David's Story

by Zoe Wicomb

G. F. Watts, I say, a replica of the one in London’s Kensington Gardens, then hope to cover my embarassment by explaining that I have just read that in an old guide book.

  But David is indulgent today.

  Never mind, he says, as it happens it’s a European culture vulture I need to talk to. It’s about a painting, about a strange event of a few years ago that I remembered only this morning as I woke up and lay staring, half awake, at the curtains draped over a chair. Sally took them down last night for a wash, left them lying over the chair, and something about the colours or the floral pattern, I don’t know about such things, but it brought it all back, even though there’s no resemblance, really.…

  His embarrassment is greater than mine.

  David had visited the city of Glasgow in the eighties as a member of a small delegation of teachers handpicked by the Movement. Ostensibly it was a short course on child-centred learning, courtesy of the benevolent city council, but never you mind the real purpose, except, and he chuckles proudly, that it was successfully accomplished in spite of careful National Intelligence surveillance.

  Rather incompetent, I would have thought, to lose black people in such a white city.

  Never you mind, he says, tapping his nose.

  He is hopelessly addicted to this boys’ stuff.

  Walking the streets of Glasgow in late October proved difficult. He had never, not even in Cape Town, seen such a combination of wind and rain. You have to be properly dressed, he laughs, buttoned up and plastic-coated to survive; then you need to brace your body at the correct angle against the wind, otherwise you find yourself treading water without making any progress.

  One of the Scottish councillors lent him a green, gold, and black umbrella produced by the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, and how good it was to sport the prohibited colours and taunt his watcher on an innocent sight-seeing trip. But no sooner had he stepped out than the wind whipped it away and wedged it between the bare branches of a tree. The next day, blown into the railings of a bridge, he clutched at his hat while doing up a throat button, and caught a glimpse of the umbrella sailing down the river Kelvin, and he thought he heard someone snigger.

  By then David was getting used to the idea of walking about drenched to the skin, fascinated by a city in which he could enjoy the unfamiliar and yet read the well-known names of streets or road signs. Everywhere the names of places at home: Kelvingrove, Glencoe, Aberdeen, Lyndoch, Sutherland, Fraserburgh, Dundee. There was no danger of feeling lost in Scotland, except that he felt dizzy with the to-ing and fro-ing between rain-sodden place names and the dry, dusty dorps at home. It was as if, along with his watcher, the vast terrain of South Africa had accompanied him as map, now folded and tucked into wee Scotland, and who in such wind and rain would choose to unfold a map?

  Then there was Govan, a place to which David’s hosts seemed particularly attached. No trouble was spared bussing the delegation into that rundown area of boarded up shipyards and buildings with broken windows, where they held meetings and drank tea with unhealthy-looking citizens who shook their heads and said that Thatcherism and Apartheid were the twin evils of the modern world, that they, oppressed by England, knew exactly what Apartheid was all about. Ye ken, an old man said repeatedly, and that ken, soothing for being also the Afrikaans word for know, quite made up for everything. Govan Mbeki would be coming there straight from Robben Island, they said, and David wondered about the dampness of the roots the old man would find in such a place.

  The grand sandstone buildings, blonde or pink, were indeed old and beautiful as the guidebook said, but the city began to haunt him with its history of elsewhere, so that the majestic structures would, from time to time, before his very eyes, disappear into a fog. Then, on many a corner, there would float into his vision a bank called Clydesdale, the very name of the farm near Kokstad that had driven Le Fleur mad with rage. Out of the fog, too, grew the grand museum called Kelvingrove, the place where as a student David caddied for the wealthy golf players of Cape Town: no blacks, no Jews in Kelvingrove. In this friendly foreign city, his visit had become an exercise in recognizing the unknown, in remembering the familiar that cast its pall over the new.

