Small Circle of Beings (2 page)

My mother is mad. This condition beset her one day, one evening, as she went about her existence with the calm of habit. Or so it seemed to me. Actually – as I was told afterward by the
doctor who treated her – her madness advanced on her by the slowest degrees. It took over her mind, the doctor said, bit by bit, but became evident to those around her only when it passed a
certain point. That point was reached one evening, when at the supper table she picked up her plate and hurled it with startling force against the far wall. It was still full of food, which sprayed
out in intricate patterns across the floor. There were guests present, one of whom was myself (I had left home already and was living alone in town), and we sat in amazed silence and stared at her
where she stood, napkin in hand. Oh, she was a beautiful woman, my mother, even then: a serene figure, with a wooden face that belonged on the prow of a ship. She smiled.

‘It was poisoned,’ she said.

She has lost that beauty since then. For a time she continued to live alone in this too-huge house, managing affairs with reasonable competence. But it became increasingly clear that events had
fallen beyond her grasp. When she’d spoken of poison, she was referring not to her food, but to her daily existence in this lonely house on the hill.

People were out to get her, she told me (on my regular visits from my little flat in town). Old friends desired her wealth. Murderers lurked beneath the bed. She wept at night. I knew my duty
and I faced it with bitter calm. There was nothing I wanted more than for her to die and vanish. Nevertheless, I packed up my belongings and, in a single day, moved back here, to the home in which
I’d grown up and which I’d left for ever just two short years before. I looked after her. I cared for her as completely as I had any of the flowers in the garden outside, and she wilted
as quickly at my touch. The madness progressed. I observed its daily triumph as the things on which she’d once prided herself began to go bad. Her frosty, backswept hair went unbrushed and
unwashed. Her long, thin nails, painted grey, were bitten to the quick. Her jewellery and dresses, boxes and cupboards of them, were untouched; she wore a single slacksuit, blue at first, but
growing darker and darker as it was left dirty. Her body, too, decayed: that skin, with its lustre, its high silver sheen, became cracked and loose, as if it were the covering of some larger
mysterious creature beneath that was trying to break out. She smells, I hate to say; when she comes near to me, I have to breathe through my mouth. And, wherever she goes, she is followed by a
decrepit, tattered poodle, blind in one eye and lame in two legs, that totters behind her like a diminutive parody. This dog was once a pampered, powdered beast, tied up with ribbons; it was the
object of her most absurd affection. It cannot understand its own demise any more than hers, but limps around in the hope, I suppose, that its day will return.

(There is an irony that does not escape me: all that most angered me about my mother when I was young has decayed now, and is the source of my greatest shame.)

All this simply to explain: Moses is a servant as old as this house. He worked here when my mother was a child and being raised by
her
mother. There is – how, I do not know, but
there is – a pact between Moses and the mad old woman that will defy my wants. I cannot get rid of him. It would break my mother’s heart. On the days that he doesn’t come in,
Sundays or other holidays, she is almost beside herself. She wanders about the lawn, calling to him in a voice as strained and thin as the cry of a bird.

So I endure this man. From the time that he arrives in the morning I have little trouble from my mother, who stays close to him in order to keep an eye. Even when she doesn’t follow him
around, she hangs about the window of her back room and peers out at him through the curtains. She lives back here, in a separate flatlet once used to house guests. She moved there when I married
Stephen, shortly after I returned home. She hates my husband. I think she always did, even before her madness took command. Why I cannot say; he’s always been good to her. But he evokes in
her an irrational response that leads her to make up extraordinary tales. Often she has taken me aside with an air of grim frenzy, and warned me that Stephen is plotting to kill me. She has seen
him, she says, mixing poisons in the kitchen while I’m out. A few times she has seen him paying Salome to stab me.

All of this I hear with amusement, and fear. Her thoughts are insane, but they are based on fact: Stephen mixes drinks in the kitchen, he gives Salome her wages. This is the form of my
mother’s madness: it distorts the meaning of what she sees.

