The Eye of the Moon
by Shelley Davidow
The Habit of Rainy Nights Press
Portland, Oregon
The Eye of the Moon
by Shelley Davidow
copyright 2011 by Shelley Davidow.
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1st Printing, July, 2007
Ebook Edition, October 2011
ISBN: 978-0-974-66833-8
Cover Photo by Åsa Tordenmalm
Book & Cover design by Duane Poncy
Published by
The Habit of Rainy Nights Press
At Smashwords
Branches litter the riverbanks from the summer flood some months before, and the sun is bright in a harsh and merciless sky. This is where we meet. Secretly. I wait for him behind the tree, and he drives up in a gold Toyota automatic. It’s the car they share.
The Toyota is dusty from the wheels up. The gold doors are splashed with hardened mud. Winter, in this part of South Africa, is brief and dry. The veld turns to gold and night after night, fires light up the horizons, fires that turn the ground to black, and the air to gray. In the mornings, skeletons of small animals lie scattered across the burnt earth, and the smell of ash and decay is bitter in the wind.
His body trembles through the rough knit of a wool jersey she made.
He thinks the age difference bothers me. He imagines that I lie awake at night and wish that he were ten, no, twenty years younger. He can’t penetrate the thoughts or the imagination, which for years has been constructing this in its erotic intensity.
I don’t care about age at this point. I’m so wrapped up in the terror and lust that accompany these meetings that I keep telling him to be quiet, that he should not mention the word Time, since it is an illusion.
The water that is so dark and murky carries Bilharzia. When I was younger, I was ill for months until it was discovered that the culprit was a tropical disease that lived in the snail shells in the depth of such stagnant waters as these. In the long summers, my half-brothers and I swung over the river that ran past our house, hanging onto the tender willow reeds until they broke and we fell into the water.
This is not the first time that we’ve met on the riverbank. It’s been going on since summer. No one is aware of this, though I think she knows. My family, who live further along this same road on the river, are utterly unaware that I am now secretive, insincere. They don’t sense that most of my words now are only half-truths, since everything relates to him, to The Journalist, whom they know as someone else.
I’m too old and too young for seventeen. I’ve seen too much of certain things - blood and death and poverty.
~
My mind weaves a passionate erotic tapestry. But my lips tremble on his and I won’t open my mouth even though my body aches with the heat of the African desert.
He was a journalist years ago, before I was born. I met him first when I was twelve. He tells me now that he’s loved me since then. He wanted to keep his thoughts pure, and now it’s almost too late. If I would just hold him at arm’s length, he says, we could avert this imminent catastrophe- avert this horrible betrayal of ideals. All it would take would be for me to wake in the morning, and find that some Angel of Common Sense has breathed upon me, and I no longer feel anything for him. He says this and we smile, but from the advantageous and almost arrogant future, you could look back and see that his smile is already broken around the edges.
~
She has a name, but I can’t say it anymore. I’ve known her as long as I’ve known him. She’s older than he is. I can never look at her properly again. She will never acknowledge me as an individual, it’s not possible. I see myself through her eyes all the time and project myself years into the future, watch the pattern repeat itself, only this time I am the one who is betrayed. I am convinced of this even then, know it somehow with a hollow certainty. At seventeen I am selfish, taking him, this forty-six-year-old, for myself.
~
In Africa the clichés that existed seemed different from those that played themselves out in the rest of the world. I was unconscious of clichés. It was only later, when The Journalist was in the past, that I read Middlemarch, Lolita, and a hundred others, and found my secret reiterated in numerous versions. It was then that I became aware of something far larger than my individual life, some truth that played itself out again, and again, mercilessly through the ages.
~
I live with the knowledge that this story will quite certainly be told again.
~
In the years before The Journalist, you could wake to the song of birds and the rustling of grass. You learned the formidable ways of the wilds as you learned geography at school: snakes; scorpions; lions; mesas; buttes; the Great Rift Valley; how to put out a bushfire or suck poison out of a snake bite. Every morning there passed through your heart an indescribable joy. You loved to be alive, to be you, to be where you were in Africa. You never wanted to leave. You swore to your friends who had already planned escaping the violent, decaying outpost of white colonialism, that you were here, you would stay.
