by Norman Rush
I teased Giles to this end. I’m against what I did. I didn’t enjoy doing it. A utopia I would join in a minute is a society which could be communist or capitalist, anything, except that no woman member of it ever underwent sex unless she was hot. Pretending to be hot bears a distinct resemblance to self-rape, but it’s a rape accompanied by boredom instead of fear. Everyone raved about Victoria Falls and in fact I was right to want to go there.
For his postcard project Giles wanted bucolica—happy faces in rural places, as he put it—but he did point his camera my way now and then when the mood struck him. He decided I was a good subject. Would I let him do some indoor studies in his suite at the President Hotel? His promo was that shooting me indoors would be clever because I was so plainly an outdoor type. He had some ideas about how to exploit that, involving some props he had, antique veils and fans. There must be a term for the faint whining sound the fingers produce as they slide down the strings of a guitar to make a chord lower on the neck. I heard the equivalent in his voice. I agreed on condition he not buy me dinner first, just as a genuflection toward professionalism.
I arrived about eight one evening. All was in readiness: the photo-floods, the reflectors. He thought it would be helpful if we each had a touch of brandy. He had been married twice, each time to a flawless woman, if their photographs were to be trusted. One of them was Thai. The pictures of his exes were propaganda: who were you to resist a man who had won such human gems? Denoon once said that if Martians conquered the earth and ran an ethnic beauty contest to decide who should be given control of the planet on the basis of sheer beauty, it would go to Thai women and Cretan men. I remember I said Speaking for my fellow colleens I am outraged. He began absurdly backtracking and trying to say something nice about women of Irish descent, but this was Denoon before I managed to tone up his sense of humor. Could there be a little deshabille? Giles wanted to know. I couldn’t see why not.
I let things stretch to the point where he wanted to neck. At that point he wasn’t being untoward, so when I said no way Raymond and told him what the deal was—which was that I was his if he took me along to Vic Falls—he was in shock. I was absolutely naked about it.
Obviously my no was a first. He bridled all over the place. I was prepared, though, and had a few things to point out.
To wit, he was forgetful. Very goodlooking people are as a rule more forgetful than the median. Their mothers start it and the world at large continues it, handing them things, picking things up for them, smoothing their vicinity out for them in every way. I on the other hand remember everything. I’m practically a mnemonist of the kind people study. My mother forgot everything during the raptures of misery she was always involved in, so I had to remember everything for both of us, perforce, before we sank. She also used to lose things as a strategy against people like creditors and landlords. Academically my memory starts out a blessing and ends up a curse because it carries me into milieux where people have been led to make strong assumptions about my core intellect based on it. Recall is not enough. Not that I’m stupid. I don’t know if I am, yet. But my photographic memory was useful to Giles. The panoply of things I had been keeping track of for him constituted everything except his camera. I gave him some recent examples.
Then there was Africa. His experience was the Republic of South Africa plus a little Rhodesia during UDI. He seemed to feel this qualified him for all of Africa. He walked around as though he knew what he was doing, but I knew better—as I had proved. Black-run Africa is different. He didn’t take Botswana seriously. More than once I’d stopped him from shooting scenes with public buildings in the background, which is not appreciated by the Botswana police. Also I had convinced him it was not smart to be continually using the adjective “lekker” for great, terrific. He had picked that up in South Africa and it was doubtless okay at the bar in the Grenadier Room at the President Hotel but not out among where the people could hear. He slightly disbelieved me when I told him the Batswana disliked Boers, because he had been overwhelmed by Boer hospitality, which is a real entity, if you happen to be white.
He said he needed to think about taking me along.
After a little swallowing he came around, but would I mind paying for my own breakfasts and lunches at Vic Falls if he picked up my dinners and everything else, all the travel? That made it perfect and crystal clear all around. We shook on it. I can take breakfast or leave it anyway. I could tell he needed some kind of reassurance that I found him physically attractive, our negotiations notwithstanding. Finally I just told him so, and that worked. It was all set.
Bulawayo
The train trip from Gaborone to Victoria Falls is in two stages—a night and half a day to Bulawayo, then a layover until ten and then overnight to the falls. There is no Rhodesia, I had to tell Giles over and over, to grind into his brain that we were going to a country called Zimbabwe and only Zimbabwe. I made up a rhyme to help him.
We toyed with the idea of doing it in our compartment but decided to hold off until Vic Falls and luxury. There’s no hot water on the train, only cold water that comes out of a little tap and down into a zinc basin that folds out of the wall between the windows and which you know has been used as a urinal by people not eager for the tumult you standardly get in the corridors on your way to the toilets. This is the case with basins in any accommodation not accompanied by a private bath, so this is not a third world failing. I liked the wood paneling and all the glittering brass fitments, but if you looked at the carpeting you were not seeing something pristine. Also the berths were a little short for a beefeater like Giles. We agreed about amenity being important. We held hands.
