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The Directory › Africa & the Levant › South Africa › Cape Town
Plate VI · i · a · The City

Cape Town

One house on the mountain's lower slopes, and a page written in the future tense because I have not been.

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A quiet residential street on the wooded lower slopes of Table Mountain at last light, a whitewashed gable behind pines
Plate VI · i · a · The lower slopes

A city where the mountain decides the light, and I have only ever been told about it.

A day, properly arranged
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Written as a plan. Nothing above has happened yet.

The entries

One entry, and it is still hollow.
A shuttered studio at dusk, a plain work table and unframed canvases stacked against a lime-plaster wall
Interior · a painter's own rooms

An artist's house is the one museum where the collection and the collector cannot be separated, and I should like to test that against this one rather than keep asserting it.

NOT YET SEEN
Still on the list in Cape Town
Everything here, in fact. Kept so I cannot quietly forget it.
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Notes for Cape Town

This page carries one entry and no experience behind it. I have not walked this city, so I will not tell you how the light falls off the mountain in the afternoon or how long the rooms take — that is precisely the sort of thing one borrows from other people's books and repeats as one's own.

What I can tell you is why the entry is kept. It is a painter's own house, with her own collection still in it, which is the arrangement this directory exists to record. A reader wrote in about it and would not be put off, and readers who will not be put off are usually right.

March is the plan, on that reader's advice, and the day left deliberately loose either side of the house. Until then this is an intention with a plate number, and it is marked hollow for a reason.

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