The Last Train to Zona Verde Read Free Page B

another side.
    It took me a while to understand that the window of Africa, like the window on a train rushing through the night, is a distorting mirror that partly reflects the viewer’s own face. Among the Ju/’hoansi I was indeed witnessing a reenactment, and I came to realize that the folk who called themselves the Real People were, alas, unreal. The heroic pagan world of golden-skinned Ju/’hoansi was an illusion. I had hoped to find that rarity in the world, a country of uncontaminated delight, but what I found was a desperate people, sad static unhoping souls, not indestructible, as I’d thought, but badly in need of rescue.

2

The Train from Khayelitsha
    S OME WEEKS BEFORE MY VISIT to the Ju/’hoansi, who sleep flat on the ground in their simple lean- to shelters, ever wakeful because of the nighttime prowling of predators, I woke from a sound sleep in a soft bed in a luxury hotel, between the swooping green flanks of Table Mountain and the aqueous glitter of Table Bay. This was in Cape Town, with its heights and cliffs, the only city in Africa with a claim to grandeur.
    Yawning toothily like a baboon, I switched on the TV and saw the turmoil in Europe, the sort of improvidence and chaos that people usually associate with Africa, and gave thanks that I was far away. I would head north one of these days by road to Namibia, Botswana, and Angola, and perhaps farther. No long-range plan was required. I was alone, traveling light, and needed only a cheap one-way ticket. A daily bus ran to Northern Cape province, to isolated Springbok, and continued overnight past the Namibian border, which was the east-west course of the Orange River.
    An aging traveler now, I took my morning pills, two different ones to keep gout away, a vitamin, and a dose of malaria suppressant,and then dawdled, still groggy from jet lag. And remembering that I was on a journey, I dated and wrote the first line of my diary, about waking in a soft bed in a luxury hotel.
    In such a pleasant place, no matter how far away, you never imagine you’re too old to travel. I can do this till I die, you think as you summon room service for lotuses to eat (“On second thought, I will have the pepper-crusted Wagyu steak with the black truffle vinaigrette”). It’s only when in a hovel in the bush, or being stared down by a hostile stinking crowd (“Meester! Meester!”), or eating a sinister stew of black meat or a cracked plate of cold, underdone, greasy, and eye-speckled potatoes, or banging in a jalopy for nine hours down a mountain road full of potholes — with violent death as close as that dark precipice to the right — that it occurs to me that someone else should be doing this, someone younger perhaps, hungrier, stronger, more desperate, crazier.
    But there is such a thing as curiosity, dignified as a spirit of inquiry, and this nosiness has ruled my life as a traveler and a writer.
    In much of Europe and North America a curious gaze is considered a hostile intrusion, and curious questions often arouse a vicious or unhelpful response. “You writing a book, pal? Well, leave this chapter out.” But in Africa such close attention is taken for welcome concern, a form of friendliness, especially when customary pleasantries are exchanged and tribal niceties observed. What brought me back to this beautiful city, and this continent, was the wish to know more at first hand, that vitalizing itch that keeps all of us amazed and some of us on the road.
    Over breakfast — salmon, scrambled eggs, fruit, guava juice, green tea, brown toast, and “Please pass the marmalade” — reading the
Cape Times
, I saw the headlines “Mountain Closed at Night” and “City Responds to Attacks.” The reason for shutting down Table Mountain after dark was crime — muggers, thieves, or in South African slang,
tsotsis
and
skelms
, the local names for thugs. A numberof nighttime strollers and people beaming in admiration at the city lights from their parked cars had