The
Place of the Paintings
Unlike the others he had never been afraid of the place of the
paintings. Yet this day was different. His body shivered even in the
sun and gave off a smell that did not belong to him. For the first time
he felt something like disquiet as he approached the place of rocks
where he would paint the men who had died.
It was a feeling he had carried since morning. The sun was already hot
by the time he woke. He lay on his back and listened to the muted
sounds of the day. There had been a dream, but all he recalled of it
was an oppressive darkness and a sudden overwhelming urge to wake
himself. Somehow he’d forced open his eyes and was startled
by the
brightness. He closed his eyes again. There was something
he’d
forgotten. Something had happened when he was asleep, but many hours
ago, when he was asleep and it was still dark.
He slowly became conscious of the pain in his side, the strange smell
which covered him. And the feeling began to grow despite himself, the
inexplicable feeling that his body was not really his own anymore, that
somehow his own body no longer entirely belonged to him; that some part
of him had been taken away in his sleep, taken far away and left in the
open to be devoured by sun or animal. He sat up and scoured his torso
for a tiny smearing of ash or semen, a sign that he had been visited in
the night by an enemy or by the dog-faced spirits beyond the river. He
stared at his palms, then ran his fingertips carefully over the soles
of his feet. He rocked himself on his haunches, gently backwards and
forwards, and the pain seemed to die down a little.
They all watched as he dragged himself down to the mudflats. He lay in
the faintly warm mud and looked up at the cloudless sky. He caught
himself waiting for a flight of birds to cross his vision. Long ago he
had taught himself to fix their passage in his eyes, to see the
vanished sweeps and arcs of many birds in the sky as if they were being
traced out by his own hands across a smooth rockface. But nothing
disturbed the deep blue stillness. When it was empty like that, with
not a cloud or bird anywhere, the sky was almost like a blindness. That
blue, there was no name for it, no colour on his earth to mirror it; it
was almost like a huge breach in the constant world of the visible.
Once, when he was a boy, they’d stood on a rocky outcrop
which had
towered high above the surrounding land. They’d arrived there
after
many days of hard walking. Perhaps they were fleeing, he no longer
remembered. But for a short time they had all gazed across from the
heights at a vast blue stretch of plain on the horizon. He had cried
out in something like fright to see this blue that wasn’t
sky. He was
exhausted and had hardly trusted his eyes, hardly recognised the joy
that escaped in his cry, a searing joy even stronger than his small
boy’s fright of the unseen. But they had not gone towards it.
They went
back across the sparse grey plains towards the sunrise. No longer a
boy, he’d tried to ask one of the old men what they had seen
that day
but he could not find the words.
No one came to him as he lay there in the muddy warmth and after a time
he felt some of his strength returning. Yet still the unfamiliar smell
was with him. Even the sharp smells of mud and weed and wallowing
animal could not disguise it.
But now, many hours later, the worst of the journey was behind him. It
had taken much longer than usual to follow the steep rock ledge. He was
often forced to stop and catch his breath, and yet the deep gasps of
air gave him no relief. It was as if something far off, some furtive
and implacable will, was working against his progress. He edged his way
along and tried to cast his mind back to the night. For a moment he
thought he remembered: strong fingers pressing down on his eyelids,
keeping him there in darkness. But there was nothing before or after.
He crawled through the narrow cleft of rocks that led to the place of
the paintings. Then he stopped and listened for the voice, the voice
that told him again the reason of his journey. He listened for it above
the pounding of his heart and the quick rasping swallows of breath.
Since he’d set out the voice was with him, telling him the
ordination
of the three figures. He heard it as he heard the sound of his own
footsteps, constant and reassuring, at the threshold of thought. But
whenever he stopped to catch his breath the smell of his own body was
suddenly very strong again, and he realised that the voice was almost
lost to him. It was only the faintest murmur.
He rested his back against the cool rock and wiped the sweat from his
face. He closed his eyes and felt himself falling into the sudden
quiet. A sour taste, like mud, rose up into his mouth. He spat it out.