The ambience got worse in a more global way at our first stop inside Zimbabwe, at Plumtree, where Zimbabwe customs and immigration people get on and check you out. They weren’t dreamy like the Batswana officers. Giles found them aggressive. His appearance was against him because he looked so classically proconsular, with his tailored safari kit and opulent wristwatch. I saw it coming. He was the epitome of what they had overthrown, and here he was again. He had never ever until then had his passport taken out of his presence, he told me, when that happened, vibrating. Eventually it was all right, but it developed he had chewed the lining of his mouth till it bled while he was in anxiety, which he showed me evidence of on a serviette.
They had only recently resumed the run from Bulawayo to Victoria Falls: there were still bullet holes in the sides of some of the coaches. Political euphoria was the air we breathed once we were under way. I had luckily forewarned Giles to expect this. People who were already pretty boisterous surged out of third and fourth class and got more so fooling around in first class trying to find empty compartments if they could. There was full-blast camaraderie going on. We were the only whites in our car. You could lock your compartment, but anyone could get into it by taking the piece of slate with the compartment number on it out of its holder on the door and inserting it into the gap between the door and the frame and tripping the catch, which the conductors routinely did when they wanted for any reason to check out a compartment and didn’t feel like fiddling with different keys. They weren’t secretive when they were doing the trick. The corridor was a mêlée of people carousing and singing freedom songs, which I liked—the singing, not the carousing. Giles wouldn’t undress, in case he had to repel somebody. In fact he dozed sitting on the floor with his back against the door and it woke me up when he did finally fall backward out into the corridor. Somebody had gotten the door open who then vanished—apologizing, as I pointed out. Giles roared briefly, mainly because by two a.m. the corridor was aqueous, shall we say, and he’d gotten his shirt befouled. He tore his shirt off and I got up and soaped his back for him.
Of Surfeit One Can Never Have Too Much
We got to the hotel before seven. It was perfection. It sits alone high up in ordinary thin woods and bush. The grounds are perfection. The hotel is huge, cavernous, and quiet. Staff was everywhere, but there were no other guests in
evidence, which Giles incorrectly assumed was because people were still asleep. I had to tear him away from a fixated perusal of a placard that told you what the drill was in the event of a terrorist attack, which was taken down the next day along with the sign commanding you to turn in your firearms when you registered. This no longer applies, I had to tell him firmly several times.
We were in an apotheosis of whiteness. The hotel was white inside and out. The white paintwork in our room was like porcelain. When you turned up the white ceiling fan to maximum you were under a white disk that seemed symbolic. Our bedspread was white. At meals there were white sauces to go with the cold meats, the vegetables, the trifle. Later I would see a woman, white, eating spoonfuls of béarnaise sauce directly out of a gravy boat. The cleaners and porters, not kids but mature black men, had to wear juvenilizing white outfits like sailorsuits—shorts, and jumpers with tallywhackers. There were other white statements I forget. Our bed was contained in a trembling white cone of mosquito netting, and delicate white lace curtains were lifting and sinking at the open windows as we dropped our bags. This is practically sacral, I said. But Giles wasn’t hearing me. That should really be asses’ milk, I said as he was drawing his bath. He was so tired he got into the tub with his socks on. I thought I’d await him in bed, having acted tartish enough unpacking to suggest that the gates of paradise were ajar. I felt sorry for Giles so far. I was patient, but where was he? Eventually I found him asleep in the tub.
I got re-dressed and headed for the falls, hurrying because I realized how pleased I was to be going by myself and also because if you stopped to muse for a second anyplace on the oceanic front lawn of the hotel you were pursued by drinks waiters with their little trays, even at nine in the morning. If you pause on the lawn and concentrate you can feel the vibration from the falls through the soles of your feet. The path went to the left through the woods. I was excited.
I was excited to the point that I was able to ignore a handful of baboons who seemed to be shadowing me for a while. I normally hate and fear them, based on personal experience. They sometimes shy off if you make a throwing motion. Not these, though. But I proceeded. I was on the verge of a confused but major experience.
Weep for Me
Well before you see water you find yourself walking through pure vapor. The roar penetrates you and you stop thinking without trying.
I took a branch of the path that led out onto the shoulder of the gorge the falls pour into. I could sit in long grass with my feet to the void, the falls immense straight in front of me. It was excessive in every dimension. The mist and spray rise up in a column that breaks off at the top into normal clouds while you watch. This is the last waterfall I need to see, I thought. Depending on the angle of the sun, there were rainbows and fractions of rainbows above and below the falls. You resonate. The first main sensation is about physicality. The falls said something to me like You are flesh, in no uncertain terms. This phase lasted over an hour. I have never been so intent. Several times I started to get up but couldn’t. It was injunctive. Something in me was being sated and I was paralyzed until that was done.
The next phase was emotional. Something was building up in me as I went back toward the hotel and got on the path that led to overlooks directly beside and above the east cataract. My solitude was eroding, which was oddly painful. I could vaguely make out darkly dressed people here and there on the Zambia side, and there seemed to be some local African boys upstream just recreationally manhandling a huge dead tree into the rapids, which they would later run along the bank following to its plunge, incidentally intruding on me in my crise or whatever it should be called. The dark clothing I was seeing was of course raingear, which anyone sensible would be wearing. I was drenched.
