The Promise

by Damon Galgut

This morning I met a woman with a golden nose. She was riding in a Cadillac with a monkey in her arms. Her driver stopped and she asked me, “Are you Fellini?” With this metallic voice she continued, “Why is it that in your movies, there is not even one normal person?” —FEDERICO FELLINI

By tomorrow already this will have changed, the body will be long gone and its permanent absence covered over with plans, arrangements, reminiscences and time. Yes, already. The disappearance begins immediately and in a certain sense never ends.

But in the meantime there is the body, the horrible meaty fact of it, the thing that reminds everyone, even people who didn’t care for the dead woman, and there are always a few of those, that one day they shall lie there too, just like her, emptied out of everything, merely a form, unable even to look at itself. And the mind recoils from its absence, cannot think of itself not thinking, the coldest of voids.

They forgot I was there, in the corner. They didn’t see me, I was like a black woman to them.

Numbers go on and on, but what does mathematics help? In any human life there is really only one of everything.

So the only people who were with Rachel Swart when her time came were her husband, aka Pa or Manie, and the black girl, what’s her name again, Salome, who obviously doesn’t count.

How would you know she is a ghost? Many of the living are vague and adrift too, it’s not a failing unique to the departed.

The statement is untrue, but Lexington cannot answer truthfully. He senses that the minister wants something, but to give him what he wants might endanger his position. It is not always possible to please two white people simultaneously.

You come back after long vanishment and the surface closes as if you were never gone. Family quicksand.

Apartheid has fallen, see, we die right next to each other now, in intimate proximity. It’s just the living part we still have to work out.

she likes the feeling of being between two places, recently departed and not yet arrived.