Authors: Thomas Pynchon
But as you swung away, who was the woman alone in the earth, planted up to her shoulders
in the aardvark hole, a gazing head rooted to the desert plane, with an upsweep of
mountains far behind her, darkly folded, far away in the evening? She can feel the
incredible pressure, miles of horizontal sand and clay, against her belly. Down the
trail wait the luminous ghosts of her four stillborn children, fat worms lying with
no chances of comfort among the wild onions, one by one, crying for milk more sacred
than what is tasted and blessed in the village calabashes. In preterite line they
have pointed her here, to be in touch with Earth’s gift for genesis. The woman feels
power flood in through every gate: a river between her thighs, light leaping at the
ends of fingers and toes. It is sure and nourishing as sleep. It is a warmth. The
more the daylight fades, the further she submits—to the dark, to the descent of water
from the air. She is a seed in the Earth. The holy aardvark has dug her bed.
Back in Südwest, the Erdschweinhöhle was a powerful symbol of fertility and life.
But here in the Zone, its real status is not so clear.
Inside the Schwarzkommando there are forces, at present, who have opted for sterility
and death. The struggle is mostly in silence, in the night, in the nauseas and crampings
of pregnancies or miscarriages. But it is political struggle. No one is more troubled
with it than Enzian. He is Nguarorerue here. The word doesn’t mean “leader” exactly,
but “one who has been proven.”
Enzian is also known, though not to his face, as Otyikondo, the Halfbreed. His father
was a European. Not that it makes him unique among the Erdschweinhöhlers here: there’s
German, Slavic and Gypsy blood mixed in by now too. Over the couple of generations,
moved by accelerations unknown in the days before the Empire, they have been growing
an identity that few can see as ever taking final shape. The Rocket will have a final
shape, but not its people. Eanda and oruzo have lost their force out here—the bloodlines
of mother and father were left behind, in Südwest. Many of the early emigrants had
even gone over to the faith of the Rhenish Missionary Society long before they left.
In each village, as noon flared the shadows in tightly to their owners, in that moment
of terror and refuge, the omuhona took from his sacred bag, soul after converted soul,
the leather cord kept there since the individual’s birth, and untied the birth-knot.
Untied, it was another soul dead to the tribe. So today, in the Erdschweinhöhle, the
Empty Ones each carry one knotless strip of leather: it is a bit of the old symbolism
they have found useful.
They call themselves Otukungurua. Yes, old Africa hands, it
ought
to be “Omakungurua,” but they are always careful—perhaps it’s less healthy than care—to
point out that
oma-
applies only to the living and human.
Otu-
is for the inanimate and the rising, and this is how they imagine themselves. Revolutionaries
of the Zero, they mean to carry on what began among the old Hereros after the 1904
rebellion failed. They want a negative birth rate. The program is racial suicide.
They would finish the extermination the Germans began in 1904.
A generation earlier, the declining number of live Herero births was a topic of medical
interest throughout southern Africa. The whites looked on as anxiously as they would
have at an outbreak of rinderpest among the cattle. How provoking, to watch one’s
subject population dwindling like this, year after year. What’s a colony without its
dusky natives? Where’s the fun if they’re all going to die off? Just a big hunk of
desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining—wait,
wait a minute there, yes it’s Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his
teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it’s nothing but Cheap Labor
and Overseas Markets. . . . Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the
outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy
the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as
he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and
rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly
as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and cannabis and coca
grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric,
the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death
and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality
in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals,
white marble statues, noble thoughts. . . . No word ever gets back. The silences down
here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets. . . .
Some of the more rational men of medicine attributed the Herero birth decline to a
deficiency of Vitamin E in the diet—others to poor chances of fertilization given
the peculiarly long and narrow uterus of the Herero female. But underneath all this
reasonable talk, this scientific speculating, no white Afrikaner could quite put down
the way it
felt. . . .
Something sinister was moving out in the veld: he was beginning to look at their faces,
especially those of the women, lined beyond the thorn fences, and he knew beyond logical
proof: there
was
a tribal mind at work out here, and it had chosen to commit suicide. . . . Puzzling.
Perhaps we weren’t as fair as we might have been, perhaps we did take their cattle
and their lands away . . . and then the work-camps of course, the barbed wire and
the stockades. . . . Perhaps they feel it is a world they no longer want to live in.
Typical of them, though, giving up, crawling away to die . . . why won’t they even
negotiate? We could work out a solution,
some
solution. . . .
It was a simple choice for the Hereros, between two kinds of death: tribal death,
or Christian death. Tribal death made sense. Christian death made none at all. It
seemed an exercise they did not need. But to the Europeans, conned by their own Baby
Jesus Con Game, what they were witnessing among these Hereros was a mystery potent
as that of the elephant graveyard, or the lemmings rushing into the sea.
Though they don’t admit it, the Empty Ones now exiled in the Zone, Europeanized in
language and thought, split off from the old tribal unity, have found the why of it
just as mysterious. But they’ve seized it, as a sick woman will seize a charm. They
calculate no cycles, no returns, they are in love with the glamour of a whole people’s
suicide—the pose, the stoicism, and the bravery. These Otukungurua are prophets of
masturbating, specialists in abortion and sterilization, pitchmen for acts oral and
anal, pedal and digital, sodomistical and zoophiliac—their approach and their game
is pleasure: they are spieling earnestly and well, and Erdschweinhöhlers are listening.
The Empty Ones can guarantee a day when the last Zone-Herero will die, a final zero
to a collective history fully lived. It has appeal.
There is no outright struggle for power. It is all seduction and counterseduction,
advertising and pornography, and the history of the Zone-Hereros is being decided
in bed.
Vectors in the night underground, all trying to flee a center, a force, which appears
to be the Rocket: some immachination, whether of journey or of destiny, which is able
to gather violent political opposites together in the Erdschweinhöhle as it gathers
fuel and oxidizer in its thrust chamber: metered, helmsmanlike, for the sake of its
scheduled parabola.
Enzian sits this evening under his mountain, behind him another day of schemes, expediting,
newly invented paperwork—forms he manages to destroy or fold, Japanese style, before
the day’s end, into gazelles, orchids, hunter-hawks. As the Rocket grows toward its
working shape and fullness, so does he evolve, himself, into a new configuration.
He feels it. It’s something else to worry about. Late last night, among the blueprints,
Christian and Mieczislav looked up, abruptly smiled, and fell silent. A transparent
reverence. They study the drawings as if they were his own, and revelations. This
is not flattering to him.
What Enzian wants to create will have no history. It will never need a design change.
Time, as time is known to the other nations, will wither away inside this new one.
The Erdschweinhöhle will not be bound, like the Rocket, to time. The people will find
the Center again, the Center without time, the journey without hysteresis, where every
departure is a return to the same place, the only place. . . .
He has thus himself found a strange rapprochement with the Empty Ones: in particular
with Josef Ombindi of Hannover. The Eternal Center can easily be seen as the Final
Zero. Names and methods vary, but the movement toward stillness is the same. It has
led to strange passages between the two men. “You know,” Ombindi’s eyes rolled the
other way, looking up at a mirror-image of Enzian that only he can see, “there’s . . .
well, something you ordinarily wouldn’t think of as erotic—but it’s really the most
erotic thing there is.”
“Really,” grins Enzian, flirting. “I can’t think of what that would be. Give me a
clue.”
“It’s a non-repeatable act.”
“Firing a rocket?”
“No, because there’s always another rocket. But there’s nothing—well, never mind.”
“Ha! Nothing to follow it with, that’s what you were going to say.”
“Suppose I give you another clue.”
“All right.” But Enzian has already guessed: it’s there in the way he holds his jaw
and is just about to laugh. . . .
“It embraces all the Deviations in one single act.” Enzian sighs, irritated, but does
not call him on this use of “Deviations.” Bringing up the past is part of Ombindi’s
game. “Homosexuality, for example.” No rise. “Sadism
and
masochism. Onanism? Necrophilia. . . .”
“All those in the same act?”
