Читать книгу What Poets Need - Finuala Dowling - Страница 6

6 pm

When you are not there, I don’t know who I am. The happiness of each day is poised around the arrival of your letter.

It usually comes at four in the afternoon. At 3.45 I start to make a tray of tea. This is a hungry time of day for me, and I used to make toast, too (a raisin bun, squashed flat and blackened in the toaster, fatly layered with butter), but Steve my computer guy pointed out the disgusting amount of debris wedged into my keyboard, so now I eat something in the kitchen and bring just the tea here. Though even that I spill.

The anticipation is partly the simple pleasure of the company of your words. To walk with you and your dogs in the shady wind-breaks of the farm, listening to their eerie whispering hum. To swim with you in the clay-bottomed dam among frogs. To feel the warmth of the enclosed space and smell the young buds as you walk into the tunnel every morning. To drink austere black tea with you. To listen to you saying wise, soothing things to Jackie or Liza when they phone about their latest man crisis. To sit with you on your stoep in the evening, thinking your thoughts with you.

Those thoughts are always plans of goodness. The truth is that ever since you got the prize for esprit de corps at Queenstown Girls’ High School in 1974, you have felt the mantle of perpetual devotion. Perhaps some wild child, son of friends of yours, needs expensive drug rehabilitation and you agonise over how to give them a big loan that they won’t feel pressed to repay. Or perhaps one of your rose-pickers is being abused by her husband: it falls to you to get her a new life. And then the perennial Frikkie, whom you first encountered being perambulated in a shopping trolley, has some fresh request. You’re always bailing out the needy, setting off their losses against your gains. Though sometimes I fear the purity of your thoughts, still I look forward to them. Saint Theresa.

But another part of me anticipates something else. Perhaps today she’ll write that she’s leaving Theo at last. That she’s asked for a divorce. That she’s coming to me. That he’s dead.

We no longer lie to each other. I don’t think we ever did. But there was a time when I didn’t say all the brutal things I thought. As I’ve just done. We used to leave things out.

I try to wait till 4.05 to log on. I want your mail to be there already. If Outlook Express says, Receiving message 1 of 12, then I think, Good, there are at least eleven chances that Theresa’s is one of these. When I see your name, the universe is benign. I quickly delete the spam so that you are not defiled by proximity to the rapacious beasts. I sink into your words. I’m bowled over by you afresh. I don’t even mind that Theo is not dead.

Theo says that the Isuzu’s engine is completely wrecked, pistons cracked, crankshaft driven backwards through some vital aspect, you write, and he has gone to Caledon to see if Dieselman Henry has a solution. Then I love you for being alone on the farm, for moving about in a world of pistons and crankshafts, for the phrase “vital aspect”, and for knowing or naming “Dieselman Henry”.

When it is not there (though it almost always turns out you’ve faithfully sent it, it has just got trapped in a cyber backlog) I am mean, I am vindictive. I take each one of the eleven spam inviting me to enlarge my penis, get cheap drugs, get rich quick and lose weight, and I click Properties, Message Source, highlight and copy and paste them into a mail which I send off to my service provider under the header Abuse. I used to imagine that this resulted in punitive action, spammers in Wyoming opening their front doors to a posse of cleansing police, who would confiscate their hard drives and wash out their mouths with soap. But Steve says I must be nuts; probably my service provider just deletes my whinges. He says Wyoming is a very beautiful state.

Today there will be no letter, I know, just spam. And the twelfth letter, which is always Ryno’s. I can rest assured that even if your mail is held back, Ryno’s will come through, like Ryno himself, hacking through some Malayan jungle or trudging in crampons through Himalayan snow. Ryno reporting to me in terse one-line e-mails from the land of real men. My friend has another side to him, of course; everyone does. But hacking and trudging are on the dust jacket.

Every year, as August approaches, I know that it will happen. You don’t mention it beforehand, don’t build up a picture of the preparations, the booking, or the packing, but I know that soon I’ll receive the one that begins: “This will be my last mail until September. Theo and I drive to Johannesburg tomorrow and stay the night with Jackie. Then our usual holiday in the Kruger National Park. I’ll miss you.”

I can’t bear it that you are going on holiday with your husband. Why do you have to go on holiday to the same place you honeymooned? Why this sentimental pilgrimage? I hate the way you are both interested in baobab trees. I wish that one of you were restless for a casino, or even an acacia. I hate the thought of your happy family reunions with your daughters. I hate your campfires. I am shut out, my nose pressed to the pane, dribbling with envy. I don’t even belong in the same room as a happily married couple.

Are you happily married?

Ways of Keeping

I have kept my love for you

like an unloved dog,

chained up in the yard.

You have kept your love for me

pressed between

pages of a well-loved book.

With a diamond you have secretly

etched your love for me into a glass pane,

showing me its hiding place

with a cupped hand.

One night, unable to sleep for thoughts of you, I got up and scribbled this down with a pale pencil crayon on a scrap of paper. I’ve just broken it into lines, choosing to put “pages” on a new line and omitting the definite article. I do take line breaks seriously, don’t adhere to the carriage-return theory of poetry.

