From: hornpete@uctvax.uct.ac.za (Peter Horn)
Newsgroups: alt.prose
Subject: A Ritual in the Kloof (Story)
Date: 30 Sep 92 17:29:14 +0200
Organization: University of Cape Town

A Ritual in the Kloof
As he stepped from the train at the little station among the vineyards, with
the typical insolence of the adolescent, and looked around, he didn't see the
car of his father. He carried the bag over his shoulder and the suitcase across
the platform and past the little station-master's house to the dusty circle in
front of the station. Then he waited. The sun burned down from the implacably
blue sky, and there was no shade anywhere near. finally he sat on the stairs of
the station-master's house.
Thinking vaguely of Cape Town and the boarding school, he stared down the road.
As the loneliness of the space invaded him, he felt as if he had sat here many
times before, as if sitting and waiting was what his life was about, and as if
there would not be anything new ever, and as if he would have to live this over
and over again. He was afraid of losing his life in this way, being banished to
a dusty little railway station somewhere in the Boland, waiting for old age,
suffering, disease and death. He was painfully aware of something else, which
for lack of a word he called perfection. He thought of it as being able to do
everything he felt himself capable of, thinking interesting ideas, making love,
enjoying life, enjoying the power and precision of his body and his mind. Like
the sailing boat of his friend's father in False Bay, bending over in the
Southeaster, running into wind, climbing and rolling over the waves, a perfect
machine, and the hands of Max's father on the tiller, the certainty that the
boat would not tilt and be buried in the water. But that was not here. Here was
only a dusty road, empty.
When the car did not come, he took his suitcase, knocked the station master's
door, and asked whether he could leave the suitcase here, for his father to
fetch when he came into the dorp. Then he slung his bag over his shoulder again
and walked across to the village and along the main road into the open fields
and the vineyards towards the farm. There were few people on the road, an
occasional car with a cloud of dust trailing after it, a few dark-skinned
children walking to town, or back to the farm, an old man, a fat woman, her
breasts rolling under the bright red dress.
It was a two hour walk, and he still hoped that his father would come with the
car, but the road remained empty and hot. He got thirsty, but there was no
water anywhere along the road. All the little streams only ran in winter, when
it rained. As he plodded along the verses he had had to learn off by heart for
his last Latin test went through his head and he repeated them as if in a
dream:
Ut redit, simulacra sua petit ille puellae
Incumbensque toro dedit oscula1
The pictures  of the nude marble goddess in his Latin book, which he stared at
for hours, never came alive to throw her limbs around his aching body. He had
to hallucinate a face, a body, an embodiment of his strong feeling when he was
in his bed, to caress it, and to be caressed by it, and as he walked he
conjured up this body again, made it move, naked, next to him along the road,
embracing him from time to time, enticing him to follow her into the vineyards
where she promised to do his bidding unseen, hidden in the vine leaves, she
would crown his head with a wreath of vine, he would be her hero, she would be
his, yes, his, entirely, he could take her and do with her as he liked. Finally
he gave in to her seductive voice and followed her a few metres among the thick
green of the vines, and as she grabbed his life, he suddenly knew all the words
which one must speak to a naked woman,  who picks one up as one walks along a
country road, naked, it was the perfect love, hermaphroditic, she and he were
one, locked into each other, and she understood perfectly every movement of his
body and moved with him, when he embraced her, he embraced himself, and as he
went down on his knees, he experienced this wild love, which took hold of his
body and shook it until he reached one glorious explosion, stars shattered his
brains, and then after the happiness had been drained from him, and his hand
stopped moving, he found himself on the brown earth among the vines, all alone,
his trousers hanging above his knees, and his knees dirty from the soil of the
vineyard. He knew that he would experience this many more times, this sudden
let-down, and that there will be nothing new in it. But he felt too weak to
curse this emptyness. He felt crushed and lonely. To think that he would have
to do this once more and innumerable times more filled him with despair. If you
desire, but do not act, you breed a kind of pestilence. He was groping for an
understanding of what was happening to him, but for some time all words escaped
him. Then he knew: exuberance was the word he was looking for, there was no
exuberance. There was too much sameness. There is no reason in what happens, no
love in what will happen to you. Sometimes he had felt that thinking was an
exquisite delight and he could not understand those of his schoolmates who
never seemed to think. They seemed empty and bloated to him. But now he felt
that all this thinking was a burden, and he wanted to live in thoughtless
ignorance.
