“What is palany?” The question elicits a puzzled look from behind the bushy beard of the young Arab man behind the counter at Grand Palace Fast Food. “Palany, pa-lo-nee, polony,” I repeat, altering the pronunciation slightly each time until I get it right. “What is polony?”
The young man looks to the customers next to me for help.
“Is it a kind of meat?”
He nods and adds, “it is ground.”
“Like mince meat? What animal is it from?” I shoot back.
“It's beef, right?” the young black lady next to me in line chimes in. On my other side a light-skinned woman chuckles at my not knowing but seems unable to answer any of my questions.
“Is it good?”
The young man remains noncommittal, but patient. The young woman on my right nods, “Yes, it's good.” She seems glad to know the answer to one of my questions.
“I just ordered one,” the young lady on my left adds.
So I do too. One quarter polony gatsby with salad on it. In New Orleans, it would be a po-boy. Elsewhere, a grinder, hero, a sub. Here it is a gatsby. Eskimos have many words for snow. I have many words for sandwich.
It comes slobbered in hot chili sauce, stuffed with soggy South African french fries, an afterthought of lettuce and tomato added on top. Among the fries are a few pink beet-like slices of meat. This must be the polony – a thicker, beefier version of bologna. I probably should have translated people's inability to describe it into an unwillingness to order it But it only piqued my curiosity. And it cost R6.50, less than a dollar. So, I eat it, enjoy it, wash my hands with a wet nap, and silently promise myself to never order it again.
As we wander through Cape Town, Table Mountain tosses off her veil to celebrate summer in the sun. When we arrived last night, her head was completely shrowded in clouds. Just the tip of her chin periodically peaked out while we walked along the promenade from Sea Point to Green Point under gray skies reflected in gray seas. Seaweed imitated thousands of whiskered sea lion heads playfully ducking in and out of the waves. Joggers, mostly white, ran amidst the statues of a girl in a red and white bathing suit becoming a dragon fly. Annette and I agreed we've only seen more people exercising in our travels on the morning ride to the airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Today, the colors of Cape Town reveal themselves under a crisp blue sky. We walk through Company's Gardens. I soon learn that the “Company” is the Dutch East Indies Trading Company, a leader in the slave trade for centuries. As David Gladstone taught me in a Social Policy course, this was the first corporation to be granted the legal status that would become the corporate veil that makes international corporations more powerful than nations.
The gardens are beautiful. A solitary white tear seems to have frozen in its path down the trunk of an enormous rubber tree. A young girl feeds a pigeon out of her hand. Another chases them in the grass with a shriek. Annette snaps photos of both. The rainbow nation is evident here in the park. The young children are varying shades of black, white and light brown, mostly matching their parents.
I find a sunny patch of grass and kick off my sandals I open my notebook to a blank page just past my to-do list. Most of the items on it are baby steps in finding a future for ourselves. As our travel has slowed and our money dwindled, the urgency of finding more of both has increased. The to-do list has seven bullets that go a thousand directions – teaching English in Thailand, selling photos online, conducting interviews for international companies, heading home to make more money to continue traveling.
“Ham! Come here!” It's the loudest I have heard Annette's voice all day. I look around to find her under a huge pine tree, camouflaged by the shade. I go, reluctantly, to see what she wants. “Have you ever seen an albino squirrel?”
“I am not sure,” I respond. But there stretched out, facing down on the trunk of a huge pine is a squirrel with a shiny white coat and pinkish lining around its eyes. Of course, it is here. In South Africa, a race-obsessed society trying to be color blind in the face of historic and recent racial atrocity. Albinism, a curve ball in the idea of classifying anything according to skin color. Of course. An albino squirrel in Cape Town's Company's Gardens – the most racially-mixed environment I have found since setting foot on South African soil – on the grounds created by one of the most racist corporations in history.
No comments:
Post a Comment