by Miller
IV
CHAPTER 44
I wish I had written it down at the time
I started writing this to reach out to you, whoever you are, wherever you are. I needed to extend, I needed to push further. Simply dying, which I will soon do, and letting my eyes slip shut – leaving behind only what is in this house, these libraries, these rooms and rooms of computers and devices and failed connections, leaving that as my only message to you – I refuse.
I need to talk.
I need to tell you more – of myself and my time – and so I started, word by word, to explain, to tell my story, to leave a personal interpretation behind. For you. And of course – obviously – for me.
But now, after this word and this one, and then this one, after the thousands and thousands of I’s and ands and buts, I am deeper than I expected. I am wrestling with time itself, the snake of my life, the python. I am throttled by what I have forgotten, by the mists of story, ever rolling. I duck and push the hair out of my eyes, looking for the few things I know for sure will be there. I jump, pillar to pillar, and all else is lost, shrouded and vague, opaque.
I wish I had paid more attention.
I wish I had written it down at the time, because now there are only statues and monuments, presentations and experiences. Narratives. Design.
The furrow on Gerald’s brow.
Babalwa and her babies and her breeding maps. Kiddies at the knee, charts and cross-referencing red lines and genetic mixes. Her hand on their heads, guiding.
Fats’s fro, always modest yet strong, hard. Small, even. Bouncing. Firm.
The twins. Hand in hand.
Jabu’s body, so tiny, covered in blood, her neck literally pumping the red out, her red mixing with the cows’.
Entrails and tears.
The years of us. Our farm and our people. The children, from this distance now almost all completely interchangeable faces and forms, smiling and running and growing so easily into this other thing. So unfettered by time. So shaped by our story, yet somehow so completely untouched by any of it.
CHAPTER 45
Getting your shit together technically
It was the dream, Babalwa told me as we grew into our age. Right back at the beginning, the dream was complete and fully formed. She knew as she woke up, as soon as she met me, that the dream would always guide her. A rock, firm and flat-topped, solid in a terrible sea.
The baby farm allowed us to move. It was the only way to pick up momentum again. I see that now.
Now, also, I view Jabu’s death as the spark. As the shove in the back we needed to get serious. Of course, that’s my way of rationalising the horror of that soft thump, the sound I will never shake. Yes, it’s my method of layering some kind of sense into the incomprehensible.
Maybe.
Regardless, it’s the line I choose to take. It works for me.
The biggest miracle of all – as is meticulously detailed in the archives* – is that we did it as planned. We jerked off, we poured cold semen down, again and again. The couples made sure that in a world without people, in a world begging for children, contraception was used and accidents avoided. We calculated the baseline requirement of diversity. Wherever possible, we followed the maths.
When there was no maths, we stumbled on.
‘Roy, you know I can’t explain things properly any more,’ Fats said to me sometime around the winter of ’49. ‘I used to be so sure. It used to be so easy. Simple. Now I look at you and I feel this love for you and I can’t even put it into words. You know?’
I did know. He was very drunk at the time. It came from somewhere deep inside, and it was also booze-true. It rang raw and honest. I rubbed his fro and offered something similar in return. He held my hand.
I started to draw. I took lessons from Andile, who equipped me with a few charcoals, some watercolours and a box of acrylics. I drew trees and landscapes. Fruit and such. Most of it looked worse than stuff I had done in Grade 7 art class. Gradually she showed me how to create perspective, to give trees shape and cheeks blush. How impossible watercolours are to use and how much faster rewards arrive with acrylics.
Drawing and painting quickly began to feel like a way to capture Jabulani, to hold on to her fading form before she was erased altogether. That was my initial reaction, but more followed. A desire to catch her actual death, somehow. To remove that terrible thud. To blur that single moment when she fell out of us.
