The Madonna of Excelsior (2 page)

“The Father has no use for me,” said Niki as she walked out of the gate of the mission station. Popi was sulking on her mother's back. She had wanted to stay with the distorted people in their skewed houses.

“We cannot waste time with your silliness,” said Niki.

She had a long way to go. She was going to hitch-hike all the way back to the black township of Mahlatswetsa in Excelsior,
thirty kilometres from the Roman Catholic mission in Thaba Nchu. Traffic was sparse on these roads. She knew that she would have to walk for miles before a truck would stop to give her a lift. Truck-drivers were really the only people who felt sorry for hitchhikers.

But trucks were few and far between on these provincial roads. She would have to walk for miles with only cosmos, the qokwa grass and sunflowers for company. Popi would be fast asleep on her back.

Although her visit to Thaba Nchu had not been a success, she was grateful that the priest had given her a few coins for her trouble. But she was disappointed that he had no use for her. She had heard from the women of his congregation that he painted naked women. In all the neighbouring townships and villages, women walked out of their skewed houses to pose in the nude for him. He paid his models well. Niki had hoped that she would also be able to pose for him.

But the priest had no need of a model. He was not in his nudes-painting mode. He had a few canvases of distorted people and skewed houses and donkeys and sunflowers to complete. Then, in a few weeks' time, he would be painting the madonna subject. If Niki and Popi could come back then, he certainly would use them as models.

The priest was captivated by Popi. He loved all children. Even those who were emaciated and unkempt. Though Popi stayed on Niki's back all the time they were in his studio, he played with her, making all sorts of funny faces. Then he tore out a page from a magazine and shaped her a donkey. He gave it to her and pranced around the room, braying like a donkey. The stocky trinity with his broad face and snow-white mane brayed and brayed, and Popi laughed and laughed.

All this time Niki was nervous. She knew that the priest must have been wondering why Popi was so different from other children. Why she was so light in complexion. Why her eyes were blue, and why she had flowing locks.

We who know the story of Excelsior do not wonder.

As Niki trudged the black road until she became one with it, Popi's mind wandered back to the man who loved women, donkeys and sunflowers. And to his creations.

Woman and girl melted into God's own canvas.

P
OPI TELLS US
that it all began when the trinity was nourished by Flemish expressionists. Theirs were ordinary subjects: sympathetic men and women living ordinary lives and performing ordinary rituals. Popi knows all these things, and shares them with all those who care to listen. We suspect that there are many other things that she knows, but keeps to herself. And there are others that she has decided not to remember.

Twenty-five years ago she saw the thin outlines that defined the concertina player and the dancers. At the time she knew nothing about Flemish expressionists. She had not experienced, through the broad pages of colourful coffee-table books, their mystique that embodied protest.

She was only five. And she was with Niki.

The strokes were not broad like today's strokes. The trinity had not started with broad strokes. They got thicker and rougher as he became more comfortable in his own style. The strokes Popi saw did not stand out. The surface was smoother. The finish was grainy. The colours were fruity. Thick fingers like bunches of bananas pressed the concertina keys. White and brown strokes
marked the folds of the instrument as it breathed heavily in and out.

The musician's hat was an overripe tomato. Brown hair peeped under the brim. He was intent. The song had drawn his eyes into his skin, and they had become brown slits. His long nose was sunburnt. He squeezed the concertina. It squealed. Men and women danced. Full-figured women in Starking apple dresses. Skirts of golden pears and Granny Smiths. Pink blouses. Out-of-step men in brown hats and brown suits. Or in light blue shirts and green pants. Sleepy-eyed men with big groping hands.

The musician squeezed the instrument and it wailed a graceful wals. Men and women floated on the clouds. Then he squeezed a lively vastrap. Quicker, quicker than the wals. He was playing Japie Laubscher's
Ou Waenhuis
, the famous composition about an old barn. The zestful party danced in a circle. The men's arms were around the women's waists. The women's arms were around the men's shoulders. Feet close together, turning on the same spot in a fast tiekie-draai.

Rosy-cheeked girls in pink dresses screeched their laughter under the architrave. Then they ran to the lawn to make a nuisance of themselves to the boys who were playing with a rugby ball, practising throws that might see them being picked for Haak Vry-staat, or even the Springboks, in later years. There were no flowers in the garden. Just the lawn. And the small shrubs that would one day grow into a hedge along the short wrought-iron fence. The girls chased one another among the boys. The boys didn't take kindly to this. They chased the girls away until they disappeared behind the whitewashed house.

The house was an imperfect copy of an English bungalow. But it was more exuberant than an English bungalow. As exuberant as the fruity dancers. Two bay windows with ornate stained glass on each side of the brown double doors, which also had painted glass panels. Purple columns supporting the purple architrave. Pillars whose crude capitals were halfway between Ionic and Corinthian. The roof was green. It was made of corrugated-iron sheets instead
of tiles. Purple gutters. Green and white chimneys on opposite ends, one with a cowl and another one with a television aerial attached to it. Television was only a few months old in South Africa. This house, therefore, belonged to a man who not only had the money for such novelties, but was also determined to set the trends.

