Here and There Page 16
Words are important. They don’t have to be posh or rare, they just have to be honestly come by. I think I can always tell thesaurus writing. It has a spongy overstuffed pout, a slippery, out-of-sync fuzziness. Sentences that obscure rather than illuminate. The test is to speak them out loud. If it doesn’t sound like a plausible statement, it’s thesaurus writing.
I know it’s a bit late to introduce a subject, a theme to this column, but I was asked to write about luxury, and that’s what made me think about the thesaurus, because luxury is a word I almost can’t bring myself to use without inward mockery. And here we come to the problem with the language. Generally, if you have a breakdown while manoeuvring English, it’s your own fault. And it’s because you’re mistreating the finest mouthful of expressions ever invented. If you can’t say it in English, you can be pretty sure you can’t say it at all. But there are some things you can say, but you wouldn’t want to. Like luxury. And luxurious. Luxuriant. And, nastiest of all, luxuriate. For all its subtle, muscular chiaroscuro, English is particularly duff at figuratism. The descriptive terms for effortless, thoughtless supine enjoyment are all embarrassing, to say or to write. They make every sentence sound like the brochure for a health farm.
I enjoy a pleasurable experience as much as the next man. There’s nothing wrong with being rubbed, scrubbed and grubbed into a pinkly gleaming state verging on insensibility, if that’s your cup of single-estate first-flush orange pekoe. It’s the word that sticks in my craw. Luxury, for me, has associations with tastelessness, snobbery, waste, boredom, blandness and insincerity. It rarely arrives on its own, usually travelling with the help of ‘timeless’ or ‘effortless’. On a dirty weekend, luxury can usually be found luxuriating with sophistication, creating the glacially botoxed thrill of sophisticated luxury, an expression which is inevitably attached to two-inch wider, three-degree more acute airline seats.
Luxury, and its braying, swilling, posing and poncing mates, lives in the half of the world I travel to avoid. (The trips to St Tropez and the Caribbean being merely part of my gruelling working life, that is.) Of course, having written all that, I had to go and get a thesaurus just to see who luxury sleeps with. Here is the unadorned list, and I think it’s rather profound. I still won’t use one, but it’s given me a little more respect for the old lexicon.
Maybe there is a beat of irony behind all the synonyms. Read this as a poem: convenience, comfort, cosiness, snugness, creature comforts, luxury, luxuries, superfluity, lap of luxury, wealth, feather bed, bed of down, bed of roses, velvet, cushion, pillow, softness, peace, quiet, rest, repose, quiet dreams, sleep, painlessness, euthanasia.
Dawn of a new era
Post-apartheid, Johannesburg has become the luckiest place in the unluckiest continent.
A tokoloshe is a Zulu demon, a nightstalker, a sprite goblin. Familiar, it lives under your bed and comes to you in the dark. South Africans put their beds on bricks, on tins, wrap spells around them to prevent the tokoloshe climbing up.
What he’ll do to you, if he does, is never mentioned. It’s too horrible. The tokoloshe isn’t some cosy fairytale because of naughtiness to add a frisson to bedtime, he’s a real five-star terror. And what makes him different from every other night-sweat apparition, what makes every tokoloshe unique, is that he’s singular. Each of us invents our own. He is the creation of our deepest, most horrific fears – a bespoke, made-to-measure personal demon.
So when you wake in the stillness and you can hear the faint scratching of hard fingers on the headboard and the sharp-toothed muttering, you know it’s coming just for you. It isn’t interested in anyone else. The tokoloshe can’t be bought off with lies or flattery. You can’t trick him. He knows you outside in.
The tokoloshe is a particularly brilliant and terrible invention, a horror version of psychoanalysis – the psychoses, irrational fear, the weakness that is inside all of us manifest as homunculus. It’s also particularly apposite to South Africa.
