How could Turtle have not seen its reptile beauty? It had been living silently in the tiny garden all this time, mostly unnoticed, minding its own business. Somehow, this solitary, prehistoric-looking creature had even managed to evade our cat. I knew how unique chameleons were; my mom said they could change colour to camouflage themselves. I wondered if there were people who could change colour too.
Once, I tried picking it up, prising its sticky toes from its branch. I must have squeezed and hurt it, for its mouth opened wide, big enough to swallow half its own body, and it let out a scream. Apparently, chameleons don’t scream so maybe it hissed. But that is not what I heard; I heard a penetrating, almost human scream. I dropped it back on its tree and ran, heart pounding.
I prayed the chameleon was all right. I feared I’d damaged its organs. I could still feel the scaly sack of its bulging body through my fingertips.
But then along came Turtle. He was no different from other boys, said Mom. Most boys liked to go out and kill things just for the thrill of it – crunching snails under their shoes, chopping earthworms in half and watching them wriggle, shooting doves with pellet guns. And doves are the symbol of peace, she said. Picasso had drawn one for the United Nations, where my exotic Aunt Sonya, my mom’s youngest sister, worked.
Mom said Turtle’s parents should have taught him better. Turtle was a normal kid; that is to say he was a proto-psychopath, which is a person without feelings for others. In time, most parents manage to sensitise and civilise their offspring. It was I who was different; I was not like the herd, like other kids; I was like her – born sensitive! The world was not kind to people of our nature, she said, ‘but may you always stay that way, my darling, for the meek will inherit the earth’.
I nodded, but something told me it wasn’t possible. At some point I’d have to defend myself, and there would be times when I would have to stop myself feeling. Already, my feelings were unbearable.
‘It’s because children are brought up in cities and buildings,’ my mom explained. ‘They are cut off from nature. Children should be raised with animals. Kids in big cities, like New York and Tokyo, they think milk comes in bottles! They don’t even know what a cow is. They think milk is made in a factory.’
She drew a picture of a cow to explain. I preferred the idea of milk coming out of factory bottles, not being squirted out of dangly cow tits.
Then she drew an exquisite illustration of my favourite nursery rhyme. For many years, when I was miserable, I’d recite it:
Hey, diddle, diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed,
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
Over and over again like a mantra, that last bit – ‘the dish ran away with the spoon’ – especially comforted me. I could easily imagine a cat playing a fiddle with such gusto that even a cow could hurdle the moon, and a dish and a spoon elope to a better world where they wouldn’t be used by people.
My mom would spend hours on end painting in her studio. The walls of our flat were already covered in her oil paintings, with their beautiful, strong colours. There were jungles and deserts and oceans for me to gaze into and dozens of strange men and women gazing back at me – a blue man with a fez, who she said was a merchant from Isfahan; a Chinese lady in orange with a pigtail who had come fully sprung from my mom’s imagination; a many-headed green monster which she said was there to frighten nightmares away; and a naked Greek hero, with his arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross, plunging from the sky. The wax that had held his golden wings together had melted because he’d flown too close to the sun, she said.
We had a handful of works by other artists. In Mom’s bedroom was a small Irma Stern watercolour of the flower sellers in Adderley Street, which the famous artist had given her as a gift. I thought it fairly unimaginative and trite when set alongside my mother’s work, but my mom loved it and I remember her repeatedly saying as she stared at it, ‘If only I could paint that well … If only.’
Mostly my mom did works in pen and ink and watercolour. She filled a whole book in a week. Occasionally, she would draw in pastels and Conté crayon on large sheets of paper that were so expensive they made her nervous. Only when she could muster enough energy did she paint in oils, a medium as time-consuming, tricky and demanding as it is rewarding.
She quoted Leonardo da Vinci: ‘An artist’s strength lies in solitude.’ Yet as children we were not banished from her studio, although there wasn’t much room in that poky work space for me and my brother.
It is only recently that I had the startling realisation that up to the age of six I had absolutely no playmates my own age. This only changed when I went to primary school and at first I was terrified of the other kids. Even later, I would have very limited interaction with my school friends outside school hours.
Meanwhile, my brother, Paul-Henri, named after our father, William Paul, and our grandfather, Henri François, was already out in the world being three years older than me. He would return home with grass stains on his knees and bruises on his arms and legs, evidence that the world outside was a dangerous place. We would watch with fascination over the course of several days as his bruises changed colour – pink, ghastly blue, deep purple, mustard, occasionally bilious green. He called them medallions. He seemed to get into a lot of fights. I think he was much bullied, but he appeared undeterred.
I, on the other hand, stayed home, almost never leaving the flat in our three-storey block, which was not quite high enough to jump off by the time you were an adult. The flat was in Milnerton, Cape Town, on the ‘right’ side of the railway lines, so to speak, not on the tracks but close, on the border of Rugby, the suburb where my mom said the ‘low-class types’ lived. As a child, I sometimes wondered about living in a house over there with the common people, rather than in our childless flats where the only other children were two little thugs who lurked upstairs and the horrid Turtle next door. Some nightmarish families, always fighting, came and went over the years, but most people in our block were retired or close to it, while across the railway line there were big, noisy families with lots of children and plenty of pets. But my mom said I mustn’t go near them.
Mom said teenagers were especially to be avoided. She said three teenagers had been put on trial for murdering a toddler. They’d pushed him into a sewer drain for a bit of fun, then stamped on his fingers until he fell. When asked by the judge why they did it, one of them said he had merely wanted to experience what it felt like to kill another person.
On my way to school my heart would quicken, and I’d almost break into a run when I had to pass the storm drains on the curb. I was terrified a gang of teenagers would suddenly appear, even though I couldn’t see how they could possibly fit my body down the maw of that drain.
While my mother was absorbed in painting, I calmed myself by drawing. Much as I loved being near her in the studio with its warm smell of oil paint and the cool evaporation of turpentine, I would go off to the lounge and spread myself on the carpet with a big sheet of paper and a world atlas. I liked copying maps, memorising the outlines of the continents and even the internal borders of some countries. The most difficult thing was choosing where to begin the outline so it would all fit on the paper. I usually started with Africa as it was smack bang in the centre of the world, and I loved its simple shape. I did not use tracing paper and it took me some time to master copying to scale by freehand. I am still able to sit down and draw a vaguely accurate world map purely from memory. Back then, I never dreamed that by the time I turned fifty, I would have visited more than half the countries on the coastlines of the world, including the Antarctic. Such voyages were far beyond the realm of possibility in that cramped, working-class flat beside the railway line.
I took a while to figure out map scales, eventually leading