its way inside—I was sweating like a trapeze artist who, during a daring new act in the ridge of the tent, is clinging only to precisely that one mouthpiece, with precisely those teeth—‘but apart from that I can’t see much that is spectacular. Losing a few kilos wouldn’t hurt you. I can prescribe you some stomach acid inhibitors, but more exercise and less wine will get you just as far.’ At my insistence he took a few more samples from my stomach wall, to check whether I wasn’t cultivating a handful of open sores, and actually mainly to confirm what I already strongly suspected. I had at least terminal stomach cancer.
The head of the endless adder turned out to contain, besides a lamp and a camera, a pair of forceps, three steel teeth that moved toward each other to grab and extract a piece of my stomach. I became aware of it. Something was gnawing at me, from inside. A death-watch beetle, a rotting space creature, a caterpillar leaving the cocoon, a just desert—something was nibbling at my guts. I had not felt the intestine itself, you have to drink an anaesthetic beforehand, probably distilled from the poison of a bird spider, which anaesthetizes your oesophagus so heavily that afterwards you mustn’t eat or drink anything for an hour, or else everything will literally go down the wrong way, toward the lungs. Before you know it you’ll be drowning in a cup of tea.
I didn’t drown, I was simply hollowed out. I was still lying on my side, I was still biting desperately on the mouthpiece, as if I was hanging on to life itself, spinning through in the roof beams of our universe, sweating like a cheese round in the sunlight, with fanatically closed eyes—and yet I saw before me how, deep inside me, an endless mechanical snake, a monster with a Cyclops’ eye and a miner’s lamp on its head, started pinching bits of my stomach. I felt its clawing trident snipping around, at random, and I recognized it, dammit, I recognized the insatiable trident.
I recognized it twice.
We once had at home—how old was I? Five? Seven?—a pair of sugar tongs that I could not stop playing with. A silver-plated hollow stick with a button on one side, and when you pressed it on the other side exactly the same kind of primitive claw opened as the one now gnawing at my stomach, eating what was supposed to digest my food. Picking, nipping—a humming bird fighting a closed, carnivorous plant.
With the silver-plated tongs you picked up a cube and deposited it in a cup. I did it so often not because of the sugar but because of the playful delight of those perfect tongs, which were taken away from me every time, on her sighing orders of course, and I got a flea in my ear into the bargain because I wouldn’t listen at once.
I couldn’t locate those tongs after she found her way once and for all and inexorably into the closed institution where she would spend her last few months, among other human wrecks—carcasses with limited movement capable only of drooling and relieving themselves, most of them lopsided and tied, like her, to their beds, their armchairs, their wheelchairs. After that unwanted separation my father moved by himself into an old people’s home four streets away from her. He left the flat where they had lived for almost two decades that was situated above the butcher’s shop where they had done business for nearly forty years. Virtually none of their household effects could go with him.
For a week I was condemned to the role of arbitrator. I, the liquidator, handing down verdicts on every knick-knack and every heirloom, both equally precious. The archive and register of two intimately interwoven lives, also the backdrop of my childhood, with all the props—it degenerated in my hands into a collection of anonymous things, whether or not usable elsewhere, sometimes with a market value, sometimes distributable, usually to be thrown away. Vanished, wiped out, passé. My father left the decision entirely up to his children, just as in the past he would have left it up to my mother. Apart from photos of her, and his television set, there was nothing that he indicated was necessary for the rest of his existence.
However hard I looked for them, there was no sign of the three-fingered sugar tongs.
As a ten-year-old ringleader I used another claw foot, but larger and yellowy-white, and scaly, and with long horn-like nails, to terrify a girl who lived nearby and was two years older than me. A severed chicken’s claw from our butcher’s shop. I held it in my bunched-up sleeve and advanced on her with a contorted face, grunting, talking gibberish, drooling, swiping with my new limb at her freckle-covered arms and legs.
You could even fish out a tendon with a needle from where the leg had been hacked off and like a puppeteer pull the tendon taut with two fingers so that the chicken’s claw opened and closed again. My little neighbour was already upset, but when she saw my new hand actually moving she started screaming.
A few years later she showed me, in our lock-up garage halfway down the street, where all the car owners in our neighbourhood rented garages, in a maze of gravel paths with rows and rows of long concrete compartments, all the same size, all with pink corrugated sheets and each with a rickety double gate—the complex itself was the limbo area outside a wood yard, which smelt eternally of diesel and pine woods—in the dim light of our lock-up garage, then, my easily frightened neighbour showed me, unsolicited, her pristine tits. Two swollen nipples actually, already deeply dark, that was true, silky and yet recalcitrantly stiff, the flesh around the areola lightly accentuated and as white as the cap of a freshly picked mushroom, but with freckles. ‘They’re going to be very big,’ she whispered, ‘later, like my sister’s. Have a feel.’
And I felt, honoured and bewildered. I plucked and picked, not with the aid of a dead chicken’s foot, but with three cautious fingers of my own, a mouth of fingertips, which sucked at her soft deep dark expectancy, first left then right, and the more I plucked and sucked, the more resistant her soft mushroom caps with their freckles became, the more she sighed in my face, closer and closer.
A smell I didn’t yet know, something halfway between milk and almonds, dispelled the diesel and pine woods around me.
-
I LEFT THE stomach specialist determined not to wait for the result of the ulcer and cancer examination before finally getting down to writing. Anyway, the result would not reveal anything other than the palpable suggestion of the specialist: affectation.
The report proved him right. A month later, in which I had still not composed a note of what was to be a more exalted Song of Songs, a better Bible, a more beautiful Scripture, everything and nothing at once. In the hope that it would not, falling between two stools, simply become neither. For now it was even less than that. Eccentric escapism, respectable idling. For a year a mother was proved right with her prediction of the writer as a wastrel.
Twelve months, four seasons passed in a flash.
Because I also spent the previous European winter in the windy Cape high summer, in the Victorian house where I am typing this, on this laptop. This paragraph, this sentence, these three words, and these and these, at this very moment. I am writing them now instead of last year. Yet I was already here then. In my cramped study with its childlike office furniture and its wooden terrace at the foot of the almighty Table Mountain, in a neighbourhood called Oranjezicht, during my annual escape to this temporary paradise of isolation and sun and carefree writing and reading, without losing myself in the distractions that I can so seldom resist in my home country. Of course I am also a kind of actor, a failed one, a hopeless ham without inhibitions. Give me a stage and an audience, give me a microphone and a book of mine or one of my literary heroes, and I will read it aloud until the break of day. There is an element of, besides coquetry and greed, abject despair, I don’t myself know about what, but I go on, and on. Another splendid battle won for the spoken word. Another illustrious day lost without having written.
I did do some writing here last year, albeit working on that play in alexandrines. Counting on my fingers for days like an ambitious toddler, always the same formula. The alexandrine consists of six iambic feet; explained for convenience that gives twelve syllables, linked two by two, alternately
