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House of Hunger
Dambudzo Marechera
(First published 1978)
Julia was the girl who had been left in my charge when I was in the sixth. Now she had straightened out her hair with the damnable hot comb. Her lips were a flaming crimson, like blood. There were darkened patches around her eyes, and false lashes. The eyebrow pencil seemed to have completed the transformation of my old Julia into a beerhall doll. And she immediately clashed with Flash Harry by exclaiming:
‘Isn’t he the police spy whom you chaps beat up behind the dormitory?’
Harry was not at all amused.
‘You’re just a nigger whore,’ Harry flashed. ‘What do you know?’
She appealed to me.
‘Yes,’ I said yawning, ‘it’s him all right.’
‘Look sonny,’ Harry said, getting up.
‘Why don’t you run along to your goddam white chick?’ I suggested.
But Harry has got style. He drew himself to his full height and was about to position his arms akimbo when – his handcuffs once more rattled into view.
There was a dead silence for exactly seven seconds.
I used the pause to savour old Julia’s make-up; her massive breasts that were stamped by the gigantic legend of Zimbabwe. With weapons like that Africa could – my thoughts were shelled like groundnuts by Julia suddenly breaking out in the most scornful laughter I’ve ever heard. Harry cracked, and took a coal-like step towards her; but before he could actually hit her I was between them, drawing slowly upon my stub of a cigarette.
‘I’ll try one of your cigarettes now, Harry,’ I said.
I opened the packet he had given me and lit one. It was as good as he had said. All of a sudden I was a child again, enjoying myself. Mentally dancing with glee. And Julia…
‘A brandy is it, Julia?’ I coughed smoke into Harry’s face.
His Wankie face.
His eyes were glowing like live coals. He managed a little spittle of a laugh from the side of his mouth.
‘Yes,’ Harry said, ‘I’m just going to see my white chick. But I’ll be back – for you,’ he added pointedly.
It flashed through my nerves:
‘Harry, if you come back there’ll be no more fencing,’ I said.
‘Are you threatening me? There are witnesses…’
‘Barman,’ I said, ‘a brandy for the lady. And a beer for myself.’
The barman winked.
When I turned round with the drinks Harry had gone. She took the drinks and put them on the table and, eyes twinkling as of old, she threw her arms around my shoulders and brought her face close enough not to touch.
‘Hi,’ she smiled.
‘I though you were never coming,’ I said. ‘I waited and waited the whole of yesterday.’
‘I had to fight to get anything out of father,’ she said. ‘He was in one of his moods. You know how difficult he is when he is like that.’
‘Your passport?’ I whispered.
‘Sssshh.’ She kissed me lightly on the cheek and we sat down. She dipped her little finger into my drink and licked it quickly. ‘Well, what was Harry on about?’
I hesitated.
‘They must have some leads I suppose, and they’ve sent him to…’
‘But we know,’ she said slowly.
‘That picture in the newspapers,’ I reminded her without conviction.
‘They probably know I’m the weakest link in the chain,’ I added.
‘We had to feed that to them,’ she said.
I looked up sharply.
‘Did you have to tell them about my being…’
‘It was my idea,’ she said.
And her eyes were sparkling. I was staring at the legend on her breast and thinking about black heroes.
‘And did you have to paint yourself up like that?’ I demanded weakly.
Her eyes opened wider; there were stars in them. I had to change the conversation.
‘Any trouble getting through?’
She bit her lip ruefully:
‘A little,’ she said.
She was looking closely into my face.
‘I left the House of Hunger today,’ I explained vaguely.
‘What about the girl?’ she insisted.
‘Immaculate? With a name like that she’ll survive.’
‘Do you still – are you still…?’
‘I never was. You know I can’t, at least not forever. Now and then, perhaps.’
‘At least that’s honest,’ she said. Her voice was brutally sarcastic. She said:
‘You disgust me.’
My cheeks slowly rose from my boots and settled back in my face.
‘Now, Julia, what have I done wrong?’
‘You didn’t phone like you promised. And I kicked up a fuss so fierce that father said if ever he saw you again in his house he would – congratulate you.’
‘He’s daft.’
‘Why didn’t you phone?’
‘Trouble at the House,’ I sighed theatrically. ‘You know what that is.’
‘Your disinterested intervention?’
‘Yes. It backfired.’
She bit off a corner of her forefinger nail. Her eyes quickened.
She asked again:
‘What about the girl?’
‘She’s got lots of courage. But only the kind that’s the quickest way into the madhouse.’
‘You are arrogant,’ she said.
