This notebook happened to be in her hand. She had taken to carrying it around at work as a sign of her status, much as a medical intern carries a stethoscope. It was a small gesture of rebellion too, a rejection of the paperless-office requirement, a measurable objective in the Environmental Accounting section of the Corporate Balanced Scorecard from which she thought she should be exempt. The notebook held a selection of her best stories, handwritten on unlined paper, the current favourite bookmarked with a silk ribbon. She straightened her spine against the brushed aluminium wall of the compartment and pressed the notebook to her stomach.
After a flurry of phone calls to find out what the problem was and how long it would take to fix, the others began to cancel appointments and rearrange schedules. They had to share three cellphones among four people, and as the devices passed from hand to hand, illuminating one face after another, she tried to place them. The man with the loud voice was the Chief Risk Officer. He was accompanied by two departmental heads, a man and a woman. And then there was an anxious young man in a checked shirt with a red tie plunging through it like an arrow on a graph. A junior knowledge strategist.
It was beautiful, she thought, the play of cellphone light on furrowed brows and pursed lips, every bit as dramatic as a Caravaggio. If only the shrill young man would press the phone to his right ear like the others instead of holding it up to his mouth on his palm like a slice of pizza.
When the first of the cellphones faded out, the Chief Risk Officer spoke again to Maintenance and raised his voice. A mechanical failure, he said after the call. Roll on the day when mechanics is done away with entirely. The words were hardly out of his mouth when the second phone went down. They rationed the last one for twenty minutes, switching it on only to see how much, or rather how little, time had passed, and the knowledge strategist tolled the minutes in a tremulous voice.
Now might be a good time for a story. It took the storyteller a moment to realise that the suggestion was directed at her. The Chief Risk Officer, anticipating the panic when the last light failed, had called for a distraction.
Her stories were neither corporate fictions nor emergency tales, they were simply things she had made up for her own amusement, but there was no time to explain. She opened the notebook at the ribbon. There was a breathless pause. She could not see in the dark, of course, and no one could see that she could not see. She asked for light. The knowledge strategist protested, but the departmental head switched on her cellphone and held the screen over the page.
It was the story of Lamberto Violante, a double-entry bookkeeper in the city of Buenos Aires, who would have led a happy life had he not become terrified of vanishing without trace. For thirty years, he’d devoted every spare moment to avoiding this fate. It was hard work at first, signalling his continued existence and manufacturing evidence that would make him easy to find: he was always jotting down notes, getting himself photographed, leaving messages, scraping and sampling, checking in and touching base. But as the years passed, he became aware that complete strangers were taking care of things, keeping tabs on him and monitoring his every move, and the burden eased. He was able to live a normal life again.
The corporate storyteller began to read.
As the story unwound, the circle drew closer. The arm of the departmental head holding the phone coiled about her waist, the hip of the Chief Risk Officer pressed against her own. She saw the little band of them, huddled around the page like the last people of their tribe at a dying fire. Another tableau from Caravaggio, spoilt only by the red pulse of the low-battery light.
The phone went dead.
The after-image of the page quivered in her mind. All that could be heard was her faltering voice and the breathing of the knowledge strategist. Her eye swept along the lines to where the last words were evaporating. She wondered afterwards what she would have said next, not read but spoken, and almost regretted that she would never know, for just then the lift jerked and the lights came on. As they blinked at one another, colleagues again in the glare, the compartment fell back to the 11th floor and the doors opened.
metamorphosis
As I left the building, three of the performers came through a side door and walked towards the staff bus. Natalie was not among them. I gathered from their costumes that they had been in the chorus of gigantic insects. They had pulled sweaters on over their black leotards and leggings, but they were still wearing their bug-eye make-up. One of them was clutching an armful of carapaces, which proved to be nothing more than shin pads, breastplates and face masks of the kind used by hockey players.
grecian food
I happened to be in Margery’s old neighbourhood when she called about the trunks. I told her where I was – eating a gyro at Tropical Fast Foods in Langermann Drive – and we joked as usual about their neon sign. ‘Grecian Food,’ it said. Obviously a cut above the ordinary Greek stuff like moussaka. I said they’d started to put on airs when they moved from Hillbrow to the suburbs. Margery said the only place you’d find Ancient Greece in that joint was in the chip fryer.
Then she told me the news: we were finally rid of Claude and his papers. She’d called an auctioneer, someone who specialises in old photographs and books, and he took everything off her hands for a couple of grand. All of Claude’s letters, all of Berti’s books. The whole caboodle.
After we rang off, I sat there picking at my cold food. To my surprise, the knowledge that Claude and Berti had finally been dismembered brought tears to my eyes. The leavings of their lives could never be put back together again; all the traces that junk contained of their restless passage through the world had been irrecoverably lost.
response to a curator
From: Pollak Gallery projects [[email protected]]
Sent: Tue 11/16/2010 1:50 PM
To: adam b
Subject: RE: alias show
Dear Adam,
The photographer you’re thinking of is Lonni Cadori and I do in fact represent her. She prefers ‘lens-based artist’ for obvious reasons. Her father took pictures for the cops in the 1980s – there’s a news image of him aiming his camera from the back of a Casspir. The idea of shooting at a crime scene is central to her work.
