But, he repeated, she was adamant that he should not come inside her and laid out to him why this was not to be. Obviously he promised not to. Isn’t the woman the all-wise teacher, initiator and priestess of eternity? And fumbled. She was skitterish. Rejected him with a vigorous kick of the hind legs. Eyes like moons. Moans.
Again and again the hand fluttering imperceptibly hung above the pieces. The flank of his attack had been turned, a bishop (le fou) sacrificed to no avail. White was in a predicament. The hand had to choose while the forehead caught the light through the barred windows. Stuttering. And becoming enmeshed, woven into the dislocation of parry and thrust and probe, of commitment finally.
So he had promised her that he would obtain some means of prevention. From a medical friend, an old man with white hair and smoked lenses, he managed to procure a contraceptive jelly. Something, apparently a spermicide, which would kill the seeds. Rather like an insect extermination. She, he said, had claimed to know all about the product and the method. And he had remembered about a farm in the North where they could enjoy the desired romantic isolation. It had been his grandfather’s, used for growing tobacco, but now it was run by his nephew. His grandfather had died, buried in the mirror. His grandfather had penetrated the soil. Was rotting (in) the dark earth. He recalled the fine tobacco the old man was fond of making for his own consumption: carving up the odd leaves, sprinkling the little curls with rum essence before exposing them in glass jars for three days to the sun.
They had driven to the farm. The nephew wasn’t at home. The main building — the master’s house — was closed up, but the barn they found unlocked. They went in there. It was utterly dark and she didn’t wish him to open any door, afraid that their intimacy might be observed. The empty barn had been used for the storing of tobacco — the enormous crackling leaves becoming wrinkled and veined with controlled decomposition. There was a fine layer of tobacco dust over the floor. He kneeled before her thinking about how his trousers were getting soiled, and she hitched her skirts above the hips. He was to insert the jelly using an instrument somewhat like a small pump with a nozzle. He couldn’t quite describe it. Didn’t know how to manipulate it. The knees were getting tired. Above all he was afraid of hurting her by introducing the spout too deeply. And didn’t dare strike a match for fear of embarrassing them both. Hesitated thus. Fumbled. A bird in the dark having to decide its movements.
Eventually, he said, he felt that the right amount had been injected. Since it was so uncomfortable — unhygienic — consummating the act in the barn, he talked her into rather going down to the dam with him. She was reluctant to be taken outside, had very sensitive buttocks. The soft wind from the nearby marshes was rustling their clothes. The water itself was dead and weighted down. But when they came around the wall by the soft and furry grass they just about stumbled over a black labourer and his companion, naked and glowing, doing that which they themselves had in mind naturally. They would end up lying very still, he thought. He thought he knew.
Night had fallen like a hood. He then noticed, he recounted, lights going on in the central building, the one housing the dining room and kitchen and bedroom. His nephew must have returned from wherever he’d gone to. He led the woman to the house through the darkness. The dogs, he said, the dogs were snarling most viciously around their legs. In the house he asked his nephew for the use of the bedroom. To fuck the lady, he explained. They undressed by the bed in the big dark room. Her handbag on the floor. A vortex of emotions when finally unclothing. Her dress of muslin slightly lighter in the dusk. Discarded wings and sprung muscles. Flashes of light and, prevalent, areas of darkness. An orifice. As if he’d taken narceine. And the smell of vomit. Also her eyes turned up white.
“And then?”
It was, he said, a muddy matter of the vulva. Or valves perhaps.
“I couldn’t stay in her. Kept on flip-flopping out. She was too slippery. It was a sticky situation. I had used far too much of the stuff you see. There was no way. The wetness.”
(The sadness of his white finger with its stains of smoked tobacco. The sustained shiver. But it was too late: the queen had already been removed and now he was mated. The combination of black knight and black rook was fatal. There was no way out.)
The Redemption of the Image
Once is perversion, twice philosophy.
It rains as if a gigantic watch, a fat onion, had long been clogged, at last burst open, and now may release all its ticks abundantly. Shall we go further? If we have waterboots and raincapes yes. My grandfather carries an onion-shaped watch on a chain in his waistcoat pocket. The watch, just like an onion, has many shells, peels. With his knotted old man’s hands dated with brown liver-spots he opens the lids, one after another unto the last one of glass. The glass you mustn’t open up otherwise time will run delirious. Quicksilver. Under the glass the flywheels pivot, the cogs circle, the hands comb, the mechanism quirks with the movement of water. My grandfather’s watch must be leaking. He doesn’t even notice it. His pocket is growing heavier causing his back to bend. “I do wonder what time it is,” he says, fumbling his ancient fingers all down the chain. But the hands have become too slippery. When the load becomes unbearable he snaps and he is dead. Tch-tch-tch go the tongues of the family. Some say he died from water on the heart. Others maintain he must have had a poisoned onion. Or simply that his time had come. It is the breaking of the water. His time was done. It became too much. He passed away like showering rain and now there are no more clouds. I peer through the glass caps of his eyes. The frequencies are fixed, the indication of time-passage isolated and breathlessly caught on the bridge between one second and the next. Already gone from the one but never arrived at the non-one. We enclose him in a box, the one lid on the other. Hammer in the nails rhythmically. Fill the box with ticks. We shake the coffin but the guts refuse to get going again. We carry him to earth. Shall we go further? If we have raincapes and waterboots indeed. It is the planting season. There are tears in the eyes of the family as if they’d been peeling onions. Above the huge dark clouds, each with an internal movement, an accumulation — like watches without circumference. I look for an heirloom. What became of the old pocket watch? I return to the hole in the earth, put in the spade: the trough is filled with water. Time has devoured the very mechanism. Wheels and shafts lie under the water like disbanded bones. There must have been cellular decadence, the blueprint is destroyed and now there is licentious procreation, a frenetic vanishing. Dissipation. Onions will do well along here, the earth is nice and sandy. A pity it is so wet. I go looking for an onion. Tie it on a string to my waistcoat pocket because I have no confidence in links. When I hold it to the ear I can hear the ticks. The raven will build a nest of sticks. It is darkly working up for rain. Shall we go further? On the roof the rain comes down tic-tac-toc. Fat, onion-coloured little watches are shattered. Time flows away in water. It’s raining like homeless precise delimitations searching for the secure restraint of a timepiece, a grave.