"As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans."

That is, of course, you guessed it, from Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast". If you haven't read it, it's worth every cent. In fact, it is one the books I always take with me wherever I go. I think perhaps that this time I did not bring it with me, which is a pity. My stuff is stored in Stanford and I'll have to buy another copy or wait till I am settled again.

There is another book of his in which he describes food and wine beautifully. He did this before food became people started to pay so much attention to food becoming, in fact, a global obsession. And that is what makes this so special.

He did much the same thing in The Garden of Eden, for me a wonderful novel, perhaps even my most favourite after A Moveable Feast!

This is what I mean: "They were always hungry but they ate very well. They were hungry for breakfast which they at at the cafe, ordering brioche and café au lait and eggs, and the type of preserve that they chose and the manner and the manner in which the eggs were to be cooked was an excitement. They were always so hungry for breakfast that the girl often had a headchache until the coffee came. She took her coffee without sugar and the yong man was learning to remember that.
On this morning there was brioche and red raspberry preserve and the ggs were boiled and there was a pat of butter that melted as they stirred them and salted them lightly and ground pepper over them in the cups. They were big eggs and fresh and the girl’s were not cooked quite as long as the young man’s. He remembered that easily and he was happy with his which he diced up with the spoon and ate with only the flow of the butter to moisten them and the fresh early morning texture and the bite of the coarsely ground pepper grains and the hot coffee and the chicory fragrant bowl of café au lait."

This follows after a lengthy description of the fishing boats and their nets in the water outside the village, so that by the time you get to the breakfast part, you yourself are ravenous! Surely the sign of writing of the first order.

West Coast

Since I was 21 I have undertaken six hiking trips through the Fish River Canyon which, I have to say, is not for sissies (although on one of my hikes a girl’s hockey team actually overtook us!). Be that as it may. It’s tough going but not as taxing, I thought, as my hike up the Cape West Coast. Melkbosch. Ever heard of it? Very few people outside South Africa have, but I will never forget it. It’s where we started. I think we walked for four or five days, all the way to Saldanha Bay and it was the most difficult hike I have ever experienced. You will have had to walk in sand to know what I mean, and I mean loose sand, not hard damp sad. My feet felt like lead. Here I was, at the peak of my youth, a mere 22 years old or so, and I felt like an old man, panting, concentrating only on lifting my foot and taking the next step.

You have to be really exhausted to appreciate the words from the leader of our group, “I think this is a good place to make camp.”

One of boys had a fishing rod with him – or was it just a line – I can’t remember, it’s so long ago. He separated from us and went to the rocks where he sat and dropped his line in the water. I took a bottle of white wine; I think it was a Cape Riesling and buried it in the damp sand to chill. The others started to make a fire.

We would sleep under the stars, no problem. We had ground sheets and sleeping back and, frankly, the weather was so perfect we had no needs of tents of further shelder. While it was still light we cleared the sand of rocks or shells or other objects and lay down our ground sheets. There were about ten of us, including Kiewiet, a lovely girl who was the niece of our leader, Piet van Zyl.

The smell of woodsmoke mingled with that of the ocean, as did the soft crackling, mingling with the sound of the lazy waves. Did any of really expect the youth to catch a fish? No, we didn’t. But he did: a huge galjoen easily weighing 4 lbs, which was just as well, because there were many mouths to feed.

Piet barbequed the fish on the coals. On another fire a stew was slowly simmering. I fetched the bottle of wine from where I’d buried it. It was ice cold. The Atlantic Coast is known for its freezing waters. We had the fish and drank the wine. It was not a very expensive wine, nor, I think, a very good wine but it is the best wine I have every tasted. We slept under the stars, happy.

In the morning I was awoken by Kieweit’s cry, “Look!” We sat up and looked. During the night a whale had entered the bay and had given birth to a calf. Now they were moving, how shall I put it, with a kind of quiet dignity in the waters, these torpid beautiful monsters.

Shortly before reaching our destination, Saldanha Bay, we were caught in a thunderstorm. We found shelter in a barn, where the farmer allowed us to overnight. Come to think of it, Johan Wicht’s parents owned a huge farm in the area and his father was at one stage captain of the academy. They were well known in the area, influential people which is probably why the farmer so readily gave us shelter.

The next morning when I woke, the first thing I saw was Johan in the drizzle – it was still raining and the skies were grey – stooped over a fire, the smoke rising into the air. On the fire was a pan. He was shaking it. In the pan was a huge orange blob. It was not an ordinary egg and it was enough to feed all of us breakfast. It was an ostrich egg, deep and rich and with a yoke that was intensely yellow. I have never forgotten that colour, although I don't think there's a name for that in the English language, such a yellow.

