saw it in his eyes that he would commit murder without a momet’s
hesitation and without much provocation.
And while the men connived impotently behind his
back, he ravaged their daughters and many of their wives, as well as the
servants and the slaves and even a few mothers.
Jakoeb became the first and wealthiest Overberg
land barron.
And Jakoeb’s blood mingles with my own even as the
tentacles grope and swirl through the wombs of countless mothers whose
daughters and sons sometimes became mistresses or slaves in the employ of their
father.
He was never married but he kept meticulous
records and when he was on his deathbed sometime in the early 1800’s, he called
each of his forty-seven children to his bedside to personally give to them
their allotment of his slaves, his livestock and the land.
And it was in his deathbed that he was killed by
one of his sons who discovered that his wife and the mother if his child was in
fact his sister.
The family tale is littered with stories of incest
and patricide.
**********
The Maanwater
Spring is situated in the greater Jakoebsdal district which was in turn
situated on the original farm Verdwaaldraai and so the twenty-two hectares that
remained of the family inheritance when my grandmother died, was in fact twice
bequeathed. Thrice in fact.
That’s what the
story says.
Thursday, 2 August 2012
Sir Gump and His Walker...
...All dogs, whether young or old, enjoy lounging in the sun in the morning... "Nieu-Bethesda Field Guide"
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