Ivan Vladislavic - Double Negative

Unwilling to watch any of it through to the end, I do my research (Mr Lister’s Festival of Films with Peculiar Accents, coming soon to a multiplex near you); and when I weary of that, I piece together my own staccato sub-plots, ranging across the channels, leaping from one floe to another, taking as material whatever wildlife documentary or cookery show or courtroom drama or soap opera I land in. One jab of the remote and a round fired in Hollywood brings down an antelope in Mala Mala. A serial killer is always on the loose somewhere, and if he’s wielding a knife I can get him to chop onions, and use those pungent shards to make the survivors of the latest mudslide weep. Cooking, shooting, weeping, these three abide, 24/7.

The remarkable thing is how it all cuts. There is so much afloat, it’s impossible to create a clash, let alone a contradiction, and my improvisations can scarcely be told apart from the scheduled programmes. Chaos is a kind of congruence. Everything has jumped out of its skin, everything is raw and ready to be remixed. In the deluge of contiguity, things that are self-contained, that persist on their own course and refuse new relationships, cannot be endured.

These were the late, late hours of our Friday evening, the end of our end-of-the-working-week routine. Leora and I had eaten supper, finished a bottle of wine, watched a DVD. Her choice one week, mine the next. Last Friday, mine: Dances with Wolves . I had been calling her Stands with a Spoon all week and it was time to move on. Tonight, hers: Pride and Prejudice . No obvious jokes there. Now she was asleep beside me on the couch with the top of her cherished head pressing against my thigh, and I was flossing my teeth, savouring the exotic combination of minted wax and twelve-year-old scotch. In the uncharted reaches of the menu, between a documentary on Roman ossuaries and reruns of classic frames from the world snooker champs in Leicester, I found him: Jaco Els.

Chef Giacomo of the Paragon Laboratory. Still sleek, almost dapper. Thicker around the middle, but the chef’s tunic flattered. It was a vaguely military tunic with silver buttons and epaulettes, and the toque was not the usual tall mushroom but an oversized beret. Giacomo! It’s all Italy now. Whatever became of Greece?

Back in the ’90s, when the TRC hearings were on television, I’d watched as much as I could stand, hoping to plug the gaps in my knowledge and reanimate the deadened nerve-endings of my sympathy. Among the perpetrators, a long line of men whose memories were as badly made as their suits, I’d always expected to see someone I knew, someone like Jaco. And here he was, ten years too late, giving truthful testimony on the Paragon range of non-stick cookware.

Chef Giacomo was in command of a postmodern kitchen, the kind made for deconstructive cooking. Hi-tech finishes concealed traditional carcases. There was a coal stove with a stainless-steel hob, there were worm-eaten cabinets with granite tops, copper pots hung from steel-plated ceiling beams. Behind pale-green frosted glass that made the cabinets look like shower cubicles were the hazy feminine forms of glasses and bowls. Hollowware, they call it in the trade. On the end of the counter stood a Bunsen burner.

Leora would have loved it and I thought of waking her up. But the sight of Jaco after all these years was too strange: I needed to absorb it on my own.

I thumbed up the volume.

Maestro! Time had knocked the rough edges off his accent and there was a twang in there now that intrigued: he sounded like a spray painter from Roodepoort who’s been to Bible School in San Antonio. It made his storytelling more compelling than ever. In a minute, I was drawn in. While he described the unique properties of the Paragon’s non-stick coating, he settled a pan on a gas ring and turned up the heat. He showed us a bottle of sunflower oil and tossed it in the bin. He showed us a brick of butter and sent that south too.

Sticky stuff was lined up in tubs beside the stove, and he reached for them and dribbled honey and jam into the pan, and spooned in sugar and custard powder. He made it bubble, added a handful of flour and gave it a good stir with a spatula. Then he poured the goo out and broke an egg into the empty pan.

Where exactly is a twang, I wonder. I would like a linguist to explain it to me. And why San Antone? Why not Tulsa or Forth Worth?

While the egg was frying, he showed us a pot scourer and tossed it in the bin. He spoke about the damage caused by steel wool and abrasive scouring agents, ickcetera. He tossed aside brushes, pads and soap-impregnated pillows.

When the egg was done, he slid it on to a plate, put the empty pan back on the gas and turned up the heat until the flame formed a blue calyx around the black iron base. He spoke about the special guarantee, but that’s not all, he mentioned special prices if you dialled now. He said that if something stuck to a Paragon, they would give you your money back. While he was speaking, he took from under the counter a thick, rainbow-striped beach sandal and dropped it in the pan. Easing a paper mask over his mouth and nose, he fired up a blowtorch and played it over the rubber until it smoked and bubbled and began to melt. Prices and order numbers flashed in jagged clouds. Jaco reached for the spatula again and pressed the molten sole down in the pan. The smell of burning rubber filled the room.

My knees are packing up, my mother would say, and my back’s already gone out. Quoting Shelley Winters, I think. Now this business with her eyes. She’d woken up with double vision. Hoping it would go away, as the aches and pains usually did, she’d held out for a week before making an appointment with Dr Jacobson, who did her cataracts. ‘You should see me trying to decide which of my faces to powder,’ she said when she phoned, making light, working her way round to asking for a lift to the clinic. We’ve spoken about moving her into a retirement village or a home, some place with frail care for when the time comes, you have to think ahead, but she loves the flat. She has friends in the block, widows like herself, decent bridge players. And she values her independence. Not being able to drive is the worst.

Herbert got up from his desk in the lobby to usher us out of the lift and then took her other arm with the decorous familiarity of a son-in-law. He even held the door of the Charade while I helped her into the passenger seat. I always worry she’ll bang her head, more so since her eyes started troubling her, and I was glad of the help. How much was it worth though? Recently Leora had rebuked me for giving a car guard two rand. Apparently the standard rate had risen to five. I gave that to Herbert and he seemed satisfied.

‘We should have kept the Merc,’ my mother said as we drove off. ‘You and Herbert could have carried me down on a stretcher and stashed me in the back seat.’

‘You always were a back-seat driver.’

Letting that pass, she asked: ‘How’s the work going?’

In my mother’s vocabulary, ‘work’ means what you do for a living. I told her about the shoot that morning. We’d been on Constitution Hill, in one of the cold, narrow cells at the old Women’s Jail, dropping crockery on the concrete floor, clay pots and china cups called Annemarie, Busi, Caroline, and so on down the alphabet. A public service ad on spousal abuse. By the time we were finished, the place looked like a Greek restaurant.

We moved on to other things. I thought of telling her about the interview for the News , but my nascent career as an ‘artist’ still embarrasses me in front of the family. I am much too old to bud. Giacomo Els and his shtick — his non-shtick — might amuse her. Or it might remind her of my father, which is not always a good thing. She still has her wit and her wits about her, but these days she’ll get sad in the blink of an eye. To play it safe, I told her about the catering business Leora is setting up with her friend Bo. Before they’ve even registered the company, they’re arguing about the colour of the table linen.