In his mind he saw the old woman carrying the girl’s severed
finger,
wrapped in dry grass, towards him. He saw the girl being led down to
the river, whimpering and faint. She held her mutilated hand out in
front of her. It was bloodreddened and trembling. The women comforted
her and made a poultice of mud and leaves. The old woman stopped in
front of him. She knelt and laid the small ball of bloodied grass on
the earth. She looked up at him with her white, clouded eyes. Grown
slowly sightless, she had somehow taught her hands to see beyond the
reaches of gazing. Somehow the shape or weight of a stone in her hand
could reveal the coming of a storm or a snake’s hidden
closeness.
Then suddenly he was no longer seeing her in his mind. It was the three
figures. They had all seen them, at dusk the day before, the bodies of
the three men floating down the river. The strangeness of it had
defeated recollection, defeated the wordless voice that carried the
seeds of their depiction. And yet they’d all recognised them
soon
enough. The three were borne along on a log. They seemed bound to it in
some way, and their limbs had coiled together. The log sometimes dipped
over in the calm current, submerging them. But always they returned to
the surface, still held fast to one another in their placid lolling
embrace. It was a long time passing out of sight. They had all gathered
on the bank, their sorrow briefly stilled by confusion or foreboding at
the inexplicable bonding of the three men and the great ravages to
their bodies. The three had only set out that morning and yet their
flesh was greatly broken, as if they had drifted the sleepy waters for
day upon day. They grieved into the night that the bodies of the three
men would not pass through the fire. Instead they would journey on and
on down the river, unresting beneath the sun and the stars, on and on
to the edge of the world.
His progress had been so slow he had missed the light. On other days
the sun slanted down through an opening in the rocks high above. The
light fell directly across the rockface. But today the sun had already
passed the zenith and the paintings were shaded and strangely sombre.
He had never seen them like that before. It was cool here in this outer
rock chamber, and the quiet was not within him anymore but in the air,
in the dimness. He felt his breath come more easily. Many times
he’d
searched among the rocks for such a wall, for a surface as smooth and
sheltered as this, but he had never found one. Many had been here
before him and their faded paintings were still visible beneath his
own. The ones who had made them were long gone from the river. He ran
his fingers over the dull ochre lines which those vanished hands had
once traced. Always he felt a strength come to him when he touched the
lines; felt some sleeping part of himself stir and come to life like a
sudden hunger. Yet this time there was only a solitude and a deep
weariness. The alien smell of his body crept back. He began to shiver.
Above him, well out of his reach, were the striped gazelles, creatures
made solely of lines winding across the contours of their bodies. From
the beginning they had fascinated him. Their markings were a great
mystery. He wondered at the men who could have painted them there, so
high on the rockface. But perhaps they weren’t men at all.
Perhaps they
were only the shadows of men – the sleepless ones from far
away – who
had made those paintings so unlike all the others on the wall.
Once, after a day of heavy rain, he had sat in the mud with a twig and
tried to trace the lines of the striped gazelles, just as he had seen
them on the rockface. He’d closed his eyes. In his mind he
saw the
simple, faded lines come to life. The contours of the gazelles coursed
swiftly in the darkness, and their lines hummed and sang. He opened his
eyes and tried to trace them in the cold mud but the lines would not be
drawn. He sat there until the rain returned to wash out his lifeless
marks.
And once, when the sun was setting in a red sky, he’d lain
stretched
out in the long grass and watched the gazelles drinking at a waterhole.
The light was thick and yellow, and the water darkest green, trailing
silver at their hocks. He remembered how still they were, silhouetted
against the dark water, each a single line of sinew and bone, a bright
line full of darkness. Today, because the light had passed, he could
barely make out the lines of the gazelles on the rock, only the deep
red outline that contained the swift darkness of their flesh. Yet still
it was not as he had seen them in the dusk. He remembered the taut arch
of the gazelles’ necks as they dipped to drink, the invisible
power
that surged within them like the hum of the wind through the rocks.
