A Fork in the Road Read online

  We were seldom the only guests, as Grandpère, as he insisted on being called, seemed to pick up young strangers much as a dog collects fleas. Some of them were boursiers like us, others were simply rounded up in the streets and squares of the city, in churches or churchyards, at the markets, in the Louvre or other museums, at concerts or various theatres. However haphazard his collection of guests might appear – usually four or at most six of us at a time – there was a shrewd method in the old man’s madness. When Estelle and I were there, we would also find at least one black African as a fellow guest; an American would be counterbalanced with a Russian or a Korean; a Frenchman with an Algerian or a German; an Israeli with an Arab. In this way a microcosmic United Nations would be set up.

  Sometimes our discussions would be relaxed and amusing, as when the sardonic René was talking about his travels in the Midi or his military service in Algeria. Sometimes, as when the musical twins from Madagascar held the floor, it would be more light-hearted. But often it would become excited and passionate, when Mario from Argentina turned on the South Africans. Otherwise Tai-Kun Lee, the thin, dark-eyed young man from Korea, might cast a satirical eye on world events, a perennial smile on his lips as if he were inwardly chuckling about jokes no one else had understood. Literally anybody might turn up, from a Japanese to a Spaniard, from an Austrian to an Australian, from a Chilean to an Icelander. And Grandpère Maurice knew enough about all our countries to contribute small but profound or humorous comments. He always wanted to find out more, encouraging us to bring along books and photographs which would add to our mutual understanding. This was his reply to the tensions and misunderstandings of the world; and bringing together young men (Estelle was, as far as I could establish, the only woman ever invited) from so many different backgrounds and races and cultures, invariably inspired us to return home, usually very late at night, with more understanding and more hope.

  Each guest would be given his own large white serviette, tied up in a tidy roll at the end of the meal with his name tag on it. Whenever one returned for a visit, the tagged serviette would be taken from hundreds of others kept filed away in an enormous old armoire in the small salon, to welcome one by name. On one occasion, when I returned to Paris after an absence of several years, Grandpère Maurice immediately went to the armoire to retrieve my own serviette, which had patiently awaited my return.

  His apartment was cramped, stacked to capacity with furniture and ornaments and books and pictures. In the little salon one had to follow a veritable obstacle course past chairs from the reign of the Roi Soleil to the pretentiousness of Napoleon III, small tables laden with old leather-bound books, coins, delicate laces. Beside the door to the passage stood a display cabinet with a satin dress that had once belonged to a lady-in-waiting of Marie Antoinette. Above the cabinet was a portrait of the lady: a rosy, round-faced, vaguely attractive but rather insipid face surrounded by an ostentatious coiffure. On the opposite wall was a portrait of her husband, an architect who had allegedly survived the Revolution, gazing smugly over the lacework of his collar, his wig tied with a satin bow.

  ‘Sometimes I take my chess set from the drawer,’ Grandpère Maurice told us with a wink. ‘Then I set out the old ivory pieces, put off the light and go to bed. But a couple of times I had to get up unexpectedly in the night – and then I’d find the portrait frames empty, and the architect and his wife would be sitting here at the table, playing chess.’

  The table itself appeared undisturbed after two centuries, the architect’s instruments neatly arranged on one side, beside a massive old French grammar.

  The walls were covered from floor to ceiling with paintings and plates and precious woodcuts, photographs and the 1,001 pieces of bric-a-brac sent to the old man over many years by his young friends from all over the world.

  Just before eight o’ clock our host used to go to the kitchen, where he had been working on our dinner since early afternoon. He never had any help, and consistently refused all our offers. About fifteen or twenty minutes later he would reappear on the threshold, delicate touches of light, like brushstrokes, in his long Father Christmas beard, and a broad white apron over the brown dressing gown he always wore.

  ‘Dinner’s ready!’

