As it turned out, averting the eyes, if not turning a blind one, was the order of the day. See no evil, etcetera. Other black women appeared in the Café. Always women, in the beginning, on the arms of sallow-skinned men wearing gold jewellery and open-neck shirts. Continentals and Slavs, men with overstuffed wallets and easy habits, consumers of espressos from tiny cups which they held in their signet-ringed fingers like the crockery from doll’s houses.
Mrs Mavrokordatos had her nose in her books and her eye on the bottom line.
‘You’re starting to attract a different sort of clientele,’ I said to her one day.
‘You mean blacks?’
‘They’re ladies of the night, in case you haven’t noticed.’
‘And what if they are? The men have money and like to spend it, and I want them to spend it in here. Don’t pull such big eyes, Mr Tearle. I need the business. You have to change with the times or you get left behind.’
Big eyes? Was it just a way of speaking, or a dig at my bifocals? All the better to scrutinize you with, I should have said.
I went back to my chair and surveyed the clusters at the tables with new eyes. The men were leaning in, they had clumps of hair at their necks where the shirt collars gaped, they had small buttons on the vamps of their shoes and thickly jointed watch-straps like astronauts. The dark women had fleshy shoulders, upholstery puckers of skin in their armpits, and glaringly red lips, which made their mouths seem even larger than they were. So large that the rest of their features looked somehow devoured. Black women. There would be black men too, one of these days, sleek and tufty, here and there.
You have to change with the times or you get left behind. And if you’re left behind, is that such a bad thing? Is the past such a terrible place to be?
*
Bogey did not go away. He came back as often as he pleased – to practise his English, he said. Merle took a schoolmistressy interest in his progress. To give him his due, he was a fast learner. His head proved to be stuffed with odds and ends of American, scraps of motion pictures and hits and commercials just waiting to be used. He fitted his ‘balonies’ and ‘gee-whizzes’ and ‘gimme-a-breaks’ into conversation like a child trying to master an educational toy intended for a more advanced age group. Once, he referred to Mevrouw Bonsma as a ‘broad’. You would think a Sauer Street nib-licker had emptied the Balaam Basket down his throat.
Predictably, it did not end with Bogey either. He had opened up a crack in our society with his chocklike person, and other strangers squeezed through it and made themselves at home. We welcomed them with open arms, we were so accommodating. We were no longer a foursome but a circle, and it is in the nature of a circle to widen irreversibly, like a ripple, while pretending to remain itself. But I knew better, I saw precisely what we were becoming, and I charted the evolutionary decline stage by stage. We were a sextet, and then briefly a septet, and then, God help us, an ogdoad. Ugly words for unpretty polygons and battered circles; each mutation heralded by the shuffling of chairs, as if we were dogs in search of new places to settle. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that necks were craned from other quarters. The lesser patrons patronizing us!
Many of these newcomers were men like Bogey. They had ridiculous names, like Grog and Bleb, which I vowed never to utter. Just as I vowed never to answer to their flatulent ‘Aubreys’. They were argumentative and obstinate. They sat at our table crackling their yellow newspapers like stage lightning and thundering among the crockery with their fists. They were obsessed with communism, both its demise in the old countries and its apparent resurrection in the new. Whenever Eveready came near, they tried to draw him into discussion about the Congress of South African Trade Unions, to call a spade a spade. Their great love was ‘talking politics’. Our ways did not cut much ice with them.
In my eyes, what bound them together most tellingly was their putrid spelling. I overheard one of them in the Central News Agency trying to locate the works of Bulgakov, with which I was familiar in my youth. B-L-U-G-O-V- They couldn’t even spell correctly in their mother tongues!
Broken English is no longer a drawback in the business world. Bogey went into import-export, commodity unspecified. He spent a great deal of money on clothes. His first and proudest purchase was a leather jacket from the Oriental Plaza. The garment was clearly some sort of Mohammedan practical joke. It was made entirely of offcuts, hundreds of patches of different colours, mainly if not exclusively imitation, and none larger than a playing card. A joker, I should say, or a knave.
‘Neat, no?’ he asked like a matinee secret agent.