Bouillabaisse Elizabeth David
“I was a child of ten. He was called Bauzan, my fisherman at Canet, our fishing rendezvous on the bank of the ètang de Berre. And before eating his bouillabaisse, I used to savour the delight of watching him fish for it.

“Hardly had my grandfather’s creaking but reliable old wagon, dusty from having carried us so far through the scrub, come to a standstill than I, with what alacrity, leapt to the ground, and into the arms of my friend the old sea-wolf.
“Quick, let’s get off.”
“The mistral is blowing; we shall dance about a bit.”
“Oh, how lovely –“
“The more the little cockleshell danced in the waves, the happier I was. actually, there was no danger. Bauzan, who had been round the world five times, took the helm, and the ‘sailor,’ his third son (the two eldest were serving in the squadron at Toulon), was at the oars. How I should always have liked to have been “sailor’s mate – if only my parent had let me have my way!”

“Already, a league out, Bauzan’s still piercing eyes had caught sight of a little indicator buoy. Stop! Sailor pulled towards the guoy. We dropped anchor. Now, round a pulley and across the boat the long rope was coiled in, two metres at a time, and the baskets came out of the waves. After we had drained off the water there was gurgling inside – sometimes, however there was nothing.



It was I was had the excitement of undoing the catch which closed the lid. And there, in the bottom of the boat, multicoloured and sparkling and smelling good, lay the bouillabaisse; rascasses and canadelles, red mullet and gurnard and muggione (grey mullet) and other rock-fish whose names I no longer remember, but not forgetting the exquisite little favouillles (crabs) nor the eels, those viscous and slippery sea-serpents which Bauzan had taught me to catch with three fingers.

“We returned by sail., in ten minutes, for we were hungry. On the shore, in the wind, Madame Bauzan had lit a great wood fire upon which, in a huge cauldron, a litre or olive was coming to the boil, with four sliced onions, as many cloves of garlic with, of course, salt, pepper and saffron, with a few tomatoes in the season, and two or three potatoes, not forgetting, for Parisians, a handful of flour mixed with a glass of water.
“The mob of little Bauzans and their mother wasted no time in jumping on board, cleaning the fish and throwing it, all fresh as it was, into the saucepan, where the poor eels, cut in slices, went on wriggling in the boiling liquid. No more than a quarter of an hour’s cooking and the divine golden yellow bouillon was poured through a strainer over a mountain of large slices of bread, and the fish served separately. And then, my children, our stomach hollow from the sea-voyage, we stuffed ourselves up to the neck!”

“Nowadays, I still feast sometime on bouillabaisse – Parisian bouillabaisse. But in Paris, alas, the little crabs have been replaced by mussels, the the raacasses and the canabeblles with a modest langouste, and so on. A makeshift, in fact. And it is a long time since I was ten years old, and Canet no longer belongs to us, and what has become of my friend Bauzan

Paul Alexis:
Quoted in L’Art du Bien Manger by Edmond Richardin, 1915.

 

 

The Mystery of Shoes

 

Last night had an Eikendal Sauvignon Blanc that was breathtakingly good. I did not have the opportunity or inclination to try to identify the composition of flavours that made it so magnificent but even today, I am trying in vain to recall its distinctive flavours. It was a terrific amalgam of vivid flavours which I thought were in perfect balance.

One summer’s day, I was sitting at the table, on the sunlit terrace, across from Neethlingshof winemaker. We tasted three sauvignon blancs of different vintages which clearly illlustrated what interesting things can happen to a sauvignon blanc in the bottle if you are not in a hurry, like me, to open it immediately and guzzle it down.
Perhaps something happened to that Eikendal in the bottle in the year it lay resting in the bottle cellar.
Mysteries.
I think back of the wine I had last night, and I think back of an unknown Malay girl appearing briefly in the doorway 15 years ago.
Both have an elusive quality. And it was all to do with my failing memory. Or perhaps I was never that sharp, never that observant anyway. What was that flavour silently appealing to my palate while I was ingrossed in conversation? And while I was talking to the mother, and biting into a Malay koeksister, what impression had that young girl made on me? She was backlit somewhat by the sun that was behind her. It makes me realize there was a window somewhere behind her in the passage.

In the case of Mrs Noerdien, things were different. She did not so much as glance at Coetzee or acknowledge that his father had just introduced him. She averted her gaze. She spoke to the father, wishing him good night. She left.

