‘It’s a Bert Middler,’ Nomsa explained. Whoever he is.
‘No ways. More like a Naas Botha,’ Wessels said. He was chafing away at the tattoo with a rubbery forefinger. ‘Ask Mr T. He knows all about it.’
I’d been reading about rose cultivation in the paper a few weeks before: some rugby-lover had named a bloom after Botha, the fly-half.
I took refuge as usual behind the news.
Then Wessels wanted Nomsa to draw a replica of the rose on his plaster cast and they asked to borrow my pen. I refused. No ways, so to speak. They got one from Moçes instead. He was tiddly. Of no use as a waiter.
I should try to like them, I thought, despite their broken English. In fact, I should try to like them for that, I should find a place for them, not a soft spot, not in my heart, but a well-worn, callused spot, something pachydermatous and scarred, where their shrillness, their abrasiveness, their rough edges might be accommodated without tearing any tissue. I made resolutions to that effect. But they came to nothing, watching the girl Nomsa, a deracinated Xhosa as I recall, crouched over Wessels’s plaster cast, with his stubby toes wriggling like newborn puppies, blindly delighted to be alive. The way she held the pen! It was worse than Wessels himself. You would have thought it was a vegetable peeler.
*
-rama suffix, commercial enterprises: Hyperama … Meatarama … Cupboard-a-rama … Veg-a-rama … Leatherama … Motorama … Computerama …
*
Having once discovered the Café Europa, in the days before Wessels and Errol and everyone else, I made it my haunt. I steeped in its European ambience, in a mild dilution of pleasantly polite strangers, for half a year before I found companionship.
One afternoon, the stranger I would come to know as Spilkin entered the Café and sat at table No. 3, which was identical to mine, a small distance away and also ranged against Alibia. On the wall above that particular table was a sconce, which the muralist had cleverly appropriated as a beacon on one of the city’s rounded hills. The cone of light that the beacon played upon the water – or rather upon the place where the water would have been if the sea in the foreground had spilled out over the wooden dado that hemmed it in like a breakwater – gave that quarter of the city a wartime air, a mood of siege quite at odds with the [George] Ferris wheel and the festive lights on the terraces at the Hotel Grande. The stranger shifted his chair and crossed his legs, so that the searchlight’s beam, I imagined, would drop over his shoulder and illuminate the newspaper that he was about to prop against his knee.
He turned straight away to the page of the Star that carried the cartoons and puzzles, the chess problem, the bridge hand, the crossword. (Never played chess myself.) Then, cocking his head to one side, holding the paper at arm’s length and squinting at it out of the corner of his eye, he began to tear a square out of the page. The action was so awkward and silly, and yet so familiar, that I felt a pang of sympathy for him, as one might for an old friend observed in an unguarded moment. This feeling was so intense that I had to examine him more carefully, smoothing vanishing cream into his wrinkled brow, putting curls back on his crown, trimming the exuberant eyebrows, to see if there was not some more youthful incarnation I would recognize, some immature pentimento. Proofreading him, if you like, for familiar flaws. He looked soft, small and mild, but inquisitive too, almost saucy, like a worldly cherub.
I had been doing the cryptic version of the Star’s two-speed crossword since my days as a junior proofreader in the Department of Posts and Telecommunications. For as long as I could remember, the cryptic clues had been printed above the grid and the straight ones below. Very sensible. All one had to do to obscure the straight clues, and thus remove the temptation to glance at them, was to fold the page in half. And it was a temptation. So long as the simple clues were visible, hovering on the periphery of vision, the eye was drawn to them, seeking the easy way out, despite the mind’s attraction to the difficult problem. There was something wilful in the human eye that made it impossible to discipline. It would look. I had had the same problem in the old days when I reached the last page of a book. I would have to obscure the final paragraph with my hand or a bookmark to prevent my cheating eye from leaping to it at once. To think of coming all that way by the specified route, step by step, word by word, only to throw away whatever satisfaction there was to be gained, by skipping the last few paragraphs and arriving at the goal ahead of schedule. It was like taking a short cut in the last mile of a marathon.