I lit her cigarette. I was watching a tiny spark of combustion pulsing in her eyes. I still held the flaming match, between my thumb and second finger.
‘You’ve never forgiven me that filthy film,’ she said.
She dabbed at her face, messing up some of the eye-shadow.
I did not bother to answer; after all I had also made one with a girl called Patricia.
‘Then why do we always…?’
‘Yes,’ I repeated pointedly, ‘why do we always quarrel?’
I still held the burning match.
Unaccountably Julia burst out laughing. Her laugh is very infectious – the barman crackled hilariously like crisp bacon frying spatteringly.
And when she raised her glass and the highlights of it flung their spears into my watery eyes my life gleamed for an instant, like a searing flash of pain.
It was Philip who had left Julia in my charge; and when we joined him at the university things had soured a little. The gist of it was Philip made a scene and declared that I was a beer-guzzling little Judas; Julia stormed out of the room to return a few seconds later wielding a broom and scared Philip to death. Whereupon I fled the campus and wandered about in the streets until I found a black night-club that was still open. There I drank heavily but something was wrong and I couldn’t get drunk. It was the place: all garish colours and lights and a band of half naked girls dressed up in leopard skins and gyrating out some coarse smanje-manje. The big man at the microphone was not so much singing as farting out in an unnatural bass voice. The walls were all plastered with advertisements for skin-lightening creams, afro wigs, Vaseline, Benson and Hedges. There was one in particular of a skin-lightened afro-girl who was nuzzling up to her coal-black boyfriend and recommending the Castle Lager. As the music boomed against the advertisements and the arse colours and lights flickered on and off I lost count of time and simply soaked myself with the stuff. I was no nearer to discovering the authentic black heroes who haunted my dreams in a far-off golden age of Black Arcadia. And then it was time to leave. I lurched out through the doors into the cold night-horrors. A taxi came to a halt. I stumbled into the back seat, mumbling where I was going. But someone, a very fat skin-lightened woman – one of the dancers – jumped into the car and sank against me smiling.
‘You want to forget?’ she whispered a gust of gin into my incredible face.
Before I could say anything she tapped the driver on the shoulder and the taxi shot off into the night. After many turns and side-turns – it seemed to me we were going round in circles – I no longer knew where on earth we were. But the taxi, slowing down, stopped before a bright blue door which was lit up by a naked light bulb. She got out first and then walked round to open my door. She paid the driver who then drove up the ill-lit street and swerved sharply out of sight. She took out a key and in a second we were taking off our coats in a narrow hallway and she was whispering something indistinct:
‘…you must be a good boy now.’
My head hurt with the sudden glare of white light. The floor was painted charcoal black but the walls were spotless white. In the far corner an effigy of Ian Smith dangled by the neck from a large butcher’s spike. She caught me smiling.
‘You want to forget?’ she asked.
I could not place her dialect but I understood her. I was sure now.
‘No," I said firmly.
‘Good.’
The lights went out.
That night all the lights I had known flashed through my mind. The pain was the sound of slivers of glass being methodically crushed in a steel vice by a fiend whose face was very like that of my old carpentry master who is now in a madhouse. The skin-lightened dancer – she was burning, burning the madness out of me. The room had taken over my mind. My hunger had become the room. There was a thick darkness where I was going. It was a prison. It was the womb. It was blood clinging closely like a swamp in the grass-matted lowlands of my life. It was a Whites Only sign on a lavatory. It was my teeth on edge – the bitter acid of it! It was the effigy swinging gently to and fro in the night of my mind. And the pain of it flared into flame, flickering like a match; for a moment it lit up the room, making the shadows of the naked dancer and me leap quickly across the ceiling and fuse into an embrace. Leaping like ecstasy grown sad – a violence slowly translating into gentleness.
But the match died out and history was the blackened twig of it. The fine grains of that burnt-out insurrection were the stories of those black heroes among whom my story was merely one more skin-lightening pain.
Is the pain of the mind greater than that of the body? The friends whose hurt looks have flung me back into living like this – little cubes of ice burning through my mind…
‘You’re burning your finger!’ Julia exclaimed.
I threw the almost burnt-out matchstick into the ashtray.
Julia had darted up to order more beer. The bitch. But I could never swear by convincement like the Quakers, though certainly a divine spark seemed to be her primum mobile. My expletives are raked out of me by a liking for blasphemy.
‘I swear because of a lack of adjectives to use,’ I said as she handed me a drink.
‘Fuck!’ she exploded casually and sat down.
