Haaji and I, as new companions, could consider ourselves privileged as we went from house to house carrying cleaning equipment. We got to see good furniture, art, sculpture. Only the richest people could afford Warhol’s, usually the Mao. There were eerie deserted swimming pools and kitchens with no food in them bigger than apartments. We washed down sheer walls of glass overlooking the city.
At night, when I was sometimes the watchman in these houses and all was quiet as a monastery, the beautiful quiet of a city, we sat with our feet up, compelled by the ever-changing night landscapes. In our way we could share the privilege. We could walk on the most luxurious carpets and eat on tables made of Carrara marble. We slipped into their swimming pools and floated on our backs in our pants. What a wrongdoing it was. How we violated them, living their dream. And how childish it made us.
In this panopticon, permanently under the unfeeling eye of some nebulous authority, Haaji and I did a dangerous thing. Our eyes lit up when we saw one another. Something was starting between us; luckily it wasn’t what you think.
We began to play games. We knew where the cameras were. No one looked; Bain and his men rarely glanced at them. There was nothing to see. I’m not sure if any of us stole anything. We were searched all the time.
In my city I ran a coffee shop.
Haaji and I liked to pretend we actually owned these houses of the rich where we served. During these games we could be wealthy and royal. We strode about with authority, shouting orders. We discussed how difficult the builders were and how severely our lawyers would treat them. We wondered about lunches and lovers. I asked her which suit she preferred me in, and which tie and shoes looked best. We speculated about whether we would go to Venice or Nice for our holidays, if we would have sea bass or veal, champagne or vodka.
It was an empty exhilaration. One-Arm came to me with a warning. We had to be more secretive. The others had noticed. There were several black men working with us, mostly doing building work and deliveries. They were dirty, licentious, argumentative, threatening. Their language was incomprehensible and none of them had read a book. Forgive me, please. I hear you. But to each his own foreigner. Can’t I hate arbitrarily too? Is that another privilege I have to forsake? Sometimes hating tastes better than eating.
One-Arm said the blacks were gossiping about us and they liked the girl. Why would these others want us to be happy when they were not?
In our closet, bent under the sloping walls, among vacuum cleaners, brooms, mops and buckets, Haaji and I talked harder by candle-light. Democracy, love, dreams, gender, virtue, childhood, racism: we had it all out. The sensation of infinity and no one else in the world.
She tried to show me her body, a madness I couldn’t sanction. I looked away and told her about my coffee shop. To keep the café alive I’d describe the families, smiles and jokes of my friends there, now scattered who knows where.
In my city I ran a coffee shop. These beautiful words I recite each morning, like a prayer or affirmation.
I consider myself middle-class. With a hesitating, timid manner, I’ve always feared mirrors. I was never much to look at, with bald patches, a heavy, duck-like walk and shortness of breath. I have had two lovers, but I was always scared of women and never keen to copulate. What is a man before a woman who is having an orgasm? Is there anything more terrible? I don’t believe most people really like sex. Certainly, I found so-called sex physically intrusive, if not obscene. It seemed unbelievable that people could want to put their tongues in one another’s mouths. Now, I loved motorbikes. A Ducati is a thing of glorious beauty.
Socrates said, I can only think of Eros. I take this to mean: how does one relate passion to the rest of one’s life? Some people look for God, but I look for my own god of Eros in everything, and not only bodies. I see it in coffee and sentences. So I go along with St Augustine: I may have remembered it wrongly, but I like to think he said that having a penis was God’s hilarious punishment for being a man. Your dick goes up and down randomly, particularly when you’re young, and you can’t control it by willing. In church, I found, it went up with inconvenient regularity. Then, when you’re finally in bed with Cindy Crawford and she is murmuring your name, you know you’re not going to make it. Forget penis envy, I’m all for castration. That is why I hide my penis in books. I’d rather read about it than live it.
There, before, in my city, with my routine, I was dedicated to my work and liked to serve. It was an honour; I was proud of the little place. Making an Americano, offering pastries and newspapers, talking to my customers, seeing if I could charm them, this was my vocation.
