The Road of Excess. Ingrid Winterbach
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he pulls away, he has the urge, still, to roll down the window and shout at Jimmy: Sooner or later, life catches up with all of us. You can count on it! But he bethinks himself, holds himself back. Pulls away so fast the gravel spatters out from under his wheels. His heart is turbulent, his spirit troubled.
Not once did either of them ask him about his own work.
*
What must he make of this? What was Knuvelder thinking when he sent these two smart-arses to his door? Aaron has yet to achieve clarity on the matter. He can see various possibilities. Perhaps Knuvelder wants to punish him. But why? Teach him a lesson. But what kind of a lesson? Are both Bubbles, with her tapes, and now Knuvelder, too, launching a campaign for the upliftment of his soul? For its kneading and proving, so it can be elevated through an apprenticeship in patience, endurance, and humble acceptance; so the ego can be laid aside. (The hungry ego that wants to grab everything for itself. Everything. All the honour, the glory, all material and spiritual profit.)
The sun sets over the bare veld. The entire outstretched landscape is gilded by the last of its rays. Now Aaron conceives of a different possibility. Knuvelder’s sending him a message – and Harris is the messenger. Harris with his sandals, his androgynous body, the bleached hair. His partiality for the spoken word. Harris as travel-guide – so this is Knuvelder’s intention! Did Harris not lay out the inner workings of the art market for Aaron’s benefit? It was as if he’d taken Aaron by the hand and allowed him to survey a vast area – the great and labyrinthine landscape of the international art business. Art as capital. And is it therefore, finally, not his task as messenger to guide Aaron’s sinking soul down into the underworld? (Because make no mistake, death has already grabbed him by the ankle. Of that Aaron is deeply aware, and in all likelihood Eddie too.) Is Knuvelder not doing Aaron a favour by sending this man to him, this man who, like Mercury, the god of travellers, must open up infinite – and ultimate – possibilities for him? Mercury with his double nature: both devil-monster and child-philosopher. Was there not something devilishly unrelenting, but also childishly uplifting, in Harris’s belief in words, in his cool, utopian vision of video?
In the last rays of the sun, Aaron is overcome by nostalgia for Joseph Beuys – European, deceased, in conversation, twenty-five or thirty years ago, with a dead hare. It is to Beuys’s work that he now wants to return. Beuys in conversation with the dead hare, his head covered with gold leaf and honey. Beuys locked inside a space with a coyote, with his formulas and his hat, his felt and his fat. Crazy, brilliant, compulsive Beuys, who found it necessary to create an alternative artist persona for himself.
A final possibility. The landscape is now blanketed in cool air, a certain bleakness. Knuvelder is blissfully unaware of the effect these two fellows may be exercising on Aaron right now. No. Not Knuvelder. He’s no fool. He’s a calculating bugger. Cunning, all the way down to his manicured fingertips. Dog! A planner and strategist. Aaron has seen him in action before.
Whatever. Enough speculation. The time has come for him to talk to Eddie Knuvelder personally.
Just as the sun finally sets, he stops in Nottingham Road, at the first hotel bar he finds. He targets the healthy, the damaged and the shrivelled kidney with a total onslaught of alcohol. Systematically and deliberately, he inflicts harm upon himself. He drinks one whisky after another, and smokes half a pack of cigarettes. In the course of the evening, a man materialises next to him at the bar counter, as if from nothingness. He strongly resembles Savonarola. Savonarola with his crazy black eyes, unruly beard and long hair. With his mad gaze, he holds Aaron captive. He gives off a smell of sulphur as he expatiates widely on the rise of sectarian movements in the country, his face close to Aaron’s. When Aaron eventually stands up to resume his journey, he realises he’s in no condition to drive. He has no option but to overnight in this second-rate hotel. In the dining room he eats a dismal dinner, along with three other visitors, each in his own comfortless corner, each caught in his own downward spiral. A waitress stands sentry at the door, using the fingers of one hand to clean the dirt from under the nails of the other. During the night, Aaron is as sick as a dog. He crawls on all fours down the passageway to the bathroom. He no longer has any resistance to alcohol and nicotine. The next morning, he also discovers his wallet’s been stolen. He suspects the Savonarola character. This too now, on top of everything else. All of it must be laid at Knuvelder’s door.
*
He phones the gallery the following morning. He wants to talk to Mr Knuvelder as a matter of urgency, please.
“Mr Knuvelder is not in the country at the moment,” says Wanda, or is it Zelda? (How is it that the two female assistants both have almost exactly the same intonation, the same style of formulation, the same affected accent, and the same neatly packaged optimism?)
“When do you expect him back?”
“He’ll give you a call the moment he returns from his treatment.”
“Treatment,” says Aaron. “Are you telling me he’s ill?”
The woman hesitates just a split-second too long before replying; a moment during which Aaron realises without any doubt: she’s spoken out of turn.
“Not at all,” she says firmly, “everything’s just fine.” (It is Zelda, he thinks, the younger one – Wanda would not have hesitated for even a split second, and she would never speak out of turn.) “He’ll be in touch with you the moment he returns.”
Might Knuvelder be ill? Aaron didn’t notice anything amiss when they last had lunch together. Knuvelder was as princely and manicured as always. No problem with his appetite. He sucked with obvious pleasure at the little bones of his osso bucco. Or is “treatment” code for a vacation in Tuscany with that little tart who does such unbearably pretentious work? Or for something like an extended stay in a spa: mud baths and liposuction, god knows, maybe even a facelift and botox. Not that Eddie, with his full-blooded lips, would ever need such a thing. Pectoral reconstruction? Who knows? Eddie can afford it; he pays careful attention to his appearance.
Later that morning, the doorbell rings. Mrs Sekete opens up and calls to him in a strident voice. He wants to strangle her. She knows full bloody well he doesn’t want to be disturbed, but since when has she given a damn about his instructions.
Bubbles stands in the doorway. She’s wearing a mask: a gorilla with a smirk on its face. He can see it’s her. The same running shoes, the same spandex pants.
“Take that thing off,” he says.
She ignores him.
“Where were you,” she asks in a smothered voice, as if from deep within the cave of Machpelah.
“Have you now become my self-appointed guardian?” he asks scornfully.
“Man,” she says, “I just had this gut feeling everything wasn’t right with you.”
How much of his green gills and battered state can she see through the narrow slits of her mask, he wonders.
“Everything’s perfectly fine with me, thank you,” he says.
She remains standing there. So does he.
“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” she asks.
“No,” he says, “and for God’s sake, take that ridiculous thing off.”
She continues to ignore him. (Where does she find these things? A big full-faced gorilla mask made of rubber. Not the modern plastic kind, either, but rubber, like when he was a child).
“Where were you,” she persists.
“Bubbles,” he says, “I was away. Let’s just say that, like Hercules, the hero, I was out on one of my labours.”
“The man from the gallery asked you to do something for him,” she says.
“Yes, to tell the truth, he did,” says Aaron. “At his request, I took two individuals to Balgowan. Two of the ones he’s possibly chosen for the exhibition.”
“You let yourself be taken for a sucker!”