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I'm looking for a place. To buy. To live in and to live for. That kind of place. (To lose a place, you must have had it first.)
The flat I'm living in at the moment is not mine. The owner is climbing mountains in Russia; apparently he's busy divorcing his wife - that's the story I hear. Anyway.
Sea view this side, soccer fields that side. On this side you hear the sea, on that side traffic. In the passage you hear both. It's never quiet. Monstrous mansions on both sides of this modest block. The residents of the mansions are 50 percent holidaymakers and 50 percent Jews. Before and after work an influx of people to this end of the country, as if they were trying to flee and couldn't go any further, intensely patrolling the coastline for options for getting away. Fit people jogging, children on bikes and rollerblades, old people in wheelchairs being pushed by nurses. Dogs. All on the move. The essence of the place lies in the movement: the ocean, the cars, the people.
I've lived here for more than a year. Before that, 18 months in an obscure hotel. Before that, ten years in pure white, stagnant Stellenbosch. Before that it was the Free State. That could have been my place, the Free State, my father's plots, but I don't want to live there. To hanker after it is more glamorous, visiting more pleasurable.
It's safe where I live. Once I left my purse on my car's dashboard and 24 hours later the windows were all still in one piece and the purse was still there. (The garage is so full of my and other people's junk that I can't park in it.) It's also conveniently near the highway. (My time is not mine at all.) Most of all, it is affordable, this modest little block between the mansions, and that's reflected in the residents, the affordability: old and young, white, brown, black, gay, single parent. My mother thinks it's psychologically unhealthy to live up in the air like this; you have to have ground under your feet, in her view.
Below me lives Mrs Barrett. She's lived in her flat for 18 years already. Her name is Cynthia and even though she introduces herself as such, no one calls her that. Mrs Barrett and her ancient poodle regularly walk slowly around the soccer field. Mrs Barrett is also old, but not as old as the little dog. The dog is 14. I regularly meet them in the lift and never know what to talk about. So I ask how old the dog is, realising too late that I always ask that. Then she says 14 and then we both look down. Little old dog, Mrs Barrett's walking shoes, her legs puffy from water retention and bulging veins, that's what I see. Does she see my dirty shoes, or just the little dog that is her life? I wonder. There used to be two dogs, but somewhere in the course of the winter one gave up the ghost. I still haven't had the courage to ask what happened to the second dog.
Mrs Barrett is the chairperson of the body corporate. She regularly leaves handwritten blue koki notes in the lift with warnings about rubbish bags and parking.
Mrs Barrett has a friend who sometimes comes to visit. She drives a blue BMW and calls Mrs Barrett "Barry". Mrs Barrett's friend has a very melodious voice. That form of address pleases Mrs Barrett, I think, because she smiles slightly when her friend calls her that. (It could also be from embarrassment.)
Once Mrs Barrett's car was broken and she asked me to drop her off in town. That evening she came to thank me with a plate of cooked food (potatoes, pumpkin, rice, meat and tomato-and-onion salad). Everything tasted the same. When I pass Mrs Barrett's floor in the lift in the evening, I smell potatoes, pumpkin, rice, meat and tomato-and-onion salad all in one.
Above me lived a man who never spoke to anyone. Last year he locked himself out of his flat one night and tried to climb in through an open window from the roof. He lost his balance and fell to his death, eight floors down. He had to have fallen right past my window, and I was probably awake, but I didn't see anything, or hear anything. Julius, the caretaker, found him only early the next morning. None of us knew what his name was, and Mrs Barrett was too shocked to remember. I don't remember how we knew that he wanted to climb in through the window, and why we did not think he'd just jumped. I often wonder why he didn't scream, how fast he fell past me and what it must have sounded like when he hit the cement. I still don't know what his name was.
His flat stood empty for a while until a young couple moved in at the beginning of the year. It was only then that I realised how quiet the man who fell to his death had been, how little he had moved around in his flat, that he'd never made any sounds of life.
A few weekends ago the young couple was held up at gunpoint in the flat one night; apparently the robbers got in by climbing through an open window from the roof. Since then the security in the block has been jacked up and there are lots of blue Mrs Barrett notes in the lift with new rules about buzzing and the use of remotes.
