South Africa - 6

I got into Johannesburg in the afternoon, a Sunday. I called the hostel and they told me a driver was waiting there at the airport, about to leave. They said his name was Jamma. He was wearing a blue shirt. To hurry up.

I found him. We walked back and he called to a skinny blond girl sitting on a bench. She picked up her hiking bag and Jamma took us to his Explorer and we got in and he drove into the city.

The girl was Polish. Her hair was greasy and pulled back into a ponytail. Her eyes were blue. Her face was sunburned. She smiled when I asked her questions. She’d been living in Scotland for four years, living on an island and taking care of horses and working at a restaurant. She took a couple months off for the winter and was going on an overland tour in a converted truck from South Africa up to Kenya. They’d stop at the big nature reserves and camp-out at night along the highway. There were a dozen other people going. The truck was leaving from the hostel we were headed to, from the Backpackers’ Ritz.

There was some traffic.

We got to the Ritz. It was at the end of a lane of big mansions and offices-inside-mansions. There were black metal fences and electric wire around each place. You could see off into the hills between each place. The hills were all trees.

There were two gates to enter the Ritz. Two fences. In between the fences were thick coils of razor wire, wrapped through bushes and tree branches.

The Ritz was in an old mansion.

A tall fat white-haired guy was working the desk. He had a scratchy low voice. When the girl and I gave him our passports he laughed at our pictures and asked what we’d been on. He explained where everything was in the hostel, how to get stuff, what was nearby. He said it like he was reading a list he’d had to read too many times.

There was a kitchen but the guy said there wouldn’t be any dinner, that he’s the cook but hasn’t felt like cooking for a while.

There was a pool in the backyard of the place, down by a guest house. The water was green. There were a few kids sitting around on the grass drinking beer. Some of them were on the same overland tour as the Polish girl. I walked down there and sat on the grass and didn’t know what to do. There was a girl lying off by herself on a higher part of the lawn. She had dark hair and dark eyes. I thought maybe she was from South America.

I walked up and checked my mail to see if my friend C. had made any more plans to come visit. She hadn’t written.

I walked out to the front porch. That same girl was sitting there smoking a cigarette. I went back in and bought a pack at the front desk.

She was French, it turned out. She was doing an internship in Jo-burg and was waiting to get picked up by a brother in this host family she’d stayed with for a couple weeks. A tall skinny Scandinavian guy came up and said something to her. He had short gelled hair and was wearing tight white jeans and an undershirt.

I left and walked back down the lane to a busy street. The bakery and the fruit stand and everything else was shut in the shopping center to the right.

There was a lot of traffic. A lot of nice cars. Only a couple people on foot. It was warm, balmy. They said it was safe around there.

I walked to a BP station. I bought some biltong – cured spicy meat – and a Mail and Guardian, which comes out on weekends, a couple potpies and a Coke.

I walked back.

The potpies had been sitting out at the BP and were cold. I heated them in the microwave. They got hot and soft.

The Ritz is at the top of the hill and you can see almost to downtown Jo-burg. I went to a picnic table in a garden and ate my pies and watched the sun go down and listened to an episode of Entitled Opinions.

My mom gave me a call from the U.S. I told her Frithjof was supposed to be getting into South Africa today and that I hoped we’d meet up the next day. I called the two numbers he gave me to call: the taxi driver Mike and the innkeeper Richard. Mike referred to Frithjof as the professor. He said he’d tell him to call me.

I was sleeping in a big circular room at the top of a tower of the mansion. There were a dozen bunk beds along the wall but only a couple people staying the night. The windows were dusty and some of the latches were broken. Only a couple opened. The ceiling was curved and the floors were wood. You could hear echoes of your voice when you stood at the right spot. The air was thick and hot when I first walked in there and put my stuff down.

I hung around the lounge after it got dark and kept reading The Wretched of the Earth. A girl came up to me and pointed at the book and said it was great. She walked out to the front porch to smoke.

I walked out there.

Her name was Lia. She was from Italy. She said she’d read Wretched of the Earth in French for a class in Paris. She’s doing a Masters on transgenderism in Africa. She took mini-bus taxis everyday from the Ritz to Wits University downtown to research in their library. She’d spent a while in Nairobi working on the same thing at a university there. She had brown hair and skin whose best description was…stereotypically…olive oil.

She told me to check out Andre Brink. That she’d read A Dry White Season and liked it. I told her about Waiting for the Barbarians.

I went up to the dorm to go to bed. I got under the covers and lied there. It wasn’t so hot anymore. Then a mosquito hummed by my ear.

I didn’t sleep much. The mosquitoes started biting. Then a couple people checked in late and unpacked their bags and got into their beds. Then a couple people checked out early and packed up their bags and left their beds.

In the morning there was a lady working in the kitchen. I ordered toast and beans and orange juice. The toast was white bread with some butter. The beans were heated up from a can. The orange juice was a concentrate powder mix.

I took my plate back to the picnic table and ate outside again. It was sunny and humid but not too hot yet.

I went back inside to read. The fat man from the day before was lying down on the sofa in the lounge. He was watching a history show on Scotland. He said he should get some work done and got up and sauntered out to the patio and smoked a cigarette. He had a dry hard cough while he smoked.

There was a chalkboard on the wall. It was supposed to list dinner on it. It said instead Thought of Day: The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like Prostitutes…

A couple backpackers came to check-in. The fat man made fun of their passports.

I was going to go the mall and the bakery and wait for a call from Frithjof.

South Africa - 5

A driver named Malcolm picked me up the next day. When I tried to leave the hostel the key code for the gate didn’t work. They said they changed it and gave me the new combo.

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.

South Africa - 4.2

We walked around the corner to the Slave Lodge, which is now a Cape Town museum about slavery in South Africa. The Keiskamma Altarpiece was there in the entrance hall for a few more days.

Bradley checked his watch and said we must’ve missed the noon canon, which is a canon that gets shot off at 12:00 and used to be a way to set your clock or watch but now is traditional and tends to frighten visitors and children.

The Keiskamma altar is in the style of the Issenheim altarpiece, which was made in France in the 1500s. It was made at a monastery that was treating people with ergotism. Ergotism in those days came from eating bad bread, with a fungus in it. Symptoms of the disease are divided into the convulsive and the gangrenous.

The Keiskamma piece was made mostly by women in Hamburg, which is a South African village in the Eastern Cape. The village is poor and a good number of people there have or have died of HIV/AIDS.

A girl from the village was working at the museum as a guide for the altarpiece. She told us all about it and with Bradley on one side and her on the other opened the heavy wide panels and showed all the scenes of the altar. She said all the books about the altarpiece were sold out but this video playing on the small television set on the pedestal to her left explained how it was made and was (the DVD) available for purchase. She said the altar’s been touring around the world but is almost done now, but that it’s too big to be put in the church in Hamburg.

We walked into the slavery museum but there was a rather unreasonable and ocularly-fatiguing amount of text on the walls and we got tired of reading and walked back outside into the sunshine.

We walked down Government Avenue, a leafy sidewalk away from traffic that goes past the national library and parliament and one of the president’s houses. Bradley and I talked about President JZ. We agreed that while he may well be a convicted rapist and doesn't know much about AIDS, he at least doesn’t disdain and talk above the poor people who’ve elected him – unlike his predecessor.

A flock of schoolchildren came at us. School’d gotten out. They were wearing baby blue blazers with some complex school crest over the breast and baby blue vests and ties. The boys were wearing wool slacks and the girls skirts. Most of the kids were coloured or black.

We waded through the children. I asked Bradley what language they were speaking. …English, he said.

We passed the Company’s Gardens, which was made by the VOC to grow food for the passing ships. It’s a public park now that’s lush and quiet and has a lot of tourists and homeless people sitting and hanging out and walking around inside it.

We got to the end of the path, back to a busy street.

I asked if we could get some coffee.

