There have been people of my close acquaintance who have
shown an interest in my eating habits. Take Harry. Harry was a year behind me
at school, so I did not have much to do with him, apart from when we played
rugby. It was only two or three years after matriculating that I got to know
him better through two mutual school friends. He went to Stellenbosch
University and was a National Party supporter, which put him at odds with us
‘liberals’, who loathed the apartheid government and despised most Afrikaners.
We had many heated but good-humoured discussions that did not prevent us from
enjoying one another’s company. Then, in his second year at Stellenbosch, he
suffered his first nervous breakdown, from which he never fully recovered. In
fact, his mental state continued to deteriorate, and although psychiatric
medication enabled him to function to a limited extent, he struggled socially,
and took on the role of an obnoxious buffoon in order to gain attention. In
spite of his bad behaviour, however, he was not ostracised, and continued to be
invited to braais and parties.
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As time went by and we all followed diverging paths, Harry
managed to hold down a sinecure in a government department, owned a car, and
even bought a house, where he lived with a succession of highly-strung fox
terriers until his death at the age of 59.
He led a largely miserable bachelor’s life and suffered more
than a fair share of mental and emotional distress, which included chronic
loneliness. To alleviate his boredom he would phone his old friends once a week
and try to have a conversation about what had happened to him since the
previous communication, and to elicit information about the other person’s
intimate life. His calls were often tiresome and at an inconvenient moment but,
to my credit, I never lost patience with him, and would give him ten minutes or
so before making an excuse to end the interaction. This weekly ritual
continued, with occasional breaks, for nearly 25 years.
From early on, he began to enquire about my dietary habits
and, because he would phone on different days of the week, he gradually
discovered that my wife and I follow a regular regime.
“So, Ian, what are you having for supper tonight? Mmm,
Monday. That’s beans and pasta, right?”
“Yes.”
“What beans? The big kidney beans?”
“Could be, Harry. But maybe not. Could be black-eyed Susans,
for all I know.”
“And what pasta? Spaghetti this week?”
“Hell, Harry, I don’t know. I could go and ask Krystyna, but
she might tell me to bugger off, or get me to do some chores.”
“And I suppose you will have two veg with it?”
“Of course. Got to have our greens, you know. Carrots and
cauliflower or broccoli.”
“I don’t know how you can eat broccoli. I hate the stuff.”
“Just force it down. Tell yourself it’s good for you. But
hey, look at the time! Got to go, Harry. Duty calls.”
I think he found the predictability of my domestic routine
somehow reassuring, and I tried to humour him over the years. His own
existence was painfully monotonous, especially after he had been boarded. The
only details of his life as a civil servant that I can remember are these:
during luch hour he would lock his office door, remove jacket and shoes, don
his dressing gown, and lie on the carpeted floor with his head on a pillow
brought from home, and set an alarm to wake him from a half hour snooze; and the
other snippet was that he treated himself to a pelvic massage after work on pay
days.
He had mental afflictions which, as a student of the human
condition, I found fascinating. His psychiatrist was continually adjusting his
medication in order to alleviate his bouts of anxiety, manic depression and
schizophrenia. Of particular interest to me were his accounts of hallucinatory
episodes, both auditory and visual, which filled him with terror and left him
in a state of dread at the prospect of a recurrence.
Most of his adult life was tormented, and I would hope that
my friendship helped in a small way to lessen his anguish. If I had given way
to exasperation and refused to confirm or deny that we were about to enjoy a
Thursday pot with chicken livers and rice, and not mince with brinjals and
potatoes, because that was what we had last Thursday, he might have felt
spurned and abandoned, and paranoid anxiety could well have tipped him over the
edge again.
So, that was Harry Pugh. Now for Czesława Zieminski, my
mother-in-law, otherwise known as Mama or Babcia, Babcia being polish for
Grandma. Like Harry, and most of the human population, she also had mental
health issues. Hers were not as severe as Harry’s but, never the less, her
anxiety and depression were debilitating. After the death of Artur in 2000, she
seemed to decide there was no longer any point in making an effort to remain
independent, and it fell to Krystyna, her eldest daughter, to take care of her.
She came to stay with us while her house in Cape Town was
put on the market and we tried to motivate her to take charge of her life
again. For eight months we tried and got nowhere. Her house went for a good
price and we arranged for her to move into an assisted living unit in a newly
built retirement centre in Hermanus. The Village of Golden Harvest. She did not
baulk at the name, nor did she resist the move away from her family to a new
environment where she would be cared for by trained staff and waited on hand
and foot.
