Lydia said the major references were Italian.
Michelangelo, I said, naturally.
Raphael, actually.
Très quattrocento, Karen said.
Personally, I thought they were too well-fed to be angelic, like art-school types got up as saints. But then Lydia always said I didn’t understand how things worked – anything important, that is, the soft, human things, as opposed to the hard facts and figures.
In the end the archangels (my joke) did much to deepen my appreciation of the arts. I spent hours at a stretch, with my feet on the fender, gazing at their robust limbs and cheery faces, until they were as familiar to me as people I knew. There was the Archangel Barry, for instance, strumming something jazzy on the harp, and the Archangel Justin with his hand up the vestments of his celestial neighbour.
* * *
—
It was to be expected, I suppose, after the commercial success of the heavenly host, that devils would come back into fashion too.
I took my dinner to the lounge and put a match to the pyre. I half-expected some practical joke of the kind I might have dreamed up myself: the devils would drop their forks, or the puppy-dogs from hell would lift a leg and douse the fire. Once a squealing of sap in the wood seemed to issue from a dog’s mouth, but the illusion quickly passed. They just stood there, with the fire blazing all around them.
When the logs were whole, and the flames were leaping up into the flue, my devils were majestic. Holding the conflagration up above their heads, they lost the taint of pantomime and looked almost biblical. But as the logs caved in on them, and I had to shovel on more anthracite, the devils’ gloom returned. When you took a good look at them, they were seedy, unshaven, unfit, like dried-out old soaks, with hollow cheeks and maudlin eyes, thickening middles and stubby horns butting the air, ash mounting around their ankles. It really made you wish that they’d do something, flick their tails, or curse, or spit. Their acquiescence in these domestic duties was shameful.
Don’t you want to do something with your life? Lydia used to ask, just to annoy me. Don’t you have a sense of adventure?
I decided to renounce them, to deny their origins; it was too complicated to start explaining about Lydia now. I would tell Annie I had picked them up in a second-hand shop.
Better get rid of the evidence. I tore off the lid of the box and threw it on the fire. Then I tossed in a handful of the polystyrene but it let off such a noxious reek I went to dispose of the rest in the outside bin. When I up-ended the box a postcard drifted out. Cézanne’s Still Life with Apples and Oranges, according to the useful caption. And on the back that familiar, creatively illegible scribble.
Dear Duncan,
What’s it like living in Gauteng? Paris is wonderful. I really feel at home here, if you know what I mean. There’s so much happening – movies, exhibitions, music – you don’t really know where to start. Yesterday I was at the D’Orsay (to look at their Rodins) but I saw this too, which you might like. You would definitely like the museum – it used to be a railway station. Excuse my scrawl, I’m writing this on the train. I still think Jo’burg would be better if it had a metro. And I don’t want to hear about the unstable dolomite or whatever. Anyway, these are for those cold Highveld nights (I’ll leave you to figure out what they are). I hope they remind you of the old days.
Always,
Lydia
Busy, busy, busy. So busy she hadn’t even bothered to check whether I was still at the same address. I tore the cardboard box into small pieces and fed it to the fire.
* * *
—
Mercifully, the explosive mechanism of Lydia’s departure has vanished almost entirely from my memory. But I remember as if it were yesterday the melodramatics with Justin which primed it. It was at this very fireside. Lydia had invited Justin and Barry and Karen and so on to a poetry evening. Justin read some of his poems, odious things about silky – or was it milky? – thighs and tonguetips in navels, all made for Lydia’s exquisite ears.
I don’t know anything about poetry, but I engaged him on the veracity of some anatomical detail. He was quite put out.
Lydia was embarrassed. It’s a poem Duncan, she said to me, not a medical journal. You have to use your imagination.
So then I said that poetry was a dead art. Who bought the stuff anyway? You’re history, I said (meaning poets in general).
What would you know about books? Justin said.
Very little, I said. But who cares? The book has been superseded by the computer.
That always gets to them.
