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.
Bulawayo
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.
Of Surfeit One Can Never Have Too Much
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.
Weep for Me
Well before you see water you find yourself walking through pure vapor. The roar penetrates you and you stop thinking without trying.
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.