As far as content went I mixed Euripides with George W. Bush, Troy with Iraq, Manhattan with Troy, towers with towers, war with war. As far as form went I piled plosives on sibilants, internal rhymes on alliterations, as if I were a hip-hopper of ancient protest songs preparing for a poetry slam in the townships of Mitchell’s Plain, on the other side of Devil’s Peak, the brother of Table Mountain. Ta-tám, ta-tám, ta-tám! Turning my beloved native language, which is so much suppler and generous and colourful than most of its users are prepared to believe, into a beatbox.
I had six women—two elderly queens and four princesses—take the measure of one man, the Greek commander-in-chief Agamemnon. Seven lives, thousands of years ago, thousands of kilometres away, different continents, different centuries. While I should have been taking the measure of one woman in my own life. I fell short again, and I realized it. I began counting and running away even more angrily.
‘O Muse, sing now for me. / Sing of my frenzied state.’
‘At least be brave enough / to speak with your own blood.’
‘Each second that ticks by, / once more she’s here with me.’
My summer’s writing was not as carefree as all that. Many a morning’s sleep was wrecked by the whirring blades of helicopters flying low overhead. Everything in this country is massive and overwhelming, from poverty to economic growth, from language interaction to forest fires. In the case of the latter the helicopters sweep slowly and ear-piercingly over, like extras in a Vietnam film, to the reservoir round the corner, the size of two football pitches and as old as the district itself—the first foundations were laid by the Dutch and their slaves, in the service of the United East India Company.
Under each helicopter hangs a bright orange bag that can be closed at the bottom. However, it continues to leak and from the top too water sloshes out because of the movement and as a result of the whirring is immediately vaporized as if for a local shower of rain. On the return journey the bag, hanging open, still leaks profusely, so that at each pass my terrace gets soaking-wet, the corrugated sheets of the roof rattle like a washboard used for percussion, so that finally, distracted even here and tempted to enjoy myself, I just sit on that wooden terrace, with towel and binoculars at the ready, following the ballet of the fire-fighting helicopters.
Only when you can no longer hear them, they are so far away by now, as small as flies against the monstrously high and steep wall of Holy Table Mountain—only then do they open their water bags, simultaneously and making a swerving manoeuvre, so that the water hits the seat of the blaze in an elegant fan shape, causing furious clouds of steam to rise from the side of the mountain, a filthy reddish billowing column, temporarily blotting out the sunlight, an orange ball behind a curtain of churning smoke.
Then the pounding mounts again and the iron dragonflies, quickly swelling in your binoculars, make straight for the reservoir, straight for you, with their dripping bags, their exotic rowanberry, bitten to pieces, emptied. Their rhythmical whirring mixes with the maniacal counting in your head. Wap-wáp, wap-wáp, wap-wáp.
Give me adversity. Cadence and poetry.
Misfortune has a right. To beat and poetry.
During one particular night, hours after the helicopter ballet had been discontinued because nocturnal sorties are too dangerous, even though the cargo consists of water and not of bombs—we are talking about the years of the Great Cape Fires, the year of my Elegant Flight Forward, also the years of the Wild Water Rumours: for the first time in living memory the bed of the reservoir was threatening to become exposed, baking in the fierce African sun, drying up in the hellish Cape Town wind, the feared ‘South-Easterly’, whipped up by the tropical summer heat and the two oceans that enclosed the city, one ice-cold, one lukewarm, the Atlantic and the Indian, making its good name of Cape Doctor a joke. It tortured the corrugated sheets and the swaying palms and made electric cables snap like the anchor lines of a tanker adrift, it screeched louder than the mistral and the sirocco combined and, no longer hindered by fire-fighting helicopters, it fanned fires on four mountains at once, Devil’s Peak, Table Mountain, Lion’s Head and Signal Hill, which together form a basin in which the old, vulnerable part of the city lies.
I was still sitting on my terrace, no longer with my feet on the balustrade, but staring around me in astonishment and fear in the red-glowing darkness, surrounded by more and more glowing scars, tangible heat, the angry, dense smell of scorching, the stink of sulphur, the demonic laughter of the South-Easterly, the snapping of distant blazing tree trunks. I was more and more hemmed in, like everyone else, like the city itself. Some way further up our street, twelve blocks up, there were fire engines with revolving lights. The inroads of the fire were being combatted there with traditional hoses and the struggle was gradually being lost. Still further up two houses were already ablaze; a little further down the residents were already carrying their furniture into the street and in the distance, across the whole side of Table Mountain, from top to bottom, ran an awful crack, hundreds of metres long, filled with blazing charcoal as if with lava. I couldn’t stop looking; the obscenity of fire is inexorable, terrifying, fascinating.
It roared and hammered at the same time in my brain: didn’t write, didn’t write. Even here.
‘The world is vast, it’s true. / But everywhere the same.’
-
ON MY RETURN to the Worn-Out Continent, I finished the play in alexandrines, attended rehearsals and the first night, so, taking the most recent escape route to its end and completing it, I began after all on my song cursing her bitter lot. Indeed I got going industriously and built up a head of steam.
Then my father died.
And I faltered again.
Not because of death in itself. It was sad but also, I don’t hesitate to say it, beautiful. After the horrors that had befallen her, during which he was condemned to be a helpless spectator—the star witness of her slow terror of being excluded for ever from a life that had formed the foundation of his—after that ordeal he was allowed to pass away as he would have wished. Not long after her, for a start.
And quickly. Two weeks or so, and he was gone.
And not in the aseptic, deadly hospital where he was supposed to die, but in his familiar room in the old people’s home into which he had moved.
And without pain, high on morphine, sinking into ever-longer periods of sleep and finally coma, surrounded by his closest family, who took turns watching at his deathbed, staying awake as was proper: with a thermos flask of coffee on the table and a dish of filled rolls, as well as a bottle of Wortegem lemon gin, his favourite aperitif and favourite nightcap, and anyway a welcome reviver during the strange timeless nights, in which someone lies dying who saw you being born, and is now on the point of closing his eyes for ever. His television was on the whole time, from morning till night, as always, babbling more endlessly than an Old Testament woodland stream. The only concession was that the sound could be turned off at the last. In this way my father faded away, while football matches were silently lost and won, world crises were averted and revived in utter silence. They cast their flickering shadows pityingly on him.
And I was about to forget the most important thing: he was surrounded by all the photos of her that he had brought from their flat. One of them is that photo on the front cover. Just look at it. It won’t be the last time. When I found it during the liquidation at which I acted as arbitrator, it was hidden among a mass of other photos—stuffed together in an old biscuit tin, so that the plain lid was pushed outward by them—and covered in scratches; it was not much bigger than a passport photo. Later, enlarged and framed, it took pride of place, often with a burning tea light in front
