NIVEN GOVINDEN
All the
Days and
Nights
Copyright
The Friday Project
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014
Copyright © Niven Govinden 2014
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
Niven Govinden asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007580491
Ebook Edition © September 2014 ISBN: 9780007580507
Version: 2015-10-13
I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.
Frida Kahlo
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.
Walt Whitman
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
All the Days and Nights
Also by Niven Govinden
About the Publisher
WHERE WERE YOU when the sky collapsed; rain falling in pinched sheets, but constant, and the mist descending as if gravity was its master, until it settled on the front step and the path? Was the sky in collusion? Had you conspired with the elements to stay hidden from me; not satisfied with withholding so much of yourself, now your physical body had to be hidden too? Your intentions have brought the mist. You have unsettled nature. The swallows nesting above the window fret over what is to come. They scratch the roofing felt with urgency and speak their fear with a caw that rises from the pull of their guts. How instinctive their talk is, how deeply felt. The cassette spool from the answering machine in the hall hums and burrs more audibly than before, making me think of a hornets’ nest under the bed; each creature whirled into a fury and ready to break out. Everything is angry. But what signal is ours? What cry or call will reach you, muffled by cloud, lost in the mist? The dank has whitewashed the landscape, reducing you to a wisp, a dot in the meadow. Is this where I have driven you: into the chill of first light, to be soaked to the skin, slipping on the edge of the path as gravel gives way to mud as you walk toward town and the store that is not yet open, but the rail station that is, and the incoming train that will take you away from me, if you have decided that this is the day? There will be nothing in your pockets bar the silver-edged comb that belonged to your father and your frayed notebook, wedged in the back and struggling to be held. There will be no metallic clink as you walk, keys left behind and no money to speak of, but if you have decided, woken from the bed on the other side of this wall and filled with the determination you’ve previously threatened, you will find a way to be on that train, through charm, or theft, or an attempt at forced entry. Reviving the same hobo spirit that brought you here. If this is the day.
But it isn’t, is it? I know you too well to be crippled by surprise. You forget how I hear your footsteps as you creep down the stairs. Even in your stealth I can read you; the difference between the tiptoe to the doorway of the outbuilding where you punch your frustrations into the hay bales stored there; the steps that lead to the liquor cupboard in the middle of the night, when you believe that I am asleep, and not numbed enough to follow. A man, seventy years old, with the furtive steps of a teenager. Then those that take you to the bottom of the path, where you stand in your shirt and jeans, the same as when you arrived, hesitating at the gate before turning back. Innumerable times I’ve seen you at the gate, a shadow filling the cleft in your chin, the rising motion as your face twists southward to take in the house, deciding whether you have had enough of it. When you no longer lift your head, when there is no pause, fingers not drumming on the latch, where the echo of flesh pounding metal falls flat against the window and culls the ringing in my ears, I’ll know. Until then, we’ll carry on as before, in our spurts of comfort and unease. You will continue to sit and I will continue to paint you, because that, John, is why you are here.
VISHNI BURNS THE COFFEE. She is distracted by the thickness of the rain and the absence of you. Usually she would wake to find the fire in the kitchen lit, the stove light on, possibly some voices in heated argument on the radio; whether Carter can hold his own against Reagan; new anger for a new decade; one of the few things from the outside world that interests you. She expects these things and today they are not there, disturbing her in a way she had not anticipated. She stands in the darkness of a barely broken morning for several minutes, wondering if there was a note mentioning a business trip she had forgotten, or whether she had paid scant attention to the clock before leaving her room. She wrings the excess bathwater that has soaked her plaited hair into the sink before re-coiling it into a bun, all the time, thinking. An epoch of wondering passes until I hear the rip of the light cord as the rise and fall is pulled. You never sleep late, nor leave the house without some kind of welcome for her. She is undecided whether to march or creep up the stairs and so manages a little of both. The door of your bedroom is opened in the same confused manner and then closed again within seconds, the final crack of the handle pulled hard against the door frame and ringing through the hall. This is Vishni all over: covert but ultimately clumsy. Bureau drawers not entirely closed and overdue bills stuffed roughly back into envelopes are typical of her handiwork. There is nothing to see there: the bed will be made, the curtains drawn. If I had the voice I could save her the futility. At our ages, we think of economy in all things. She is breathless with exertion, her heavy lungs punishing her for this impulsiveness. As she stands outside my room, more hesitant than before, her wheezy rasp seeps through the gap under the door. She knows it is unlikely that you will be here but wishes to be thorough. The door handle rattles with her uncertainty, to wake me with a knock or ease the door open to spy on someone who despises being watched, who has made a career of being invisible.