We walked down the street to the original Vida e Caffe, which is a chain all over the country now. It’s a simple chic café, with a big red awning out front. The design of the signs and menu have a like “Keep Calm and Carry On” British royalty PSA aesthetic. The logo’s a shield with a cross inside and a crown on top.

It’s near the art school of the University of Cape Town and near a lot of design and media studios. There was one kid sitting at a table inside with a greasy pompadour and a checker vest. On the wall was a big slab of cork with the Vida e Caffe escutcheon carved in bas-relief. There were designer t-shirts and bags for sale in the back near the bathroom. It was standard hipster fare: faded bright colors, precocious child-type illustrations.

Bradley and I got cappuccinos at a table out front. I faced the street and could see Table Mountain. The clouds had cleared and it was blue and clear and warm like a fleece blanket.

The coffee was served in a white ceramic cup that had the red emblem stamped onto it. It came on a white saucer with a tiny spoon and a square of Lindt dark chocolate.

There were some kids next to us at a table looking at fashion sketches and thumbnail photos in an album. The girl with the book had horn-rimmed Ray-Bans up on her curly hair. She was wearing a dark purple plaid shirt and black short shorts.

Bradley and I talked about what he studied and how he ended up in South Africa and how he did his PhD in Cape Town. The traffic was noisy. We had to speak up.

We sat in the shade and lounged and I looked at this enormous stone mountain glowing in the sun and thought how tiny Mount Royal in Montreal looks compared to this thing.

We walked back to Gov’t Ave. and went to the National Gallery. There were three shows on. The first in the front hall was a solo show on Alexis Preller, who was a 20th century white South African painter. His stuff is a cross between like Diego Rivera and Juan Miró and Thomas Hart Benton, but based on a lot of old African culture. Most of his paintings are portraits of objects that look wood-carved, with a lot of arcs of color floating around.

The next show was a photo exhibit on the four South African Nobel Peace Prize winners: Albert Luthuli, Desmond Tutu, FW de Klerk and Nelson Mandela. There were paintings and sculptures and photography by recent South African artists, too.

There was Mashego Segogela’s little wood sculpture-tableau “Satan’s Fresh Meat Market” – which has got black demons eating various human body parts and an angel in white filming things with a camera and a green shack with more limbs dangling as if to dry and cure and another demon working inside.

There were sculptures by Wille Bester like “For Those Left Behind”, which is a sculpture of a fat white police officer at a machine gun with a pit bull behind him, its mouth in a harness. They’re on top of a wheeled pedestal. The whole thing is made of old metal machine parts, soldered together.

The last show was called Dada South? and had some recent SA art along with the best European Dada stuff – like a sculpture of a Prussian officer with a head like a pig’s, dangling from the ceiling. They had some of John Heartfield’s photomontages for AIZ magazine that he made in the 1930s in Germany. They had the one called “Hurray, the butter is gone!” that has a German family sitting around their kitchen table all happily eating bolts and bullets and bike parts. There’s a portrait of Hitler in the background and the kitchen wallpaper has Swastikas on it.

The museum was closing at five. Bradley and I left and walked out to the gardens in front. The Southeaster wind was blowing but the afternoon was clear and bright.

A little kid ran past us. He’d dropped his green plastic lunch box and it was getting blown down the path just out of his reach. He kept running after it. It got blown underneath the fence around a statue. He squatted down and tried to reach for it but couldn’t. Bradley and I laughed and continued walking.

There was a hill straight ahead of us, in the distance, about a third as high as Table Mountain. I asked what it was.

It was Signal Hill, Bradley said. You can drive or hike up there and watch the sunset.

We drove up and walked around. You could see the new soccer/World Cup stadium near the ocean. There was a red ship in the harbor that goes and back forth to Antarctica. Another ship had printed on its side “PEACE BOAT”, and is apparently a floating NGO. Bradley said the Semester-at-Sea ship stops here too. One day he was near the waterfront and felt there were just way too many American girls everywhere so he looked near the docks and saw their large and entitled S-a-S ocean liner.

I asked him what he thought of the movie “Blood Diamond”. He said it was all filmed in South Africa, actually, even though most of it supposedly takes place in Sierra Leone. For the city scenes they just went to the parts of SA that look a little more run-down and black and typically “African”. The scene with Jennifer Connelly as she gets a cell phone call from a mortally-wounded-but-spiritually-redeemed Leonardo DiCaprio was shot at the V&A Waterfront, which was where Bradley and I’d be headed for dinner and a movie.

There was a partridge and her cheepers walking on the hill near us. I asked Bradley if he remembered how to say “happily ever after” in Spanish.

We drove back down and passed through Bo-Kaap, which is a Muslim neighborhood at the base of Signal Hill known for pastel-colored houses and hilly streets. On the radio there was speculation that Tiger Woods was in Cape Town for sex addict outpatient therapy.

We parked and went to the V&A Waterfront. It’s a luxury mall/hotel/office/apartment complex. Dubai World bought it a couple years ago for a billion dollars. Dubai World is about $60 billion in debt, these days.

We walked up to Primi Piatti, an Italian restaurant chain that, so it says of itself, “embraces creative exchanges and Urban Energy”.

We sat at a table that was outside the restaurant, as it were al fresco, but still inside the mall.

A waiter came over and took our order for some Sauvignon Blanc and a pizza with chicken and broccoli and sun-dried tomatoes. Another waiter came over and asked if we were being served. Their uniforms were day-glo orange jump suits.

We got our bottle of wine in a day-glo orange plastic pail filled with ice. A third waiter came over to see if everything was OK. The second waiter brought the pizza. Later the first waiter started clapping and bobbing his head and dancing around slightly. We were there early and the other tables were empty.

Some of Bradley’s students came up to us. They’d been at the mall shopping for the J&B Met, which is a big annual horse race that’s also kind of an informal fashion show where you’re supposed to dress either expensively or cleverly to the theme, which this year was In Full Colour. The Met is, so it says of itself, “A spectacle of glossy vibrancy and intense exhilaration enveloped in a cauldron of sensual excess that sets the pulse racing.”

The girls said they were having a hard time finding dresses. There was a compromise-suggestion of colorful scarf-wearing.

Our table was near one end of the mall and its big bay windows. You could see Robben Island, the old prison colony, in the distance, from where we sat on day-glo orange cushions, sipping our Sauvignon Blanc.

We finished and walked to the movie theater and met all the study abroad kids. We saw “Skin” a new feature-length South African film about a lady named Sandra Laing, who was born to white parents but had the darker skin of a coloured person. She grew up during apartheid and suffered all sorts of absurd racist things. In one scene her father – played by "Jurassic Park"’s Sam Neill – returns home after trying to get his daughter re-classified as white and sees her by the banks of a stream and stops on the other side of the stream and shouts, in close-up, “You’re white again!”

It was unclear just why the mother of the family was giving birth to coloured-looking children. The film made it seem like that it’s a possible genetic fluke, as if the recessive genes of an ancestor can just pop up from generation-to-generation. It really seemed like the mother was just having an affair with a coloured person but never got found out nor brought herself to admit it.

The movie got out and some of the undergrads wandered off to buy things and we had to wait for them to be herded again. A van came and picked us up and brought us back to Stellenbosch.

Joe had come and said he’d interviewed Carl Lewis that afternoon on his radio show.

We got back to Stellenbosch and the undergrads got dropped off at their respective dorms and were asking each other if they were gonna go out or what they were gonna do Friday and responding that no they had a big day and had a lot of laundry and some reading to do etc.

I got back to my hostel and shut the windows so the mosquitoes wouldn’t get in. I went to bed.

South Africa - 4.1

Bradley picked me up at quarter to nine. He was taking me to the U.S. Consulate and downtown Cape Town. They’d invited me there because of the video contest I won. The State Department had paid for my whole trip.

We drove in on another sunny clear day, past the vineyards and farms, past the ostriches and horses, past the prostitutes, past the still-being-built hangars of Cape Town Film Studios.

