Entertaining Angels
Page 2
It was Rhonda who’d suggested she write about it.
‘But no one wants to read about a failed marriage,’ she protested. ‘Not in this country. We’ve enough other problems.’
‘Write it for yourself,’ said Rhonda, phlegmatic as always. ‘Not for other people.’
‘You mean like a diary?’ Griet turned up her nose as though she’d been confronted by a blocked drain – an all-too-frequent occurrence in her friend’s flat. ‘I’m a bit past that.’
‘No, I mean like a story. Fictionalise yourself. It’s what you’re always doing in your imagination anyway.’
Griet had laughed off the suggestion – or so she thought. But it must have stuck somewhere in her subconscious. Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a woman. That was her first thought when she woke up this morning. Who on earth still began a story with ‘Once upon a time’? That was her second thought, as she sat up with the taste of the previous evening’s last illegal cigarette like a reproach on her tongue. It was her work that was affecting her mind, she decided for the umpteenth time.
She earned her bread and butter at a publisher’s, in an office full of children’s books, at a word processor on which she edited and translated and sometimes fabricated fairy tales and other fantasies. The last year or so she’d been busy with what would probably be the most comprehensive collection of fairy tales ever to appear in Afrikaans. It was a strange experience to be taking stories that had been passed on orally for centuries and pinning them down in space-age characters by pressing a bunch of electronic buttons on a personal computer. Magic meets technology.
I know what magical realism is, she often thought. Her clever friends were quick to talk about it, but she rediscovered it afresh every day at her word processor. The South Americans didn’t have exclusive rights to absurd situations and anachronisms.
‘Why do they call it a personal computer? The only personality that mine has ever revealed is a ruthlessly psychopathic streak,’ she told her therapist after a particularly demanding day at work.
‘So, you think your computer doesn’t like you?’ Rhonda asked, serious as always.
‘Now you’re making me sound paranoid again,’ Griet accused her. ‘No, that isn’t what I’m trying to say. But only a psychopath could take a story you’d poured your soul into for weeks and tear it to shreds before your eyes, then throw it into a fire without any compunction. That’s how it feels when your PC wipes out a story.’
Her clever friends said machines didn’t have human characteristics. But you couldn’t always trust your friends. Her friends fell into two groups – the clever ones and the mad ones – and she dangled in mid-air somewhere between them, struggling to get her feet down on to the ground. The clever ones were in law or journalism or academe and they liked talking about politics and religion and the latest French film with subtitles. They sat in stylish restaurants sipping vintage wine from crystal glasses and argued about Namibian independence and Wimbledon tennis. Their feet were always firmly on the ground, even when they were drunk. The mad ones were painters and writers and other artists who sat at home smoking dope and drinking boxed plonk out of cheap glasses, while they quarrelled about the Struggle and erotic art and people’s culture. They sometimes got high on pills or other substances, but they always came down with a painful bump the next morning.
‘Mandela reminds me of Hansel who was caught by the witch,’ she confessed to her friend Jans during one of many lengthy restaurant meals. ‘You know, the one who had to stick his finger through the bars every day so the witch could feel if he was fat enough to slaughter.’
Jans was a lawyer with a political conscience that compelled him to work for the Struggle. It had landed him in a moral dilemma because he was making a packet out of the Struggle. He’d bought a cottage with yellowwood floors and a fireplace, but he felt so guilty about so much luxury that he gave the key to his less privileged black friends every weekend and hiked off into the mountains. And he liked reading myths and legends which he wouldn’t discuss with anyone but Griet.
It was George who’d started the speculation about Nelson Mandela’s seventieth birthday in the Victor Verster Prison – while he topped up everyone’s glass with sparkling wine. Anton-the-Advocate and Gwen-the-Journalist had dived into the conversation with the eagerness of children who wanted to prove they weren’t scared of the deep end. Gwen’s lover, Klaus, reckoned that not one of the liberals round the table would recognise Mandela if he walked into the restaurant now. Not even a radical like Jans. The only photographs they’d seen of him were nearly thirty years old. And, as usual, Anton’s wife, Sandra, looked as though she was trying to listen telepathically to her children at home in case one was crying.
‘Oh, that Hansel,’ said Jans.
‘I hear he has his own sickbay where he’s examined twice a day by a major from Prison Services.’
‘Hansel and the witch?’
‘Mandela and the major,’ said Griet.
Jans smiled and wound a long ribbon of pasta deftly round his fork. Klaus told the rest of the group about an article on South Africa he’d read in The Economist.
‘And you think he needs a Gretel to push the witch into the oven?’
‘Maybe – but remember, Hansel didn’t wait passively for Gretel to come and rescue him.’ Griet had cut her own pasta into pieces and was carefully loading her fork. ‘He was too clever for the witch. He didn’t really stick his finger out.’
‘He fooled her with a little stick!’ Jans laughed and took a great swig of sparkling wine. ‘And you think Mandela is fooling them?’
Griet shrugged. ‘I can only hope he remembers the fairy tale.’
