THE WICKED GIFT FROM FRANCE
(part 2)
Anneline Kriel, Annie to her friends, is one of the two most beautiful people at the street café opposite Notre Dame. The other is Maggie, as Margaret Gardner the winner of last year’s Miss Teen competition. A spring breeze sweeps through Paris, the hair of the lovely girls dancing as they enjoy Jasper and just bear with me.
To say something, I mention that I need to find an English whip in France for my father’s birthday. No one laughs. The girls focus on Jasper. I heard somewhere, probably from a bitter reporter like me, that a man’s most important tool for models is his camera.
Jasper and Annie decide that Maggie should wear some of the South African outfits for the fashion shoot in Paris. Maggie is stunning but very young, more experienced Annie is the mother who has to protect her from danger in a foreign land. Jasper wants to take the fashion photos against the backdrop of Sacre Coeur, according to him a more beautiful cathedral than Notre Dame. The girls suggest I go look for my father’s whip on the square behind Sacre Coeur, where there is always a flea market. I know they want to get rid of me, but it’s not a bad idea. Artists are always at work in the market square, I bought a bargain of a landscape there on a previous trip.
There are no English whips for sale at the flea market, but there are some nice walking sticks an Arab is trying to peddle. I see one not unlike Desmond Colborn’s, and decide it’s really not too expensive. After I buy the French kierie from the Arab, a feeling of guilt overwhelms me: it was far too expensive, my wife and children are going to be living on the street, I’d better buy them more expensive French gifts than originally planned. And some French sweets too. At a stall, another Arab is selling nougat and calling it hommit. I click he means homemade. The Arabs of Paris, refugees from North Africa, are still trying to speak English. Your smoke-addicted Frenchman refuses to speak English. The trick is to then speak Afrikaans, my home language; the French guy gets so curious he speaks English to find out where you’re from.
The nougat looks so good I sit on the steps of Sacre Coeur and enjoy a piece while I watch Jasper play Hollywood director with the two most beautiful models in Paris. The fact that they’re both from South Africa makes me feel quite the patriot.
But the nougat is unexpectedly hard, damn that Arab,, I painfully bite the filling out of a molar. Now I have to keep my mouth shut, it feels as if the spring wind of Paris wants to pay the tooth a sharp visit. Damn this for luck, I actually want to take my new French walking stick for a spin, but I desperately have to get back to the hotel and a phone; I need a dentist more than anything now.
No luck on the phone. Summer holiday has struck. I hear I can’t see a dentist in Paris for three weeks. Icall my wife on the phone and she suggests clove oil. She’s brilliant, my mum used to give us boys that for tooth ache. I buy half a dozen bottles. The cave in my molar doesn’t hurt too much yet, but it could be a problem on the train and train staff don’t usually keep painkillers or clove oil on them.
That evening we catch the night train to Cannes. Jasper doesn’t want his trunk full of “exclusive South African fashion” to be downgraded in the bottom of a plane again. Luckily I like train travel and the route to the coast goes through towns like Arles where we apparently have to drop off passengers, so my French stick and I might take a detour to where Van Gogh walked with his bag of canvases and pots of paint. I’m a Vincent fan.
But on that train after midnight I don’t even think about Vincent with his one ear anymore. And the clove oil only helps for a short while, the hole in the molar is obviously too big. Jasper sleeps through it all. I lie and read with a pillow against my mouth, feeling sorry for myself, missing my wife.
In the grey light of early morning, with the busy port of Marseille outside the train window, I finally fall asleep from sheer exhaustion.
Jasper wakes me when the train stops at Cannes station, and guess what the horrible viper of a human being has to say to me?
“You don’t know how lucky you are, sleeping like a baby, I was up all night again”
I’m too tired to kill him.
South African film producer Tommie Meyer meets us at the station. He informs us Anneline Kriel will be landing from Paris this afternoon. Tommie treats me like his best friend and Jasper even better. I’ve done features about other films made by Tommie, so I do know him slightly.
“Tommie has a heart of gold but the gold is protected by black Mambas,” film director Dirk de Villiers once explained the producer to me. Dirk himself loved to exaggerate..
