Cape Town
I’m just about to fly out of Cape Town and boy are my arms tired. No really!
When I flew out of Durban to Cape Town it was the first non-international flight I have taken thus far on my itinerary, and suddenly my weight allowance dropped from 32 kg to 20 kg and my carry-on restriction dropped to 8 kg. I used the last of my cash from Durban to pay for the excess luggage and vowed not to let that happen again.
The Cape as viewed from the plane.
I know I might be accused of being fat-ist here, but when the guy behind me must have weighed 350 pounds stark naked and shaved, and I am being charged a hundred bucks because I have some brochures and CDs in my luggage, something is seriously wrong.
So, when I got to the airport this time, I took out as many CDs and DVDs as I could squeeze into the pockets of my winter coat, shoved my four international cell phones and portable hard drive and computer wires into its inside pockets and held the coat jauntily by two fingers. Then I took a hundred Paul Lucas Productions brochures, which weigh a ton, and put them in my arms like a little stack of in-flight magazine for reading purposes and pretended that I wasn’t supporting eight kilos in one arm while they weighed my carry-on, which squeaked in at 8.2 kilos. $100 saved, only to be used for the chiropractor when I get to Australia.
But on to more important things, like Cape Town, or at least my little window into Cape Town – a window in St. James overlooking the sea with dolphins skipping along on the waves.
The view from Lizzie's house.
Crispin’s family tree has many limbs and even more branches. Husbands, wives, wives of ex-husbands, ex-lovers of step mother’s once removed’s brothers all play a part in one another’s lives, and any friend of yours is a friend of mine, as long as I like them.
And so it happened that I was invited to spend the night with the inimitable Lizzie Robinson, the widow of Crispin’s stepmother’s ex-husband. Or the woman Crispin’s father’s wife’s ex-husband married. Well, whoever she is, she is a sheer delight.
Raised in Zimbabwe by Scottish-born parents, she know lives with two beautiful Siamese cats in a wonderfully-breezy turn of the last century house built on a hill overlooking the bay. Her neighbors include Richard Branson (when he is in town) and Richard Branson’s cousin.
Richard Branson's house is on the top on the right. The fenicular comes down the hill to his cousin's house on the left.
I took a taxi from the airport that, like virtually all taxis in South Africa, was allowed to accept multiple passengers. So what should have been a half-hour ride from the airport took almost two hours, but I didn’t care. I got to see more of the city and, as I was the last to be dropped off, I got to speak to the female taxi driver and get to know her and her story a little better.
Table Mountain in the back, with the salt and pepper shakers (old water towers) on the right.
“Only take official taxis and only accept ride from colored, like me, or maybe a little darker. Don’t get in the car with a black, they are Nigerian and can’t be trusted. They’ll tell you that they don’t know where it is you’re going, but they are going to pick up their cousin. If they do that, tell them ‘Thank you, no — I think I’m going to get out here and walk for a while.’ Otherwise, the two of them will hold you up and rob you. The colored people are good people with families at home, the Nigerians that come here are all criminals.”
“If you want, I can give you a tour of the whole city tomorrow for 2,400 Rand (the price later dropped to 1,800 because I was only going to be here for a day and a half. I’ll talk you to down the Cape, Table Mountain, to see the penguins, the City, a township where you can see how they live. Everywhere. I can pick you up a seven and we’ll have all day.”
I told her that, as I didn’t really know my hostess, I needed to see whether she would be offended if I just stayed overnight and left first thing in the morning. She told me about her plans to get a bigger car (taxis are often and fourteen seaters, instead of her four-seater, into which we had squeezed five people. The world cup will also be happening in Cape Town, so everyone is hoping to be able to make some money while the tourists pour in for the event.
We called Lizzie from the road so that she could open the gate for us (Yes, here in Cape Town most white people appear to live behind gates as well) and she was waiting for me when I arrived about fifteen minutes later than I had said I would. Like in Durban, the construction and road improvements plans were a bit out of line with reality and the road to Lizzie’s is no exception. We crawled along the one lane at a snail’s pace, but Lizzie was fine with it all.
Lizzie's house. Taken from the garden.
I dragged my suitcases up a few outdoor flights of stairs and left them in the leaving room while I recovered. “Now, I’m having a vodka and tonic, how about you?”
“That sounds great. “
Her eyes lit up and, after I noticed the Capodamonte on the dining room table and she exclaimed “Oh, and an educated man as well!” there was no turning back. We were going to be fast friends and I could see that there would be no creeping out at dawn with the taxi driver. I can always come back to Cape Town and see the sights, but it’s not every day that one meets Lizzie Robinson.
Lizzie’s mother hadn’t planned on one child and having two just made her cross. But Lizzie’s brother, five years her senior, was the light of her life. Her mother asked him when he was seventeen, in Zimbabwe, “Are you a homosexual?” to which he responded “Yes.” And that was that.
“But why would you tell her something like that?” a young Lizzie inquired.
“An honest question deserves an honest answer,” was his response.
Although his mother accepted him, life as a gay man would have been impossible for John in Africa in the 1960/70s. So he moved to America, served in the US army for a time, was dishonorably discharged for being homosexual, and landed in San Francisco. There, he flourished as an architect and bohemian, hanging around in the same circles as Janis Joplin and tons of other artists.
