Charl-Pierre Naudé Vampires
Vampires in Malawi, the newspaper reports.
Even the president issues a statement:
“Show me a vampire, and I’ll lock him up in jail!”
But who needs proof, if corpses prove everything?
A girl of about eighteen, sucked dry and stiff
like a branch, found with two slaughter marks in her neck;
her hands unnaturally large and bony
like falcon wings on her wide-eyed breasts.
And the headman’s son, spine snapped in the breech
against a ploughshare, when no one looked —
his dangly legs clasping the udder of his phallus,
and not a drop of blood in the rest of him!
Three army jeeps from Lilongwe rush to the scene
in a small town, three others to an emergency zone:
to stand sentry at night, but in vain.
The vampires sneak through, more corpses in the morning;
some without marks, just a pubis that bulges
like new bananas, or an abdomen arched in animal terror.
“Where are the corpses?” asks the circuit commissioner.
They all get buried promptly, as a rite of exorcism,
the priest whispers and crosses himself in haste.
The soldiers confirm events, some of them die too.
One on guard duty collapsed in his boots,
arms twined around his rifle like a vine
or a snake, around the caduseus of medicine.
Even the UNAIDS clinic gets targetted overnight.
“It sleeps it my blood, the full length of my body!”
someone says, to bolt the doors or nail up the apertures
is not enough, vampires walk through walls.
Vampires: some without teeth, but with syringes;
they draw blood and make off with their loads in plastic bags.
The folk are getting used to things, an aid worker says;
they even look forward to it, with a growing desire.
She descends on my roof at night and squats there naked, says a man;
from beneath I can see that leopardskin purse
in her crotch, thróúgh the corrugated iron …
“She awaits her moment, and I wait for her.”
A graveyard with candles flickers like a birthday cake.
A wedding, but only one stands in front of the pulpit:
a skeleton of a girl up to her ears in love
with hér vampire, a bridegroom in absentia.
More and more lanterns roam without walkers;
a village comprises only a dog, but someone feeds it at night.
Whisperings drift: “cannot wait” and “why tomorrow …”
while gleaming youngsters dance in a town hall
like masks on sticks in a very old carnival.
And as in far-off northern parts,
where the people enter long seasons of darkness,
life continues,
in the realm of phantoms.
During early 2003 several reports appeared in newspapers about
communities in Malawi who claimed they were being “attacked
by vampires”. These “vampires” differed from the
classical variety in an important aspect: they would, in many
instances, have the same modus operandi as medical personnel:
draw blood form “their victims with syringes”, and
“walk away with it”. It was further significant that a
prime target of the vampires was a UN Aids clinic.
© 2003 Charl-Pierre Naudé / De Gekooide Roos
Over Charl-Pierre Naudé
Charl-Pierre Naude is 'n joernalis, skrywer en digter van Johannesburg, Suid-Afrika.Charl-Pierre Naude is journalist, schrijver en dichter uit Johannesburg, Zuid-Afrika.