Away, So Far Away

A. A. Gill’s travels

A. A. Gill Is Away by A. A. Gill

You are on a great salt flat in the dead centre (probably) of Africa and it starts to rain. Biblical rain. Rain as hard as bullets. You shelter in a canvas tent as if it were a bomb shelter. And the rain comes on. It might crack the floor your tent’s uneasily tied to, which is a thin salt coating hard baked by the sun over a primeval ooze. And you are ill. You’re ill in a tent under terrible assault from the sky. The rain turns to hail. Hailstones the size of golf balls pelt you in your tent. And now you must leave, crawl away to be ill. You must leave in the midst of a storm, as the sky screams, as the thunder crashes.

Now you’re in a place of terrible hunger. You know there is terrible hunger because well-fed foreigners have flown in to film it. To film the hunger. Some of the cameramen call the thin people ‘skellies’ – that’s the press for you. They all want their fill. You’re there because you’re writing a magazine feature, a really lavish, luxurious one with glossy photographs. As you wander around you see small children, unable really to move, their mouths permanently open and their swollen, cracked tongues lolling out. There are, as is almost traditional, flies – flies floating around insistently. Flies all over. They dot the scene. A mother holds her horribly small son, his belly distended, up in a clinic where he might be seen for malaria. You ask a local guide about the girl. She’s very thin, very still, very quiet. He tells you she is sixteen.

You are in Japan, but unlike many of your colleagues at a similar time, you do not like it. You’ve heard bad things and you largely believe those bad things. You think it’s an odd, sick culture here and you see it everywhere: in advertising, in vending machines, in merchandise, in how people move around, in what you’ve heard about their families. The culture as embodied in products and art. You see it. In research, you might first have looked at the statute book and recoiled. Why people think this place is normal, you have no idea. You’ll write home and tell them they are all mad. They are all mad if they think this place is sane and normal and good. You’ll write home and tell them. They’ll have to listen to you.

You’re in Cuba and you notice that everyone is gorgeous. It’s a time warp. Like the 1950s because of the blockade. Purchasing power extraordinary. A tourist’s paradise. And they’re beautiful, all of them. It’s all the dancing, you think. It makes olive skins glisten with sweat like they’ve been anointed with oil. No, no, now you’re in Iceland and you notice, and believe you are the first to notice, that everyone is gorgeous. (You’re in Iceland, implausibly, to judge a beauty contest, which might have something to do with it.) The world must know about these places.

Now you are in Argentina and you recall that someone told you it’s the last frontier, out here, in cattle country. It’s cowboy season every day and every night. Like a film but not a film and real They lasso steers in their sleep, these men. They eat beef pulled from open fires with their pocketknives They’re something else, something beyond. There is no frontier any longer. It is all in the mind, except in South America, where people from where you’re from don’t take the first bit of notice. It is all hidden from your readers. They could fly to South America and see it all for themselves. Some even might. But if you wrote about the place no one would read it and if you wanted to wax lyrical no one would listen. They’d tell you to talk about the old men of Milan instead, or the California porn industry, or something they had already heard just enough about to make reading anything other than a terrifying introduction to the unknown.

People want novelty, but not too much. So the Sunday papers send their highest paid and most talented writers – the ones given TV- and restaurant=reviewing jobs – around the world. So you can’t do what it is you’re paid for. It makes sense. It always makes sense in the end.