Episode 28: The Red and the Black: 1
My Life as an African: A BiograFictional Memoir
A link to the previous episode: Episode 27: Some Bits About My Character
In my last year in high school I take painting-and-drawing lessons one afternoon a week at an art school. Our teacher is a late-thirties refined-looking Dutch woman with brown rounded arms, a rounded full body, and long elegant legs. She is a new immigrant to South Africa, fleeing the Dutch Indonesian ex-colonies after the troubles there, and she has café-au-lait skin and a chalk-white smile. She is corporeal and good-natured, down-to-earth and solid. In fact, she could easily be mistaken for a Cape Coloured, whose shades run the entire color spectrum. Despite that, having fled Indonesia, she is strongly pro the Nationalist apartheid government.
During class she likes to slip her small bare brown feet out of her brown moccasins and wiggle her toes on the classroom floor beneath the table at the head of studio. Once, looking down at herself, she gives us a mock-serious lecture on the dangers of not drying your feet thoroughly after a bath, and proceeds to illustrate in great detail how to use an imaginary towel to carefully dry between her toes. The glimpsed nooks and crannies of her body seem more intriguing and mysterious than the bodies of the bland younger-than-me girls I’ve liked. Her easy way is something I’ve never seen.
Her husband occasionally comes to art-school functions. He is a portly gruff sensual-looking man, dressed in dark suits like the men in Rembrandt’s somber group portraits of Amsterdam patriarchs. A year later we hear that he has left her and her late-teenage daughter for another woman.
My uncle in Tel Aviv, a newsagent, send me free regular copies of Mad Magazine, which he gets for free, and which is hard to find in South Africa. One of the issues has a spoof on vending machines, and one of the cartoons shows a large machine with women of various styles behind the glass doors, with labeled buttons to push after you insert your quarter. One of the buttons is labeled “Pleasantly Plump
” and the woman behind the glass reminds me of the art teacher. The label evokes a world of frequently savored familiar yet exciting passions
Sunday mornings in my third year at university I’m a Habonim counselor in charge of a bunch of boys between eight and twelve years old, meeting every week in the nearby Orphanage. I prepare the morning meetings in advance. Everyone is in Habonim uniform, I administer corny Boy-Scout-style opening ceremonies in Hebrew, organize scavenger hunts, teach bits of Jewish history badly, play rounds of soccer or cricket, give quizzes, teach campcraft and other scoutingy things.
One Sunday a new eleven-year-old joins the group and becomes a regular. He has a charming open way about him. I feel paternal, and he has asked me for a book on physics so that he might learn something. I tell him I have one aimed at a popular audience and I will bring it to him, and so one weekday afternoon I drive over to his address, about five minutes by car from ours. I park in front, and take the book with me.
I push open the low front gate in the center of the hip-high brick wall facing the street and walk down the stairs. The front door is made of panels of lensed translucent glass through which I can dimly see a kaleidoscopic interior. I ring. Something happens.
I hear footsteps and see the blurred shape of a pink housecoat approaching in mosaic through the glass. As the door opens I register an impression of flesh and solidity that seems to burst all boundaries. She is in her late thirties. Her hair is dark black, thick and stiffly coiffed above a broad white forehead; she has heavy plucked black eyebrows above dark brown eyes, a thick sensual nose, and somehow impatient red lips. I think momentarily of Myrtle, Tom Buchanan’s energetic and vulgar mistress in The Great Gatsby.
“I’ve brought a book for Daniel,” I say.
“I’m Mrs Gold,” she says. She pronounces it heavily. Her voice is deep and sonorous, no-nonsense, but she smiles and looks me over. “Daniel told me about you. He’s not here now, he’ll be back soon, but come inside.” She holds out her hand. Her nails are bright red, her arms ample and full below the short sleeves of the housecoat. Her palm feels big and warm.
She leads me into a plain comfortable living room. Her cork-soled mules (I don’t know that that’s what they are called until much later) tap up and down against her heels as she walks. The toes and backs are open, there is just a strap across the arch. She seats herself in the armchair opposite and leans back, crossing one leg over the other at the knee, dangling one shoe off the front of her raised right foot. Red toenails peek through the front; a white heel emerges smooth and round at the back. She is too substantial to be graceful, but she isn’t ungraceful either. I suddenly wonder about her carnal life.
The maid soon brings a small tray with a tea pot, two cups and saucers, milk and sugar and some home-made biscuits. She pours me a cup, and then pours one for herself. She takes a pack of cigarettes off the side table and taps one out and lights it and takes a quick draw.
“Oh my goodness, sorry, I should have asked”, she says as an afterthought. “Do you smoke?”
“Sometimes, yes,” I nod. “I wouldn’t mind one.”
“Of course,” she smiles. She rises and walks towards me with the pack, taps it upside down on the coffee table to shake the cigarettes loose, and proffers the pack. I take one. She offers me her lighter, a small solid slim silver Ronson that looks too angular for her soft fingers. She reminds me of the art teacher, without resemblance.
“What are you studying at university?” she asks. I explain about physics and particles and fields. We drink tea and smoke and talk about her son for ten minutes, like two adults. Then Daniel arrives and she fusses over him.
“It was nice talking,” she says when I say I must go. “Drop in again if you’re near.”
After that I make my path often cross that of Mrs. Gold. Sometimes, driving home from university or to neighboring suburbs to visit friends, I see her white four-door tail-finned Chev parked in various places, like a talisman. Sometimes it’s in front of my friend’s flat in Vredehoek where she takes her daughter for music lessons. Sometimes it’s opposite another friend’s house in Oranjezicht where she visits her sister-in-law. She seems to spend her days driving her two young children.
There is no visible husband. Later I learn that he owns and lives on a farm in South-West Africa, hardly ever comes to Cape Town. The kids visit him there during vacations. Daniel tells me his father has to be at the farm. It never occurs to me that there is something strange about this.
Driving to university, I begin to take circuitous routes that run via her house. On rainy weekend days I take long walks in her neighborhood, hoping for glimpses. If I see her car parked outside, then sometimes, not so often as to be too noticeable, I allow myself a visit, usually on the pretense of saying hi to her son.
Now when I knock on the door, I wait for approaching footsteps and the vague pink shape of the housecoat through the glass. Sometimes the maid answers the door, and, now familiar with me, gives a smile and then shouts up the stairs, Madam, your young man is here.
For twenty or thirty minutes we sit in her living room. After the maid brings tea she offers one of her cigarettes and I inhale too as I watch her take long drags at the cork filter she places between her lips. She likes to talk, and, self-assured though she is, seems puzzled by young people in the Sixties. She quizzes me on what I read, on politics, on what it’s like to be young and at university. She wants to know what her son and daughter should learn about.
I think about her a lot. I wonder what to do.
To be continued