There is definitely something still wrong in the last stanza. It still has the heavy sign-pointing of prose. You can even see that the second line is too long. Rather: “You have etched/your love for me into glass”, but that would take away the faint echo of “pain” in “pane”. “You have secreted your love for me/etched it in a pane”? But “diamond” is good. Leave it, they say, put it in a drawer and come back to it.

No, I know:

With a diamond you have secretly

etched your love for me into a glass pane,

showing me its my hiding place

with a cupped hand.

And maybe also make the tense less perfect:

With a diamond you have secretly?

You have gone away, and when you come back, you won’t tell me about your holiday. You told me once, just a little, about the game park trip. But I behaved badly. I raged about the campfires and the stars. I imagined Theo whispering to you to see the lioness and her cubs or some other rustling intimacy of the savannah. So now you spare me, and even the sparing is painful.

Today I walked a very long way, across the saddle of Kalk Bay mountain by way of Echo Valley, down past the old silver mine itself, up onto Ou Kaapse Weg, past the woodcutters with their bundles of rooikrans, all the way to a mechanic’s workshop behind the old Sun Valley shopping mall. My car has been in for repairs – it’s been overheating, has had its pressure checked and its system flushed but still the gauge swung up and the rusty-looking water boiled. At last a cracked cylinder gasket has been diagnosed and has been sealed with metal stitching.

Beth would have given me a lift, or I could have caught the train and a taxi, or walked along the main road and across the avenues, but I chose this three-hour route. The weather was crisp, one of those brilliant, blue-skied late winter days, when the peninsula seems to apologise for unremitting rain.

As I hiked, focused on my destination but alive to the fynbos and sugarbirds around me, I thought of a friend who once outlined the plot of a novel he planned to write about Cape Town. Various disasters would befall the city, resulting in a massive drop in population and necessitating a gradual return to nineteenth and even eighteenth century forms of transport: steam train, horse-drawn carriage, sailing boat. One of the last big tankers would dock at Simon’s Town and load derelict, obsolete motor vehicles for shipment to the Far East. Pristine nature would return. Dull parking areas in Fish Hoek would be reclaimed by the dune system, tarred roads would decay and eventually be wrenched up, leaving the sandy track of history. The bend between Kalk Bay and Clovelly would revert to a perilously rocky set of steps requiring assistance in descent, and consequently the re-establishment of the old corner toll.

Once I had listened to this detailed outline – not really a plot, but a beautifully imagined setting – I knew that my friend would never write the book. Because if a writer starts letting out his ideas before he puts pen to paper, they escape, taking their energy with them. This is particularly true if the plot outline or germinal idea is met with rapturous interest. On the other hand, I have noticed on two occasions when I outlined ideas for poems and was met by blank stares, I went back and wrote them with uncanny force, as if to say, See, fool, this is what I meant! Perhaps these observations of mine are true not just of artistic plans.

I never know if what I say to you is obvious, something you and everybody else have always known, and I only just lighted upon.

It’s interesting to me that I walked that distance today with ease. I have developed a taste for exercise relatively late in my life. My infantile aversion to physical recreation I put down to the fact that duffers, weaklings, boys without Springbok colours potential, were actively discouraged from partaking in games in my youth.

In my youth.

It was all about winning. If one wasn’t good at them, one had no place in games. Then in the army, exercise was only ever a form of punishment, an excellent way to break you down so that you could be re-created in the image of the SADF.

After I klaared out, I got into the habit of not taking exercise. In my late twenties I would have been puffed by the first leg of today’s hike and prayed for mountain rescue. Now, at thirty-seven, having happily discovered the truth that moving one’s limbs in a coordinated yet non-competitive manner is a simple human pleasure, the hike was exhilarating. I note without comment that the boys who were first-team rugby, cricket, etc. even victor ludorum Ryno himself, are nursing ominous knee and shoulder injuries these days.

I took water with me on my excursion, and cheese and tomato sandwiches. I’d have liked to carry nothing but a biscuit in my pocket, as Mr Ramsay claims to have done in his youth, but I’m made of more mortal stuff. Or maybe the “biscuit” Mr Ramsay refers to was pemmican.

When I got back, the sun was starting its early afternoon descent behind the mountain. It’s more of a sudden drop than a descent. Unlike the Atlantic seaboard, we do not enjoy lingering sunsets. But I could see the Brass Bell still basking in a sunny patch so I went down with a newspaper and had two beers on the wooden decks, catching the occasional spray of the rising tide. You can see our house from down there: from a distance it has a certain Edwardian, bow-fronted, St-Ives-ish charm.

A word came to me to describe myself: insouciant. I know it’s come to be associated more and more often with its pejorative meaning, “unconcerned” (see INDIFFERENCE, says my dictionary), but I prefer “carefree”. I am carefree because I have a half-share in a valuable seaside property; the Feinstein Trust has sent me my contract; I live my life at my own pace. Though I miss you, and long for you, it is also true that without this mood of yearning, I would not be able to write any poetry.

I read somewhere that the British “poet laureate” Andrew Motion once took or sometimes takes cough mixture in order to simulate the slightly sorry-for-yourself head cold feeling so conducive to verse.

I’m feeling drowsy after those beers.

Please don’t think that I am comparing you to cough syrup.