OK, Mr Field

by Katharine Kilalea

  AUTUMN

  Chapter 5

  The capacity to love

  Autumn arrived with a general spray of autumn colour. It wasn’t winter yet, but it would be; there was a hint in the air of the cold to follow. The village was quiet. The cafes had covered their tables and upturned their chairs and the ice cream shop had its roller shutters pulled shut. Waiters at the fish and chip shop loitered around with nobody to serve. The holidaymakers who’d swarmed the bead shops and art galleries (I’m looking for a painting with ochre in it, something to go with my Indian silk curtains) had covered their sofas, locked their houses and left.

  I hadn’t liked the holidaymakers. I hadn’t liked the way they clogged up the roads with their expensive cars and sat around in cafes – the men in cricket hats and the women with their hair curled under – staring at the sea over the tops of their newspapers with their mouths open as though they were so at ease with themselves that they’d forgotten they were in public. All summer I’d longed for them to be gone but when the cavalcade of motorbikes and white sedans towing boats made its way out along the road towards Cape Town, I regretted their leaving. Surrounded by deserted roads and deserted windows, I felt like I’d been separated from the total mass of the population, like someone left in an environment that wasn’t intended for humans anymore.

  I thought of Mim, but not often. I missed her, but in an ordinary way. I didn’t pine for her. I didn’t miss her in the way you’re meant to miss someone you love. And the truth is that sometimes I even enjoyed the small, unforeseen pleasures of my situation. Like the quiet, or the predictability of days spent alone, or being able to walk around the house naked without it seeming sexual. But there were times in bed, when my feet couldn’t find hers to warm themselves against, when all at once my body would register her absence with such shock that I’d go to the window and stare at the empty parking space where her car used to be as though its return were somehow more likely if my gaze was there, waiting for it.

  Sometimes, in the afternoons, which were a lonely time, I’d go down to the cafe. Sitting among the families eating and couples fighting and friends meeting for coffee, I’d find myself thinking, though not explicitly, about myself. Or rather, thinking about myself in relation to them. They are so much better than me, I’d be thinking. Because as I watched people eating and talking and letting their knees touch under the table, the banal phenomena that are repeated in almost exactly the same way by hundreds of people day in, day out, I was, all the time, making comparisons between myself and them. I watched how long it took people to eat compared to me and thought, What’s the matter with me, why am I so hungry? I watched people adjusting their hair with their hands and thought, How often do they touch their hair compared to me? I watched friends exchanging platitudes and thought, How bored they look, sitting there. Do they like being together? Why do they choose to spend time with each other rather than being alone? I watched mothers feeding their children and answering their childish questions and thought, What is it about having children that gives people pleasure? Perhaps they liked teaching them things. Then I saw a boy touching his mother’s face and playing with her hair and thought, It must be nice to be adored in that way.

  One afternoon, encircled by strange thoughts like these, I left the house. Instead of taking the coastal road into the village, I made my way along the dirt path that led through the nature reserve on the mountain. The trail was easy and popular with tourists; in summer it was overrun with rosy-faced holidaymakers in hiking gear, but that afternoon, although the cold and the winds had not yet set in, the car park had only the odd car in it, and the path itself was empty apart from a few people shuffling around in raincoats.

  The path started out in the direction of the village but it soon became apparent that it didn’t lead towards it, or if it did, it did so indirectly, circling towards its destination via a series of staircases and diversions. I walked slowly. All around me – the end of the day was looming – was white grass yellowing, green grass lightening to a yellower, more luminous green. Birds, invisible in some tree, were squawking. I was alert to people passing. I saw joggers and women walking in pairs, their shadows mingling with mine on the path. I saw rock rabbits. I saw a picture of a lost dog sellotaped to a tree and this, for some reason, seemed significant. Leathery shrubs with pale-pink flowers poked from the rock face.

  After meandering for an hour or so along the side of the mountain, the path dipped through a forest. It climbed for a while upwards, over some rockier terrain, and then the trail branched. The arrow pointing downwards read CABLE CAR and the one pointing up read HARBOUR. Above me the cable car building stood out grandly against the emptiness of the sky. There were no birds or aeroplanes, just air thickening into dense grey clouds. The light was changing. I stopped, looking down on the bay. Perhaps the choice of route had gotten confused with some more significant decision in my mind because I stood there for some time looking upwards and then downwards and then upwards again. Who knows how long I’d have gone on standing there had not a group of teenagers suddenly appeared. They were smoking and I felt afraid to be alone, with nobody to know that I was gone, no one waiting for me. One of the boys spoke to me in a language I didn’t understand, though I could tell from his rising inflections that he wanted something. No, I said. He spoke again and again I said, No. Then, because they chose the higher path, I took the lower.

