The Road of Excess. Ingrid Winterbach
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or tonsillitis. As she works, she sings. She’s like a ship in full sail. Unbending in her faith, mistrustful and outspokenly critical of all politicians. They’re all thugs, she says. The lot of them out to make themselves rich, secure their own safety.
If she’s not singing as she works, she talks to herself. An incessant commentary, of which he understands not a word because it’s all in Sesotho. (Like him, she hails from a different part of the country.)
She does his washing and irons his clothes (energetically), makes his bed, sweeps the house clean and vacuums everywhere. Sometimes she cooks him a meal. Always, she sings while she works. Je-su, Je-su, she sings.
She keeps unwelcome visitors from his door (although, this morning, she somehow let the woman from next door slip through). She has her own way of doing things, she’s hard-headed and wilful. The studio is the one place he cleans up himself. No one is allowed in there.
At 1.30 pm each day she puts away the iron, showers, eats her lunch, and travels first by taxi and then by bus back to her house, which is situated in one of the Indian areas. She prefers living there, she says, because black people in the townships cause too much trouble.
Although they’re about the same age, he and Mrs Sekete, she refuses point blank to call him by name.
Sometimes he wishes he could dismiss her. Out! he wants to say. Be gone! I no longer need your services. I can no longer bear your energetic presence in my house! I cannot endure your vigour, your steadfastness. You are my right hand, but also my tormentor. Just by crossing my threshold every morning, you do me harm.
But it’s too late now. He cannot dismiss her. Wasn’t it she who wailed the loudest when Naomi died? Isn’t it true their souls became intertwined, then, in the shared act of mourning?
Aaron’s waiting for a message from Knuvelder, the owner of a gallery in Cape Town, where he exhibits his work. It’s been a week since Knuvelder’s visit to his studio to see his new work, and still he hasn’t heard a word.
For a number of years now, abstraction has given Aaron a way of escaping the tyranny of the specific, while still offering him a means to express emotion. But he has experienced this renunciation of the recognisable image as a loss. Even in his most abstract – his most nonfigurative – work, there would be a wound, like internal bleeding, just below the skin, a seepage in the tissue of the paint. Large canvases on which the most prominent colours were pinks and reds. In this period, fifteen, twenty years ago, Eddie Knuvelder sometimes stood right behind him, and Aaron recognised something akin to lust in Knuvelder’s gaze as he looked at the paintings – the work was engaging him erotically. In those days, Eddie marketed Aaron’s work with enthusiasm and conviction; Aaron’s career flourished. Over the years, however, his palette gradually darkened. The texture of the paint began to thicken. Reds and pinks, favoured in the large nonfigurative canvases, still dominated, but they became coarser, more clotted, contrasted with greens and violets. He began to work with clusters: a greater concentration of forms in the middle of the canvas, suggesting the proscribed image – not through any recognisable representation, but via the intensity of heightened expression. Warm clusters of emotion, longing, memory. A melting together and a densification, foreshadowing the non-present image. Although Aaron restrained himself from painting anything recognisably figurative, this remained the basis, the frame of reference, the point of departure. His longing for the image lay at the root of its absence.
Below, Mrs Sekete moves around on her solid calves and her Florentine feet. After Naomi’s death, he often used to get impatient with her; brusque and unreasonable. But she never said a word, just stopped singing as she ironed.
At night Aaron and Naomi would sleep in each other’s arms. She was a beautiful woman and he was a handsome man. Still, he could not come to rest because the banned image kept pulsing behind his eyelids. It awaited him in the mornings like a thief hiding in his studio. His palette became starker, stripped even more bare. Bent black shapes began to dominate his canvases. Eventually he gave up colour as well, working only with chiaroscuro. (A lot later, his brother Stefaans talked about radical disinvestiture.) From this matrix, this disrupted and unstable space, the image gradually began to assume form again.
A day or two after introducing herself, his new neighbour comes knocking at the door again, just as he’s making breakfast. Mrs Sekete hasn’t yet arrived to protect him from unwelcome visits.
She’s wearing a T-shirt with a giant tiger on it, spandex pants, and reflective sunglasses.
“You’re not maybe going into town this morning, are you?” she asks, lighting a cigarette. “My car’s in for a service.”
“No.”
He does not invite her inside.
“Please don’t disturb me this early in the morning.”
“You’ve been awake for a while already,” she says.
“Are you spying on me?”
She laughs, stubbing out the cigarette with her heel.
“Spying, my arse,” she says.
He says nothing.
“I’ll tell you what,” she says, “you give us a lift into town today, and I’ll buy you a Lotto ticket.”
“I’ll tell you what,” he says, “we’ll go to a tattoo-parlour and afterwards play some bingo.” Immediately he feels bad about this needlessly sharp reaction; whence the powerful urge to protect his space, at all costs, against this woman?
Unblinking, she stares back at him. Lights up another cigarette before turning on her heel, just as she had the last time.
“Think about it,” she says. “Bye for now.”
When she gets to the top step, she turns around and says: “Have you renewed your gun licence yet?”
*
For quite a while now, he’s been working on raw canvas. He no longer bothers to stretch it first. In this way, part of the canvas remains unpainted when he finally stretches out the finished work. He likes it this way. A reminder that paint is nothing more than wet pigment on canvas, and that painting is the art of illusion. He’d spent the whole night tossing and turning, awakening with difficulty from a swoon of green guilt. Remorse about everything done as well as undone. Green as sludge. Mrs Sekete has yet to unlock the house and energetically announce herself, when the doorbell rings. He thinks it might perhaps be her; she may have left her key behind. When he opens the door, there stands Bubbles, Miss Bubbles Bothma, on his front step.
No, he thinks. No.
“You’re not maybe going into town this morning?” she says. “My car’s still being serviced.”
Certainly, she’s not an attractive woman. Her features are too coarse, her face too asymmetrical, with those odd-sized eyes of hers, and there’s a puffiness around her cheekbones this morning that he hadn’t noticed before. It doesn’t help that her hair’s been coloured, unwisely, and has a jagged cut.
“I work in the mornings, I work in the afternoons, and I work at night,” he says. “Please do not interrupt me.”
She holds up her hands defensively. “Don’t stress,” she says. “I come in peace.”
“Whatever it is you do, and however you come, do not bother me again.”
“Sorry,” she says. She’s still holding her hands up, her face turned away in a gesture of subjection.
“I’ve been sleeping badly lately,” he says, yielding unexpectedly.
She listens with her head averted, maintaining the theatrical pose.
“And I take a while to get going in the mornings,” he adds, much to his own surprise. Is he really confessing to this complete stranger of a woman?
“I hear you,” she says. “Let me know if your plans change. I’m still willing to sponsor you a Lotto ticket.”
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