For some reason I began to recount to myself trivial incidents which had left me feeling like a cat thrown without extreme unction into a deep well.
One day I had been invited to give an informal – illegal – speech to a group of vagrants. As I warmed up to my theme – I knew all the boys there, except one who throughout sat apart looking very gloomy and frowning darkly at my rhetorical effort – something clicked in my mind and I began to harangue them, trying to rouse their minds by giving them examples of heroism on the part of our nationalist guerrillas. As usual I overdid it. I realised this when I became aware of the venomous silence that had come upon my audience. The flood of political rhetoric escaped like a cloud of steam out of my crater of a mouth, leaving me dry and without words. At that point the boy who had been sitting apart stood up and advanced menacingly towards me. There was on his face no natural landmark but one twisted mark of violent intention. The boys behind him were as compact and expectant as celebrants at a particularly bloodthirsty rite. And behind them the late afternoon sky flickered and dipped, abandoning me to my unhappy fate. The rapid twilight seemed to propel the angry youth towards me. He struck me with his fists twice upon the same side of the jawbone. My spectacles, glancing off, tinkled in the grass. He struck me again, twice, on the same spot. I remember I was terrified, not so much by the pain but by the likelihood that if the Trojan traitor went on hitting me like that I would probably fall and pass out. I turned the other cheek. This time the boy was less sure of himself as he struck me again. I stared straight into his eyes and muttered something about ‘calling it a day’. But that rekindled his fury – he was hitting me the way a hailstorm destroys a garden of flowers. I could feel various pains and aches all over my body. The boys, moving closer, closed in a tight circle around us. The boy had become as wild as a man who is trying to stamp out a tiny bug which he can scarcely see. At this point a low growl wheezed among my vagrant audience. The boy paused uneasily and realised as I did that the mood of the boys had swung to my side. Like me, he had overdone it. In a moment the vagrants flung me aside and jumped on his back. The boy was instantly lost to sight in a mass of fist-flying, boot-kicking, head-butting; even his squeal of fear was rudely choked by the grunts of my saviours. The boy is now a permanent invalid; as if that was not enough, his mind from that day refused to budge in any direction and he is now also what they call an idiot. But he seems to remember the cause of his misery, because the other day he nearly beheaded my mother as she was returning from a wedding feast.
‘Life is a series of minor explosions whose echo dying out settles comfortably at the back of our minds,’ Peter said as he reviewed my sixth-form report.
I agreed reluctantly.
Peter was holding the offending report by the scruff of the neck and through it shaking me back and forth the more to emphasise my vagrancy.
Immaculate was thoughtlessly staring at the sock she was darning. I bowed my head in a vain attempt to strangle the laughter that was roaring at the back of my throat and cackling out through my ears.
Peter was looking at me the way an ugly boy inspects a sudden rash of pimples.
Finally he threw the offending report at my feet.
‘Get out of my sight!’ he shouted, like Jesus saying ‘get thee behind me, Satan’.
I was about to precipitate myself out of the room when he called me back.
There was a grim silence.
But the guillotine did not fall.
I dared to look upwards at the blade.
He threw a handful of dollars at me:
‘It’s the best report I’ve ever set my eyes on,’ he said. ‘Go and get drunk.’
I smiled, crumpling up the tinfoil of my delight.
I returned, hours later, stone sober, with a parcel under my arm. He was screwing her underneath the table. Before I could retreat Peter said crossly:
‘Come in: sit down. This is home, man. Anyone would think you’d wandered into Daniel’s lions’ den.’
I sat down still clutching my parcel. He looked pointedly at it.
‘What’s that.’
‘Some books by Robert Graves,’ I said.
He stared the way one does on discovering some shameful family secret; or the way one does when one finds out that one’s best friend is actually a murderous lunatic who has escaped from a grim and satanic institution.
I lowered my eyes first and mumbled an apology. Immaculate, still pinned under him, said:
‘Leave the boy alone, Peter.’
‘He’s my brother,’ Peter said.
And he removed the blanket that covered them. The heavy lead of my mind sank quickly into my belly. I stared. then, like a drunk in a daze, I got up, knocked a chair over and tottered towards the door. Before I knew what I was doing I was gleefully talking too myself over a beer in an African night-club some five miles away.
She finally tracked me down late that night and found me raving blind drunk. I woke up in some bed in the small hours and there was someone asleep in my arms. I lit a match. It flared for an instant upon Immaculate’s sleeping face. A blue-grey spider lay on her exposed cheek. But when I held the match closer there was nothing there, nothing but the faint outlines of a dimple.