He and his boyfriend Peter bought a beautiful home above the Mission District that they decorated within an inch of its life, and he decorated a room for Lizzie to have whenever she came to visit. Their mother was ailing and Lizzie, who nursed her until her death, was disconsolate when she arrived in San Francisco for the first time.
John’s friends swept Lizzie up in their circle, took her to parties and she had the time of her life. For the next 15 or 20 years, until John’s early death, Lizzie traveled with him when she could, visited him in San Francisco and generally adored him. She misses him desperately to this day – the man who introduced her to a marvelous and glamorous life of art and music and theatre and society.
They went to India together and Europe and New York and New Orleans and did it in style. Their parents, though not always forthcoming with affection, did leave them well-looked after and John was successful as well. At one point, Lizzie bought the house I stayed in in Cape Town for a song, though it is probably worth well over a million dollars today.
Lizzie had a servant who lived behind her house and worked for her for over 30 years. Like Crispin’s stepmother, she put her servant’s son through school and, although she lived in separate quarters out back, she considered her her best friend until the day she died.
She actually found her after she had had a stroke one day and she called the ambulance who brought her to the hospital. When it looked a though she was going to live, but require 24 hour care in a nursing home, Lizzie was prepared to take on that financial responsibility for the rest of her life, and she visited her in the hospital every day. This sot of relationship is so particular to life in SA, yet so different from anything that I know, that I find it hard to reconcile, yet I have no doubt that Lizzie really considered her part of the family.
I am writing this too long after the event, but I spent the whole night talking with Lizzie, and couldn’t get enough of her stories of growing up in Tanzania with parents who left Scotalnd, moved to Italy and then wound up in Tanzania almost on a whim.
She had a little boy she played with in the huge yard in Africa that was seemingly filled with snakes. She knew to wear boots wherever she went, but the “picanniny boy” ran around in bare feet ahead of her in case there were snakes. She wasn’t able to see the snakes in the dust and the grass, but he could spy them from yards away and he would catch them and kill them with his bare hands.
She told me stories about the various acts of violence and crime that, while not everday occurrences, are not altogether irregular. When I pointed to a beautiful house up the hill form hers with a rounded living room, she told me about a photographer who lived there who took pictures of his beautiful wife and how, one day, she heard screaming and the woman was outside, covered in blood, yelling for someone to call the police.
When Lizzie called the police, they didn’t even know where he neighborhood was and tole her that they would try to find it. “Useless” Lizzie said. “The police here are completely useless and most of them are criminals as well.”
So Lizzie ran next door to the “Lesby-terians” house and old them what was happening. They told her that they had “Chubb” which is apparently a private security force attached to an alarm company that one can pay for in South Africa, and that they would call them instead, which they did.
Apparently, they were right on it and they took the woman to the hospital, but there was blood all over the walls of her living room for montha, in the shape of her handprints as she fought of the attacker who now only stabbed her, but tried to rape her as well.
And then there was the time a few months ago when she woke up to find a young black man on the floor of her bedroom going through her jewelry. She yelled at him to get out, but he put his finger over his mouth and said “Keep quiet.”
The South Africans have learned that keeping quiet in those situations is the way to remain alive. She said that she didn’t really feel in danger, but who knows. “If he wanted to come in and steal a little money or some food, fair enough.” Lizzie reasoned, “but he took one of my favorite rings.”
An art nouveau window Lizzie had installed in her house.
Everyone in South Africa knows someone who has been a victim of a break-in, or car-jacking, or mugging, or robbery. When they here about it happening to someone they know, they ask “Where they hurt? Where they raped?” If the answer is no, there is a sigh of relief and life goes on. It’s just a fact of life.
Lizzie thinks her front garden needs an overhaul, but I still thought it was quite impressive. It was getting too late to go out for dinner, so I picked some fresh oregano, rosemary, sage, thyme and marjoram from her garden, mixed it with some garlic, fresh grape tomatoes, olive oil, butter and parmesan cheese and made dinner for the two of us, which was accompanied by a bottle of South Africa white wine from Lizzie’s fridge.
Lizzie's garden, from which I harvested the herbs for dinner.
We talked into the night about each of the paintings in her hose and the furniture and which uncle they had belonged to, and which things john wanted and which things she wanted. There was one painting that both of them hated, but that they had reason to believe might be worth a lot of money. It sat across from where Lizzie sat for dinner every night and a dog stared at her from the painting.
John and Lizzie decided to bring the painting to a famous auction house in London. The artist was well known for his landscapes, which fetched tens of thousands of dollars or more in the 1970s. The two of them made a act that, whatever the painting fetched, even if it was $250,000, they would spend every cent on a luxury vacation.
As they waited for the appraisal, they talked of a guided tour of India, a villa in the south of France with servants, nothing was too extravagant… The appraiser came out and told them that while this artists work was fetching unheard of sums at auction, this was figurative, and not a landscape, and best offer they eventually got was £35. But they definitely had fun dreaming.
Lizzie brought in the cats, locked the front door for the night, but her bedroom windows were still flung open to the crashing of the ocean. I turned in for a good night’s sleep, full of stories and wine and food and the sounds and smells of Lizzie’s Africa.
Lizzie's blue cat.
Lizzie's brown cat.