I told Bradley about the sand on the highway the day before. We turned off onto the N2, one of the big highways that go downtown.

We got in to the city, past the two big cooling towers of the old power plant, past a golf course. Bradley pointed out the neighborhood he lives in. Its old name used to be Driekoppen, which means “three heads”. A white colonist was murdered there in the 1700’s by three slaves. The slaves were caught. Their heads were put on pikes as a reminder.

We drove south around Table Mountain and got to the consulate by ten. We called ahead to let them know we were getting close. I said now they could light the sparklers for our arrival.

We pulled into the lot and got waved to a parking spot. A guy in a uniform came over and made us pop the hood. They call the hood a bonnet in South Africa. A lady came over too with a shammy cloth and stroked the trim of the car door and the handle.

We got out and I tucked in my shirt and Bradley put on a sport coat. We walked up, got buzzed in, emptied our pockets, went through the metal detector. We slid our passports to a man behind a glass panel. He gave us laminated clip-on badges. We had to leave our stuff, cell phones too, in little wood lockers in the entryway.

Our meeting was short. We sat at a circular table in the café/canteen, in a tall bright geometrically-arrayed-wood-design decorated atrium.

I was offered coffee. I refused. The person who offered seemed confused. How about a glass of water, she asked. I said OK. A couple other people came and talked with us. One man gave me his card. Another man ordered a panini and sat with it while we spoke then wrapped it in napkins when we finished.

I tried to explain why I was there. Who Frithjof Bergmann was, what he was doing, why I was going to Johannesburg to find him. I wasn’t able to give a simple answer, and they didn’t quite seem to buy it.

I talked about the video I made, for the contest I’d won. They said they hadn’t seen the video; it wasn’t coming up on their computers. Flash wasn't working.

They asked the person I came there with a lot of questions about what he was up to, where he was living these days, who he’s working with.

They invited me to come back the next day and meet with somebody else there. The man who’d given me his card said let me you give my card and gave me another one. I said OK I’d come back.

We were led out and opened up our lockers and got our stuff and traded our ID badges for our passports.

We drove back to the city center. The Table Blanket cloud was settling over Table Mountain and covered the sun and made it a gray day.

We drove through a rich neighborhood on the east side of the mountain, where even some European royalty have homes, where some other consulates are. Bradley said the Italian consulate’s in a mansion in this neighborhood. The street it’s on is one letter different from the street he lives on a few miles away. He said very regal and wax-sealed envelopes sometimes show up in his mailbox, especially around the holidays. He’s tried to say something to the post office, but it keeps getting messed up.

We drove up to Kirstenbosch Gardens, a big botanical garden at the base of the mountain. It’s got trails that slope up toward the mountain with beds of flowers and grasses and trees from around the country. We hiked up to the fynbos section, which is shrubland that only grows in the Western Cape. It’s so diverse that it forms one of the six floral kingdoms. Fynbos has got so many so many unique species it’s diverse as tropical rainforests.

We walked up to a lawn. A tour guide was coming down a trail with a few hikers. Bradley knew her. If clouds come up over Table Mountain the tours get cancelled and the hikers have to come down emergency routes.

The sky was blue and clear away from the mountain. The lawns of Kirstenbosch were trim and tidy and psychotropically green.

We walked back down and past a music pavilion. There’s a summer music series – sunset concerts on Sunday nights. There’s a big pitched lawn running down to a band shell. The concert that Sunday was going to be Lira Molapo with HHP and RJ Benjamin. Bradley was bringing his study abroad students there for it.

The place reminded me of Ravinia in Highland park, near Chicago. For the second time in Cape Town I felt like I was in the North Shore of Chicago.

We left and drove into the city. There were guys selling complex reptilian beaded sculptures at the stoplights just outside the garden.

We got lunch at Mariam’s, a Cape Malay Halal restaurant. We got salomis, which have got curries baked inside roti, a flaky flatbread.

I asked Bradley where the bathroom was. He pointed me to the back of the place. I walked in there and saw a sink, then a floor and some mats. No toilet. It was the prayer room. I walked back out and sat down.

We ate lunch and made a plan for the rest of the afternoon. Some of Bradley’s students were taking the train into town and were going to meet us at night to see a new movie that’d come out at the V&A Waterfront theater.

We were thinking of going to Robben Island but we called and tickets were sold-out. We left and headed for the Slave Lodge.

South Africa - 2

A driver named Calvin was waiting for me at the gate of the Cape Town airport. My flight got in on time at 11PM.

We left, heading for Stellenbosch.

A little kid wearing a canvas jacket was standing on the median at a stop sign, his hand out. Calvin shook his head. The kid sat down on the curb and picked at his hair with a comb.

There was a Christian talk show on the radio. It was going back and forth from Afrikaans to English. The host was talking to call-in guests about how long they’ve all been serving the Lord.

I asked Calvin what Stellenbosch was like. Very conservative, he said.

We drove past walled neighborhoods, then out to a winding road through black hills. The only lights were out over the triumphant gated entrances to vineyards.

We got into Stellenbosch after a half hour.

Calvin slowed as some kids were walking down the street. He shouted "ahoy" at them.

We got to Banghoek Place, the hostel where I was staying.

Calvin walked to the gate with me, leaned his head close, and whispered the password for the keypad.

The front doors to the lounge were locked. There were some kids eating and one got up and walked outside and opened another gate for us.

Calvin led me in and pointed upstairs to number eight, my room, and gave me the key.

I didn’t know what kind of room I’d be staying in. I figured it’d be a shared dorm.

I opened the door.

It was a single room. It had its own bathroom, a queen-size bed with high thread-count white sheets that you really had to yank at to untuck. There were animal pelts on the floors and designer lamp shades made with recycled soda cans on the nightstands.

There was a brown gift bag on the bed.

Inside was a new cell phone, granola, juice boxes, a carton of milk, dried fruit, biltong (dried meat), peanuts, a bunch of bananas, and a signed welcome letter from Bradley.

I washed up and got into bed. A mosquito came in and was flying by my ear and keeping me awake. I turned on the lights and saw it on the wall and killed it with my slender edition of "Waiting for the Barbarians". There was blood on the cover.

I went to sleep.

* * *

In the morning I ate breakfast and read and drank some complimentary rooibos tea, which is grown in the Cape.

I looked around the place. A concrete wall surrounded the hostel. There were four wires suspended above it. It was an electric fence.

Bradley came at 10. I had been sitting on a sofa, waiting, looking towards the front gate and the street.

I saw a tall guy walking up. He was in the shade of a tree. I thought he was black. Then he got a little closer and I thought he was coloured. Then he came into the lounge and I saw he was white and tan. This was Bradley.

We walked through campus to his office. There weren't any sidewalks until close to the university buildings and student housing.

School had just started for the year. It was bright and hot and crowded. There were shorts, dresses and sandals. The buildings and lawns and students looked clean and well kempt.

Stellenbosch is one of the few South African universities that still teach in Afrikaans. The campus signs are in Afrikaans and English.

Bradley took me to his office and served me some more rooibos tea. He teaches geography at the University of Cape Town and works at Stellenbosch for CIEE.

He gave me a short version of the study abroad, welcome-to-Africa tips and rules. He went over my itinerary for the week, with some trips to Cape Town and some free time to wander through Stellenbosch.

Bradley had spent time in Latin America, too. I asked if he still read any Spanish lit. He said he liked post-coup Chilean stuff. He said it fast and it sounded like “Postkoochelean”. I remained quiet and nodded my head until I parsed the phrase and figured out what he meant.

We left to go eat lunch with one of his assistants, a recent-grad named Joe.

We went to a café called The Nook, a place painted what I guess would be Tiffany Blue and had thin chrome chairs on the patio and Death Cab for Cutie and Iron and Wine playing on the speakers. I felt like I was in the North Shore of Chicago.

