When her father retired, Maria’s parents came to live in the Western Cape. Her mother kept on working as part-time bookkeeper till shortly before her death. Now both of them are lying buried against a low hill, far from their place of origin.
Maria followed in her mother’s footsteps, worked by day as a qualified accountant for an auditors’ firm; did auditing jobs for various businesses in the town, the city and surroundings, and in the evenings she read widely to extend her range of reference. As an accountant, somebody who had for all her adult life dedicated herself to accounts and balance sheets, she was all too inclined to feel inferior to Sofie, her sister, a poet, and also to her ex-husband, the sculptor. She thus earnestly educated herself in history, history of art, philosophy, psychology. All of this also for the sake of her sculptor ex-husband, in order to hold her own in the company of his friends, admirers and acolytes. She would not permit her numeracy to stymie her general cultural literacy. (Not that she expected any of them to conduct an informed conversation with her on the subject of markets or figures.)
Until, one day, she’d had enough and told the sculptor: Go take a flying fuck. Enough of trying to second-guess your every need in every possible way. You bugger on in your own time now. Select a more suitable candidate for your requirements from your wide circle of groupies.
A year later she embarked on a relationship with a steadfast man. This time she selected someone from the business world, who appreciated her aptitude for figures. She’d learnt her lesson — no more getting into bed with an artist.
Martin du Bois’s job involved frequent relocation. They lived in Johannesburg, overseas for a while, and for the last seven years in the harbour town of Durban, the garden a true bower of delight, verdant and tranquil, secluded from the street. A refuge, she thought, a safe haven, paradisal. A balmy, sultry garden in summer, with snake, monkey and chittering locust. In winter, when the rest of the country was shivering, bloodwarm, and the days so perfectly balanced, the garden so fruitful that at times it took her breath away, and she felt a kind of fullness rising in her throat (from the regions of the heart). A landscape of plenty, she thought at such times. And that was what it was, the last few years. Her life, by and large, perfectly satisfactory.
Their relationship, hers and Martin’s, always courteous and considerate, but suddenly, a while ago, Maria started craving silence and solitude. Enough of having to adapt to someone else’s rhythms and requirements — however unexacting the person’s requirements, or predictable his rhythms. It suited her well when he decided, a month or two previously, to open a branch of his business in Taiwan. So now she needn’t send him packing. Now she needn’t say to him: Goodbye, see you in a year or two.
She stayed behind on her own in the house. She’d earned well all her life, dealt sensibly with money and invested cleverly. If she wanted to, she needn’t work full-time ever again. She had time.
Fortunately the child from her marriage with Andreas Volschenk has left home, because in his twenty-seven years he has complicated her life considerably. He gave her trouble from early infancy. He’s asthmatic. His nature is terrifyingly contradictory. He can be affectionate and engaging, and then whip around and bite you on the ankle, as it were. On the one hand ridiculously accommodating and on the other obdurately rebellious. Mistrustful and gullible at the same time. A large, clumsy child. His psyche a veritable battle ground of conflicting impulses: of good and evil intentions. At times, during adolescence, he was downright impossible to manage.
As a baby he was a projectile vomiter. Allergic to mother’s milk, and then to cow’s milk. On goat’s milk and soya milk she had to raise the child. He wouldn’t eat, he wouldn’t drink, he wouldn’t sleep. Always picky and particular about food. Allergic to everything. Passionately fond of animals, but dog and cat hairs brought him out in an inflamed scabby rash. Waxen, etiolated, his mouth perpetually half-open because of enlarged adenoids, he looked a bit like a retard.
But he had an extraordinary gift for figures (like Maria and her mother), and in addition, perfect pitch. Against his will he endured violin lessons up to the age of eleven. The teacher was full of praise for his exceptional abilities; the child would go far, he opined. Before every lesson Benjy was pale with tension. And she was tired to death of the effort of persuading (or blackmailing) him to go just once more. Until one day he vomited on the carpet by the teacher’s feet. And from that day on he refused ever to touch a violin or any other musical instrument. So that was a round she lost.
He has attention deficit syndrome. He has trouble completing things. He doesn’t want to study. He wants to invent things, he wants to undertake things. It was hell getting him through school.
He is both gullible and cunning. He frequently gets bamboozled by swindlers and sharpers. He is vengeful and tender-hearted. He often comes up with the most surprising things. She has a vivid image of him on the hot pathway in front of their house. He’s lying under a blanket. He’s breathing through his mouth. He is totally engrossed in his game. His skin is raw with scratching. He is building an elaborate castle of clay for two snails.
He has poor muscle tone, but attractive eyes: light-grey with speckles, like a guinea-fowl feather, and long, lush lashes like a girl’s.
To make things worse, he got mixed signals from his father ever since infancy. Andreas encouraged Benjy, but quickly got impatient with him — if he didn’t get going soon enough, if he didn’t complete a task.
With his aptitude for figures it was clear that Benjy should study mathematics, or physics. In this direction he persevered for two years, with high marks, but dropped out at the beginning of his third year. He refused to study any further. Neither heaven nor earth nor mother nor father could budge him. He wanted to be an artist. Like his father. Maria blamed her ex-husband; she saw Benjy’s choice as an unresolved father-son issue — if the child had had a sounder relationship with his father, he wouldn’t have had this foolish compulsion.
Now Benjy is living in Cape Town, where, as far as Maria can make out, he’s enrolled himself as a kind of apprentice to some or other established artist. A magus, Benjy calls him. If it’s a question of magic, it’s probably black magic, thinks Maria, as she knows Benjy.
The Plains of Huang-He
SOMETHING, ONE DAY, starts closing in on Maria Volschenk. It manifests itself first of all in her body as a sensation of emptiness, exactly at the juncture of her last two floating ribs, approximately at the lowest point of the sternum, just to the right of the lowest point of the heart, more or less where the gullet enters the stomach between the tenth and eleventh dorsal vertebrae. Right there is what feels like an ice-cold, hollow spot — something closely akin to pain — gradually permeating the rest of her organs. The heart, the liver, the stomach, the gall bladder, the kidneys, the bladder, the intestine. Eventually the sensation of a percolating void, a vacuum, settles in her head as well.
All of a sudden everything seems pointless to her. Music she can no longer listen to. Nothing that used to give her pleasure does so any more. Neither lieder nor rock. Neither Charles Ives nor Stravinsky nor Mahler. Neither El Niño de Almaden, the Spanish flamenco singer (with his raw, discordant voice, his searing voice like acrid, fragrant moss). Nor the blind sheik Barrayn, making Sufi music from Upper Egypt, singing love songs and Koran psalms, deeply rooted in the ancient Bedouin tradition, accompanying himself on a little tambourine, held up close to his face, his fingers slapping, slipping, stroking its surface. Nor the family Lela de Permet from Albania, with the two toothless old men singing a duet in which one of them seems on the point of rending his shirt to expose the fragile, love-impaled heart. Nor Tallis, nor Monteverdi, nor Bach. Nor Berlioz’s settings of Baudelaire’s poems. Nor Schoenberg nor Alban Berg nor Britten nor Buxtehude.