My big motorcycle was outside, where I could appreciate it as I wiped the tables down and swept the floor. There were pictures and photographs on the walls – works I bought from local artists to encourage them. In the back of the café were books on architecture and comfortable chairs. My clientele were fine dissenters a blink away from prison: human-rights lawyers, academics, blasphemous writers, singers, anarchists, trouble-makers. I made sure to know them all by name. Sometimes I was invited to their houses. I imagined a band of aliens, bohemians and originals. Like Paris after 1946: Richard Wright and Gertrude Stein chatting.
Now, suppose some dictator takes the guns the West sold him and blows up your coffee shop. Not only that. The street, in fact the whole quarter, everything and everyone there, is, one day, obliterated in a surging fire. Suppose you look out at your neighbourhood one morning and everything you know is gone. Behind the smokestorm there is only filth, ruin, smoke. The people you saw every day – shopkeepers, neighbours, children – are dead, injured or running. And no one recalls why making this hell was necessary or what good cause it served.
Civilisation is a veneer. Underneath we are incontinent beasts. Who doesn’t know this? Yet it is not true. If we are savages, it is because we are commanded to be so. Because we are followers. Because we are obedient.
People: I am coming at you with my strange ways. Like many others, I scrabbled to the city of the Enlightenment. I slept on benches and beneath dustbins. I shat in your parks and wiped my arse on your leaves. It was dangerous. Strangers roughed me up. I took that as an affront, having never seen victimisation as a natural part of my condition.
My papers were stolen as I slept. Later, I got new papers. I was forced to go to Bain. You should have seen the approval on his face. He had predicted I would have to ask him humbly for help. He had done it a hundred times with others and made sure it cost me. His friends grabbed all the money I had brought with me, and Bain took his cut. Then I worked to pay him back. I would never pay him back. Like the others, in exchange for some safety, I was the devil’s for ever.
You must think me careless. I got new papers. Then I lost them. Really, it was then that I lost everything. This is how.
You walk along a quiet street in a normal city with your friend, One-Arm the poet. It is a part of the city which considers itself civilised. You see a woman in a café reading a book. Attractive people talk of Michelangelo. You see galleries and museums with people strolling and looking. There are new buildings with fabulous curves. You want to go in. You tell One-Arm that even Ulysses went home.
You approach a bar. For you, the ordinary citizen, it is nothing but a bar. But to me, for whom the normal was a long time ago, it is a danger point. From where I see things, you might call ‘the normal’ a façade or window-dressing, just as the dying might think the healthy inhabit a stupid illusion.
Outside the bar a man is drinking. He looks up and his eyes take you in. Here, in the heart of paradise, an explosion takes place inside him. Your being outrages him. At the same time he is filled with a peculiar pleasure: this is satisfaction anticipated. I should say: madness is the mainstream now. Haaji calls it the new normal. For thirty years I was a free man. Now I am a dangerous dog in someone’s path.
You grab your poeticising friend by his one good arm and you shuffle away. You have recognised definite danger.
As you feared, the
man comes, with others. They are always nearby and they are quick. These are productive times for vigilantes, the protectors of decency.
Nihilism doesn’t dress well. You wouldn’t want to discuss poetry with them. They have shaved heads. They wear leather and have tattoos. They have clubs and knuckle-dusters.
One look at us is all it takes for them to know civilisation is at stake. We raggeds with our awful belongings and need are a threat to their security and stability.
I have no doubt: it is dangerous for us here in Europe. I am paranoid, I know that. I hear interrogations and arguments in my head. I expect people to have a low opinion of me. We are already humiliated. Not that there isn’t much for us to be paranoid about. If we are on the street, just walking, they stare and often they turn their backs. They spit. They want us to know we are peculiar to them, unwanted. They talk about choice and individuality, but it amazes me how conformist and homogenous everyone is.
We, the reduced, the primitives, savages and filthy drifting blacks, are terrorised. We, I say. We are not even a we. We are still a ‘them’. The cause of all their problems. Everything bad stems from us. I needn’t enumerate their accusations. I don’t have much time.