  In the dining room the dark round table would be waiting, the heavy plates and cutlery and candles perfectly set out as in a top-class restaurant, everything gleaming and meticulously polished. The meal was never extravagant but always unforgettable, and it would never last for less than two hours. We approached it as a ritual, an act of contemplation and meditation. It became a unique experience simply to gaze at a serving spoon dipped in sauce and changing with every flickering of the light. Or to study each new mouthful of food, concentrating on its texture, its flavour, its taste as it became part of one’s body. In the smallest movement or gesture one’s entire personality was invested.

  There was a good white wine with the entrée (a Pouilly-Fuissé, or a white Bordeaux), an even better red (a Brouilly, perhaps, or a Nuits-Saint-Georges) with the meat, usually a prime cut of beef or veal, prepared in its own jus, with a minimum of additives, more delicately savoury than anything, I can honestly say, I have ever tasted in another home. This would be followed by a vegetable, and a salad, a dessert served with a new bottle of white wine – usually a little-known label he had selected during a lifetime of dedicated tasting. The meal would be rounded off with cheese, accompanied by another glass of red, a small cup of very strong coffee, and cognac or liqueur, and fruit.

  The guests were always served first, even though Grandpère Maurice was so much older than everyone else. It was useless to protest. ‘I always serve myself last,’ he would insist, ‘even when I’m alone.’

  Then came the third act of the evening. In the first, Grandpère Maurice allowed us to talk, and argue, and discuss. The second was devoted to the meditation of the meal. Now, in the third, it was his turn. There was never a fixed pattern. Some evenings he would fetch the small volume of poetry he had published forty years earlier, to read in his rich, sonorous voice, sometimes with trembling hands and tears in his eyes, his white beard caught in the candlelight with every movement of his head. On other evenings he might bring out a volume of Baudelaire, or Valéry, or even Ronsard, or Villon. Or he might open a fat scrapbook of letters and press cuttings from his long past: from the First World War, when he’d helped to nurse the wounded; or the many years when he’d worked as a banker; from his travels in Europe, mostly to Spain; or the many people, famous or obscure, he’d met during his life. On other occasions he would show us photographs for a guidebook he was compiling on the small church at Marly, where Louis XIV had often attended the service, or about the royal park where after years of battling with bureaucrats he had succeeded in having the old fountain restored. Or he would simply regale us with anecdotes about his interminable skirmishes with officials and authorities of all kinds. If at a given hour the Métro that was supposed to arrive at his station did not arrive, he might start a correspondence that could last for months, until he managed to get hold of the minister in charge to lodge his complaint; should an announcer on the radio get a single word wrong in a quote from the classics, a new succession of letters would be unleashed – each one of them a peerless example of French wit and sarcasm and poetic imagination.

  Round about midnight we would become aware of the time. He possessed an amazing number of clocks, all over the apartment, each with its own rhythm, each set to a different time. This was done partly because Grandpère enjoyed savouring the separate voice of each, but also because it afforded him a peculiar Gallic pleasure to exercise his brain should he happen to lie awake at night, and draw his own conclusions. Suppose number one struck seven, followed by number two striking four, he could start calculating: number one was three hours and twenty minutes fast, number two x hours slow; and by the time number three struck eleven, he could wind up the sum, check it against number four, and then wait to make sure all the others were ‘on time’. />
  When it was time to leave, each guest would be ritually kissed on both cheeks, Grandpère’s white beard tickling one’s neck. And then we would disperse through the dark streets, Israelis and Arabs, Irish and English, white South Africans and black Nigerians, Turks and Greeks; all of us restored to our common humanity in a broken world.

  My immersion in Europe meant that I had, at least temporarily, turned my back on Africa. At that moment I did not experience it as a loss. On the contrary, it was an escape from claustrophobia. And there was a whole new world to discover, which, if I had previously known it at all, had existed only in books: a European world of painting and music and theatre, a world of life in a different key.

