I went in to dinner in my resort hotel in Mosselbaai, on the spectacular Big Sur-like "Garden Route" along the coast between Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. I'd had my six or eight whiskeys with the Irish couple in the lounge and was ready for one of the elaborate, big, bland and indifferently cooked meals that constitute South African cuisine. The restaurant was turned out in red plush and crisp linen. Candles glittered in cut-glass sconces. But when I sat down at my table there were three teaspoons, two water glasses, one dirty wine glass, no forks, no knives, and no napkin.
"I need a dinner fork, a salad fork, a knife and a napkin," I said to the waiter, who stared at me in dull surprise and then headed out across the dining room at the speed of a change in seasons. His feet were sockless below the tuxedo pants and he was standing on the backs of his shoes with just his toes stuffed into the unlaced oxfords.
He returned with another spoon.
"I need a fork, a knife and a napkin!" I said.
He came back twenty minutes later with the water pitcher and filled my wine glass.
"LOOK HERE," I said, "DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?"
He thought about that for a long time. "Oh, yes." He disappeared and came back in half an hour with one more water glass. "Is the master ready to order?"
He was without recourse, voteless, impoverished, unpropertied, not a legal citizen in his own nation, yet he had reduced me to a paroxysm of impotent drunken rage. I left him a huge tip and ate my chicken with a spoon.
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