She listens to her entire music collection, hoping that something in it can still appeal to her, but she feels an aversion to everything she listens to. An aversion such as she felt to certain odours when she was pregnant with Benjy.
Diminished, too, is her delight in the balminess and profusion of her tree-filled garden. She no longer inhales its fragrances with such sensual relish. The voluptuous excess of it rather disgusts her, truth to tell.
She thinks: How can everything have changed like that overnight? (It is at this time that she has the dream of her sister.)
Meticulously — because she’s a systematic woman, with a precise mind — she sifts through all the facets of her present and her past. Somewhere must lie hidden the key to this sudden beleaguered sensation in her body and her mind. She thinks of places where she’s lived, places she’s travelled to, people she’s known. She goes back as far as her memory allows. She compresses her memory, in an attempt to squeeze every last drop of information from it.
If she could, she would go back all the way to the womb, even to herself as an unfertilised egg in the body of her mother, but that is not possible. How far back must she go? To her parents, her grandparents?
Her father is seated on a big, loose boulder somewhere on a mountain with a woman, his first love. (Far beneath them a hazy landscape extends into infinity.) He’s wearing a tie and a white long-sleeved shirt. (Has he climbed the mountain in his shirt, tie and neat flannel trousers?)
Maria’s mother, not much older than four, is sitting on a tiny cane chair in front of her seated grandfather and grandmother. They were prosperous middle-class people. Maria’s grandmother (whose name she’s inherited) stands behind them. She is young, dressed in white like a girl. The expression on her face is unfathomable — the same expression she often has in photographs: aloof, reticent, wary of the camera. Is that where it started — in the undivulged, unrecorded disappointments and losses of her grandparents, her great-grandparents?
The same grandmother is standing, many years later, next to an elephant (with Indian trainer in knee boots and pith helmet: it must have been somewhere in Durban on holiday). She is no longer the same young woman, she’s dressed in something that looks like a dark, lightweight gabardine coat. Behind her is Maria’s smiling grandfather (an extrovert), his hand on his wife’s arm. Her grandmother’s arms dangle by her side, almost without volition; she is smiling faintly at the camera, but her gaze remains guarded and reserved, as if wanting to say: Don’t even try to unravel my secrets. (Is that where it started, this emptiness that feels like pain?)
Maria’s earliest childhood memories are sparse. An outside toilet (which she associates with one of her earliest dreams). Curtains billowing slightly, slightly in the wind. Red cement steps. The birth of her sister, Sofie. Her first day at school, the smell of Marmite sandwiches at break. The smell of poster paint (in powder form). The patterns they made with it on large sheets of paper. The way in which the sheets hardened as they dried, cracking where they were folded.
Was it this early school experience, does that perhaps provide a key? Perhaps one of many keys? School was not for the sensitive or the tender-hearted. Some of the children had an off-putting smelclass="underline" of fish-paste sandwiches, of rancid butter, of pee. Mrs Roodt, her Grade Two teacher, one day yanked her own child from his desk and gave him an almighty thrashing, in full view of the startled class. Mrs Roodt had white-blonde, curly hair like a merino sheep. (Maria overheard her parents say that Mrs Roodt was much older than her husband.) She wore pearls and a shirtwaister with three-quarter sleeves, of which Maria can still recall the woolly texture. Her best friend, Dalena, once whispered to Maria that Mrs Roodt had big titties.
Is that where it started, in her first years at school — in the Grade One class of drab, depressive Miss Hendrikse, in the Grade Two class of Mrs Roodt with the merino hair and big titties? Early misery and misfortune, because school was a minefield of smells and unpredictable (often cruel and inconsistent) actions on the part of teachers as well as children.
She concludes that she feels neither longing nor nostalgia for any single place on the globe, nor for any single person — not even her deceased parents. The house in which she grew up feels to her like a place in which sorrowful, even violent, things happened. A house in which emotional damage was inflicted upon her, without the conscious intent or knowledge of her solicitous parents. The birth of her sister, Sofie, for instance. Impostor. For years she felt nothing for her sister. Only once she left home did she start finding Sofie’s singular take on things interesting.
Summer arrives, the rainy season commences for the umpteenth time. Everything ruffles its pelt and pinion, shell and carapace, in readiness for the season of brash unbridled burgeoning. Baby monkeys are born. They cling to their mothers who trapeze intrepidly from branch to branch high up in the trees. The monkeys gorge themselves on dates from the palm in front of her window; snap and eat the sweet young buds of the strelitzias. Maria dreams that she tries to garden in sandy soil; she sometimes cries in her sleep. Everywhere in gardens, in parks, there are trees and shrubs, big with gravid blossom clusters, the intensity of colour assails the eye. The flying ants are due any day now. They will launch their mating flights evening after evening in unstoppable swarms. Vulgar, Maria thinks, the profusion of this season, the fungiferous humidity and unquenchable fecundity. Only the loerie’s call remains modest.
She wonders if she needs an alternative vocabulary: Meek. Taciturn. Attentive. Forgiveness, purity, remorse.
Sometimes she wonders, in a preoccupied sort of way, whether little strings are indeed what tie the universe together, and if, with our awareness of three dimensions, we are perched as on the spout of a teapot in a universe of nine or more dimensions.
*
But Maria Volschenk is plucky and pragmatic. She has an enterprising spirit. She knows that she has to adopt some strategy to hold her own against the onslaught of the beleaguering void.
She devises a plan of action — quite apart from her regular contact with her two neighbours. (With the one woman she plays cards once a week, with the other chess once a week.)
The university offers evening classes and she attends a lecture series on the nude in pictorial art. The six instalments cover the Apollo figure, the Venus figure, the nude as embodiment of energy, of pathos, of ecstasy. In the last instalment an alternative convention is examined.
It is especially the instalments on the nude as embodiment of energy and ecstasy that interest her. These lectures examine the multiple transformations, variations and subtle and not-so-subtle deviations from and interpretations of the classical ideal. In the nude as embodiment of energy the body is directed by the will. The nude as embodiment of ecstasy renounces the will — the body is possessed by some irrational force. Satyrs, dryads and nereides represent, in the Greek imagination, the irrational element of human nature, the vestiges of the animal impulse that Olympian religion tried to sublimate or tame.
The yearning for levitation and escape is the essence of the ecstatic nude. Like all Dionysiac art, this figure is a celebration of the welling up of exuberant forces erupting as it were from the earth’s crust. From earliest times the ecstatic figure has been associated with resurrection: from its depiction on sarcophagi in ancient religions to the depiction of the saved souls in representations of the Last Judgement. A representation of the most ancient of religious instincts — the rebirth of plant and animal life after a deathlike hibernation.