For eight months of my life, I played a significant part in
looking after my wife’s mother, and for eight months the dear old relative
shared breakfast, lunch and supper with us, and it is Sunday supper that stands
out in my memory.
By no stretch of the imagination can I be regarded as a
patriarch, and I am certainly not the head of our household but, nevertheless,
I have always sat at the head of the table with my wife at my left hand. While
she was with us, Babcia was seated to my right facing her daughter. It
sometimes amused me to think of myself as a Christ-like figure with just two
disciples, the others having betrayed me and gone elsewhere for supper.
As Harry would have confirmed, the menu for our Sunday
evening meal seldom varies. It consists. primarily of soup and toast.
This is not soup from a can or, worse still, from a packet, but is produced by
my good wife from fresh ingredients, both nutritious and wholesome, and comes
hot from the stove exuding a mouth-watering aroma. Her stock is made by boiling
in water the bones of farm animals, be they poultry, sheep or cattle, over a
lengthy period to extract the goodness contained in the marrow, and has a
superior flavour to the concentrated cubes bought at the supermarket. My
personal chef specializes in Polish barszcz made from diced beetroot cooked in
smoked gammon stock. In a similar category are chicken broth and clear soups
such as French Onion and the Italian variety. She does on occasion make beans
with shredded chicken breast, as well as lentils cooked with shin, but she is
averse to the over consumption of meat, and favours vegetable potages whose
main ingredient could be pumpkin, cauliflower, broccoli, carrot or tomato.
I enjoy two pieces of buttered toast with the meal. The
bread used is home-baked yoghurt bread, and I cut both slices lengthwise, so
that I have four halves to work with. I eat the first half with the soup,
saving the bottom crust to mop the bowl. On the second half I spread Beefy
Bovril and eat it with two slices of tomato. Having consumed this, I tackle the
remaining halves. First, I smear a liberal layer of Black Cat peanut butter,
which is unsweetened and has few additives, to both surfaces. Then on the one
toast I apply Seville Orange marmalade, and on the other, apricot jam. Finally,
I top each portion with a slice of yellow cheese, cheddar or sweetmilk,
depending on what is available. I am then ready to do justice to both pieces,
starting with the marmalade version.
It was on the second Sunday that she was with us that I
noticed Babcia was taking an interest in how I participated in the evening
repast. She, herself, enjoyed her bowl of soup with one slice of plain toast
and, once finished, was free to observe the proceedings on her left. Over the
many Sundays she had me under surveillance, she never ventured a comment, and
her habitually dour expression remained inscrutable. however, I could tell from
the way her eyes, which were generally dull and glazed like those of a dead
fish, became clear and focussed that I was providing her with stimulating
entertainment.
As a devout Catholic, her life had been steeped in religious
ritual, and she might well have recognised something ceremonial in the way I
went about the elaborate preparations before partaking of the sacrament. Again,
I was reminded of Harry’s delight in being able to predict what I was about to
put in my mouth, and I suspect both he and Babcia experienced a thrill of
triumph when they were proved correct.
Harry died in 2009, and my mother-in-law passed from here to
there in 2016. I thought my eating habits would never again be placed under
such scrutiny. But, in 2018 my wife’s younger sister, who is recently deceased,
came to stay with us for three weeks. On the very first Sunday, I was
astonished to find that she was becoming engrossed in the proceedings viewed
from the disciple’s chair on my right. On the second and third Sabbaths she
observed the formalities with anticipatory eagerness, an expression of wonder
tinged with disapproval and disdain plainly registered on her stern
countenance.
So, there we are. That’s that. Or is it? I thought it
extremely unlikely that I would ever again fall under the female gaze that
reduces me to an object of voyeuristic fascination. But, lo and behold, my
wife’s other sister, the one in Australia, has decided to visit us at the end
of the year, and will be here for three Sundays. Does this fill me with
trepidation? No. Somewhat perversely, I am actually looking forward to her
arrival. Will she, too, notice what I eat? She is a voluble extrovert, and she could
well be too occupied with her own presence and concerns to bother taking an
interest in what her brother-in-law is getting ready to shove down his gullet.
If she does, indeed, pay no attention to my behaviour, it will be a minor blow
to my ego by adding to my sense of redundancy. It could be further evidence
that I have become superfluous am no longer worthy of attention. But that need
not worry me, as I can always follow Harry’s example and start carrying on like
an obnoxious buffoon, thereby justifying my existence.