a hell of a season

 

I remember it was a hell of a season,

the Spring of that year.

The magnolias had bloomed earlier

and had faded before April was done.

The riverbanks were extinct

because of two consecutive floods.

Never before had it rained like it did then.

Then! My days of wandering were over

I had unpacked my (f)utile possessions

in a small hovel of an apartment

overlooking the tumid river.

Thence I could behold the island 

on which the two bridges met.

Against all odds, I had come back home.

Of course, the oddball oracle had yet to be fulfilled:

the old Indian fortune-teller, with his parchment skin

and cracked lips the sight of money widened to a grin,

had augured too many coincidences:

hindsight would be acquired years from now.

The first of his predictions happened a day earlier,

a day before the full moon. I was hit by a car.

My sister had cried: “God, leave him alone!”

as I lay humiliated a second time by Fate;

yet it turned a blind, unblinking eye and walked out on me,

once it had ascertained the deed complete.

I was misunderstood, forsaken and covered in dust,

nursing my wounds like a curled-up animal.

My instinct bound my steps homewards.

Since then the Shadow has followed me – 

It is like a crack in the bathroom mirror –

its outline sketched half an inch off my natural shadow.

I had come back home and nothing had changed.

I, the only one who'd gone nomad, was different.

The people stayed where the stones lay. Because, not where.

Even the old man I had known in my youth was still there.

The same old chap who was sitting and waiting,

for God knows what, for God knows who.

Only him knew. As old as when I left,

still waiting, still sitting.

We had seen him sitting here since we were born.

Our fathers and forefathers had known him 

in much the same way we came to know him in turn.

That same old man who rolled his r's

who had a phony falsetto voice.

His dungarees smelt of papier d'Arménie,

and were worn out at the groin and knees.

He always leaned back on his chair

and against the outer wall of the bar

because the front legs had been broken

in a donnybrook a long time ago, so he claimed.

Levitating and rocking his decrepit, lank body,

watching the passers-by strut away, he would tut

and shake his head mysteriously like a sphinx

muttering to himself what sounded like imprecations.

Chewing on the same liquorice root for days on end,

until all that was left was a soggy mesh of fibres

at the perlèched commissures of his mouth

– chewing – chewing – chewing – 

as if he actually tasted time passing

– munching – munching – munching – 

his teeth creaking like a grindstone.

He would mumble that it is all about settling scores.

Even-Steven. An eye for an eye. Eye to eye.

To every and no one in particular,

sitting in a remote corner of the bar,

leaning on a four-legged chair.

He would also say that there are five stages in a man's life:

the walk, the burden, the desert, the ennui and wrath.

He would stare at the bottom of his mucky glass

– cheap wine was the common denominator –

and answer the question everyone had forgotten

who had posed it first. In all probabilities

the questioner had long been anointed and buried

in a hurry near the place he had fallen.

“The very minute you start walking,

there's no stopping you, ever.

Have you noticed how the wee'uns

who can barely walk like breaking

into a staggering run?”

He would scrutinise his thoughts and then add:

“Then comes a point when your shoulders

get burdened with kin and work.

Losing this burden of yours, forever and ineluctably,

leaves you coasting through a nameless desert

Reaching port means you get to sit down,

but all you're left with is ennui, the terrible,

deleterious, gut-gripping ennui.”

He would pause again,

solemnly lifting his glass as if for a toast. 

“This is by far the longest period in a man's life.

Wrath comes when every word is said and done,

when you finally reach the end of the sitting.”

One couldn't but mull those words watching him wait,

his back against the outside wall of the bar.

No one knew him by any other name,

he was intrinsically an old man to us.

He seemed to have no other life

than that which was walled against the bar.

I remember wondering often where his house was,

if he had ever owned, or even needed one.

His mangy dog who always lay beside him

would only rise to its feet and trot to the ditch opposite

to sniff a moribund pigeon or some wet patch of grass.

The old man would get up in turn, walk around behind

and piss noisily against the back wall.

Both would be back as soon as they were done,

usually in unison, both having bad teeth and a bad bladder.

Often he said that he was hidden and visible.