– What is it?
– I was looking for John, Anna.
– I sent him to the store. We ran out of one of the oils last night. Had to finish early because of it.
Lightness appears in Vishni’s voice – relief – betraying that she too shared the same thoughts.
– Let me get the fire going. I’ll have breakfast ready for when he returns.
She is only here for you; enjoys your company and pandering to your needs. Coffee is served how you like it, breakfast and other meals to your whims. It’s why we often eat like children: franks and beans, macaroni with everything. On those mornings when your presence at the table is shortened because of the need for firewood or household repair, the tone is quite different. The radio is mostly switched off. She will not sit and watch me eat. No teasing passes between us. The offer of second helpings when the plat
e is clean is only made the once, both of us understanding that mothering cannot be applied here. We are left as two women thinking about their respective work, aware of the other’s presence, but still in our separate spheres.
When you first moved here, I warned you of my need for silence and space. You warned me of your need to eat something that was not raw or burnt. Vishni has been here almost as long as you, following barely a month after your arrival. See how quickly I acted for you back then! Your every intelligent suggestion was my command. I wonder if you even remember the nights I spent away from my work to call people I knew in the town asking for recommendations; people who were alarmed at hearing my voice at the end of the receiver, having been aware of my long-standing reticence toward the telephone, and believing that I would only be calling in a case of dire emergency. But then they remembered that you had arrived and their panic, if not irritation, softened to indulgence and finally warmth. If I pressed you on this now I am certain you would not even recall it, so taken were you with the meadow and the scattering of macadamia trees that flanked the drive. Out of New York for the first time in your life, you were full of wonder and mischief; running back and forth the length of the meadow with one of the yard dogs from the neighboring farm, each trying to exhaust the other, pulling yourself up the first trees you had ever climbed that were not in Central Park and swimming the river that divided the house from the village, not minding the rain or mud, nor the stones on the river bank and bed that bruised and cut your feet.
– I’m looking for work. Anything you have.
– Can you build a fence? Knock down a wall?
– I’ve little experience, but I can try. I’m strong and can work hard. Been asking at the other farms, but they’re having the same problems as those I left behind in the city. All of us, scrabbling around like mice.
The bulk of my work, what they will remember, sprang from those words. You; sitting on the veranda steps while I fetched you some water, returning to see how the light treated your face; how everything changed during that minute I was in the house.
On those first afternoons I sketched you, you were restless, wanting to be anywhere but indoors. Instructed to keep your eyes forward, you constantly deviated, looking past the window to the garden table where Vishni had promised you that she would serve all meals. Those twin pulls have never changed: someone to put home-cooked food in your belly and the need to feel your feet in the grass. This is why I know you can never leave, not entirely. Something will always bring you back. Inside and out, you have made roots here; from pushing your fingers deep into the earth when you thought no one was looking, as if the feel of soil between your hands and under your nails made it real; and from your face being in the paintings. Whether you are aware of this or not, you have created invisible roots capable of dragging back the unwilling. Once they are unfurled they will recoil. In the meantime I have my work to keep me occupied and the smell of Vishni’s coffee burning on the hot plate to jolt me when my attention slips.
WE ARE HUSBAND and wife. Some run a shop or diner together. This is ours.
You once said that the darkness of the studio was my comforter, having watched my first minutes or so there each morning, when I seem wrapped up in its closeness before rolling back the shutters from the skylight.
– It’s like the dark is some kind of magnet. Pulling away all the shit that’s amassed since you were last here. Everything about you is different. Another person.
In those days you were referring to a myriad of things. Attention, wanted and unwanted; the demands that often pulled us away from work. Now our problems are more localized, to do with ageing bodies and various worries about the condition of the house. We have both had recent spells in hospital, which each will not talk to the other about; the magnet’s main area of concern. You were amazed that I could cut off mid-sentence as soon as I reached the studio door; how my face would change, the hold it had on me. It is true that the moment often feels like a shrug, something similar to walking through disinfectant before diving into a municipal pool, or the long, measured exhalation of a yogi’s asana. I need this ritual in order to feel ready; precious seconds to right wrongs and clear my mind. The day ahead feels unbalanced if I do not begin by walking into black.
Vishni’s sixes and sevens have rubbed off on me. I stand in darkness for longer than I should, imagining the lump of rags on the floor to be your prostrate frame, twisted into the shapes I long made you hold. I have often started the day without you being in the studio. This part is normal; a series of corrections and progressions that can be made without the model present. There may have been many periods of days, months even, when I wished for it to be more that way; when the sound of your voice riled me, or simply the sound of mine. If only then I had the ingenuity, the confidence to believe that working alone from a mere set of photographs rather than using a sitter, could reveal a truth. But I needed you. If you were not here to start, at my request or otherwise, you were always nearby: somewhere in the house or on the land. At your most petulant you still responded to my call when it came. You had various stages of wonder and resentment of the process, sometimes hating it to the point where you were ready to happily destroy the paintings, but still you came when I called. Your claim to this room, where you have stood every day for the past fifty years, is greater than mine. I gave my eyes, but you readily gave up your soul. And again. And again.
