Kalahari
AT THE time the Kalahari wasn’t on Afonso’s list of priorities. It was just a desert. But there can be compelling reasons, even at eighteen, when the bug gets one. The trip was coming to an end and would soon be over. He left Durban with Saskia and Marta after
lunch. They crossed Pietermaritzburg at nightfall - the show at the Austin hadn’t been bad - and it was only later that they got the warning of a storm. They were rounded up in the middle of the Drakensberg - there was no way they could ignore the warning from the Natal police helicopter. “Go immediately to the nearest campsite.” In this country with its apartheid, nothing was left to chance. Saskia reckoned they could avoid the mountain guard control, but the attempt was an immediate failure. Night fell quickly and, half an hour later in the Giant’s Castle Motel, confusion reigned. It was becoming almost impossible to get everyone in; there were almost twice as many people as beds. So the manager went round the bungalows with one definitive criterion: couples would stay with their young children and the remainder were to be divided up according to sex. Young children were considered to be those
under fifteen. Even so, there were going to be some who would have to sleep on camp beds and in the armchairs of the tiny lobby. Saskia and Marta went off to number 19, zone B. Much put out, Afonso was sent to number 7, zone C.
He found a tanned young man there with bright eyes and untidy hair who looked very much like a rugby player. “Rylands, Ralph Rylands.’ He gave his name and joked about there being only one bed. Afonso learned that Ralph was twenty, was studying anthropology at a college in Warwickshire and that, as part of his course, was on his way to Sekoma. His parents lived in Kelso, south of Durban, on a farm with its own private beach. He felt trapped
when not in England and made pretexts for getting away. This time it was the Kalahari Hottentots. He was travelling east so that he wouldn’t have to cross Lesotho. He had left home on Friday and had spent the weekend in the city. He hadn’t been able to go to Edward’s, as his family would have found out straight away, but
with his sister’s collusion he stayed at the Oyster Box. Durban was great fun as long as he didn’t meet up with his vast number of cousins. It wasn’t hard to give them the slip. “I spend the day at
Vanilla Beach and at night I go to the Candy Room. I was there the night before last.” Afonso cottoned on at once - it couldn’t have been more obvious. Vanilla Beach was in what they called the gay section, a broad stretch of sand tucked between the smart south zone, the exclusive run of the whites, and the north zone that was reserved for people of colour. And the Candy Room Club was a well-known disco, highly exclusive, whose name quite rightly suggested its type. It was all quite obvious. In fact, the night before last was Saturday and Afonso had been there, too. He went with his two girl friends, and how they sweated to get a Members Only card - after they had been to see Reflections in a Golden Eye. He did remember the film, but he certainly didn’t recall that Boer face. Ralph noticed his disbelief, smiled and went on talking calmly. They were brought mineral water, cheese omelettes, watercress salad, cucumber sandwiches, paw-paw and hot cocoa. Afonso reckoned the eggs were over-done and left them. At eleven, the generator was turned off, and half way through his shower the hot water ran out.
Shock, screams and a freezing shower. Ralph gleefully rubbed him down. “There, all done.” They went to bed, it was a cold night and the heating wasn’t working. Ralph talked about the desert, which Afonso began to imagine, rippling and hot. “You can come with me, then I’ll take you home.” The following day he’d made up his mind: He would go with Ralph to the Kalahari. At breakfast Saskia and Marta were angry but eventually resigned themselves to finishing their trip alone. As they were checking out, for no apparent reason,
Saskia recalled the horrendous murder of Orton. “It’s a month today.” Indeed on the 9th of August at 25 Noel Road, London - he had bought the house for Joe - before taking twenty-two Nembutal tablets, Kenneth Halliwell smashed in the head of his 34-year-old
partner, nine times with a hammer. In spite of the viciousness of the attack, Halliwell, who was also a writer, achieved the feat of dying first. Saskia wouldn’t shut up. “We’ve got to go to Jo’burg to see the play.” (The premiere of Crimes of Passion was in November at a theatre in Hillbrow.) He got angry, turned his back on them and went to wait for Ralph near the Land Rover.
