The Alphabet of Birds

by SJ Naudé

  Her hair hangs in slightly oily strings around her ears. She continues in monotone.

  ‘You know, sometimes I consider simply surrendering myself to him, just letting him do what he wants. Getting it all over with.’

  Zelda looks as if she cannot carry her own head, as if she is on the verge of falling forward and splitting open her chin on the table. Here she is sitting, in the artificial air, wasting away, Ondien thinks, the sister who once was my friend, with no one but this berserk child for company. Nothing here indicates her presence. Not a picture or a photo that reveals a thing. Her husband or the child will come and kill her in her bed and, once someone has thrown out her clothes and vacuumed a few loose hairs from the carpets, no one will know who lived here.

  ‘This is not a house,’ Ondien says. She looks around them. ‘It is a sketch, an estate agent’s hasty mock-up of how someone might live in such a place.’

  Cornelius

  Cornelius arrives from the airport, just back from Luxembourg. He looks smaller and tougher than she remembers him. His suit, once no doubt meticulously cut to size on Savile Row or in Hong Kong, is now somewhat loose-fitting. There is a new wiriness about him, his muscles small and dense from working out in the hotel gymnasiums of the world.

  Her plane had landed earlier in the morning. The concierge let her into Cornelius’s flat in Kensington, where the Romanian cleaning woman showed her to her room. She took the key to the private gardens in the Georgian square and sat there on an iron bench, in the pale light and silence. Except for a squirrel and a woman pushing a designer pram in the opposite corner, nothing moved.

  Cornelius looks bashful. Perhaps the unexpected intimacy of their phone conversation a week or two earlier, perhaps the fact that they hardly recognise each other.

  ‘You look different,’ he says, and looks her fleetingly in the eye.

  He does not elaborate, but she can imagine: bony, colourless, rhythmless. No longer the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed white girl obsessed with things ethnic.

  ‘I can cook us a pasta,’ she says.

  He smiles. ‘You will find nada in my cupboards, I can hardly find my own kitchen.’

  They dine in Mayfair, in a grandiose eighteenth-century townhouse with art installations and a DJ spinning lounge music with electronic improvisations. Cornelius announces himself at the door in his traceless London accent. They order immediately.

  Cornelius works his way through the delicate portions of an eight-course tasting menu: cool complex soups in fine glasses, shards of monkfish on vegetable flowers, medallions of lamb, lightly scorched scallops, cylindrical stacks of crab meat, dabs, mousses and foams.

  They talk about Zelda. Ondien shakes her head, looks at the video installation projected on one of the restaurant walls: the image of a man going up in flames. There is an expression of bliss on the man’s face.

  ‘There is almost nothing left of our sister,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, I phoned her recently. Difficult to talk to her, she’s lost much of her Afrikaans.’

  Conversation, she thinks: at the best of times a joint game by the speaker and listener against the forces of confusion. He shifts the conversation away. They talk about Johannesburg, the recession, the economic cataclysm in Britain. On the wall next to them, the man keeps burning. Gradually the man disappears; only flames remain.

  Ondien looks at the smooth Londoner in front of her, an ideal specimen of the borderless world’s financial elite. She has difficulty matching this image with that of the semi-incoherent man to whom she spoke on the phone a week or two ago. But here he is. With his aura of a life beyond national identity. It is all about art, she thinks, in his world. The art, obviously, of financial alchemy. The art of conversations with neutral, smooth surfaces and deeply embedded codes. The art of consumption in the luxury markets of the most sophisticated metropoles. Contemporary art as investment market, edible art in the most sought-after restaurants, the art of charm and seduction. The art of power.