My vast, expanding library was simply unable to help me cope with the death. There were hundreds – thousands – of texts on the shelves, virtual and otherwise, that addressed the subject, directly and tangentially, but they all missed the hammer blow. The direct, metaphysical impact of my own context. None could handle the electricity still buzzing on the muscles of my heart. They were all just words on a page and almost all of them spoke of the writer rather than the world being written. None of the carefully structured arguments and plots were relevant to my world of seven adults and their calculated brood.
I had built the library, the archive, in self-defence. As if by gathering around me the better, more acknowledged works of man, I could protect myself against the echoes booming up at the gates. But for the biggest, most important sound of all there was no help. No buffer at all. Art, on the other hand, offered at least a sliver of what I craved.
And so I drew.
I also widened the range of the library to include art. I started at the university art departments, where students were learning to draw. In the paused classrooms there were definite flickers of life, of true moments being captured. A line drawing of the city. A man with a bag in his hand walking fast down the street. A nude girlfriend, sprawled yet guarded.
Once I was well into my lessons, the twins accompanied me and we targeted the museums and the corporate galleries. MTN, Standard Bank, Joburg Gallery, Everard Read, Goodman et al. Arts on Main.
‘Amazing,’ Andile said as we breezed through the collected works of our age – a post-1994 retrospective at the Goethe Project Space. ‘It’s so easy. It used to be so hard and now it’s so easy.’ She took a running kick at a coat-hanger installation.
‘I think I know what you mean,’ I said, grabbing a couple of the hangers, which were of the Woolworths variety, for my closet. ‘But enlighten me …’
‘Well, Roy, that picture there’ – Andile went into mock lecture mode as she pointed out a semi-abstract Kentridge, the usual man leaning/running – ‘at least has some kind of aesthetic value. It’s a not unpleasant image of a male moving. There’s some kind of flash that feels like something to me.
‘Whereas that’ – she pointed at the collapsed pile of coat hangers – ‘is just a bunch of fucking coat hangers. We all knew it at the time – I was at the opening of this show – but no one could say it out loud. Only whispers behind the hands.’
‘That’s why I fell in love with her,’ Javas jibed from his seat on top of a half tractor tire studded with gold pins entitled Means of Production III. ‘The power of her analysis.’
‘For real though.’ Andile kicked a hanger in Javas’s direction. ‘Now it’s simple. No brokers, no hustlers, no art slags or groupies, none of the PR chickies – just pictures on the wall. I look at some of it and I want to cry, it’s so beautiful. But there is just as much that is just … just …’ She took another skipping run up and hoofed a hanger at my head.
‘Depressing?’ I asked.
‘Irrelevant?’ Javas chipped in.
‘Kak.’ Andile took the Kentridge print and frisbeed it across the length of the very white Goethe Project Space. It crashed into a long-dead video installation in a shower of glass.
‘And yet, in terms of its emotive potential, I still find art more attractive, currently, than books, which fail at a deeper level,’ I added, hurling a small, heavy blob of metal, about the size of a tennis ball and with no discernible aesthetic form, through another retro flat-screen (Sony 97-inch super plasma) installation entitled Urban Dynamics – Ocean Flows.
The metal blob was called Weeping Underground. ‘All of the books, all of them, stay within the same place, the same realm. I read and read and read and I don’t find anything that even considers what actually happened to us. With art, at least, there is some kind of hit rate. Every twenty or thirty pieces you find something that screams at you, that at least gets close to the chaos of life. The books are just useless.’
‘We should go back to the student studio in town.’ Javas left his half tyre and began heading out. ‘There’ll be better stuff there. Better odds than here, anyway.’
I grabbed a few brochures for Urban Dynamics – the name of the exhibition as well as the video installation – on the way out. Andile took a small wooden sculpture of a lady balancing an absurdly large barrel on her head. ‘Reminds me of my mom,’ she said.
I drew cows’ heads and sweeping, curved knives and rivers of blood. I drew Jabu in the various stages of falling. I drew people in an abattoir clustered around a child corpse.
Jabu’s death was just the start. I needed to convey our new context. We weren’t just people who had killed their child. We were the only people, and we’d killed one of our only children. The work had to be unique. It could not be the same as anything that had gone before it. There was a gulf that had to be bridged, and I was lost as to how to do it.