The worst bit was the mountains. Afonso felt sick on the bends and with the number of ups and downs, his body felt the harsh suspension of the car. It took two days to get to the actual desert. But the desert was a disappointment. Afonso found it wanting; a savannah full of clearings was not his idea of a desert. Perhaps Sekoma would be better. Ralph was well-informed, prepared for every eventuality, and drove for a straight ten hours (from five in the morning till three in the afternoon) and knew exactly where each lodge was. The food wasn’t the worst thing - an indigestible purée of
greens and peanuts, biltong, boiled cassava and barbecued corn on the cob, grapefruit - it was the mosquitoes. There were no mosquito nets and Afonso would invariably wake up covered in bites. “It’ll soon go, want to see?” Ralph made tiny bites on his calves, his buttocks, his thighs, his neck. His teeth were strong, knew what they were doing. This was how each day started: bites and a shower.
Then at breakfast he would have to swallow an anaemic porridge, boiled in unsalted water (he liked it cooked in milk, with butter and an egg yolk). At five the car would break through the dusty air. One day, when Africa was just a memory, Afonso would look at a picture of Calapez and everything would come back to him in a flash. At that moment he had other concerns. He hated the isolation, he didn’t want to seem a wimp, but they still had hundreds of kilometres to go. He found a much-thumbed copy of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom in the glove compartment with underlining and notes in pencil and green ink. It was Ralph’s bible; Lawrence fascinated him enormously. “He always took the wrong route, and I’d like to do the same thing.” Then the third day a woman appeared. She started as a tiny dot, cloudy on the horizon. They drove towards her, they saw her make a shy wave, they gave her a lift. She was black, still young, tall, slim, determined and with a turban of green sequins. She talked to them in pidgin, a mixture
of Afrikaans, English and a few Portuguese words. “Vunderful, senhor.” She had come on foot from the lower Limpopo, was looking for her son who had left as a teenager, attracted by the mirage of the Transvaal mines. Years of silence had made her take to the road. She travelled as far as Lobatse with them, and then was going on to Ledhakane where men were being taken on at the diamond mines, where she ought to be able to find her boy. She stayed silent, very upright on the back seat.
Ralph didn’t like what he saw, he wanted to finish his course and forget Africa. He found the concept of apartheid unbearable, the introduction of the bantustans was a repulsive farce. “I was in Transkei last year, and it’s even worse there than here.” And he most certainly did not agree with his father. Old Rylands belonged to the right wing of the National Party, he had supported Verwoerd and was a personal friend of Vorster, whose campaign he’d financed in order to guarantee the immutability of Separate Development. In Warwickshire he had faced hostility because of South African politics. “Some snob from Holland Park called me a Nazi, that son of a Nazi whore, but he was no match for this liberal’s anger and had to swallow his words. He even swallowed this.” He touched the
full, hard crotch of his khaki trousers. He remembered everything as though it were yesterday, every detail, and realized it had been a clumsy pretext. Bill Hartley was a bully and had been at St Patrick’s
for some time, but he didn’t come off best. Ralph stuck his head between his legs, and at once realized that the other guy’s cock was hard, no doubt about that. He got up, pretended to push Ralph
away and walked off shouting insults. He went back to find him after dinner round the back of the chapel, where the older boys went to smoke dope. They were alone, standing either side of a small stone wall, until the other boy approached and held out his joint. Ralph didn’t like the sweet smell of hashish, but he accepted, took two or three puffs, and knew that this was just the beginning. They stayed silent for quite a while, each listening to the other breathing. Night fell, Bill Hartley walked round the wall and Ralph had to lean against it as he felt the other boy’s demanding hands. He let him undo his buttons and put his lips round him, thinking of nothing else but the gentle mouth of the show-off who was well-known for persecuting the freshmen. “It was a blow job worthy of a Tory...” He laughed as he related it. And it didn’t stop there. At dawn the following morning, with a great hard-on, Ralph went into the other boy’s room
where the student in the bed beside his was still asleep. He didn’t waste any time with introductions. “I’m going to suck you off.” It wasn’t easy at first, there was some pretence of resistance and
then Bill Hartley gave in, turning over, convinced. Ralph sucked at him hungrily, his mouth moist, not at all gentle. “He was hard. It might have been his first time, but he lay back and enjoyed it like a
madman. Then the other guy woke up, looked at us, got up and started to wank.” The conversation had turned them on, they had to pull the Land Rover up to a bare baobab tree that stood in a stony area. It was the first time they had fucked in the car; Afonso took off his trousers and sat on Ralph. When they got back on the road, a harsh light shone down on them.
