‘That’s amazing.’ I meant it.
‘I can get merlot out of a white linen sofa like that’ — splitting another second between thumb and middle finger — ‘but I won’t bore you with the details.’
‘And then you also write criticism about art and music.’
‘Ja.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Well, it’s meant to be funny, obviously. Give me some credit, Neville. I know the difference between a household hint and an oratorio by Handel. It’s a branding thing, it gives me the edge on my competitors, and readers find the mix amusing. But the hints work, believe me, I test them all myself. It’s a question of credibility. Without that, everything would fall apart.’
‘Saul Auerbach,’ she said, ‘he was the reason you became a photographer.’
‘No, we can’t blame him for that.’
‘But he influenced you.’
I let the statement settle while I drove the plunger down to the bottom of the cafetière.
‘My uncle had a photograph by Auerbach in his house when I was a kid. You would recognize it, I’m sure, a street corner in Judith’s Paarl. It really bothered me. I couldn’t see the point of having it on the wall. Then in my student days my father gave me a copy of Auerbach’s first book and that was my real introduction to his work. To be honest, it was disturbing to see my own world presented so coldly. For the first time, the houses I lived in, the people I passed in the street were at the right distance to be grasped fully. They looked so solid, they were so there, I felt I knew them all. And yet there was a levity to them as well, because a photograph is a flimsy thing when you compare it to the world. It’s always on the verge of floating away or turning to ashes. You don’t want to go waving a lighter in that vicinity.
‘But I’m speculating. I might be making it up. I must be making some of it up, because I can only imagine what I saw when I first looked at an Auerbach. They’ve been stored in the darkroom of my memory for too long, reproduced a hundred times for a hundred different reasons, packed away again under the tissue-paper layers of living, and I’m not sure at all what they revealed to my young self.’
Apparently a personality could get away with phrases like ‘the darkroom of memory’ or ‘tissue-paper layers of living’ if the delivery was natural enough.
‘Did you ever meet?’
A direct question. I’d meant to avoid the subject, but now I told her about my day with Auerbach and Brookes. The gist of it anyway. Although the experience had made a more decisive impression on me than the photographs themselves, I had seldom spoken about it and the details had been slipping away. The last time Leora and I discussed my initiation, as she calls it, I had the feeling I was embellishing, adding in touches I couldn’t possibly have remembered. These days, when I think about that time, Auerbach’s accidental portraits come into my mind and they seem more reliable than my own memories.
Janie was curious about Auerbach’s legendary impatience with people and patience with light. Is it true, she wanted to know, that he’ll wait all day for a shadow to lengthen?
I answered as well as I could and she wrote in the green notebook. I wondered what she was writing down that she could not retrieve from the recorder.
The gist. It’s always the gist, isn’t it? We’re left with so little to go on. Only the present is full enough to seem complete, and even that is an optical illusion. The moment is bleeding off the page. We live on the precipice of our perceptions. At the edge of every living instant, the world shears away like a cliff of ice into the sea of what is forgotten.
Mrs Magwaza was my first thresholder. Despite an apparently impenetrable wall, she had spotted me outside her house. Perhaps a neighbour with a clear view of the street had called to alert her to my suspicious presence. She came out and challenged me as I was setting up the tripod on the opposite kerb. Once I’d explained, she was happy enough to pose, although I had to dissuade her from going inside first to change into her Sunday best.
In the photo, she is holding my dissuasion in her left hand, a small consideration, which I’d been carrying in the cubbyhole for this very purpose. If not for the way she presents the envelope to the camera, suggesting that it’s more important than this, you might think it is a letter she has just retrieved from the box in the wall beside her. In her housecoat and slippers, she looks like an office cleaner accepting a long-service award or a lucky shopper who has just won a voucher in a raffle at the supermarket.
Mrs Magwaza gave me faith in the human subject. I admired the way she stood between me and her privacy like an amiable security guard. I was moved.
‘Weren’t you curious to go inside,’ Janie asked, ‘to see how she lives?’
‘Not at all.’
‘I really want to see behind the wall.’
‘I don’t. Just thinking about the interior makes me squirm.’
I showed her the pictures that had followed: Mr Passmore of Dowerglen at his curly wrought-iron gate. On the wall of prefab cement panels is one of those increasingly rare signs that says ‘Beware of the Dog! Pasop vir die Hond!’ The letterbox is an alpine chalet with a slate roof. Then old Mrs Spoerk with her nursery rhyme box in the shape of a boot, a fibreglass novelty from the ’60s that Dr Pinheiro would have given his eye teeth for.
These were the photos Claudia Fischhoff had come to see a few months ago. Out of the blue, she had called to say she was curating a show for the Pollak and thought my project might fit the bill. ‘Project’ was too grand a term, but I was flattered. Presumably Claudia’s interest had fuelled Janie’s. But what had prompted Claudia’s? I had no idea. One hand was washing the other, scratching the reciprocal itch, doing what hands apparently do in the wonderful world of appearances.
I had taken half a dozen portraits of people at their gates before I noticed that every one of them included a letterbox. I pointed it out to Janie as we leafed through the prints.
‘I’ve got it into my head that the people look like their letterboxes. What do you think? It’s like people and their dogs. Have you ever been to a dog show? The resemblances are uncanny. The chap with the St Bernard always has a mop of curls and a shaggy beard. The elegant anorexics have borzois. Retired ballerinas, I’m sure. There are unwritten rules at play. Take a look at Roelof here with his browbeaten letterbox. Have you ever seen such an unhappy-looking man? It’s like he’s been cemented into a wall himself.’
I pulled the Charade out of the garage (quite right, I bought it for the name) and we went down into Bez Valley. She didn’t drive at all, Janie said. When I asked why not, she said she was ahead of the game, preparing for the day we ran out of gas, collectively. I took this as a criticism. She was growing her own vegetables too and generating her own electricity.
On the drive, her phone sneezed twice to attract attention. The conversations were quick and cryptic. Hey. Cool. You wish. She sent two rapid-fire text messages. Between calls, she took photos with her left hand, reaching out of the window with a small silver camera as if she were tapping ash off a cigarette.