The Road of Excess

By Ingrid Winterbach

Die benederyk, the Afrikaans edition of this novel, was awarded the M-Net Prize in 2011. The novel has been translated into English by award-winning author and translator, Leon de Kock.

This is the story of two brothers – Aaron and Stefaans Adendorff – the one an artist, the other an ex-addict. When Aaron’s gallery owner, Knuvelder, lets him down, Bubbles Bothma, neighbour and friend extraordinaire, suggests various outrageous solutions. And, throughout, Stefaans reports on his time wandering in the dark world of substance abuse, and his quest to establish the descent of their elusive third grandfather... Apocalyptic and burlesque –
vintage Winterbach.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Human & Rousseau
• Release date: Apr 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9780798158831

Ingrid Winterbach

Ingrid Winterbach is ’n veelbekroonde skrywer. Sy het al meermale die Hertzogprys, die M-Net-prys en die UJ-prys ontvang. Winterbach se romans het al in Nederland, Frankryk en Amerika verskyn. Sy woon op Stellenbosch en is ook ’n beeldende kunstenaar.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Early one morning, Aaron Adendorff dreams about his older brother. That same evening he receives three SMSs from the selfsame brother.

Everything OK there?

Never hear from you.

Brother

And:

My one grandfather was a carpenter

the other a gardener and irrigator

and the third a self-made man.

Where does that leave me?

Bru Stefaans

And:

I’m taking on 17 different personas now

like old Pessoa.

Stefaans Mhlope

*

Right now, Aaron’s a bachelor. Like his mother, he has three kidneys. A year or two ago, a tumour was found on one of them. It has since been removed. Aaron had chemotherapy, as well as radiation. For months he couldn’t work. He remains aware of a certain vulnerability around the kidney. The area’s still sensitive.

For months on end, he was hobbled by his illness. Then, one morning, he got up after a night when he really let go (cursing the neighbours’ dogs in the early hours, pelting them with stones), and realised he could no longer postpone the matter, even if this might result in his physical downfall. He had to start working again. After this, something new began to happen in his art. Less detail, less tonal modelling, the configuration rawer, crasser than before, with more daring in his approach. His colours remained non-naturalistic. Rich pigments, almost tangible. Simplified forms anchored on the canvas by the tangibility of the paint. So fresh and new that at times it felt like devil’s work. He’d achieved this with difficulty. In fact, it had taken him a lifetime to reach this point. After all the months of sickness, privation, and low spirits. Even so, Eddie Knuvelder appeared unenthusiastic about this new work when he visited Aaron’s studio.

At eleven o’clock, the doorbell rings. Gloria Sekete, Aaron’s domestic worker, knows it’s one of her tasks to make sure no one disturbs him while he’s working. Usually, she keeps all intruders away from the door. But this morning she calls him out of his studio, announcing that someone wants to speak to him. It’s urgent.

Unwillingly, he goes downstairs.

A woman stands in his open doorway. She offers her hand in greeting. (Somewhere behind him, Mrs Sekete is moving about, quietly. She’s failed him this morning.)

Bubbles, the woman says, Miss Bubbles Bothma. She points, over her shoulder, to a figure at the top of the stairs leading to the street. And Miss Violet Visser. Your new neighbours. We came to introduce ourselves.

Bubbles? He thinks. As in Bubbles Schroeder, murdered, strangled, and now risen from the dead?

He shakes her hand. She’s on the short side, stockily built. Broad face, wide cheekbones, coarse features, pale eyes. The one eye is slightly smaller than the other. Not exactly an attractive woman. About his age – mid-fifties, maybe a bit older. He gets the feeling both of them are carefully sizing each other up. This woman looks just a little too hungry for a fight, too eager for action. A strange light in her eyes; something fanatical. First impressions are often the truest, people say. Be careful, he thinks. This one looks like a tricky customer. Watch out. Too much energy. She’s decked out in a Donald Duck sweatshirt, back-to-front cap, brightly-striped exercise pants, plus silver running shoes.