  The cultural tour took him to a huge collection in a park to see the treasures brought from all over the world by a merchant whose name he does not remember. What he wants me to know is that he wandered through it all without looking at a single artefact or painting. There is unmistakeable pride in his voice. Yes, he passed dutifully through ancient Greece and Egypt, through Europe’s and Asia’s unwieldy treasures, but did not really see anything, could think only of the extraordinary idea of shopping for strange things made by other people for their own particular use and shipping them to a warehouse in Scotland. David had no interest in the artefacts themselves and certainly has nothing to report; he finds the very notion of the man’s collection distressing and distasteful; he would gladly be called uncultured. Oh, but the setting was memorable: an airy glass structure in a wooded park—the relief of seeing something modern!—where the trees had turned into a riot of copper and gold and fiery reds as holy as the burning bush of Moses. He had never before seen such a transformation of leaves, just as he had never before looked at paintings, but he knew which he preferred. All this by way of putting off his story of the painting in the People’s Palace. I have come to recognize the symptoms: the desire to tell, the stalling, the attempt at withdrawal; thus I keep prodding and provoking.

  Yes, of course he looked forward to visiting a museum that celebrates the history of the working people of the city. He remembers entering the People’s Palace via its Winter Garden, a huge glass house in the shape of an inverted ship’s hull (Nelson’s Victory, he later learned from a brochure) that housed the familiar Cape flora of palm trees, begonia, poinsettia, hibiscus, and strelitzia, and taking unexpected pleasure in the tender green of the hothouse versions. He listened to the tepid ticktock of moisture dripping from tropical leaves, then heard, through the counterpoint of rain drilling on the glass outside and through the tame roar of an artificial waterfall, the thunderous voice of Le Fleur, roughened by Robben Island, preaching in the Winter Garden in Cape Town’s District Six his messages of temperance and of Griqua independence. So that was what a winter garden was. He could not imagine what they would have kept in such a structure at home, unless these plants had only since the knocking down of District Six been driven outdoors to toughen up and propagate.

  David took off his wet coat, gloves, scarf, and hat, and sat at a white wrought-iron table to order lunch. His watcher, that day replaced by a bespectacled black man at a table in a far corner, had the same reddish soup with brown bread, which, in that humid ship of glass, protected from the rain, drew them into a fellowship of sorts, so that on a devilish impulse he carried over his tray to join him. Nothing odd about fellow Africans greeting or even speaking to each other in a foreign country. The man was jovial. From Zimbabwe, he said, with a vigorous and heartfelt handshake, and among all those white people it was nice to talk to someone. They chatted genially about the weather and the cosy refuge offered by the Winter Garden. David told him about Cape Town’s District Six and Le Fleur’s Griqua choirs in their green cotton drill raising the glass roof with song.

  And so, says David, I slipped up once again. Just as Sally says, I’m prone to sentimentality, the fake feeling that brings nothing but trouble. And in a foreign city, of all places. There I was, full of bravado and sentiment, a commander of a new cell, doing something as foolish and undisciplined as chatting with the enemy. At the time, of course, I knew nothing about Le Fleur except for snippets of nonsense from my childhood, but I certainly knew who I was talking to. For some reason it didn’t occur to me to report our little chat at the time, which means that it can be construed in any way, be used against me.

  He holds his head in his hands, which seems to be an exaggerated gesture, surely the very fake feeling of which he has just spoken. Fearing that he might scuttle off into this peculiar and
needless shame, I elbow him in the ribs with a jovial reminder that he has not finished his story about the museum, the People’s Palace.

  David starts off like a tour guide: The first room celebrates the rise of the city as mercantile centre and focuses on the economic growth of Glasgow in the tobacco trade with the American colonies. There are displays of fine Glaswegian Delft pottery, hand-painted tiles, clay pipes, novelty snuff boxes, a Negro Head tobacco tin with the image of a man in a striped shirt, a slave contentedly smoking his pipe. There is an old map of times before the city inched its way westward, towards prosperity. Then, as he turns away from the glass case devoted to tobacco paraphernalia, he sees the painting on the wall.

