Halfhearted Eroticism

We walked to the car, even walking felt wrong, as if I had to start over with everything. The sky was violet-gray, the horizon glowing with a nuclear brilliance.

I looked back. The Elder sat motionless, almost like a wax figure, as if he had folded himself into the visible world only for me. I remembered the words of an anthropologist: “The San do not move through the landscape according to its topography, but through the cosmos of their interpretations.”

I bowed to the Elder, who no longer noticed me. I obeyed a need. Perhaps it revealed a profound difference between his perception and mine. I wanted to see, to feel, to understand. He embodied what I could not yet even touch.

In the car, the air smelled of dust, metal, and trapped heat. You were silent. Perhaps I had wandered too far in recent days. Perhaps you knew how significant that brief encounter with the Elder had been for me. I longed for an initiation into the spirit of his cosmology. Had he called me, who knows—I might have left you to drive back alone.

You laid your hand on my thigh. I experienced the gesture as halfhearted eroticism. Perhaps I misjudged you. Perhaps it was just your way of anchoring me in your matrix while I lost myself in the thought of having missed a chance for the most exclusive accumulation of knowledge. Your fingers did not move, and nothing stirred in me.

Dust danced in the headlights’ cone. We were silent. Your hand slid back into your lap. Perhaps you were frustrated. I could not help you. It was as if the Elder’s words had erected a barrier between us.

“You walk through history. Not your own.”

We were not only clueless guests on this continent, but also in the narrative of ourselves in Africa. You still considered yourself the main actor in your own play, while I felt like a minor character in an archaic drama.

You said, “It’s beautiful here. But you’re somewhere else.”
I found the phrasing too deliberately poetic.
“I know,” I said politely.
You turned to the side, gazing out the window. The sky was black, with only a faintly brightened horizon line.

The Gorge That Listens

We took off, Windhoek shrinking beneath us. Soon we were over the Kalahari. The flight to Durban lasted two hours; South Africa pulsed differently, a completely different rhythm than Namibia. We rented a poison-green Toyota Hilux, and I took the wheel. Our first destination was Oribi Gorge, a canyon where waterfalls poured into an emerald river.

The elongated sandstone gorge was not only geologically spectacular; it carried spiritual markers. Every twist of the terrain, every rocky outcrop and needle of stone was part of a story. Ancestral pathways linked sacred pools, ceremonial sites, and thresholds between the visible world and the “time before.”

I was receptive to mythological overlays of everyday life. I wore a dress lighter than the faintest thought. It was a river of cotton, ivory-colored, with barely-there embroidery along the neckline. The straps were narrow, the back bare. The fabric tended toward transparency, hugging my waist like a tender hand. The dress whispered: I can hardly wait.

The gorge smelled of moss clinging to cliffs, figs, reeds, and the resin of acacias. I inhaled deeply, after all the dusty, thirsty stretches of Namibia.