He resumed his walk home, dazed, he nearly forgot to pick up his bag, singing a
love song he had heard on the radio - On the island of my desire - squinting
into the burning sun, nearly blinded (he had heard somewhere that masturbation
makes you blind, but he no longer believed this). As he walked aimlessly, he
felt in himself a great freedom. A freedom from any convictions. He felt that
he was able to see freely, whereas before he had been blinkered, like his
father who had all kinds of principles and convictions. What is the difference
between a conviction and a lie? He began to understand that the most common lie
is when one lies to oneself. When one does not wish to see what one does see.
Belonging to a gang or a group or a church or a party forces one to lie.
When he reached home, his mother stood on the stoep and cried, Franz, I thought
you would come tomorrow, Alfred, Alfred, she shouted, look here, Franz is home
already. So he had had to walk through the heat and the dust, all this way,
simply because of a silly misunderstanding. He hated his mother, her
scatterbrained inefficiency. Then he could see she was feeling sorry for him,
because he had had to walk all this way, and his eyes followed her as she
brought a bottle of Oros and water and poured him a cool drink.
Can I have some ice, he asked. He craved the clean, cold feel of an ice cube on
this tongue, but his mother said that ice is dangerous if one is as hot as he
was from the walk and that he should first drink the cool drink. She was always
full of such stupid precepts, he knew better, because he had ice after cricket,
when he was even hotter than now, at the school, and nothing happened to him,
just the wonderful feeling of the cold clear ice on his tongue. Later his
father went to fetch the suitcase in the car.
The first few days at home he spent on his bicycle, exploring the
neighbourhood, looking for the girls, who, however, were under strict control,
and not allowed so much as to speak to him. Only at the farm dam in the valley,
when they came to swim in the afternoon in their tightly fitting swim-suits,
emphasizing their developing breasts, did he occasionally get near to one, but
there were always the others, watching, and there was no way that one could be
separated from the crowd. When they had dressed in the bushes and walked away,
it seemed to him impossible to ever touch these strange apparitions in their
light skirts which sometimes against the sun revealed the shadowy legs,
confirming that they, too, were not essentially different from him, that they,
too, bifurcated below the tummy, and that they, too, must have something, a
dark secret between their legs. But they always escaped him with their giggling
voices, and disappeared down the road into the far off shadows of the trees. So
he sat many hours somewhere in the thicket, dreaming of these apparitions and
their bodies and of what he would do with them, if only he got one here amongst
the bushes. But none ever came to interrupt his dreams.
The time when he had believed that the white sticky substance that flowed from
his painfully stiff penis was the sign of some illness, was past. So was the
time when he fought his "dirty" thoughts whenever his cock raised its head and
forced him into a toilet to make it docile again or the "vile" images which
flooded his brain as he dozed off to sleep, with a firm grip on his dick. The
tension and the wonderful flightlike release when the white stuff poured out of
him had long since got the better of him, and while there was a certain shame
attached to these acts, performed in secret places, the lust was more immediate
and won out every time against the injunctions of his conscience which had been
formed by half-understood biblical stories about Onan and Sodom and Gomorrha,
which to him sounded like gonorrhea. He had for some time now begun to despise
the words which were poured into them every morning in chapel, and the word
which he hated most was chastity. It was all a lie. He didn't believe that
anybody he knew was chaste. Somewhere in the dark, in beds, in sheds, hidden
from sight, they all indulged in the pleasure. Sometimes as he dozed off to
sleep he felt the world filled with writhing and heaving bodies caught in their
tensions and delight, grinning and moaning. Then he cried out and went to the
bathroom and took a cold shower. But the images never left him. Not only
people, but animals, everything was involved in this strange and exciting dance
to reproduce itself. Pain is not the opposite of joy. There is a joy which
consists of a rhythm of stimulations of displeasure. He was not certain what
happiness meant. He understood that this was nature. Not the beautiful
postcards of Cape Point, but the straining and fighting and fucking and
multiplying. He even had developed a ritual, where he would kneel in the
thickets of the mountainside and dig a hole into the hard earth, symbolizing
the release he desired but did not dare to contemplate, and then, it was like
praying to a long forgotten female earth deity, water the earth with his seed. 
