Beautiful Screaming of Pigs

THE BEAUTIFUL SCREAMING OF PIGS

Damon Galgut was born in Pretoria in 1963 and now lives in Cape Town. He wrote his first novel,
A Sinless Season
, when he was seventeen years old. His other books
include
Small Circle of Beings
,
The Quarry
and, in 2003,
The Good Doctor
, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the International
Dublin IMPAC Literary Award.

First published by Scribners, Great Britain 1991
Published in Abacus by Little, Brown and Company 1992
Revised edition published by Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd 2005

This paperback edition published by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd, in 2006.

Copyright © Damon Galgut 1988, 2005

The moral right of Damon Galgut to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

Extract from
Ajax
by Sophocles and translated by Robert Auletta used with kind permission of the International Theatre Bookshop.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

1 84354 462 8
eISBN 978 0 85789 173 0

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Author’s Note

This book has troubled me since it was first published in 1991. The rhythms of the language have always sounded discordant on my ear. It has been many years since it was last
in print, but now that it is being reissued, I have taken the opportunity to rework it. It is not a new book, but it’s not quite the old one either.

A bit of historical background is perhaps in order. At the end of World War I, the German colony of South West Africa was placed under South African mandate. Later, South
Africa refused to hand it over to the United Nations, choosing instead to fight a long and bloody war with the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). In 1989, under the interim
control of the United Nations Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG), South West Africa held its first free elections.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

We came down the drive. The headlights picked out the house, the garage, the silent, patient figure in front.

‘Oh yes,’ said my mother. ‘There she is. Waiting for us. She’s always waiting. Like the sphinx.’

‘Mom,’ I said.

She came forward to welcome us. Diminutive, dour, she was wearing the same soiled apron I remembered from every previous visit. It was two years since I’d last been here.

She came to me first. ‘Patrick,’ she said. She held me by the shoulders.

‘Hello,
Ouma
,’ I said.

Then she went to my mother. They embraced cautiously, with tender hostility, in the wash of light from the car. The engine was still running.

I was given the room in the attic, where the roof sloped down. I had always slept here, since I was a small boy, in the days and days I’d stayed on this farm, when my
mother still loved my father.

I unpacked my clothes, though it wasn’t necessary to do so: we were leaving again the next day. But for some reason the orderly routine, as well as the friction of fingers on cloth, was
comforting to me. I sorted and stashed my clothes into drawers and pushed them carefully closed. Then I sat on the bed, staring out the window, to where the last of the sunlight was fading. It gave
me a small shock when I turned to see my mother watching me from the doorway, her arms folded across her chest. I didn’t know how long she’d been there.

‘You gave me a fright,’ I told her.

‘Sorry. I thought you knew I was here. Do you want a pill?’

‘No. Thank you.’

‘Supper’s almost ready.’

‘I’ll be there,’ I said. ‘I’m coming now.’

But she didn’t go. She stayed there, watching me.

We sat in the dining room, my grandmother, mother, myself. We ate in silence, our iron spoons dashing the plates, and I kept my gaze fixed downwards, on the surface of the
table in front of me. There were burn marks and scratches and stains in the wood, a whole history of damage. A chill was coming up from the slate floor, like the presence of the house added to our
own.

Ouma
sat at the head of the table, in the place she’d occupied ever since her husband had died a couple of years ago. Whenever she needed anything she would lean forward and ring a
heavy metal bell with a shake of her wrist; the surprisingly delicate note it gave off summoned a black woman, who came in from the kitchen on bare feet.

‘Anna,’ my mother said the first time she saw her, ‘how are you?’

Anna gave a little curtsy and a shy smile, but she didn’t answer. I had no memory of Anna from before, but the servants were moved around from job to job on the farm at my
grandmother’s whim, so she may have been hidden behind the scenes somewhere.
Ouma
disapproved of friendly connections with her underlings, and frowned almost imperceptibly now through
the deep silence that set in the cold room, in which the only audible sound was the scraping of Anna’s feet on the floor.

After supper, we moved out to the back stoep. We sat in a row on three wooden chairs, looking out towards the mountains. The moon was up and in its light bats were flying and flickering over the
orchard.

‘When are you leaving? You don’t want to stay an extra day?’

‘No, no,’ my mother said. ‘We have to go in the morning, after breakfast. We have a schedule to keep to.’

‘Ah,’
Ouma
said with ironic awe. ‘A
schedule
.’ She sucked on her teeth and said to me, ‘Your father called, Patrick.’

