Unwilling to watch any of it through to the end, I do my research (Mr Lister’s Festival of Films with Peculiar Accents, coming soon to a multiplex near you); and when I weary of that, I piece together my own staccato sub-plots, ranging across the channels, leaping from one floe to another, taking as material whatever wildlife documentary or cookery show or courtroom drama or soap opera I land in. One jab of the remote and a round fired in Hollywood brings down an antelope in Mala Mala. A serial killer is always on the loose somewhere, and if he’s wielding a knife I can get him to chop onions, and use those pungent shards to make the survivors of the latest mudslide weep. Cooking, shooting, weeping, these three abide, 24/7.
The remarkable thing is how it all cuts. There is so much afloat, it’s impossible to create a clash, let alone a contradiction, and my improvisations can scarcely be told apart from the scheduled programmes. Chaos is a kind of congruence. Everything has jumped out of its skin, everything is raw and ready to be remixed. In the deluge of contiguity, things that are self-contained, that persist on their own course and refuse new relationships, cannot be endured.
These were the late, late hours of our Friday evening, the end of our end-of-the-working-week routine. Leora and I had eaten supper, finished a bottle of wine, watched a DVD. Her choice one week, mine the next. Last Friday, mine: Dances with Wolves. I had been calling her Stands with a Spoon all week and it was time to move on. Tonight, hers: Pride and Prejudice. No obvious jokes there. Now she was asleep beside me on the couch with the top of her cherished head pressing against my thigh, and I was flossing my teeth, savouring the exotic combination of minted wax and twelve-year-old scotch. In the uncharted reaches of the menu, between a documentary on Roman ossuaries and reruns of classic frames from the world snooker champs in Leicester, I found him: Jaco Els.
Chef Giacomo of the Paragon Laboratory. Still sleek, almost dapper. Thicker around the middle, but the chef’s tunic flattered. It was a vaguely military tunic with silver buttons and epaulettes, and the toque was not the usual tall mushroom but an oversized beret. Giacomo! It’s all Italy now. Whatever became of Greece?
Back in the ’90s, when the TRC hearings were on television, I’d watched as much as I could stand, hoping to plug the gaps in my knowledge and reanimate the deadened nerve-endings of my sympathy. Among the perpetrators, a long line of men whose memories were as badly made as their suits, I’d always expected to see someone I knew, someone like Jaco. And here he was, ten years too late, giving truthful testimony on the Paragon range of non-stick cookware.
Chef Giacomo was in command of a postmodern kitchen, the kind made for deconstructive cooking. Hi-tech finishes concealed traditional carcases. There was a coal stove with a stainless-steel hob, there were worm-eaten cabinets with granite tops, copper pots hung from steel-plated ceiling beams. Behind pale-green frosted glass that made the cabinets look like shower cubicles were the hazy feminine forms of glasses and bowls. Hollowware, they call it in the trade. On the end of the counter stood a Bunsen burner.
Leora would have loved it and I thought of waking her up. But the sight of Jaco after all these years was too strange: I needed to absorb it on my own.
I thumbed up the volume.
Maestro! Time had knocked the rough edges off his accent and there was a twang in there now that intrigued: he sounded like a spray painter from Roodepoort who’s been to Bible School in San Antonio. It made his storytelling more compelling than ever. In a minute, I was drawn in. While he described the unique properties of the Paragon’s non-stick coating, he settled a pan on a gas ring and turned up the heat. He showed us a bottle of sunflower oil and tossed it in the bin. He showed us a brick of butter and sent that south too.
Sticky stuff was lined up in tubs beside the stove, and he reached for them and dribbled honey and jam into the pan, and spooned in sugar and custard powder. He made it bubble, added a handful of flour and gave it a good stir with a spatula. Then he poured the goo out and broke an egg into the empty pan.
Where exactly is a twang, I wonder. I would like a linguist to explain it to me. And why San Antone? Why not Tulsa or Forth Worth?