But it needed to be done.
I moved through sheet after sheet of Fabriano. Andile told me to keep the rejects, so I piled them up, a huge stack of childlike failures. Stick figures without perspective. Cows’ heads and badly composed chainsaws and barrels in watercolour and charcoal and acrylic.
About thirty or forty attempts in, I switched subjects and began beating out an equally ill-composed series of us on the farm. Beatrice leading the cows. Fats on the ladder fiddling with another panel, screwdriver in his mouth. All of us in the abattoir, clustered in panic around a single cow head.
This series felt better. It had the ring of settler art to it. Strangers lost in a strange land. I began exaggerating the poses. Myself running up Munro Drive, but a steeper road, the kind that leads to God, the path thin and getting thinner, almost unimaginable as it faded through the growth and the trees. This was my first success. I enhanced the yellow of the Nikes to the kind of biblical hue able to compete with the surrounding jungle. My legs were super-hard, thighs bulging with effort, my face strained and taut with ascension, my eyes fixed on the pinprick of light breaking through the forest at the top. It was epic. Godly. The hyperbole worked.
Next, Babalwa. I fattened her up, added folds to her thighs and sat her on a kind of rocking chair with a quilt over her knees, a nursing baby in her crooked arms, and ten or eleven brats in various stages of development at her feet. Behind them, to the right, the complex, our complex, the endless horizon with just a hint of the Northgate Dome on the left. I added ten, twenty years to her face. A middle-aged woman surround by her brood. Her swarming brood. Some of them staring absently, some fiddling with toys, and a few at arm’s length, fighting over something. Babalwa the breeder.
Gerald alone. No backdrop. Nothing. Just standing there in a stained butcher’s coat with that curved knife strapped to his wrist, dangling limp, a smudge of congealed blood brown on the tip. His eyes vacant.
And on I went, my lines growing more and more biblical with each picture, my exaggerations extending, seeking out the nuggets in all of us and distorting them, twisting them up and out and into the open.
‘You got something going here, eh Roy?’ Andile clucked, poring over the pictures. She giggled initially and then was silent. ‘I mean … ja.’ She paused at the one of her and Javas, hand in hand, walking into the sunset, an ambiguous Moses-type basket dangling lightly in Javas’s free hand. ‘You’re getting your shit together technically. Bodies and legs and all.’ She leafed through to Fats straining on his ladder, muscles bulging, arm reaching in vain for an elusive socket. ‘I don’t like them, but I’m not going to stop you.’ She pushed tears away with her palm – a strange, unproductive gesture, as if by using the part of her hand with the least utility she could reverse, or at least deny, the flow. ‘A lot of them are repulsive, in fact, Roy. You must carry on. And I must go.’ She walked away, pushing again with the palm.
Painting became my nightly ritual, the thing I now did to replace reading, which I had consigned to a necessary pre-sleep technicality. I let myself follow the perverse path I had started. Andile’s tears had been disturbing, but also inspiring. I was, I believed, accessing the bubbling anxiety that ran common through us.
I was making art.
We were now shut off. Initially, in those first few months in Houghton, I had felt the vegetation acutely. Our isolation was made all the worse by the unmown lawns, by the obvious disappearance of order and straight lines. But slowly the plants receded from my consciousness, and only occasionally would that initial sense of invasion and claustrophobia recur.
Our personal feelings were incidental, however, to the green forces inching over roads and fences, chipping away at the chasm. We noticed it – the growth – again in the months after Jabu’s death, when it suddenly seemed to become much harder to move outside our regular zones. And even those – the paths and roads we used the most – had begun to require steady, intensive maintenance.
Gerald was at the forefront of the hack-it-back campaign. His ambition in this regard was, I believed, a way for him to expunge or rechannel his anger at Jabu’s death. He would load the chainsaw and the axes into his bakkie, his jaw set and his mind fully on the battle. He never asked for a partner, but if any of us offered he would hand out a tool and wordlessly pull the volunteer into the fight.
