The other day, while curing hides in the parking bay I rent, a fat woman in a purple dress suit approached me with a clipboard under her arm. She kept licking her lips, and her eyes had the slightly bulging aspect of someone from Johannesburg who is not yet accustomed to breathing genuine air, albeit air tinged with the saucy bouquet of the Sasol refinery.
She opened her gold-trimmed alligator-skin handbag and produced a roll of money. She waved it at me.
‘Hi, dear!†she called. ‘How much for the land?†I looked blank. ‘How much for the property? I’ll give you a mil. A mil and a half if you clear off by tomorrow. Pregnant women get an extra day’s grace, but only if they’re more than eight months.â€
Again I shrugged, not comprehending. She brushed a fly off her nose and scratched her head. Then she went back into her bag and produced a handful of beads.
‘See this, darling? Real glass. Wanna feel them?†She began rubbing them against her cheek. ‘Mmm, so smooooth! So shiny! No? How about a cowrie shell? See, it’s got writing on it: ‘Port Elizabeth Agricultural Show 1983’. Yes, that’s the Port Elizabeth, no lie. How about it, love?â€
It took some time to explain to the woman that I did not own the property on which I lived, that it belonged to the Great Spirit known as the Body Corporate, minions of the all-powerful, all-knowing Landlords.
Naturally, this story is a ludicrous distortion of reality: I was in fact curing hides in my neighbour’s bay and, offered a mil, I would have sold her my rented flat, indefinite mining rights on Table Mountain and hopped on the next flight to Buenos Aires. But the fat woman is very real. She is everywhere in Cape Town, sweating discreetly under her shoulder pads, over-dyed hair rustling like wild grasses in the breeze. She is the property market, and her name is Legion.
It is rare that a form of legalised profiteering, like being an estate agent, becomes a cultural phenomenon, but a glimpse through the bulging weekly property supplements in the Mother City reveals the existence of an enormous aesthetic cataract, creeping over what shreds of clear sight are left to a population systematically blinded by the blunted red-hot poker of marketing. As if an immense neo-classical faux-Pompeian patio table were slowly blocking out the sun, the distinctions between day and night, truth and lies, beauty and hideousness are being blotted out.
Take the current national obsession with ‘Tuscan-styled villasâ€, pronounced ‘Tuskin-stahled villers†by those who build and sell them. In theory, they cater to white South Africa’s desire to sip iced-tea in front of billowing muslin curtains while Helena Bonham-Carter plays the grahnd piahno in another room, accompanied by the distant bubbling of doves in cypress trees. In practice, they provide the space, style and privacy of a Mexico City brothel. Curtain billow, certainly, but through neighbours’ windows to be set upon by endlessly yapping pitbulls, and it is irrelevant where the music is coming from: paper-thin walls make these ghettoes of ignorant aspiration giant live-in subwoofers.
Once you could trust estate agents’ lies. ‘A DIY dream†indicated a kitchen with a fire-pit in the linoleum where Nigerian drug lords had cooked their cat. ‘Old world charm†meant sub-economic council housing built from solid asbestos for returning servicemen in 1945, often with said servicemen still dozing on the stoep, iron-lung wheezing away, waiting for the lorry from the old-age home to pick up him up.
But today’s property euphemisms make all predictions and plans futile. View a ‘lock up and go†on sale, and you’ll discover a self-contained maximum-security prison, replete with bamboo spike-pits in the lawn. Which begs the question: Why not lock up and go to New Zealand? And why, if one wanted a ‘cozy starter homeâ€, would one pay R1,5 million for the kind of dank lair in which opium-smoking Tsar-shooting consumptive students spent their last hours before committing suicide?
And so the sun sets on the new Tuscany, a landscape as dead as Pompeii. No, not quite dead. See little concrete Cupid balancing on one toe. See him peeing borehole water into a fiberglass Roman bath. Plink, plonk, plash —