  Another video installation is playing silently on the wall behind Cornelius. Snow falls from the ceiling and morphs into leaves. The leaves gather and change into a young woman on a penny farthing. The penny farthing changes into a spinning wheel, the young woman becomes as old as time in front of one’s eyes and makes the wheel spin. A strong wind blows backwards and the woman gradually dissolves in the wind. She changes into leaves again, which change back into snow and disappear towards the ceiling. A few notes rise up inside Ondien, like in her student composer days. A short phrase. Strings, a texture. She holds her breath, waits. Cornelius quickly looks around them. To gauge the effect on the other guests of her presumably odd facial expression, she imagines. But she does not care. She closes her eyes, tries to develop the motif, or at least hold on to it, but it disappears.

  ‘What is wrong?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she says.

  Paper-thin sheets of caramelised sugar are balancing on Cornelius’s basil ice cream. He orders coffee. His skin looks cool and dry. There is a fleetingness about him, a swift alertness. She cannot place it; it is new. The world is still his oyster, but keeping his balance, preventing his feet from slipping from under him, apparently now requires more artful magic than ever before.

  She realises a blunt approach is required to free him up, to hear what is really going on. The manner of Free State farm kids shooting the breeze on a riverbank, getting something off their chest.

  She sits back. ‘So, what’s biting you, Cornelius?’

  He looks straight at her and she takes fright. A shocking, fiery vulnerability. He signals for the waiter. They will take their coffee in another room.

  The waiter, white linen napkin over the forearm, leads them up the stairs to the top floor. The Library, it says in flickering neon on the wooden panelling. They sink into deep purple couches in a room filled with psychedelic props from the 1970s juxtaposed with elements from the original library. Against the walls on two sides are rows of lava lamps; a third wall carries shelves with eighteenth-century manuscripts.

  ‘They’re going to let me go,’ he says.

  She nods slowly. ‘I’m not too surprised,’ she says. ‘The economic realities …’

  ‘That’s not it …’

  ‘An opportunity, perhaps, Cornelius, to break out? Perhaps you can now escape the anaemia, do something quite new … ?’

  ‘What else can I do, Ondien? I spend my days in conference rooms, between glass sheets. Calculations, negotiations. Finely calibrated conversations, the painful formulation of sentences that shift money around invisibly. The more abstract, the better. That is my life. Just that. And don’t think I can retire. The recession has taken its toll. My investments are buggered.’

  There are chocolates in a little wooden bowl between them, handmade with cocoa from Borneo and flavoured with truffle oil, lavender and saffron. Cornelius stirs cream into his coffee. He puts down the teaspoon and his mood changes abruptly. He softens; something floating but intense comes over him.

  ‘It’s a liberation of sorts, I guess, or ought to be. I should tell you. Something has changed over the last few months. First it started reporting itself quietly, like a child tugging at the sleeve. You know in my heyday I had more girlfriends – affairs, shags, whatever – than I could count. Pretty girls, Chelsea or Kensington girls from private schools, an asset on a banker’s arm. A kind of transaction in itself, of course; they take their pound of flesh, such girls. But then, for a long time, I had zero need for relationships. Dedicated myself with monomania – or, perhaps,’ he smiles, ‘monogamy – to my job. But something kept gnawing at the edges. Something was building up. One evening in a hotel, I can’t recall, Los Angeles or Tokyo or somewhere, after a day of aggressive, gruelling meetings, I started reading a little book. Someone left it behind in the room. Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. A floodwave hit me from those pages. Something like a swarm of bats. All the things that I had never allowed to break through. Desire, yearning, loss. I wa
s facing myself. De Quincey wrote about his “constitutional determination to reverie”. In a flash it occurred to me, that’s what I’m staring in the eye: the neglect of my own urge to swoon, the refusal to acknowledge how deeply dream-fucked I am. I suddenly experienced the most intense regret – no, grief – over the years of self-denial, the methods of my obsessive escape from rural South Africa. The years of dreamlessness.’

  He takes a sip of coffee. She too. It is scalding, as if being heated by something in the air.

  Cornelius goes on. How would a project look, he considered, whereby repressed dreams are brought to light? In what kind of workshop could one have the Self welded to the Unknown? It had to be a fearless project, he decided, a hard, impersonal scheme. The polar opposite of the psychotherapist’s couch, that subdued little laboratory where the core structures of bourgeois life get tattooed into the deeper tissue.

