by
Norman Rush
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He was a professional photographer. The last I heard, he was unknown, although I still think he was very very good. He was someone totally permeated by his vocation. He related to the world compositionally. I was already inclined against the visual arts as a hunting ground for mates, but Giles clinched it. Two women I knew married to painters were supremely unhappy in an identical way. Men whose raison d’être is to wring images out of everything around them range from mute to gaga when they stop doing art, such as at breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bedtime. Giles’s stance was to be always alert to the parade of images that constituted the world, because one of them might be classic, like the Frenchman weeping when the German army marched into Paris. The trick was to never stop taking pictures, which is what he did. He was working on several contracts simultaneously. One was for documentation for the UN, one was for the firm in South Africa that supplied Botswana’s picture postcards, and one was for an unbelievably crude men’s magazine put out in Malta. And then he was always adding to his personal portfolio, which I promised to someday review for possible classics.
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.
lmao
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 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.
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.
lmao
He was a celebrity among the South African exiles in Gaborone. His nickname was Mars, which was what the Batswana neighbor children in Bontleng called him. Martin Wade itself was a nom de guerre. He had been significant in the National Union of South African Students at Wits and had done something spectacular enough to get himself conscripted out of turn and sent to the “operational area.” Then he had done something spectacular in the army, after which he had deserted and made his way to Gaborone. In Bontleng he lived in a genuine hovel on some kind of subsidy from the Swedes. People still in South Africa got information to him on strikes and jailings, which he published in a little mimeo newsletter that went out to different newspapers in the West, to be ignored. He was said to be ANC but sub rosa. He was myopic and wore glasses, which like his weight had an effect on me. I have a certain inordinate feeling toward revolutionaries who wear glasses, because there is the sense of how easily they could be unhorsed in the slightest physical confrontation with the enemy just by someone flicking their glasses to the ground and stepping on them. So you assume such people have unusual amounts of courage.
lmao
A little breeze had sprung up, and it did a cruel thing to him, lifting the lattice of hair up from his head like a lid. I know he noticed it, but he was stoical and ignored it, which went to my heart.
It became the kind of scene that makes you want to be a writer so you can capture a transient unique form of social agony being undergone by people who have it made in every way, the observer excepted. The bouts of wind continued. Z turned out to be right about the saté, but it appeared during the appetizer phase. Emissaries came out with salvers of skewers of it but never made it to our neck of the woods. Where are these treats? a Motswana said plaintively. Overhead there were strings of paper lanterns with real candles in them, a poor idea because the lanterns were jerking around and spilling hot wax on selected prominent people. We joined a move to get into a pergola that had been erected on a platform over a drained swimming pool. AID directors are forbidden to live in houses with functioning swimming pools. Had this thing been constructed for this number of people? I wondered, thinking I could feel the floorboards yielding. I got out. I pulled Z back out into the teeth of the gale with me.
I was elated, but now I felt shabbily dressed, next to her. Nothing could be done about it. I perceived that her skirt was in fact expensive culottes. So definitely that night I was among the avec-culottes, a joculism I would later use on Denoon and that he would praise. She was wearing a very sheer lime green thing for an ascot, brilliantly obscuring her throat lines, if any. Her nostrils astounded me, they were so small, like watermelon seeds. How could she breathe?
Meantime I was trying to keep something of an eye on Grace and figure out what was going on with her as she made herself small behind the arboricola. She still looked crazed. Remember this is Africa, I said to myself, where hospital patients run around the streets of the city in pajamas. Grace’s glittering eyes were nothing. In West Africa the foux were part of the cityscape. Also I was certain that there was something subsidiary going on with her, something involving cunning, which I chose to take as reassuring. I should have been more sisterly toward her, but I couldn’t be. She was extremely goodlooking, which I had to push aside a little if I was not going to be affected by envy of her derisory little hips and just right bosom. My breasts are the wrong size for an active person. They would be fine for someone restricted to lounging. I am built for childbearing, which was the last thing I wanted to happen to me, but — but looking at her I comforted myself with the idea that should I fall pregnant, as the idiom goes over there, I’d be in better shape than she would. Her bust was perfect in that it was perfect for galvanizing oafdom if she chose to stand up straight and inhale, and perfect in that she could let a succession of males pass by her in a narrow train corridor without having to keep her back to each one that passed. Of course apparently something unspeakable was going on between her and her husband. She had something planned relating to it. A talent I have is being able to step into a roomful of people and fairly instantly classify the majority who are just walking around in intake mode and the handful who are bent on something.