  Painting insinuated itself into our lives within the first few weeks of our stay in Paris, when we were still living in the PEN residence. There was a portrait of a very young girl in a gallery just around the corner; and in the grey, oppressive early winter days she brought a sudden, shocking ray of light which brought both of us to a standstill the very first moment we saw her. She was naked, her face turned away to stare into a measureless distance of impressionistic blue and white, her long hair loosely tied up with a bright blue ribbon behind her head and half-covering one small breast; and she was clutching – a trifle too anxiously perhaps – a skimpy white cloth to the gentle curve of her lower belly. In retrospect I must confess that there was a hint of the chocolate box about the painting; but at the time the girl seemed like the perfection of pulchritude. I was reading Lolita at the time, and though Nabokov’s young temptress had a streetwise, provocative hardness about her, none of the sweet aloofness of this luminous image painted by an unknown Polish artist called Talwinski, she did confirm a stereotype lurking in the deeper recesses of my mind. Innocence personified, but an innocence at its most dangerous, on the verge of the Fall. A hint, in the angle of her head, of the forever untouchable, the inviolable, the eternally just-out-of-reach. Belied, perhaps, by the anxiety with which she clutched her little towel? But in a way that only confirmed her air of self-awareness, self-assuredness. A beyondness.

  She was ruinously expensive. At 120, 000 old francs, she was the equivalent of three full months’ stay in Paris. Impossible even to contemplate. Yet we dared to ask the small round man who ran the gallery to reserve her for us, for a week. That, we assured each other, would be enough. She would be placed in the front window, where we could come to visit and to gaze on her. For a week she was ours. And the small white sign, Reservé, in the upper right-hand corner confirmed a secret only we shared.

  A week of feverish discussion and calculation. We even checked the Bible for the parable of the merchant who had sold all his possessions to acquire one single pearl of great beauty, and the one about the labourer who got rid of everything he had in the world to buy a field in which he had found a treasure.

  But no go. Absolutely and totally no chance in hell. Setting this Lolita against the journeys we could make to the south – to Spain, to Italy – or the concerts we could go to, or simply the food we could buy for that money, just confirmed how outrageous, how utterly disastrous, how impossible such a step would be.

  And so we bought her.

  * * *

  Not all our encounters with art in Paris were so expensive. Often we would simply wander down the rue Bonaparte, or the rue de Seine, or along the small steep streets of Montmartre, and meticulously explore every little gallery along the way to find out what was happening. Much of it was depressing, repetitive, derivative. I even enrolled for life drawing at the Grande Chaumière, but when it came to the push I was just too timid to risk it. With painting, as with music years earlier, I knew when I was out of my depth.

  But then there were the great museums: the Jeu de Paume, sometimes the Orangerie, quite often the Musée d’Art Moderne. And many Sundays, when entrance was free, the Louvre. Which in the course of our two years we methodically explored with total dedication, section by section, hall by hall, gallery by gallery. Sometimes we would spend the whole Sunday just absorbing two or three paintings, returning for more the following week. This was a luxury, an investment for the future, a journey of never-ending delight and discovery.

  Yet the greatest single aesthetic discovery of those two years came, not in Paris, but in London, in the Tate, in August 1960. It was one of the most intense and profound emotional experiences of my life. I had seen some Picassos in Paris during the months before this, but even so I was unprepared for what I can now call a spiritual tsunami. Never before this day had I fully realised that the impact of Picasso was comparable to that of Michelangelo, or Rembrandt, or Beethoven.

  Words like ‘beautiful’ simply do not express it any more. What I felt was awe. And if this was beauty, then beauty terrifying in its magnificence. The gradual deepening and widening during his early years: nothing tentative about it – even in the work from his teens there is a sureness, a self-assurance, a conviction in his exuberant but at the same time dedicated exploration of styles and influences. Then the blue works, the intimations of a world of grief and melancholy washing like rain across the canvases – but already bearing a premonition of the power looming ahead. The gradual assertion of the forces of life in the deceptive ease of la vie en rose, the powerful undulating yellows and browns, the awareness of the plastic possibilities of the nude. This is where it really takes hold of him: he’s got to remodel the body, feel it from the inside, get to know it, probe it, break it open in order to explore every possibility of scale and volume.