Sometime, as he walked across the farm, he met the children of the farm
workers. They had grown up together, but since he had gone to Cape Town, there
was a distance between them. They still said hullo, and asked him, how it was
in Cape Town, and whether he had to learn a lot, but the conversation was
monosyllabic. There was one girl, called Hanna, who he had thought to be very
beautiful, when he was younger, and when he met her, he was shy, but she
laughed, and said, so, you are having many of these white girls now, you no
longer care for your Hanna, do you?
He said, no, that's not true. No, Hanna. No, I am just too busy learning.
Don't lie to me, she answered. I can see, you think of girls all the time.
But he was shy, and did not know what to make of her words, and he was confused
that she could see right through to his hidden thoughts, and he blushed. At
that she laughed even louder, mockingly and ran away.
When he was in the bush, he now often dreamed of her without her dress, and he
took off her panties and her bra, too. But then she always laughed at him, and
he could not do it. Even in the dream. For a few days he slouched around the
huts where the farm workers lived, but when he saw her, she was with another of
the farmworkers' s boys, Mark, and she did not even seem to notice him. So, he
did not go back there. It was useless anyway, he could never marry a Coloured.
He even heard that if you got caught fucking them, you could get jailed. He
deliberately thought this strong word, which he heard other boys using at
school, and believed that he was very brave thinking it. There was a farmer in
a nearby valley, he had been taken in by the police one day, and there were
rumours among the boys that he had done it with the daughter of one of his
workers. But he still regretted that he hadn't tried something with Hanna, when
she talked to him. He had a vague idea that that would have been a heroic
defiance of an injust law. In his school they were all against apartheid, it
was a church school, but he wasn't sure whether they would have supported him,
had he been caught with Hanna. They were anti-apartheid, but they were also
anti-sex.
Two weeks into the vacation he met Lourens van Tonder, the son of the cafe
owner in the main street. 
You are coming tomorrow? Lourens asked perfunctorily.
To what? he asked.
The testing, Lourens answered.
The testing?
Yeah, the testing, don't you know about it?
No, he said. What testing? What do you test?
Well, if you are a man, or so.
He had heard this often: We will see whether you are a man. and then they had
subjected him to all kinds of painful experiences. Rugby, mountain climbing,
running a hundred meters. Make you tough. He hated it when others were trying
to make a man out of him.
So he asked: And how does that work?
You'll see. Be at the farm dam Sunday afternoon.
When he got there, there were about ten fourteen year olds, he knew most of
them, he had gone to the village school with them, and saw them on and off
since he was in boarding school when he was home for vacations. They stood
around in their dirty shirts and shorts, with their knobbly knees, and felt ill
at ease. Then came Fisher, and motioned them to follow him into the thicket
which covered the kloof above the dam. They walked for about fifteen minutes,
in silence. Then they came to a small clearing.
O.K., said Fisher, lets see who are the men and who are the boys among you.
They all looked at him expectantly.
Take off your pants, you sissies, he laughed, lets see what you got.
They stood around, not knowing what to do, some blushing, all silent, avoiding
to look into each others eyes.
Well, are you all still pissing and shitting in your pants? Come on, don't be
shy. This is where you have to show it.
Eventually, they all took off their shorts and shirts and their underpants and
stood around naked, embarrassed. Lanky and gangling, their arms much too long,
their knees much too thick for their bodies, they showed the grotesque
disproportion of the pubescent. Most of them showed some desultory growth of
hair above their penis. 
He felt alone, alien, uncomfortable. He was thinking: It is a disease, this bad
conscience. But perhaps it is necessary. Perhaps one cannot become aware of the
beautiful and the good, if one is not aware of the ugly and the evil. He
thought vaguely, that the evil was not having sex, but being part of this
group, being forced to do it, having to prove that one is a man. Yet, he wanted
nothing to be different, even if it hurt. Nothing that is may be subtracted,
nothing in life can be thrown away. 
