In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,28
He shrugs.
They languish for a few days in Lilongwe, a featureless town full of white expatriates and jacaranda trees, killing time while somebody in their party tries to organize a visa to go somewhere. He is bored and frustrated, and by now he is irritated with the other travellers in the group. They are completely content to sit around drinking beer for hours, they go out in search of loud music at night, and some of them show an unpleasant disdain for the poverty they encounter. The two young women in particular, who turn out to be Swedish, have stopped being silent and go on in loud voices about their terrible trip through Zambia. The rocks, oh, it was just horrible, and the bus-station, oh, it was so dirty, it smelled, oh, disgusting. The shortcomings and squalor of the continent have let them down personally, it never seems to occur to them that the conditions they found horrible and disgusting are not part of a set that will be struck when they have gone offstage.
But things improve a little when they get to the lake. It’s the destination he’s had in mind since leaving Zimbabwe, everything he’s ever heard about Malawi has been centred on that long body of water running up half the length of the country. Take a look at him there a few days later, standing on the beach at Cape Maclear. He is staring at the water with an amazed expression, as if he can’t believe how beautiful it is. Light glitters on the tilting surface, the blond mountains seem almost colourless next to the intense blue of the water, a cluster of islands rise up a kilometre from the shore. A wooden canoe passes slowly in perfect profile, like a hieroglyph.
As the day goes on his wonder only grows, the water is smooth and warm to swim in, under the surface are schools of brightly coloured tropical fish, there is nothing to do except lie on the sand in the sun and watch fishermen repairing their nets. The pace of everything here is slow and unhurried, the only sound of an engine is from the occasional car on the dirt road high up.
Even the local people take up their appointed place in this version of paradise, they are happy to drop everything when called and go out fishing for these foreign visitors, or prepare a meal on the beach for them in the evening and clean up when they’re gone. They will row you out to the islands for the price of a cooldrink, or go running for miles over the hot sand to fetch some of the famous Malawi cob, even carving you a wooden pipe to smoke it in. When they’re not needed they simply fade into the background, going back to their natural tasks, supplying peaceful lines of smoke from the picturesque huts they live in, or heading across your line of vision at an appropriate moment in the distance.
Only someone cold and hard of heart could fail to succumb to these temptations, the idea of travelling, of going away, is an attempt to escape time, mostly the attempt is futile, but not here, the little waves lap at the shores just as they always have done, the rhythms of daily life are dictated by the larger ones of nature, the sun or moon for example, something has lasted here from the mythical place before history set itself in motion, ticking like a bomb. It would be easy to just stop and not start again, and indeed a lot of people have done that, you can see them if you take a little walk, here and there at various points on the beach are gatherings that haven’t moved in months. Talk to them and they’ll tell you about themselves, Sheila from Bristol, Jürgen from Stuttgart, Shlomo from Tel Aviv, they’ve been here half a year, a year, two years, they all have the glazed half-shaven look of lethargy, or is it dope. This is the best place in the world, they say, stick around you’ll see, you can survive on next to nothing, a bit of money sent from home once in a while, we’ll go back again one day of course but not just yet.
And already after a day, two days, three, the massive gravity of inertia sets in, the effort of walking from your room to the water is already more than it seems necessary to expend. Swim, sleep, smoke.