While the egg was frying, he showed us a pot scourer and tossed it in the bin. He spoke about the damage caused by steel wool and abrasive scouring agents, ickcetera. He tossed aside brushes, pads and soap-impregnated pillows.
When the egg was done, he slid it on to a plate, put the empty pan back on the gas and turned up the heat until the flame formed a blue calyx around the black iron base. He spoke about the special guarantee, but that’s not all, he mentioned special prices if you dialled now. He said that if something stuck to a Paragon, they would give you your money back. While he was speaking, he took from under the counter a thick, rainbow-striped beach sandal and dropped it in the pan. Easing a paper mask over his mouth and nose, he fired up a blowtorch and played it over the rubber until it smoked and bubbled and began to melt. Prices and order numbers flashed in jagged clouds. Jaco reached for the spatula again and pressed the molten sole down in the pan. The smell of burning rubber filled the room.
My knees are packing up, my mother would say, and my back’s already gone out. Quoting Shelley Winters, I think. Now this business with her eyes. She’d woken up with double vision. Hoping it would go away, as the aches and pains usually did, she’d held out for a week before making an appointment with Dr Jacobson, who did her cataracts. ‘You should see me trying to decide which of my faces to powder,’ she said when she phoned, making light, working her way round to asking for a lift to the clinic. We’ve spoken about moving her into a retirement village or a home, some place with frail care for when the time comes, you have to think ahead, but she loves the flat. She has friends in the block, widows like herself, decent bridge players. And she values her independence. Not being able to drive is the worst.
Herbert got up from his desk in the lobby to usher us out of the lift and then took her other arm with the decorous familiarity of a son-in-law. He even held the door of the Charade while I helped her into the passenger seat. I always worry she’ll bang her head, more so since her eyes started troubling her, and I was glad of the help. How much was it worth though? Recently Leora had rebuked me for giving a car guard two rand. Apparently the standard rate had risen to five. I gave that to Herbert and he seemed satisfied.
‘We should have kept the Merc,’ my mother said as we drove off. ‘You and Herbert could have carried me down on a stretcher and stashed me in the back seat.’
‘You always were a back-seat driver.’
Letting that pass, she asked: ‘How’s the work going?’
In my mother’s vocabulary, ‘work’ means what you do for a living. I told her about the shoot that morning. We’d been on Constitution Hill, in one of the cold, narrow cells at the old Women’s Jail, dropping crockery on the concrete floor, clay pots and china cups called Annemarie, Busi, Caroline, and so on down the alphabet. A public service ad on spousal abuse. By the time we were finished, the place looked like a Greek restaurant.
We moved on to other things. I thought of telling her about the interview for the News, but my nascent career as an ‘artist’ still embarrasses me in front of the family. I am much too old to bud. Giacomo Els and his shtick – his non-shtick – might amuse her. Or it might remind her of my father, which is not always a good thing. She still has her wit and her wits about her, but these days she’ll get sad in the blink of an eye. To play it safe, I told her about the catering business Leora is setting up with her friend Bo. Before they’ve even registered the company, they’re arguing about the colour of the table linen.
My mother was reminded of the shenanigans at body corporate meetings, which she attends purely for the theatre. Now the members were at war over the redecoration. ‘That old queen Paul Meagher wants lilac tiles in the lobby!’ she said. ‘It will look like a bathhouse, which is where he got the idea, I think.’
In the parking lot at the Garden City, as I was about to get out of the car, she put her hand on my a
rm and said, ‘Is everything all right?’
‘I’ve been out of sorts,’ I said. ‘This place gets to me sometimes.’
‘What is it now?’
‘Nothing specific, a succession of small irritations with the way things work, or don’t work, as the case may be.’
‘Tell me, before we go in.’
