Speechless - Tom Lanoye

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knick-knack and every heirloom, both equally precious. The archive and register of two intimately interwoven lives, also the backdrop of my childhood, with all the props—it degenerated in my hands into a collection of anonymous things, whether or not usable elsewhere, sometimes with a market value, sometimes distributable, usually to be thrown away. Vanished, wiped out, passé. My father left the decision entirely up to his children, just as in the past he would have left it up to my mother. Apart from photos of her, and his television set, there was nothing that he indicated was necessary for the rest of his existence.

      However hard I looked for them, there was no sign of the three-fingered sugar tongs.

      As a ten-year-old ringleader I used another claw foot, but larger and yellowy-white, and scaly, and with long horn-like nails, to terrify a girl who lived nearby and was two years older than me. A severed chicken’s claw from our butcher’s shop. I held it in my bunched-up sleeve and advanced on her with a contorted face, grunting, talking gibberish, drooling, swiping with my new limb at her freckle-covered arms and legs.

      You could even fish out a tendon with a needle from where the leg had been hacked off and like a puppeteer pull the tendon taut with two fingers so that the chicken’s claw opened and closed again. My little neighbour was already upset, but when she saw my new hand actually moving she started screaming.

      A few years later she showed me, in our lock-up garage halfway down the street, where all the car owners in our neighbourhood rented garages, in a maze of gravel paths with rows and rows of long concrete compartments, all the same size, all with pink corrugated sheets and each with a rickety double gate—the complex itself was the limbo area outside a wood yard, which smelt eternally of diesel and pine woods—in the dim light of our lock-up garage, then, my easily frightened neighbour showed me, unsolicited, her pristine tits. Two swollen nipples actually, already deeply dark, that was true, silky and yet recalcitrantly stiff, the flesh around the areola lightly accentuated and as white as the cap of a freshly picked mushroom, but with freckles. ‘They’re going to be very big,’ she whispered, ‘later, like my sister’s. Have a feel.’

      And I felt, honoured and bewildered. I plucked and picked, not with the aid of a dead chicken’s foot, but with three cautious fingers of my own, a mouth of fingertips, which sucked at her soft deep dark expectancy, first left then right, and the more I plucked and sucked, the more resistant her soft mushroom caps with their freckles became, the more she sighed in my face, closer and closer.

      A smell I didn’t yet know, something halfway between milk and almonds, dispelled the diesel and pine woods around me.

      -

      I LEFT THE stomach specialist determined not to wait for the result of the ulcer and cancer examination before finally getting down to writing. Anyway, the result would not reveal anything other than the palpable suggestion of the specialist: affectation.

      The report proved him right. A month later, in which I had still not composed a note of what was to be a more exalted Song of Songs, a better Bible, a more beautiful Scripture, everything and nothing at once. In the hope that it would not, falling between two stools, simply become neither. For now it was even less than that. Eccentric escapism, respectable idling. For a year a mother was proved right with her prediction of the writer as a wastrel.

      Twelve months, four seasons passed in a flash.

      Because I also spent the previous European winter in the windy Cape high summer, in the Victorian house where I am typing this, on this laptop. This paragraph, this sentence, these three words, and these and these, at this very moment. I am writing them now instead of last year. Yet I was already here then. In my cramped study with its childlike office furniture and its wooden terrace at the foot of the almighty Table Mountain, in a neighbourhood called Oranjezicht, during my annual escape to this temporary paradise of isolation and sun and carefree writing and reading, without losing myself in the distractions that I can so seldom resist in my home country. Of course I am also a kind of actor, a failed one, a hopeless ham without inhibitions. Give me a stage and an audience, give me a microphone and a book of mine or one of my literary heroes, and I will read it aloud until the break of day. There is an element of, besides coquetry and greed, abject despair, I don’t myself know about what, but I go on, and on. Another splendid battle won for the spoken word. Another illustrious day lost without having written.

      I did do some writing here last year, albeit working on that play in alexandrines. Counting on my fingers for days like an ambitious toddler, always the same formula. The alexandrine consists of six iambic feet; explained for convenience that gives twelve syllables, linked two by two, alternately stressed and unstressed. ‘Ta-tám, ta-tám, ta-tám. / Ta-tám, ta-tám, ta-tám.’

      As far as content went I mixed Euripides with George W. Bush, Troy with Iraq, Manhattan with Troy, towers with towers, war with war. As far as form went I piled plosives on sibilants, internal rhymes on alliterations, as if I were a hip-hopper of ancient protest songs preparing for a poetry slam in the townships of Mitchell’s Plain, on the other side of Devil’s Peak, the brother of Table Mountain. Ta-tám, ta-tám, ta-tám! Turning my beloved native language, which is so much suppler and generous and colourful than most of its users are prepared to believe, into a beatbox.

      I had six women—two elderly queens and four princesses—take the measure of one man, the Greek commander-in-chief Agamemnon. Seven lives, thousands of years ago, thousands of kilometres away, different continents, different centuries. While I should have been taking the measure of one woman in my own life. I fell short again, and I realized it. I began counting and running away even more angrily.

      ‘O Muse, sing now for me. / Sing of my frenzied state.’

      ‘At least be brave enough / to speak with your own blood.’

      ‘Each second that ticks by, / once more she’s here with me.’

      My summer’s writing was not as carefree as all that. Many a morning’s sleep was wrecked by the whirring blades of helicopters flying low overhead. Everything in this country is massive and overwhelming, from poverty to economic growth, from language interaction to forest fires. In the case of the latter the helicopters sweep slowly and ear-piercingly over, like extras in a Vietnam film, to the reservoir round the corner, the size of two football pitches and as old as the district itself—the first foundations were laid by the Dutch and their slaves, in the service of the United East India Company.

      Under each helicopter hangs a bright orange bag that can be closed at the bottom. However, it continues to leak and from the top too water sloshes out because of the movement and as a result of the whirring is immediately vaporized as if for a local shower of rain. On the return journey the bag, hanging open, still leaks profusely, so that at each pass my terrace gets soaking-wet, the corrugated sheets of the roof rattle like a washboard used for percussion, so that finally, distracted even here and tempted to enjoy myself, I just sit on that wooden terrace, with towel and binoculars at the ready, following the ballet of the fire-fighting helicopters.

      Only when you can no longer hear them, they are so far away by now, as small as flies against the monstrously high and steep wall of Holy Table Mountain—only then do they open their water bags, simultaneously and making a swerving manoeuvre, so that the water hits the seat of the blaze in an elegant fan shape, causing furious clouds of steam to rise from the side of the mountain, a filthy reddish billowing column, temporarily blotting out the sunlight, an orange ball behind a curtain of churning smoke.

      Then the pounding mounts again and the iron dragonflies, quickly swelling in your binoculars, make straight for the reservoir, straight for you, with their dripping bags, their exotic rowanberry, bitten to pieces, emptied. Their rhythmical whirring mixes with the maniacal counting in your head. Wap-wáp, wap-wáp, wap-wáp.

      Give me adversity. Cadence and poetry.

      Misfortune has a right. To beat and poetry.

      During one particular night, hours after the helicopter ballet had been discontinued because nocturnal sorties are too dangerous, even though the cargo consists of water and not of bombs—we are talking about the years of the Great Cape Fires, the year of my Elegant Flight Forward, also the years of the Wild Water Rumours:

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