There were four of us children in my family. I was the first, then came two girls and lastly my brother. But both my sisters died in one of those typhoid epidemics which were inflicted upon our remote African world, like one of the plagues of Egypt, before each of our fanatical droughts. So my brother and I were left, as my mother one day put it under an emotion that I was too young to share, not only to be brothers but also sisters to each other. I mention this here not out of a belated recognition of what she must have felt but because I had reason to remember the remark many years later. Between my brother and myself there was a difference of seven years and these seven years now had a difference of their own because of the tender flesh and blood so brutally extracted from them. They moved lean and hungry in my memory with the slow, mediumistic pace of the famished out of the river-bed of time, like the gaunt herd in Pharaoh’s dream which warned Joseph of the great hunger and thirst to come. This, then, added a particular stress to this separation in age between my brother and myself, making it a difference not only of life but of death as well. However, this was only one of the many differences between us, all of which I have to mention because they contribute to my story.
To begin with I was born fair with dark blue eyes. I was well made, and I grew up tall and strong without hurt or impediment to assail the physical confidence implicit in my step and carriage. My body was at home in the wide physical world about us, and my person at ease with the people in it. I seemed to move as appropriately to my environment as does a gilt-edged fish with its silky swish in an amber sea. From an early age I played, rode, shot and worked with the best of my childhood peers. In my response to the challenge with which the disdainfully cunning and infinitely experienced old earth of Africa teased and provoked the life it contained, I’m told that I was tireless and fearless. I was also well spoken and good-looking. In fact this last sentence is so much of an understatement of something which had an important effect on my character that I ought really to enlarge on it.
The truth is that from an early age most people found my looks disturbing and many of them were strongly attracted to me on account of my appearance. This again is one of those things I say without pride or humility, without vanity or self-satisfaction. I have long since come to the diamond point of the tumult within myself where facts alone, and nothing but the facts, accurately observed and truly interpreted, can move me. I know that only facts can save me and I long passionately to be able, from the facts of my being, to forge a weapon strong enough to enable me to fight back against the power and pomp of unreality which is marching so boastfully against both me and the spirit of my time. But over this matter of my appearance if I do recognize any other emotion in myself it is one of subtle and pervasive distaste. Perhaps this sounds ungrateful to life which has conferred such favours on me? Yet the truth remains. Part of me strongly resented my looks and blamed them too for what became of me. We had a neighbour who was born a dwarf and, as a child, whenever I saw him I used to pity him and feel grateful that I had not been given his shape. Yet today I am not sure that I should not have envied him. I simply do not know which constitutes the greatest danger to the integrity of being: to attract or to repel; to incur the dislikes or likes of one’s fellow men. The dwarf, after all, had only pity to fear and, men being what they are, that is never excessive. But I had their instant, magnetic liking for my enemy and before I knew where, or even who I was, I had become a prisoner of the effect I had on them. The dwarf was firmly shackled to his deformity. But I was shackled not so much to my good looks as to what people, after seeing me, first imagined and then through their imaginations compelled me to be. I know now that from my earliest age the effect that I had on those about me enticed me away from myself, drew me out of my own inner focus of being, and left me irrevocably committed to the role that my admirers and the obscure laws of their magnetic attraction automatically demanded of me. To this day I shiver at the recollection of the cold impersonal power and efficiency of the mechanisms of this compulsion, both in me and others, which forced me to lend my little measure of irreplaceable flesh and blood to the shadowy desires, phantom wishes and unlived selves of those around me. Slowly but surely I grew into a bitter estrangement from myself: a prodigal son in a far country of famished being, without any inkling of the dream that could have worked on my errant raw material. I suffered, as it were, from the curse of Helen whose face ‘launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium’, that Helen whose image still haunts the eyes of men wherein she was held prisoner for so long.
Yet I was not Narcissus-bound to any lilied reflection of my physical body. I never saw myself as good-looking. I have stared often enough in mirrors and shop windows but not with pride, only furtively, as if afraid of seeing also in the reflection what I felt myself to be. For, despite the plausible object evidence to the contrary, I have known always that I was also an ugly person. I knew that what others found so attractive was only an outer aspect of something greater to which both it and this other ugliness were equally and irrevocably joined. In some mysterious way I was conscious that there was never one but always a pair of us, always a set of Siamese twins sitting down nightly to sup at the roundtable of myself, a pair of brothers designed to nourish and sustain, yet also inexplicably estranged and constantly denying each other.
Yes, despite all provocations, I could never see myself as others saw me. The reflection that has become my master-reflection is not silver-quick in the crystal light of a modern mirror but is somewhat withheld, like the slow gleam behind the glassy surface of a particular pool which used to lie in our black bush-veld wood like a wedding ring in the palm of a Negro’s hand. Oh, how clearly I remember that pool and that far distant dawn when I first dismounted from my horse to quench our thirsts at its golden water. I was kneeling down, my right hand held out to scoop up the burning water and my left holding the reins of the steam-silver horse beside me as, before drinking, it carefully blew the dawn-illumined pollen of spring in a rainbow smoke across the flaming surface. And suddenly, there, beyond the rose-red bars of the rhythmical vibration set up by my horse’s fastidious lips, I saw my own reflection coming up out of the purple depths of the pool to meet me. I could not see clearly. The reflection remained shadowy, very different from my bright morning figure bent low over it. It stayed there, a dark dishonoured presence straining in vain for freedom of articulation against that trembling, dawn-incarnadined water as if the corrugations on the surface were not the bars of a natural vibration but rather those of a cage contrived to hold it forever prisoner. At the time it made me sad. It would have been better, perhaps, if it had made me angry. Who knows? Certainly not I.