‘Neat, no,’ I replied. ‘You look like something swept out of an abattoir.’ The overall impression was of a bale of bloodied hides, with one rudimentary cephalon still attached. It was the meaty colour of him too, and the Bovrilish substance he had taken to smearing on his head in place of the home country’s pomade.
What was it again in the perfume factory? Something lost. (One of Wessels’s cracks.) Pull yourself together, Pedro. (Mine.)
Bogey showed me the lining of his jacket, as enragingly red as a matador’s cape. Then the label, which was sewn on the outside at the back, between the shoulder blades. Leatherama. I added it to my -rama list, below Cupboard-a-rama and Veg-a-rama. Merle said I was cruel. But even she had to laugh when he appeared a few days later in a pair of sunglasses with ‘Glarebusters’ printed across the lenses. My scorn he mistook for concern that the trade name obscured his vision, and he would not be quiet until I had looked through them and confirmed, out loud for all to hear, that one could see right through the words from the other side. ‘You see, I no see,’ he kept declaiming. And then, when I had them on my nose, plunging the place into darkness, he went on in tones of childlike wonder, as if there were some witchcraft involved, ‘You no see, I see.’
This liking for things with their labels on the outside is degenerate. What sort of person willingly turns himself into an unsalaried sandwichman? A walking ‘salami on wry’ (Sonja’s Delicatessen). And pays for the privilege?
But despite my better judgement, I found myself making allowances for him. He was enchanted with being a consumer. No, it was more than that, for we are all consumers, willy-nilly, even the less materialistic of us, like myself. He, however, was a consumerist. His passion was not mere consumption, but consumerism. He regarded it with religious awe and defended it with the zeal of a convert. And coming from a country in which the opportunity to practise his faith had been so cruelly curtailed, who could blame him?
I saw him window-shopping in Pretoria Street one evening as I left the Café, and followed at a distance. He was waddling along with his hands behind his back, pigeon-toed, short-legged, bobbing his head from side to side, sweating in the butchered jacket. The blind trilby had been driven from his head by a straw Tyrolean with a guinea-fowl feather in the band. All in all, he looked like some odd bird that had strayed off course.
He stopped outside the Ambassador and looked into the glass-fronted display cases at photographs of revellers disporting themselves in the hotel’s discotheque. Shamelessly under the weather, most of them. Went on to Exclusive Books, where the latest blockbuster by the author of The Unhappy Millionaire had been given a whole window to itself. Went on again past Freeman and Marks, the outfitters, High Point Lock and Key, Papoutsi (from the Greek papoutsus, shoe) the shoe shop, past the Daelite (that is, Daylight) Pharmacy, past the trestle-table of knives and holsters at the top of the steps to the High Point Centre, tarried in front of Diplomat Luggage Specialists. He gazed through the iron mesh at the carry-alls and tote bags, some of them quite possibly relatives of his poor jacket. ‘Window-shopping.’ What a shabby word, concealing a rash of thwarted desire beneath a cloak of respectability. As if it were no more than a pleasant pastime. The expression on his face was curious and greedy, inquisitive and acquisitive. Avis, avid. Could there be some connection? I reached for my Pocket.
But he was on the move again, down the stairs past the hanging garde
ns of High Point, to the automatic photograph booth. He drew the curtain and I watched his feet sticking out below, facing west, and then north, and then south. He was having himself photographed, full-face and in profile, like a felon. And now east! From behind! Then I understood why: for the label. I hurried away before he should see me.
After several months, Bogey and his comrades discovered Benjamin Goldberg’s, the world’s largest ‘liquor supermarket’, and his faith in consumption found a shrine. He would ferry the new arrivals from Eastern Europe out there – more and more of them, as time went by – to introduce them to the mysterious abundance of the new world. Weekly pilgrimages were made. Sometimes they went merely to browse in the bottle-lined aisles, absorbing the atmosphere osmotically through their swarthy skins; more often, they returned with primitive forms of alcohol that the sober-minded could never have imagined and could scarcely pronounce, wines and brandies made from macerated fruits, beers as black as pitch, luminous vintages in oddly-shaped bottles with small animals suspended in them, liqueurs named after the leaders of obscure reformations, spirits so volatile the smokers had to stub out their cigarettes before the stoppers were drawn for fear of igniting a conflagration. They were always forcing their firewaters upon us, to win approval and friendship, when these were not freely given. Mrs Mavrokordatos let them keep their bottles behind the counter.
