In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,30
boat, while I get out to help him look. The price of the flipper is worth maybe a week or two of fishing to this man. We search in the shallow water, between the crevices in the rocks. Hurry up, one of the Swedish girls calls crossly, we’re waiting for you. But now the anger finally touches the surface of his tongue, you get out of there, he cries, his voice rising, get out of there and help us look. One of you has lost the flipper, we’re not going back till you find it again. There is muttering and resentment, let him buy a new one, but they all troop out onto the shore and pretend to cast around. In the end the flipper is found and everybody gets back into the boat and in a little while the frivolous conversation resumes, but he knows that his outburst has confirmed what they suspect, he is not the same as them, he is a fucked-up South African.
Something has changed for him now, he finds it difficult to make innocent conversation with these people. The next day he goes off alone on a long walk down the beach. At the far end, where the local village is, where the tourists never go, is a rocky headland, he thinks he would like to climb round it. But when he gets there he discovers that people have shat among the rocks, everywhere he tries to climb he finds old smelly turds and wreaths of paper. He can imagine the shrill voices of the Swedish girls, oh how disgusting, and it is, but now another notion comes to him, that if people are using these rocks for a toilet it’s because they don’t have an alternative. He climbs back down, his head hurting, his feet in pain on the hot sand. Nearby there is some kind of marina for wealthy expatriates, expensive yachts lift their silken sails like standards, but he passes it by and goes into the village. He tells himself he’s doing it for the cool of the shade between the huts, but really a curiosity drives him. On the long hot walk back to his room he sees properly for the first time the ragged clothes on the smiling children, the bare interiors of the smoky huts with their two or three pieces of broken furniture, the skeletal dogs slinking away at his approach, and for the first time he chooses to understand why people who live here, whose country this is, might want to run errands for these foreign visitors passing through, and catch fish and cook for them, and clean up after them. It may only be the heat but his headache is very bad, and through the haze of pain the beautiful landscape has receded and broken into disparate elements, the water here, the mountain there, the horizon in another place again, and all of these into their constituent parts too, a series of shapes and textures and lines that have nothing to do with him.
When he gets back the Irish girl is sitting outside her room in the courtyard, smoking a cigarette. I’m feeling upset, she tells him, I just lost my temper with somebody, I think I was a bit extreme. The person she lost her temper with is an old man who works at the guest-house, she paid him, she says, to do her washing for her, but when he’d finished he hung it up on the line and neglected to take it down and fold it. Is it too much to expect, she wonders aloud, when you pay somebody to do your washing that they should fold it when it’s dry. She smiles and asks, did I go too far.
He can’t contain it any more, the anger that fuelled his little outburst yesterday is now a rage. Yes, he tells her, you went too far. She looks startled and confused. But why. Because he’s an old man maybe three times your age. Because he lives here, this is his home, and you’re a visitor. Because you’re lucky enough to have the money to pay this old man to wash your clothes, your dirty underwear, while you lie around on the beach, you ought to feel ashamed of yourself instead of being so certain that you’re right.
He says all of this without raising his voice but he sounds choked and vehement, he himself is startled at how furious he is. She blinks and seems about