So now comes the time to wield the second weapon, the pickax.
Nelson is in agony, dancing around the perimeter but being careful to be ready to dodge when pater monster lets fly for the second time.
He said something to try to get his father to stop, but he has no memory of what it was. His father begins to swing the pickax around in the air.
All I could think the first time I heard this story was If you marry you will regret it, If you fail to marry you will regret it. This was one of the few things I was able to bring to Denoon’s already topheavy intellectual armamentarium. He had somehow missed reading the great Either/Or of Kierkegaard, which is an ordeal except for the one small section whose name I forget that contains that gem. And what I was thinking, of course, was if you have a father you will regret it, If you have no father you will regret it: I was thinking of myself. This became one of Nelson’s favorite quotes, somewhat to my chagrin as to what it meant vis-à-vis being with me. But if we had I would have gotten an agreement out of him not to use it in public when I was around. He always used the aphorism in the most general or comic sense as a way of saying nothing ever works out, but still it stung me slightly. There was a period when we were in effect married, by most criteria.
Did you scream or cry? I asked him. How did you feel seeing he was about to destroy this thing without showing even for an instant that he knew it was remarkable?
What adds to the pathos of this is that Nelson knew stories about his father’s deprived early life — he was fostered to a farm family, for example, where he was told he had to drink the water for the animals as opposed to the water that was for the family — and that once he knew these stories a consuming fantasy of his was to go back in time and appear at his father’s side, as a buddy, and to fight the injustices he was enduring, get him out of things.
Did you beg, did you plead? I asked him. He had protested, but he couldn’t say how exactly.
Did he show any sign he appreciated even just the industriousness behind your creation, which is exactly the kind of creative thing you presumably want your children to do, if only to keep out of mischief? He was drunk, Nelson said.
His father whirls the pickax awkwardly around his head like someone tossing the caber but he is in fact so drunk that when he lets go, the pickax flies off, missing the bottlements altogether, through the madrones, down a slope into long grass where it is lost.
The detail is horrible.
Get me it, Nelson’s father says or screams, meaning the lost pickax. Clearly this would be so he can have another try. And clearly he knows he is too wobbly with drink to go and find the thing himself.
Couldn’t you have gone to get your mother? was my question. This is what we’re for, I said. But he claimed it never occurred to him, which makes me suspect that his father’s praxis toward Nelson’s mother was cruel enough, whatever Nelson says, to make him want to leave her out of this, that it might be dangerous for her.
Nelson refuses to retrieve the pickax.
All right, his father says, then I’ll do it with the wrench. At which his father begins reeling toward the partly shattered structure to pluck the wrench out of the shards it’s lying in.
What drenches Nelson’s consciousness is that his father could stumble and be hurt or killed, impaled on the spires of broken bottles — and he, Nelson, will have been responsible for it as the builder of the injuring structure.
He sees his only choice as being to go and find the pickax rapidly and give it to his father to use in the final destruction of his creation, which is in fact the outcome.
God leads him directly to the pickax in the blackness.
He furnishes the pickax to his father, who smashes the bottle sculpture into nothingness, drenching himself and wrecking a good suit in the process.
Never could I really convince him that his retrospective fatalism about this incident was false somehow and worth pursuing. Why is it, I asked him more than once, that when I hear this story I feel worse than you do? He once went so far as to say that it might have been worse: his father might have made him demolish the structure himself. So it goes among the males.
I don’t know how many different ways I told him This is not just one incident among others in your life as a boy — this is formative. I might get a Maybe so out of him. Although once he did say, rather passionately before changing the subject, How many times can you imagine that it would happen that someone who is still basically a child could be in the position of saving his father from serious injury or death? I think this is when I gave up on the subject.
TSAU
The Prospect of Rescue Undoes You
The prospect of rescue undoes you.
The closer I got to Tsau the more I decompensated. The eight miles felt interminable. I was feeling much worse. I lost all patience with my animal and abandoned him a mile from the gateway into Tsau. I wanted to run. I tried to, a little.
There was an actual gateway. The path I was on led straight to a crude square wooden arch about twenty feet high. It was a gateless structure like a torii, painted in alternating red and black bands like a coral snake and fringed across the top with bigger and better wind chimes. It was carnivalesque. Dark green waist-high rubber hedges straggled away from the arch to the left and right as far as I could see. In a yard to the right of the arch was a compound in which were two very tidy rondavels with peculiarly glossy thatch and other odd features I was too ragged to attempt to parse. This would have to be the gatehouse compound. I could see a kgotla chair set in the shade of a gigantic cloud tree in the yard, and I knew I had to get to it immediately.
I wanted to rest, but I also wanted to see everything. The path through the arch became a roadway leading to a complex of much larger buildings halfway up the koppie. In the flatland between the arch and the slope were neat identical rondavels in oblong fenced plots. There were thorn trees throughout. The scene was very busy in the sense you apply the term to a piece of printed fabric. There were novelties in the scene before me. There was the ubiquitous flashing and glinting, coming, it seemed, from all over and due, I was already assuming, to the various mirrors and solar instruments and other glass oddments that seemed to be specific to the place. There were repeated clicks of brilliant color observable at points along the upper paths: I had no idea what was causing them. I wanted to see everything at once, especially an ominous thing, something white and shrouded, hanging from a tree near where the roadway began to rise. Body, I thought. I was frightened and felt that at least I had to see what this was. In fact I was having a regressive recurrence of a feeling from kindergarten. I painted a sheet of newsprint with blue calcimine, solidly blue. I had never seen such a sublime blue and I had kept trying to fill my eyes with it by staring at it and by holding it close to my face. My teacher made me stop.
Goats all seemed to be either tethered or in pens, which I had never seen in an African village. There were no stray dogs. I could hear poultry but not see any — that too meant pens of some sort. The rondavels were not the usual monochrome red brown: they were painted in bright colors, sky blue being a dominant choice. There were people, but they were looking at me from around the edges of things.
The rondavel closest to the arch was magenta with a canary door. This door was flung open and a woman ran out toward me, stopped, turned and went back inside, and came out again with a police whistle in her mouth, on which she blew three skreels. Someone farther up the slope repeated the signal. This didn’t strike me as unfriendly. The person approaching me with the whistle was a motherly older woman. I see that I’m using Denoon’s or my neologism for the sound a police whistle makes, which was a byproduct of one of our personal games, called Filling in the White Spaces in the Dictionary. We satisfied ourselves that there was nothing in English for the sound except shrill blast, which was two words. Everything should have a name, according to Denoon. Decadence is when the names of things are being lost. He could be eloquent on this. He loved the Scots, who had had more names for everyday things in the eighteenth century than we do today. Greece was in terrible shape. He showed me an article in the Economist proving that groping for words among the general population was becoming a serious issue. On it would go.