The Final Curtain
How should things conclude? What kind of landscape should this continent come to an end in? When you’ve traversed it, from North to South, undaunted by the continent’s brooding, its unstable serenity and its inertia, and its susceptibility to emergencies – where do you then fetch up? It’s perfectly possible to cross this continent from top to bottom in such a way that all you’ve ultimately done is endure it. But it can’t just end. You cannot conceive of any chord on which it might finish, or of any crescendo or finale it might rise to. So all it can do is come to a diminuendo and just fade away.
At some indefinable point before you get to Cape Town, Africa recedes and turns into some cosmopolitan region, a neat and toothsome place full of street sweepers and wine growers, leisure activities and golf courses. And out of this decidedly Swiss ambience, Cape Town arises, with its ‘served apartments’ and ‘guarded communities’, its beachfront strip with bistros and cappuccino bars, surfers crossing the road carrying their boards, and white widows sipping colourful cocktails. Viewed from Cape Town, Africa is as far away as India.
‘Keep the Cape in Shape’, posters urge. Women doing Pilates exercises bend and stretch on the lawns, watched by groups of workmen in high-vis vests holed up in their trench in the road or sitting on two garbage dumpsters they’ve pushed together to create a makeshift seat. Their attention is split between this spectacle and the beach, which is like one big shop window, with all its tempting goods on show.
The tourists strike poses like the goddess Aurora with the sun star, reaching up and arching their backs into a hollow and stretching both arms up to the sun, as naked as the sun worshipper Fidus doing his nudist physical jerks in the open air. Look, the female tourist’s psyche whispers to her, I’m free to go native here too, while the almost totally naked athlete next to her stretches himself in the heavenly, all-embracing light.
Nowadays, the whites are well-versed in carefully regulated and well-covered-up bouts of defensive sunbathing. The sun has become more hostile and people have become more pragmatic. Now the sole purpose for the sun shining is so that designers can come up with sunglasses to protect against it, chemists can develop a sun cream with a high anti-UV factor, and sunbathers can slap on an ointment to guard against allergens.
By contrast, in old photos sunbathers can be seen sprawled-out invitingly, soaking up the sunlight; indeed, their utter devotion to it has something almost obscene about it, like they were positively urging the sun to ‘take’ them. It was all such a lustful business back in the old days of sunbathing. All that leg-spreading, stretching out, all that complete self-abandonment! And even now young people show their willingness and are spendthrift with their nakedness, while the old people spend their time cowering and shying away from the light. They lie there like flotsam; sometimes even a brief spell in the sun is too much for them, and they go all limp at first before getting irritable.
The black workmen on the dumpsters sit and stare at the beach like anthropologists. The white man is inherently comic, and even more so when he’s a sun worshipper. A human spatula, a gourmet sublimating himself into a delicacy by lying, turning and grilling himself in the sun, all the while promising himself beneficial effects from it.
The ‘Miner’s Convention’ is meeting in the city.
‘Is that good for business, then?’ I ask the taxi driver.
‘The Diabetes Symposium was better,’ he replies.
The local paper, the Weekend Argus, concurs with him. ’12,000 diabetics in one place’ runs the headline, ‘– that’s a real goldmine!’ Likewise, a former Miss South Africa, who now spends her time organizing charity dinners with Nelson Mandela as the star guest, rhapsodizes about the diabetics in terms that are normally reserved for political party donors in the USA. We are sitting in a large circle at a waterfront restaurant. Africa is nowhere to be seen; our field of vision is restricted to a coastal road, and we’re drinking, by turns, latte macchiato and white wines from all over the world, as well as some pretty run-of-the-mill plonk.
But if you stroll along the shore a piece, you come across a row of brightly painted bathing huts lining the beach for ‘Blacks’ or ‘Coloureds’, who are all just lumped together as ‘Africans’ here-abouts. Here they keep themselves to themselves in a kind of beach reservation, standing around for ages in the surf before decamping to little family groups huddled around a towel, where they spend their time chucking balls to one another.
I’m walking through the receding tide when a square scrap of grey paper washes up at my feet. Unfolding it, I see it’s the bleached-out passbook of a South African man born in 1981, whose stamped photo makes him look like someone who’s just been caught red-handed. Who might he be – someone who fell overboard from a ship? Perhaps it was stolen from him. Or maybe he drowned. Someone who has departed this life, either voluntarily or forcibly. Your imagination can’t help but be stimulated when the Atlantic washes up an identity card as jetsam. Later, I sit down in an internet café and try to trace the man on the highways and byways of the web. But no one of this name appears; his life remains an unsolved puzzle, a mere anecdote whose only remarkable feature is that there should be anyone in this day and age who has left behind no trace of himself and, what’s more, someone who has lost his identity in the ocean.
