Photograph courtesy York Museum Trust
Ashwin Desai
- Father’s Day and the Beautiful Torment of Books
O
n a friend’s bookshelf was a series of books by French authors. Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Georges Simenon (notice I do not mention Proust whom like most of my Park Runs have ended half-way with a pee under the tree). Simenon. The first one was a slim novella, ‘The Sailors Rendezvous’. I was hooked. Like an addict locked down in an illegal tobacco warehouse [in South Africa alcohol is allowed but not cigarettes], I smoked through four, five of them. Striptease tells a story of a dancer who pursues a painstakingly planned vindictiveness that can only result in a creative self-destruction. It is in willing her to succeed that you see the horrible truths of your own life.
But it was The Fate of the Malous that seared the throat already made raw by the Dubai cigarettes delivered by the local funeral parlour; as he opened the coffin he offered a half-hearted rationale without a smile of irony; ‘boss what can I do business is…’.
The story revolves around a young man’s journey to understand his father Eugene Malou, who kills himself after falling into debt. It travels into Alain’s inner self with merciless precision. As I turned the pages it swept me into a rollercoaster of emotions, holding on for dear life, while all the while trying to let go .
My father was an ace table-tennis player. How many times did we stand on opposite sides? How many times would I take the lead, 10-6, 19-15 only to be beaten? Quick on his feet. If he had a weakness, it was his backhand. I would try to exploit this by a flat serve to the corner. But he would pivot on his heels and, quick as a cat outside a Chinese takeaway, take the shot with his forehand. A blistering drive and if I did get to it, I could only parry it back. And there he would be waiting, drawing his elbow half-cocked, and stab at the ball. It leapt back like a rocket and the point was done. He called that innovation Shaka, after the short stabbing spear used by the Zulu king’s impis. My father, I remind myself, was a history teacher.
Later, he would make his tea. Leaves brewed slowly on the stove. Milk boiled. Separately. His forehead would crease in mountains of ripples as he savoured his drink. And victory.
The first day I returned from travels, far, the game would be on. The victory already written, but still I gave it my all.
Then, I won two games in a row. A few months later, the same result. Once, rocking on his heels, he fell backwards. I laughed and mocked. Another time, the bat slipped and flew out of the garage entrance. I was beating him. Sending him to his backhand, dropping the ball short and then whipping it with top-spin into the opposite corner. By the end of the set, he was like a punch-drunk boxer, jerking his head, slipping and smashing the ball after it had long passed his bat. I was merciless. Thinking, striving to catch up on two decades of defeat.
It was the decline. Neither of us had an inkling. But Parkinson’s was eating his body. The ball would not stay in his palm as he served. The short elbow jab was reduced to an involuntary jerk. One day, as he lunged, he fell and cut his forehead. Blood flowed. It was the last match we ever played.
My father, who wielded a table-tennis bat like a musketeer a sword, could not even butter his own bread; had to make do with tea bags as he could not hold the strainer steady.
He landed in hospital. His medical aid collapsed as some of the trustees had gambled their savings and invested in a casino. The hospital demanded R80 000. Hounded out of an academic job, I did not even have R800. The ambulance cost R1000 to take him home. A distance of a few kilometres. Bundled him into a white sheet. Into the front seat. As I made my way down Sparks Road, a friend followed, thinking I was carrying a dead body. He had bed sores. Holes through his heels. He slept on the lounge couch. I on the floor. Nursing him. Covering the holes. Slowly. Opening new wounds. For myself. He had to sign on to a legal process to pay the medical bills monthly. A court judgement. This man who meticulously paid his accounts. Who refused to owe anyone a cent. Like Eugene Malou, reduced to a delinquent.
A few times, my mother insisted I put him in a nursing home. Alone. When I left, he would mumble ‘so quickly’. I promised to come back later in the day. Never did.
Turning to Camus gave no respite. In ‘The Fall’ he, Camus tells us that ‘even for a ten-minute adventure I’d disavowed father and mother.’
My father played Cordelia in high school. He put on a scarf, lipstick and mascara. Was it here that my penchant for cross-dressing was born? King Lear sought to turn love into an article of trade, to measure it, as Brian Rothman in the superb Signifying Nothing points out, and in the process destroyed it. Shakespeare, writing at a time when England was living through a brutal period of declining feudalism and a world where financial transactions, calculations and measures was being born.
It is this violation, this destruction that King Lear relentlessly and obsessively pursues. The play was written in a London of bubonic plague, cheap death…a London given over to the deal: the buy/sell transactions of a risingly brutal capitalism… It sets up, and ultimately recoils in horror from, what it conceives to be the terminal transaction: the buying and selling of natural love.
Today we live in a world of an arithmetic panopticon. How many have tested positive, how many have died, how many recovered, keep your distance. Counting is complicated and begs questions of comparison as countries label who dies of Covid-19 in multiple ways. But still the media persist, with headlines that tell us Brazil has just passed England in the number of Covid deaths, with Italy after leading for a few weeks, fading into fourth place. One could easily think one was watching results of World Cup soccer rankings until one reads that India outpaced Italy. The last time India qualified was in 1950 when all the other teams in the group pulled out.
Salvation too is a number. In places of worship, only 50 are allowed. Once we shook hands in peace. Now we use an elbow, or an ankle tap to get to the head of the queue to receive the Lord’s mercy.
