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      The Road of

      Excess

      Ingrid Winterbach

      Translated by Leon de Kock

      Human & Rousseau

      For

      Sandra Kriel

      The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom

      — William Blake (Proverbs of Hell)

      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

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