Mandela Archives - 3 Quarks Daily

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

MOSS-CAMPBELL-FARROW Back in the late 1980s, a girlfriend of mine in South Africa was commissioned by a newspaper to make a painting of Mandela. He was anticipated to leave prison soonish, and since no image of him was allowed to be shown anywhere, nobody had any idea what he looked like after 27 years in prison (it was a tip from the CIA to the South African Security Police that landed the “Black Pimpernel” in jail). So my friend made the painting, it was printed, and she wasn't far off.

And then she met him at some do, and was introduced as the painter.

She told me that her first impression of him was that he was very, very sexy. In fact, he came on to her as a man, and she confessed that if he had merely crooked his little finger at her, she would have followed him anywhere and let him have his way with her.

An old biddy, a friend of my father, a racist, confessed that if there was one black man who could put his shoes under her bed, it was Nelson Mandela.

When Mandela was young, he liked to swan around in suits and long silk scarves.

Mandela was a ladies man.

He met the queen of England once, after not having seen her awhile, and wrapped her up in a bear hug, and said “Ah, Elizabeth! You are as beautiful as ever. How do you manage to keep so young?” and while all the courtiers were beside themselves with embarrassment at god-knows-how-many protocols of etiquette were being trounced, she blushed, giggled and said helplessly: “Nelson!”

It was with this same charm — a sense of mischief, warm humor, and unfailing grace and politesse — that Mandela wooed his jailers and the politicians with whom he negotiated his freedom while he was still in prison.

Here is what happened, since no one is telling the story now, and it's not often told anyhow.

by Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash)

Five weeks ago I said to my brilliant girlfriend: “I'd like to see my father before he dies.” She said: “Congratulations.” She'd been asking me on and off for two years whether I'd like to go and visit him where he lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and my stock answer had always been: “I don't have the slightest interest in ever seeing my father again.”

So what changed?

You here at 3quarksdaily know me as a passionate ranter against our irresponsible elites (for my favorite screed ever, google this title: “Government Is Not The Problem, Private Enterprise Is: The Global Terrorism Of Al Qaeda, BP And Goldman Sachs”). However, that's not what I'm up to now. This time out, I'm autobiographical. Personal. Self-revelatory. Unbuttoned. A la Moll Flanders. Or Paris Hilton. Confessions of an Opium Eater or something, at double the length of my usual rants.

I made the big Gauguin move of my life two decades ago, when I walked out on my South African Jewish Princess wife in our seven-room, three-bathroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Except I didn't go to Tahiti. I went to a garret on Manhattan's Lower East Side. For fifteen years, while I was poor and wrote, wrote, wrote my seven unpublished novels (and became the 90s slam poet Evert Eden), my ex-wife and I didn't communicate. Then, out of the blue, I got a call from her.

“I'd like to see you,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

“I'm dying.”

She always had a way of knocking the wind out of my sails. This time the issue was galloping cancer in her stomach.

I went to hang out with her and her brother and her sister during her last days on earth, in that big, elegant apartment, now sans my large paintings, but filled with South African art, a shrine to our homeland.

“I've got no charge with you anymore,” she informed me, in the magnanimous version of her imperial Jewish Princess voice. I thought, “fuck you,” but I just nodded.

Two days before she died, throwing up her guts in a gush of blood and stuff, my ex-wife lay propped up in her bedroom with me on the side of her beautiful bed, designed to her specifications, as was everything and everyone around her. Her doctor brother had been slamming her with as many drugs as he could to keep her semi-comfortable but still lucid.

The two of us were sitting alone, the very ex-married couple. She said:

“How can this be happening to me, when I've always tried to be so good?”

“It's fate,” I said. “We can't control what happens, just how we deal with it.”

It's amazing how one pulls out the most boring cliches at the best and worst of times. My ex-wife suddenly got up and walked to the bathroom, which had always been her bathroom when we lived together; I used the bathroom one room over. As she walked, trailing a sheet behind her, she said in the commanding version of her imperial Jewish Princess voice:

“Make the bed.”

I stood there, looking at the huge mess of sheets and blankets, caught like the proverbial husband in habitual male learned helplessness.

“How?” I asked.

Without losing a beat, and without even looking at me, she snapped:

“Military style.”

The door of the bathroom closed behind her. And I made that goddamn bed that she and I had spent ten years in, that I hadn't seen in fifteen years, and General Patton himself would've approved.

Tag: Mandela

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