But I pity her her mind. What terrible visions she must have when the wind moves the leaves outside her window at night. Certain sights appal her. She cannot bear it, for instance, when Moses
mows the lawn. For some inexplicable reason, probably least known to herself, Moses pushing the mower causes her great distress. For this I have found a bizarre solution: for the past three years
now this chore has been done under cover of darkness. Every few weeks, on a night with a clear moon, Moses mows the lawn. It is, you may well believe, a strange and wonderful sight: the squat black
man gliding across the moonlit lawn. While my mother, unsuspecting, sits in her room and dreams.

I did not wish to raise the subject of my mother now, and have discussed her in far greater depth than I in tended, but there is another thing that must be said, if only in passing. I have been
told by the doctor who treated her that her madness is not entirely explicable. He suspects, however, that it is a hereditary thing. I think at once of my mother’s sister, my aunt, whom I did
not know well, but who is, I believe, in an institution somewhere. And so confirm this doctor’s veiled warning, if only in my own mind: I too shall be mad. There will come a time in my life
when, unbeknown to myself, my comprehension of events will begin to change in subtle ways. I will fail to grasp the true significance of words. People will threaten me, will plan my downfall behind
my back. The thought of this is terrible to me: I cry. Stephen tries to comfort me, but there is nothing he can really say. If this will happen, it will happen despite my will.

I have by now, of course, accepted the idea. At times it seems an interesting notion: to endure the shrinking of my brain until my world is an acre of lawn and two dirty rooms. Who will care for
me then? Stephen, perhaps? Or David? It’s possible even that Moses will relent and take me under his wing. Perhaps I will reach a reconciliation with my mother, and we will sit and drink tea
together, cackling to ourselves, while the lawn is being mowed outside. At other times the idea repulses me: I think of myself as she is now, and feel ill. I want to wash, I want to change my
clothes. I want to be seen as a person with pride.

To protect myself from this eventuality, I guard my thoughts. I constantly test what I believe, asking myself: can this be true?’ Is this so? In such a manner do I hope to put off what may
be inevitable. But, for now, I am safe.

So there are, in fact, the six of us: Stephen, David, my mother and I. Salome and Moses. Between us we see to the running of the house. We maintain relations. We keep things safe.

This is the way it is.

By the time Stephen gets home in the late afternoon, I have put David to bed. He’s been complaining that the pain has returned. The Disprin that I gave him has failed to work. He
doesn’t feel hot to me, but there is no reason to disbelieve him. I sit by him in the bed and read to him. Later he falls asleep. When I hear the noise of the bakkie outside, I get up and go
out.

Stephen stands on the back lawn outside the garage.

‘David is ill,’ I tell him.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘I don’t think it’s serious. Don’t look now, but my mother is watching.’

He does look. She is crouched at her window, staring out from beneath a lifted corner of the curtain. As our eyes meet hers, the curtain falls.

I put my arm about him. Together we go inside.

A cry in the night. Perhaps I have been waiting for it: I am instantly awake and fumbling for my gown. I wrap myself in it, and stumble barefooted across the wooden boards to
David’s room. He’s sitting up in bed, the sheets thrown aside.

The pain, he says, is still there.

I sit by him and murmur to him till he falls asleep. This takes a long time; he whimpers to himself, he bleats. I stroke his head with a rhythmical hand, back and forth. Eventually he subsides
into the pillows. His head falls aside, distilling his dreams.

In the morning he seems to be all right. The pain is gone. I help him dress for school (though he’s old enough to do this for himself). As he and Stephen drive off I stand at the window
and watch them go. David looks up and I shrink back where he cannot see me.

When I fetch David from school after lunch, he’s waiting for me on the curb, his chin on his knees. I haven’t been thinking about it, but as we drive back up the long dust road, I
say to him: ‘How is the pain?’

‘Gone,’ he says. He seems preoccupied and I don’t question him further.

It’s later, after he’s eaten, that he says, looking at me over the table: ‘Red came out.’

‘What?’ I say.

He tells me. In the cloakroom at break, as he stood at the urinal, a stream of red came from his body. What frightened him more was the reaction of the other boys. The row of them along the
trough, as they saw the bright flow pass by their feet, turned their heads one by one to look at David. He recalls with vague alarm the faces turned toward him, staring with open mouths.