~
And then one day, you left. For America. This was after The Journalist. There was no way of making money. You had fallen in love with someone else.
You thought America was where people went who wanted to become writers.
~
Before I knew The Journalist, I was someone who sat on a swing and climbed the tree over the rusted yellow veld. I was the girl, who on her ninth birthday, felt sad because the stoned photographer who happened to drop in that day, took photographs of everyone but her. She thought that because of this incident, her presence on her birthday would be erased from memory. In the future, she thought of that specific day as happening without her. But the day itself is clear, also the tree, with the dove’s nest and two small eggs, and the slanting tree-house carpeted with left-over carpet tiles - a spot you could not rest on for long because of the precarious slant of the branches.
There was the mother who gave birth at home, a month overdue, sick with Toxemia. I heard them say, crazy woman.
In the adjoining room, which had a fire burning in the fireplace because it was midwinter in Africa, a girl of eleven heard her mother crying and said, why, why is she crying - and they wouldn’t answer her intelligently or directly and she hated them for it, for not understanding that she already knew anyway, but wanted them to speak to her. Hated them for not seeing that the inside of an eleven-year-old’s universe is larger than out. At last they spoke grudgingly and admitted that when the baby comes out, it’s sometimes painful - but she cried for far too long. The mother. Then the girl heard the baby’s cry, and rushed into the room, saw blood, so much - as if someone had been killed - saw the blue cord and the tiny dry wrinkled body that was purple, and the nails that had grown so long in the womb, they had to be cut immediately. The ambulances arrived because the mother was hemorrhaging.
The girl said, my mother nearly died, on the phone to the grandmother - she felt proud that the mother had not died, had made it despite all saying crazy woman - so she said with pride, my mother nearly died.
~
We did not make love for an entire year. The thoughts and the dreams and the touching were more inescapable than any act of penetration. For a year I learned slowly, the shape of his hands, the way the hairs caught between the slats of his watchstrap. I breathed in the smell of the skin that was so much older than mine, touched the hair already gray at the temples. With closed eyes I traced the line from forehead to chin, the place where his ears joined his face and where the skin, worn and tired from forty-six years beneath the harsh sun, folded up in wrinkles. When he smiled, his face folded up in wrinkles. But from a distance, he had the face of a boy.
I’ve thought of my life as a narrative ever since I can remember. Each event framed itself, and at the moment of its framing, I caught it forever in my image cavern. I went back into the cavern often, as if to remind myself of what I dared not lose.
There’s no distinction between the dream-space in writing and the dream-space in love; they exist for themselves. That was why it happened with The Journalist through writing.
In the back seat of the car, gold on the outside, I wriggle away from him and open the window. It’s grown dark and the stars are huge. Several of Jupiter’s moons are visible lately even through the lens of a pair of binoculars.
“One day it’ll happen to me,” I tell him.
“What?”
“I’ll be there, just like an extra limb, yours maybe, and you’ll find some other woman, someone younger, with darker hair, more youth.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
The crickets are loud in the grass at the side of the car. He wants to make love and I refuse. He says he understands, but I know that he doesn’t. I think then, about patterns in the universe, how every action has a consequence. I’m not quite sure yet how it works, but I’m beginning to feel as though my life has taken on a form where there are recurrent recognizable threads. This is how I know that one day the situation will reverse itself, and I will find myself on the other side of the looking glass, older, jilted, divested of myself.
“It will happen to me exactly as it’s happening to her. I’m absolutely sure.”
