Double Negative

by Ivan Vladislavic

  ‘It’s creepy,’ she said, ‘I absolutely agree. It’s like those people at Moyo who eat three courses without taking off their shades. You think they must be watching you, and so you watch them, which is the whole point.’

  I take comfort in the debris strewn over the walls: the shadows of numbers pilfered for scrap, the unstrung lyres of electric fencing, the armed response signs, especially the old and weathered ones, which fade unevenly depending on how their colours stand up to the sun. Sometimes the names and numbers of the companies have bleached out entirely while the emblems of snarling dogs and charging elephants persist. All that remains on the oldest signs is two black pistols pointed at one another in a perpetual showdown. Their candour is admirable. They’re empty gestures, like snapped wires and dog-eared spikes. The company faded away years ago, but their boards are still everywhere saying, ‘Bang!’

  I had photographed walls all over the city, some of them chanced upon during walks, others spotted from the car, focusing on the clutter, the faded threats, the scars of signs ripped from painted surfaces like sticking plasters. There was nobody to be seen in any of the photos except for one, which showed a woman beside a wooden door in a brick wall.

  ‘And who is this?’ Janie asked.

  ‘That’s Mrs Magwaza. She noticed me loitering with intent and came out to see what I wanted. She was the first of my thresholders.’

  ‘Apparently it’s good strategy for the interviewee to ask a couple of questions,’ I said from the sink, where I was rinsing cups for coffee.

  ‘Says who? Dr Phil?’

  ‘I read it in Business Report actually, in one of those motivational columns. Best thing in the paper in my opinion. I guess they were talking about job interviews, but I’m sure it applies everywhere.’

  ‘What’s the idea?’

  ‘Asking some questions of your own shows that you’re curious, that you’re interested in the world and other people, in a healthy way.’

  ‘Your egotism has limits.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  There was a pause while I ground the beans and she read about the Ethiopian coffee-drinking ceremony on the package. Then she said, ‘Ready when you are.’

  ‘Do you like your job?’

  ‘Some of it. It’s quite varied, mostly interviews, personality pieces or profiles like this one. I don’t really do straight features. And then I’ve got a blog where I review exhibitions and concerts, as well as art and design books, interior design and landscaping, collectables, coffee-table stuff. It’s a great way to build up a library.

  ‘On the blog I also offer household hints, taking stains out of carpets, dyeing cottons with indigenous herbal teas, mixing your own environmentally friendly air-fresheners. And then stuff like how to make a snow cave and survive if you’re buried under an avalanche or why everyone should carry a surgical glove and a clove in the cubbyhole. The whole blog has this dualism. It’s like the Book of the Week meets Reuben the Screwman.’

  A happy meeting, I thought. I said, ‘That’s incredible.’

  ‘It’s my thing, it’s what I’m known for.’

  I was grinning, but she went on, ‘I’ve got the best advice. The tips are definitive.’

  ‘For example …’

  ‘Well.’ She scraped some orange pulp off the rim of the glass on her finger and put it in her mouth. ‘Okay. You know how frustrating it is to get the price tags off things? They make them extra sticky so that shoplifters can’t switch them around. They don’t care what happens when you get the thing home. Some people couldn’t be bothered. Ten years later, the bathroom scale’s still got the bar code stuck to it. Other people can’t wait to get rid of them and every last smear of glue must go, even if they have to swab it off with benzine, it’s like a sign that they’ve taken possession. I’m sort of in-between, it depends on the object. If it’s cheap and nasty, I don’t really mind. Anyway, here’s the tip: if you wave the flame of a cigarette lighter over the tag for a few seconds, it will peel off just like that.’ A castanet click of the fingers. ‘Of course, you’ve got to be careful when you’re playing with fire. It works perfectly on glass, I promise, there’s no need to kill yourself scratching the price off a bottle of wine. It works on books too. Just watch you don’t set the merchandise alight.’

  ‘That’s amazing.’ I meant it.