At the end of the street there’s an antiques shop. Among the revue photos, stuffed animals and the autobiography of a professional bird photographer entitled I Walked Into the Woods, I come across the handwritten diary of a mountaineer. Tucked inside the book is the photo of a woman, hugging the two men standing either side of her energetically, like she’s effecting a reconciliation – a kind of mountaineering Jules et Jim. I purchase the diary and start to decipher it that evening under the glare of the bedside lamp. Wouldn’t it be nice, sixty years after their climbing exploits, to pick up the trail of this trio once more? But I’m thwarted by the fact that the diary entries name not a single person; instead, the climber expended all his energy on describing his exertions, the climbs themselves, and the flora he saw en route. In these gruelling conditions, though, all individuals obey the same diktat: they become ciphers and speak in platitudes, even if those platitudes are extreme ones. But the three people in the snapshot hail from a quite different life that lies invisibly beyond the realm of exertion. So I put their photo with the passbook of the unknown South African.
The thought subsequently occurs to me that these photographic testimonials do indeed attest to something: despite leaving no footprints beyond the confines of the picture, they are still snapshots from the lives of people, and at the same time contain both life and nothingness. Strictly speaking, the first thing that strikes the observer in these frozen instants is generally a feeling of nothingness and how all-embracing it is: I glance up, for example, into the face of the South African television newsreader, and instantly what she’s talking about becomes empty and meaningless; no, rather, it’s she herself who is hollowed out and, for the duration of her appearance on the screen, is filled with non-existence, a total absence of meaning even. The same thing can recur in any given context, no matter where: a waitress balances a tray on her hand, but she’s asleep on the job; a building signifies no particular style, no expression, it may well not bespeak any great passion behind it; the voice of the pilot, the train manager, the guy sitting next to you, all of them are of such a consummate unintentionality, as if they wanted to say: Please disregard me. I’ve no desire to importune you with my presence.
Later that evening, I return to the restaurant. My friends are still sitting there, perched above a rock in the sea on which two sea lions are flapping their flippers and giving themselves over to the business of procreation. On the next table, the waxenfaced old squire with the complexion of a miso soup and a patrician mien has finally made up his mind; today, he is full of the joys of life. By contrast, his gay friend beside him is struggling to maintain a youthful front. Inevitable really, because you can see from around his eyes how old age has penetrated through them into his very being, and is making him wilt from the inside. Soon, he’ll give up bleaching his hair blond, stop tinting his long sideburns, and take off the native-chic bracelets he’s wearing. The old man bends down to his friend’s hairy ear and whispers:
‘Cheer up, Prince Grumpychops!’
At our table, Pierre, the South African golf pro, is busy recounting the remarkable spectacle of two elephants mating, which he’d witnessed on a visit to Kruger National Park.
‘It looked like one cathedral mounting another.’
‘Oh, you saw elephants,’ chips in the charity beauty queen, ‘elephants for me are like Wow!’
Suddenly there’s a shriek, high-pitched and affected like someone ostentatiously hooting at a joke. But on the table next to us, a spirit lamp has tipped over and sent a tongue of flame shooting across the table straight onto the polyester shirt of the mutton-dressed-as-lamb homosexual, and he’s screaming like someone who’s put on an exaggerated falsetto to mimic a gay man. By now, his shirt’s completely ablaze and he’s struggling to tear it off, and no sooner has he succeeded in plunging his hands into the flames and dragging it over his head than his chest hair catches fire too. The blaze licks inexorably upwards. At first it smells foul, then acrid, and his neck’s thrashing around in a ruff of flames.
Then someone appears and rips the remaining tatters of burning polyester off his chest. A lesbian giantess at a neighbouring table had been planning to use this evening to introduce her girlfriend to her parents, but hadn’t yet summoned up the courage to kiss her in the full public gaze. Now, showing great presence of mind, she rushes up and smothers the burning man in a tablecloth. For a moment he’s enveloped in the linen, a pall of smoke, and the arms of his helpers, whilst still emitting a piercing wail, but then all of a sudden he rears up, erect and pallid-skinned, from his tablecloth swaddling and stands there in his gaudy underpants, slightly askew and looking for all the world like Edvard Munch’s painting Scream. A strong smell of burning pervades the restaurant, mingled with artificial perfumes wafting in from the entranceway. A man sitting nearby leans forward to get a better view, as the victim is led away and the ashen-faced head waiter starts dashing round from table to table, desperately explaining how the accident could have happened. Meanwhile, some diners fall to speculating that this could see the place closed down for good, as the ensuing court case would be unwinnable.