  Cubism, burgeoning until the passionate engagement with the figure begins to spill over into the background.

  Followed by one of the most moving periods: the return, the violent replunging into a redefined sense of the real: the newspaper fragments, the hallucinatory words flung at the spectator – the name of a lover, a playful song, a village. In such a way that within the construction of the whole those single, concrete moments hit you like a scream in the ears. All of this as part of the whirling, spiralling search for essences, in the all-encompassing creation of his own, new reality.

  And then the reconstruction, the interrogation of what lies beyond facades and immediacies, in the slow movement towards the terror and the infernal nightmares and exultations of Africa, and of the Spanish Civil War. The omnipresence of the shout, the scream in colour, and beyond colour.

  Finally, if anything in Picasso can ever be final, the latest series, the childlike rediscovery of munificent life: white pigeons, blue skies.

  It is a descent into hell, an ascent into heaven – not as an inevitable progression, as in Dante, but with a shattering simultaneity.

  A small moment during the hours of confrontation with this force of nature: dazed from the bombardment of the senses, exhausted, overwhelmed, I slump down on a bench in the middle of a long gallery, in need of rest, of physical and mental equilibrium. But the hard bench has no back. It is impossible to relax. Suddenly there is a back reclining against mine. All I can make out is that it is a young woman. I have no idea of what she looks like, and will never know. But for a few minutes, in the whole chaotic, tumbling world, flooded with weariness and emotion: this fleeting human touch. Leaning back, shoulders against shoulders, a brief moment of sharing. And then I can return to the crowd.

  In a brilliant, light-hearted session of questions and answers after a lecture, Doris Lessing once spoke about the kind of book that leaves an indelible impression on the mind, changing utterly and irrevocably the course of one’s life – for at least two weeks. But that day in the Tate did not fade away with time. It remains, along with only a very small handful of memories, a moment of radical change.

  I could never write again in the way I’d done before. I could never be again as I’d been before.

  Since the first day in Paris, I had known that this period in my life would mark my writing. More than ‘mark’: it would definitively decide whether I was really going to be a writer as I’d so foolhardily resolved when I was nine, or not at all. And within two mont
hs I’d started writing in a different key altogether. It turned out to be a play, based on Julius Caesar, with whom I had been preoccupied for months. A verse play, no less. It took me a week, writing day and night. And I was convinced that, if not the world, then at least Afrikaans literature, would never be the same again. Today I cannot help but cringe. It really was bad. Pretentious, derivative, strained. But it was, for me, a new beginning. Still, verse has never been my medium. The problem was that I had really no idea of what to do with prose. Until that day in the Tate.

  When I returned to Paris I had no clearly formulated aim as yet, but I was conscious of a welter of possibilities in my mind unleashed by Picasso. Suppose, like him, I could try to break language open, to see what makes it tick. To put it together in new and unexpected ways. To say new and unexpected things. The revelation came at a very specific phase of my experience in Paris: I found myself in a slough of despond with no horizon visible. I was going through a period of misery about my studies: I went through the motions, but without really believing in the enterprise or being able to work up any enthusiasm about it. Attempts to change direction – originally in Netherlandic studies, later in English, focusing on George Eliot and her ‘literary fortune’ in France – made no real difference to the utter lack of interest in what I was doing. Estelle, who had taken a secretarial job at our embassy in the avenue Hoche to keep us going financially, had landed in her own slough. And it was spilling over into my writing. I was beginning to have serious doubts about the experiment with Caesar. All I knew was that I wanted to do something new. But I could think of nothing at all to say that had not already been said, and incomparably better, by others, in many languages. Yet how could I give up writing? No matter how futile it might be, it was all I had. But it was pointless! Even in despair there was nothing new. Language itself appeared to be a useless, second-hand garment already worn by too many others. The mere possibility of originality seemed a dead end.