People who think the weather is perfect in California should try Johannesburg. The morning sun here would make god jealous.
In the summer (now) it gets just hot enough to wish for the shade you can enjoy under whichever tree works your run of ground. With last month’s rain, all these trees are rich and full and in the suburbs, where I am, you come to the crest of a road and see downtown as if surrounded by forest, like Oz, calling to you from the distance.
But this is no paradise. The men in the middle of a four-lane highway, gesturing to their mouths as they ask for food signal as much. As do the parks too few people use. As do the idle groups gathered at intersections because there is nothing else for them to do, a blight not likely to be alleviated by the current power crises in which electricity is off between four and twelve hours a day.
But mostly it is the walls. Around every home and every complex, every shopping center and any school, endless walls that shutter the mind’s eye, and squelch the imagination. In the vast townships—barrios of tin houses and dirt floors—life comes fully exposed to nothing. Otherwise, high walls and barbed wire imprison everything.
“We could have everything.” That’s a line from a Hemingway story you may know called “Hills Like White Elephants.” It often gets taught in school. I used to teach it. It is sort of about a couple and fertility and what is reasonable vs. what is unreasonable. But really it is about looking over the boundary that divides what makes life verdant from what makes it flavorless.
“It is just to let the air in,” says Jig’s partner, telling her that if she does this then yes “he will love her.” But Jig knows everything is out of reach, over there, across the way, where the hills look like white elephants. Or so we infer. She gives no sign of wanting to be a mom or of being a particularly fertile person spiritually or psychologically. In so far as she and her unnamed partner once enjoyed a romantic adventure in Spain, that has been lost. “That's all we do, isn't it,” she says, “look at things and try new drinks?”
(That’s all we do: look at things and try new . . . clicks.)
What Jig says may as well be a rewrite of a biblical line from Matthew that haunted Fitzgerald: "Ye are the salt of the earth. But if the salt hath lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?"
What do you do when salt loses its saltness? Bigger houses, faster cars, more clicks.
Those are walls too.
Mr. Dash suggests that the real reason for the walls is not so much protection from criminals but because the people inside know what they have done. The security, that is, is against the guilt of having committed apartheid, not the brutality of its aftermath. “May one be pardoned and retain th' offense?” Claudius the usurper asks in Hamlet. Nope. Not without the sublimated energy that murders the world.
This is not paradise. But it offers a stark picture of how paradise might be: sunny, spicey, and without the sin of divide.