The Impostor by Damon Galgut Read Free Book Online

starting to hate this parched, hostile place he’d landed up in. But what could he do? He had made such a show of his poetic mission that he couldn’t backtrack now; Gavin would never let him forget it. He had to get on with things, make his peace with the Karoo, find a way out of this impasse.
    He decided to set himself a task. He would take an object–any natural object his eye fell on outside. He would force himself to sit and focus on that object. Then he would write about it, however ineptly; a few lines of doggerel, even, just for practice. Afterwards he would go and find another object and do the same thing again. He had lost confidence; his technique had rusted up. Well, that wasn’t so surprising: he’d had a twenty year break from it, half a lifetime. What he needed to do was start slowly, sharpening up, a little bit every day.
    He picked up a stone outside the front door. It was a jagged lump about the size of his clenched fist. When he’d carried it in and put it down on the table, he sat and looked at it for a very long time. But the stone remained mute. There were things he could say about it; there were metaphors he could apply. But the lyrical ease floated high above the ground, while he stayed earthbound in a self-conscious tangle of anapests and spondees and iambs. Describing something in obvious metaphors–that wasn’t poetry.
    Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath.
    Poetry was time made audible.
    Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history.
    Poetry was language free from habit.
    Poetry was beyond him .
    He recoiled from this last thought, jumping up from the table and striding around the room. It wasn’t true! It couldn’t be true–he knew, all the way down to his innermost being, that he was a poet. It was how he had always thought of himself–it was why he had come here. He shouldn’t push himself. It was bad to force anything, especially something as abstract and delicate as a poem. If he was patient, if he just bided his time, the spirit would speak when it was ready.
    So he stopped trying. He didn’t go near the table or the pen any more. The stone sat on top of the paper, and it didn’t speak a word.

4
    The world shrank very quickly to the size of the house. He hardly ever went out, unless it was down to the supermarket or the bottle store. He started drinking in the afternoons, to make the evenings come faster. There was no cell-phone reception in the valley and he waited weeks for the land-line to be connected. When that finally happened, he sat and stared at the telephone for a long time, wondering who to call. There was only his brother, but he already knew the conversation they would have.
    One night, when he was drunk, he did make a disastrous call to a woman he’d been engaged to briefly a long time ago. The engagement had been a big mistake, and they’d both been happy to escape so cleanly, no kids or property, no major damage done. They hadn’t spoken in years, and he had to ring a few other people to get hold of her number. It turned out she was living in Durban now, married to somebody else, with two children. He had learned this in advance, but it didn’t stop him from calling. For the first couple of minutes she was chatty and effusive; she sounded happy to hear from him. But then a silence opened up and his own mood turned. He realized now that she’d been talkative because she was nervous.
    ‘Adam,’ she said eventually. ‘What is it you want?’
    ‘I don’t know. Just to catch up, I guess. Find out how you are.’
    ‘Well, I’m fine, Adam, I’m fine. My life is good. And how are you?’
    But she’d already asked him this; he didn’t feel like lying again. ‘Pretty shitty, actually. I’ve kind of lost my way. Midway on life’s journey, as Dante has it.’
    ‘Adam. That’s awful. I’m sorry to hear it.’
    ‘I’m living in my brother’s house out in the country. I’ve got no money. I’ve got