All he can see of Violet is a bush of crow-black hair. A hazy figure at the top of the stairs.

So, then, all’s well that ends well, the woman says, saluting. Turns on her heels.

Violet waits at the top of the stairs. The lapdog in her arms is emitting excited little barks. Does he have an appetite for any of this? No. Under no circumstances. New neighbours? Not quite. The owners of the house next door are a yuppie couple. Bubbles and Violet must be renting their garden cottage. Looks like it might be a case of reduced circumstances. (The same garden cottage was vacated just a short while ago by the owners of the dog he’d pelted with stones in the middle of the night, at the end of his tether after a long convalescence.) For a long time now he’s had no contact with his neighbours, on both sides, and he prefers it that way. This unexpected attempt to create neighbourly contact doesn’t quite meet with his approval.

On his way upstairs, back to the studio, he tells Mrs Sekete, talking over his shoulder, that he doesn’t want to be disturbed while he’s working, This is something she should know by now, he adds.

But Mrs Sekete just laughs and continues on her merry way.

For him, Mrs Sekete is in many ways a source of learning. She informs him about the weather and the latest goings-on in politics. Why don’t you watch TV, she asks him. Because I have you to keep me informed, he says. This makes her laugh exuberantly.

Three mornings a week she travels by bus and by taxi, landing punctually, at 8 am, on his doorstep. She unlocks the kitchen door, loudly announces her presence, puts on her floral domestic overcoat and then carries a garden chair into the kitchen, where she drinks her tea and eats her bread. She reads everything she can lay her hands on in the kitchen while she eats – notices, pamphlets, art exhibition invites, newspapers – and delivers commentary on all of it.

Mrs Sekete doesn’t have high standards of hygiene; she understands little or nothing about germs and their habits. In addition, she displays a marked lack of finesse when eating, spitting out apple-seeds over her shoulder and slurping her tea. She sits on the chair with her legs splayed, her black nylon lace petticoat showing. He keeps his gaze averted. He tries to avoid the kitchen while she’s eating her breakfast there.

She has small hands and feet, reminiscent of Raphael’s female figures – like the nymph Galatea, for example. The slim shape of her limbs is in marked contrast to her solid body, her big breasts and her sizeable trunk. She carries most of her weight on her breasts and around her waist. Her hips are quite small, her buttocks not that big. Slim legs with firm calves. Long, narrow fingers, with pointed tips. Her face has few distinctive features, so that it is difficult, in her absence, to recall it. A mostly rounded face, flattish nose, a large, full mouth, and small eyes behind the lenses of glasses. She is a firm believer, she attends church enthusiastically, and she’s a fine, canny observer.

You should’ve gone into politics, he says to her.

They would’ve killed me, she says, because I speak the truth. Lies, it’s all lies these people speak. Lies and cheating, she says, spitting something out of the corner of her mouth. All of it to make them rich, and we, the poor – we stay poor. Who looks after our interests? Them? Politicians? Not a damn. They’re too busy feathering their own nests.

Her father was a mineworker in Welkom with no education at all. Her mother got as far as grade eight, which, for a black woman of her generation, was exceptional. Mrs Sekete is one of six children. A middle child. Most of her brothers and sisters are still alive. Her Sesotho name is Hahatsele – the one who does not get cold. After falling pregnant, she left school at fifteen. Apart from this one child of her own, she also has two adopted children. When she was twenty-eight years old, her husband was murdered. Over the past ten years she’s kept a boyfriend, a married man, just for the sake of company, she says. She owns a house in Matatiele, in the old Transkei part of what is now the Eastern Cape. Every December she takes her holiday there so she can work on the house.

When she unlocks the back door in the morning and enters the house, she brings the outside world in with her. She’s never sulky or in a bad mood, and she’s always talkative, except when she has toothache or tonsillitis. As she works, she sings. She’s like a ship in full sail. Unbending in her faith, mistrustful and outspokenly critical of all politicians. They’re all thugs, she says. The lot of them out to make themselves rich, secure their own safety.