The waitress came. Joe ordered a Thai chicken sandwich. I ordered a Thai chicken sandwich. Bradley ordered one, too. He made a joke about there being enough for three. The waitress didn’t get it. None of us looked at each other.

We sat and ate and talked. Joe studied philosophy, like me. Unlike me, he did what a self-respecting philosophy student should do and studied Greek and Latin. He’s written journalism, too. He’s thinking of doing a Masters in linguistics next year.

He’s the co-host of a popular afternoon-drive radio show. It’s a sports show where every so often the hosts go out and do something and bring listeners with and let the sponsors come on air and talk about what the hosts used as they did some interesting and amusing athletic outdoor thing.

We finished our sandwiches. We got more drinks. Me, a latté. Bradley, a cappuccino. Joe, another coffee with a side of honey.

Bradley left and Joe took me through the downtown.

The buildings are whitewashed and glow in the sun. Many of them are Cape Dutch style, with thatch roofs and tall curling gables.

It’s a tourist town, with big buses passing through the narrow streets. There’s Italian gelato, gourmet hamburgers, an Ernie Els restaurant called Big Easy, used bookshops and home ware stores and art galleries. One shop had large black women seated out front in traditional dress working on looms.

There’s old historical buildings still, like a magistrate’s court with a rose garden in front and the original town cathedral, called the Mother Church.

Joe took me to one of the campus bookstores. I couldn’t believe all the Routledge philosophy editions they had there. More than I’d ever seen in the U.S. or Canada.

We left and went to a bar Joe spends a lot of time at called The Mystic Boer. It’s got a lot of nostalgic Afrikaner stuff nailed to the walls like a TGIFridays in America. He said he DJs there sometimes, with CD turntables.

Joe left and I walked back to my hostel. Bradley came at six and got me for dinner.

Joe’s radio show had just ended, he said. We drove back downtown and parked and a guy in a neon vest came over and helped us pull-in. That was the car guard, the guy who tries to make sure no one steals your stuff while you’re eating or shopping or whatever.

Bradley said that a lot of car guards in Johannesburg are immigrants from other, usually Francophone African countries. He said they’re often well-educated and get brought here by recruiters for “job opportunities”. Bradley said there he just speaks French to them.

We went to the gourmet burger restaurant and met Cezanne there, another assistant.

Cezanne was a champion junior tennis player but blew out his shoulder just before university. He studied accounting but is now trying to get to Brazil to teach English.

Bradley said Brazil’s like a Creole South Africa.

Cezanne got to talking about tourists and how they expect there to be huts and tribes and spears and lions when they get to South Africa. He said he’s never been to a tribal village his whole life.

Bradley said people might complain how here across the street for instance there’s a Cape Dutch building next to a Victorian building, but that is just what makes this place what it is. And that there’s a Porsche SUV driving down this street, but shanty towns ten minutes away.

We drank white wine and ate our gourmet burgers and our French fries served in slim metal canisters.

Bradley asked for the bill. He said never let anyone take your credit card in South Africa. Even if you pay at a restaurant they’ll bring a machine out to you.

The waiter came out with the machine. We paid, said bye to Cezanne, gave the car guard a few coins and left.

Cezanne was coming in the morning to drive me to Cape Point, the southwestern tip of the continent.

I shut the windows so the mosquitoes wouldn’t get in.

South Africa - 1

I left for South Africa at the end of January.

The trip was a prize for the Exchanges Connect video contest that I won last year, for my short "A Friend in Nanjing".

The trip was supposed to be two weeks, but I extended the flight to be there five instead.

I'd been in Chicago a month since getting home from Argentina and my Fulbright grant before Christmas. It was cold and dark and bleak and I was ready to leave to go somewhere warm.

I chose South Africa - of the other countries I could've gone to - because: One, it's far away and justifies a free flight; Two, it's in Africa and I'd never been; Three, it's English-speaking and gives me some reasonable chance of getting to talk to people there unlike other far-off places like Nepal, Russia, Egypt, etc.; and, Four, I was trying to track down a philosopher, Frithjof Bergmann.

Bergmann was really the big reason South Africa loomed in my mind over other choices.

He's a German/American philosopher, a retired UMichigan prof who roams around the world trying to create what he calls New Work.

I studied New Work with one of Bergmann's former students - who's now a UIllinois phil. prof. I studied this in spring of 2006, just before I took my first study abroad trip, to China.

So this trip to South Africa wound up as this sort of grand - and grandly disappointing, in some ways - culmination, termination of a lot of things that began in 2006, or, to put it in a bit more general bildungsroman/coming-of-age terms, that began when I was an eager and confused and inexperienced student, and then resolved when I was a more cyncial, clear-headed, worldly young professional.

These thing I'm talking about that...came to term...were: deep personal relationships, a certain intellectual curiosity, a succession of traveling and scholarships and wandering through various continents.

* * *

I left on a Sunday morning. My mom dropped me off at the airport before church. She dropped me off as she had almost a year before when I left for Montreal, and soon after that when I left again for Argentina.

I was flying South African Airways, first to Washington, then to Johannesburg with a stop in Dakar, and then a last connection to Cape Town.

My first week in SA was planned by a study abroad director, Bradley. He works at the University of Stellenbosch, which is in a small city outside Cape Town. Bradley's also from Illinois, from a farm town west of my city, along I-80.

My flight from O'Hare was delayed and got me into Dulles with ten minutes to connect. After a long wait for the people mover to drive across the tarmac and get me to the right terminal, I had to run to the gate. I didn't check any luggage and just had a hiking backpack and a school backpack. I used to be self-conscious about wearing the school backpack in front, on my stomach, maybe thinking it looked weird or evoked pregnancy in some way, but it's just too convenient particularly when you have to run through an airport with two moderately-packed bags.

I brought a few books with me and a fresh Moleskine notebook my sisters gave me for Christmas. I brought Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" and Coetzee's "Waiting for the Barbarians", both of which had been sitting on my shelves in my bedroom for a couple years. I also brought Shaw's "Man and Superman" and Greene's "The Power and the Glory", though wondered if I'd read them as their socio-cultural relevance to South Africa was eyebrow-raisingly low.

The SAA flight was uncrowded. People had rows to themselves. My seat was next to two large women wearing puffy dresses who were talking on cell phones and didn't look at me. The stewardess told me I should move somewhere else. I went for seats by the window.

The pilot greeted the passengers in English and Afrikaans. On each seat was a blanket and pillow and a clear plastic zip pouch. Inside was a pair of brown socks, a brown nylon eye mask, a snap-together two-piece tooth brush, and a small tube of Aerodent toothpaste.

We took off in the late afternoon. Dinner was meatballs and rice, a roll, a butterfly-shaped cracker, cheddar cheese, a salad with raisins and beef, mint ice cream cake, and a Kit Kat bar. I drank ginger ale and mineral water.

I watched "District 9" on the in-flight, in-seat monitor. It's a South African film, funded by Peter Jackson, in which anthropomorphic crustacean aliens come to Johannesburg and are penned into a township quite obviously the same as those used against blacks and coloureds during Apartheid.

The film starts off nicely, using a verité style, in which all the footage is as if recorded right there in the world itself. But then that stops and the movie becomes some mild-mannered white guy trying to stand-up for the oppressed ugly dark things, with a lot of gun violence and immigrant jokes and an unfulfilling and ambiguous conclusion.

I tried to watch Steven Soderbergh's new movie "The Informant!", but the cabin was too loud and the headphones too weak to clearly hear so I turned it off and read and slept.

We got into Dakar early in the morning. The plane crew was swtiched and Sengalese airport workers wearing neon vests with large X's on them came on to clean the plane.

We waited on the runway for an hour. I got up and stretched and an American guy from San Diego started talking to me. He was working for a evangelical missionary business that does work all over the world. It was his first time in Africa too, though he'd be coming back in a few months to go to Kenya.

