The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera

Author:Dambudzo Marechera [Marechera, Dambudzo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary, Philosophy, Literature, Short Stories, Fiction
ISBN: 9780435152123
Amazon: B00EU8VV3I
Goodreads: 19163906
Publisher: Heinemann
Published: 1978-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE TRANSFORMATION OF HARRY

At last Harry rang off and came out of the phone booth. He was smiling.

‘She’s coming!’ he said. ‘I can land her any time now.’

He was speaking of Ada, Nestar’s daughter. Indeed, for months he had been talking about nothing else; except the Essentials, as he put it. Harry desperately wanted not so much to make it with Ada – it could have been any other girl – but to get at the heart of the matter and grasp those Essentials by the root. He needed that organic transformation. At the same time a woman like Ada who had made it with all sorts of white hard-ons would give him the receptacle into which he could with satisfaction pour the baptismal waters. And the transformation would be complete.

He kicked the phone booth with pleasure.

‘It’s good, man. Damn good.’

Of course good and evil did not come into it. For Harry all that led to his success was good. Hence good was success. And to get at the heart of that divine aura was the ambition of all who would be good.

Harry knew evil. Evil was failure. There were a lot of failures where Harry came from. Uneducated shits who counted their pennies and paid the rent and made their wives pregnant for the umpteenth time and went without tobacco or beer in order to save up for a sewing machine. Calloused palms. Dirty bodies. Overalls. This was evil, failure. Toiling in factories and mines and on the roads and bridges and in farms and fields for – what? Failure.

Harry also did not think much of women. Even Ada. He despised people for whom suffering seemed to be an in-built element in life. But he liked screwing the way some people like cheating others.

As Harry walked towards his room, a stinging cloud of flies suddenly swooped upon his head and he ran like a cat whose fur is on fire. He slammed the door behind him and leaned against it to regain his breath. And then he locked it. He then released and shadowed the Venetian blinds and stooped to open his metal trunk. It was half full of Playboy magazines. He took out the one he wanted. She was an Afro-American model – wistful longing, waiting. Success. Harry smiled tenderly down at her and unzipped his trousers.

He felt ready for Ada. Nothing would go wrong. The moth would emerge from the flame transformed into its more angelic kin. And afterwards it would all have been a mere dream, and he would remember it as a pleasant irritation. Harry looked at his watch.

Later, as he absently chewed his dinner and with one eye and one ear looked and listened to the life around him, Harry had a premonition of success. It was a tiny spasm, blindingly delicious, as if heaven had distilled its choicest water and dipped a fine white feather into its essence and then delicately touched it to the christwound in his sphincter.

Harry did not like people who ‘think too much’.

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