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Forget-me-not Blues
MARITA VAN DER VYVER
Translated by Annelize Visser
SECRET STORIES
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
LETTER FROM PORTUGAL
It may be the most important letter she has ever received. It is possible that it could change everything in her life.
But what does ‘everything’ mean when you are almost seventy-five years old?
She gets up from her bed with difficulty, because she has never been more aware of her age than right at this moment. Beside the window in her bedroom there is an old-fashioned oval-shaped full-length mirror with a wooden base she inherited from her mother long ago. The glass is a little tarnished with age. Or perhaps it is just that her eyes have grown dim. Every time Mammie made her new clothes, Colette stood in front of this mirror to inspect, admire or criticise the result. Mostly, though, to admire it.
She remembers a preschool child in a wig of sleek black hair with a tiny red bow on top, her mouth painted the same red as the bow, breathless with excitement about the Snow White outfit she would wear to her first fancy-dress party. She remembers a teenager with blonde curls and blushing cheeks in a dinner dress Mammie had cut out of luminous dark blue fabric, Dior’s New Look, too-tight-to-breathe in the waist with a long wide skirt, her first grown-up dress for her first evening party. And she remembers the red, white and blue going-away outfit that had made her feel like a French flag. No need to wave to her loved ones on the quay, she could just unfurl herself on the deck of the Union Castle liner.
But what she sees in the mirror now is an elderly woman with neat silver-grey hair, dressed in sober black linen trousers and a beige cardigan. Store-bought clothes. Expensive clothes from an exclusive shop. How disappointed her thrifty and industrious mother would have been again today.
What she sees above all, even without the reading glasses on the silver chain around her neck, is wrinkles. Deep grooves carved all over her face like tree bark punished by a vandal’s knife. Heavy bags under her eyes. Loose skin under her chin.
What has become of Colette Cronjé who discovered her own body with such joyful abandon in Lisbon half a century ago? Praise my flesh with sounds of gladness. Someone stirs in the bed in there. Something stirs in me out here. My lover awakes. It is the most beautiful sentence I have ever written. My lover awakes. Phrases from her Portuguese travel journal, words that sometimes get caught on her like scraps of paper carried on a breeze, as if she had managed after all to tear up the pages from that book and cast them into the wind.
Put another way, what is left for the elderly Mrs Niemand? Just look at those drooping shoulders. She throws back her shoulders bravely, but it doesn’t make her look any younger, just a little less frightened perhaps.
She has been searching for so many years. And now that the search has finally led somewhere, she feels too frightened and too old for all the changes it could bring.
And yet.
On that windy day five months ago in the early autumn when her grandchild called her for the first time, she started to live again. Cautiously, little by little, one small shuffling step back to everything that had happened, one small shuffling step forward to everything that had once again become possible, backwards, forwards, a rolling dance to a mournful tune. Slowly, slowly down that pebble path. Smooth and shiny from its moonlight bath. A song about loss and longing. Fado’s fatefulness.
Saudade, her Portuguese lover explained to her long ago, was a deep, perpetual longing. The love that remained after love’s object had gone. She had been too young and pure to understand, but once she had lost first her child and then her grandchild, saudade had become her lifelong disposition.
She turns her back on the old woman in the mirror and returns to the laptop computer on the bed. For a few moments she stares helplessly at her hands on the keyboard, the skin as thin and dry as crinkle paper, the dark spots with which time has stained the papery texture, the blue veins bulging beneath the surface. How had her daughter put it in her farewell letter again? Skin is after all just the paper wrapped around the gift. Then her stiff fingers come to life.
Write and tell me everything, she types to her granddaughter in Portugal, where this story began fifty years ago.
OX WAGONS
But her story in fact began long before Lisbon. After all, it wouldn’t have been possible for her to turn her life into a lie if she had not been surrounded by lies from the beginning. Big ones and small ones. Black ones and white ones. Silences and blanks. This is how Colette Niemand (née Cronjé) tries to absolve herself in her old age.
She is sitting at Deddy’s feet in the drawing room listening to the poet Totius’s creaky voice on the radio. This is the yeaaar of our Looord nineteen-hundred-and-thirty-eight. Now we will ceeelebrate … Mammie is baking a cake in the kitchen. Usually she likes to help Mammie, but lately Deddy has become so excited about the ox wagons and the old men with beards and their wives with the funny bonnets that he is always listening to speeches on the radio. Come, Letty, he always says, come listen to what is happening in this country of ours. She finds most of the speeches almost as boring as the sermons in church on Sundays, but a tiny bit better because she can play with her paper dolls on the carpet while she pretends to listen.
She has taken her beloved Shirley Temple from the cut-outs in the flat cardboard box. The doll with the golden curls and the cutest dimples on earth is wearing a white vest and panties, white socks and shoes. Colette tries on one beautiful paper dress after the other, carefully folding the paper strips over the paper shoulders, patiently looking for the right outfit. But our meeerciful Father didn’t give a celebration but a reviiival …
Deddy’s pipe is in his hand – his clean, soft doctor’s hand, so much softer than Oupa Gert’s calloused farmer’s hands – but he is so engrossed in the radio voice that he forgets to smoke. He leans slightly forward, his black shoes polished to the same high shine as his sleekly oiled black hair. A gentleman, that is what Mammie calls him, and a gentle man too. The two don’t always go together, Colette. His head is tilted to one side so he can hear better, his eyes filled with a strange light, like when he points out the stars to her and her brothers at night.
‘Look, Deddy, Mammie made Shirley Temple a Voortrekker dress and a bonnet. I coloured them in and cut them out myself.’
He doesn’t hear her. His lips move below his little clipped black moustache as he murmurs the words of the poet-patriot: ‘It is a marvel in our eyes. We see it, but we do not comprehend it.’
Perhaps that is the reason she remembers this moment so clearly, her father repeating an obscure phrase, whispering as if he is telling her a secret, until his voice is drowned out by thousands of singing radio voices. Oh hear ye the mighty rumble? It is soaring across our land.
Because surely it cannot really be her first memory. In the spring of 1938 she was already almost six years old. Of her fourth or fifth year she remembers flashes, sounds and smells, shapes and colours. The smell of boiled soap on Oupa Gert’s farm, the name of the farm on a gate in the gravel road, Somerverdriet, so lovely, so sad and so puzzling. Summer and sorrow – what could the