From the toilets, we can still hear the burned man whimpering as he kneels on the floor having his neck doused with cold water and dusted with flour, which someone has recommended as a remedy for burns, while someone else offers the opinion that ‘it’s the worst thing, I repeat absolutely the worst thing, that you could do in this case.’ Stunned, the manageress appears at our table as she goes round collecting up all the spirit lamps; as she does so, she formulates the following statement in the little-used future perfect tense:
‘This will have been a black day for us.’
Soon after, we hear the wailing of the ambulance siren, and as everyone’s gaze is drawn to the door, the lesbian giantess takes the opportunity to kiss her nonplussed girlfriend, like she’s ambushing her, and a man at the next-door table attempts a witticism: ‘Seems they even flambé the guests here.’
Some people start talking, like dogs lifting their legs.
The following day, we set off finally for the Cape, a self-evident – too self-evident – endpoint of the world. The terrain leading up to it is like Heligoland, sparse and shrouded in mist, and finally we run up against a locked gate, which according to the information on an adjacent notice board, should have been open from early morning. So is it going to be open today at all? We hang around for a while, but there’s nothing doing, so we give up.
Later that evening, returning from our excursion to the wine-growing regions, we pitch up at the farthest extremity of the Cape once more. The landscape is still timelessly covered in fog, but this time the gate’s open. A board in front of it informs us that this is the entrance to the southernmost tip of the continent. A bus full of Japanese tourists pulls up and does its utmost to fulfil every cliché in the book. Fully kitted out with umbrellas and hats, its occupants stream out, take snaps of the sign and then board the bus again straight away without going in. We, on the other hand, are keen to push on to the farthest point of the Cape. But the warden in the hut next to the barrier points at his watch.
‘It’s six o’clock. We’re closing.’
In actual fact, it isn’t yet six, but the point is it could get to six and we might fail to make it back here in time. We try to negotiate the non-negotiable. Our rights are forfeited. The man has the tip of an entire continent under his control.
‘But you opened too late this morning. Can’t we simply recoup the time lost then at this end of the day?’
‘No.’
Ultimately, then, this end of the world remains closed off to us. Nevertheless, from a favourable vantage point, at a curve on the road heading west, we caught sight of the fateful promontory. It didn’t appear to have anything in common with the continent; rather, it just seemed to be some kind of knoll on some chance hill, a one-off disclaimer, a belvedere or bella vista, Land’s End and Finisterre. We’d saved ourselves the embarrassment tourists must feel when faced with this vista.
So we pulled over at the curve and experienced the drama of the traveller, who is forced to conclude that nothing really moves him and that he can find no point to his trip and consequently none to his day-to-day working existence either, which he only put up with so he could afford to come on the trip. When speaking about his future, he refers to ‘great expectations’; regarding the weather or the stock market, it’s ‘a fine outlook’; and when describing his illusions, it’s ‘rosy prospects’. But if all these should fail to transpire, he will lapse into black pessimism.
But in one particular context, these ‘prospects’ occur in the singular form: the lovely view, the bella vista. That kind of outlook is genuinely thrilling, which is why guesthouses are often called this, places with fine views of a coastline, or a mountain range, or a tower. The visitor slows down, pauses a while, and feasts his eyes on the view. It tells him that he’s reached the right altitude, precisely the appropriate angle of incidence, and that ‘The Great Whatever’ has only just finished dabbling in nature, his breath still wafting over it. A view, then, is always beautiful when, confronted by it, the viewer feels small; then it becomes sublime, and the viewer is reduced to the status of an insignificant nothing.
Yet the true magic of the moment occurs when an individual’s personal prospects converge with a grandiose view: in such cases, you enjoy the beautiful view over the landscape in a symbolic way. Only by forgetting yourself in the contemplation of such a view can space and time commingle. All of a sudden, the future appears in this panoramic view into the far distance, putting the observer in a peaceful and pious frame of mind. Then he snaps a photo; it captures the view, but never the future.