‘Here’s an example. I was at Home Affairs in Randburg last week to renew my passport. I hadn’t been out that way for ages. First I couldn’t find the place because I was looking for Hans Strijdom and the name has changed. I’ve heard Malibongwe Drive on the traffic report a hundred times and I didn’t put it together. Then there was a queue a mile long. You’d think it was an election. When I finally got to the counter, they wanted a copy of my old passport, but they didn’t have a photocopier, it was broken. The clerk sent me into the parking lot and there was a guy out there with a photocopier rigged to a 12 volt battery. He made me a copy for five rand.
‘The whole transaction was so half-baked, so underdeveloped. And there was a backscratching tone to it, the photocopy guy must be a cousin of the guy behind the counter, he probably takes a cut. They have a little business going on the side, they’re in the photocopy racket. The machine in the office, the proper machine, probably isn’t even broken. And if it is, why don’t they bloody well get it fixed?
‘The photocopy guy was eating a chicken breast. He wiped his fingers carefully on a rag, took my passport and hunkered down between two cars. The device was in a tatty cardboard box held together with packaging tape, and he flipped open the lid and got the copy going. My glum, official face edged out of the slot into the sunshine, burnt out, overexposed. This process shouldn’t be happening outdoors, I thought, it belongs in a quiet, dust-free, well-lit office. I looked across the street and there behind a palisade fence was some hi-tech head office where people behind cool grey glass were working at terminals in air-conditioned quiet. That’s where I should be doing this, I thought again, in a carpeted open-plan office with a water cooler, in an American space, not on a dusty, potholed patch of tar with the sun burning the back of my neck and the smell of fried chicken in the air.
‘I paid the guy and went inside with my photocopy. I’d been on the point of complaining about the quality of the print, which made me look like a ghost, but when I got it out of the sunlight it wasn’t too bad.’
‘So it all worked out in the end.’
‘Well, that’s what Leora said. When I told her the story, how the whole thing made me feel depressed and anxious about the future, she said it all depends on your perspective. It sounded quite hopeful to her, quite efficient and convenient. My photocopy guy is the African entrepreneur in action. He’s found a niche, he’s providing an ingenious solution to a problem and making an honest living. It’s a sign that things are working. They’re just working in a different way.
‘And I said, sure, I see that things can work this way – but I don’t think they should.’
‘You’ll have to get used to it, Nev.’
‘Or not. For the first time in years, I’ve been thinking I might be better off in England, somewhere the world meets my expectations more closely. But I’m not even sure about that. Everything seems harder to manage these days, and stranger. Perhaps it’s part of getting old.’
‘Wait till you’re my age,’ she said. ‘I can hardly follow what people are saying any more. My ears are nearly as bad as my eyes. I was watching telly the other night and I thought I’d flipped over to the wrong channel. It looked like a quiz show from Bulgaria or something. And then I recognized that chappie from Strictly Come Dancing and I realized they were speaking English.’
I’m growing into my father’s language: it will fit me eventually like his old overcoat that was once two sizes too big.
We went inside. An aide came with a wheelchair, but she wanted to walk. ‘Arrive in one of those and God knows what you’ll leave in.’ The lobby had a low, subtly shadowed ceiling, bloated sofas in private corners and paintings steeped in lukewarm pools of light. The wrought-iron tables and chairs belonged to the coffee shop. It felt more like a hotel than a clinic. We made for the lifts in baby steps. I realized again how much she’s shrunk over the years, she barely reaches my shoulder. Clinging to my arm, and blinking in wonder as she looked around, she seemed like a delicate child being taken on an outing to cheer her up.
Dr Jacobson had his own waiting room. There were pot plants with enormous leaves, which proved to be real, and posters showing the human eye in cross section. It brought back bits and pieces of my long-forgotten school Biology, the rods and cones, the blind spot, the aqueous humour.
I looked at the man on the cover of Longevity. His age was a mystery to me.
‘Do you ever do popcorn?’ my mother asked earnestly. ‘In the microwave?’
The nurse behind the counter tensed.
‘No …’
‘Good, because it’s making people sick. Popcorn lung.’
‘Popcorn lung!’
‘You get it from exposure to microwaved popcorn, the artificial butter flavour, to be precise. It’s a completely new affliction.’