I am 61. Permit number 97. I wear it round my neck. There are lots of people in the park. They avoid people like me carriers of the disease. In The Plague, Camus writes: ‘For the first time exiles from those they loved had no reluctance to talk freely about them, using the same words as everybody else, and regarding their deprivation from the same angle as that from which they viewed the latest statistics of the epidemic…there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship….’
I think about my father at the nursing home. Alone. Lear like. Where was his Cordelia? In the bastion of “civilisation” England the old were locked into care homes and died in their thousands. Lepers.
Love is about a future, Camus tells us, and those of us plagued by old age are already past. I am down to the last of the Simenon’s as day 50 of lockdown folds; Poisoned Relations. I want to tease it out, but it is like trying to linger over an ice-cream on a hot summer’s afternoon. It will be no longer. The book ends with these lines; ‘And the hatred grew all the more thicker, all the heavier, all the murkier, all the richer, now that it was so to speak, cramped for space.’
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The author Ashwin Desai in wonderland!
2. A Walking, Talking Wonderland
‘It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all, you know…’
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, And What Alice Found There
S
aturday 23rd May. The rules were pretty clear. You could exercise outside between 6 and 9am. A quick beans bunny breakfast. Stepped onto the pavement and got a push-start with a fart. The air was crisp enough to pierce my face mask and run the nose.
There is hostility on the streets. We have become ugly over the past 60 days. Separate development is back in vogue. Can eye-contact or an elbow wave spread the virus? I thought of Friedrich Nietzsche’s intimation that grimness threatens to consume the world: “A single joyless person is enough to create constant discouragement and cloudy skies for an entire household. . . Happiness is not nearly so contagious a disease.”
But I was determined to infect as many people as possible with my viral enthusiasm as I went round and round blocks of concrete. And then round again. I was in one of those trances that you enter when Zol Aunty passes a spliff filled with Swazi Gold.
A pigeon, mistaking my head for a port-a-loo, snatched me back. 8.50. I went hararies. Damn. Even at a jog, it would take me twenty minutes to get to 8th street.
I decided on that old Stalinist diktat; one step forward, two steps back. Through side-streets, double back across parks and slip between narrow alleyways was my game plan.
Remember how Alice as the white pawn advances step by step to the 8th square to become Queen. Oh, how I needed to be Queen. Would it help if I was dressed as one?
A whole new world was opening up to me. A pair of ducks waddled across the road. They stopped halfway and had a chat with a hadeda. An imperious heron was perched on a light pole plotting its next land grab. Two giraffe-like trees were kissing, only for them to be rudely parted by a gust of wind. Before they reached out again as old lovers always do, shards of dark green and yellow light stole through the interlude.
As I turned a corner to cross into the 4th square, the sun bent and threw a shadow. I slowed almost to a standstill and let it pass. On the ledge of a cottage, shocking pink bouganvilleas rustled. The colours were starting to fade. So was mine. How dare they say hair dye is not an essential item!
I said hi to a biscus. It stared back invitingly and I stroked it gently on its bum. It shyly unfurled. Inside, a bright red stamen came of age in a puff of pollen. A cell of aphids swirled in the bell of an orange lily. A rat scurried into the hedgerows.
A pied-wagtail bent low and lightly brushed the pigeon poo as it dribbled. To think I had walked these paths for twenty years and never seen all this before. It was a wonderland of intimacy and intricacy.
A pair of Crocs, size seven or eight ski-daggled downstream, only to get laced in a tangle of debris.
The sun had softened as I came down an alleyway. A strelitzia lit up the way in a razzmatazz of purple and orange. Bird of Paradise. Everywhere
‘The swift labouring insistence of insects…And the future waiting, latent in fragile cells: The last, terse verses of curled leaves hanging in the air-And the dry, tender arc of the fruitless branch’ (Ellen Hinsey).
I was shaken from my reverie by whirring, swirling blue lights. A big white fedora was bobbing up and down. Could it be Bheki Cele? ‘Shoot to kill’ crossed my mind.
I made like Jigga Joe to the right for two blocks and then pirouetted to the left. A (c)rook masquerading as a knight. As I came onto the main thoroughfare, a monkey was perched on a fence, away from the pack. Social distancing. He was strumming his midriff. Ol’ Blue Eyes was having a ball. Two. Yellow wildflowers gently poked their heads through the long grass. We are in stage 4, but stage 3 is approaching fast. Will they flower another day before their heads are cut-off by the buzzing of electric shears?
What mass murderers of beauty we are.
On the balcony of a crumbling art deco Castle Cornered, a parrot screeched ‘Petal, Petal’. I blushed. Pink. The parrot egged me on. Home. Poured myself a double sanitiser on the rocks. Like Alice I didn’t ‘mind being a Pawn…though of course I should like to be a Queen, best’. I might be an old fruit bat but for a day I would wear a crown.
As it is told in Genesis 3, the first object, the fig leaf, made of the first tool, the needle, was motivated by the desire to cover our nakedness and so mask our shame. But we are a people without shame as we impose curfews, prevent inter-provincial networks, pour disinfectant to cover the smell of arrogance.
Some Hawks might have turned into askaris.
Still. The hibiscuses are blooming, the crows are circling, the clouds are hanging low, the breeze has caught up with the wind. The (pineapple) revolution is brewing. Intoxicating everything it touches.
Flower Power.
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Note: Visual top of text is a photograph of a painting “Portrait of a Man Reading A Book” by Parmigianino (1503-1540). York Art Gallery.
Ashwin Desai is a writer and reader based in Durban South Africa.
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