As a result, there are plenty of travellers who never get further than the first step. They follow their impulse to disappear. But in this façade, they penetrate neither to a state of joy nor to a fulfilment of their own needs, but merely get caught up in photographs, in their own country, in their origins, or in analogies to things they find familiar. And consequently never get away from themselves.
The opposite case is that of the happy person who only truly comes to his senses on the summit, like that man who had climbed all the highest elevations in Europe and responded to my question as to whether he’d also reached high-points of experience in doing so as follows:
Yes, absolutely, with every peak I ascend, however small. I find I’m instilled with a feeling of elitism because I know I’m the only person doing this kind of thing. Mixed with gratitude that I’m able to do so. As I’m approaching a peak, I tell myself that no one can take it away from me, and soon enough, I’m up there on the summit. Then I need at least an hour to celebrate what I can only call a kind of personal act of devotion. Sometimes, I’m overcome by fits of sobbing on peaks that hardly warrant such a reaction, because they’re really nothing special. Then again, I’m nothing special either.
The Cape of Good Hope may be a stubby little promontory, an unimpressive hill, but in truth foreign places everywhere reveal something familiar to the traveller – the sweep of a twig broom over the floor of the railway station, the broken hook on the toilet door, a beam of light with motes of dust dancing in it, or the sight of a person yawning as they read the paper. At the obvious ends of the earth there are often no man’s lands, occupied by shacks. They turn their back on the sight of nothingness and towards the people who wash up here – all those people, all those expectations. Tourists are always looking for a route into the moment that can be authenticated with a souvenir.
‘I’ll take you somewhere where the world really does come to an end,’ Pierre says. ‘It’s called God’s Window, and it’s over in Mpumalanga province in the east, not far from the Kruger National Park.’
So, we set off. Sometimes, the rainforest closes in over the track, while at other times the villages lining the roads sit there like they’re in the savanna. Then again, sometimes the cattle farmers have protected their compounds and huts with palisades against free-roaming big cats, while in other places a steppeland opens up, a landscape of barren, sandy plains dotted with adobe-brick huts exhaling the heat and glare of the sun. The ground is blotchy, like some pigmentation disorder marking the earth’s skin.
We eat on a veranda at a bend in the road. Along with our food, the waiter serves up the following story: a woman gets mauled by a lion while she’s on safari. Her grieving husband sprinkles the corpse with rat poison, so that if the lions return, their hunger will be the death of them.
The roads start climbing again. High above the ‘lowveld’, as the land stretched out one thousand metres below the Panorama Route is known, the ancient primary forests lie stunned and dense. The newly forested islands of trees curl next to the woods like florets of broccoli. At the places where the water plunges into the ravines, the crags with their shattered anatomy soar into the sky like hollowed out vertebrae. But no sooner have you passed such a river bed than the wood is free to stretch out once more and finally make way for fields, and presently nothing is as astonishing as the fact that nature in these idyllic circumstances is really quite nondescript.
The place we have travelled all this way to see ultimately turns out to be a balcony measuring six metres squared, floored with natural stone flagstones and marked off by a balustrade coated with peeling, rusty-orange coloured paint. The balustrade has been put here to prevent the trippers in their brightly patterned leisurewear from plunging into the abyss along with their handbags and binoculars. The fact is that summer visitors, after making the long trek up here, are so entranced by the sight of the abyss that they have to be physically restrained from plummeting to their deaths by wooden posts and crossbeams. Indeed, their behaviour up here in general clearly has less to do with the landscape than with these dark temptations – the only sinister dimension to many a tripper’s life.
So the traveller likes nothing better than to have himself photographed at this dizzying altitude, captured not just in an instant of imperious sovereignty over the panoramic landscape but also striking a self-possessed pose. As if teasing the vertiginous drop, he likes to stand with just one hand resting on the balustrade. At the same time, this lends the pose a studied insouciance, which only serves to heighten the sublime nature of the moment. The man leaning on the balustrade becomes a monument, while his horizons open out into the infinite distance.
‘God’s Window’ is a balcony perched over a steeply plunging ravine, which is around 1,000 metres deep, formed from shining rock walls overgrown in places with vegetation; the ravine is washed with falling spring water and echoes to the sound of chirping crickets and twittering birds. It’s a chasm whose walls seem to be straining towards one another, as though a rock curtain were about to close over the view into the depths, across the woods and streams, and over the distant prospect of Mozambique.