Fourteen bergies live on the soccer field. Over the weekends there are 17. In summer they stay near the road, where the tap is, but in winter they move to the middle of the soccer field, where the drainage is better and the water seeps away more quickly. They each have a piece of black builder's plastic sheeting that they open out just before dark, in two rows of seven. All neatly laid out for the night. In the morning each folds his little bundle up and one stays behind to watch over the bundles.
This year they moved to the middle of the fields one nice sunshiny day. The weather bureau had said sunny and warm for a week. That night it started raining. It rained for days. On the third day of rain I asked Mrs Barrett whether they couldn't move into my garage, just until the rain let up. She refused outright. So I made them a pot of soup with a lot of meat in it and took them three bottles of sweet wine to salve my conscience, reduce my guilt. They were more pleased about the soup than the wine. When the sun started shining again, they laid all their possessions and clothes out in formations and patterns on the soccer field. And only then drank the wine. They are nice bergies, they don't make a mess, they are quiet except on Friday evenings, and they never ask for money, just for old clothes. Except Anton. He's forever wanting to wash your car, for five rand.
I know the longer I live here, the more difficult it will be to move. I moved from Stellenbosch when the white got too blinding, when the chemist, the bank, the coffeeshop all knew my name and business, but mainly because of a sore heart. I moved out of the hotel when one of the other residents collapsed in the lounge, out of his mind on acid or something, and I just climbed over him and left him there to wallow in his misery. Too tired for my generation and specifically the area's dependency and experiments and boredom. And because they gunned down my favourite barman in the street for R2 000. And because one evening someone asked for a lighter and then held a gun to my head for a cellphone. (He didn't know about the R10 000 cash I had on me after a show.) The whole incident wouldn't have happened if someone hadn't parked in front of the gate to the safe parking lot and I had to stop in the street. While he held the gun to my head, and also against my stomach, three people walked by and did nothing. Only Sally, the drunk bergie who spent five years in jail for killing her husband by hitting him with a frozen snoek, screamed and held me when I started to cry uncontrollably after the robber had gone off with the cellphone.
You are not staying here a day longer, my boyfriend said, and he found me the place where I live now. Furnished. I went to pack my clothes and moved out of the hotel.
And now I'm over 30, beyond my wild youth. My furniture has been in storage for almost three years, my books at a friend's house, my paintings at my sister's. Someone borrowed my couch, but I can't remember who, will probably never get it back, don't really want it back. I don't know what it is that I do want. Ambivalence is such an underrated state to be in.
I live quietly in my flat, of which ten friends have the address. I seldom open the door when someone comes to visit. I live fast in my car, which clocks up 60 000 km a year. I work hard in an office among designers and copywriters and artists. I work hard in school halls and church halls and primitive rehearsal venues. Seldom, very seldom in a theatre. My laptop, which contained my life, was recently stolen in Grahamstown. I'm still getting to know the new one, careful as a new lover, finger by finger. There is still too little on the hard drive to be a blueprint of me, to understand my language. And there's no trace of the mails for referring back to what and where and when. And especially who. That place, that access to past has been lost.
Since my father's death, the members of my family sit in a different place at each meal at family get-togethers. I've lost that place too. Our family never goes in one car anymore, my place behind the driver is gone. My mother lives in a smaller house in town now. I sleep in the guestroom.
Sunday after Sunday I look at houses and flats, and especially at what people have in their houses and flats, on show for the strangers hunting for places. Not appreciated by the agents with calculators and contracts ready for signing. I can't find a place that I want.
If I were to buy a place and make it mine, and try to place my life in it, as the ultimate point of reference from which to live, perhaps I would be able to fill a space and call it my own. My place. Something to look after and to protect, that gives sense to life with its responsibilities and bonds, that tempers my wanderlust. And then, perhaps, I'd be able to think bigger about a country and a continent.
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Saartjie Botha is a playwright and theatre impresario.
She has won great praise as a playwright, particularly for
Spanner, Die Goue Seun and 1975. As a
producer she has tackled productions like Peter Verhelst's
Aars!, Tom Lanoye's Mamma Medea and Astor Piazzolla's
tango operita Maria de Buenos Aires under the banner
of the production company Vleis, Rys & Aartappels. She is
also involved with community theatre on wine farms in the
Boland. She managed a coffeeshop before going into full-time
theatre work in 2001. The establishment of a permanent theatre
company is her next goal. She lives in Cape Town. 
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