  David describes the painting of John Glassford and his family, circa 1767, in minute detail. A really glossy picture—is that good or bad? he asks. A sealed, even surface that releases its information with reluctance. He wonders why he is drawn to this portrait of a tobacco lord and his family, of which he can’t quite make sense. The white wigged patriarch wears a kindly expression, as does his eldest daughter, his favourite, standing beside him with a musical instrument that David cannot identify. She is the apple of his eye; her full lower lip droops like his. His other favourite, the fifth, hands him a posy from the flowers she carries in an extravagant green cloth slung from her shoulder. David remembers that there are many more children, all girls except for the an infant of ambiguous gender whose bare shoulders rise above the wrap of the mother’s silver-gray frock. He shivers for them all, displaying their bare arms and chests in the cold Scottish air, except for the father, who is buckled and buttoned up to the chin.

  The painting is all hands: clutching, holding, or reaching out for fruit or flowers, as well as the prominent, too-large, limp hand of the mother, whose elbow rests on something beyond the canvas. She leans somewhat towards the edge of the picture, her head inclined, as if she wished to escape from the group.

  There is an abundance of flowers: garlands on the heads of flimsily clad girls, flowers in the paisley pattern of the carpet, flowers hidden in the fold of a child’s green velvet wrap, posies taken and given to each other, and in the centre, on a tray before the second daughter, a basket of flowers. David is puzzled by how this tray is held up, unless, like a cinema usherette’s, it is strapped to her waist. An unnatural bird also perches on the tray.

  None of the subjects looks at any other. Neither do they look at the objects, at the instrument held by the eldest or the flowers they give or take. Most marked is the child who hands a posy to the receiving father, a gesture performed with eyes straying elsewhere. The things are there to show their wealth. There is a basket of fruit—grapes, apples, and perhaps peaches—on the oriental carpet. A small child in the foreground, in rich red cloth draped over one shoulder, points to the fruit, again looking away, indifferently, from the object of her desire. Standing on its hind legs with paws on the red velvet of the child’s clothing is a little black dog, whose cluttering presence allows for her drapes to merge with that of her mother’s red underskirt.

  It is then, fixing on the red and the black, the intrusion of black dog between child and withdrawing mother, which at the same time joins their clothing into a single drape of red fabric, that his gaze is drawn obliquely upward, following the gaze of the black dog, along what transpires to be the only sight line in the painting, to the space to the left of the father’s head. There, as if being developed in photographic solution, out of the darkness of a wooden panel, the face of a black man takes shape before his very eyes. In three-quarter profile, the distinct face of a bald black man in red livery, repeating the colours of the foreground. David feels himself going cold with fright. The man, who was not there a moment ago, looks directly at him, rather than at the adoring dog. His hands are held together as if in prayer. David steps back somewhat, meeting his steady gaze, and, yes, the man is still there. He does not know how long he stands gazing at that face, but he stays transfixed until the edges of the image start wobbling as if under water, the eyes shift to meet those of the dog, and the colours of that crisp outline dissolve and fade into the high gloss of the paint, leaving just a darkish smudge above Glassford’s head.

  When he steps forward he reads the plaque underneath. He swears he had not read it before looking at the painting. He remembers the precise text:

  John Glassford (1715–1783) tobacco merchant and family at home in the Shawfield mansion. The painting by Archibald McLauchlin, c. 1767, included a black slave on the left hand, which has since been painted over.

  Surely, I say, you simply forgot that you’d read the inscription earlier.

  But, he insists, there was no mention of slavery in the documentation of the city’s economic growth. No mention of the fact that slaves produced the sugar and tobacco in the American plantations, owned and managed by Glasgow merchants like the wealthy Glassford. There was nothing to make him think of a black man, not in the People’s Palace, where he did not expect to find the effacement of slavery to be betrayed in representation, as an actual absence, the painting out of a man who had once, alongside fruit and flowers, signified wealth and status and who, with the growth of the humanitarian movement, had become unfashionable as an adornment on canvas. How could he have known about the absent slave without reading the inscription? And that, he swears, he had not done.

  David thinks that it is shame that makes the Glassford mother lean out of the picture, away from her family, away from the grasping hands. He wants to know whether I have heard of McLauchlin, whether he is a famous artist, whether the painting is considered to be a good one, what its value might be. I am, of course, unable to answer such questions; I know very little about art, have not heard of the artist. The painting sounds awful, but it is not possible to judge a work that one has not actually seen, that is only reported, I explain.

  Look, he says, I’ve described the painting as accurately as possible.