Ten years after Mandela and de Klerk, truth and reconciliation and elections, South Africans are still soggy with disbelief that they’ve managed to avoid a civil war. The longer they go on with majority rules, the more astonished they are that it still works. They’ve become immensely forgiving of occasional outbursts of irrational fury or bad behaviour because, ‘Oh, it could all have been so much worse,’ they shake their heads and sigh. For 10 years, they’ve got away with it and there’s no obvious rhyme or reason. Africa is the very last place you’d bet on having a mass agreement of contrition and forgiveness. And South Africa is the only country in the world to uninvent a nuclear bomb.
Of course, everybody gained. It was a platonic triumph. One up for humane civilisation. But – and it’s a huge but – in practical terms most people are, if not worse off, not doing much better. Unemployment could probably beat employment in a fight. And for the first time, this is as bad for young whites as blacks. Affirmative action has reduced their options. The finance minister is running a very Thatcherite strict economy which thrills men in suits in New York and London but is testing the long view of the townships. And then there’s AIDS and illegal immigration from every other country in Africa. There’s a strong export-stifling rand and a drought. It’s tough all round but – and this is an equally big but – it’s also ridiculously hopeful. South Africans smile and look at the sky and say ‘Pinch me, am I dreaming, did we get away with it?’
The last time I was in Jo’burg six or seven years ago, it was a frightening city, unravelling into medieval crime. People who had stuff lived behind barbed wire and spikes with multiple dogs and alarms and private security firms. They drove like fighter pilots sealed in 4WDs with snub-nosed .38s on their laps. Their kids were taught to run in zigzags and lock themselves in their bedrooms and put their fingers in their ears. They all still cooked braais in the garden, played tennis, got drunk, but the strain was terrible. You could see it in their eyes – the wear and tear of terror. Jo’burg rode its luck until it almost died of nervous exhaustion. Everyone knew someone who’d been, well, never mind, we don’t talk about it. The centre of the city emptied and died, the suburbs became mid-western shopping fortresses.
But now, this time, I got out of the airport and was amazed – it’s a new place, really astonishing. Areas you’d never have walked through have grown cafés and boutiques. There’s an atmosphere. It feels like a collective decision to get better, to get on and up. There’s still miles of razor wire, you’ve still got to watch yourself, but Soweto’s a tourist destination. You can get a tour, eat lunch, buy a wire motorcycle souvenir. There’s arts and music – loads of music. There’s theatre and there’s the new apartheid museum which just rams a lump down your throat. As a rule, I don’t like walking round museums that have been twisted into social engineering. There are lessons to be learnt from the past and the past can be accessed through things, but the reason for putting things in museums shouldn’t be to make kids polite citizens because, in general, it makes for self-righteous exhibits and the kids smoke behind the bookshop and swear at passers-by. But this one is something else. There are very few artefacts, it’s a journey through history commissioning an execution of apartheid, told with photographs and film and hundreds of televisions. If that sounds dull, then it’s because I’m not explaining it properly. It’s a cross between a moving scrapbook and an art installation. It’s also the most thoughtful and emotional couple of hours I’ve spent in a museum for years. The divisive story is told inclusively and if you’ve never been to South Africa, you can have no idea how difficult, restrained and courageous that is. The museum is a lesson in how history doesn’t have to have consequences or at least not the ones that were written on the packet. Fate is open to apologies. Classes of black schoolchildren milled round me as ever in Africa, neat and beautifully turned out, in exuberant uniforms. A year ago, I’d never have suggested to a tourist that they take time to visit Jo’burg but now you’ve simply got to. Not just the apartheid museum and the townships and the mar
kets and cafés, the music and jacarandas, and the high, dry veldt, but you should go because this is the luckiest place in the unluckiest continent. This year, the UN pointed out that Africa tipped from being an agrarian continent to an urban one. More Africans live in cities than in the country. And almost all tourists who come to Africa with the best liberal intentions come to see animals and wilderness – very few come to see Africans. No pride of lions is as exciting as an African market, to walk through an African street is more entertaining and enthralling and a lot more inclusively hands-on than a drive in a game park. If you want to feel the rhythm of the dark heart, then go to an African city. I’d go to Jo’burg.
Personally, I think it was the tokoloshe that made South Africa hold back, divert the consequences of the past. South Africans lay awake in the hot night and heard the panting and the muffled sharpening of little goblin pangas and knew what the fears made flesh would bring. The tokoloshe still lurks under the bed, but the longer this normalcy goes on, the smaller the fears that feed him.
