Malcolm brought me back to the consulate.
He wasn’t allowed to park in the lot. He dropped me off and said he’d be waiting in a strip mall and to just give him a missed call when I was done.
I met with a large man in a red and white Hawaiian shirt. He led me down a hallway that had a very large and original Roy Lichtenstein painting on the wall.
There were a dozen TVs in his office, stacked on metal shelving, muted, playing news and commercials and daytime talk shows. A few of them were showing Tony Blair being questioned on the invasion of Iraq.
I wasn’t able to offer much help about the thing I was brought back to talk to him about. The man in the Hawaiian shirt said it was OK.
He led me outside. It was windy and sunny. He said he didn’t care. Whatever. I gave him my e-mail address. He gave me his card.
I called Malcolm and we got back on the highway. We drove past Khayelitsha again. There was a prostitute waving a yellow flag. The oldest game in town, Malcolm said.
There was a big brush fire ahead off the road. Fire trucks were pulled up near it. The flames were blowing close to the shanties.
I got back to the hostel. One of the American study abroad students called and wanted to meet with me.
I walked onto campus. A colored guy came up to me and mumbled something and sort of put his hand out. I thought he was asking for money but just said huh? He pointed at his wrist like asking for the time. I looked at my watch and told him and walked away and felt guilty but also suspicious.
I met the student. He had a bag of laundry with him.
We went to a place next to The Nook and got a table outside. He got an Appletiser. I got a cappuccino. The tables had white tablecloths and blown-glass vases with roses in them.
He wanted to show me a documentary he made the semester before. He took out his Macbook. It was red. It was the same red as his Lacoste polo.
A toothless black homeless man came up to us and put out his hand for change. We said we didn’t have anything. He walked away.
A little disheveled black kid came up selling long-handled wooden spoons and feather dusters. We also waved him off.
There were some Afrikaner girls sitting at a table across from us. One of the girls was slouched against the booth, laughing, sipping a milkshake. She had on the same kind of sandals that my girlfriend in Argentina spent several gratuitous hours shopping for in Buenos Aires a day before I flew home to Chicago.
He showed me the documentary. It was about a school in a colored township. There were interviews with a few kids and one of the administrators of the school. There were shots of the township. They were shot from inside a bus as it drove through the neighborhood.
We finished our drinks and got the bill. It came in a cigar box.
I walked to the art museum. There was a permanent collection of a lot of European-style painting and an anthropological section on African tribes from the region.
One of the captions on the wall read: “Young Thembu men dressed in their beaded finery and decorative head-cloths on their way to intlambe: a formal gathering of their peer group organized as an age association, which has important socialization functions and to which any initiated males and marriageable females belong.”
I walked upstairs. There were a lot of gray-haired white people looking at drawings on the walls. There was a new show opening of illustrations done by a couple early European settlers of Cape Town.
I was looking at a portrait of some Cape Malay slaves. An old lady came up next to me and said the slave girl’s hairstyle was very modern, like the mannequins in the fashion stores today.
The only non-white person was a kid on the museum staff helping set-up chairs.
It was a gathering of the Friends of the Museum. They took their seats and a younger man started explaining this illustrator and how gentleman in those times would be able to draw quite well and so on.
I stayed back from the chairs and just kept looking closely at the drawings.
A lady started coughing and staggered out to the hall. Her continued hacking echoed from the hallway back into the hushed gallery. Her cell phone then went off with the familiar Nokia tune and also echoed back into the hushed gallery.
I walked past the crowd and tried to get out. A lady, one of the Friends’ organizers, asked didn’t I want to stay for the talk?
I looked at her, paused. She said oh go on no you don’t.
I walked back to the entrance of the museum. There were a few monographs for sale. I saw one on Willie Bester, the sculptor. The guy at the front desk gave me a copy. I paid. Then I asked for a second one, for my friend C. who told me she was going to come visit me from France.
I walked a couple blocks outside of town, to a creek. The sidewalks ended.