The boeremusiek of the concertina was relentless. The liedjies, or tunes, were getting louder. The volkspele or dances were getting exaggerated, as the concertina filled the dancers with even higher spirits. It had something to do with the cherry liqueur. The circle of buoyant rounded figures danced in and out of the wide doors. Niki passed the time by trying to identify each of the revellers. Popi couldn't be bothered. She was busy sketching houses on the sand just outside the gate. She was concentrating very hard, determined that her houses would not be skewed like those she had seen at the trinity's studio a week before. Her houses would stand straight.

Niki knew almost all the revellers. There was Sergeant Klein-Jan Lombard with his voluminous wife, Liezl, stamping the ground as if they were in a military drill. He of the South African Police, who also acted as a prosecutor at the magistrate's court. She of the yellow cherry jam that had made her famous throughout the entire district. There was Groot-Jan Lombard, Klein-Jan's doddering father. There was the Reverend François Bornman, the dominee of the local Dutch Reformed Church, dancing with a woman Niki could not identify as she had her back turned most of the time. The dominee—one marble eye from a gun accident five years ago—was not in his usual black suit and white tie, but in a brown safari suit. There was Johannes Smit, a very prosperous and very hirsute farmer with a beer belly. He didn't have a partner. And, of course, there was pint-size Adam de Vries, and his strong-boned wife, Lizette. This was their house. This was their garden party.

Adam de Vries ran a small law practice in addition to being the mayor of Excelsior. Like most of the revellers present, he prided
himself on the fact that his grandfather had been one of the founders of this town, back in 1911. It had been established on an old farm called Excelsior. People came from surrounding farms to settle here. And since then various members of his family have worn the dynastic mayoral chain. Except on a few occasions when there was no clear candidate from the family. Like when the late and lamented butcher, Stephanus Cronje, became the mayor.

More families of farmers and businessmen were arriving. All pillars of the local Afrikaner community. The very cream of Excelsior society. And of other nearby towns such as Tweespruit, Brandfort and Verkeerdevlei. Niki could see their old bakkies or trucks and veteran Chevrolets approach on the one-kilometre stretch of road that was lined with black iron-bark bluegum trees on both sides. Then the cars would disappear, masked by Reverend Bornman's church that looked like hands in prayer, only to appear again on Adam de Vries's street behind the church. They parked in the street and the visitors walked in through the gate without giving Niki and Popi a second glance. They joined the sitees—a much slower dance than both the wals and the vastrap. Even with the fuel of the cherry liqueur, the dances had become languid and the laughter louder.

The rugby-playing children had increased in number and the garden was becoming too small for them. A boy threw the ball too hard. The catcher failed to catch it. It dropped in the street and bounced until it stopped in front of Popi and Niki. The catcher ran out of the gate to get the ball. Niki knew him immediately. Tjaart Cronje. She had not seen him since he was seven. Since the days when he used to insist on being carried on her back, even though he was ridiculously big for that mode of transportation. She would indulge him because he was such a respectful boy. But she stopped when she realised that whenever he was strapped in a shawl on her back, he induced an erection and worked himself up with unseemly rhythmic movements. All that time the boy had been pretending to play horsey-horsey, he had in fact been in venereal heaven at her expense. Now here he was, a gangly lad of twelve.

Tjaart took the ball and threw it to Popi.

“Catch!” he said.

Popi missed it. Tjaart laughed. She ran after the ball and got it. Instead of throwing it, she walked to him and handed it back. He looked at her closely and then at Niki. It was obvious that he no longer remembered who Niki was. Five years can be a lifetime in the memory of a boy. Also, her face had changed. The chocolate-smooth complexion was now marred by black, brown and reddish chubaba patches.

“Why are you sitting here?” Tjaart asked.

“I was hoping to get the bones . . . or any leftovers . . . after the party,” she said haltingly. “Something for me and my little girl.”

“Your little girl? This can't be your child!” said Tjaart. “She looks like a hotnot child. Like a boesman. You must have stolen her.”

Then he ran back to his rugby game.

But soon he came back with a slice of cake, broke it into two, and gave a piece to Niki and another one to Popi. The woman who was dancing with the dominee saw him and hurried to the gate. For the first time, Niki got a good look at her. She was face-to-face with Cornelia Cronje, Tjaart's mother. Five years had changed her. She looked old and tired. Cornelia recognised Niki too. And glared at her. Niki glared back. Straight into Cornelia's eyes. Niki did not cringe. She did not cast her eyes down as was expected of her. Cornelia laughed. It sounded hollow and crude. Not rich and full-bodied, like the laughter Niki knew when she worked for Cornelia all those years ago. Then deadly anger flashed in Cornelia's eyes.

“What the hell do you want here?” she asked.

“I can be here, Madam Cornelia,” said Niki calmly. “It is not your house. I never go to your house.”

“Tjaart!” cried Cornelia. “What are you doing with these people? Come back here at once!”

Tjaart looked at his mother. And at Niki and Popi. He walked back to the rugby game.

M
ADONNAS ALL AROUND
. Exuding tenderness. Burnt umber mother in a blue shirt, squatting in a field of yellow ochre wheat. Burnt sienna baby wrapped in white lace resting between her thighs. Mother with a gaping mouth. Big oval eyes. Naked breast dangling above the baby's head. Flaky blue suggesting a halo. Unhampered bonding of mother and child and wheat.