Surely there’ll be facilities for the kitchen staff I thought a little table somewhere where she can sit & eat. So A. goes along in her best cap very reluctant but for Jakkie’s sake. When we arrive there she doesn’t want to know anything about the hotel kitchen & she won’t budge & she stays sitting in the car & next thing Jakkie gets up suddenly without apology or explanation & takes his plate of food with him to go & give it to A. & apparently she then scolded him so fiercely that he threw the plate on the ground. This Jak then found out because when Jakkie didn’t return to the table he went to see what was happening outside & when they eventually returned to the dining room Jakkie’s face was blood-red & he had a white ring round his mouth. Heard later that Jak had thrashed Jakkie with his belt right there in front of A. How could J. do such a thing? The child is fifteen already & very over-sensitive. Terrible atmosphere because then we still had to pack everything at the beach house & Jak shouts at everybody & goes like a bat out of hell back within two hours. When we got here he made Jakkie pack immediately & ordered Dawid to take him back to Stellenbosch in the bakkie.
A. has disappeared it’s almost dark & she’s not back yet what’s going to happen to us here? J. is out of his mind charged out of here in his running-clothes. How can they just leave me all on my own like this after all that?
15
For supper there’s spinach. For dessert there’ll be stewed prunes.
Green food and black food. 12 December. Already noted on the calendar, entered in the log book.
Puree.
In the Braun.
Zimmmm-zoommm.
And after that strained three times through a sieve.
Fine but fibre-rich.
Agaat came and stood in the doorway with her little hand folded in her big hand to tell me all this. She couldn’t control the timbre of her voice. Couldn’t spare me the details of pulping. She tried. But she couldn’t. Triumphantly. Clipped. A real elocution lesson. Lips tensed around the p’s. Breath expelled robustly as if she’d rather be singing. If only I could prompt her to perform something. A libretto for the great purgation scene. Prima donna on her Procrustean bed.
Or something of the kind.
In her present mood she’d rather call the thing by name outright.
Sometimes I wonder whether, if I were suddenly to recover my speech, we could in these last days find a language to understand each other.
In which to make last jokes.
Or first jokes.
First smile.
First word.
But perhaps a lot of jabbering would have prevented us from getting to where we are now. Where that is I don’t know. I just have to guess. And she has to guess. Our positions in this studio, who is in the chair of the drawing-master, who the model on the podium. Both beginners rather, I tend to feel, with a stick of charcoal in the hand, dumbfounded before each other’s nakedness, without anybody to instruct us in the fashioning of a faithful representation.
Perhaps I’m reading too much into everything she does and says. Perhaps I’m imaging her evil. Or her goodness. Perhaps I’ve been delirious all this time because of a lack of oxygen.
Perhaps I’m more clear-minded than I’ve ever been. And perhaps she’s trying at all costs to make me keep my wits about me. By providing me with material, pricks to kick against.
I know how Agaat’s mind operates. She has no respect for a helpless human being. Possibly still pity. But not for long, then she wants to see signs of independence. She knows she’ll have to generate it in me herself if she wants to see it, reaction, resistance. Because only when she’s brought me to that will she have something to subjugate.
Spinach and prunes, thus.
Her chin has made that clear.
She will no longer be a passive spectator of my constipation.
She is now taking control of my bowels.
If she gets nothing else out of me, that she will get out of me.
Shit I shall shit, says her attitude. For her I shall address myself to the pan with abandon. Even if it is the last time. That’s one thing of which I shall not deprive her. I may be struck dumb in the mouth, and too cowardly to face her for one moment longer than is necessary, and too ungrateful to appreciate it, the spectacle that she’s contrived here in the room. But my stomach, my stomach and its overflow are hers. My last honourable mechanism. She’ll work it for me. Work it and make it work. For the night is coming.
And if her ministrations don’t have the desired effect, then she’ll push a pipe up me and pump me full of lukewarm saline water. Would I rather have that? The glug-glug in my ears while I’m filled up from below like a gallon canister of Caltex? The bed tilted head-down at fifty degrees? Shaken by the feet to get rid of air bubbles?
Has she forgotten that she embraced my feet? Or is she pretending she meant nothing by that? Can she really have forgotten that she bowed her head over my shins, crumpled up her untouchable cap against my shins?
That was yesterday. Today, apparently, the Cape is Dutch again. Without a crease in the gable is her cap. Perhaps she embroidered herself a cap especially for the occasion. An allegory. Millions of tubes running through the stars. Stuck into the Black Hole, to mock the Evil One in her pit until she gives a sign of life?
Come and bend down here close to me, Agaat, so that I can check whether that’s your latest needlepoint strategy. Give me a dream from the point of your needle. How many angels are there dancing there? And will you accompany me to heaven as embroiderer of deathbed stories? How would you design your deathbed accompanist if you were to be given the chance?
For supper there is spinach. For dessert there’ll be stewed prunes.
With quite a little air of importance she said it. In the chest register of the mezzo-domestico, the one who has to keep her pose under all circumstances, an air hostess on a doomed flight, a waitress in Towering Inferno.
As if she’s singing of duck’s tongues in port-wine sauce, or of pumpkin flowers in batter.
From its earliest incipience this morning the meal has been prepared with an amplitude of gesture. The first you-don’t-know-what’s-in-store-for-you-madam look I got just after breakfast, while I was still sprawling unproductively on the bedpan. With the dish full of springy, curling spinach-beet leaves she marched down the passage past my room to go and rinse them in the bath. Fresh from her vegetable garden of which she’s so proud. Left right, left right, all she lacked was fife and drum. On better days she holds the sunripe strawberries under my nose before she mashes them with a fork. But today it’s green. Colour of the dragon. The pennants are fluttering for the last battle of The Spout.
Three thorough rinses I heard, a stirring and a shaking and a splashing in the bath. This afternoon I got the smell, mercifully braised in butter with onion, a shred of bacon if I can still trust my nose. An hour ago the Braun started singing in the kitchen, at the high pitch of the puree setting. Zimmm-zoommm. Six, seven eight batches. I could hear the wet spinach slapping up in the jug, could see the slurry ooze down on the inside. Who does she think is supposed to eat it all? She’ll get three teaspoons into me, maybe four. And she won’t eat any of it herself.
Now she has enough for a constipated army. Perhaps she wishes she had a whole hospital of casualties to care for. So that she could repeat her ministrations from bed to bed. So that a Revolution of the Shitting Classes could erupt. Which she could suppress with a counter-offensive. Bored to death she must be. Three years long the same routines, over and over, the washing, the feeding, the pans.