It was about half past six when the pig came to talk to me. There might have been fifteen to twenty piglets in its down-hanging, sagging stomach. It had been rolling about in the gutter. Its back shone charcoal-black from the gutter waters. Underneath, its stomach hung in flesh-coloured lumps
“Look here, I need to talk,” it said.
“Why have you chosen me?” I asked.
“Don’t expect me to say all manner of things to the effect that I chose you because of your intelligent, brilliant eyes. As a matter of fact, I don’t see any such light shining around here. See, I am a pig. Give me an opportunity to talk. I am frustrated by the slow passage of time.”
Now I am not one who is taken in by flattery, but all the same these words seemed excessively egotistic. But before I could retort hotly, “Look, I don’t have the time,” the pig had sat down and lowered its stomach carefully, hanging piglets to one side.
“All right, talk,” I said.
“I am doing just that,” said the pig, as it laid down its large head.
“Nothing that I can hear.”
“I talk silently,” it said.
Now if it’s one thing that I hate more than arrogant pigs, it’s philosophical ones. I turned my head away with indifference.
“Just joking. People tend to think that words come out of the mouths of animals, dripping with wisdom. They let us run free in fables and moral tales. They expect us to come out with epigrams like, ‘The grapes are sour.’ As for me, I am a pig who is bored, tired, and weary from rolling about in rubbish heaps. I have no experience of anything to do with wisdom.”
“Well then, what is it you want to talk about?”
“About the gate to your apartment block.”
Ours was a block of apartments on two levels, with six apartments in all. Next to it, enclosed on both sides with barbed wire, stood an empty plot of land. Empty in mere name, that is. Actually, it was a free lavatory for the hut dwellers. And it was also a shelter and dwelling place for pigs. Beneath our windows, in the afternoons, you could sometimes hear a shriek that went driiyo driiyo. At once the pigs would start running. Sometimes, as you entered the lane near the top of the street, you could hear a blood-curdling yell, ei, ei. If you stopped, people would push you onwards, saying, “Keep going. They are slaughtering the pigs.”
“Why? Why are they doing that?”
“Why do you think? To eat them, of course. Keep going.”
There was a small square hole in our gate, just large enough to let a dog through. Several times, the pigs who had been chased would run through this hole and escape. There was talk of closing the hole.
“I like this escape hole very much indeed. I find I crawl through it most delightfully. When I am surrounded by barbed wire on all sides, it’s a most convenient hole to crawl through. When I am running for my life, it’s like heaven’s gates opening in front of me. It strikes me that what every pig needs is a door it can crawl through.”
I remembered the pet pig in Wodehouse’s novels. The Earl’s fat, rose-pink pig. The pig that won prizes in many competitions.
I spoke about it.
I also told it about pigs in America which were fattened in their sties and then slaughtered painlessly.
It agreed that it was a considerable privilege if one could die without pain. It didn’t show that much interest in the question of colour. What did it matter to a pig doomed to die whether it was pink or black, it said. It wasn’t even concerned about dying in order to be eaten by others. When I asked about this, it refused to speak, saying it wasn’t in a position to raise objections. After that it was silent for some time.
“What do you think about death?” I asked.
“It’s a huge rod,” it answered. “A rod that is long and cylindrical, made of either iron or wood. If iron, one is stabbed to death from the seat through to the mouth. If wood, one is clubbed to death.”
“How can you be so calm about it?”
“Nothing is gained by getting excited. Perhaps we should fight for the right to choose the manner of our death: by clubbing, stabbing, or electrocution. Unfortunately we pigs are not united.”
“Why do you refuse to talk about a natural death?”
“What’s natural about death? It is always enforced.”
“O no, no. To mingle gently with nature, just as the leaf withers away from the tree…”
“Do me a favour. Please don’t bring poetry into this. As it is, my life is as terrible as possible. I just couldn’t bear poetry on top of it all.”
“What’s poetical about what I said?”
“You are separating blood from death. You speak of a death without bloodshed, a death like the beautiful withering away of leaves. But death is inseparable from blood. Whether you are actually spilling it externally, or whether it drains away within. You are trying to make death beautiful.”
Accusation.
I first thought about death when I was twelve years old. Feet floating in air, I was reaching out to catch a ball. On that instant, just as I tossed my head back to look at that ball, on that very instant, the thought struck me like a painful shaft of lightning. I shall die. I ran in and buried my face against my knees and knew fear. My hands and feet, my face, my whole body seemed alien to me. As if they were hung on to me. I crawled deep within, seeking myself myself myself. Fear took hold of me. I searched in the ear hole and within the eye and between the teeth and in the pit under my arm. Where was I? I was sweating with fear.
After that, I allowed myself certain privileges. I did not wish to die in certain ways. I did not want to die in an accident. I did not wish to die in a sudden disaster, my body shattered and destroyed. A death of protracted pain? I didn’t want that either. After reading about the second world war, I did not want to die like the Jews in gas chambers. I did not want a death by nuclear explosion, as in Hiroshima. After Vietnam, I refused for myself a death by chemical weapons such as napalm. After I had learnt about other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, I rejected in turn deaths by famine, floods, earthquakes; death in prison, death by hanging, death by gunfire. What was left was a beautiful death. A poetic death, merging into space. Without pain. Or wounds. Or blood.
I understood the pig’s anger.
The pig rose. It went away, shaking its body from which the piglets hung.
Some days later, at break of dawn, wild shrieks could be heard. Four men were chasing the pig with their sticks. It ran in haste towards the hole in the gate. but it had forgotten that its body had grown even bigger than before. It got stuck in the passageway. Before I could get there, its blood poured out in great gushes. The piglets fell out, one by one, like dolls. When I approached, the pig recognized me. It opened its bloodshot eyes and said, “Please don’t expect me to speak some rare truth about death. There is only one thing to say. We die.”
The long rods drew nearer.