On the way to our hotel, Tommie tells us that he was thrown out of his hotel, don’t we have a place for him to sleep? Jasper looks at me in horror. I can’t remember all the stumbling words of my apology anymore, basically a no, disappointed Tommie just smiles sadly at our treason..
We soon find out Tommie is not the only South African at the film festival with a strange accommodation situation. The very Dirk de Villiers, not a friend of Tommie’s, stays in the cramped little Hotel de la Poste in an alley behind the expensive Hotel Carlton. The Carlton is where all the big names usually stay. Every morning during the festival Dirk walks out of his modest accommodation and enters the Carlton by its back service door, then slips through the enormous kitchen to the grand front door where he triumphantly appears as if he is one of those big names.
Dirk is here to sell Glenda, his film about a famous stripper performing with her big pet python. Tommie is here to try the same with Somer, starring Anneline “Miss World” Kriel who keeps her clothes on in the film. Things seem darker than usual between him and Dirk, I suspect Tommie’s lucky break with Miss World in a leading role is not helping either.
Of course I don’t know it yet, but years from now Dirk de Villiers will turn an original script of mine into a hit television series from which we would carve two very successful sequels: Eagles, the dramatic and tense adventures of of Boer War hero Sloet Steenkamp and his fellow prisoners of war on St. Helena Island, site of Napoleon’s captivity as well.
Tommie makes a flashy point of introducing us to “Anneline Kriel, Miss World” that afternoon to arrange the fashion shoot. I swear, he carries on grandly as if we haven’t met her yet. Annie looks beautiful but pale and tired. The Paris ashion boss she and Maggie work, Jasper tells me, is a cruel slave trader. I ask why she puts up with it. Annie smiles wryly: “Money, honey.”
That night Jasper disappears again. During the film festival Cannes is, of course, teeming with ladies of the night. I go to dinner with Melanie Millin, the lovely and sweet advertising director of a South African film distribution giant. We’re old pals, she notices I’m struggling to eat. I confess there’s a cave in my mouth. She wants us to go look for a pharmacy immediately, but it’s too late in the evening. The next day Melanie has the real McCoy, a miraculous tooth pacifier of a drug, delivered to my hotel. I still worship the ground Mel walks on.
Through her I also meet Hollywood stars who are screening their new films at Cannes this year. This story is not about those interviews, but allow me to drop the names Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Paul Newman and Sylvia Kristel, among others. I’m doing the last one out of curiosity – the interview, I mean. Sylvia Kristel is the lovely and highly intelligent Dutch star of soft porn hit Emmanuelle a film we’re not allowed legally to see in South Africa. That doesn’t mean we don’t see it, of course.
I also interview Sir Freddie, the almost legendary general who chased Hitler through Europe with Field Marshal Montgomery. He’s impressive, to say the least, a fit little man with the head of a clever, elderly lion. My editor is certainly not going to use the whole interview. Sir Freddie is not hostile at all, but he does have certain problems with African politics. And no, you can’t see a Roman aqueduct through his toilet window, the mountain is completely overgrown.
The two weeks of the festival fly by. Jasper and Annie make beautiful pictures, he cleverly does the celebrity photos I ask him for, and after dark t he hunts the ladies of the night. I just don’t understand this at all. “Anneline Kriel, Miss World,” if I may quote Tommie Meyer, obviously enjoys Jasper’s company, why won’t he try his l;uck there? Why does he have to climb into strange and possibly unhygenic beds at night? The hunting does improve his French, he now realizes the butt-slapper shouted fien, not pien. Fien, correct spelling fin, means end and in context it therefore means: “Finish,, dammit!”
The day before we fly back to South Africa, Jasper surprises me with a package. He warns with a smile that it’s not for me. I open it. It’s not an English whip, but it looks like one, a real riding whip. I want to refuse the gift at first, but a little devil arrived on my shoulder: Come on, have some fun with this.
So I bring home a fancy French walking stick, expensive presents for wife and kids, and a birthday gift.
My father loved that whip, used it with great joy on his horses and cattle. Eventually the blue ribbon braided through the black leather broke completely. My wicked brother begged me to confess the truth but I couldn’t do it to our dear mother, and for years our father proudly cracked that whip. Mom and dad went to their graves without ever knowing what a lady of the night once did with that very whip to willing buttocks.