He opened the skin bag and dug his fingers into the fat, slowly
kneading in the reddish ochre. The familiar smells soothed him. He
listened for distant sounds. It was very quiet, the face of the land
hardly moving in the afternoon heat. For a moment he wished
he’d
brought the boy with him, just to be watched by curious eyes as he made
the preparations. He sensed the boy was somehow like him; recalled how
he sometimes looked at things, held them in his small hands, staring
with a dark curiosity, almost as if he were on the verge of anger.
With a shudder he thought again of the three men and their deaths that
still had not ended. He thought of the river. The river that was lines.
The river that drew all creatures to its banks in the fading light. He
wiped his hands and ran his fingers over the lines of the river he had
once painted, and over the figures of the bathers, the women and
children running from the water. As he touched the dry ochre lines
their laughter came back to him, the glistening wet brightness of their
limbs. His own figure was there, a tiny dot of yellow clay beneath the
feet. It seemed to him strangely still among the careening women; stiff
and weighted down by some invisible burden. He began to paint a body
beside it, a small body, walking as if hand in hand. He gave it the
head of a dog. The sour taste came into his mouth again. He felt dizzy
and his legs had begun to ache. He let himself sink down onto his
haunches. The rushing figures blurred above him and he wiped the
stinging sweat from his eyes. He could feel himself falling asleep,
giving in to the heaviness of his body. He was at the river again. The
splashing arms and swaying torsos of the bathers filled his vision.
They stood against the sun. It broke through their bodies in blinding
flashes. For an instant he would recognise one of them but then the
face was swallowed up in the swishing water or lost against the sun.
The figures seemed to be swirling around him in the water. Then, as if
she had called out to him, he turned his vision to the
water’s edge.
She was standing quite still, her feet sunk into the wet mud. She
seemed rooted in the earth. She held a small child in her arms and
stared out at him. Her thighs were splashed with mud, moist and
glowing. The familiarity of her body made him feel inexplicably
helpless. She was always at the threshold of his thoughts. Sometimes
the others seemed hardly living at all, just mute unseeing presences,
but she was never like that. She was always agonisingly, tremulously
alive. Suddenly her face was very close and she looked at him as if
from another world, a hidden and forbidden place that would never
reveal itself in red ochre lines, never submit to the will of seeing.
He shook himself awake and struggled to his feet. The light had grown
much weaker. He peered up at the wall but the striped gazelles had
vanished from sight. The voice was louder, recalling him to the three
lost men journeying still. He began to paint the figures of the three
men low down on the wall. He painted them standing side by side. The
one with the twisted leg, the weakest, he placed in the centre. He drew
beside them the lines of the fire. When he’d finished he
stared at the
ochre figures and tried to summon up their faces as he had known them
in life. The three men were so familiar to him and yet now he saw in
his mind only their dimness and their agony, their eyes breaking in
death. He shuddered, sensing somehow their panic and the last helpless
threshings of their bodies, the savage futile strength that must have
entered them. For a moment it was like a roaring scream in his ears, a
scream that seemed to swallow him up, like night swallowing up the
land. But now the three dead men stood in the warm shadow of the red
ochre fire. Their bodies were no longer ravaged by the
river’s
endlessness. Their journey was almost over.
He began to make his way towards the inner rock chamber where he would
paint them again. A narrow sloping shaft led down to this inner
chamber. He tried to move quickly, groping for handholds on the rock to
pull himself along. He knew the chamber would soon be in darkness.
Sometimes his shoulders swayed heavily against the narrow walls,
grazing his skin. His body felt huge and trembling. Several times he
stumbled over rock shards, blindly pushed out his arms to break the
fall. He felt the sweat coating his whole body in a sickly smothering
warmth. He felt himself rushing blindly through the eye of a dream. The
walls seemed to be moving, crushing in on him. He was conscious of the
tearing pain in his side. Perhaps it was there they had wounded him. He
pressed his fingers against the spot and the pain leapt through his
body. The dog-faced spirits must have wounded him there in the night
and the dark had swallowed up all trace. And then they had confused his
dreams so that he would not remember their coming.