Your problem – the friends had never diagnosed me before, although Lydia had set a fine example – your problem is you don’t understand the difference between an object and a device. I could tell Justin was very angry because he began to speak with a peculiar Slavic intonation. He seized a book from the mantelpiece – it was some Folio Society thing in a slip case, which suited his argument rather well – and waved it at me. This is an object, an artefact, not a bunch of dots and dashes on a screen. There’s a difference between turning a page and pressing a button you know. There was a lot more about the differences between paper and silicon, appreciation and consumption, sensuousness and sensory abasement, but I soon lost track. Then he looped back to his own poems and enduring values.
Enough is enough. The folder containing Justin’s poems was lying on the coffee-table next to my chair and a devilish impulse made me pick it up and throw it into the fire.
How I wish I could let that stand, that I’d actually done it. But I did not. Whether it was a failure of the imagination or a victory for common decency I cannot say. Lydia always said I had no imagination; but then didn’t she also say I was a decent sort? Wasn’t that one of the things she saw in me? Wasn’t that what she said she saw in me when they asked? Anyway, I hesitated and was lost. Justin snatched the folder out of my hand and threw it into the flames himself. I should think it was the most Russian thing he’d done since blowing up the curio; he was quite overcome by himself. Barry or someone tried to rescue the pages with the tongs, while Lydia clapped her hands.
It only occurred to me later that the little poseur probably had carbon copies at home. Or in his head (he set so much store by recitation).
Later on, when everyone had gone home, Lydia and I sat by the fire, not talking, just feeling silly, the way people do when they’ve behaved like characters in books. The object Justin had waved at me was on the couch, and she tipped it from its case and leafed through it, running her fingers over the paper as if to demonstrate a point about literature which I did not grasp, and then fell asleep with it open on her chest. I should have checked to see what it was. She took the better books with her when she moved out, and left me the “manuals.” Annie came in at ten and woke me up by putting her cold knuckles against my neck. The fire was dead, the surprise spoilt. She said it was cosy anyway, she’d get it going again in a minute. I went to the kitchen to put on the kettle and heard her exclaiming over the firedogs.
I bought them at that place in Queen Street, I lied. They go with the angels.
They’re cute.
I heard her scrabbling in the scuttle. Did you finish the firelighters?
Use a cone.
I can’t get it to catch. Won’t you bring some paper with you when you come.
The newspaper rack was empty. I took the Times from under the cat food.
The devils looked even more pathetic now, knee-deep in ashes. The toy poms had vanished entirely under the debris.
I took the poker from her and raked over the coals, crumpled the front page into a ball and tossed it on top. As the paper blackened and curled, the corners of my mind darkened too. The Truth Commission. The very idea filled me with dread. Not because I personally had anything to hide, but because the exercise was bound to be so repetitive. They would be digging over our sorry history, dragging things
to the surface, corpses, crimes, injustices, everything that had been buried and could stay that way as far as I was concerned. Why was everyone so obsessed with the past? Why did time pass in the first place if not to conceal from us our own unpleasantness? Now the scar tissue would be torn off in the name of healing and the guilty secrets excised and hauled out into the light. We would have to go over it again, the killing, the stealing, the lying, the whole list of broken commandments.
You know, Duncs, they remind me of you.
What’s that?
The firedogs. They remind me of you.
At least Annie has a sense of humour.
I’m being serious. She leaned closer to the hearth as the paper flared. How odd, they actually look like you. Is that why you bought them?
Who was I to argue?
Acknowledgements
Some of these stories first appeared in English Academy Review, New Contrast, Sesame, Staffrider, Stet, TriQuarterly, World Literature Today and in the anthology Obsession, edited by Sarah LeFanu and Stephen Hayward (Serpent’s Tail, 1995).
Part III of “Propaganda by Monuments” draws on A. Lunacharski, “Lenin and Art,” in International Literature, No. 5, 1935. “Isle of Capri” words and music by Jimmy Kennedy/Wilhelm Grosz © 1934, KPM EMI administered by Gallo Music Publishers (SAMRO), all rights reserved – used with permission. The description of marine grottoes is from Italy, edited by Doré Ogrizek (McGraw-Hill, 1950). “The Book Lover” quotes from Barbara Cartland’s A Ghost in Monte Carlo (Rich and Cowan, 1951) with the kind permission of Ian McCorquodale. The same story borrows from the publishers’ blurbs for Naught for your Comfort by Trevor Huddleston (HarperCollins) and The Burning Man by Sarah Gertrude Millin (Heinemann).
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