  When I shake my head, he snorts. Now why does that make me think of Mrs. Thatcher? The South African government has every right to defend itself against terrorists, he intones in that lady’s sanctimonious voice. The only judgment one can make of Nelson Mandela is on the basis of his acts of terrorism.

  He is not interested in my arguments against this preposterous comparison, and so continues with his story.

  I don’t understand why it’s taken me so long to identify the face of the original. I thought that the man in the hotel reminded me of someone, but I could not for the life of me place him. It wasn’t until this morning, when I woke up to the curtains draped over a chair, with their old-fashioned pattern of fruit and flowers crushed in colours similar to those in the painting, that I remembered. Then I knew instantly where I had seen the bald-headed waiter before. He is without any doubt the very man who appeared in the painting. Down to the hands held together deferentially.

  Well, well, I mock. Here we have the true descendant of the Griqua chief, the green-eyed visionary who can make a canvas cough up its secret. Although I should point out that the man’s hands have changed from the praying position to the deferential.

  David says nothing, is lost in thought. Then his face breaks slowly into a smile, Hey, listen to this: strelitzia was discovered by a Scots gardener, that’s what the brochure said.

  Well, thank God for that, I say, for how would we otherwise have recognised that flower disguised as a golden bird of paradise.

  But really I am thinking of how extraordinarily good he looks when he smiles.

  Instead of being concerned about the madness of his vision, David is troubled by the idea of false memory.

  Fashionable nonsense, I say, but no, he is suspicious of the ways in which the tilt of a hat, the rustle of a palm leaf, or the bunching of curtain fabric will hold its meaning sealed, until one day, for no discernable reason, it will burst forth to speak of another time, an original moment that in turn will prove to be not the original after all, as promiscuous memory, spiralling into the past, mates with new disclosures to
produce further moments of terrible surprise. Is one to believe that terror lies dormant in all the shapes and sounds and smells of our everyday encounters, that memories lie cravenly hidden one within another? Surely memory is not to be trusted.

  Thus he is reluctant to acknowledge the shaven-headed waiter as the young security department lackey, then sporting a beard and full head of hair. But what else does the memory of the painting ask him to do, if not to return to Angola, to the Quatro camp, where he had arrived just before the mutiny, the envy of rebellious comrades who wished to be working at home. Yes, he had supported their cause, their demands for greater democracy in the army, their stance against the leadership that landed him in solitary confinement, and, yes, all sorts of things that shouldn’t have happened had indeed happened, not only to him, his was the least. For the mutineers, unfortunately, things did not go well at all, but what else could have been done, what other ways of dealing with insurrection in the face of a steady infiltration of enemy agents? And who can say even now, with absolute certainty.

  Yes, he had argued for the legitimacy of their demands and that earned him days of interrogation and so forth by the big men from security. The young lackey, perhaps in training, had been present once or twice, sitting silently with his head in his hands. Only once, David remembers, was he alone with him, minded by the man whose instruction it was to sit in the corner with his face averted. At one point, perhaps through boredom, he overstepped the mark, and got up to confront his charge.

  Imbokodo, he announced pompously, beating on his chest as if he were the entire security department. The grinding stone, he translated.

  When David, acknowledging the slight, said he knew that, the man barked for silence.

  The boulder that crushes, he added, with the melodramatic turn that David now recognises in his role of waiter-buffoon, and with that returned to his chair.

  David is not sure of what he remembers. They were difficult times, times best forgotten. He rubs his face with both hands. People could not, under those pressures, always afford to be cautious, he explains; it was crucial to act quickly. He does not say why he was at Quatro, but yes, as in any movement beset by treachery there was bound to be paranoia, bound to be some mistakes, and yes, if his treatment had been a mistake it was soon rectified, nothing really serious, perhaps the odd excesses practised by the overwrought. God knows, it was difficult enough. It was war, for God’s sake. Every movement produces its crackpots, its power-mongers who cross over into a corrupted version of the freedom they set out to defend. That does not discredit the Movement itself. If things go off course, that course is also determined by the very system we attack. And it’s enemy tactics, he repeats, that produce corruption.