From The Light, a Durban bookshop open round the clock, Afonso bought books that, for one reason or another, never made it to Lourenço Marques. John Rechy’s Numbers was one of them.
He had read it in one go and was astounded by the promiscuous world of male prostitution, the cruising in Los Angeles parks and tunnels, on beaches, in urinals, garages and cinemas. Ralph didn’t know the author’s work and was amazed by the descriptions of the rent-boy scene in Griffith Park, the battle ground of the homosexual outsider. “It gives a sense of choreography, ritual and mystery to the
sexual chase.” Afonso recommended he read City of Night, an earlier, more exciting book. “It’s a story about a desperate, compulsive guy.” Ralph said he would look for the book, as he wanted to learn more about this writer who likened repressed
homosexuals to Black people who straightened their hair and wanted to be white. He knew from his own experience that this was exactly the case, but had never read anything about it. At St Patrick’s there were no Black pupils, a well-educated Pakistani was the only note of exoticism at the college, but when he went to London every other
weekend he would go to the Foxy, a bar in Old Compton Street, where he came across enough people to see that deception is commonplace. Afonso knew respectable family men who went in search of boys, the kind of people who’d never go to the Egípcio or gay parties, but would discreetly look round the terrace of the Scala and, less cautiously, on the balcony of the Polana. They chatted cheerfully about all this until Ralph remembered there was no lodge to go to that night and that the following day they’d be in Sekoma. They improvised a tent, where they swapped the protests of Baez andDylan for Promises, Promises...What would the bushmen - who ate game, roots and honey - think of Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach? Sekoma was disappointing. Ralph bought antelope horns, heaven knows why, and sarongs for his sister. They stayed there a day in a sort of boarding house where hunters would turn up on the off-chance. Afonso hated the thought of the inevitable return
home. Ralph remained in a good mood. They both knew the Kalahari had been an illusion, an illusion in the midst of the temporal.
lunch. They crossed Pietermaritzburg at nightfall - the show at the Austin hadn’t been bad - and it was only later that they got the warning of a storm. They were rounded up in the middle of the Drakensberg - there was no way they could ignore the warning from the Natal police helicopter. “Go immediately to the nearest campsite.” In this country with its apartheid, nothing was left to chance. Saskia reckoned they could avoid the mountain guard control, but the attempt was an immediate failure. Night fell quickly and, half an hour later in the Giant’s Castle Motel, confusion reigned. It was becoming almost impossible to get everyone in; there were almost twice as many people as beds. So the manager went round the bungalows with one definitive criterion: couples would stay with their young children and the remainder were to be divided up according to sex. Young children were considered to be those
under fifteen. Even so, there were going to be some who would have to sleep on camp beds and in the armchairs of the tiny lobby. Saskia and Marta went off to number 19, zone B. Much put out, Afonso was sent to number 7, zone C.
He found a tanned young man there with bright eyes and untidy hair who looked very much like a rugby player. “Rylands, Ralph Rylands.’ He gave his name and joked about there being only one bed. Afonso learned that Ralph was twenty, was studying anthropology at a college in Warwickshire and that, as part of his course, was on his way to Sekoma. His parents lived in Kelso, south of Durban, on a farm with its own private beach. He felt trapped
when not in England and made pretexts for getting away. This time it was the Kalahari Hottentots. He was travelling east so that he wouldn’t have to cross Lesotho. He had left home on Friday and had spent the weekend in the city. He hadn’t been able to go to Edward’s, as his family would have found out straight away, but
with his sister’s collusion he stayed at the Oyster Box. Durban was great fun as long as he didn’t meet up with his vast number of cousins. It wasn’t hard to give them the slip. “I spend the day at
Vanilla Beach and at night I go to the Candy Room. I was there the night before last.” Afonso cottoned on at once - it couldn’t have been more obvious. Vanilla Beach was in what they called the gay section, a broad stretch of sand tucked between the smart south zone, the exclusive run of the whites, and the north zone that was reserved for people of colour. And the Candy Room Club was a well-known disco, highly exclusive, whose name quite rightly suggested its type. It was all quite obvious. In fact, the night before last was Saturday and Afonso had been there, too. He went with his two girl friends, and how they sweated to get a Members Only card - after they had been to see Reflections in a Golden Eye. He did remember the film, but he certainly didn’t recall that Boer face. Ralph noticed his disbelief, smiled and went on talking calmly. They were brought mineral water, cheese omelettes, watercress salad, cucumber sandwiches, paw-paw and hot cocoa. Afonso reckoned the eggs were over-done and left them. At eleven, the generator was turned off, and half way through his shower the hot water ran out.
