Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [187]
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