The Struggle, thought Griet as she made her way to her office full of children’s books, the eternal Struggle. She’d often tried to convince Jans that fairy tales were nothing less than people’s culture. Stories handed down from the people for the people. The same crystal-clear division between good and evil – princes and dragons, black prisoners and white warders, fairies and witches, township kids and suburban housewives – the same simple presentation, the same moral lessons. But to sit and spin fairy tales all day didn’t give her much credibility in the Struggle.
Tonight she’d throw her balcony door open wide, Griet decided while she waited at the traffic lights across the street from her office block, and she’d fly away with the wind. Ring-a-ring-a-roses through the clouds, over the sleeping city with a fork and a spoon, leap-frogging over the curve of the moon. Up, up, up on to the flat slab of the mountain, where the witches were sure to meet on All Saints’ Eve. Round this giant table under the moon, with a lion and a devil keeping guard at each end. Who’d dare to chase them away? Not even the angels.
3
In Search of the Golden Goose
The woman – witch, rebel angel or ordinary sinner – lived in a dreadful country. The sun always shone, except at night when the moon shone, and the people of the country changed colour like loaves in an oven. From creamy-white to biscuit-brown to coffee-black, or from salmon-pink to beetroot-red, or from the colour of butter to the colour of turmeric. Some even from blue to green. But the worst sinners never changed colour. They just bleached whiter and whiter.
This is what Griet had written on a sheet of paper in her office full of children’s books that afternoon. It seemed a long, long time ago, she thought with her chin in her hand and her elbow on a bar counter. She’d crumpled up the page and rung her friend Jans: ‘How about joining me for a drink?’
‘What’s the occasion?’
‘It was the Day of the Dead yesterday.’
‘Can’t we be like ordinary people and just have a drink because it’s Friday?’
‘But it’s a feast day in South America. The Mexicans buy sugar-bread skeletons and lay a place at table for absent guests. They believe it’s the day the dead get leave in heaven to visit the earth again.’
‘I can’t think of a better reason to drink myself into a stupor.’
And now, several drinks later, she remembered there was something important she wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t think what it was. Her head felt like a flower that was too heavy for its stem.
‘I’ve had a gutful of clever men,’ she muttered into her hand. ‘I’m looking for a stupid man. Stupid and strong.’
Jans looked at her blankly through the round gold-rimmed spectacles that had slipped down on his nose. He was still in his working clothes – a conservative dark suit, white cotton shirt and muted paisley tie – but the top button of the shirt was undone and the tie had been tugged loose. If Jans didn’t have to wear a suit every day, Griet had often thought, one could easily mistake him for a fairly decent tramp. He always looked as though it was two days since he’d last shaved, and three days since he’d combed his hair. And to crown it all, tonight he looked as though he hadn’t slept for four days: his mouth was tired and there were shadows like bruises under his eyes.
‘I don’t mean the village idiot, Jans. He’ll have to be able to read and write. I don’t trust men who don’t read. Maybe that’s the root of my whole problem. Instead of checking on whether he likes dogs, as my mother always said I should. Or what his underpants look like.’
Her sister Petra was a connoisseur of men’s underpants. Said they spoke volumes. Never trust a man with holes in his underpants. She didn’t really like red underpants either. Said it was a dictator’s colour.
‘But I look at his bookshelf,’ sighed Griet.
‘If he reads Camus, he’s OK?’ A light seemed to have been turned on behind Jans’s spectacles.
‘Something like that, yes.’ Griet took another sip of wine and shook her heavy head. ‘And I land on my bum every time.’
‘We aren’t just talking about George and the recent past?’
‘No, we’re talking about men in general, the whole catastrophe. I’ve never had a decent relationship with a man who didn’t have an overload of intellectual pretensions. Of course, this says a lot about my own intellectual pretensions. But the best one-night stand of my life was with a gym instructor who’d never read anything heavier than the back page of a Sunday paper.’
That was a long time ago, of course, when she still shaved her legs regularly. If he could see her now with a dowdy ponytail and all her lipstick smeared off on to the wine glass, clinging to a bar counter, the poor gym instructor would completely lose his impressive erection.
So this, then, was what people did on a Friday evening. There had been a time when she also went out on Friday evenings, when she still wore mascara and flirted with muscle-bound instructors, but it must have been in a previous life.
‘Just say you could have lived with him,’ Jans stared at the rows and rows of bottles behind the counter, endlessly reflected in sparkling mirrors, an alcoholic vision of heaven. ‘How long could you have stood it before you started screaming every time he opened his mouth?’
‘For always – if I’d known what I know now. The problem with clever men is that they talk too much and don’t screw enough. The trouble with stupid men is usually the same. But every now and then you find one who knows how to shut up and use his body. Then you must hang on to what you’ve got – and bite your tongue every time he says something stupid. But that’s what you have to do with any man, anyway.’
All men are the same in the light [Louise wrote from London]. Graffiti that I read in the tube on my way to work. But I never seem to see the light, let alone a man in the light. It’s dark when I go to work in the morning and dark when I come home again in the evening. This is definitely going to be the winter of my discontent, here in the country of Shakespeare and the Sex Pistols where I always wanted to live. It’s terrible when your dreams come true.