Her ongoing project is called Over My Dead Body. Her MO (as she puts it) is risky: ‘I visit houses that are up for sale on show days and, while an accomplice distracts the estate agent, I stage photographs in the rooms. Usually this involves planting evidence before making a photographic record. For instance, I might lie on the bed in the master bedroom and leave an imprint of my head on the pillow; or stub out a half-smoked cigarette in a pot plant; or wear a large pair of men’s shoes over my own sneakers, make a muddy footprint in the bathroom, and abandon the shoes under the bed.’ There is a play on evidence, veracity etc.
I’ll Dropbox some images to you in a minute. Let me know if they appeal and we can talk further.
Warmest,
Claudia
Does the name Neville Lister ring a bell? We showed his work here in 2009. A late bloomer, middle-aged, difficult. I’m not sure it would interest you, but I could let you see some new images from a series called Dead Letters. Suspicious behaviour of a different order. Just shout.
Claudia Fischhoff|Pollak Gallery
21 Melle Street, Braamfontein 2001
Tue – Fri 10:00 – 17:00 Sat 10:00 – 15:00
If you cannot see the images in this message, click here.
lost detectives (51)
Another Meet and Greet, another networking opportunity. He should abscond. At breakfast, he could tell them that he nodded off in front of the TV. He could say he was lost in thought. He could be the lost Detective. But there were so many lost Detectives already. They were all lost.
swansong
A man in short pants and gumboots entered the hall and tottered towards the pit, waving his hands and shouting. I thought this intruder was a drunken dishwasher, but my servitor explained in a whisper that he was a poet sent to keep us awake un
til dinner was served. One might have expected a poet to rouse his audience by the brilliance of his words, but he relied on the simpler expedient of clapping his hands. He mumbled a few lines, and bellowed a few more, to the delight of my companions, and slapped his palms on his chest and thighs. Once or twice he bent down and drummed on his toes and then clapped both palms to his cheeks with a resounding smack.
Finally he quietened down and pulled a cushion up to the fire. He looked remarkably like the King, only smaller and chubbier, a deflated prototype. He sat there with a trencher propped between knees and belly, smacking his lips.
The poet had a second function, my servitor explained: he was the King’s taster. Just then two attendants came with a long-handled fork that had a single tubular prong, and they plunged this into the largest slab of protein on the rack and extracted a sample. This gelatinous rod was extruded on the poet’s trencher. With a theatrical flourish, he pinched it between two fingers and displayed it to the assembly. Then he put one end in his mouth. A single bite would have been more than a mouthful, but he hawked it in whole, inch by inch, like a snake consuming a rat, and batted the protruding end with his palm until that too disappeared and his lips were sealed. He chewed, and blew out his cheeks, and chewed again, and sweated and swallowed.
His eyes boggled and he fell back on the cushion. I was greatly alarmed, thinking he was dead. But after a minute, he lifted his head and leered at us, which was a sign for everyone to clap their hands and tuck their bibs into their collars. Then the poet laid his head down on the greasy board and went to sleep.
Acknowledgements
Some of these stories have appeared in Art South Africa, Die Horen, Karavan and Siècle 21, and in the anthologies A Writing Life: Celebrating Nadine Gordimer (edited by Andries W. Oliphant), Opbrud (edited by Chris van Wyk and Vagn Plenge), Touch (edited by Karina Szczurek) and Home Away (edited by Louis Greenberg). I am grateful to the editors of these publications, to Martha Evans and Sean O’Toole, and especially to Michael Titlestad for his meticulous editing of this volume.
The account of Edward Sheldon’s life in ‘The Reading’ draws on Eric Wollencott Barnes’s biography The Man Who Lived Twice (Scribner’s, New York, 1956), in particular the passage about reading (pp. 169–76). The comments about the ‘sewing machine’ style are on p. 172; the quote about pity is on p. 167.
The phrase ‘translated from the dead’ (also in ‘The Reading’) is drawn from the testimony of Regina Gwayi before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on 23 April 1996, as reported by Antjie Krog in her book Country of My Skull (Random House, Johannesburg, 1998), p. 28. Mrs Gwayi testified about the killing of Sonny Boy Zantsi by a policeman in Guguletu on 16 September 1976.
Neville Lister’s Dead Letters exhibition was a joint project with David Goldblatt. I am grateful to David for the use of Neville’s photographs, and to Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, the curators of the Alias exhibition, for prompting the work. The image of the exhibition in the ‘Dead Letter Gallery’ is by Marek Gardulski and is used courtesy of the Foundation for Visual Arts, Kraków. My thanks to Natalia Grabowska for sourcing the image.
My thanks also to Minky Schlesinger, Isobel Dixon, Corina van der Spoel, Kim Wallmach, Alan Schlesinger and Hilary Wilson.
I worked on some of thesestories during a residency in 2012/13 at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), which is based in the Wallenberg Research Centre at Stellenbosch University. I am grateful to the Director and staff of the Institute, and to the other fellows, for their support and good company.
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101 Detectives Page 18