Shock, screams and a freezing shower. Ralph gleefully rubbed him down. “There, all done.” They went to bed, it was a cold night and the heating wasn’t working. Ralph talked about the desert, which Afonso began to imagine, rippling and hot. “You can come with me, then I’ll take you home.” The following day he’d made up his mind: He would go with Ralph to the Kalahari. At breakfast Saskia and Marta were angry but eventually resigned themselves to finishing their trip alone. As they were checking out, for no apparent reason,
Saskia recalled the horrendous murder of Orton. “It’s a month today.” Indeed on the 9th of August at 25 Noel Road, London - he had bought the house for Joe - before taking twenty-two Nembutal tablets, Kenneth Halliwell smashed in the head of his 34-year-old
partner, nine times with a hammer. In spite of the viciousness of the attack, Halliwell, who was also a writer, achieved the feat of dying first. Saskia wouldn’t shut up. “We’ve got to go to Jo’burg to see the play.” (The premiere of Crimes of Passion was in November at a theatre in Hillbrow.) He got angry, turned his back on them and went to wait for Ralph near the Land Rover.
The worst bit was the mountains. Afonso felt sick on the bends and with the number of ups and downs, his body felt the harsh suspension of the car. It took two days to get to the actual desert. But the desert was a disappointment. Afonso found it wanting; a savannah full of clearings was not his idea of a desert. Perhaps Sekoma would be better. Ralph was well-informed, prepared for every eventuality, and drove for a straight ten hours (from five in the morning till three in the afternoon) and knew exactly where each lodge was. The food wasn’t the worst thing - an indigestible purée of
greens and peanuts, biltong, boiled cassava and barbecued corn on the cob, grapefruit - it was the mosquitoes. There were no mosquito nets and Afonso would invariably wake up covered in bites. “It’ll soon go, want to see?” Ralph made tiny bites on his calves, his buttocks, his thighs, his neck. His teeth were strong, knew what they were doing. This was how each day started: bites and a shower.
Then at breakfast he would have to swallow an anaemic porridge, boiled in unsalted water (he liked it cooked in milk, with butter and an egg yolk). At five the car would break through the dusty air. One day, when Africa was just a memory, Afonso would look at a picture of Calapez and everything would come back to him in a flash. At that moment he had other concerns. He hated the isolation, he didn’t want to seem a wimp, but they still had hundreds of kilometres to go. He found a much-thumbed copy of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom in the glove compartment with underlining and notes in pencil and green ink. It was Ralph’s bible; Lawrence fascinated him enormously. “He always took the wrong route, and I’d like to do the same thing.” Then the third day a woman appeared. She started as a tiny dot, cloudy on the horizon. They drove towards her, they saw her make a shy wave, they gave her a lift. She was black, still young, tall, slim, determined and with a turban of green sequins. She talked to them in pidgin, a mixture
of Afrikaans, English and a few Portuguese words. “Vunderful, senhor.” She had come on foot from the lower Limpopo, was looking for her son who had left as a teenager, attracted by the mirage of the Transvaal mines. Years of silence had made her take to the road. She travelled as far as Lobatse with them, and then was going on to Ledhakane where men were being taken on at the diamond mines, where she ought to be able to find her boy. She stayed silent, very upright on the back seat.