  ‘I can get merlot out of a white linen sofa like that’ – splitting another second between thumb and middle finger – ‘but I won’t bore you with the details.’

  ‘And then you also write criticism about art and music.’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Well, it’s meant to be funny, obviously. Give me some credit, Neville. I know the difference between a household hint and an oratorio by Handel. It’s a branding thing, it gives me the edge on my competitors, and readers find the mix amusing. But the hints work, believe me, I test them all myself. It’s a question of credibility. Without that, everything would fall apart.’

  ‘Saul Auerbach,’ she said, ‘he was the reason you became a photographer.’

  ‘No, we can’t blame him for that.’

  ‘But he influenced you.’

  I let the statement settle while I drove the plunger down to the bottom of the cafetière.

  ‘My uncle had a photograph by Auerbach in his house when I was a kid. You would recognize it, I’m sure, a street corner in Judith’s Paarl. It really bothered me. I couldn’t see the point of having it on the wall. Then in my student days my father gave me a copy of Auerbach’s first book and that was my real introduction to his work. To be honest, it was disturbing to see my own world presented so coldly. For the first time, the houses I lived in, the people I passed in the street were at the right distance to be grasped fully. They looked so solid, they were so there, I felt I knew them all. And yet there was a levity to them as well, because a photograph is a flimsy thing when you compare it to the world. It’s always on the verge of floating away or turning to ashes. You don’t want to go waving a lighter in that vicinity.

  ‘But I’m speculating. I might be making it up. I must be making some of it up, because I can only imagine what I saw when I first looked at an Auerbach. They’ve been stored in the darkroom of my memory for too long, reproduced a hundred times for a hundred different reasons, packed away again under the tissue-paper layers of living, and I’m not sure at all what they revealed to my young self.’

  Apparently a personality could get away with phrases like ‘the darkroom of memory’ or ‘tissue-paper layers of living’ if the delivery was natural enough.

  ‘Did you ever meet?’

  A direct question. I’d meant to avoid the subject, but now I told her about my day with Auerbach and Brookes. The gist of it anyway. Although the experience had made a more decisive impression on me than the photographs themselves, I had seldom spoken about it and the details had been slipping away. The last time Leora and I discussed my initiation, as she calls it, I had the feeling I was embellishing, adding in touches I couldn’t possibly have remembered. These days, when I think about that time, Auerbach’s accidental portraits come into my mind and they seem more reliable than my own memories.

  Janie was curious about Auerbach’s legendary impatience with people and patience with light. Is it true, she wanted to know, that he’ll wait all day for a shadow to lengthen?

  I answered as well as I could and she wrote in the green notebook. I wondered what she was writing down that she could not retrieve from the recorder.

  The gist. It’s always the gist, isn’t it? We’re left with so little to go on. Only the present is full enough to seem complete, and even that is an optical illusion. The moment is bleeding off the page. We live on the precipice of our perceptions. At the edge of every living instant, the world shears away like a cliff of ice into the sea of what is forgotten.

  Mrs Magwaza was my first thresholder. Despite an apparently impenetrable wall, she had spotted me outside her house. Perhaps a neighbour with
a clear view of the street had called to alert her to my suspicious presence. She came out and challenged me as I was setting up the tripod on the opposite kerb. Once I’d explained, she was happy enough to pose, although I had to dissuade her from going inside first to change into her Sunday best.

  In the photo, she is holding my dissuasion in her left hand, a small consideration, which I’d been carrying in the cubbyhole for this very purpose. If not for the way she presents the envelope to the camera, suggesting that it’s more important than this, you might think it is a letter she has just retrieved from the box in the wall beside her. In her housecoat and slippers, she looks like an office cleaner accepting a long-service award or a lucky shopper who has just won a voucher in a raffle at the supermarket.

  Mrs Magwaza gave me faith in the human subject. I admired the way she stood between me and her privacy like an amiable security guard. I was moved.