When the Bogeymen had had a few too many, which was often, one had to mind one’s tongue in their company. A single word – and not just the obvious tear-jerkers like ‘mother’ and ‘home’, but innocents like ‘football’ or ‘sausage’ – would make them weep inconsolably or break glasses in their fists. Mrs Mavrokordatos, more fool her, paid for the breakages from her own pocket. And Mevrouw Bonsma would chip in as well. They were just boys, she said, far away from home, as if that justified their Bohemian excesses.
All the others, even Spilkin, found this hooliganism picturesque. When I dissented, the old accusations of ‘dryness’ resurfaced.
‘Any fool can see,’ I had occasion to remark, ‘that the problem is not dryness but wetness, a certain soaked quality, a sousedness.’ Souséd, I styled it, pointedly, by analogy with curséd.
*
Not all the newcomers were Bogeymen and Bohemians, although they were all Philistines. As the circle widened, so did the cracks, and some peculiar creatures came floating through. There was a Mrs Hay, for example, a clairvoyant adept at performing her own facelifts, by gathering up the slack and securing it to her skull along the hairline and behind the ears with tabs of sticking plaster, in different ways every week, so that she always looked subtly unfamiliar. For me she predicted a long and happy life, bless her, in the bottom of a cup of Joko made with a tea bag (a round tea bag, which flavoured more in the steeping than the square kind, the advertising insisted, but portended less in the dregs). Then there was a McAllister who had worked for the municipality reading meters, until he fell into a French drain and broke his hip. He was prone to quoting Rabbie Burns at us, especially ‘To a Mouse’; and very often prone full stop, from a surfeit of usquebaugh. Jimbo, we called him, just a vowel removed from a pink elephant. And there was Wessels, who struck me at first only because he said ‘Hull-ohs’ when he arrived and ‘Chow-chow’ when he departed.
Wessels. Of all people! Riddled with plurality, liverish, toothy, thatched, thick as two short planks.
I missed the days of intimate quadrilaterality. But I would be lying if I said that I was not sucked into the maelstrom of our growing circularity.
All these new acquaintances had one happy advantage for me at least, one ‘spin-off’ – the perfectly apt Americanese, implying as it does that something is going round in circles rather too quickly and throwing off consequences like sparks. I had never before in my life been exposed to so much misuse and malapropism, so much sheer barbarism. I had stumbled upon a windfall in the least likely place. Even as I struggled to concentrate in the mounting babble, I began to keep lists of these bad apples for incorporation into ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’. It wouldn’t take long before the newest of the newcomers, in sub-standard English of one variety or another – we had ceased to attract the better sort of person – would stick a nose into my business and ask: ‘What are you scribbling in that notebook of yours?’
‘Oh, it’s just something you said.’ And I’d put the book quickly in my pocket, with a deliberately dusty chuckle. ‘Nothing important.’
Then they would insist, indefatigably, until at last I relented: ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you … You see, a moment ago you said: “My cousin’s a computer boff.” Well, it’s not “boff” – it’s “buff”. Or “boffin”. But never “boff” or “buffin”, which I’ve also heard more than once.’
And from there it was a short step to telling them all about ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’, and a whole lot of other things besides. My ‘topics’ (Merle). Things they didn’t necessarily want to hear. Not one in ten had the foggiest idea what I meant; but they were impressed with me anyway, and proud to be part of my research. It was the index cards that did it, and the lever-arch files with the granite finish.
As far as my letters to the press were concerned, I believe the admiration was sincere. I had long since learnt to lay the newspaper down on the table in such a way that Merle would realize one of my letters had been published, and share it with the others. None of them in all that time ever earned the distinction, although several followed my example and tried their hand at it. What thrilled them most was seeing my name in print. ‘A. Tearle,’ they would mutter, turning it over in their mouths like so much melanzano or what-have-you, savouring the unexpected taste of it, while the living embodiment sat before them, sipping a tea, twirling a pencil. ‘A. Tearle.’ I served as a basic English lesson.