~
There is a party at the end of the year, and it is filled with friends. In the newspapers, one reads of unrest and on the streets on Sunday mornings, one steps briefly over blood trails. All these images swirl around the garden at the party. I have a few friends who have come from the townships for the party. They catch mini-bus taxis, despite the daily taxi wars. If my friends aren’t lucky, a territorial taxi lord who wants to claim a certain route as his own might take it upon himself to murder any offending taxi-driver and all his passengers. My friends risk their lives just to move in and out of their places, but they smile anyway and laugh and joke with all of us, eating heartily. Live for the day, they say. What choice is there anyway? Sometimes someone with a car will offer to take the township friends home, but this too, is a risk. If the driver of the car is white, and the group runs into any militant Pan-Africanists, they might be killed. The townships at night are desolate, silent, smoky. Pot holes line the roads and fires smolder in rusty drums. Sewerage runs anywhere downhill. Courtesy of Apartheid, we say. People hide inside, afraid of the police, afraid of being branded informers by their own people and necklaced with burning tires. But there is the belief that this will end. Eventually. The Journalist is at the party because he is invited. No one seems to think it strange that I am with him. It’s chilly and I walk to the bottom of the garden. This is the last time that I will be there, together with all of my closest friends, in an Africa at the brink of transformation, but I don’t know this, and so don’t appreciate their presence. I only think about The Journalist, and the night, and when he will leave and go back to her. I attribute my nervous, painful euphoria to The Journalist. He has told one other journalist friend about me. I’m unaware of the way in which the journalist friend will be significant.
~
Later, looking back on this night, I understand the point of no return, where I unlocked myself from my own reality and began to slide into The Journalist, that world.
~
In the white light of the moon I held his naked body to me. He smelled strange, smelled too old. I didn’t think that. Or if I did, I committed the thought to silence. I didn’t want to be on the back seat of a car. It was Friday, and the African Pentecostal church had begun its hymns. The voices floated through the air, as strong and rich as the earth in summer. The voices would not be shut out. I should be elsewhere, I thought. Not in Africa.
It was painful, and I was delirious, unprepared. I pushed him away and then kissed him. I loved him more than I cared about anything else. Voices grew louder through the grass. The singing had stopped and soon in the moonlight, the flowing robes of the church-goers appeared. The Journalist pulled me down under his body, covered me with his body. The crosses that hung from their necks caught white light. They looked in surprise at the gold Toyota parked in the grass so late at night. They must have feared it at first, and then taken note of the white naked body over mine, and hid their faces in shame. Their voices quietened. I didn’t understand the language but the focus of it. Shame, I thought I understood them saying. Shame on you, shame.
~
Cape Town. One year later. We behave like a couple, do all the things that couples do. He writes poetry to me and we walk on the dazzling beaches and dig crystals from the mountains, but I am uneasy. The beauty of the mountains is unbearable. It presses down on me.
“You are the only lover I ever want to have,” he says. And it’s always painful, always like the first time. I start to think that there is something wrong with me. The pleasure never blots out the pain. Sometimes it’s so severe that he has to stop. He broods, paces the wooden floor of the house and rubs his unshaven chin.
I always look at the way the blue cotton of his shirt catches the hairs on his wrist as he moves his hands. I say that I want to get out of Africa and he smiles.
“It’s just a phase you’re going through,” he says.
At this stage I haven’t published anything, but I want to be a writer. I write all the time, late into the night, anywhere, on the floor, the beach. I want to study, but don’t have the money.
~
Sometimes he goes to see her. When she is in a bad way. Because he has broken her heart, he feels responsible, wants to still be her friend, so to say. I grow very uncomfortable about these visits. I don’t know when they happen. He tells me afterwards. He says, “I keep telling her, she’s doing much better than she thinks. But it breaks my heart, she looks terrible.”
“Stop telling me how she is. I can’t stand it. Don’t ever say anything about her to me again.”
I begin to wish that he did not have so many wrinkles on his face. I can see that everyone assumes I am his daughter by the way they respond to us when we go out to eat, if we can afford to.
~
The issue is always money. I don’t have any. I can’t find a job even waitressing because the waiting list for such positions is endless. And the people who work in restaurants have degrees, in Science or Drama or Botany. There are no jobs for them in their fields.
After I return from Cape Town my family takes out a loan against their house, and I go to university. I work hard and realize that the Muse who inspired Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley is redundant. I cannot get beyond a C, because I will not look on Caliban as the Colonized and Prospero as the archetypal Colonizer in Shakespeare Against Apartheid. Instead Apartheid is in itself according to me an enactment of some bitter archetype.
~
In retrospect I detect in myself an almost arrogant unwillingness to take part in the university era of my life. As though I somehow thought myself beyond it.
I am a consistent and satisfactory C student.
Then I meet The African Literature Guy, a lecturer who speaks softly and swallows his words so that I have to strain to hear what he’s saying. He is originally Zimbabwean, but left Zimbabwe for South Africa after the War for Independence.