A roach by any other name
Cockroaches live everywhere we do, but they aren’t our competitors or the scuttling, creepy enemy to be squashed underfoot. Rather, they are fellow travellers.
Who was Gregor Samsa, and what does he have in common with nuclear Armageddon, the Rwandan genocide and an Australian rugby league team? We’ll come back to that. A couple of years ago I wrote a story about goldmining in Johannesburg. The shaft goes down two kilometres. The alleys come off the central shaft like the veins and arteries of a body, and a new capillary is blown out every morning and the rubble cleared every afternoon. At this depth, the rock is almost too hot to touch. When it was formed, when it last saw the light of day, the sky was red and there was no atmosphere. It’s pre-oxygen. This rock is older than life. In the seam of rubble, with the mile or so of roof held up by crooked steel jacks, in the light of my helmet, I was seeing something that no one and nothing had ever seen before.
I crouched in the heat and the dust in this little rock cellar thinking deep, deep, deep thoughts. And then something tickled my hand – I looked down and there was a cockroach. Three hours before, this was solid, hot, mineral blackness, and here was this bug, questing, pushing the frontiers of cockiness. Roaches live everywhere we do. In the hot, stony dark they were here eating the residue of the explosives.
‘Cockroach’ is, of course, the answer to what Gregor Samsa was. He is the subject of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the guy who wakes up to find he is a cockroach. Roaches were always supposed to be the main benefactors of a nuclear war. Cockroaches are what the Hutus called the Tutsis in Rwanda, making it easier to slaughter them. And I’m told it’s also the New South Wales rugby league side’s informal nickname, for reasons I didn’t ask or wish to be told. As far as I’m concerned, you can never know too little about sport.
But the roach’s nuclear radioactive invincibility is now being questioned. In universities in the ’70s, no discussion of the Cold War could finish without someone pointing out that as cockroaches were able to sustain more than six times the radiation of humans, they would become in a flash the top of the rearranged evolutionary pyramid – and would quite literally inherit the earth and all the wreckage thereof, ushering in a new age where six legs and two antennae were good.
Not so, it turns out. We were wrong about nuclear annihilation and the Cold War, and we were also wrong about the cockroaches. They can indeed endure more radiation than us (radiation particularly afflicts cells that divide. Ours tend to divide quite a lot; roaches’ only divide when they’re changing out of their work clothes, which is about once a week). But scientists are now saying the critters would last only a year or two after we’d gone. They would pine away without us. Cockroaches, it transpires sweetly, aren’t our competitors or the scuttling, creepy enemy to be squashed underfoot. Rather they are our fellow travellers. We’re joined together at an alimentary level. We feed them, and without us and our refuse, they would waste away.
This has made me feel quite differently about the roach, and I have had what can only be called a Gregor Samsa moment. I am searching for my inner cockroach. I must strive if not to love them, then to realise we share the same bathroom and kitchen in life for a reason. I must understand they are as much allegorical as insect.
‘Cockroach’ was a term some radical Latin American writers used to identify the invisible, persecuted immigrant workers in the United States. They even had a song, ‘La Cucaracha’. And I’m trying to remember memorable or entertaining cockroaches that have passed though my life. It’s difficult.
There was the kitchen in Delhi where I went one night to get a glass of water from the old colonial stone filter and thought the floor crunchy with spilt sugar, until the next morning when I saw my footprints perfectly captured in hundreds of dead roaches. And there was the London hotel restaurant where I was briefly a dishwasher. If you flicked on the light in the scullery, the room seemed to shiver – there was a momentary flicker, like a camera shutter. It was the carpet of roaches sprinting for cover. I also remember a vast one I reluctantly shared a shower with in Port-au-Prince, and the 500 I shared a boiled terrapin with in Saigon.