Eventually we had to structure the process. Once a month, during summer, we would all throw ourselves into a week-long maintenance mission. First, hack back the trees and vines trying to swallow Munro Drive. Second, clear the perimeter areas – Fats’s gates and the outer border. Third, make sure we had access to the major arteries in and out of the city. North and south were easy – nominal effort was required to access the M1 highway. Lastly, keep Louis Botha and Empire avenues clear. Not because the routes were necessary to us as such, but because it was philosophically impossible to concede to living in a jungle with only one road to the highway.
Regardless, Gaia shrugged off our fight. We were slowly becoming a one-road town.
We had too much invested in our set-up to try to move, although the idea of transferring out to flatter farm areas was increasingly mooted. The girls were sick of the creeping forest, and Javas and Gerald leaned in favour of relocation. I fought it, as did Fats. I couldn’t accept the idea of having to retreat from Jozi. It felt like the defeat that would crown them all. If we left we would never be able to come back. The forest would close its arms and that would be that. Joburg would be a mythical memory, a place of the past, of adventure stories for children, of warnings not to get lost.
Still, the summer monsoons kept coming, the forest grew and we were all carrying machetes and a chainsaw in our vehicles whenever we went anywhere.
Which wasn’t that often.
‘You still think of your people?’ Gerald asked me, apropos of nothing, as we headed to the bottom of St John’s for creeper maintenance. ‘I think of mine all the time,’ he went on. ‘All the time. My wife. My kids. My mother. My family. I never thought of them that much when they were here, and not even so often just after they were gone, in the beginning, but now I can’t stop. I want to know where they are. Where they went. Is it like that for you?’ His right elbow rested on the bakkie’s window pane, jutting slightly out into the passing breeze. He was driving so slowly we were almost stationary.
‘I didn’t really have that many people, to be honest,’ I admitted. ‘Bitch of an ex-wife. Dead father. Mother I never really knew, so no real extended family …’
Gerald was frustrated. ‘So now? What’s it like for you? I’m feeling like the deeper we go, the more babies and the better we get at the farming, the worse it is for me personally. I
want to go back to how it was. I feel so alone, I think about just ending it.’
‘I’ve thought that too,’ I said. And I had. Many times. Yet it was always an abstract kind of thought, more philosophical than anything else. Gerald, on the other hand, was not exuding a philosophical vibe. He was all nuts and dangerously practical bolts.
‘And? What stops you?’ he asked.
‘Dunno. Guess I just can’t override that human thing. Survival. The need to keep on.’
‘I tell you, Roy, I tell you …’ Gerald stopped the bakkie. ‘It’s becoming real for me. The question. That question. I mean, they must have gone somewhere. It’s not like they died, they just disappeared. Which means that there must be something else besides this, besides what we know now. And then I think, well, why not just end it? I’d probably end up in some other world, living in some other way. Maybe I’d end up with them, wherever they are, and worst case is I just die, and would that be so bad, compared to this?’
‘What about Beatrice?’ I had to ask.
‘Beatrice is fine. She’s a good woman. I have no problems with Beatrice. But I live with her because I must.’
There were several levels to our conversation. Around this time, Gerald would surely have been noticing that Beatrice had begun paying me the odd visit, again.
We were breeding according to Babalwa’s master plan, using the established cup method for all combinations save for existing couples. But my experience with Gerald and Beatrice was fundamentally different from that with Fats and Babalwa, and the twins. Gerald refused to participate – he left it up to us, and thus, thanks to our sexual history, the masturbation and insemination took on distinctly erotic overtones. As it turned out, the middleman was essential if the exercise was going to be emotionally neutralised. With Gerald refusing to play his position, Beatrice and I developed our own unique and not unpleasant variation. Her fingers brushing mine as she took the cup. Me waiting, lingering, in fact, to make sure she had no issues in transfer. A soft, warm peck on the cheek that lasted too long. The smell of her lips.