None were used to such cryptic words,

So all saluted him in case he knew sorcery.

We stopped our conversations if he spoke.

We made ample way for him to pass us by,

going from his amputated chair outside to the one inside,

allowing more space than was actually necessary.

This old man claimed scars acquired after

an entire season spent in Hell, yet it had not been enough

to kill or to subdue him — he had come back.

He was perhaps older than the chair,

perhaps older than God himself, yet subject to both.

We never spoke of him lest he heard us, lest he jinxed it.

Always at the back of our minds, weightless like a shadow.

Once he said that God was in the palm of his hand.

He outstretched it, and we looked into it, intent and dreading.

Amidst the decussations of the lines and the scars

we distinguished an obscured blotch, like a scab,

and his sardonic smile and the glint in his eyes

scared the bravest of us.

For eyes like his had seen the horror.

Thereupon he bent down and scooped a handful of dust.

He showed it to us, his hand held out in front of him.

Then he let it trickle down from his clenched fist.

Few of us had the sense to flee, riveted to the trickle.

He would play the funambulist on his chair,

rain or shine, from winter to winter,

from before dawn to long after dusk,

long after the last one of us had headed home.

One morning, I was running errands. He hailed me.

“Listen, son, why don’t you come over here

listen to the ramblings of an old man?”

He instructed me to squat beside him.

“People say I’m mad. Half-mad. Half-baked.

Whatever. People blab and have a worm’s wits.

Truth is, I’m less insane than, say, Hammurabi,

yet the man was revered and feared.

His hand was both stern and righteous.

He knew the Euphrates was treacherous.

He had right and wrong decided at a man’s stroke,

at man’s instinct of survival,

at the hand of discharge and Fate.

Pray, what is more maddening than this?”

There was little I could say or add, so he pursued.

“Syntagmas are set in stone now, but words shift.

Paradigms shift. Our actions do too.” He paused.

“Curst be he that makes me move my bones!

I’m wedged right in the caesura —

I have the right to be left there alone.”

He riposted — responding to something I never said — 

that he would not — ever — demean himself

like the Cumaean Sibyl had done.

“Look at her now. She is but a heap of rattling bones

and rasping breaths, full of spite and regrets.

One feels only pity for whom has been

one of the grandest Seers of the ancient world.

I shall not become an aporia.”

He spat a chunk of liquorice pulp on the ground.

The dog lifted its head, sniffed it,

then put its head back on its paws,

slumbered almost immediately.

Its master resumed its monologue.

“Ici reposent dans l’attente de la résurrection

such-and-such — nonsense!

Even dust has a shadow, and no one cares as much.

We are walking dreams.

I have seen men hollowed out with a jeweller's loupe,

both their sentiments and their tendons

raked out with an ass's jawbone.

They now roam the streets without aim.

They now dwell in dreamless nights.

They are us! — and by ‘us’ I can't meant me.

Never! Always remember this, son.”

He began fidgeting on his chair.

He seemed to remember something.

“When the day came to an end,

the last of the dawn-breakers was dead.

I was left alone to carry the torch.

So I gave it to them.

You should have seen the fascination

in their sparkling eyes. The mania.”

“Serendipity is like seeing the ground

where the shadow of the tree lay.

We seek clarity in light and darkness

whilst the world is shapeless and ashen.

Let’s take a walk!” So on we went,

his chair askance, the dog fast asleep.

He folded his hands behind his slouched back,

munching. Yet he was not walking idly.

“Look at me! I was once the very heart of the fray.

I was the weathervane and the thaumaturge of the world.

I brought kings and emperors to their knees or to glory,

according either to a grand scheme or on a whim.

I put dictators onto gilded thrones.

I saved a widow and an orphan from a certain death.

I gave alms and I burnt cities down.

I have spared and slaughtered the innocents,

butchered the Centaurs and abducted Lapith women.

I have hewn down the Cedar Forest

to build a raft and a city gate.

I singlehandedly diverted the course of the Euphrates

to bury my companion in its riverbed.

I defeated Qin with a single arrow shot

with my Holmegård bow a thousand yards distant.