I’m trying to find some fondness, some liberal sense of multicultural, multi-species togetherness with the cockroach, but I can’t. Likewise, I suppose I’m also trying to find something positive and winning to say about parties. It’s a Freudian slip, that asked to contribute to the magazine’s party issue I come up with insect vermin. But I’ve always been very bad at parties. Even in the short, frenetic period when I was good at them, I was really appalling at parties.
I have been to some astonishing ones over the years. Just taking New Year’s Eve, for example, there was a candlelit castle which sat in the sea off Sri Lanka where we had to wade up to our waists in the warmly lapping Indian Ocean to get to the turbaned waiters with the champagne. There was a swimming pool in Bali in a thunderstorm with a roast pig. A tented camp in the Kalahari with a dozen Germans in fancy dress. A yacht in the Caribbean on a sea fluorescent with DayGlo. There have been penthouses and snowy cabins, with punch and mulled wine, with fireworks and cabarets, with cocktails and topless samba dancers. With people I’ve loved and people whose language I don’t speak. And every time I’ve yearned for the first bellow of ‘should auld acquaintance be forgot’ because I can’t wait to forget all of them. To get through the sticky alcoholic kisses and the soggy bear-hugs so I can leave and go home to bed.
I have never been to a party I didn’t think could be improved by fewer people. The only thing I enjoy less than other people’s lavish hospitality is my own. Years ago I gave up giving communally. It made me too miserable. I clearly haven’t come to terms with my inner cockroach, the ability to be singular in company, to catch a common mood and gain happiness from the propinquity of happy people. A jolly community depresses me. Small talk is too much of a mouthful. I’m bad at flirting and worse at being flirted at, and I despise myself for not being able to just join in, to get up and dance on a table once in a while.
Oh, to be Gregor Samsa, to wake up one New Year’s Day to discover that at last, finally, I’d metamorphosed.
True believers
Utah may be better known for the fervour of its resident Mormons, but this state is also home to the West’s most pervasive morality play.
Give them the barest, skinniest streak of half a chancy idea, and people will believe anything. Somewhere, sometime, someone has put their hands on their hearts and believed everything. There is no human thought so logically bankrupt that someone isn’t hanging it up as one of the solemn truths of their lives, and God gave us Utah just to prove it.
Utah is pretty much monopoly Mormon. Now I don’t want to wee on anyone’s cherished and precious soft centre, but the history and beliefs of the Mormons would make a Rastafarian blow his cheeks out, roll his eyes and click his fingers in incredulous wonder. But then I quite admire that. Faith is all about a step into the mystical. It is the trust i
n the unknowable. So the more unbelievable and unknowable, the bigger the leap of faith. And when you come from the land of Anglicanism, which is no more than dipping your toe in while holding on to the secular handrail, I’m rather envious of the belly-flop belief in Utah.
Utah came to me as a revelation, which is biblically appropriate. I didn’t mean to visit it – I was actually in Colorado for a kid’s holiday, but we just sort of edged on in to Utah, and it’s astonishing. Outside of America, it’s not in the top 20 states people want to visit. In fact, the Mormons only settled there after they’d been moved on from everywhere else with pickaxe handles. There is the story that Brigham Young promised that after their 40 days in the wilderness he would lead the Mormons to the land of milk and honey that God had promised them. The weather got worse and worse, and the land got harder and harder, and the Indians ever more hostile and the Mormons were complaining and moaning, and finally they came across this great lake. Here we are, said Young, this land will bloom with our crops and our livestock; this is the land of milk and honey. And he took a drink of the water. And it was salty. Okay, newsflash, he spluttered. God says you can have as many wives as you can handle.
Utah is a breathtaking landscape of red sandstone bluffs and weirdly sculptured cliffs and precipitously balanced stone. It has pinnacles and canyons and deserts and huge mountains all arranged in a shimmering beauty. The desert is full of aromatic plants that smell of turpentine and stunted acid pine and juniper. In the evening, it’s like opening the door to an old garden shed. We stood on 2000-foot cliffs and looked down at rivers that had carved serpentine canyons. In the sunset, the whole pink and russet sky cast a last glare over 100 miles of wilderness that in scale and colour and texture, and surreal imagination, is unrivalled anywhere. It all ended up with the horizon of Monument Valley.