All those, and more. Both know by now that what’s under discussion is the act of suicide,
which also includes bestiality (“Think how sweet,” runs the pitch, “to show mercy,
sexual mercy to
that
hurt and crying animal”), pedophilia (“It is widely reported that just at the edge
you grow glaringly younger”), lesbianism (“Yes, for as the wind blows through all
the emptying compartments the two shadow-women at last can creep out of their chambers
in the dying shell, at the last ashen shoreline, to meet and embrace . . .”), coprophilia
and urolagnia (“The final convulsions . . .”), fetishism (“A wide choice of death-fetishes,
naturally . . .”). Naturally. The two of them sit there, passing a cigarette back
and forth, till it’s smoked down to a very small stub. Is it idle talk, or is Ombindi
really trying to hustle Enzian here? Enzian’s got to be sure before he moves. If he
comes out sez, “This is a hustle, right?” and turns out it isn’t, well— But the alternative
is so
strange
, that Enzian is, in some way, being
S
OLD
ON
S
UICIDE
Well I don’t care-for, th’ things I eat,
Can’t stand that boogie-woogie beat—
But I’m sold, on,
suicide!
You can keep Der Bingle too, a-
And that darn “bu-bu-bu-boo,”
Cause I’m sold on suicide!
Oh!
I’m not too keen on ration stamps,
Or Mothers who used to be baby vamps,
But I’m sold, on,
suicide!
Don’t like either, the Cards or Browns,
Piss on the country and piss on the town,
But I’m S.O.S., yes well actually this goes on, verse after verse, for quite some
time. In its complete version it represents a pretty fair renunciation of the things
of the world. The trouble with it is that by Gödel’s Theorem there is bound to be
some item around that one has omitted from the list, and such an item is not easy
to think of off the top of one’s head, so that what one does most likely is go back
over the whole thing, meantime correcting mistakes and inevitable repetitions, and
putting in new items that will surely have occurred to one, and—well, it’s easy to
see that the “suicide” of the title might have to be postponed indefinitely!
Conversations between Ombindi and Enzian these days are thus a series of commercial
messages, with Enzian not so much mark as unwilling shill, standing in for the rest
of the tip, who may be listening and maybe not.
“Ahh, do I see your cock growing, Nguarorerue? . . . no, no, perhaps you are only
thinking of someone you loved, somewhere, long ago . . . back in Südwest, eh?” To
allow the tribal past to disperse, all memories ought to be public record, there’s
no point in preserving history with that Final Zero to look forward to. . . . Cynically,
though, Ombindi has preached this in the name of the old Tribal Unity, and it’s a
weakness in his pitch all right—it looks bad, looks like Ombindi’s trying to make
believe the Christian sickness never touched us, when everyone knows it has infected
us all, some to death. Yes it is a little bit jive of Ombindi here to look back toward
an innocence he’s really only heard about, can’t himself believe in—the gathered purity
of opposites, the village built like a mandala. . . . Still he will profess and proclaim
it, as an image of a grail slipping through the room, radiant, though the jokers around
the table be sneaking Whoopee Cushions into the Siege Perilous, under the very descending
arse of the grailseeker, and though the grails themselves come in plastic these years,
a dime a dozen, penny a gross, still Ombindi, at times self-conned as any Christian,
praises and prophesies that era of innocence he just missed living in, one of the
last pockets of Pre-Christian Oneness left on the planet: “Tibet is a special case.
Tibet was deliberately set aside by the Empire
as
free and neutral territory, a Switzerland for the spirit where there is no extradition,
and Alp-Himalayas to draw the soul upward, and danger rare enough to tolerate. . . .
Switzerland and Tibet are linked along one of the
true
meridians of Earth, true as the Chinese have drawn meridians of the body. . . . We
will have to learn such new maps of Earth: and as travel in the Interior becomes more
common, as the maps grow another dimension, so must we. . . .” And he tells too of
Gondwanaland, before the continents drifted apart, when Argentina lay snuggled up
to Südwest . . . the people listen, and filter back to cave and bed and family calabash
from which the milk, unconsecrated, is swallowed in cold whiteness, cold as the north. . . .