The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online Page B

had publicized Vicki’s Place. Vicki had the newspaper and magazine clippings, all mentioning her good humor, her effort, her enterprise in this township.
    Phaks had yet another surprise: his van wouldn’t start. He sat wiggling the key in its slot, next to a fistful of wires he’d pulled out, hoping to find the problem.
    “I’ll take the train,” I said.
    “Bus is better.”
    Ten years before I had wanted to take the train but had been discouraged from doing so by the clerk in the ticket booth.
    “I’m taking the train,” I told Phaks.
    He walked me through the back streets to the station and stayed with me and insisted on buying my ticket. When the train arrived we shook hands, we hugged, and he glumly said he’d have to return to his broken car.
    “Keep your hand on your money,” he said.
    The train was fairly empty because it was headed to the city. Returning from Cape Town, it would be full. I looked for potential muggers and, scanning the passengers in the car, caught the eye of the woman in the seat across from me.
    “Why are you here?” she asked.
    “Just looking.”
    “Whites don’t come here. White people don’t live here,” she said with almost boastful conviction.
    “But I’m here,” I said.
    “Because you have that man to help you,” she said. She must have seen Phaks at the ticket office. She looked defiant, almost contemptuous. “You wouldn’t come here alone.”
    “What are those lights?” I asked her, to change the subject, and pointed to the slopes of Table Mountain.
    “Rondebosch, Constantia.” She had answered without looking up.

3

Cape Town
:
The Spirit of the Cape
    N OTHING, APPARENTLY , is hidden in Cape Town: it is a city like an amphitheater. Its air breathing upon me sweetly, I sat in elegant, embowered, villa-rich Constantia, the district on the ridge I’d glimpsed the day before from the shacks of Khayelitsha. I was sipping a glass of sauvignon blanc in the majestic portico that was the tasting room of the main house at Constantia Glen Vineyard. From this vantage point I was able to see over the rim of my wine glass the poisonous cloud of dust that hung above the Cape Flats.
    This visibility is one of the unusual features of Cape Town. The estates in its wealthiest enclaves, in the cliffy suburbs of the middle slopes of the mountain (Constantia, Rondebosch, Bishopscourt, Newlands), have views of the bleak horizontal profile of the suffering squatter camps and poor sprawling townships on the flatland below. The orderly green vineyards look down on brown muddled scrubland, and likewise, through the wide gaps in the plank walls or the rips in the blue plastic of the shacks in Khayelitsha it is possibleto enjoy a panorama of university buildings and colonnades bulking on the heights of leafy Rondebosch.
    Gated communities all over these highlands display signs warning any unwelcome intruder of 24/7 MONITORING AND ARMED RESPONSE , yet the poor have an unimpeded view of the rich, and vice versa. And each exposed person, squinting from this distance, looks passive and ubiquitous, like a sort of human vegetation.
    The last time I’d been in Cape Town this winery did not exist — no vines, no casks, no activity except the mooing of cows. It had been a dairy farm, bought by an entrepreneur named Alexander Weibel, who’d had money and been interested in making wine. He plowed the hills and discovered that the land had clayey subsoil, had good water-holding capacity, and was rich in mica that would impart a “distinctive minerality,” as he called it, to the white wine. He planted vines, fenced them, staked them, pruned them. He invested in winemaking equipment, and in 2007 he had his first harvest. His wine was acclaimed. All this within ten years.
    “I know that’s Khayelitsha,” I said, looking down at the townships on the Flats.
    “And that’s Mitchells Plain,” the helpful woman in the wine-tasting portico told me. “And Guguletu, and over there, past Langa,