November 2009
It is true that few of us understand our own foibles and vulnerabilities. When we are confronted with them, it is usually in the midst of some other pitched battle about who should have fed the cat or washed the dishes or covered the canary. And so rather than accepting them as true representations that we might be able to do something about, we simply go on in the blind belief that ?one has no particular failings.?
In passing, you may remember a Zulu nightwatchman at the University of Wits who would enter the class before some august lecture, stomp his knobkierrie on the floor three times and then call out the following:? I?hhm a gon to tall you somting for natting. When you are finish, clobe de wimbows, shup de lipes and throw de cat out da door.? You would be left in a bedazzled state of complete bewilderment by this unexpected outburst only to realize that the economics lecturer was in full swing when you reemerged with the necessary translation about closing the windows and doors and switching off the lights.
This was a small diversion from my purpose of explaining to you that I do have weaknesses, a primary one of which would be to never confess to my weakness during a pitched battle with my quaint little wife. Confession and capitulation are unwelcome bedfellows in my version of the Art of War. And diversionary tactics are a key weapon.
When Rhona and I were first married, it, the marriage, ran counter to popular will. Norman Sandler raised his eyebrows, the wicked witches of east and west, Rhona?s Bobba and Granny, about whom I have regaled you in the past, immediately assumed the new fashionable statement of sackcloth and ashes. Indeed Rhona?s wise father counseled her quietly that love is but a temporary and temporal thing but that when ?Money? is scarce, love is pitiful protection. Other than Sally, the pharmacist?s wife, there were few energetic supporters for our nuptial. And she was behind it only to add another shidduch notch to her belt or wherever such notches are kept.
When we were married, I earned about R20 a week handed to me in one of those Manila packets for which I had to stand in a long line on a Friday afternoon with a bunch of other dissolute working men. They might have been mistaken for coal miners except in their case it was a natural hue. By way of further diversion the man who handed out the pay packets was the company quartermaster who went by the name Stillerman and he had only one hand.
So when people presented themselves at the paystation window , they would announce their names and so would begin an interminable search for that particular packet. You can imagine that leaving through a bunch of packets with one hand is somewhat difficult. But what made it infintely worse is that so many of these people went by somewhat strange monikers. There was a handful of Januarys, hundreds of Johanneses but the one that lives on in my memory was the unforgettably named Lettuce.
In 1972 R20 a week meant we could buy groceries and put R10 away in the Post Office where we believed our savings would be held safe. I did try at one stage to get a bank account but was rejected as an unsuitable candidate.
So you can imagine my quaint little wife?s chagrin as time passed and it emerged that I had only adopted the sanctimonious Ghandhian pretension to poverty and the rejection of material wealth for as long as material wealth couldn?t be had.
Once anointed with the instinct for personal gain, however, my appetite held no bounds. I was as competitive and eager as the next Berlusconi.
In retrospect, though I quickly realized that my acquisitive condition bought with it very little else than acquisition itself. A purpose in its own dead-end. I had little appetite for more land, more grandeur, finer clothes, a more sumptuous palace. Mostly I was pretty satisfied with my lot.
And crucially I realized that my happiness had no connection whatever to the state of my finances. The GHI (gross happiness index) moved up and down in total disregard to my liquidity or otherwise.
With one mournful exception. To my quaint little wife?s eternal dismay I had developed a great predilection for motor cars. The psychologists say that there are few vestiges of masculinity left for the average bloke. Shaving used to be the domain where gun metal and engineering contraptions allowed a man to feel like a man but even that space is now overrun with young girls with fancy contraptions looking for pubic patterns like the trees on the grounds of Windsor Castle.
And so my own castle is indeed my car. I do not pretend to know or understand the size of the engine, the unlimited possession of valves, I cannot distinguish torque from Torquemada, although the more torque my car gets the closer I get to expulsion from my home.
And so to the ultimate confession of my weakness. Only a year ago I was invited by my ?all-too-smart for his poncy suit? car salesman, by way of personal and private invitation to a unique car sale. And despite myself, and my sense that the car I had was perfectly adequate, I went and returned home that night rather sheepishly with a new white fancy car.
Back to the psychologist who will tell you a something rather revealing about the way men buy ? a friend?s father was an engineering type who aspired to a manual shift Datsun. Preferably in Blue. And he would bore people to death with his insistence of the superiority of a manual gearshift over an automatic one. So when he finally had earned enough to afford to buy one he went on down to the Datsun store and was confronted with this challenge.
Well sir, you can have this blue Datsun here right now, but its automatic. Or you can have this white manual one. But if you want a blue manual you?ll have to wait. So he went home with the blue one.
I had never imagined myself driving a white car, even if the white was described as Storm Cloud Ivory. And I cannot confess to be anything other than skeptical of the salesman in the fancy suits assertion that ?white is the new black?.
But all the same, home I went with a white one. I was well armed with argument as to its diesel based fuel efficiency, its 4 wheel safety APS steering. (I believe APS stands for Altogether Phoney Shtick. )
The quaint little wife could only lament to the heavens ? what happened to the hippie I once married.
But that isn?t really the highpoint of this confession. No less or rather no more than 8 months later, that altogether too clever salesman in the now even fancier goddamn pinstripe suit called me, with what for me seems to be a magnetically tranquilising quality in his phone manner, to offer me a slightly higher specced version of the same car with more torque than ever before. ?And this one has a TV,? he exclaimed.
I was there in no time.
Fortunately this car, had the same essential shape as the one I had just bought and it still smelt of that leathery perfume that car manufacturers so cleverly impregnate their cars with. Moreover, it too is white. And I do know that even if her life depended on it, the quaint little wife would never ever remeber the number plate my car had had.
And so when I returned home that night I had resolved that there were some things the quaint one simply did not need to know. The following weekend as we headed off for a short sojourn at a coastal spot, there was no indication whatsoever that anything unusual related to the car had been noticed. She complained immediately as she always does that it was too cold and too loud and don?t drive so fast and why don?t you take this road instead of that (as if she was ever able to navigate her way around a town circle).
But I have to confess that a rather dark storm cloud came over her calm and serenely quaint visage when, in error, I turned on the radio for the news and the TV started to play..