  The path started off down the slope but turned back on itself after a few minutes before narrowing and entering a ravine so encroached upon by overgrown bushes and trees that it felt less like a path than a tunnel. The sun was setting in earnest now. Something about the time of day and the time of year – like hinges between day and night and summer and autumn – seemed to unhinge me too. I knew where I was but at the same time I had only a vague sense of where I was. Beneath me some amalgam of the failing light and humidity had dematerialised the sea, turning it and the sky into a single grey mass. The rocks, which earlier had been too bright to look at without squinting, grew formless. Shadows came alive with small animals diving away into other shadows. As the light gave way, objects slipped their boundaries and as they did my thoughts blurred, as though seeing and thinking were connected, so that not being able to see clearly meant not being able to think clearly either. I began to make out, I thought, a shape on the path. It looked like somebody walking ahead of me but it was just a long black strip, so it was hard to tell whether they were coming closer from somewhere very distant or the opposite, if they were almost almost gone. My heart sped up because although it wasn’t Mim – of course not – in the dark, when a person is reduced to the shape of their hair or the colours they usually wear, figures are just figures, and every upright figure could be the person you long for and have been hoping to see.

  I walked quickly, following the walker, trusting him or her to lead me somewhere, and before long, hemmed in on either side by black shrubs and black rocks and black foliage, I lost my bearings on the narrow turning path. Once, as a child, my parents had taken me to the Duomo in Milan. Having paid a few lira, we joined the crowds climbing the long spiral staircase to the roof of the cathedral, which offered panoramic views of the city. I remember the sign outside the cathedral as having read FROM THE HIGHEST LOVE COMES THE MOST SHATTERING BLISS, though I suppose it couldn’t really have said that. The stairwell was dark and narrow and ascended in a gently sloping spiral; the only light was the light coming in from the slitted embrasures cut into the thick stone wall. I could see only the two or three steps directly ahead of me and the windows were so far above eye level that it was impossible to gauge, in relation to the outside world, how far I’d climbed. The cathedral had looked stumpy from outside but must have been quite tall because I seemed to be climbing endlessly and became so dizzy and claustrophobic from going round in circles that at one point I tried to turn around, but the stairwell was too narrow to squeeze back past the queue of people behind me, so I kept climbing, feeling with each turning step that I was beco
ming more submerged, more cut off from the world, as though the further up I climbed the further inwards I was going, as if with each stair I was moving deeper into my own body or the maze of my mind.

  The mountain path was still lined on either side by a combination of trees and some kind of dense mountain hedge. From time to time I stopped and looked around but all I could see in the dim light were differentiated shades of black and, occasionally, through what must have been a gap in the leaves, the flecked edges of the sea. The path rose higher along the side of the mountain then levelled out, its contours dissolving into the ridge which dropped off sharply beneath me. The air was blood temperature. A cloud of mosquitoes hovered around me and I, because all my attention was on where next to place my feet, let myself be eaten. I had the impression, as if in a dream, that somewhere nearby a dog was driving a few cattle up the mountain.

  The stars had disappeared so completely behind the clouds that I didn’t see the little cottage until it was right in front of me. It was a plain rectangular building, painted black or built from very dark brown timber, like a fisherman’s cottage. Its lights, if it had any, were off, so that like everything else, it was swallowed into the general darkness. The cottage had two doors, a wooden inner door and a netted screen to stop insects, which bounced shut behind me. As the clouds shifted, a strip of dust was illuminated by a beam of moonlight cutting through the room. There were some furnishings inside but not enough to live by: a dining chair but no table, a television but no sofa. Baboons must have ransacked the cupboards because bits of broken glass and half-eaten food were trodden into the floor. On the counter was an aubergine so misshapen it must have been months old. I thought of a story in the False Bay Echo about an old lady, Mrs So-and-So from Capri Road, who’d been at home one night, tending to her fire, when two men broke in. They tied her hands with the toaster cord and removed her jewellery. Don’t make a fuss, they told her, or we’ll cut off your head – swish – with a knife. They took whatever they could, including her furniture. She relaxed her finger so they could take off her wedding ring. They took it gently, she said, like it was made of glass. They took it so carefully that I felt no panic. In fact, I felt so calm, lying there on the carpet, that I was tempted to just stay there and go to sleep in front of the fire.

  I was relieved, shortly after leaving the cottage, to encounter an elderly German hiker who directed me back down the mountain. The path terminated not at the car park but on a stretch of pavement beside the sea. Ahead of me, across the bay, I saw the village. Sounds drifted across the water, the sounds of dishwashers and kitchen porters singing and clapping their hands as they cleaned plates. How wonderful their singing sounded. It presented something to get closer to. It gave a shape to a journey that, until then, had seemed endless. As I walked I tried to sing – and why not, there was nobody to hear me – but my voice seemed to be far down in my chest and when I opened my mouth all that came out was a kind of barking sound, as though I was trying to cough up something that wouldn’t come.

  The tide was low. Gulls turned in slow arcs overhead. Fishermen came off their boats with their trousers rolled up. Yellowtail! Yellowtail! Yellowtail! Yellowtail! they said as they offloaded their catch onto their tarpaulins. I watched a fisherman trap a fish beneath his foot and cut a half moon under its mouth. Rosie, he said, throwing the innards into the sea, come and get your dinner. A seal who’d been floating in the water with her chest upturned flopped over and swam to the pier. She climbed out and came right up to him, taking the fish and slapping her fins together as if to say thank you. Now, Rosie, said the fisherman, you must go and share with your family. Which she did, letting the fish loose in the water for the cubs, who crowded round snatching bits of flesh.