Ralph didn’t like what he saw, he wanted to finish his course and forget Africa. He found the concept of apartheid unbearable, the introduction of the bantustans was a repulsive farce. “I was in Transkei last year, and it’s even worse there than here.” And he most certainly did not agree with his father. Old Rylands belonged to the right wing of the National Party, he had supported Verwoerd and was a personal friend of Vorster, whose campaign he’d financed in order to guarantee the immutability of Separate Development. In Warwickshire he had faced hostility because of South African politics. “Some snob from Holland Park called me a Nazi, that son of a Nazi whore, but he was no match for this liberal’s anger and had to swallow his words. He even swallowed this.” He touched the
full, hard crotch of his khaki trousers. He remembered everything as though it were yesterday, every detail, and realized it had been a clumsy pretext. Bill Hartley was a bully and had been at St Patrick’s
for some time, but he didn’t come off best. Ralph stuck his head between his legs, and at once realized that the other guy’s cock was hard, no doubt about that. He got up, pretended to push Ralph
away and walked off shouting insults. He went back to find him after dinner round the back of the chapel, where the older boys went to smoke dope. They were alone, standing either side of a small stone wall, until the other boy approached and held out his joint. Ralph didn’t like the sweet smell of hashish, but he accepted, took two or three puffs, and knew that this was just the beginning. They stayed silent for quite a while, each listening to the other breathing. Night fell, Bill Hartley walked round the wall and Ralph had to lean against it as he felt the other boy’s demanding hands. He let him undo his buttons and put his lips round him, thinking of nothing else but the gentle mouth of the show-off who was well-known for persecuting the freshmen. “It was a blow job worthy of a Tory...” He laughed as he related it. And it didn’t stop there. At dawn the following morning, with a great hard-on, Ralph went into the other boy’s room
where the student in the bed beside his was still asleep. He didn’t waste any time with introductions. “I’m going to suck you off.” It wasn’t easy at first, there was some pretence of resistance and
then Bill Hartley gave in, turning over, convinced. Ralph sucked at him hungrily, his mouth moist, not at all gentle. “He was hard. It might have been his first time, but he lay back and enjoyed it like a
madman. Then the other guy woke up, looked at us, got up and started to wank.” The conversation had turned them on, they had to pull the Land Rover up to a bare baobab tree that stood in a stony area. It was the first time they had fucked in the car; Afonso took off his trousers and sat on Ralph. When they got back on the road, a harsh light shone down on them.
From The Light, a Durban bookshop open round the clock, Afonso bought books that, for one reason or another, never made it to Lourenço Marques. John Rechy’s Numbers was one of them.
He had read it in one go and was astounded by the promiscuous world of male prostitution, the cruising in Los Angeles parks and tunnels, on beaches, in urinals, garages and cinemas. Ralph didn’t know the author’s work and was amazed by the descriptions of the rent-boy scene in Griffith Park, the battle ground of the homosexual outsider. “It gives a sense of choreography, ritual and mystery to the
sexual chase.” Afonso recommended he read City of Night, an earlier, more exciting book. “It’s a story about a desperate, compulsive guy.” Ralph said he would look for the book, as he wanted to learn more about this writer who likened repressed
homosexuals to Black people who straightened their hair and wanted to be white. He knew from his own experience that this was exactly the case, but had never read anything about it. At St Patrick’s there were no Black pupils, a well-educated Pakistani was the only note of exoticism at the college, but when he went to London every other
weekend he would go to the Foxy, a bar in Old Compton Street, where he came across enough people to see that deception is commonplace. Afonso knew respectable family men who went in search of boys, the kind of people who’d never go to the Egípcio or gay parties, but would discreetly look round the terrace of the Scala and, less cautiously, on the balcony of the Polana. They chatted cheerfully about all this until Ralph remembered there was no lodge to go to that night and that the following day they’d be in Sekoma. They improvised a tent, where they swapped the protests of Baez andDylan for Promises, Promises...What would the bushmen - who ate game, roots and honey - think of Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach? Sekoma was disappointing. Ralph bought antelope horns, heaven knows why, and sarongs for his sister. They stayed there a day in a sort of boarding house where hunters would turn up on the off-chance. Afonso hated the thought of the inevitable return
home. Ralph remained in a good mood. They both knew the Kalahari had been an illusion, an illusion in the midst of the temporal.
Translated by Alison Aiken
Page(s) 16-18
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