  Communion with Infinity – that was his urge, that was the ultimate purpose. He had to strip off his skin, layer by layer, had to feel the feculent air on raw flesh. He wanted to see the city like an insect, from below. He would become a disciple of the terrae incognitae, he would learn to carve out the subterranean city map, the networks of sewage tunnels and cellars, on the Soul. And, if he were to discover that the Soul does not exist, then on the Intestines.

  He felt his way in the dark. The methods were banal, the means were those available to the novice. One realised there were levels here, he explains; one had to be patient.

  Level I were the nightclubs, the hollows that lie like catacombs under Victorian rail aqueducts in South London. Halls like caverns where men were dancing shirtless, slick with sweat that would rise in steamy vapours and hover in front of their faces.

  ‘You smell it, those places, the fragrance of mud or fungus or roots. The smell of fresh blood. The first hint of Escape. Somewhere behind it, beyond consciousness, you suspect the strong fresh aroma of Freedom. And beyond that, further yet, Oblivion.’

  He shows level II with both index fingers.

  There, in shadows behind a torch, at a tunnel entrance, the guide was beckoning: Infinity’s pharmacist. You held out your hand and allowed yourself to be led. The route, with its multiple stations, had been prepared for you. The pharmacist-guide pointed out the entrance. But the trip was yours alone. Cornelius tried out the mind-altering things. All right, it was no longer De Quincey’s 1820s, and laudanum wasn’t available in every corner shop. But alternatives were plentiful. All the usual, those that stimulated the dopamine levels especially – the short, powerful kicks. Whatever he could lay his hands on he took. MDMA, GHB, crystal meth, ketamine, the lot. The music was tight as a drum and hard as rock. Boundaries, whether cellar walls or human skin, became permeable.

  With his finger, he writes a III on the table.

  Sex was now exclusively with men, as frequently as possible and with as many as possible at a time. Palms against cold walls, electricity shocking through the spine …

  Ondien lifts an eyebrow, her voice an octave higher than earlier. ‘All those women who answered your phone in your days of tight collars … Who’d have guessed?’

  He places a chocolate on his tongue, continues.

  He understood the role of chance, and risk, where it concerned capital. But he wanted to know about randomness: random meetings, random losses. He found himself in flats, rooms and places that astounded him, emerged from waking dreams not knowing where he was or how he had ended up there. Whether it was high above or deep below the city, he could not tell. A factory, a power station. Burnt-out gasworks. Places smelling of rust, of vinyl, where concrete rubs you raw, where dripping water causes limestone stalactites to hang, where the sweat and saliva of a little crowd would drip onto you.

  ‘I took stuff that would wake up every fibre, that would keep you awake for twenty hours on the torture rack. After the tenth hour you gaze at the men who are waiting with hard hands. You decide you can flay yourself with your own muscle power, can tear open the carcass and give it up for slaughter …’

  Cornelius’s eyes glow coldly.

  He never knew, he goes on, from which direction – and whether – the morning light would come. It took a long time before it appeared, the light, from behind all the bodies, from behind the weight of boots.

  ‘Every morning I saw the morning sun rise over a new city.’

  For a while he remains silent.

  ‘Level IV?’ she wants to know.

  His eyes change. One night he locked himself out of his flat; the concierge was already off duty. The rest of the night he walked in the rain, arms stretched out, face upwards, probably thirty or forty kilometres. Round and round, in wide circles. A spiral outwards and a spiral inwards. The entire time a certain paragraph from De Quincey was circling around in his head.

  ‘Wait, I’ll find it for you.’ He fiddles with his iPhone, finds the passage on the internet. He reads with a clear voice:

  ‘The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, et cetera, were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for seventy or 100 years in one night – nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience …’

  He puts the phone in his pocket and looks at her, the glow of the lava lamps against his cheek.

