Mating (4 page)

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.

I intrigued him enough that he followed up to get my suggestions about picturesque spots near Gabs, mostly in the hills along the back road from Kanye to Moshupa. It was a little greener there. Goats kept it parklike in the small villages. He was grateful and started offering me tiny fees, which I refused, which seemed to overwhelm him somehow: I became sexual to him. Suddenly he wanted to turn our picnics into something a little different. I had been bringing chicken sandwiches and milk stout along on our photo excursions. The idea of making love al fresco was suddenly to be discussed. He was likable, possibly because he liked his subject, which was everything, oneself included. To some extent I was responsible for the direction things took, but it was my duty to point out that outdoor love was not a good idea. I explained about dispersed settlement patterns in Botswana, that what looked like blank veld could erupt with boys herding cows or goats right past you, how there could be homesteads or cattle posts functioning in the midst of spectacular desolation, miles from anything. I also knew of two anthropologists working out of Kanye who were cataloging stone age settlement sites, which could be anywhere. He got it. He was not an aggressive man and the question went away, leaving an undertone in our outings that was to my advantage. Pastoral sex is exclusively a male penchant. I guarantee no woman ever proposes it if there are quarters available. Even Denoon had a vestige of a tendency in that direction until I mused pointedly a couple of times that the tendency must have something to do with exhibitionism.

I had an objective where Giles was concerned. He had an assignment pending in Victoria Falls, which I was in danger of never seeing before I left Africa. I not only wanted to get to Victoria Falls but to stay there in splendor at the Vic Falls Hotel, the way the colonial exploiters had. This was less greed per se than it was wanting to visit or inhabit a particularly gorgeous and egregious consummation of it. I was convinced that under Mugabe accommodations would be democratized and establishments like the Vic Falls Hotel would cease to exist, which of course was only one of a number of things that didn’t happen under Mugabe. I had a fixation on seeing the greatest natural feature in Africa and seeing it at
the maximal time of year, which was just then, when the Zambezi was still in spate. I might be going back home to exile in the academic tundra, but I wanted to have seen the world’s greatest waterfall from the windows of an establishment amounting to a wet dream of doomed white settler amour propre.

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.

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.

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.