If she’s not singing as she works, she talks to herself. An incessant commentary, of which he understands not a word because it’s all in Sesotho. (Like him, she hails from a different part of the country.)

She does his washing and irons his clothes (energetically), makes his bed, sweeps the house clean and vacuums everywhere. Sometimes she cooks him a meal. Always, she sings while she works. Je-su, Je-su, she sings.

She keeps unwelcome visitors from his door (although, this morning, she somehow let the woman from next door slip through). She has her own way of doing things, she’s hard-headed and wilful. The studio is the one place he cleans up himself. No one is allowed in there.

At 1.30 pm each day she puts away the iron, showers, eats her lunch, and travels first by taxi and then by bus back to her house, which is situated in one of the Indian areas. She prefers living there, she says, because black people in the townships cause too much trouble.

Although they’re about the same age, he and Mrs Sekete, she refuses point blank to call him by name.

Sometimes he wishes he could dismiss her. Out! he wants to say. Be gone! I no longer need your services. I can no longer bear your energetic presence in my house! I cannot endure your vigour, your steadfastness. You are my right hand, but also my tormentor. Just by crossing my threshold every morning, you do me harm.

But it’s too late now. He cannot dismiss her. Wasn’t it she who wailed the loudest when Naomi died? Isn’t it true their souls became intertwined, then, in the shared act of mourning?

Aaron’s waiting for a message from Knuvelder, the owner of a gallery in Cape Town, where he exhibits his work. It’s been a week since Knuvelder’s visit to his studio to see his new work, and still he hasn’t heard a word.

For a number of years now, abstraction has given Aaron a way of escaping the tyranny of the specific, while still offering him a means to express emotion. But he has experienced this renunciation of the recognisable image as a loss. Even in his most abstract – his most nonfigurative – work, there would be a wound, like internal bleeding, just below the skin, a seepage in the tissue of the paint. Large canvases on which the most prominent colours were pinks and reds. In this period, fifteen, twenty years ago, Eddie Knuvelder sometimes stood right behind him, and Aaron recognised something akin to lust in Knuvelder’s gaze as he looked at the paintings – the work was engaging him erotically. In those days, Eddie marketed Aaron’s work with enthusiasm and conviction; Aaron’s career flourished. Over the years, however, his palette gradually darkened. The texture of the paint began to thicken. Reds and pinks, favoured in the large nonfigurative canvases, still dominated, but they became coarser, more clotted, contrasted with greens and violets. He began to work with clusters: a greater concentration of forms in the middle of the canvas, suggesting the proscribed image – not through any recognisable representation, but via the intensity of heightened expression. Warm clusters of emotion, longing, memory. A melting together and a densification, foreshadowing the non-present image. Although Aaron restrained himself from painting anything recognisably figurative, this remained the basis, the frame of reference, the point of departure. His longing for the image lay at the root of its absence.

Below, Mrs Sekete moves around on her solid calves and her Florentine feet. After Naomi’s death, he often used to get impatient with her; brusque and unreasonable. But she never said a word, just stopped singing as she ironed.

At night Aaron and Naomi would sleep in each other’s arms. She was a beautiful woman and he was a handsome man. Still, he could not come to rest because the banned image kept pulsing behind his eyelids. It awaited him in the mornings like a thief hiding in his studio. His palette became starker, stripped even more bare. Bent black shapes began to dominate his canvases. Eventually he gave up colour as well, working only with chiaroscuro. (A lot later, his brother Stefaans talked about radical disinvestiture.) From this matrix, this disrupted and unstable space, the image gradually began to assume form again.

A day or two after introducing herself, his new neighbour comes knocking at the door again, just as he’s making breakfast. Mrs Sekete hasn’t yet arrived to protect him from unwelcome visits.