You know you’re in Africa at Victoria Falls because there is nothing anyplace to keep you from stepping off into the cataract, not a handrail, not an inch of barbed wire. There are certain small trees growing out over the drop where obvious handholds on the limbs have been worn smooth by people clutching them to lean out bodily over white death. I did this myself. I leaned outward and stared down and said out loud something like Weep for me. At which point I was overcome with enormous sadness, from nowhere. I drew back into where it was safe, terrified.
I think the falls represented death for the taking, but a particular death, one that would be quick but also make you part of something magnificent and eternal, an eternal mechanism. This was not in the same league as throwing yourself under some filthy bus. I had no idea I was that sad. I began to ask myself why, out loud. I had permission to. It was safe to talk to yourself because of the roar you were subsumed in, besides being alone. I fragmented. One sense I had was that I was going to die sometime anyway. Another was that the falls were something you could never apply the term fake or stupid to. This has to be animism, was another feeling. I was also bemused because suicide had never meant anything to me personally, except as an option it sometimes amazed me my mother had never taken, if her misery was as kosher as she made it seem. There was also an element of urgency underneath everything, an implication that the chance for this kind of death was not going to happen again and that if I passed it up I should stop complaining—which was also baseless and from nowhere because I’m not a complainer, historically. I am the Platonic idea of a good sport.
Why was I this sad? I needed to know. I was alarmed. I had no secret guilt that I was aware of, no betrayals or cruelty toward anyone. On the contrary, I have led a fairly generative life in the time I’ve had to spare from defending myself against the slings and arrows. Remorse wasn’t it. To get away from the boys and their log I had moved to a secluded rock below the brink of the falls. At this point I was weeping, which was disguised by the condensation already bathing my face. No bypasser would notice. This is not saying you could get away with outright sobbing, but in general it would not be embarrassing to be come upon in the degree of emotional dishevelment I seemed to be in.
What was it about? It was nothing sexual: I was not dealing on any level with uncleanness, say. My sex history was the essence of ordinary. So any notion that I was undergoing some naughtiness-based lustral seizure was worthless, especially since I have never been religious in the slightest. One of the better papers I had done was on lustral rites. Was something saying I should kill myself posthaste if the truth was that I was going to be mediocre? This was a thought with real pain behind it. To my wreck of a mother mediocre was a superlative—an imputation I resisted with all my might once I realized it involved me. I grew up clinging to the idea that either I was original in an unappreciated way or that I could be original—this later—by incessant striving and reading and taking simple precautions like never watching television again in my life.
There must be such a thing as situational madness, because I verged on it. I know that schizophrenics hear people murmuring when the bedsheets rustle or when the vacuum cleaner is on. The falls were coming across to me as an utterance, but in more ways than just the roar. There seemed to be certain recurrent elongated forms in the falling masses of water, an architecture that I would be able to apprehend if only I got closer. The sound and the shapes I was seeing went together and meant something, something ethical or existential and having to do with me henceforward in some way. I started to edge even closer, when the thought came to me If you had a companion you would stay where you are.
I stopped in my tracks. There was elation and desperation. Where was my companion? I had no companion, et cetera. I had no life companion, but why was that? What had I done that had made that the case, leaving me in danger? Each time I thought the word “companion” I felt pain collecting in my chest. I suddenly realized how precipitous the place I had chosen to sit and commune from was. The pain was like hot liquid, and I remember feeling hopeless because I knew it was something not amenable to vomiting. I wanted to expel it. Vomiting is my least favorite inevitable recurrent experience, but I would have been willing to drop to all fours and vomit for hours if that
would access this burning material. It was no use saying mate or compadre instead of companion: the pain was the same. Also, that I genuinely deserved a companion was something included. I wish I knew how long this went on. It was under ten minutes, I think.
Who can I tell this to, was the thought that seemed to end it. I may have been into the diminuendo already, because I had gotten back from the ledge, back even from the path and into the undergrowth. It all lifted. I sat in the brush, clutching myself. I had an optical feeling that the falls were receding. Then it was really over.
I hauled myself back to the hotel feeling like a hysteric, except for the sense that I had gotten something germane, whatever it was, out of my brush with chaos.
A Datum
What kind of person gets into bed still dripping wet from his bath? I had to conclude that this was what Giles had done, from the condition of the bed I now needed to share. I was ready for sleep. I put towels down over the damp on my side. I thought I’d try nudity again.
The most I could distill from my crise was that it was somehow rubiconic for me, that I had passed up an exit and so now more than ever I should fight, fight like a man, fight the world—which I was under the impression I had been doing all along—but fight harder, possibly. This seemed banal to me and probably a self-mystification. There was something far more deeply interfused, so to speak, but I couldn’t get it. Did it have something to do with an association of maleness I had for the falls as an entity? This also led me nowhere, and even now when I raise it it has the feel of a confession. I only mention it because the point is to exclude nothing.