We took off at dawn. Kids were playing soccer in a dirt field along the runway. There were dull plain apartment flats near the airport and golf courses and pools and tennis courts near the mansions along the ocean.

In accordance with an unexplained WHO ordinance, the pilot said the plane had to be sprayed. He didn't say with what.

The flight attendants walked up the aisles, blue aerosol canisters in each hand, white clouds hissing out. The spray faded and evaporated into the air like the pilot's own explanation for such a measure.

We were sterilized. The cabin felt like the smell of fabric softener.

We were served breakfast. We got folded pancakes, a wedge of sausage, a hot tin of syrup, a cold croissant and butter. A fruit salad of an orange wedge, blueberries and raspberries. A sealed plastic container of orange juice, a container of berry yogurt, and a cup of tea.

The flight attendants spoke a prim, tidy English, while offering us drinks and meal choices and tea or coffee refills and duty-free shopping. They all wore perfumes and colognes, the odor of which trailed behind them and grazed your face like a long delicate scarf. I wondered if they did it on purpose, to reassure you of their presence and/or to counteract in its own highly chemical way the stale, airplane-food-flatulence-soaked cabin air.

We flew along the west coast of Africa, over deserts and beaches. I slept, and when not sleeping read "The Wretched of the Earth". There seemed to be something both appropriate and disgusting - or appropriately disgusting - that I was reading such a book seated in a jetliner, coasting above the clouds, being served food and drinks and multimedia entertainment, flying towards a really-not-much-more-than-a-glorified-vacation-getaway to Africa.

The pilot said turbulence was ahead, so lunch would be served early. We got a cold bowtie pasta salad with chickpeas, red peppers, and olives. A hot bowtie pasta with chicken and mushrooms and cream sauce. Some crumbly bread and Kiri cream cheese. A roll. An eclair for dessert.

We got to Johannesburg in the late afternoon. The city and the tall buildings were off in the distance, away over the hills and the suburban homes and their walls and swimming pools. The air was hazy and orange.

I had a couple hours to wait until my flight to Cape Town. I sat down in the red plastic chair of a Vida e Caffe, a new coffee shop franchise in SA.

A woman came up to me who'd seen me on the flight. She asked if my bags arrived OK. I said I hadn't checked any.

She said hers didn't come, and she's worried because the Tambo airport has a reputation for theft. Her bags wouldn't come until the evening, on another flight. She'd come from Iowa, where she was visiting her daughter.

She asked what I was doing, where I was going. I took out a map of the country in my Lonely Planet guide.

She pointed to Johannesburg and said "This is a terrible part of the world."

She and her husband live in the country, in KwaZulu-Natal province. They're not city people she said.

One of the VeC workers was dancing and strutting to some Afro-Latin music. She looked at him and shook her head and said he wasn't a Zulu.

She gave me her name and her number and said to give her a call if I pass through. She went back to her table, finished her coffee, and walked off without looking back.

I read some more, waiting, then got on the flight to Cape Town. It was the last of the evening.

Summertime is the rainy season in Jo-burg and storms usually build-up in the afternoons.

The plane took off into a thunderstorm. Lightning shone into the cabin as we gained altitude.

I was seated in an emergency exit row and sat next to the door and its large red tempting handle.

I started "Waiting for the Barbarians". I got tired and closed the book and fell asleep.

20: "To the country: Part 2"

Sole and I slept in til noon on Saturday. We were going to the country, to a farm outside Maciá that her uncle José takes care of.

It was hot and windy and humid. We left her grandma’s house and walked down the main street. We stopped at a kiosk to see if they had El Uno, one of Paraná’s daily newspapers. An article of mine was going to be in it. I had been writing what I called portraits of contemporary U.S. culture. This week’s was going to be on David Foster Wallace.

We didn’t see an Uno. We asked the lady and she said it doesn’t come to Maciá.

We passed an office building, the only one on the street. It had black tinted windows and was surrounded by a tall dark fence. There were delivery trucks in the parking lot.

This was the headquarters of Huevo Campo (“Country Egg”), which is one of biggest egg distributors in MercoSur. The Roths are the family that own the company. They’re the richest people in Maciá and their son went to Harvard. They own a school, and an evangelical church, too.

On the website of Huevo Campo it says "producido por familias que creen en el Poder y Amor de Dios" (made by families that believe in the power and love of God).

We got to the edge of town after walking a few more blocks. We passed some speed bumps. A warning sign called them donkey humps (lomo de burro).

We walked under a tree, to wait in the shade and try to hitch a ride to the farm. Sole’s aunt, Dioni, and José were cooking an asado for us, with chicken and sábalo, a big river fish. The food was almost done and we should’ve been there already.

A couple of cars and trucks came by on the gravel road. Sole stood up and put out her thumb but they just looked at us and pointed down the road and kept going.

They were going to work at a recycling plant, she said. The plant was a quarter mile down the highway. You could see it from where we sat.

I took some pictures and Sole and I drank from a bottle of Sprite she’d bought. We drank with a straw. That’s usually how they drink from plastic bottles in Argentina.

She called her aunt and they came and picked us up in her uncle’s new used car.

We got in. They told us we should’ve gotten up earlier, that no one’d be headed out this way so late in the day.

We drove along the highway. A guy on a horse was coming in the other direction. He was wearing baggy brown pants and a white shirt and a flat brimmed hat. He had a knife hanging from his belt.

I asked if that was a gaucho. I said it was the first real one I’d seen.

That’s José’s son, Sole told me. José’s a gaucho, too, she said. José was wearing an aqua blue polo and khaki slacks and moccasins and glasses.

We got to the farm. We pulled up to the house and got out and a pack of dogs came up and barked at us.

In the yard of the house was a cage with a couple of parakeets. They were squawking and screeching when we got close. Dioni said they do that with strangers. She came over and talked to them and they quieted down. She got them to repeat what she’d say.

Behind the parakeet cage was a big pen with ducks and roosters and chickens.

Sole went inside and got a plastic pitcher and we went to a big mulberry tree in the front yard to pick berries.

She stood on a plastic chair and I held the pitcher. The ripe ones fell from a touch. The juice stained our fingers and hands.

The food was ready and we went inside and sat down to eat.

The sábalo had a lot of bones and you had to feel the meat in the front of your mouth, with your tongue and your teeth, carefully, so you didn’t swallow any.

There was a tomato and onion salad, squash, and homemade bread. We drank a knock-off lemon lime soda.

Dioni served fruit salad for dessert.

After lunch Sole and I left the farm and walked on a path through the monte, to a creek.

There were cows grazing in the forests along the way. We walked past an electric fence that wrapped around another field.

We saw the nest of a bird up in the trees. It’s made of dried mud and is called an hornillo, which means little oven. It’s got an entrance on one side, like a cave.

There were ducks in the creek. They had a blue in their feathers that glowed in the sunlight.

When we headed back the cows stopped and turned and stared at us. We stopped, then walked ahead, slowly. The cows relaxed and some turned away and some kept looking, but none of them moved.

We got back to the farm in the late afternoon.

We sat down at a picnic table under a portico, in the backyard, to eat some more fruit salad.

José took a sheep from a pen and brought it close by and strung it up by one leg from the mulberry tree.

Sole got nervous and started breathing hard and telling José no. She turned away and covered her eyes.

I kept eating the fruit salad and turned to look at what José was doing.

He cut the sheep’s neck and let the blood pour onto the ground. It was thick and steaming and splashing into the dirt and the grass and the fallen berries.

The dogs came close and waited with their tongues out.

The sheep kept kicking after the blood had drained.

José began butchering it. He cut off the hoofs and tossed them to the dogs. You could hear the crunch while they chewed them. There was blood and wool on their snouts.

I was taking pictures. I had never seen this before.

Dioni called me over. She was posing with one of the dogs. It was up on its hind legs and had a cap on its head. I took a picture then turned back to the sheep.

José stripped and pull off the wool, then split the stomach.