You are coming back. I know it. You are probably minutes away. The work can continue. Vishni’s fears shall be allayed. But still I stand at the door, unable to move closer to the painting. Do you remember how I told you about the house I was raised in, how there were crucifixes in every room, but that the largest one was above my parents’ bed; terrifying in its expansive iron cast, the face writhed in pain so lifelike, the gaze itself inexplicably direct, that as children we were unable to go past that room without breaking into a run, so determined were we not to look at it. Without realizing it, we trained ourselves to look downward whenever we were in that part of the house, because to catch even the briefest glimpse of His tortured face frozen in acceptance would be to turn to stone. Many summer days were cast over for one or other of us by making that mistake. It was only later that I understood what my mother must have gone through, having to make love and give birth on that bed with a grotesque Christ hanging over her. This wasn’t an icon of a loving God, but something else entirely: a wedding present from my paternal grandmother who disapproved of the marriage. And slowly something from that face seeped into our general behavior. We still ran around and played like other children with our mischievous, secretive ways, but in the house, at table and before our parents, we were mostly quiet, our heads often bowed. My father put this down to God-fearing, from his teaching and that of others, and was pleased. It was once I had left home, that I retrained myself how to see, how not to be afraid to look at the face of anything, that the act of looking propelled me like no other. And when he saw my first paintings exhibited he understood that it was not God that I was ever fearful of, merely the propaganda that dictated the Art around Him. He could not bring himself to comment, or even come close to me, only to seek out the gallery owner and shake her hand before leaving. That was the last of my work he looked at. He never saw my paintings of you. I haven’t thought of my father in a long time, but seeing the easel now shrouded in half-light, the back of the canvas facing me, I am reminded of him and of the crucifixes. How I cannot bring myself to look at the painting as it was left yesterday. Essentially, it will appear no different than it was the day before, but I will start looking for cracks, a gesture in your eyes or hands I might have unwittingly captured that explains where you might be. Was the river in your eyes? The beach? What was it I missed that now prevents the painting being real? What have I been looking at, if not you?
And it is that fear above all others which keeps me from the easel: that I have seen something with false eyes, added something that was never part of you. I have left work unfinished before
. All around this room are canvases of ideas that have not worked, missteps that cannot be repaired. Everything starts with past failures in mind. It is one of the cornerstones I work from. For those paintings that navigate beyond that, the finish point is to be satisfied that I have done everything I could and no more. For the moment, I cannot decide where this current work sits. Your absence makes the decision ominous. All I can do is take the blanket from the floor, where you were sitting last night, and throw it over the easel, at last shrouding your face and neck. Only your hands are visible, crossed in your lap, your index fingers pointing outward as if in the direction of what went wrong.
I AM LYING ON the daybed when Vishni appears for a second time. She came earlier, tense in her posture; the oxygen tank pulled closely behind her frame, as if I could not hear the creak of the trolley that carried it. The clumsiness made me angry and I sent her away before I could taste what was actually needed: slow inhalations of sweet gas to give me strength and clear my mind. They say I should use it as often as needed. I ration that advice and its practice; hateful of both. Sleep will not come, neither work, but by now I have opened the skylight and placed a sketchbook on the small table next to me, knowing that pencil can be more comforting than paint. Even without you the day must end with progress being made. Vishni’s face is dappled by patches of light breaking through the cloud; something from both this and the coyness of her gaze make her appear ten years younger. It makes me think about one of the pictures, labored over beneath this skylight, now hanging in one of the ambassadorial residences: Helsinki or Buenos Aires. At this age, not every work I remember, and this rarely troubles me. Lists and chronology are best left to collectors and other documentarians. When I do remember, especially if the work was good, it is mostly worthwhile. I think of the sweat, the processes and the mistakes. The fear of not knowing what I was doing, of falling into an abyss of banal movement, can be looked upon with fondness. In those days I was always so quick to be angry with myself. Nowadays I still hold myself to task, but I have learned to be more forgiving. These are not the hands or eyes of a twenty-year-old, or forty-year-old. I have learned to work with what I have. Vishni’s posture is similar to now, bent forward and conspiratorial, momentarily glancing backwards at the door, wary of being overheard.
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