The Letterbox
As I look at the contours of the Swartberg, someone’s business is crumbling beside me. To my right, a woman in the dusk of middle age complains about the size of the Louvre. A photographer (American, perhaps, by the look of his shoes) tries to frame the dense landscape, while a teenager pours Black Label into a branded Coke glass. Through a crack in the door labelled “No entry”, I see waiters inconspicuously sharing a neon lime vape. Sour apple, I imagine, kiwi if they’re feeling bold. The businessman speaks in whispers about retrenchments and hearings to his uninterested wife, who cradles her chin in her hands and looks out, blindly, into the green rocky mountain-shore.
And then, there is silence, and I am in a room of my own.
This is the Klein Karoo.
It has been almost thirty years since I last set foot here. Now renovated, it spans three storeys and boasts an interpretive film show, a restaurant offering egg-white Johnnie Walker cocktails and ostrich pizzas and creme soda floats, and a curios shop called Kraal Kraft promising an “African Shopping Experience”, replete with faux zebra carpets, ostrich feather dusters, stuffed monkeys, and a lonely sub-Saharan wooden drum.
Running up the ramp to the beginning of the tour, my son could have little inkling as to why “Mom” was staying behind. Mom had taken him to see crocodiles in the morning, I explained to him, and it was dad’s turn to take over the reins. All of that was true (I’ve done my fair share of the “Is this a wildlife centre or is this a zoo?” guessing game that one plays on the Garden Route this holiday), but like most truths, it was partial.
I do not care for cheap similes or metaphors here about darkness (cave) going towards the light (sun). I have no desire for an empty aphorism to find its way to an anonymous post on LinkedIn. But there is something about this place that has haunted me for decades, and even now I can feel the shape of it without being able to land precisely on its name.
So, in the contemporary spirit of the n and em dash, here it goes: the-first-moment-my-shoulders-went-through-the-Letterbox*-while-something-in-my-body-said-no. My mouth said yes, as it always said yes, to anyone whose disappointment I couldn't (or can’t) hold.
My shoulders have gone through that gap a thousand times since, in rooms with no walls of rock. Once an amoeba absorbing my entrails, that feeling has been reduced to a flicker.
Only now, as I stagger into the fifth decade of my life, is that flicker gaining its flame again.
As always, it is his voice that I recognise first.
My son runs up to me at the end of his tour, exuding childhood excitement about the dark caves and the bright lights and the man who was singing Miriam Makeba, oblivious to the fact that he has rewritten my past into his present.
And I remember, as ever, the closing lines of Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home: "it’s impossible to be told by our parents what our dreams are supposed to be like. They know they have to dream themselves out of life and back into it, because life must always win us back."
Sometimes that being won back is simply walking towards the exit together, his gooey fingers folded into mine, chocolate melting down his cheek as he clings to the closing moments of the Magnum bought from the “Spekkies Sweets” kiosk.
*The Letterbox is one of the notoriously narrow squeezes on the Cango Caves adventure tour. It is a horizontal slot you post yourself through, shoulders first.