She’s wearing a T-shirt with a giant tiger on it, spandex pants, and reflective sunglasses.

You’re not maybe going into town this morning, are you? she asks, lighting a cigarette. My car’s in for a service.

No.

He does not invite her inside.

Please don’t disturb me this early in the morning.

You’ve been awake for a while already, she says.

Are you spying on me?

She laughs, stubbing out the cigarette with her heel.

Spying, my arse, she says.

He says nothing.

I’ll tell you what, she says, you give us a lift into town today, and I’ll buy you a Lotto ticket.

I’ll tell you what, he says, we’ll go to a tattoo-parlour and afterwards play some bingo. Immediately he feels bad about this needlessly sharp reaction; whence the powerful urge to protect his space, at all costs, against this woman?

Unblinking, she stares back at him. Lights up another cigarette before turning on her heel, just as she had the last time.

Think about it, she says. Bye for now.

When she gets to the top step, she turns around and says: Have you renewed your gun licence yet?

*

For quite a while now, he’s been working on raw canvas. He no longer bothers to stretch it first. In this way, part of the canvas remains unpainted when he finally stretches out the finished work. He likes it this way. A reminder that paint is nothing more than wet pigment on canvas, and that painting is the art of illusion. He’d spent the whole night tossing and turning, awakening with difficulty from a swoon of green guilt. Remorse about everything done as well as undone. Green as sludge. Mrs Sekete has yet to unlock the house and energetically announce herself, when the doorbell rings. He thinks it might perhaps be her; she may have left her key behind. When he opens the door, there stands Bubbles, Miss Bubbles Bothma, on his front step.

No, he thinks. No.

"You’re not maybe going into town this morning? she says. My car’s still being serviced."

Certainly, she’s not an attractive woman. Her features are too coarse, her face too asymmetrical, with those odd-sized eyes of hers, and there’s a puffiness around her cheekbones this morning that he hadn’t noticed before. It doesn’t help that her hair’s been coloured, unwisely, and has a jagged cut.

I work in the mornings, I work in the afternoons, and I work at night, he says. Please do not interrupt me.

She holds up her hands defensively. Don’t stress, she says. I come in peace.

Whatever it is you do, and however you come, do not bother me again.

Sorry, she says. She’s still holding her hands up, her face turned away in a gesture of subjection.

I’ve been sleeping badly lately, he says, yielding unexpectedly.

She listens with her head averted, maintaining the theatrical pose.

And I take a while to get going in the mornings, he adds, much to his own surprise. Is he really confessing to this complete stranger of a woman?

I hear you, she says. Let me know if your plans change. I’m still willing to sponsor you a Lotto ticket.

At the top of the stairs she turns around and calls out: A luta continua! The road ahead beckons!

This woman’s not going to leave me in peace, he thinks. He can feel it in his kidneys: the healthy kidney, the targeted kidney, and the small, shrivelled kidney; the little addendum.

*

During his studio visit nine days ago, Eddie Knuvelder had moved woodenly through Aaron Adendorff’s studio. Knuvelder is a big man with a heavy, dark head. He has a lush crop of hair, and his skin has the ruddiness associated with snowburn. The even distribution of fat, the hairless body, the slight oiliness of his skin are things that Aaron associates with a northern origin, with ancestors who come from the arctic tundra – hunters clothed in pelts pursuing seals and living on a diet of fish. People who crawl on their knees into dwellings made of whale-rib, and lined with bearskin. Possibly nomads. Eddie’s ancestors could also have been nomads, Aaron imagines – horsemen who traversed the steppes and domesticated wild horses; barbarian warlords hungry for a fight, but with an eye for aesthetic artefacts. Eddie has a heavy, Hun-like head and a cynical, reserved gaze; the line of his upper lip indicates something tyrannical in his personality, while the full, broad lower lip suggests a more hedonistic inclination. His lips are a more intense red than those of the average person – clearly a good blood supply to the mouth. He’s not a man who wears his heart on his sleeve, although Aaron has always felt, with Knuvelder, that he knows where he stands.