Then he remembered the word ritual. That is what it was, a ritual. The strange
ritual of an exotic tribe.
O.K., said Fisher, now do it. You first, Hans. He laughed: you know, what you
do every night in your bed.
Hans asked - Why me? - but then looked vacantly into the bushes, started to tug
at his penis, rubbing it, faster, his knees slightly bent, until the white
semen ran over his fingers. Then the others formed a tight circle, and one
after the other jerked off, while the others watched. Most of them took a
minute or less. Only de Rust worked and worked like mad, the others shouted
encouragements, his face grew red, his dick was swollen and looked sore, and
then he produced a few drops of the white substance, which excited them all so
much. 
Finally it was his turn. A few movements from the wrist, and his cock stood
straight and his glans gained its full dark purple colour. He jerked off twice.
Hardly had he squirted the first full load white across the dark humus, when he
started again. After a short time he splashed the same white load on top of the
other which by now had dried up and seeped into the ground. The others laughed
nervously, and applauded. 
Fisher said: I wouldn't have thought you could do this. You always look so ...
well, prissy. 
He hit Fisher with a hard fist, and Fisher looked at him incredulously, before
he fought back. Things do not behave regularly, there are no things, there are
no rules, there is no one-after-another. They rolled, naked on the black
ground, punching and hitting furiously, while their genitals dangled and
touched in a wild dance, and he kept thinking, why do I do this, what is this
all about, Fisher screaming all the time, well, you are a sissy, but we are
going to teach you, we are going to teach you, we are going to make a man of
you yet. You bloody bookworm, you nerd, you think you can fuck us, screw us,
look down on us, you, you... you wanker! Pain, too, is a kind of joy. 
In the end, the others separated them, and they all raced through the thicket,
their clothes in their hands, across to the farm dam, still naked, and jumped
into the ice-cold slightly dirty water. As he dived down into the dark depth of
the dam, he washed off the afternoon's activities, he heard his breath escaping
from his mouth, gurgling upwards towards the light, and he returned to the
greenish brilliance broken like shards. He thought: I do not want to be
mistaken, I do not want to be confused with them, even when I cannot escape
them, even when I swim with them in this slimy farm dam. He somehow knew he was
different from them, but he could not formulate, how. When he rose out of the
water, he saw Fisher swimming towards him, grinning. He started to crawl, and
escaped to the bank, raced towards the trees and grabbed his clothes, ran into
the thicket, but Fisher had lost interest, had jumped into the dam again, so he
could dress and walk away from the noise of the boys in the water.
That night he dreamt of Fisher hunting him through the trees, they were both
naked as they had been in the afternoon, naked they climbed the trees, in a
hurried, febrile nakedness, squirting their seed into the rough bark of the
trees, then Fisher started embracing him, and then mounting him, like he had
seen a dog mount a bitch, screaming all the time, well, you are prissy, but we
are going to teach you, we are going to teach you. You bloody bookworm, you
think you can despise us, look down on us, you, you, and then he hit on the
right phrase, he must have heard it somewhere, you, you, you bloody
intellectual!

-- 
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Peter Horn 
German Department, UCT 
43 Trevor Road, Lansdowne 7764, Cape, Republic of  South Africa . 
Phone Home ZA-(021)696-1983		e-Mail: HORNPETE@UCTVAX.UCT.AC.ZA 
      Work ZA-(021)650-2936		Fax ZA-(021) 650-3726 
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Peter Horn, Walking through our sleep (Poems), Ravan Press 1974
Peter Horn, Poems 1964-1989, Ravan Press 1991
Peter Horn, An Axe in the Ice (Poems), COSAW Publishing House 
forthcoming September/October 1992
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Ravan Press, P.O.Box 31134, Braamfontein 2017, Republic of South Africa
COSAW Publishing House, P.O.Box 421007, Fordsburg 2033, Republic of 
South Africa.
USA: Ohio University Press Fax (614) 593-4536
Britain: Central Books, Fax (71) 378-1811
Australia: New Era Books, Fax (02) 596-0045
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