‘Talk about death, disability and dread disease! The insurers must be reeling.’
‘You can laugh, but it’s the scourge of our times, every bit as horrible as consumption.’
Janie emailed to say she’d posted her first impressions on her blog. As soon as the article was done, she’d let me know. She’d looked again at my thresholders – they were more like gatekeepers, to be frank, just a thought – and for all the lack of drama in the pictures, found them engaging. They had a cumulative effect.
Had I heard of gate trauma? A dozen South Africans are killed by electronic gates every year. Closing gates cause a third of the fatalities, while falling gates account for the rest.
Some thoughts about the dead letters, btw: ‘You’re making them up. Heard it on the grapevine. So the ethical question – Whose letters? – yields to an aesthetic one – How convincing are they? Well done on clearing that hurdle. I picture you bent over your bench like a monk, with a stack of antique stationery under your fist and an old airmail sticker on the tip of your tongue, stuff you’ve been hoarding for ever and at last have a use for. Pretending to be someone you’re not, inventing signatures for your alter egos, making up weird handwritings and breaking English into little pieces.’
The digital grapevine: now there’s a poisoned plant. I wrote back: ‘Would hate to be accused of authenticity, but don’t believe everything you hear in the whispering galleries of the internet. No one knows about the dead letters except you and Leora, whose lips are sealed.’ It didn’t seem appropriate to mention my mother.
The first impressions were cut to a pop song, perhaps one of her own. The tune burbled along like a cellphone ringing underwater. Small animated shrieks zipped out and faded like rockets, while larger groans thumped in the bottom of the pot like root vegetables. Antoine K’s shanty town and Aurelia Mashilo’s palazzo. Street corners, flyovers rushing closer, bursting into the slipstream like surf, letterboxes, shrubbery, an ejaculation of soapsuds across a dirty windscreen, a braid coiled on the pavement like a house snake, capering children, here and there against a scudding backdrop my solemn profile, my double chin, my hands on the steering wheel, steering. The designated driver. Neville the Navigator.
I went to see Saul Auerbach. This was a few years after the walkabout at the Pollak, where I’d failed to introduce myself; and a few years before my late start at the Switch Box, where I showed my photos of walls. I took some of those prints with me, the first I ever made, thinking I might ask Auerbach to look at them, let him cast a beady eye or a blessing. But when I drew up outside the house in Craighall Park, it seemed presumptuous and I left the pictures in the car.
Still at the same address after all these years. People take root in places, it gets to the point where they cannot imagine being anywhere else and it’s too much trouble to move.
Auerbach came to the
gate in his trademark khaki shorts (as the papers would put it) and a worn pair of combat boots. He was smaller, bonier and browner than I remembered.
Another visitor was just leaving, a tall man of about sixty wearing a fawn linen suit, impeccably crumpled, and a doffable panama with rising damp on the crown. We shook hands on the pavement – Matti Someone-or-other, a photojournalist from Finland – and then he got into an Audi with Budget stickers in the windows and drove away. An intrepid explorer with an expense account and a hotel room in Sandton. You could imagine that he had just got off a paddle steamer, but not that he would die soon of a fever.
As Auerbach ground beans for the espresso machine, the aromatic details of my last visit to his house swirled into my head. The place had not changed much in twenty years, but whereas I had felt then that I was stepping back in time, now I seemed to be lurching forward. I glanced into the lounge to see if the Swedish chrome and Afghan kilims were still there. That archaic term ‘futuristic’ came into my head. It was not that fashion had caught up with the house, but that the house had gone on ahead. Quotation was a curse. It was no longer possible to imagine a different future, let alone a better one. Tomorrow always looked like a recycled version of yesterday. It was already familiar.
When we were seated in the garden at opposite ends of a long wrought-iron table, the espresso cups steaming before us, mine host in the full glare of the sun, toasting himself lightly, yours truly in the shade of a frangipani, I reminded him about that day.
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