Once, when I’d included a covering note to explain a complicated layout and unthinkingly appended my full name, the editor took it upon himself to add it to my letter. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the imbecile rendered it Audrey Tearle. I hoped no one would notice, but the fool with the echolalia did, illiterate as he was, and started cracking jokes about ‘Little Audrey’. He was full of jokes. It reminded me of the mania for joke-telling that had seized Spilkin when Mevrouw Bonsma first settled among us, and I prayed it was just a ‘phase’ this one was going through, a nervous habit perhaps, brought on by the strain of being in more sophisticated company than he was accustomed to. But the condition proved to be chronic.
‘Who is that dolt?’ I asked Merle, when he had gone to the Gentlemen’s room, which he did at regular intervals, seeing that Mrs Mavrokordatos was plying him with beer.
‘Wessels,’ she said. ‘Martinus Theodosius Wessels.’
Perhaps that was when ‘Empty’ first occurred to me.
*
For two whole weeks, Mevrouw Bonsma poured out nothing but dirges, long draughts of ‘Galway Bay’ and ‘The Mountains of Mourne’ that had the Bohemians weeping as if they were Irishmen themselves, which they very nearly were. I said it was homesickness; the Wessels character insisted it was ‘dronkverdriet’ We pleaded for jollier melodies – ‘Loch Lomond’ was a favourite with McAllister, I recall, to restore the geographical balance – but Mevrouw would not comply.
‘I remain your humble servant, but I cannot. I feel so sad, and so does the piano. It hurts here.’ She stroked a tender spot on the keyboard and sucked a föhn off the Alibian Alps through the gaps in her teeth.
‘I feel it too,’ said Merle. ‘I feel it in my bones. Something terrible is about to happen.’
‘What do you say, Mrs Hay?’
Our clairvoyant just hitched up a region of her fallen face with her thumb and kept silent.
Whether or not the tragedy had been foretold in bone and ivory, it came to pass. Mrs Mavrokordatos acquired for the Café Europa two television sets. They were hoisted aloft on pivoting platforms attached to the walls, one over the door to the kitchen and the other over Mevrouw Bonsma’s head. Once again, I had to alert our propri
etress to the perils of the course she was pursuing.
‘This will bring in the wrong crowd.’
‘You mean blacks?’
People had Africans on the brain.
‘I mean television watchers. “Viewers” as they want to be called. And sports enthusiasts in particular, fanatics of hockey, cricket, and especially football.’
I was right. The television sets brought in a lot of noisy immigrants from Glasgow and Manchester and Leeds, whose greatest joy was to watch the football teams from their old home towns, turnipy manikins with bulging legs and rosy cheeks, rushing around on lawns of the unnatural lushness usually reserved for botanical gardens. The clubs had the quaintest names, Rangers and Hearts, Tottenham Hotspurs and Crystal Palace. Occasionally there were local fixtures too, played by teams out of the Christmas pantomime, such as the Chiefs and the Pirates. I half expected poor old Noodler to take the pitch. One of the players, by the name of Khumalo, claimed to be a doctor. Probably struck off the roll for misconduct. The football fanatics were all diminutives: Robby and Freddy, Bobby and Teddy, a whole dynasty of Harries. Clientele, Mrs Mavrokordatos insisted, so long as their money is good. The phrase that came to my mind was ‘paying customers’. When they gave the attendance figures at sports stadia, that was the term they always used, as if there were bound to be gatecrashers and cheats too, who should not be counted.
After the sports fanatics, came a variety of others: spinsters addicted to situation comedies, bachelors with a passion for news or weather reports, devotees of the quiz show or the courtroom drama.
As I’d anticipated, Mevrouw Bonsma’s reign was drawing to a close. Soon she was confined to a single shift between five o’clock and half past six, a period known with cavalier disregard for accuracy on every count as the ‘Happy Hour’. By arrangement with the proprietor of the Haifa, a noticeboard spangled with chalky Hebrew Magen Dovids was secured to the railings at the bottom of the escalator in the street outside, with a photograph of Mevrouw Bonsma signed ‘Yours, Suzanna’ sellotaped to it under plastic, as if she were a piece of cheap merchandise – a disposable watch or an overripe melon. I tried to get up a petition to have more of Mevrouw Bonsma and less of the television sets, but no one would sign it, apart from the old squares, and even they thought it was a losing battle.
The Restless Supermarket Page 15