In spite of the large barbarian head, and the suggestion of a nomadic (unchristianised) ancestral lineage, Eddie is always manicured, looking as if he gets the full treatment from a professional masseur every morning, as if aromatic oils are rubbed into his skin on a daily basis, his hair cut and conditioned regularly. His preference is for dark clothing – indigo blues and heavy reds – for raw silk and linen, and rich textures; much like a contemporary mercantile prince. A connoisseur right to his nerve ends, with a fine, discerning eye; and a cunning businessman into the bargain, sharp as flint. In the past few years, his gallery has become one of the most prestigious and influential in the country. To be included in Eddie Knuvelder’s stable is to carry the mark of distinction, of success, as a matter of course.

For the past twenty years, Knuvelder has been Aaron’s gallerist. Knuvelder has marketed his work both locally and internationally. During this time, Aaron has held solo exhibitions every two or three years. As a result of his illness, however, he’s been unable to paint for several months, and didn’t exhibit anything in the previous year. It’s been a long time since he’s delivered new work to the gallery. As a result, his visibility as an artist has suffered a severe blow. Then Eddie arrived to look at the work Aaron had produced since getting back into the swing of things over the past few months. Also with a view to taking five artists along to an important exhibition in Berlin. Aaron wants to be one of the five. Knuvelder’s Berlin exhibition would once again bring him to the attention of critics, buyers and gallery-owners.

But Knuvelder had remained stiff and uncommunicative as he moved through Aaron’s studio. He said nothing, and didn’t linger very long before any individual work. Aaron got the impression Knuvelder didn’t want to open himself up to the work. He wanted to see something different from what he was looking at. Clearly, he had another agenda. He didn’t want to allow the work to speak to him. In the few comments he did make, he referred to the work of other artists, younger artists. Why shoot yourself in the foot, was the only question he put to Aaron.

If you’d only look, Aaron wanted to say to Knuvelder, if you’d only look, you’d see just how radical, how impossibly innovative the work really is.

He’d formed the impression Knuvelder wanted to put the visit behind him as quickly as possible. Afterwards, during their lunch at a trendy restaurant, Knuvelder talked about everything and nothing at the same time. He explained how he wanted to open sister galleries in Berlin and New York. All the while sucking the marrow from the bones in the osso bucco. Meat-eater. Dipping the fleshy joints of his hairless hands into the small bowl of water. A papal gesture. Delicately wiping his full-blooded mouth with the serviette. On his right pinky, a ring carrying the family crest; he comes from an aristocratic family. Old money, no doubt. Sophisticated, cultured, subtle. He talked about almost everything except the most urgent issue: what he thought of Aaron’s new work. When Aaron referred to his next solo exhibition, Knuvelder waved the topic away with a gesture of his hand, saying the gallery dealt with all the practical arrangements, he didn’t concern himself with that side of things; Aaron should get in touch with one of his personal assistants – Wanda or Zelda.

Just that one remark: Why shoot yourself in the foot?

Throughout, Knuvelder avoided eye-contact. He was less hearty than usual. (Or was Aaron imagining this?) As he took his leave, he made vague promises. He would let Aaron know the moment he’d settled on his choices for the Berlin exhibition. Within the next few days. But Aaron is still waiting to hear from him.

He should have pinned Knuvelder against the wall. Threatened him with a fucking Stanley-knife, shoved a broken bottle against his neck. Drop me, you bastard, and you’ll see your arse. He should have caressed Knuvelder’s fucking throat with a blunt blade. Whispered into his ear: betray me, let me down, and I’ll make your life a misery, you cunt.

*

And so Aaron waits to hear from Knuvelder. He works from nine to five now. A glorified office-worker. Now that his illness has forced him to leave behind all excesses, all intemperance and transgression – drinking, smoking, irregular hours – what’s left for him to do? Reflection, repentance, and regular hours.