José was talking to Sole and I. He took out the kidney. It was bright blue and wet. It’s the kidney, he said, just like you have. He tossed it into the grass and a dog went for it.

He pulled out the rest of the organs in one big bundle – the stomach and intestines and all that – and threw them onto the lawn.

The dogs ran for them and chewed and ripped them apart.

A black cat came by and tried to nibble at the organs but a collie growled and it backed away and had to watch.

Each dog took different parts. The collie took the stomach. It split it open and green mush oozed out and didn’t smell good. It was partially-digested grass, José said.

A tiny black lab was eating the small intestine. The stuff inside was splattered on its paws. It pulled at them like spaghetti.

The dogs looked happy and focused.

José was wearing the same clothes as earlier. There were big dark stains on his pants now.

Dioni took me and Sole into the barn, past big tractors, past sacks of feed and fertilizer. We went into one part that was dark and stuffy. There was a cardboard box on the ground. It had a half-dozen puppies in it. They were feeding on its mom.

We shined a flashlight inside and the mom – a tiny, short-haired dog – looked up at us. Sole took one of the puppies out of the box. It fit in her hand. She put it back and we left.

We walked into the chicken coop and Dioni and Sole collected the eggs. José came by and threw seed to the birds and they all came by and started pecking and fighting.

The day was getting late and we were going to head back into town. José had butchered the sheep for somebody and had to drop off the meat.

Dioni took the parakeets out and put them into a tiny cage to bring them with. They´ll bite everyone but her, she said.

We got into the car and drove down the road to the gate. I got out and opened it up. José drove ahead but then Sole shouted that I’d left my door open. They stopped and shut the door, then I closed and locked the gate.

Well, I did something on the farm, Sole said.

We got into town and walked to Sole’s mom’s house. She made empanadas for us. Sole didn’t like them much and got out the leftover perdix from the night before.

We went back to Toni’s for ice cream afterwards. Toni served us again.

We went home and changed and then went to one of the two social clubs in town and had a couple drinks with some of Sole’s old high school friends.

* * *
Sunday we slept in again then got up and walked to Dioni’s house for lunch. José made tallerines, which are a pasta like spaghetti, from scratch.

We got there late and they and Jose’s son - the gaucho - had already finished eating. They served us plates and we sat and ate while they had seconds.

José´s son didn´t speak much. Sole said he´s studying biology in Paraná and hitchhikes back and forth from Maciá every week. He works on the farm on the weekends. His hands were so big the fingers looked swollen.

We finished and left and stopped by to see Sole’s friend Diana. She was working at an ice cream parlor. Along the way we passed a nice two-story house that had the same black fence around it as the Huevo Campo office. Sole said it was one of the Roth homes.

We got to the ice cream parlor. It was connected to the house of an old couple, who own the store and make the ice cream there.

When we went up to the counter I could see through into the living room. The curtains were drawn and an old man was sleeping in a recliner.

We got two-scoop cones and played a card game. Nobody came in. I did a magic trick that I’d learned when I was in middle school by taping and studying a David Blaine TV special. He’d done it for villagers in the Amazon.

Diana’s shift ended and we walked together to go see another old high school friend. She was with her baby – a boy who was about a year old. We drank tereré, which is mate served cold with fruit juice.

The sky was getting dark and we headed back to Sole’s grandparents’ house to pack our bags. We had to buy bus tickets to go back to Paraná. Since it was Sunday we had to wait for the station attendant to show up at 7:00 PM. The bus was coming at 7:40 and we had to meet it at a highway junction 10 miles outside Maciá.

José and Dioni came by to say goodbye and take the key to the house. One of the dogs came with them in the car.

Another dog came up and got into a fight with José’s and he threw a rock and it ran off.

Sole and I said bye and left and got to the bus station. Her brother Pepe was going to give us a ride to the junction. He had to get up at 3:00 AM the next day to do his mail route.

The bus station attendant wasn’t there at 7:00. We waited as the sun set and the sky looked stormy towards where we were headed.

The guy finally showed up. He was bald and sweating. He got the computer turned on and we asked for the tickets. He said there were three seats left. We bought the tickets as Pepe showed up in his station wagon.

I rode shotgun and Sole sat in back. When we got up to speed he asked me if I wanted to put on my seatbelt. Argentine’s don’t wear seatbelts.

We got onto the highway. It was a two-lane road. There was no shoulder, just a strip of grass and then fields. It was windy and Pepe went into the grass a couple times. There was lightning up ahead and it smelled like rain.

We got to the exchange. A couple other cars and a couple other people were there, waiting for the same bus.

We got out and it was breezy and cool and you could see the storm close-by but it never started raining. I took a few more pictures while Sole talked to her brother.

The bus showed up and we got on. Our seats were in the way back. We drove into the storm and the rain and lightning.

We got back to Paraná around 10:30.

19: "To the country: Part 1"

My friend Sole is from a farm town in the middle of Entre Ríos province. It’s called Maciá. It’s got a population of 10,000 and is surrounded by soy and sorghum fields, and pasture. Sole said the population´s really not quite 10,000, but they like to round-up.

The land there is rolling and green and dry. It’s called monte, which is a mix of prairie grasses and bushes and creeks and rivers. There’s palm trees, and a lot of thorn trees called espinillos.

Sole is short for Soledad, which means solitude. She moved out of town after high school. She left to go to Córdoba with her then-boyfriend who was finishing a thesis on Amartya Sen. Córdoba’s the second biggest city in the country, and is hundreds of miles west of Maciá.

She moved to Paraná this year, a few months ago. She’d been studying law at the University of Córdoba, which was founded in the early 1500’s. She’s dropped that major and is looking for a new one, to study here. The way Argentine university’s work is you have to start over, from the beginning, if you change majors.

She’s been looking for work since she moved here. Her mom got her a job working for an ambulance company, selling their emergency service to businesses in town. She had been working for a law firm, but her old roommate was dating the boss, as well as dating a guy who was also going out with Sole’s cousin. Sole told her cousin. The roommate told the boss to get rid of Sole.

She moved away from that roommate and lives in a girls’ boarding house with Flor, an old friend from Maciá.

She has a lot of free time now. She does gymnastics. She sleeps a lot, and reads a lot. She likes Ray Carver and Charles Bukowski and John Cheever.

She sprays her books with perfume so they smell nice when she turns the page. Her Ray Carver anthology smells like lilac and bubble gum.

* * *

Spring is ending here. The days are longer than the nights. We went to Maciá during a heat wave, when it was humid and breezy and near 100º at midday.

We left Friday afternoon. It was a three-and-a-half hour bus ride. We stopped in a few other small towns, including one where people still speak German. They call the Germans here Rusos, which means Russian.

Sole and I got off at a highway junction. The buses don’t stop at her town in the afternoon.

You could see the horizon in every direction. There were some barns nearby, and others far off. I felt like I was in Champaign, in Illinois. It was late afternoon and mellow and quiet.

We walked down a highway. She called her brother, who lives in town. He said his kidney hurt and he couldn’t come pick us up. A puppy came up and played with Sole while she smoked a cigarette.

We waved down a cattle truck that had stopped at the junction. The cattle had plastic tags on their ears. Some of them looked at us as we walked to the cab.

Sole asked the driver if he´d take us down the road, to the turnoff to her town.

Sole threw her bag in the back of the cab and climbed up and then took my backpack and I got in and we pulled out.

The driver’s name was Omar. He had Gauchito Gil stickers and Virgin Mary prayer cards stuck to the dash, and red Chinese tassels dangling from the ceiling. There were cases of CDs and a pack of cigarettes and a lighter by the steering wheel. He was 21 he said, and started trucking after high school, because his dad did it.

We got up to speed. There were stripped cowhides in a ditch on the side of the road.

We got to the turnoff and he stopped and we climbed down and said thanks.

We waited a few more minutes. A lady got dropped off at the corner. She was waiting for a ride in the direction we came from.