We flee, One-Arm and I. We run as we’ve never run before. A blur of limbs, a streak of terror.
They catch us. They beat me so badly I can’t open my eyes. I can barely hear. The police are indifferent, of course. The fewer of us, the better.
One-Arm was murdered that night, but people came before I died. Haaji persuaded Bain to let me stay while she wrapped me in her pale love. What use was a wrecked man to him? She convinced him I would soon be back on my feet. I wonder how she really persuaded him, particularly after he said he would have her skin made into a pretty handbag for one of his employers. It wasn’t entirely a joke. He was selling the women in other ways. Our bodies have their uses.
There were shouts. Haaji had been out looking for me, and at last she found me. My mouth open on the bed, the howling mouth, crying. Pessoa describes somewhere falling through space into a void, a vortex, a maelstrom. You see, he knows me.
Haaji must have been in love, or at least devoted at that time, because her kindness was unlimited. This will surprise you, but she had been uplifted by my optimism. These are dark days in a dark world for us dark people. And perhaps I’m some kind of holy fool. Yet I never stopped telling her that I believe in the possibility of collaboration and exchange. People can, I maintain even now, do creative things together. I’d seen it in the coffee shop, where good things were said. If there were only destruction, there’d be no life at all on this planet. Hear me: let us try some equality. Equality is such an interesting idea. Why is it the most difficult thing?
After the attack nothing was right with me. Bain had his group, and he had seen that Haaji was susceptible. There are many men keen to run cults, and many devotees who will join them if they believe they will be eventually rewarded. The cult generally, whether religious or political, patriarchal or matriarchal, has not stopped being the modern form of belonging.
There were those who saw him as a liberator. He was Schindler, protecting and hiding those of us threatened with extinction. Unfortunately he had his theories and preferred belching words to listening. I can see him pacing up and down like an imam or preacher, on a priceless wooden floor, while we slumbered at his feet.
Humour is usually humiliating and tyrants don’t encourage such instant deconstructions. My mumbled quip about the price of disenfranchisement being the necessity of enduring hurricanes of hot air didn’t boost my attractiveness. Unluckily for me, I’m an enthusiast and sceptic rather than a follower. In a properly efficient tyranny – the only ones worth considering – someone like me doesn’t last five minutes.
Despite my desire to remain cheerful, if not cynical, the world was making me bitter. If you think literature is weird, try reality. I had always been an admirer of Beckett. As I giggled through his prose in my coffee shop and wrote his quotes on postcards to send to friends, it never occurred to me that I’d be buried up to my neck in manure. Unfortunately, the fictionists I admire give no instructions and require no sacrifices. That is their virtue and failure.
With nothing to lose, I had a good idea.
Since the attack, toothache had taken me over. My teeth were giving me unforgettable trouble. How could someone like me afford a doctor or dentist? The pain was too much and I wanted to strike out at the world. Why can’t people be nice? That’s a good question, isn’t it? Kindness has no politics and there wasn’t enough of it in the world. I would introduce some. So I became keen to murder Bain.
He was rarely alone, but came out into the garden to smoke one night. He had his back to me: the part of him I most preferred. I was sitting behind a tree at twilight, reading by the light of a small torch. I noticed a branch nearby and it occurred to me to relieve Bain of his brains. I thought: aren’t I really a murderer dreaming I’m a respectable man? By sparing the world an evil force I would receive both satisfaction and moral fulfilment. If you ask me, it is the sadists and perverts who cause trouble, being overly concerned with what others are doing. Didn’t I want to be good?
He turned away.
I thought: I can still catch up with him, and strike him. There is time. Billions have murdered. Many liked it. Didn’t they seem to live on, unworried, continuing to enjoy TV and discounts at their local supermarkets? But I was weak. We are all Hamlet’s brothers, and killing wasn’t a breeze for me. Why should it be? I let the moment go. As he disappeared along a path, I picked up the branch and knocked it in regret against my knee. The log disintegrated.