  ‘Weren’t you curious to go inside,’ Janie asked, ‘to see how she lives?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘I really want to see behind the wall.’

  ‘I don’t. Just thinking about the interior makes me squirm.’

  I showed her the pictures that had followed: Mr Passmore of Dowerglen at his curly wrought-iron gate. On the wall of prefab cement panels is one of those increasingly rare signs that says ‘Beware of the Dog! Pasop vir die Hond!’ The letterbox is an alpine chalet with a slate roof. Then old Mrs Spoerk with her nursery rhyme box in the shape of a boot, a fibreglass novelty from the ’60s that Dr Pinheiro would have given his eye teeth for.

  These were the photos Claudia Fischhoff had come to see a few months ago. Out of the blue, she had called to say she was curating a show for the Pollak and thought my project might fit the bill. ‘Project’ was too grand a term, but I was flattered. Presumably Claudia’s interest had fuelled Janie’s. But what had prompted Claudia’s? I had no idea. One hand was washing the other, scratching the reciprocal itch, doing what hands apparently do in the wonderful world of appearances.

  I had taken half a dozen portraits of people at their gates before I noticed that every one of them included a letterbox. I pointed it out to Janie as we leafed through the prints.

  ‘I’ve got it into my head that the people look like their letterboxes. What do you think? It’s like people and their dogs. Have you ever been to a dog show? The resemblances are uncanny. The chap with the St Bernard always has a mop of curls and a shaggy beard. The elegant anorexics have borzois. Retired ballerinas, I’m sure. There are unwritten rules at play. Take a look at Roelof here with his browbeaten letterbox. Have you ever seen such an unhappy-looking man? It’s like he’s been cemented into a wall himself.’

  I pulled the Charade out of the garage (quite right, I bought it for the name) and we went down into Bez Valley. She didn’t drive at all, Janie said. When I asked why not, she said she was ahead of the game, preparing for the day we ran out of gas, collectively. I took this as a criticism. She was growing her own vegetables too and generating her own electricity.

  On the drive, her phone sneezed twice to attract attention. The conversations were quick and cryptic. Hey. Cool. You wish. She sent two rapid-fire text messages. Between calls, she took photos with her left hand, reaching out of the window with a small silver camera as if she were tapping ash off a cigarette.

  ‘You’re busy,’ I said.

  ‘Popular,’ she corrected me. ‘I’m quite famous, you know. I’ve been on the cover of Lifestyle. I’m my own wallpaper.’ Holding up the phone for me to see.

  I’d spoken to Hennie Nothnagel on the phone half a dozen times, and called the night before to confirm our appointment, but when we got to the address in Second Street, he was out. ‘Sometimes they get cold feet,’ I said. ‘Even though we’ve been introduced and there’s a connection, they suddenly decide it’s a scam. They worry they’re going to get burgled.’

  ‘You don’t look like a criminal,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Hennie’s wall would not last: it was leaning out over the pavement as if it might fall the next time the wind blew. Panels between the pillars showed little golfers in silhouette cut from iron sheets. The round heads of the drivers at the top of the backswing created a decorative border like a rolling wave. Beside the gate was the classic golf ball letterbox that had first attracted my attention.

  I wrote a note on the back of a business card and dropped it through the slot. ‘Please call me.’ Probably wouldn’t.

  Talk talk talk. Making a duck’s bill of fingers and thumb. Kwar kwar kwar.

  ‘So, Auerbach,’ I said. ‘What do you make of him?’

  ‘He’s got a bit of a cult following.’

  ‘That bad, hey.’

  ‘I’m not a believer, but … but! …’ She wagged a sinuous exclamation mark out of her forefinger and did something Balinese with her head.

  I was reminded of the sign language interpreter who appeared in a window on the TV screen during the news. Life in the digital age. I waited for her to continue, but evidently ‘but’ was the final word. I asked, ‘What photographers do you believe in then?’

