In the winter of (hour discounted) 1994 - December. I unsuccessfully tendered the fable below in a short story contest.
I should have been more than willing to assign the said fable to the limbo of spurned and suppressible disasters, were it not that a "lowbray" friend of mine, with whom I share the sovereign prospect that the most noble form of artistic expression manifests itself where the subhuman extremes of the bovine and the asinine collapse into a single point, unsubtly prevailed upon me to post it in cyberspace.
Would the preceding, blinding flash of creative chaos have flummoxed the reader, then the reader has been sufficiently primed to grope through the rhapsodic thickets of the tale below.
By
John Mutambirwa
Oh! That bash? That was where my nightmarish memories started eddying through the catacombs
of time.
My eyes, ever in thrall to a casual curiosity, had idly surveyed the wall until they were irresistibly
riveted on a familiar portrait.
Out of control, the rhythmic, vital tremor in my bosom quickened into a discord of tympanic
tumult, and my kinky coiffure was regroomed into a few hundred hedgehog spines.
Then the sepulchral image of my late best friend, Tambu, brushed itself onto the canvas of
remembrance. That was Tambudzai -- "The Persecuted One"--- in his native language..........
The irrigation of the field of sorrow on my face continued unabated as my leaky eyes falteringly
surveyed the immobile facial expression -- his bequest to an immemorially unresponsive universe.
I shall long remember the limitless moments I spent in that hospital ward exploring those Lethean
banks. I could not bring myself to accept that those were Tambu's features that my dewy irises
were trying to focus on. Perhaps they were just a remote resemblance distortedly refracted by the
saline stream in which his soul calmly drifted to Limbo.
What a topology of thanatoid agony the ridges and grooves carved on his face portrayed!
I formulated unforgiving thoughts on birth's spite which had not dowered me with sufficient
rhetorical facility as well as broad intellectual and imaginative compass to navigate, comprehend
and give expression to that geography of pain.
"You have merged with the one long yesterday", I fumblingly whispered to the tortured
topography.
"One long yesterday!"-- a phrase abbreviating man's past that I had borrowed from his library of
gnomes; poignantly felicitous, now being used as threnodic farewell.
Oh yes, it was, and had been, easy for me to become a somewhat uncelebrated witling by echoing
his casual laconic mouthings.
The police (an imaginative constabulary) who had retrieved Tambu's corpse from his carbonized
apartment never made up their minds whether Tambu's igneous demise had been a case of self-immolation or mindless caprice. I did all I could, by way of acquainting them with Tambu's
biography, as best as I would recall.
I had known him for a long time, in fact since his eleventh birthday, and he had, at least to me,
been a study in marmoreal serenity. Rake them as best I could, I would not find anything in the
embers of memory to suggest that a Mount Etna had seduced Tambu with searing overtures of
lava then spat out Empedocles slipper in scorn and betrayal. By the way, it was Tambu's ceaseless
commentary on topics obscure or plain that had made me aware of that Greek's fate.
I had not always understood the things he said or did; he was as intellectually restless and broad
as he was emotionally inscrutable. The only offbeat behaviour he had ever manifested was when
he was a doctoral student at McGill University in Montreal--- How unusual of him...........
He had been toiling, in dignified, apprenticed servility, at a doctoral programme in Computer
Science in the mid-seventies (developing a compiler) when his fascination with that portrait
manifested itself.
The portrait was bounded by a perimeter of about six by five feet. It resembled a planetary system
or atomic model. A homuncle with a face that bespoke intolerable despair occupied the centre.
Just a wee over a dozen orbital paths surrounded the homuncle. A dyad of diametrically situated
faces, in each orbital path, gazed at the homuncle with expressions that registered gorgonian
malevolence from one angle and gloating contempt from another.
Tambu had been spending his leisure time with some free-spirited sorts. He told me that the
portrait had been done by "her"; that it had been a brainchild of "cannabic gnosis" and she had
given it to him because he (Tambu) was the homuncle. At the moment he was still trying to
unravel its full significance.
As to who the "her" was, he cryptically rejoined that "him" or "her" was irrelevant in this
particular case.
"I cannot abide the unbreathable odour of metafaececal speculation", I said, citing his own words.
"Touché Funda!", this, by the by, in allusion to me, "In that case, this is something more like
graphic sociology. I, however, shamefacedly confess that lately I have felt as though a pair of
nightmen, one with a shovelful of deceptively clear ideas, the other, of eternal malice, has taken
me into the horrible toils of its workplace! I am not overly enamoured of the portrait; its only
saving grace is that it is not scholarly hypocritical and it faithfully reflects the prevalent demoniac
malice."
For a brief moment, I espied in his eyes a pupillary diminution to full stops, as though the vital
telescope had been abruptly focused on his inmost regions, then he said, "These Johann
Wolfgangs and Christophers may have been more or less innocent than is popularly
acknowledged. Great ones make great errors".
I shielded my ignorance and confusion behind a steely keep of silence. Years later, I learned that
the portrait was accidentally burned when he was in Africa.
Abruptly and shockingly, Tambu quit his doctoral program. His brother frantically scurried in from New York to talk him out of this decision.