Before, Aaron’s eye was described as penetrating, unflinching. So many things in this harsh, forbidding world. So much to look at. This morning his thoughts are preoccupied with smoke and flames. Signorelli’s depiction of hell, Aragon’s monstrous bloody ferns in a brilliant blue space; a stylised comic-book head rolling down a slope, like a stone.

This is how Mrs Sekete finds him in his studio. She stands in the doorway with a tea tray in her hands. He’d had a bad night. His head feels heavy, immovable, like the comical head on the slope. She understands everything, sees right through his frail defences.

How are you? he asks unwillingly.

The shared burden of existence.

Earlier this week she’d had infected tonsils; tied a thick black scarf around her neck.

Better, better, better! she says.

Just as well, he thinks.

As far as his kidney’s concerned: his mother also had three kidneys. She was a beautiful woman. Dark hair, high cheekbones, sensual mouth. He’s a baby, and she’s holding him, wearing a dress gathered at the hips, he can still remember its texture. Her hips are youthfully rounded, her body still soft from pregnancy and childbirth. His father takes the picture. Stefaans, his older brother, stands a small distance away, holding out something for the camera.

In earlier times, Aaron used to go out into the streets at night. In search of discussion, revelation.

*

A few days later, as he’s reversing his car out of the garage, in the late afternoon, Bubbles Bothma, his new neighbour, comes around the corner. He’s on his way to the post office. Can she please go with him, she needs to get a few things at the Spar. And Lotto tickets. Her car’s still not back from the garage.

It must be a helluva thorough service, he says.

Oh, it is, she says. Complete makeover.

(That he lets her lie to his face like this!)

Get in, he says.

She breathes with difficulty – she’s slightly asthmatic. Lights up a cigarette, but he forbids her from smoking in the car.

You have a lot of free time. Do you work? he asks her. (He has often wondered why she’s home so much.)

Yes, she says, I work. Keep the pot boiling.

What do you do?

Oh, she says, this, that and the other. A little bit of this and a little bit of that. She looks out the window.

How do you get to work now that your car’s being serviced?

Catch a bus, get a lift. With a colleague, she adds.

He lets it go. The less he knows, the better. He doesn’t want to get too mixed up with this woman. Just now it’ll be him who has to give her a lift to work every day.

I do a bit of work for the trade unions, she says suddenly. For the Clothing Workers’ Union.

Office work? he asks.

Yes, she says. I organise like a bomb. Help with the books. Send out fliers. Arrange fundraisings, public appearances, and so on.

She seeks and finds a peppermint in her bag.

Do you believe in miracles? she asks.

No, he says.

What a pity, she says.

They drive the rest of the way in silence.

After she’s done her shopping at the Spar, and he’s been to the post office to fetch a package from his elder daughter, she asks him if she can pay a quick visit to the butchery next door to the Red Dolphin in Queen Mary. She wants to get some bones for tonight’s soup, and quickly give someone a message at the Red Dolphin.

He waits outside, in the car. She emerges from the butchery with her packet of soup bones, then goes into the Red Dolphin. It’s a bar. He’s never been in there. A bead-curtain hangs in front of the window. Inside the window, an advert: Barmaid wanted. Would this woman be going in there now to apply for the job? He doesn’t think she stands a very good chance.

After a while she comes rushing out the door, almost running. Drive! she says, getting into the car in a huge hurry.

He reverses. Drive! she says. They didn’t see me getting into the car.

As he turns right into Queen Mary (now Siphiwe Zuma), she looks over her shoulder and pulls out a pistol.

What the hell do you think you’re doing? he calls out.

She ignores him. Let them come, she says, I’m ready for them. She sits, bent forward, elbows on her knees, pistol in hand, the barrel upside down.

Put your seatbelt on, he says.

Whatever, she says.

She keeps glancing over her right shoulder.

Put that damn thing away, he says.

Wait a bit, she says, sinking deeper into