The deciduous trees wear their crowns like umbels and sway gently in the odour of mint. Sprouting directly out of the cliffs, long-stemmed saplings grow askew, teetering precariously as swallows wheel around them. An endless succession of rocky outcrops, covered with climbing plants, stretches into the distance. Lilies dazzle ostentatiously in white and orange. The branches point, gesticulating into the landscape in which, at least from this elevation, there is not the slightest sign of a human presence. The wind creates a parting in the forest canopy. You could easily imagine you’re standing at the back entrance to the Garden of Eden or some equally inaccessible tract of land where everything is just as it always has been, since time immemorial.
The wood here isn’t just any old ground cover, but rather a living entity, and full of surprises. Right now, the sap-oozing vegetation is filling the air with an aroma of curry and jasmine, followed by the scents of carrion and wet stone. What appeared to us to be a mountain when we were down below, now turns out to be just a hillock, domed like a hand grasping a doorknob, while the arteries of the wood, the streams and rivulets, run off into the distance, growing ever more tiny as they do so. A landscape drama is being played out here, to which humans are just chance observers.
The evening mist descends in swathes on the valley. Then the wind suddenly picks up amid the twitter and shriek of flocks of birds as they pass through a late rust-red shaft of sunlight; briefly illuminated by its glow, they soon vanish above the network of meandering lakes. And the landscape, left to its own devices with its armpit hair, its furrows, warts, clefts and scars, scabby and overgrown as it is, slowly disappears in the darkness.
But then comes the entrance of Fuji dot.com, huge, with its red and green livery, climate control and roaring engine. Its doors hiss open to disgorge its contents: the women chattering like mockingbirds and the men, with their shaved necks and open mouths, already pulling out their cameras.
With my back to this hubbub, I sit on a crag, a thousand metres above the forest, above the ravine where the waters meet and the rock of the cliffs pile up in their different strata. Immense ferns push out into the haze of spray created by the waterfalls. In the gloaming, the great columns of rock facing one another look like sketched, deeply indented bodies. The water gushes down into the valley and washes up and down at the foot of the cliff, as the cries of bats begin to assert themselves over the roar and chirp of the waterfall.
The night nests in the hollows of the rock clefts, where total darkness already reigns, and into which the first animals are withdrawing to sleep. Tinged with yellow and red, the receding hill brows line up in front of their rocky amphitheatre like so many puffballs. Clouds hang over the arena, and shadows play across the rock faces, which are flecked with tenacious sulphur-yellow lichens. Anyone who spends time here, inhabitants and visitors alike, wear this landscape like a poncho. Everyone feels folded in, enclosed, even by the magnetic pull of the abyss. Indeed, the chasm seems to have its own gravitational field, which draws you in inexorably, and which has a single goal: ‘The Void’. Emptiness.
‘Buses Only,’ shouts one of the tour guides, no one knows why, and is answered by staccato bursts of Morse code from the ravens overhead. Down below is a forest that’s still permitted to remain a mystery, where unconquered nature may still spread, and beyond it broods Mozambique.
‘Oh my Lord, this is awesome!’
The first of the coach party set foot on the platform.
‘Oh man, Oh Lord, Oh wow, isn’t this beautiful?’
One of these endomorphs is content just to stand there breathing in the atmosphere. The rest stand around and feel the urge to name the landscape they’re looking at: What’s the name of that mountain, what’s that river called … There then follows a kind of rising chorus of adulation, almost a litany:
‘Oh shit, isn’t this beautiful?’
‘Oh look at this, for Christ’s sake, this is fuckin’ beautiful!’ And they get it all down on film, while clenching the temple arms of their sunglasses in their teeth. Then they have pictures of themselves taken in front of God’s Window.
‘Beautiful background!’
Plumes of smoke drift through the evening air.
‘God’s burning incense,’ says a Swiss woman in German, pausing for a moment to savour the poetry of her metaphor. ‘But why’s this place called God’s Widow?’
Small, shameful settlements lie down in the valley. They have gathered their huts together as though they knew full well that it wasn’t right for them to be there. A washed-out light stagnates in the young plantations. Some tree trunks stand naked on the hillsides or are perched over the abyss. The birds don’t fly up as high as this, but they do rise some way from the valley floor, and we can look down from above on their outer plumage, stretched out perfectly to catch the wind … Seeing here is inhaling, and as the mood takes hold of her, the tour guide with the booming voice steps onto the platform, turns to her group and intones in a fortissimo of pure zeal:
‘Now! Let’s have a silent conversation with God here!’
I slip the washed out passbook from the sea under a rock and leave God to his interlocutors.