There is something spellbinding about being thus ignored by a beautiful woman. Or should I amend that to read: “a gazelle-eyed” young woman who is soft and round. It creates a tension. I recall now reading what Hitchcock said about sexual tension. It appeared in this week’s New Yorker and is from a review written by Anthony Lane, a fine writer.
“During a famous exchange with François Truffaut, Hitchcock argued that “if sex is too blatant or obvious, there’s no suspense. You know why I favor sophisticated blondes in my films? We’re after the drawing-room type, the real ladies, who become whores once they’re in the bedroom.” He then referred to the scene in “To Catch a Thief” where John Robie (Cary Grant), a former cat burglar, joins Frances (Kelly), an heiress, and her mother for drinks at a Riviera hotel. “I deliberately photographed Grace Kelly ice-cold and I kept cutting to her profile, looking classical, beautiful, and very distant. And then, when Cary Grant accompanies her to the door of her hotel room, what does she do? She thrusts her lips right up to his mouth.”

And so, consequently, when Mrs Noerdien ignores Coetzee upon being introduced, the first germs of sexual tension are sowed and, we expect, sooner or later things will come to a head. He will either make an utter fool out of himself or he will be loved.

(Note: This is a thread. To read the beginning please go down a post.)

Someone wrote that art is the mediator between life and the reader, or something like that. I read it so long ago, I can’t remember the exact words but it may well have been Thomas Mann who wrote it. It is through reading the novels that we begin to see the familiar in a new way, in a way that often surprises us. The student in Disgrace and Mrs Noerdien are magnificent creatures that come alive in the pages of a novel. As Hemingway wrote somewhere: a book written from the imagination is more real than if the events really happened. (I feel I have misquoted him terribly so I will have to try to find the correct quotation.)

Was I thinking of these wonderful characters when, this past week, I was on the point of phoning Shireen and asking her, or her partner Zainuk, if they knew of a young beautiful Malay girl I could photograph. The idea is that Shireen or Zainuk will be taking me around the Cape Malay Quarter, or the Bokaap as it is commonly known, to photograph some houses bought by ‘outsiders’, many of them British I believe. I have not yet asked them, perhaps feeling a little timid about such a request, but I have this image of a door slightly ajar, or perhaps halfway, and a girl staring back at the camera from inside the doorway. She has oval cheeks, and like Coetzee’s Mrs Noerdien, this girl is gazelle-eyed, the softness of her oval face hinting at the soft, curves of her body which is mostly hidden beneath her loose cotton cloak.
Perhaps, on the other hand, I am trying to recreate an incident that happened to me about 15 years ago:
“In 1995, a year after South Africa’s first democratic election, I was taking some photographs for an article on the Bo-Kaap, a gorgeous enclave at the upper end of Cape Town, also known as the ‘Malay Quarters’. I was feeling timid. A new dispensation had come into being, a black government had been elected in the first democratically elected elections. What would happen now? What was I doing here? A ‘whitey’ (as we were known by people of colour) in the Malay Quarters. Taking photographs was also not the most desireable thing to be doing. I had always, in some atavistic manner, thought that taking a photograph of someone means you are ‘stealing’ the soul of a person. In fact, in some countries in the Far East this belief still prevails, I heard. I expected to be shown the way out of the area soon enough and had prepared myself mentally to beat a hasty retreat.”
“Instead the opposite happened.”
“As I stood in one of the little narrow street, fussing with the settings of the Nikon, a lady in a headscarf appeared at the top floor of a narrow, little house on the opposite side of the road and with a friendly greeting, she invited me to come upstairs. “Come and have some tea,” she said. “Tea?” I could scarcely believe my ears. Was this really happening? Had in this big, anonymous city a complete stranger just invited me up for tea? I was not mistaken. Upstairs the woman, in her early forties, had laid out tea things neatly on the rectangular table in the centre of the room. She went away and returned a minute later with a plate of cakes and biscuits, including Malay doughnuts, a specialty of the Bo-Kaap, which is a sweet cake dipped in coconut sprinkles. She sat down in an easy chair opposite in the sparsely furnished sitting room, which, through its large window, offered a breathtaking view over the city. As we sat talking with my telling her about the article I was doing, a young girl of 17 or so appeared in the doorway, clutching a two-year old baby on her hip. The girl looked past me at her mother. The woman, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, introduced the girl as her daughter and the child on her hip, she said, was her youngest daughter. Like her mother, the teenage girl’s oval face was framed by a cotton headscarf. When I raised my camera and asked her if I could take a photograph of her, she averted her face and quickly vanished from sight. “She’s shy,” the mother said, filling our cups once more.“
This is the way my article on the People of the Malay Quarters starts. I wonder if I am trying to recreate the image of that unknown girl who vanished the moment I tried to photograph her.
The point is, really, that Coetzee created someone in Mrs Noerdien that is unforgettable. I have wondered why his description is so effective and I have come to the conclusion that it is because by now, through his previous novels, we have come to know him. We have temporarily adopted his world view, his view of beauty, his who sensibility and we know by now that more is to come. We suspect, or at least I do, to be a little intoxicated with Mrs Noerdien, and also to fall in love with her as one tends to do with most female heroines in novels.