  A yellow-haired waiter standing outside the cafe smiled at me so genuinely as I passed, his whole face lighting up, that I couldn’t help going in. People were talking and laughing. In the kitchen a chef tossed a skillet over an open flame. Barmen unpacked boxes of wine piled onto the black-and-white chequered floor. I thought of Mim and put myself down on whatever chair was nearest. Where was she? I tried to picture her somewhere (because a person who actually exists must be somewhere) but since all I knew for certain was that she’d driven off, the only image I could conjure up was a picture of her sitting in the car. I ought to telephone her, I thought, so she’s not so lonely. All the muscles in my legs were tense, as though suspecting the chair beneath me might be about to collapse.

  The yellow-haired waiter put down a basket of bread rolls and some butter that had been out of the fridge for some time. What can I do for you, my love? he said, and it was just a turn of phrase of course, but I blushed because all at once I had the idea that I would like to be loved, or if not loved then at least liked by him. No more mussels, he said. No more mussels, no more kidneys. How can you tell if someone would like to be loved by you? Who knows. But maybe! He wore rough cotton trousers with a drawstring waist and a shirt woven from a thread so fine you could see right through to his chest. The menu was stuck to the remains of someone’s spilt drink. Are you hungry? he asked, and I suppose I was because there was a pain in my stomach, which is where Mim’s absence had located itself, in my empty stomach with no food to temper it.

  Two overweight women eating at a nearby table looked up. They seemed to be looking at me but were in fact looking at the wall behind me, which served as a makeshift gallery for local artists. The painting which interested them was on the top right-hand corner of the wall, a faux-religious image of a modern-day Mary and Joseph kissing on a rugged outcrop of rocks in front of the sea. Mary and Joseph were kissing passionately, as though in the process of being separated or reunited (you could tell they were holy from the glow around their heads), but the fact that the rocks they were standing on looked like sirloin steaks undermined any sexual feeling. The overlap of their kissing faces, painted in a flat, almost cubist style, merged into the illusion of a third face that was wonky and dislocated.

  Beneath the picture of Mary and Joseph were several portraits which I thought at first were of a number of women with a physical likeness – all large and bald – but in fact all depicted the same woman, just in different painterly styles and poses, sometimes clothed, sometimes naked, sometimes smoking a cigarette, etc. Something about the painter’s attention – a mixture of cruelty and curiosity – was strangely titillating and I couldn’t help wondering who she was and why the painter had painted her over and over again. The exquisitely intimate nature of his gaze invited one to fantasise a narrative for their situation: A man paints a woman. While he paints she looks at him looking at her. He paints her again and again, not because he finds her sexually attractive (she is, after all, a very large and totally hairless woman) but because he likes being looked at in that way. Seen in this way, the act of painting was a kind of seduction, not an erotic seduction (though sometimes she seems to be looking seductively at him from the canvas) but a sort of visual intercourse, the painter’s way of keeping them alone together in the room. There was something disturbing about the portraits. Travelling across the row of paintings, I kept hoping that something would change, that the intensity of the painter’s gaze would lessen, that his desire to paint, like the paint itself, would eventually run out. But he seemed to want to go on painting her forever.

  Across from me was a man with brown stains on his fingers who was sitting alone. Excuse me, he said to the waiter. His accent was thick and he spoke with some difficulty, as if he’d had a stroke. Excuse me, he said again. Can my dog come in? He pointed outside to a tied-up dog licking itself on the pavement. The dog looked up as if knowing it was being discussed. It depends, said the waiter. Is it the kind of dog that just sits under the table? What kind of dog is that, the man said, a dog that’s under sedation? The dog was small and had a stump instead of a tail. It looked happy, happy but with no tail to wag. I like dogs, said the waiter, but I prefer the ones with short hair. A dog is a reason to have conversations with people, the man said. About the
dog, and beyond. Then the dog came in and it didn’t cause any trouble.

  Outside, a family of seals was sleeping on the rocks. The waiter delivered a portion of squid to a group of people sitting nearby. Mmm, a man said, it’s so tender. How do you get it so tender? The waiter said they tenderised it by beating it to death against the rocks. Ouch! the man said. Do they cry? How do squids cry? the waiter replied. Through the window, boats were sailing in and out of the bay, little boats sailing in behind the big trawlers, as if dragged in their wake. A swarm of seagulls followed the boats, trailing the scent of fish, their white underbellies flashing in the moonlight. The waiter arrived with my food and said, It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I love rocks, they’re so peaceful. He put his hand on the back of my chair and poured me a glass of pinotage. He was a connoisseur of pinotage, he said. As I swirled the wine in my glass he noticed my wrist, cocked at an unusual angle. What happened? he said. Nothing, I said. Nothing serious. Is it painful? he asked. It looks painful. Perhaps a glass of wine will make you feel better. I looked at the moon, the fast-moving clouds, the moonlight on the water. Nobody cares about one’s personal trials and griefs, I thought. One’s trials and griefs are boring.