I went further than most. The habit of years, the respect for rules and regulations, the dedication to matter in its proper order, front and back, that kept me reading steadily from A to B to ‘The End’, also made me read past it, through Appendices and Indices and Advertisements, through Bibliographies and Endnotes and Glossaries, until the endpapers loomed in their blank finality. And even then, nothing was more satisfying than to turn the final page of a tome, thinking that the race was run, and find a colophon, a ‘finishing touch’. A meaningful fragment of the whole, put there to be read, but which no one, perhaps, had ever bothered to read, by which I mean to scan deliberately, to pass the eye over in full and conscious awareness of these particular shapes, impressed upon paper, now impressing themselves upon the retina and the cortex, and thus upon the soft surface of time itself.
About a year earlier, in the final months of my gainfully employed life, the editor of the puzzles page, as he was probably known, and almost certainly a new appointment, some wallah kicked upstairs at the behest of the nabobs of the tricameral parliament, had taken it upon himself to change the tried-and-tested format of the crossword. The two sets of clues, cryptic and straight, now appeared one below the other alongside the grid (with the straight ones on top!). The reasons for the change were never explained – they were always tinkering with the newspaper these days, moving things around, making them bigger or smaller or doing away with them altogether, in the scramble for what they called ‘market share’ – but the upshot was that one could no longer fold the paper to obscure the straight clues without folding the grid itself in half. Just one fleeting glance at the straight clues could take the difficult pleasure out of half a dozen cryptic ones. Even as one began to puzzle pleasantly over ‘Races Thomas ran badly’, the disobedient eye would leap with infuriating precision to ‘Long-distance running races’ in the straight column. It was dispiriting. The only solution was to remove the straight clues from eyeshot entirely by tearing them out, resisting all the while the desire to look at them: I had resorted to exactly the cock-eyed procedure the stranger was now performing, and my heart went out to him, alone as he was, and with no one to turn to.
I had kept to myself at the Café Europa in the beginning, but in time I did establish a nodding acquaintance with Mevrouw Bonsma, our pianist, and Mrs Mavrokordatos, our proprietor. To Mevrouw Bonsma I occasionally sent politely worded notes, requesting an old favourite. She knew everything. She was an immense reservoir of melodies, endlessly seeping, flowing one into the other, always brimming. It was a fullness I found a little disconcerting. I tried to trip her up a few times by asking for chestnuts such as ‘The Isle of Capri’ or ‘Arrivederci Roma’, but she played them all without missing a beat. I had hopes of making her open her leather portfolio, which she stowed in the cross-stitched seat of her stool every day, and which I assumed contained sheet music, although I had never seen her consult it. Finally, in a spirit of curiosity, for I am not in the habit of playing practical jokes, I made something up. Then Mevrouw approached my table and asked me to hum the beastly thing. I had to refuse. I had never hummed in my life, I told her, and certainly not for a pianist, and I saw no reason to start now.
My acquaintance with Mrs Mavrokordatos, circumscribed by the more dependable bounds of reciprocation between proprietor and customer (custom, like costume, from the ME and OF custume, from the Latin consuetudo), was both more formal and more at ease. It was through the kind offices of Mrs Mavrokordatos that I found a neater, less bothersome solution
to my dilemma with the crossword than the wretched ripping I had been reduced to. When I arrived at the Café in the afternoon, I would hand her the newspaper and she would snip out the straight clues with a pair of scissors, giving me the little patch of newsprint, considerately folded clue-side-in, to store in my wallet. This arrangement had a couple of advantages, in addition to the embarrassment it spared me. If there was some important information on the reverse side of the page, some damaged article I would only discover later that evening or the next morning when I was trawling for typographical errors, I could easily restore the excision, snug as a jigsaw piece. This very thing happened on more than one occasion. And in the unlikely event of my not being able to complete the puzzle, I could consult the straight clues. In my opinion, it was better to finish the puzzle with the aid of the simple clues than not to finish it at all. This proved to be one of the matters on which Spilkin and I held diametrically opposed views. (Dress sense was another. Not to mention … no, let me not mention it.) It wasn’t that we differed on the status of the straight clues themselves: in his book, as in mine, the straight clues were for simple minds. But we did not attach the same importance to completion, to finalization. He was quite happy (although it very seldom came to this) to leave a puzzle unfinished; whereas I could not get to sleep at night if a clue eluded me.