I walked back downtown. I took a picture of a shadow of a tree on a white wall and noticed some guys down the street looking at me. I walked past them. One of them was selling mangoes. I asked for two. He wanted to sell me a whole box. Then he offered four with a fifth thrown in free for twenty Rand. I asked for two. He said five for twenty. I walked away.
I went to a Pick ‘n Pay and bought a couple pot pies and a big slice of watermelon. At the checkout the guy in front of me took out an old yellow plastic bag. The cashier took it like she expected to and put the groceries inside. I got up and said I’d use my backpack. It didn’t seem to be a big deal.
I walked back to the hostel and re-heated my curry beef pie in the microwave and ate it with the watermelon at a picnic table in the shade. I read some more of Waiting for the Barbarians.
A couple was in the kitchen near me. The wife asked where the milk was. Her husband said it’s in a plastic pouch next to the water!
I walked to a park. There were a lot of black people barbequing and hanging out. I didn’t see any white people. I got looks when I walked past.
I walked along a trail, under some trees, past rock sculptures. There were wildfire warnings on signs. I took some pictures, read. I saw some graffiti that said ZEITGEIST, which I’d talked about in a lecture in Argentina.
That night the undergrads called me up and invited me to an informal gathering of their peer group. It was a barbeque, a braai. Their dorm was down the road from my hostel.
I called them when I got there. We walked past a couple other dorms. A bottle was thrown out a window and smashed on the ground. There was hooting and yelling and people talking loudly and happily.
There was a security door to get into the dorm. It was a thick glass sliding door that opened in the middle and shut after a few seconds. It made a merciless whoosh when it closed. It seemed like the doors to a pressure lock of a spaceship or underwater research station.
The girl who met me said Bradley spent like several minutes with them emphasizing that these doors will hurt you very badly and you just have to be calm and step right through and not mess around.
We got up and stepped through and walked to the courtyard.
There were a lot of study abroad students milling around. One kid from Mexico. One from Iran. A lot of Americans. There was boerewors and potatoes and ostrich meat on the grill. There was some wine in plastic cups to drink.
A couple students came into the courtyard. A girl was pushing a metal grocery cart. She heaved it aside and they walked upstairs to a room.
We ate. Talked. I was going on and on to this one girl about this friend of mine C. who seemed like she was going to come visit me. I hadn’t seen her in person for almost a year and a half, and even that last time was just for a few hours.
This girl and I got to talking about relationships. She’s from a farm town in the Great Plains and said if she marries a lousy husband then that just must be Christ’s plan for her.
The Iranian kid was talking to an American about how big America is and the American said five thousand kilometers and the Iranian went “Five thousand kilometers…wheeumph!”
The American talking to him had long blond hair slicked back and held down with a sweatband. I asked him what he was doing at Stellenbosch. He said he’s in Arts, so he can do anything.
I left. The girl I was talking to walked me out and opened the threatening sliding door for me and gave me a hug and said bye.
I got back to my hostel and took down my clothes from the hangars and folded up all the paper and brochures and maps I’d gotten since I’d arrived. I was leaving for Johannesburg the next day.
I was going to there to meet up with Frithjof Bergmann. He was flying to Jo-burg from Germany the day after I’d get there. He’d sent me a couple e-mails with the numbers of the taxi driver and of the private house where he stays. Though he said I couldn't stay at the house because it's sort of a brothel.
In Stellenbosch they’d kept asking if I had accommodations and an itinerary with Frithjof. I just kept saying it’d be taken care of.
I made a reservation at the Backpackers’ Ritz, a hostel in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg. The biggest thing it's closest to is the Hyde Park shopping mall. They were going to send somebody to pick me up from airport.
Bradley had given me some laminated in-case-of-emergency contact info cards. I put one in my notebook, one in a pocket of my backpack and one in my shoe. I charged my phone. I got into bed and finished Waiting for the Barbarians.
I went to sleep.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario