One Woman’s Flesh is Another Mans Chocolate

All is well on the southern tip of Africa. It must have something to do with the early onset of spring in Cape Town. Something is definitely up and I can feel faint stirrings in my loins as we slowly emerge from our self-imposed exile and involuntary hibernation. It’s time again to gird ones loins and go out and do battle at the sidewalk cafes of Cape Town. Yes, our ancient forefathers did exactly that. They tied leather straps around their balls and went out to look for trouble.

In winter we swathe ourselves in the protective bandage of dullness, but as summer approaches, its time to consider the virtues of being reckless again. If you want to feel truly alive nothing beats the lascivious nasty side of human existence. With the rising temperature and lengthening days, it was this nasty side that reared its ugly but fascinating head in Hout Bay recently in the form of that all too common human frailty, jealousy, but in this instance of the murderous kind. As the whales frolicked in the bay, a crime of passion was committed here in Hicksville, in our very midst, under our sunglasses so to speak, to shake us out of our winter slumber and herald the arrival of the new season.

The facts are plain: On a gloriously sunny day in a home high above the harbour an afternoon tryst ended in a bloody murder. The perpetrator of the heinous deed returned home unexpectedly and caught the two secret lovers in bed in what the police report described as a very compromising position (read having oral sex). The enraged jilted lover attacked the long-standing live-in lover, plunging a common bread knife into the victim’s neck. During the ensuing scuffle, the third party fled the scene of the crime, slipping out of the front door and speeding away to safety. Safety in this instance being the illicit lover’s home base in Camps Bay, that fertile breeding ground of deviant behaviour. As the saying goes, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Yes, dear reader you guessed correctly, the protagonists in this deadly lovers triangle were all "womyn".

While the unfaithful lover lay on the floor expiring, the muted beige lounge carpet changed colour becoming a whimsical irregular pattern of gently spreading crimson. An aura of tormented stillness and studied concentration consumed the jilted partner as the reality of her deed began to sink in. She gathered all the strength left in her whitened knuckles and rage depleted fingers to dial her attorney's number and summons his assistance. The attorney escorted his client to the local police station where she duly handed herself over to the bemused policeman on duty.

Police later found the victims body on the lounge floor and next to it the blunt and bloodied kitchen knife. On the glass coffee table next to the body they found a copy of a book called "The Powerless Penis", written by a Dutch psychoanalyst called Kees Miereneuker, “The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories”, several magazines called "WOMYN" dedicated to the joys of lesbianism, a publication called Crazy for Chocolate and an Australian Women's Weekly magazine containing Finger Food recipes.

In between pondering about Freud's vexing interpretation of sexual ambivalence being primal, I continued my relentless pursuit for the perfect cup of coffee. My diligence was soon rewarded. I discovered a new coffee shop concept called Vida e Caffe. Located next to the eTV studios and the Cape Town Film and Television School, the place is so hip, you could never imagine it to have its origins in humble Portugal, the land of Fado and the flaming chourico. A junk shop in its former incarnation, the converted space is long and narrow, its walls clad in an interesting combination of cream coloured marble and brown mosaic. An extremely wide, framed black and white photograph of some Latin looking soccer team is the only decoration that adorns the otherwise empty walls.

It is a brilliantly simple concept. A self-service counter runs along its entire length, with three tables inside, counters and barstools lining the floor to ceiling windows which face onto busy Kloof street, aluminium and plastic chairs and tables scattered on the crowded sidewalk outside. They play Frank Sinatra, jazz, big band, swing and the blues. But more importantly they serve coffee in all its glorious permutations. Freshly squeezed orange juice is also on offer from a wonderful transparent contraption that looks like an automated tennis-ball serving machine. Monster muffins which are called "bolinhos" in Portuguese and "pasteis de nata" or custard pastries, are if you exclude the customers, the only edibles.

I sat on a barstool at the window multi-tasking. While casually glancing at the new UK men's magazine called "Jack", which was opened on the counter before me on the page featuring the buttock dance, I munched on a sesame-coated sweet red pepper and feta bolinho, sipped a tall black iced Americano to wash it all down and happily contemplated the light-hearted frothiness of life. "Jack" is a great read. I highly recommend it to all genders. It is chock a block full of crass commercial goodness, that all too tasty cocktail of sterile hedonism that we so often condemn yet secretly covet. It features an orgy of war, animals, humour, fashion, girls, guns, mountains, killer whales and motel sex.

I was eyeing the clientele - a heady mixture of bored Camps Bay housewives, vegetarians but with a carnivorous look in their eyes and gays, both attracted by the Adonis serving types in their tight T-shirts and full aprons, waif like models with flat bottoms, denim clad students, studio execs, advertising moguls, lawyers, ageing lotharios and ordinary lechers like me.

My first view of her was from behind. I was unobserved and therefore safe to appraise her wares undisturbed. In a world obsessed with speed and thinness, she was a welcome exception. She had the full type of voluptuous body that Levantine men find immensely satisfying. Her movements were slow and deliberate. As she sashayed across the room, she swayed her hips with the practiced ease of a professional belly-dancer. If she had lived in another age, place and time, she would have flourished in this noble calling and been greatly admired for her skill. She wore a dove grey dress that not only adhered to but also perfectly followed the contours of her generous body. Her cleft round protuberances were on the whole mostly constricted by her underwear. But gently spreading on either side of the V-shaped lines, that rampant bulging pear of unconfined flesh made contact with the soft cotton of her dress. A thin gold chain dangled around her waist at a rakish angle to further entice the unmistakable Arab intent in my hungry eyes.

Only after more bolinho and coffee could I bear to look again at that tantalising outline of desire. Here before me was full-blooded womanhood in motion. Here before me was proof that a fully clothed woman is infinitely more alluring than a naked one. I mused if she were mine; I'd resolve to have good manners even in the bedroom. Greek style, Arab style, Turkish style, call it what you will would definitely be out of the question. I would be clean; I would never slap her on the bottom. I'd keep my socks on, I'd say please and thank you. In short I would be a perfect gentleman and like every good gentleman knows, I would use my elbows as the other critical points in the libidinous triangle.

That's the strange thing about bounteous bottoms and women who wear stockings. The top is always nearest to the bottom. It struck me that so many women are best viewed from behind. As the great author Philip Roth discovered with Irish girls, they have too many repressed feelings and are not used to being openly admired. If you want to eyeball women in a blatant direct way, it seems you have to go all the way to Brazil. No, here at home there's too much pussy-footing. Furtive, stolen glances are all that today's emasculated male can offer and all that today’s liberated woman can handle. Notice how when you ogle them directly, how they reflexively raise the ramparts and fold their arms to hide their breasts.

Then as fate would have it, I spotted a young uninhibited lass with short copper- coloured hair that proved me hopelessly wrong. She had poured herself into a red T-shirt all pointed and pert that exposed her belly and pierced navel. She wore a long faded denim hipster skirt, slung incredibly low even by my increasingly lax standards. This was not a skirt. This was a weapon worn like a gunslingers belt and with the same brazen insouciance. Adorned across her mid-riff, snaking and spiralling its way around was clearly tattooed a message of "Love". Written in a distinctive cursive longhand style and addressed to the world at large, it followed the outline of where her panties should have been, plunging downwards, with words unknown, a hidden message perhaps, to end we don't know where, but we can only hope at the lips of her shaven mound of Venus or at the very least at the tip of her Brazilian, again that mysterious triangle of desire.

While Europe flooded, I was in a trance. My midday reverie was then abruptly shattered by two well-coifed attractive young women sitting next to me sipping tall Latte's and dressed like no-nonsense professional types, dark slacks, white blouses, tailored jackets. The conversation I overheard invaded my thoughts and left me mildly perplexed. They were discussing the merits of the Indian squat position as a remedy for constipation. There are many women out there it seems that are afflicted with blockaded guts. This was a sad fact that I did not need to be reminded of, certainly not on a sunny afternoon surrounded by so much beauty. You see in my perfect world, women only have highly desirable and purely decorative bums but no functioning anuses.The two women had tried every remedy known to man to no avail: liquorice, papaya, prunes, bran, beetroot, olive oil, five rams suppositories from China, hydro-colonic irrigation, Brooklax, Agiolax, marimba jam, Senokot, seeds and such. No joy. One of the women had gone to India to find herself by losing herself in the second most populous nation on this earth. A journey of "spiritual re-awakening" she called it. She returned home several months later with a cure for her constipation and a new found respect for nice new shiny things like chrome toasters and BMW's.

At this stage an unwelcome internal debate was raging inside my head. Did I have anything significant to add to their conversation? Was continuing and all-knowing silence my best recourse? I wanted to tell them that the Indian-style squat had been perfected if not invented by the great Ghandijee as a non-violent way to defy the British. They would not have believed me. I wanted to tell them that as a young boy my father had taught me how to execute this potentially dangerous manoeuvre, while perched precariously on the slippery rim of a porcelain toilet bowl. They would not have cared to listen. On our country trips he taught me to gingerly lift the toilet seat with the tip of my shoe. Then you had to remove your jockeys and trousers, while keeping your shoes on, a task a whole lot easier to accomplish in the bell-bottom era and then squat on the rim. Keeping your shoes on was always advisable. I once tried the elevated squat wearing only my socks and a short-sleeved shirt. With superhuman effort I tried desperately to stay balanced on the treacherous rim, as all hell exploded beneath me. My foot slipped and I narrowly missed crushing my testicles into a pulp. I wanted to challenge them to attempt this position in their Manolo Blahnik stilettos but I remained silent. Constipation was not my problem, and at home I had in any event rendered the plastic seat redundant, preferring the cold comfort of sitting directly on the porcelain rim, this having the added advantage of providing more dangling room for my male paraphernalia.

Murder most foul, buttocks, bolinhos, tattooed bimbettes, lavatory etiquette, breasts and Brazilians. All in the space of a week. What next? After all this a fitting finale that could have featured the title:"Crazy Things to do with Chocolate." I read the disquieting news from Durban that an enterprising young artist called Nicola Deane shaved her body from head to toe, donned a schoolgirls uniform, sans the knickers, sat down on a chair in front of a live audience, opened her legs and under the harsh glare of the stage lights above made chocolate moulds of her vagina. This was an unusual performance of Home Economics at its best at the NSA Gallery. The performance was followed by polite applause, the audience visibly relieved that no-one was offered any chocolates to eat on the night. The chocolates are however on sale at the gallery at R250 for a gold box? of eight. A fellow conceptual artist, named Peet Pienaar not to be outdone grabbed his penis, pointed it at the the audience and waved it around in a slow circular motion.

You may ask: art, pornography or simply acts of liberating life? I don't know. What I do know is what I want for Christmas; Peace and goodwill among men and a gold box of chocolates, preferably dark.

Best regards
Costa
Cape Town, 28 November 2002.