I remember painting cave walls

and living in the wild with nought

but animals’ pelts girdling my loins.

I have lived unaccounted lives of men,

enough to enable myself to lose count.

I have seen civilizations rise and fall.

I have built some, destroyed others.

I have never looked back.

Now look where I stand.

These exploits today are regarded as hurried snippets

scribbled on the canvas of history;

they are shelved in dusty bookshops

and relegated to musty museums.

Bookshops and museums! Pah!

Some deem it a memorable place to endure.

Time has proven them wrong.

The places to endure are in men’s memory and songs,

the rest is a handful of dust in the wind.

Half the things we do don’t make any sense

and are done in a state of stupor.

The other half we spend on debating

what's the most tasteless dinner we could have

or which show we will stare at and unwatch.

Doesn’t make any more sense.

And equally dazed we are:

we’re imbecilic, emotionally-retarded fools.

Our desires are tied to the rope of a windlass.

Don’t you ever forget what I said.”

Whilst he was speaking at me

we had crossed the first bridge,

making our way to the island.

His pace was slow, but not because

of old age, but because he simply

was unhurried and determined.

In time, we reached the tip of the island

and faced the river downstream.

Once in a while he would pick up some rock,

balance it from hand to hand,

and put it in either of his pockets.

Out of the blue, he broke off mid-sentence and said:

“Detrás de yo está la muerte,”

jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

I turned my head at once, but didn’t see anything.

When I turned it back, it was pitch-dark

and all the city lights were gone.

Night had replaced day in the blink of an eye,

as it usually does when miracles are about to take place.

The coal-black mass of the river

dragged sluggishly in every direction

and the crescent of the moon hung

high up in the shrouded sky of ash

lit a single pine tree set in the midst of the current.

The reflection of the tree was no less ominous.

I could still see our old man quite clearly.

His silhouette seemed bulkier and more majestic.

His eyes glinted with an inner flare

which I deemed blazing with enough rage

to combust the entire universe.

“Turn your back on everything you once held dear:

those people whom you followed,

that which you wore,

this place which birthed you.

Those whom you followed

now tread paths of their own,

and their own only! – thence you cannot go.

Wrath deforms their features before they can walk,

for they want to be left alone.

That which you wore is burdensome.

It encumbers your stride and weighs you down.

The place which spawned you

cast iron chains on your ankles, look!

Wait for your Shamhat, and then leave!

Leave this abominable place.”

He had shot his index straight under my nose.

“Do you hear me, son?

You no longer have any business here.

One day, even I will lie down on a couch of sighs,

never to rise again. However fiercely we fight Death

– Death snapping off mankind like a reed in a canebrake! – 

dragonflies and dead bodies

will never stop drifting down the river.”

He picked up one last stone

which clinked in his pocket

with the rest of them,

and casually stepped in the current.

He was still talking. “You should leave

as soon as you can, my lad!

Here is no safe place for someone like you,

or me for that matter. We get attached to the land –

before we know it decades have passed.

We have all the time in the world

to remain rooted to the one place

when we’re buried under six feet of dirt

and in as many planks, mark my words!”

His dungarees were splashed,

revealing their original colour.

His voice didn’t falter, nor did his step.

He was waist-high in the river,

about ten feet from the riverbank.

He trudged on. His voice trailed off.

He didn’t look back. Not even once.

I could see him struggling forward

his arms bawling pitch left and right.

Suddenly his thick mane of grey hair

disappeared.

I was not stunned, nor was I angry.

I had been listening and waiting,

now doing either seemed trivial.

When I walked in the bar a while later,

the others asked me jokingly,

poking each other in the ribs,

if there was a storm outside,

or if it was so hot that I had taken a dip in the river.

I was drenched to the bones.

And in the chiaroscuro bathing the bar,

directly in the shaft of light from the open door,

I could distinctly make out my wet footprints.

I realised I hadn’t noticed the dog on my way in.

No one ever saw it again, nor claimed to.

No one ever touched the tilted chair.

In due course it rotted into sawdust and splinters.

It had been, by all accounts,

a hell of a season.