We found Tambu at the home of one of his free-spirited friends. He was in the kitchen chatting
with a woman with a pigtail - "A mermaid of indomitable eroticism. She thinks I am a kinky
Afrodisiac", he later told me. Over in the den, where an amalgam of hempen haze and odour as
well as incense had successfully competed for atmospheric supremacy, a small crowd sat drinking,
talking and occasionally dancing. Near the door of the den, a young man in his late twenties, clad
in a loud, flowing robe adorned with astral and planetary images, was talking to and gesturing
expansively at two young women. He was obviously Anglophone but he loved diluting his neat
English with a dash of French-- "Ooo! What a projection Cassandra ma petite--" "Écoutez moi
mes enfants, it is our fate..."
Tambu returned a steadfast "No!" to his brother's persuasive, sometimes tearful remonstrations
who returned, broken-spirited, to New York where he was a student.
After completing my graduate degree in 1978, I moved to Toronto. Tambu was working as a
Consultant in Montreal then. He left Montreal for our native Andwar in equatorial Africa in 1981
- so as to attain "an inner purgation". He lived there till his return in 1990............
We maintained a steady stream of correspondence while he was in Andwar--- where he occupied
a somewhat prestigious station in the Ministry of Industry and Technological Development. His
letters made me smile, chuckle and think.
He must have enjoyed taking some orphans to watch Dolly Parton in "The Bust Nibble Wow
House Intakes Us".
The same orphans prevailed upon him to watch a James Bond movie. He did not like those
movies, which he described as "sexualized propaganda". " I wonder why", he wrote, " they never
talk about 007's half-brother --003.5. It is rumoured that he did not lust very long in the
espionage business."
He must have had a poor opinion of the then reigning world heavyweight titlist whom he referred
to as "an undomesticated pyknic". When the champ demolished a Canadian challenger, which
event Tambu watched on satellite TV, he wrote, "Imagine who the winner and still wild
overweight chump is ?".
He also watched, via satellite, his favourite Redskins beat the Denver Broncos in the Superbowl -"--
The Broncos had every intention of grinding Washington into the turf, but Hart Monk and his deerly
beloved Skins would have nun of it." He also parenthetically expressed his approval of "--the Bronco foolback who dropped the ball."
No chestnuts from him. He was "jest" nuts.
In early 1990 I wrote him inquiring about the news reports we had heard concerning the
distemper in Andwar, in particular, the rumoured systematic weeding out of one of the main
tribes.
A brumous frost coated his reply, "---just an insignificant gossamer membrane separates the
upper-echelon functionary in fatigues from the one in pinstriped livery - he of the well-appointed
financial house. The ends they serve are invariably similar. The one achieves his goals through the
direct administration of violence, the other by indirectly invoking the curse of the ghouls of
starvation, despair and delayed-action-death. Both find an equal charm in functional
impersonality".
"It could be kindly surmised that these functionaries boast the same moral heroism as Macbeth,
providing, of course, that one is blest with sufficient patience and longevity to last until one hears
them cry out in anguish, 'The organization man hath murdered sleep and therefore we shall sleep
no more'".
" Well, some of us are unconsentingly tupped by a beast of ravin in our slumbers. At all events, Funda,
it is a comfort to know that some men are noble".
He also noted that he had become "inwardly uneasy" and would be coming back to Canada for
"emotional rearmament".
He did come back in the summer of 1990 and stayed with me for a couple of months until he
moved to a place of his own downtown. It was reasonably comfortable and quiet except for the
janitor whom Tambu seemed to have a jaundiced opinion of - "He is so nosy that I do not believe
he would have any difficulty distinguishing all the odorous nuances of the brimstone in the
Netherworld".
A year later he used a one way ticket to unlit Necropolis..........
A week after his death I was collecting whatever was salvageable from his charred apartment
when I overheard a voice asking the super about " the guy who got torched". I could not quite
make out the reply, but there was a time I distinctly heard the words, " --- an arrogant, brackish
half-Angel".
On my way to the elevator, I caught sight of the super in conversation with a man with a semi-grizzled head. The man was vaguely familiar but I could not recall where I had made his
acquaintance---.
Close to a year later, I accompanied two fairly close friends of mine to a party they had been
invited by an artistic director.
"Bonjour Messieurs", a voice greeted us at the door.
I gasped as I recognized the origin of the voice to be the man with greying hair I had espied in
conversation with Tambu's former Super. I looked closely at him again.
Somewhere deep in a tenebrous cavern, where the desiccated bones and carcasses of discarded
memories pile up, a faint beam of light fell upon the taxidermized shape of a young man, in a
flowing robe adorned with astral shapes, who enjoyed punctuating his conversation with Gallic phrases.
I took a few steps into the crowded room where rudeness smiled at me from the wall.
The portrait was almost similar to Tambu's, save in a few respects. It was about a foot shorter in
both length and breadth. Near the bottom right corner were pencilled in a date ("4\6\76") and,
presumably, a signature beginning with the letters "WO" with the rest of the text fading
indistinctly into the background colour. Without the brace of sinister faces, the orbital paths were
hoops of flame.
I suddenly realized that my hands had, without conscious urging, opened the front door. My wobbly legs erratically transported me down the aisle towards Oblomov's retreat.