I took some pictures. One car drove past without stopping. Sole said that’s bad manners. A lumber truck stopped and the lady got in and it drove away.

Another car turned the corner and came past us. They stopped.

It was a girl Sole knew from high school. They hadn’t seen each other since.

We got in. They had a German shepherd in back that barked and put its teeth against the glass as we got close. It won’t bite her mom said. Her dad was driving.

I sat in front while Sole was in back saying what she’d done since high school. The other girl had spent a year working in New Zealand picking kiwis and apples and studying English.

We drove past barns and houses as the sun was getting lower and the green of the trees and fields was glowing.

We got dropped off in the downtown, which is one street that runs for five or six blocks. The dog hits its face against the window and growled again when we got out of the car.

We walked towards her grandparents’ house, which is empty now that both of them have passed away. Sole found 20 pesos on the ground, on the sidewalk. For the beer, she said.

A lot of people were sitting outside on the sidewalk, in lawn chairs, in front of their homes or stores. Some were drinking mate, others beer. Some of them stared at us. Sole said adios or chau to most of them.

Her aunt and uncle were waiting for us at the house to give us the keys.

Her aunt married late because her father was protective and jealous. She married a man named José, a few years ago, whose wife had died. He’s a tenant farmer and works on a piece of property outside the town that’s owned by somebody else. The owner’s called the patron.

The property’s got both pasture – for sheep and cows – and farmland. José also has some chickens and geese for himself and his wife and sons.

I sat in the living room with José while Sole’s aunt was showing her the house and the room she made up for us. We were watching TV.

They were showing clips of a school employee getting punched and slapped by parents and other people standing and looking. He had touched some of the kids, apparently. They interviewed him with his face bleeding. He went inside the school and a woman shut the door behind him and kept the camera out.

Sole’s aunt gave me a glass of water. It tasted like something and had white flakes floating in the bottom. Sole said the town’s water’s been contaminated, that it’s got a bunch of minerals and other stuff in it and they buy bottled water mostly now.

Her uncle asked if we wanted to shower. Sole opened her bag and touched-up her makeup and sprayed deodorant. Her uncle looked at her and raised his voice and said just take a shower. We’re just going to keep sweating, she said.

We all left the house and got into José’s car that he’d just bought used. We drove to Sole’s brother’s house. His name’s Pepe and he works for the Argentine post office. There was a white Correo Argentino pick-up in the driveway. We got out and walked around to their backyard.

His little daughter was there with a friend, and a couple big dogs, and he and his wife were sitting in lawn chairs. Pepe had his shirt off. They were drinking mate. You could see big grain silos off beyond their brick fence.

Pepe´s brother talks like Marlon Brando. He called me maestro.

His wife used to teach Italian, but just stopped. She’d been to Italy, too. She also teaches in an elementary school in a village outside of Maciá. It was too much work doing both.

She said the elementary school doesn’t have running water, so the teachers have to bring it with them each day. She said it was a disaster that day, with the heat, and they had to ration it for the kids.

There’s not even running water for the bathrooms, she said.

Sole and I left and said bye. We walked along gravel roads, then paved roads. The sun had set and it was getting dark.

We passed a slaughterhouse, where Sole said you can hear the braying at night when the cows are lined up and killed. She said they were taken there in elementary school once, to see how it works.

We went to Sole’s mom’s house. She lives by herself. Her ex-, Sole’s dad, lives in Paraná, now.

Her mom said there’s a lot of discontented women in Maciá, and that she’s a threat because she’s so active. She has a green belt in Tae Kwon Do and does Arabian dancing and works with the women’s national basketball team, which she played for a long time ago.

We left and walked back downtown.

We went to Dani’s, an ice cream parlor. There’s three on main street. One’s corporate, but Dani’s and the other are local and have homemade ice cream made with fresh local milk.

We got ice cream cones. I got dulce de leche and white chocolate. Dani served us. A cone with two big scoops cost less than a dollar. Sole said you could tell the ice cream was fresh because it was so smooth. She asked and Dani said it was made that morning.

We sat outside and ate and then went back in and washed our hands at a little plastic fountain by the bathroom.

Clouds were blowing in and the moon had a halo around it. We thought it might rain.

Sole’s roommate Flor was back home, visiting, too. Her boyfriend lives in Maciá and owns a clothes shop. We went there and Flor came out with a shirt she’d tried on and they shared a cigarette.

Sole and I went back to her mom’s house. She’s turned her house into a medical office, for specialists to come to from outside of town. A doctor from Rosario was doing an exam and we had to be quiet so we walked to the backyard and waited for dinner.

There was an old empty concrete swimming pool. There were weeds growing in it. We sat on the edge and talked. She said spiders and scorpions live in the pool, now. I told her about how there was a scorpion in the shower with me right after I got to Paraná, in the professor’s house I’d been living in.

I said I didn’t really know it was so poisonous when I saw it and just sprayed water on it, which seemed to do it. But then I came back after I dried off and it was still alive and killed it with a squeegee and washed it down the drain. She said I shouldn’t have washed it down the drain.

Sole’s mom made perdix for dinner, which is a partridge that lives in the monte and is common to eat. It was marinated in a vinegar sauce and served with carrots and onions.

Perdix is Spanish are called perdiz, or perdices, plural. Children´s stories end with the line "Vivieron felices y comieron perdices", which means "They lived happily and ate perdix".

Sole’s mom has three phones, which were on the table while we ate. One is a cordless landline. The other two are cell phones.

We finished and left and went home to shower and change.

We went back out and walked along main street.

There’s two big bars in town. They’re called social clubs and are wide, bare halls with pool tables and a bar and tables on the sidewalks out front.

I saw her uncle sitting at a table drinking with a few other people as we walked by on the other side of the street.

Kids cruise around back and forth on the main drag at night. The rich boys have expensive new pick-up trucks and call girls to give them the privilege of going for a spin.

We bought two bottles of beer at a corner store with the money from the sidewalk.

We walked to her friend Nigel’s house, who she went to high school with. He and a few other friends had barbequed and were watching concert DVDs of Pink Floyd and the Traveling Wilburys and Rammstein.

We sat on the driveway and passed around bottles of beer and Nigel and another friend called Fausto played guitars and sang John Lennon and Ray Orbison songs. Fausto played an acoustic and Nigel an electric. The amp was in the living room but he played outside.

Fausto asked me if I like rock and roll. I said yes.

He’s about 30 and is tall and has curly, fluffy hair and teaches music in an elementary school in town.

He was pretty drunk and telling me about the fundamental basis of life in the country; that being surrounded by so much green calms people down, that the people are hardworking, and so on.

He said the U.S. has got something in that the states don’t fight with each other, the way the provinces do here.

I went inside and took a sausage and a bun and made a choripan. The meat had been sitting for a while and was dry, and the bread was dry. It was tough to chew but it was OK.

The breeze was steady and the night got cool. We got up around 2 and said bye and Sole and I walked back to her grandparent’s house.

The next day we were going to the country, she said.

18: "To the north, to the jungle: Part 2"

I got up at 7:45, before my alarm. I left my dorm and went to the hostel lounge and ate breakfast. There was no one else there. I took a couple of trips to the buffet and filled up on sweet bread and coffee.

I packed up and left and walked to the plaza to take a bus north to Puerto Iguazu. There were parents walking their kids to school, carrying their miniature backpacks for them, holding their hands.

I got to the plaza and saw the same kid as the day before. He was sipping a mate. He waved to me and raised his head. I waved back.

I sat in front of the souvenir stand and waited with some locals for the bus. I saw a man greet an old lady and give her two kisses, one on each cheek. I’d never seen that before in Argentina.

They didn’t show any movies on the four-hour ride. It was quiet and bumpy and relaxing. We drove through rolling, green countryside. We passed yerba mate factories and pine tree farms. Misiones used to be famous for its jungle. It’s got a subtropical climate. Now, most of the forests near the highway have been clear-cut, scorched.