‘But I’m a sucker for a clever man. I always think maybe he’s an Einstein or a Shakespeare and then I could be his muse. Behind every man, you know; all those clichés I was brought up with. Immortality by proxy. I believed George was a genius. A philosophy lecturer – how lucky can a girl get? I felt like a bird-watcher who’d come across the last dodo in existence. And then I discovered he didn’t want a muse, he wanted a mother. Someone to darn the holes in his underpants.’
‘Perhaps that’s part of a muse’s role,’ Jans said comfortingly while he tried to catch the waiter’s eye and order another bottle of wine.
‘No, there’s a world of difference between a muse and a mother.’ She pushed her glass towards him so he could take a mouthful of her wine in the meantime. ‘You can’t convert your muse into Florence Nightingale. You can’t expect Shakespeare’s dark lady also to play the lady with the lamp.’
‘You can’t have your cake and eat it?’
‘No, you can eat as much cake as you like, but you can’t expect a chocolate cake and a custard tart to taste the same.’
Griet began to shake with laughter and realised that she’d had enough to drink. But she raised her wine glass resolutely, drained it, and felt herself waft away on a cloud of recklessness. Jans was looking more and more attractive, with his spectacles low on his nose and that dark shadow of stubble round his mouth.
‘You know, just the other day I read something about a flower that made me think of you,’ said Jans. ‘Have you ever seen a wildemagriet? An ox-eye daisy?’
‘Do you know the story of the sad princess?’
‘It’s a beautiful flower, but very poisonous.’
‘Her father said that the man who made her laugh could have her hand in marriage.’
‘The black people believe it brings protection against the devil.’
‘And it made you think of me?’ asked Griet and started to hiccup in wonderment.
‘I thought that would make you pay attention,’ laughed Jans. ‘Callilepis laureola is its botanical name.’
‘Hell, Jans, this is why I like you,’ hiccuped Griet, flopping down on her elbows. ‘You’re a minefield of useless information. I always wonder when the next explosion is going to get me.’
‘There’s no such thing as useless information,’ insisted Jans, refilling her glass. ‘You never know when it’ll come in handy. Who made the sad princess laugh?’
‘The bumpkin with the golden goose,’ replied Griet, still hiccuping. ‘Don’t you remember, the goose with a whole row of people stuck to it?’
She remembered a Friday night, long ago, when she and George flirted in a pub. There was a guitarist playing the same songs over the same din: ‘Imagine’, ‘Streets of London’, ‘Where do You Go to, My Lovely?’. Maybe it was the same pub.
The next morning they woke up in the same bed.
She could hardly believe her eyes. She couldn’t explain how it had happened. She enjoyed his company, but she wasn’t sexually attracted to him. She was unusually impressed by his bookshelf. That was the only excuse she could come up with for her behaviour.
‘And now?’ she asked, quite at a loss. ‘What now?’
‘What do you suggest?’ he laughed, folding her in his arms. ‘Do you want to get married?’
She laughed with him, touching his body in amazement. He was thinner than he seemed in his clothes, more defenceless. He had a slight paunch, narrow hips, long legs. And a penis as soft as down and warm as a chicken, stirring at the touch of her fingers. She wished she could play with it all day without having it grow hard in her hand, but there wasn’t a good fairy nearby to make her wish come true.
Disappointed, she felt the chicken transform itself into a bantam cockerel. Why does a man always think he’s letting a woman down, she wondered – not for the first time – if his penis doesn’t leap to attention the moment she touches it?
‘I’m not going to fall in love with you,’ she warned him.
‘I’ve been in love with you for ages,’ he answered. But she thought he was teasing again.
‘Well, don’t
say I didn’t warn you. I don’t want a steady relationship. I’m not ready yet …’
‘Hush,’ he’d said and kissed her so she couldn’t protest any further. ‘You’ll make me impotent if you don’t shut up.’
Prophetic words, Griet thought, years later. She never became his muse. She married him and drove him to impotence.
‘You hold me too tight at night,’ she told him that first month. ‘I’m not used to it. I get too hot, it feels as though I’m suffocating.’
‘You’ll just have to get used to it,’ he laughed. ‘I can’t sleep empty-handed.’
‘You never hold me at night,’ she reproached him years later. ‘I may as well be sleeping alone.’
‘I can’t hold someone at night,’ he answered. ‘It makes me feel claustrophobic, I can’t breathe.’
‘I don’t want to be a man’s muse any more,’ she told Jans, who was becoming blurrier, as though she was looking at him through a camera lens that was being turned more and more out of focus. ‘I am looking for a man who is stupid enough not to get impotent if he becomes my muse. Or don’t you get male muses?’
‘Originally they were the Greek goddesses of the arts, but these days everything is so androgynous that the sex of muses probably doesn’t count for much any more.’ Sometimes she thought that Jans was only interested in mythology because most modern people regarded it as useless information. ‘And if he refuses to become a muse, you can always make him your Pegasus.’
‘Wasn’t Pegasus a horse?’
‘Exactly. The winged horse of the muses. Inspiration for the art of poetry. As in: I mount my Pegasus. Means I’m going to write a poem.’