  ‘While I was walking through the city, I looked up, and the rain was metallic, like quicksilver on the skin. And then it filled my nose, unmistakeably: the smell of Freedom. I had graduated to the next level. I was almost there, just short of Oblivion.’

  He sits further forward.

  ‘There were moments when I hesitated, in the dark amongst bodies, in the scorching light of a stranger’s flat. When I thought: this is the furthest I can ever venture from our childhood places on that farm.’

  He looks up. He is speaking with a boy’s voice now.

  ‘Yes, it was the greatest distance I could put between me and that Free State garden with its nasturtiums. But, wherever I found myself, with all those things in the blood creating images inside the skull, I only needed to think of that garden to cause nasturtiums to grow all around me: over the walls, ceilings and floors of the strange room I was in. Over rust marks and water stains. Over graffiti and soot. And, when our mother’s singing voice swept through like wind, the flowers would tremble lightly …’

  He coughs drily, finds his grown-up voice again.

  One evening he was in a club, he continues. He bought weightless crystals from a blond man in the toilets and deposited them on his tongue amidst chrome taps and steel urinals. The dance floor was cool and bright, air was being pumped in through tubes against the ceiling. The music was as brittle as glass. The floor like a mirror, the ceiling like a mirror. He froze. He saw her approach across smooth muscled shoulders: a floating goddess. She introduced herself: Mater Lacrimarum.

  ‘She stopped right above me and addressed me: “Cornelius!” “How do you know my name?” I asked. “You must praise the worm,” she said, “and pray to the wormy grave.”’

  The following morning he awoke next to a beautiful young Saudi, Cornelius recounts. On his other side on the bare mattress was a young man from Berlin with tattoos on his forearms and the eyes of a stag.

  ‘Coffee?’ he asked the swarthy Saudi.

  The man shook his head. ‘It’s Ramadan.’

  ‘Do you know Mater Lacrimarum?’ Cornelius wanted to know from him.

  The man shook his head. He poured a glass of water from the fridge and gulped it down.

  ‘Do you know Mater Lacrimarum?’ he wanted to know urgently from the Berliner, but there was no answer.

  Ondien waits for Cornelius to continue, but he is done.

  ‘The dreamlessness,’ she asks,
‘has it passed? And the messengers of Infinity – do they now visit you freely?’

  He smiles wryly.

  ‘There was unexpectedly another level, level V. The Pharmacist, now a skeleton, is waiting with a bottle in his hand marked X. For effect I can probably thrust a scythe in his hand too … No, it’s all over, Ondien, the project. I’m struggling. Mood swings, depression, paranoia. Everything black. Our Calvinism teaches us, of course, that joy never comes without pain. Or ecstasy without major pain. My bank’s going to fire me. I’m simply not functioning any longer, I’m fucking up my transactions, one after the other.’

  They remain silent for a long time. The lava lamps bubble imperturbably, hypnotically.

  She looks at him. ‘Tell me, were you at our mother’s funeral?’

  He quickly looks down, shakes his head.

  ‘Me neither,’ she says, and looks down too.

  After a while: ‘Why me, Cornelius? Why did you make me come here?’

  ‘I was scared,’ he says, and his eyes startle her again. ‘So scared. Of everyone, you’re most like her. Like our mother.’

  He leans towards her, as if he is going to rest his head on her lap. She lifts her hand towards his temple.

  Notes in her head, more insistent than before, right under the skull. Flutes, then silence. Something waiting, fingers stirring behind a sheet. It bursts through. Tone clusters as black as coal.

  A funeral march, that is what is building up.

  Upon returning late the next evening, after a day’s meetings in Stockholm, he sits down next to her on the sofa. He leans his head back, eyes closed.

  ‘What are you reading?’ he asks.

  She closes the book to show him. He does not open his eyes.

  ‘Louis Wolfson,’ she says, ‘Le Schizo et les langues.’

  ‘Yes? Who’s Wolfson?’

  An automatic response, just to keep the conversation going. ‘An American who wrote in French in the seventies about his schizophrenia, and his dogged project to forget his mother tongue.’