* * *
I wasn’t able to do the work Bain demanded. I was limping and weak. I had no rights and no money. There were rumours he was selling the organs of recalcitrant workers. Not that he would get much for mine. I asked Haaji to leave with me.
It was touch and go. I had to tell her that the protection she sought was an illusion. There’s never any shortage of tyrants and their self-interest was catastrophic. She had found the wrong master in Bain, and I couldn’t be a master at all.
We escaped at night, taking back ways and hiding in forests, washing in petrol stations.
We were settled in a small town which is worse for us than the city. The residents are restive and nervous. There have been bombings and attacks throughout the country by maniacs, religionists and politicos. There was a shooting not far from here. The politicians hurry down like housewives at a sale. After each tragedy, the people hold vigils and light their candles. They link hands, weep and swear they will never forget. But they do forget when there is another and then another incident.
They insist that they are being forced to put their values of decency and tolerance aside. They must protect themselves against outsiders. We are not the saints they thought our suffering obliged us to be. We have let them down with our banal humanity.
And here we are now. Haaji got a job in the hotel and smuggled me into her room. We didn’t talk. I had no mystery left. I’d taught her everything I knew and it wasn’t enough. After a time I saw what was wrong: I didn’t know what to ask of her.
I lay there for days. The room became a kind of tomb. It was a good opportunity for me to think about death. Socrates, after all, wanted to die in his own way, when he was ready. It was not suicide; death was not a ‘musthave’ for him. Nor was it despair. Rather, it is a question of whether there is any profit in living. People want to live too long now. Considering my own death certainly changed a lot in me. I lost a lot of fear.
Late at night, if the coast was clear, she and I would sometimes sneak out together, through the back door. She walked ahead, wearing lipstick. I had to go behind, tattered, making sure not to lose sight of her. Our distance was essential. A woman like her, with a man of my colour, we could never hold hands. They already believe we copulate more than anyone deserves.
At the harbour we’d sit apart, on different benches, joined by our eyes, signalling to one
another. I have come to like, if not admire, ordinariness. Along with an empty head, it is the loveliest privilege.
One night, when the weather was wild and the sea a frothy cauldron, I caught sight of many other boats on the horizon, bringing hundreds more of us aliens with upraised hands, shouting ‘Freedom, freedom!’ Meanwhile there was a hubbub in the harbour. Some wanted to watch them drown. For others, human values had to persist. While they fought among themselves some of the boats went down.
* * *
Now I hear a noise. It is her footsteps. She comes in. She barely looks at me. She is different.
She gathers her things and walks out into the street. She is ahead of me as always. She knows how weak I am, but she is walking fast, too fast for me to follow. She knows where she wants to go. It is raining. I hurry along. But it is hopeless.
I call after her. I want a last glimpse and a memory. ‘Here, take them. You will need them.’
She stops.
One day everything will be borne away in a great fire, all the evil and all the good, and the political organisations and the culture and the churches. In the meantime there is this.
I hand her my bag of books. They are inside me now. Let it go.
My Beautiful Box Set Binge
If you really want to know about it, I will own up. I’ve barely left the house in the last eighteen months because I’ve been watching what for me seems like a lot of TV, around five hours a night. And I can’t say that a moment of it – apart from, say, the second season of Mr Robot – feels like wasted time. There are scenes in Mad Men and Transparent which are as accomplished, profound and truthful as anything I’ve seen in the cinema. And the episode in Breaking Bad where the former chemistry teacher Walter White buries the money he has accumulated by selling crystal meth – transforming the spoils into waste or shit – is one of the most illuminating in all art.
Apart from the news, sport and documentaries about the Beatles, I hadn’t watched much television since the 1980s. Nor, as a young man, did I consider writing for TV. It was too compromised; and, with a few exceptions, the overall standard was low. As for the movies, many of the film directors writers worked with wanted to be artists rather than story-tellers, a vanity which ruined many directors and displaced writers. The screenwriter’s best hope was to resemble a back-seat driver, yelling mostly unheard ideas from behind. It looked like the truest test of the good dramatic writer was his or her ability to write plays.
What Happened? Page 11