‘They
watched
,’ he says.

I feel a rush of pity for him, this little boy who contrived by means beyond his control to piss blood.

‘Did it hurt?’ I say.

‘It burned,’ he says. ‘A little bit.’

Something is wrong. I take David that same afternoon to see the doctor. Because I don’t know another, we consult the same doctor who treated my mother. It’s been a long time since I
saw him last, but he hasn’t changed much.

He’s a little man whose body is made up of circles. He has round cheeks, a bald head, and two perfectly round eyes behind round spectacles. His name is Doctor Bouch. He makes David undress
and lie on the table. Then he proceeds to examine him, going over the surface of his body with the soft tips of his fingers and the cold steel ends of his instruments. As I stand by, watching,
clutching my handbag to my stomach, I catch David’s eye and smile. He doesn’t smile back.

When he has finished, Dr Bouch tells me that he can find nothing wrong. ‘It happens,’ he says, ‘from time to time.’ People pass blood in their water. The pain, he says,
‘could be anything’. But it’s likely to be minor. I am to call again if it comes back. Before we go, Dr Bouch smiles broadly and asks after my mother.

There is nothing to be done. Life goes on. I accept with relief Dr Bouch’s pronouncement on the health of my son, and we return home. In the day to day living on the farm, there is much to
be seen to. From the time that David and Stephen leave in the mornings, I am busy with tasks in and about the house. I don’t know that Stephen can understand the countless little labours that
go into maintaining our existence in this place. Every day, with the help of Salome, there is washing and dusting to be done. Armed with cloths, brushes, mops and water, we apply ourselves to the
surfaces about us. We scour them clean of the dirt that, grain by grain, invades us from outside. I have a large collection of silverware that I clean each day. I wipe and polish trays and beakers
until my face shines back at me. I smile at my reflection.

It’s not a remarkable face. When I was younger I used to wish for features that were interesting, if not beautiful. But there is something bland in my appearance, as though I have not
lived deeply enough. My mouth is straight. My eyes are brown. My hair is also brown, brushed back straight from my forehead and tucked behind my ears. I don’t like to wear makeup; it hardly
seems necessary up here, so far from anyone else. When I have to go into town to do shopping or pay bills, I usually do put a little colour into my face. I touch up my lips, redden my cheeks.

These occasions please Stephen. On the evenings of these days he looks at me and says, ‘There now. Why can’t you look like that every day?’

‘For you?’ I say.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘For me. When I first met you, you used to wear makeup every day.’

This is true. There was a time in my life when I took pride in things like this: I covered my face in powders and oils. I dabbed scent on my wrists and on the back of my neck. I wore long
dresses and high-heeled shoes. I was conscious, you could say, of the way I appeared.

But here, in my house in the hills, I seem somehow to have lost myself. I wear flat shoes. I wear old dresses and aprons. In my battle with the dust, I put on the armour of housewives. There are
times when I am frightened of myself. I take off my clothes and stand before the mirror. I scrutinise my body, examining my sagging flesh. Gravity has had its effect. As I grow farther and farther
from my birth, my body succumbs to the pull of the earth. It melts from my bones and begins to drip and ooze downward under my clothes.

Can this be pleasant for Stephen, I wonder? Does he look at me sometimes and see, as I do, the dowdy little woman I have become? Am I unpleasant for him?

When I worry in this way, I make an effort for him. There are nights, yes, when I dress up in pretty clothes, when I paint my face the way he wants me to do. I put on stockings. I pin up my hair
and am, if only for a few hours, the girl he met ten years ago. I am once again Miss Roper, the laughing schoolteacher who somehow seduced him. But there is something false about these evenings, no
matter how much he claims to like them. It is as if I am only dressing up, as if I’m putting on a costume in which I no longer belong.

There is, you see, something about the place in which we live that makes pretension impossible. Stephen spends his day in town, in the little office at school where he is headmaster. He cannot
know, as I do, the rigours of a life removed. I am far from town. I see few people, other than those I have described. I live, as it were, with necessities. There is no need for makeup or special
clothes. There is no one to impress.