‘Howard called here?’ my mother said, incredulous.

‘He wants you to phone him tonight.’

‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘Okay. Sure.’

‘It’s a power trip,’ my mother said. ‘He’s trying to get at me. Don’t call him, Patrick.’

Anna came in on her flat, calloused feet, bringing coffee on a tray.

‘
Hoe voel jy
, Patrick?’
Ouma
said.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m much better, actually.’

‘
Heeltemal gesond
?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘That will take a long time.’

She made a sound in her throat that could have been sympathy or disapproval and slurped her coffee. My mother looked sideways at me and winked.

My mother, though it was hard to believe, had grown up here on the farm. In my younger years my visits here had been filled with wonder at this fact. I had walked about the dusty veld, trying to
work out how it had given rise to her. There was no trace of her rural beginnings in my mother’s face. No evidence of this other, earlier self in the woman who had brought me up.

There was an old photograph of her – small and sepia – hanging next to the phone and I studied it now as I held the receiver and turned the handle to get the operator. It showed a
little girl in a dark dress, standing against a backdrop of trees, her hair in pigtails, grinning for the camera with a square, exact gap where one of her front teeth was missing.

‘Hello?’

‘Cape Town,’ I said and gave the number. There was a sibilant pause before it began to ring. My father’s voice was loud. ‘Howard,’ he said, speaking it like an
accusation.

‘Dad?’

Another pause. ‘Patrick?’

‘Yup.’

‘How are you?’

‘Fine. I’m fine.’

‘You taking your medicine?’

‘Yup. What’s the matter?’

‘No, nothing. I wanted to find out how you are, that’s all. Do you mind?’

‘No.’

‘How’s your grandmother?’

This said with a slight scoff, which for some reason irritated me.

‘She’s fine.’

‘And your mother?’ This was the real reason for the conversation; both of us knew it. Although he and my mother had been divorced for some time now, he still felt anxiety whenever
she left town, as though she might never come back.

‘She’s also fine. We’re all fine. Dad, what’s the matter?’

‘Nothing, I told you. Just checking up. I’m your father, do you mind?’

‘No,’ I said lightly. Some lies are light.

‘What time are you going tomorrow?’

‘I don’t know. After breakfast, Mom said.’

‘Okay. What time do you get up to Windhoek?’

‘I don’t have a clue. I’ll call you from up there, when we arrive.’

‘Do that. And you take care of yourself.’

When I’d put the phone down the silence seemed to sizzle in my ear. I went back out to the
stoep
, where my mother and grandmother had drawn together into intimacy, holding hands and
whispering. They went quiet as I arrived.

‘I’m going to bed,’ I told them.

‘What did he want? Did he ask about me?’

‘No.’

I kissed them both goodnight – my grandmother’s face rough and cool, my mother’s warm and smooth – and went up to the attic. From the window the moon seemed magnified,
swelling toward fullness. I undressed and put out the lamp and rolled into bed. I lay there for a long time, my hands behind my head, listening to the sounds of the house. I heard my mother come up
to the room underneath; heard her brush her teeth and mutter to herself as she got ready for bed. Then there was quiet. Perhaps another half hour passed before I realised why I hadn’t fallen
asleep. So I got up and swallowed my pills. Prothiaden, Valium. In a little while I was sleepy. I rolled on my side.

We were going up to Windhoek to visit my mother’s lover. She had met him there eighteen months before while she was lecturing at the academy. All I knew about him was
that his name was Godfrey and that he was twenty-six years old. Also, of course, that he was black.

I wasn’t disturbed by this fact. A numbness had crept into my life, so that no fact could hurt me again. My mother, since she had parted from my father, had given herself to much stranger
things than this. Living with her in our little cottage in Cape Town, I had been witness to passions far more curious than men. So when my mother had come back from her stint of teaching in
Windhoek with news of her lover, I wasn’t alarmed by his colour.

I had spoken to Godfrey many times on the telephone. He phoned her twice a week, late at night. In these calls, strangely, he never acknowledged that I was her son, and I didn’t refer to
his relationship with her. We never called each other by name, though we were always carefully polite. He had a clear, deep, level voice. He called sometimes after midnight. According to my mother,
this was his way of trying to catch her out. ‘He’s madly jealous,’ she said – and she fuelled his jealousy by going out when she was expecting him to call. Or she would make
me answer the phone sometimes and pretend that she wasn’t there.