Charl-Pierre Naudé The mercenary
The mercenary had fought in many wars in Africa
and in a manner of speaking was well-equipped
to tell the same story from more than one side.
Not unlike some poets, metaphorically speaking.
‘It was the end of the rainy season in Mozambique,’ he said
on the high plateau where he now hunted cattle thieves.
‘Blank curtains of water would still be drawn over everything.
It had been a particularly devastating phase of the war.
Soft trunks, of the vanishing forest and of humans,
were fermenting in the dank ground and the marshes.
I was with a regular patrol on a desolate stretch
when we spotted this figure along the side of the road.
He was walking very fast, very determinedly,
tossing his palms slightly in front of his mouth
and blowing into them every now and then.
It wasn’t a particularly cold time of the year.
It looked as if he was playing with a dice
to alleviate the tediousness of a long mission.
When we drove past him he seemed to be muttering
to himself, on his knees now, oblivious to any other presence.
The war had created many strange forms of insanity ...
Then he got up and walked on, even more concertedly
only to fall to his knees again, in the distance, as I looked back.
One of the other guys on the truck hastily crossed
his heart in recognition of the fervent Hail Marys.
There are not too many ways in which to get to a destination ...
Two days later on the way back we passed him againn
several hundred kilometres north from the first time.
I wondered from how far south had he been coming.
Who was he talking to so incessantly and lovingly
in the butterfly-mirror of his hands? His first darling?
Many people had lost all their loved ones in that war.
I saw him stop dead to cradle the air in his palms, maybe
a small animal I thought, a hamster, first in his crotch
then in an armpit, against a sudden flaring of the breeze.
I went up closer, to where he was sitting at a crossroad.
Almost there, almost there, I could hear him whispering
into his cupped hands. I know a bit of the language.
He looked quite frightened when he saw me next to him.
The locals avoid any soldiers and don’t talk to them.
The others stayed inside the vehicle, smirking at this madman.
I asked him to show me what he was holding.
He stretched out his caloussed palms reluctantly. It was an ember.
The ravaged little village he came from had no heat
and he was chosen to walk four hundred kilometres to fetch it,
braving bullets and risking his life to scoop the carbon-winged fledgling
from a fallen frieze in a church that had just been bombarded.
Night time he would rest, make a fire; next morning
set out again with a tray of coals on an iron sheet,
ending his journey each night blowing on a single ember.
This he told me in a fearful and confessional tone,
with slain eyes, as if I were interrogating him.
And I pictured him sleeping half awake, curled up
next to his breathing little charge swaddled in her own glow,
completely in love with this freight of light bones, in her nightdress of ire.
I wished this man good luck, gave his shoulder a press
while he blew into his hands again fanning on
the small goddess, his precious pet, Prometheus’ Fire.’
Engelstalige bewerking door de auteur van
die Onbaatsugtige
© 2001 Charl-Pierre Naudé / De Gekooide Roos
Over Charl-Pierre Naudé
NOTES TOWARDS A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
I was born end 1958 in a small town in the heartland of the Eastern Cape — a half-fish with a
sixties hairstyle, two years too early. I suppose I could not wait to argue with my parents.
I grew up in East London, a wind-swept coastal town built on the bones of the
Xhosa empire and the broken dreams of the Great Depression — and prone to religious revivals,
which didn't seem to help.
I went to Stellenbosch University to study Philosophy and Classics, then spent
the eighties "underground" running away from the South African Defence Force that kept on calling
me up to fight a civil war — not an unusual fate for someone of my generation in South Africa. Die
Nomadiese Oomblik was published by Tafelberg in 1995 — and awarded the Ingrid Jonker Prize in
1997.
I was made a poet by the melancholic ambiguity of Cape Town and the Eastern
Cape. But Is came to Johannesburg at the beginning of the nineties to be swept away by the current
of change and to be poisoned by all the metals in the ground here. As a journalist I made a name
of sorts as film analyst.
Being a poet in a country with nine languages and several immigrant ones while
half of the population cannot read, is like putting holy communion on the tongues of a many-headed
monster, with one small piece of bread. Already I have only one hand left. It is this hand I call
Afrikaans, no matter how much it changes.