“I was a medic,” he says. “I didn’t want to be a soldier. I didn’t believe in the war for a minute. I was sent to the frontline anyway. When I tried to escape to go to university after eighteen months, I was stopped, sent back into the bush for the most violent part of the war.” He doesn’t say much more about the war. He doesn’t even dream about it, he says. We are sitting inside the university on the concourse, a cold hard tiled interior that looks like a giant cafeteria sparsely furnished with plastic tables and chairs.
When I look at his legs beneath his jeans and his hand flat on the floor I think to myself, it could be that I will sleep with him.
I hide that thought horribly under the blanket at night, as I lie next to The Journalist.
~
The African Literature Guy gives me a short story he has written and I give him a book. We take each other’s words home, and when we meet the following day, neither one of us knows what to say. The book and the short story both begin in the afternoon in the Highveld. A man is walking down a dirt road, hitch-hiking. The sun is high in the deep, African sky, and a farmer in a pick-up stops his truck in the dust to give the man a ride. My man is dark-skinned, and his man is light-skinned. From there onwards, the stories change, but our story begins to take shape. Each day it is evident that this event of synchronicity of stories may never happen to either one of us again.
It was The African Literature Guy who introduced me to an editor at a small press. I had the manuscript of the dark man hitchhiking in the sun. One day The African Literature Guy arrived at my doorstep in jeans and a yellow T-shirt. I opened the door to sunlight. He sat with me on the floor. The Journalist sat on the couch. The African Literature Guy said: “the old man, the editor, was sick on Tuesday and so took home your manuscript to read since it was sitting on the top of the pile. He read it and would like to do it.”
After that we are both excited, because one of the men walking down the road in the synchronized story is going to find his way into the world, and secretly we feel that this gives the other man in the short story some hope for his own realization. The Journalist is like the fond parent in this triangle, which disturbs me immensely. I have the desire to follow The African Literature Guy home when he says goodbye. I think of him, preparing lectures in a bohemian flat which smells of youth. I want to uncover his life, his war. I think of his artistic hands when they were even younger- I try to imagine them forced to cradle a heavy FN automatic rifle for two years, or holding the broken head of a dying man as he tried to breathe life into cold, black lips.
In the night I hold The Journalist fiercely, blinding myself to the pain as I tell him, love me.
~
Apartheid made life simple, polemic. Everything that was bad and evil emanated from the white racist government. The ANC was the recipient of all our sympathy. In Johannesburg the young white baby-faced police force was often on campus with teargas and rubber bullets, playing hide-and-seek with the students, synonymous to them with communists and terrorists. Sometimes I accompanied the African Literature Guy to the local jail to bail out arrested students and give them a ride home.
~
The African Literature Guy has strong hands, which demand my attention. They give him away. I see a strength there that is not in his face or his voice. I see someone who has been buried. I try to dig him up, feeling strong, large.
I only see The Journalist at night, and like it when the lights are out. Then I listen to his voice; it is warm and strong. I don’t breathe in his smell or touch the sagging skin at his neck. Any terror of death or time is hidden under my skin. One day the terror begins to erupt. At twenty I have a face full of acne. It stays with me for years, after Africa, after The Journalist.
~
I write this book from an obscure place along the journey. The narrative does not develop in a linear fashion.
I look back from a place in California, in a small café where I work for five dollars an hour. Before sunrise the streets of the Californian coastal town are wet. Men in overalls hose down the debris, the broken bottles and grotty remnants of Saturday night. In the café, I begin making the first cappuccino. I pour the white bubbles of milk foam into the muddy espresso, and stir it in, leaving golden streaks and trails through the foam. I am caught in an image of golden waving grasses in a place and time far from this one.
When the Beach Police come in for coffee I retreat to the back of the store and let someone else serve them. I am the Girl with the British accent. People think I am about sixteen. I tell some of them that I’m twenty-five and not from England at all.
Vivid images from my life begin after all this time, to emerge in the milk. I can hardly believe what I am doing; can hardly comprehend that every captured image in my life was a step towards this one. There are two books published, and others written, but I’ve had no luck for years and have become despondent. I have always kept a journal, recording events so that nothing would remain uncaptured.