The stranger Spilkin, a person whose name I did not even know, finished tearing, crumpled the scrap into a ball and tossed it into the ashtray, where it immediately began to unfold, blossoming like a desert bloom in a time-phase film. He smoothed the page flat, propped it on his knee in the beam of the searchlight and took a pen from his pocket. It was a beautiful pen, a fountain pen with a marbled barrel, a Waterman I would have said (and I would have been right). The sort of pen advertising copywriters liked to call a ‘writing instrument’. This pen, reclining elegantly on the soft cushion of his forefinger, with its nib as sleek as a ballet slipper, made me proof him more thoroughly, from the open-neck shirt down to the white slip-ons. His clothes were pastel and sporty, casual but expensive; they would have been perfectly at home on the greens, under a blue sky, but looked flashy in this dim brown interior.
He began to fill out the clues with remarkable facility.
How long would it take him? Half an hour was considered ‘good’. I consulted my records: that day’s puzzle had taken me twenty-three minutes to solve. Now that my notebook lay open on the table, on the inlaid chequerboard I’d always fondly wished might be transformed one day into a crossword grid, I suddenly resolved to take up the matter of the inconvenient new format of the clues with the editor of the Star. I had been putting it off for months, but watching Spilkin’s contortions had made me aware that the problem was not just my own. A whole community of people were being inconvenienced by some lowly editorial whim. I took up the cudgels on their behalf.
The letter was a good one.
18 July 1987
Dear Sir,
Until recently, the cryptic and the straight clues to your two-speed crossword puzzle appeared above and below the grid respectively, and appropriately so. This enabled the proponents of the higher method to obscure the evidence of the lower by the simple expedient of folding the page in half.
Since the two sets of clues now appear alongside the grid, this procedure is no longer possible. Your puzzles editor can verify this in an instant.
Some of your readers may be accustomed to a diet of chalk and cheese, but my constitution will not bear it. This new format will improve neither your circulation nor mine. I urge you to revert to the time-honoured one.
Yours faithfully, etcetera
The letters editor thought my letter had merit too, for he published it in this shortened version. One never takes excision lightly, but at least the blade was true. (The present incumbent, by contrast, uses a rusty hacksaw or the blunderbuss of the delete button.) The casualties? A mot on origami that I had been in two minds about all along – ‘your puzzles editor, unless he be an expert in origami, the Japanese art of folding paper into decorative shapes and figures’; and a postscript suggesting that the type used for the clues be increased from 10 point to 12. ‘The eyesight of many of our citizens, especially the senior ones,’ I wrote, ‘is more likely to be SO-SO than 20-20, I should imagine.’ Dispatched to File 13, now restored to their rightful place.
So engrossed was I in the composition of this letter that I forgot to stop the clock, and when I glanced his way again, the man at No. 3 had turned to the business pages and was doodling on the lists of share prices. Then Mrs Mavrokordatos came in and greeted him warmly – Ronald, I thought she called him – welcoming him back and saying she had missed him, and he said he was delighted to be back, he had missed her too. His voice was small and mild too, if a little nasal, and his grammar seemed presentable. I gathered from what passed between them that he was a former customer, recently retired like myself, that he had been away for some time on the south coast of Natal (KwaZulu-Natal, as he called it, quite properly) staying with a son, but that the arrangement had not ‘panned out’.
‘I’m not cut out for living in a granny flat,’ he said, and they both laughed. ‘But tell me, who’s that?’
For a moment I thought he was referring to me – I had just risen to leave – but he meant Mevrouw Bonsma. She was playing ‘Never on Sunday’, which served me rather well as an exit march.
