Nick’s sister and his eldest brother wouldn’t know, because they were, as far as he was concerned, write-offs. His sister a heart surgeon sweeping through the wards of some academic hospital, teams of white-clad underlings bearing beating hearts on ice in sterile containers hot on her heels. She wouldn’t have time for pig memories. His eldest brother was a tycoon. Well, good for him. The past was not part of his frame of reference either. The only one who would have known – his other brother, five years older than he – wrote himself off big time on a motor bike in Namibia. Smuggling diamonds. (Who was to know?) His hero and tormentor. Nick was the youngest. Sickly child, everybody thought he was retarded. He led a secret life, his fantasies riding roughshod over him. Horrendous nightmares, visions of hell at a tender age; dreamt Bosch before he saw his work. Slid around on his belly in the garden like a snake or a snail, looking for something he couldn’t find at eye level. What the hell, he’d eat worms if need be. His sister did have a soft spot for him; eldest brother blinkered like a horse headlong on his way to tycoon-dom. That left Nick with smuggler brother, his hero. Smoking buddies, drinking buddies, porno-mag buddies and he barely older than ten, twelve. Brother wiped his arse on the world and was irresistibly charming on top of it. He made Nick draw. All positions. Brother was the first person who recognised Nick’s ability. Nick was a slow developer, and it was only when everybody else stopped growing that he shot up. Asthma, ringworm and pox could no longer hold him back. First he wanted to become a rugby player, then a bomber pilot. Become an artist, said his brother. Painters are sissies, said Nick. Brother showed him a photo of Jackson Pollock energetically at it. Does that look like sissy-work to you? (In the brother’s eyes it also counted in Pollock’s favour that at forty-four, drunk, he had written himself off spectacularly in a car.)
Nick found dark women most attractive, but when it came to getting down and dirty he’d always preferred blondes. Strong calves, legs slightly bandy. Gap between the front teeth. Expression somewhere between brain-dead and horny. For god’s sake just not wholesome blondes. Slightly off, slightly slutty and clapped-out. The vacuous, dreamy gaze at parties after twelve. As far as sex was concerned? By his mid-thirties he’d had enough of it to last him two lifetimes. Up to and including his short-lived marriage. And after that, after his failed marriage, his relationship with Isabel for the last seven years. Her hair as white as flax and her skin honey-coloured in summer. Heavy eyelids, a languid gaze, a tentative smile. Her back and limbs long and narrow, like those of a Cycladic funerary idol.
*
One morning when he was backing out his car on his way to work, he came across Marthinus Scheepers on his morning walk. No pig at his heels.
Marthinus was wearing a kind of Peruvian woollen cap, a snazzy tracksuit bottom, strange boots and a brightly coloured windbreaker. He greeted Nick cordially. Come by this evening, he said, come and watch a video with us.
That afternoon Nick found a postcard in his postbox. It was a reproduction of El Greco’s portrait of Vincenzo Anastagi. The message on the back read: Any extra copies of The Shallows? V.S.
V.S., would you believe it?! Could only be Victor Schoeman. A South African stamp. Posted here, then. This did not bode well. Did it mean that Victor was in the country? When last had they seen each other? (And that, come to think of it, went for Blinky, and Chris Kestell, and Marlena as well?!) Did he have any desire to resume contact with Victor? No. The extra copies of The Shallows that he’d stored for years, he’d had pulped when he heard nothing more from Victor. Why should he get stuck with the debt and the boxes of books?
Good choice of postcard, Victor, he thought. The El Greco was one of his favourite paintings. He’d last seen this painting in the Frick with Isabel, on their final, fatal trip together, shortly before the end of their relationship, in November the previous year. Not that he’d been all that keen to visit the Frick (had by and large had his fill of Western painting), but for her it had been a trip fraught with meaning, a kind of pilgrimage perhaps. And there in the Frick she’d suddenly pressed her hands to her ears (why not her eyes, he’d wondered), gone in great haste to claim her coat from the cloakroom, and run away (he couldn’t describe it in any other way). He’d followed, into the cold streets, a freezing wind (as if from Siberia) on their cheeks and wet snow in the streets. He managed to lure her into an Oriental museum and teahouse, where he could calm her down with a delicate snow pea and shrimp soup and tea from little Japanese earthenware teapots. Some colour returned to her cheeks. (I can’t any longer, he thought, I can’t carry you any longer, it takes too much out of me.) She cheered up so much that later she was even exuberant, flirtatious, but the day had been spoiled for him. He was morose; he no longer wanted to be charmed by her. Forgive me, she said, I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
Three
Your lover, and my beloved friend. You were speechless with grief, your cheeks cold as alabaster. A month or so later I packed my bags and left. I should have stayed, I should have stood by you, but if I stayed, I thought, I’d perish. After Jacobus’ death there was a short circuit in my head, I had to betake myself to some other environment, or perish.
We get together only at the beginning of the new year in the coffee shop, after your return from your long, extended travels. The coffee shop has a dark interior. How glad I am to see your dear face once again. I take your face in my two hands and I say: It’s been such a long while that we haven’t seen each other! We gaze into each other’s eyes long and feelingly. We sit down at a little corner table. Outside it’s been raining incessantly since the previous day. Now at last we’re both back in town, I say. You have no plans to leave again? No, I don’t have any such plans. And how do you find it, being back? you ask. I don’t know, I say. You know how ambivalent I am about the town. I had an aversion to the place for so long. I have it still, at times very intensely. Aversion or fear? you ask. Perhaps a bit of both. While I was away, I often thought that I didn’t want to come back.
The waitress brings our coffee. We are both silent for a while. How are you? I ask. You don’t reply immediately, keep your gaze lowered. Move a grain of sugar around on the table with your finger. Things have never been the same again, you say softly. Everything has changed subtly but inexorably. Not quite drowning, but with the solid ground caved in under your feet. Could it ever be different again – doesn’t time bring change? I ask; or so they say, in any case. Maybe, maybe not, you say, how would you know? At the moment it doesn’t feel as if it could ever be different again.
Again we fall silent, and listen to the rain falling gently but persistently. And your trip, I ask, did it make any difference? It provided temporary diversion, you say, though you sometimes think you should have stayed and faced out your grief. That could perhaps have hastened the healing process.
I’ve started writing a monograph on the Olivier brothers, I say. You’ve been planning to do it for a long time, you say. Yes, but it’s taken me a long time to get going, I say. There are few people in the coffee shop, the interior is dark, sound is muffled by the incessant rain outside. I hope to be granted an interview with the brothers’ father, with Marcus Olivier, but it’s not that easy.
We sit in silence for a while, listening to the rain. Drink our coffee. Then abruptly you look up and ask, what are you to do?
*
When we get up to leave, I feel slightly light-headed, whether with joy or dismay or general disorientation is not clear to me. We take our leave. I don’t feel young, I don’t feel old. It is high summer, in the streets the foliage is dense, the shadows sharp after the rain.
I am reading a book in which the deceased Fernando Pessoa visits one of his alter egos (and heteronyms), Ricardo Reis. Reis has recently moved into an apartment after his sojourn of more than two months in the Hotel Bragança,