We got into Puerto Iguazu, where the ground was orange clay, like in Georgia.

I got off the bus and walked around a few blocks looking for a hostel.

It was too late in the day to try to go to a national park and see Iguazu Falls, so I walked down through town to the river, to the Paraná. It was overcast and humid.

Down at the port of the river there’s boats that go downstream to Paraguay. Across the river is Brazil.

I walked past the port, across a creek, to a grassy corner near the bank. There was a picnic table under a tin shelter. There was a big boat rusting, grown-over, in the weeds.

I sat down under the shelter and it started to rain.

I listened to an Entitled Opinions on Kurt Weill and wrote postcards for friends in Canada and Israel, for my grandmas in the U.S. I read some more of Brief Interviews. I took pictures as the rain stopped and the sky lightened. There was an empty, rusting oil drum in front of the shelter, in the grass. It was Shell; red and yellow.

I walked back up the hill, to town. I looked up the addresses I hadn’t brought with me and walked back down the hill, downtown, and mailed my postcards just before the post office closed. I stopped at a tourist restaurant and ordered a pizza and a Coke. I was the only one in there.

I came back to the hostel and wrote a blog entry. There was a girl at the computer next to me looking at her pictures from Machu Picchu. The Internet wasn’t working and every few minutes someone would come in, check, see it wasn’t working and leave.

I sat out on the patio lounge and read and borrowed a cigarette from a girl sitting across from me and wrote. There were only a couple other people sleeping in my 10-person dorm. They left before I woke up the next morning.

* * *
I got up late. My alarm didn’t go off.

I went to the bathroom. The toilet wasn’t flushing.

I went down to eat and sat and was reading. They served coca tea and buns and toast with dulce de leche and jam. The girl I borrowed a cigarette from the night before came down to the kitchen and took her plate of food and looked for a seat. She sat at my table.

She’s from Asturias, in Spain, but lives in Barcelona and is a civil engineer. This was her first time in South America. She pronounced her s’s and c’s with a lisp.

I left. I took a bus to Foz de Iguazu, to Brazil. We crossed the Argentine border and we all had to get off and get our passports stamped. We crossed the Brazilian border and some people got off but most stayed on and I stayed on. We drove into the city, which is bigger and more cosmopolitan than Puerto Iguazu.

I got to the bus station and bought a ticket to the national park. I didn’t have any Brazilian reales, and didn’t have any small peso bills. The guy at the gate converted the bus ticket for me. I think he ripped me off.

We drove back out of town, back past the road to the border crossing, and down to the park entrance. I got off the bus and bought my entrance and a salami sandwich. I said obligado like I learned in Sao Paolo.

I got on a double-decker bus and went to the upper level where the plastic drape windows were pulled back. We drove to the waterfalls. The breeze made people zip up their coats and cross their arms and tuck their chins.

We got off. I could see a glimpse of the falls down through the trees. I followed the path to the first overlook. I stopped, stared. I leaned against the railing, gazed. The waterfalls were coming from everywhere, from the forest, from cliffs. The part I was looking at wasn’t even half of all there was.

I continued on along the concrete path, stopping and staring, looking at other people looking. The din from the falling water would fade away then come back again when you realized how loud it was.

I walked onto a concrete overlook. I saw a pair of pants floating down the river, away from the biggest, most violent falls.

They were black, fanned out. They looked like slacks or maybe cargos. No one else seemed to notice. They bobbed around, were turned in the currents, and kept going down the river, through the rapids. I didn’t see anything come after them.

I walked along the trail to an overlook that stretches out over the crest of a waterfall. You can look right down on top of the void. The railings seemed well-built, but had gaps in between each other. People were posing for pictures, getting soaked by the mist from other falls higher up. Others stood off on the main trail, looking nervous and waiting for their friends or family to come back from out over the water.

Some people had plastic ponchos on. I zipped up my coat up all the way.

It was nice to be so close to something so dangerous, to something loud and old and that would destroy you in an instant. I felt like the narrator in a Poe story, like in Descent into the Maelstrom, awestruck before some terrible, enormous thing.

I walked back to the main path. There was a concession stand and a gift shop and photo booth, and an elevator to go to another observation deck. The employees had that amusement park employee stare.

I left the trail and walked to the park restaurant. There were coatis wandering around everywhere. They look like armadillo mixed with raccoon. They say they’ll bite if you feed them. Some people were feeding them. The park employees would chase them away when they’d creep towards the picnic tables.

I ate a sandwich and drank some water. The day was overcast and cool.

I walked on the waterfall trail again. The clouds were parting and the sun came out and there were rainbows, like they say there’s supposed to be, and butterflies.

I took a bus back to the main gate and listened to an Entitled Opinions with Paul Ehrlich on the fate of the earth in the 21st century. It was finally sunny and bright while he was talking about population disaster and the earth’s carrying capacity.

I got back to the bus station and got on to go back to Argentina and Puerto Iguazu. When we got off at Brazilian customs they stopped me and said I hadn’t gotten a stamp when I crossed that morning. I told them I’d read that one-day visitors didn’t need visas. I was speaking Spanish. They were speaking Portuguese. I couldn’t follow them.

The girls stamping the passports called for a manager. He was a young guy, probably 20 years old. He said they’d let me go just today but don’t do it again or there’ll be a fine. I said tudo bem and tried to give a thumbs up and left. I waited in the late afternoon with some Australians for another bus to come by.

I got back into town. As I walked to my hostel I saw the Spanish girl with her backpack heading to the terminal. We didn’t say anything to each other as we passed.

I ate pizza again at a different tourist restaurant, then came back and wrote and read. The Internet still wasn’t working.

I went to bed.

The next day my alarm worked and I got up and ate breakfast and packed my bags and stored them in a closet and then headed out. I bought cheese and bread and a tray of fruit and took a bus to the Argentine side of the falls.

It was a clear, warm day. I walked along all the catwalks and trails and stairways that wind through the jungle and over and around the falls. I saw monkeys and coatis and a toucan. The highlight of the Argentine side is something called the Devil’s Throat, which is an overlook above the most intense part of the falls.

There’s a miniature train that takes people out to that point. I walked along the train tracks, on a mud service road, to get there. It was a mile or so and quiet, except when a pickup truck or a train would come by. There were all sorts of butterflies along the way. A few other people were walking on the trail. I saw a big bullfrog squished flat. Its body was in the trail of a tire.

The Devil’s Throat is this big half-circle waterfall that’s probably a couple hundred feet high and wide. The overlook is a concrete platform with two sections to it. There’s photographers who stand-up on ladders and wear ponchos and take portraits with the falls in the background. They have clipboards for you to fill out forms and a poster board showing examples.

Big clouds of mist fall down on the platform every minute, soaking everybody. It’s like standing on the walkway over a flume ride at a theme park.

You can’t see to the bottom of the falls, there’s so much steam and mist. It’s an abyss, I guess. I thought about that Nietzsche quote of looking down into the abyss and only seeing yourself.

I took some pictures when the mist cloud wasn’t there so my camera wouldn’t get wet. I left the platform all wet and dried off in the sun and walked back to the park entrance. I took a bus back to town, grabbed my bag, and headed to the bus station.

The only bus going back overnight to Paraná was a luxury busline called Espreso. I bought the ticket anyway. It was about 40 pesos more than usual.

After we’d gotten out of town we were stopped at a police blockade. Some national guard people got on the bus. One guy came up, looked down at me. He asked to look through my bag, then see my passport.

I gave it to him.

He looked at it, then me. He was about to hand it back, then took it and sniffed it and looked at it again. He gave it back and said thanks and left.

I listened to a radio show about the historical Jesus as the sun went down over the Misiones hills and tree farms and what’s left of the jungle. Flocks of white birds were flying around and glowing in the twilight.

I got back into Paraná early in the morning.