Farewell, Cowboy. Olja Savicevic
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in my consciousness, draining and annoying me, because particularly nauseating images have a way of keep coming back and not fading. It was a custom at certain gatherings to show such amateur little films in one of the rooms, in the small hours, films that had been allegedly taken from certain sites, nothing illegal, allegedly, although I wouldn’t swear to it. The party guests would try to make fun of the two, three or five people sporting lively genitals on the screen. I would most often wander out of the room at the very beginning of the projection, but this time I stayed to the end, because the main actor’s face caught my attention.
The film was poor quality and too dark, it had evidently been dark in the room where it was made. It was probably shot with a mobile, I thought at the time.
It begins with the expression on the face of a man rearing up over a thin, white body. The man doing the fucking has very large hands and his face, which I can’t make out clearly, is blurred, but it seems to be on the verge of tears. The person under him occasionally moves an arm or leg and emits a barely audible moaning sound. Then there’s a cut and the next image is of the narrow thighs of that second person, boy or girl, it’s hard to tell: the thighs are bare and pressed together, with a thin barb between them, the big man’s snout. The third scene shows a boyish nape, with short hair and a huge fat hand on it: the face of the person being fucked by the big man is hidden by a pillow and can’t be seen. The fourth scene moves, but barely: with one hand the fucker holds the object of his lust by the shoulder or neck, probably too tightly, and slowly pushes it downwards, grabs it lower down, thrusting in and ramming slowly and powerfully and crying increasingly loudly, then coming with a roar and a wail. His crying is the thing it’s impossible to forget, particularly if you want to.
I wouldn’t be able to say that these scenes excite me; rather they disturb me. There are some images that bruise me like slaps on the face: such as those of that huge ejaculating, crying man whose face I can't put together.
In my box of boxes, droplets of sweat travel down my ribs, I stop them with the tips of my fingers and rub them over my belly. I turn the pillow onto its dry side, push my hands down inside my panties between my thighs and try to curl up towards the aroma between my legs. That used to send me to sleep when I was a child.
Finally, I give up on my efforts to fall asleep, I take off my damp t-shirt and light a cigarette sitting by the low window of the summer kitchen, looking up into the blue cleft above the street from where, instead of the freshness of nocturnal dew, a moist, lukewarm blancmange is sliding over the town.
All that can be heard in the Settlement is snoring – interrupted by curses and squeaking springs, the irritated thrashing of limbs coming through holes in the neighbouring houses – and a cat exhaling air through its tiny nostrils. Someone’s left a player on and it’s emitting a thin repetitive squeak. The fat town is sleeping in a fever, the guttersnipe.
It’s almost six, but the air outside is already warmer than inside.
Looking back, I can see clearly that everything had changed faster and more fundamentally than I had. I must have spent the last few years standing still on a conveyor belt, while everything else was rushing and growing. I rarely came home, caught off-guard every time I went to the centre, to the west end of the town, where my sister lives, into that scintillating showroom, that garish shop-window of a broken and robbed world. Going into town is a digital adventure in which I’m met round familiar corners by ever newer and more unrestrained silicon hordes. The adrenalin scattered through the air is an aerosol that fills and pierces my lungs.
I go to the big beaches with their concrete plateaux, recliners and cocktail bars, to the marinas, where there are Russian yachts larger than our houses and to hotel complexes with ramps and a caretaker; a mass of rubble and broken glass, diggers and trucks, steel scaffolding, and smooth prisms of black opaque glass whose metal glare assaults your vision. But I pity only the birds, the dolphins and flying fish. I believe that these things must horrify them when they leap out of the water or fly down from the sky.
In the east is the industrial zone. The east is a great stranded wreck. The shipyard with its tall green cranes, hangars, cement factories and abandoned railway tracks, and behind that vast garbage heap, on the edge of a peninsula, is the shabby Old Settlement, with a post office and church and dark runny mud in the polluted port, a comical little place under the distant skyscrapers, which blink at night at us beneath them...At me and Ma sitting on the balcony, sipping tepid beer out of plastic bottles or eating melon, while a fan on the railing pretends to be a breeze. Our neighbours who don’t have air-conditioning sleep on settees dragged out onto the terrace; whole families. Around the evening news time they sit round and watch TV. Here, nothing has changed; it hasn’t budged. Perhaps this is the only corner of the world I know, my haven, my salvation, my place of greater safety. Despair and refuge, a shred of happiness in a lukewarm bitter liquid.
The oleanders, capers and bougainvilleas have come into flower in the courtyards. And our cat, ginger Jill, has a street light like a star in each eye.
On such evenings the world and the town are not divided into east and west, but, as in an animal’s head, simply into north and south. Because that, urbi et orbi, is the language of moss, compasses and wind roses, migrating birds, the rhythms by which people rise and dance, the kinetic language that divides into hemispheres; eels and smelts that mate ecstatically in the shallows, so that you can tread among them, through that lively seething and flickering, migrating birds, mapa mundi, Luna and the North Star and the place up on the hill up to where the broom bushes grow.
Ah, that’s when everything seems to be OK, and sometimes that’s the same as if it was.
Back here, I know every rat-run, hiding place and way out in case of danger.
As kids we all had that knowledge – in our legs more than in our heads, like a foreign language that waited, rolling around in our middle ear, whose hot-blooded Romance melody we had woven into our own, far more languid Slav one. Me, my sister and Daniel, and the boys too, who came to us from the new estates beyond the railway – the Iroquois Brothers’ family and some other outlanders, always with freshly shaved heads in summer. At that time they wanted to be like us, so they gabbled the way we did, differently from their sweet fat mums and hairy dads whose consonants stuck in their gullets and who used to yell, whenever they needed to speak.
We cobbled that language together from what we learned at home from our parents as much as from the unknown translators of film subtitles and dubbed cartoons; the language we’d picked up in the street and from announcers on the News and stolen from Dylan Dog, Grunf, Sammy Jo Carrington and Zane Grey. It was the musical lingua franca from the west of the city and the centre through the Old Settlement and as far as the railway. Wherever there were kids who talked and called to one another. We sought each other out and hung out, there was nothing else to do, and nor did there need to be.
Variations on the game of hide-and-seek offered endless possibilities. Or the game of group seeks group. Back alleys lead through unlocked villas, or through the kitchen of the cake shop with big vats of custard and tubs of ice cream, through dark vaults leading down to still darker cellars. The cellars come to an end in tight passages between buildings, pipes that emerge into bare courtyards with sheets drying above them, steps that end in the sky, garrets on rotten beams, roofs over which we leap to the old castle, then we clamber up on the sea side, dragging ourselves along the edge of the wall, and coming down into the park, under upturned boats in dry berths.
That’s where we found Daniel, the first time he got lost; he had hidden under a boat on the slipway during a game of hide-and-seek and sung to himself so as not to be afraid. After that he kept disappearing and he would stay away for increasingly long spells – because he was no longer afraid, he said.
We thought all our games and wars must be even more exciting than those of the children who grew up in the movies with the cactuses and the big bright sun over the wide prairie. After all, there is a prairie here, too, at the foot of the hill above the cemetery where my father and brother are buried, even though now the path there is cut off by huge houses with hens pecking around them.
It was in a battle on the lunar expanse behind the cement works and old saltpans, between the road and the prairie,