Sunday, April 10, 2011

Summer afterparty

It is the last day of Cape Town Summer. Autumn came last week but Summer has dropped back in to pick up the last of her stuff before she moves up north. We've had a three day party for her, a Summer Farewell, but now she's overstayed her welcome and left her underwear on the sofa.

My fingers still tingle with the chilli I sliced up yesterday. My body is sweaty-warm as I write. My thighs hot. Listless and grumpy, the air is so still it hangs around my ear-lobes. I feel like I am bathing in the headiness.

I have woken, worrying, in the dark for several nights now. Too hot to sleep, I get up to open the windows; to let in the air and let out the demons. But they keep coming back in to look for Summer's underwear.

This afternoon, I have taken my own underwear off. I am partly naked and partly not. I lie here, skirt pulled up above my knees and feel hot and tired from the nights. The smells of the afternoon, of chilli , of me, fill my senses and cover my fingers.

Friday, April 01, 2011

Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again.

Almásy: Let me tell you about winds. There is a whirlwind from southern Morrocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. And there is the ghibli, from Tunis...
Katharine
: [giggling] The "ghibli"?
Almásy:
[smiling] - the ghibli, which rolls and rolls and rolls and produces a rather strange nervous condition. And then there is the harmattan, a red wind, which mariners call the sea of darkness. And red sand from this wind has flown as far as the south coast of England, apparently producing showers so dense they were mistaken for blood.
Katharine
: Fiction! We have a house on that coast and it has never, never rained blood.
Almásy:
No, it's all true. Herodotus, your friend - he writes about it, and he writes about a wind, the samoun, which a nation thought was so evil that they declared war on it and marched out against it in full battle dress. Their swords raised.