Myself, I’ve chosen. I chose eleven years ago, on a spring night in Johannesburg, when the air was heady with the smell of jasmine. The world shook that night, a love so great, a meeting so intense that the universe trembled.
That was what got my attention initially, the shaking of the earth. I looked down from my candyfloss bed in my Turkish-delight universe to see what minor quake had occurred on earth. When I found the source of the vibration, my decision was instantly made. I made my choice with as much urgency as they made theirs. Naturally, fool mortals that they are, they assumed the shaking of the earth was imagined, not the real thing it is.
The artist James Jacques Joseph Tissot painted me in 1877, oil on wood. The painting’s called ‘Hide and Seek’. I’m enchanting, entirely irresistible. Golden curls frolic around the perfection of my face, defying the satin bow that tries to secure them. I’m playing on a Persian carpet wearing a Victorian silk frock. Great big orange bows fall at my shoulders and around my waist. You can just see the heel of my shiny black shoes.
My cheeks are like two dimpled toffee apples, and my mouth, at the age of three, is already set in what will be its lifelong, profane pout. In front of me is a ball. I’m looking at it, smiling to myself. The sofas are covered in sumptuous fur and silk brocades. Thick velvet curtains fall languidly across the windows.
My two beloved boys are always with me, but only I can see them. From everyone else, they hide.
In the painting, my friends peek at me from behind screens and ornaments. My gentle governess, Tatiana, reads the paper. She’s been with our family since I was born and will remain with us until my own daughter is born in twenty years’ time. As my daughter grows up, Tatiana will pass the raising of infants on to her own child.
You can’t see my mother in this picture, because she’s in the parlour making lemonade squeezed from fresh lemons from her own tree. Dashes of colour flash from the garden through the windows and the French doors.
I’m like a smiling Buddha, or Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince, frolicking in the gardens of ignorance. Everything my senses happen upon is intoxicating.
Many a lonely night I find myself weary from gazing at the earth and waiting for them to be suitably prepared for my birth. Then I’m tempted to join the boys in Atlanta, where they are going to live. But then I fly through skies of laughing stars, reverberating with the laughter of happy princes and long-lost relatives to the National Gallery of Art in Washington and dwell on that picture, admiring my next life. Mind you, I get confused; it could have been a past life. Either way, Atlanta’s not in the picture. I’ve got it all worked out. I can wait. All these years of waiting will one day be worth it when I’m the child of that love affair.