  ‘It’s not a question of belief. I like to be baffled. Do you know S. Majara? I profiled him last year for the News – I’ll send you a link – he was so oblique he was facing the other way. Everything he said about his work sounded plausible and yet suspect, as if he’d found it in an article by a shrewdly hostile critic. That’s a line from my piece by the way. These days I can’t help quoting myself.’

  That makes two of us, I thought. ‘It must be a technique, going off at a tangent, I mean. It’s the attitude I’d like to have, but I wouldn’t get away with it. I don’t have an interview manner.’

  ‘You have some strategies, you said so yourself.’

  ‘But I haven’t had a chance to practise them.’

  ‘You’ll just have to be yourself for the time being, Neville. We can’t all be S. Majara.’

  Even S. Majara isn’t S. Majara. His name is Simeon but he had the foresight to give himself a nom de guerre. I can imagine how useful that would be. If only I’d thought of ‘N. Lister’ before I ever set foot in a gallery.

  ‘Never mind the man, what do you like about his work? I take it the two aren’t the same.’

  ‘Slight, light and liminal, quote unquote as if you don’t know. Blink and you’ll miss it. “Photograph” is such a heavy word, Majara and I agreed. Even “photo” is dull. You can hear the bell tolling. Phoh!-toh! We should find some other word. Have you noticed how Auerbach always says “photograph” as if he needs to give the thing its full, awful weight. It suits his work too. Those people of his standing around in their gloomy houses like pieces of furniture, holding up their faces like signboards, like beggars at robots. No job, three kids, please help. The whites are the worst, excuse me. I can hardly bear to look at his early stuff. It makes me feel claustrophobic, like I’ve been locked up in some museum no one visits any more.’

  ‘It was a different time, you know. You’re probably too young to remember.’

  ‘Ja, but I don’t believe it was all so gloomy.’

  ‘It was horrible! Every day of their lives ordinary people were subjected to appalling abuse. This was a police state, there were soldiers in the townships, activists were being tortured and killed, bombs were going off in burger joints. Business is booming, we used to joke, but it wasn’t funny.’

  To tell the truth, this was something I’d heard from Leora.

  ‘You had to be there,’ Janie said with a laugh.

  The phone sneezed again and she glanced at the message distractedly.

  ‘Do you know Majara’s Curious Restitution?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘He grinds curios into sawdust and reconstitutes the dust as wooden blocks. There’s a whole undercurrent about mincemeat and butcher’s blocks and what have you, but it isn’t heavy, you know. He makes these abstract assemblages of the blocks, almost like children’s toys, that fit together
so beautifully you’d think they were made in a lab, like those 3D drawings in resin, and then he takes them apart again and carves them into new curios, which are so much like the originals even the people who made them wouldn’t know the difference.’

  ‘But we do.’

  ‘Only because he tells us. He paints them with special pigments derived from the boots of dead miners.’

  Surely there was a provocation in this; she was challenging me to contradict her. The boots of dead miners? The boots?

  ‘And how is this photography?’

  ‘Oh, I forgot, he photographs the toys before he carves them up again and makes these tiny black and white prints that look like they came out of a woodworking manual, something a baby boomer got for Christmas, very beautiful in an inconsequential way.’

  At the house in Malvern, we had better luck. Antoine K – he insisted on the initial – was waiting for us on the pavement in a sky-blue suit feathered with silver embroidery. The toes of his shoes were as long and pointed as powder horns and tipped with chrome. His presence was not assurance enough for the kids playing soccer in the street and when we pulled up at the kerb they retreated to a wary distance.

  The wall behind Antoine was made of old garage doors, five or six of them patched together with sheets from bus shelters and billboards. Best prices, the wall said, fresh petrol. Two breeze-block pillars held a gate of rusty iron panels. Angles of board and corrugated iron stuck out like shark fins above the wall. You would have thought the place was a scrapyard wedged between two houses on a suburban street.

  We got out of the car.

  ‘Think I’ll take a look around,’ Janie said brightly.