He felt his legs give way under him and let himself sink down onto his
knees. The sour muddy taste came into his mouth again. He tried to spit
it out, heaving for breath. He closed his eyes. A voice echoed around
him, strangely loud. He was calling her, making the sounds only she
would recognise. He saw her again, standing by the water’s
edge. But
this time there were no others. It was like early morning. He saw her
only distantly, through the river haze of early morning, as if he were
standing on the other side. She was carrying the child inside her, and
the women had covered her body with red ochre and kept her apart. He
remembered that time, those nights when she was not near him, when
he’d
called to her silently through the night and she had not come.
He forced open his eyes and walked on. The passage widened out and the
stones grew smoother under his feet. He entered the inner chamber.
There was still enough light. He knew the place on the rockface where
he would paint the three men. He laid down the small ball of
blood-matted grass and picked out the girl’s severed finger.
For the first time he wondered how he would find his way back when he
had finished. He wondered what would happen to him if he fell asleep in
that half-light, there, among the secret images of the dead. He daubed
the severed finger with ochre and began to draw with it the three
figures lain side by side on the earth. As he painted the figure with
the twisted leg he felt a sudden pity for this man who had often been
in pain and did not laugh like the others. He drew a line across the
three men. They would remain together even in death, bound by the line
as their bodies had been bound by log and river, and by the strangeness
of their recollection.
He decided to rest briefly before making his way back. The pain had
subsided a little and he felt calmer. He listened for the distant
sounds of duskfall, and pictured to himself the weary herds drifting
towards the river in the last tepid light. The smell of his body seemed
even less familiar now. The sweat had begun to dry on his skin, almost
cold in the faint hum of breeze. The unaccountable urgency he had
carried with him since morning had gone.
He squatted down close to the wall, peering hard at all the figures,
the many dead, watching them vanish in the last glow. The slender ochre
figures seemed to shimmer against the dark rock, hovering at the
tremulous edge of stillness, as if they somehow struggled against their
vanishing. Only the tall profiled figure of the reed player seemed at
rest, stilled against the darkness of the rock. Dots of yellow clay
danced around the tip of the reed in a mute semblance of its sounds.
He’d only ever heard those sounds once and had never
forgotten the
mystery of it.
There had been no rain for months and fires had blackened much of the
land. That day they’d watched a fire roar through the grass
on the
other side of the river. They’d seen many fleeing animals and
the smell
of scorched carcasses filled the air. Then they heard the sounds. Two
figures wandered through the coils of smoke and smouldering stubble.
The two stood in the far shallows and gazed at them with hollow eyes
while the sound of the reed floated across the water. The two men had
huge heads and the expressions of their grief did not change. They
walked away through the smoke, soon invisible. Slowly the sounds were
swallowed up in the silence.
When he woke again it was dark in the chamber. He had dreamt of snakes.
He was beside the river, walking upstream. He carried a heavy stick.
The snakes were coiled together in the mud, a thick writhing mass. He
watched them in terror and fascination. He beat out with the stick,
thrashed out at the swarming mass. A dark sinuous shape flashed at him,
and another, but he no longer felt any fear. He let the stick fall from
his hands and stepped into the water.
Only when he stretched out his arm in the darkness and touched the
rockface and the small mound of ochred fat did he recall where he was.
His body shivered with cold and the pain in his side made him cry out.
His mouth was filled with the choking sourness and his whole body
heaved to be rid of it. He stared with wide-open eyes into the huge
smothering darkness. He felt as if he were lying on his back in the
mud, sinking slowly through a muddy gaping darkness that would never
end.
He dug his hand into the fat, kneading it into a lukewarm paste.
Without memory or hope of seeing, he rubbed the red paste over his side
and chest, rubbed it across the risings of his face and the lengths of
his arms. Then he lay still. He let himself sink painlessly through the
warm, blindly churning mud, deeper and gently deeper.
At the end of the falling he found himself on the earth again, in the
body of a boy, standing in the dizzying brightness of the plain where
he had once seen a white leopard stalking through the watery waves of
heat, shimmering at the will-less edge of seeing.
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