When I returned to the Café a few days later, and then at regular intervals thereafter, I found him sitting at the same table, under the light, ‘ensconced’ as I thought of it. A creature of habit. Good for him. (How wrong one can be about people.) Habit maketh the manners and all the rest that maketh the man. Predictable behaviour is what makes people tolerable, and obviates a risky reliance on goodwill and other misnomers. Every day he turned to the crossword, painstakingly removed the straight clues, and went on with the puzzle. So I had the opportunity to measure his skill against my own after all. I discovered that he was a very good crossword solver indeed. Almost superhuman. He usually finished the puzzle in under fifteen minutes! At least, I assumed that he finished it, although I could not tell at that distance.
Proofreaders (one may retire from the post but not the profession) generally have suspicious minds and long memories. The Reader’s Digest, to which I subscribed in the days when my word power still needed improving, once published an anecdote (if you’ll pardon the contradiction in terms, etymologically speaking) in the ‘Life’s Like That’ feature, about a commuter, a mediocre crossword puzzler, who watched enviously every evening for many months as a fellow-traveller completed the cryptic puzzle in ten minutes flat. Until one day the master left his paper behind him in the train compartment when he disembarked, and the other, taking it up to marvel, discovered that the grid was filled with nonsense that bore no relation to the clues. Looking at the slim gold strap of Spilkin’s watch and the chubby fingers of his hands (surgeons and cardsharps have long thin fingers only in films), I became convinced that he was up to the same trick. One afternoon, when he left the paper unattended for a moment to visit the Gentlemen’s room, I actually rose and approached his table, meaning to snatch a glance at the puzzle, but he reappeared in a trice and nearly caught me red-handed. I avoided an embarrassing situation only by stooping to tie a shoelace. It was time to put a stop to this ridiculous behaviour.
It so happened that my letter on the new crossword format had been published that day and I now saw that it would provide the perfect excuse for making his acquaintance – and a rather impressive introduction, too.
Once he had returned to his puzzle, I opened my newspaper to the letters page and prepared to accost him. But my opening gambit – ‘Your troubles are over, Mr …?’ – died on my lips. My impending approach had transmitted itself to him as a receptivity to communication, for as I opened my mouth he cocked his head, rested the end of the fountain pen against his greying temple, and asked:
‘Clam for a solitary sailor?’
For a moment I was utterly non
plussed. The idiom, the rakish air, the slightly nautical plimsolls he was sporting that day, the voice which was rummier than the one he used with Eveready and Mrs Mavrokordatos, all of this took me aback. Was he making an indecent proposal? It was unthinkable. While I blanched, he snapped his fingers – an accomplishment I have never been able to master, even with the application of lubricating spittle to the relevant forefinger and opposable thumb – and exclaimed:
‘Abalone!’
Click. I clattered through my newspaper and scanned the clues. There it was: fifteen down.
‘Three across: Mabel out for a stroll? Five-letter word,’ I countered. And before he had time to reply, supplied the answer myself: ‘Amble.’
And so, swapping clues and offering tips, we began to hold a conversation.
He said he was a Spilkin. I knew the name: a dozen or so in the Johannesburg directory, with concentrations in Melrose and Cyrildene. Spilkin. It suited him, this combination of soft and sharp, lip and bodkin, wet flesh and dry glass. He said he was a retired optician.
‘By a stroke of luck,’ I said, ‘you have met the only person in the Café Europa who knows the difference between an optician and an optometrist.’
‘And an ophthalmologist?’
Easy as pie, I said. I could even spell it. Apophthegm and phthisical too, which were in the same orthographical league. I was a retired proofreader, I said, by way of explanation, and my name was Tearle. (Just the surname, to match his ‘Spilkin’. To tell the truth, deep down where the roots of language coil about the bones, I have never really felt like an Aubrey. Meaning a ruler of elves. Never had the slightest ambition in that direction. As for Aub, the inevitable diminutive – it’s nearly as bad as Sphere.)
The Restless Supermarket Page 5