Love and parked cars

Friday morning in Cape Town and the sun's shining brightly, and so it's easy to feel ambitious - and I feel like trying, a bit improbably, a bit of concurrent socioeconomic and literary analysis. Sounds daunting, I know, but I promise it won't be very high-falutin' at all. Or, if it does veer too much towards the serious, you can simply return your eyes to the less abstract photo of Cleo at the Worcester train station, above.

One of the more interesting, and revealing, aspects of Cape Town's geography is the virtually ubiquitous presence of parking lot attendants. Yes, a few parking spaces downtown are governed by posted rates, but the vast majority of lots and busy streetside spots in the city are manned, for much of the day, by men who purport to keep an eye on your car, in the hopes that you'll pay them a few coins when you leave the spot. Sometimes they wear orange vests, and sometimes not; sometimes they seem actively vigilant, and sometimes they loll under a tree until a driver returns to his car. They're rarely hired, as I understand it, by the local businesses, but they are generally tolerated - partly because, as everyone knows, they're among the millions of poor and unemployed who are still, arguably, a result of decades of apartheid. And so, over several years, an informal wage scale has evolved: as an employee of the Tokay library told me, when I asked about the man in their lot, a tip of 2-5 rand (30-75 cents) is common.

But not inevitable. Since Cleo and I spend a good deal of time at popular parks, we've seen our share of parking lot attendants. And since Cleo still likes, occasionally, to stand in the front seat and to pretend to drive, I've had a chance to study, informally, Capetonians' responses. I'd say that about half of all drivers give something, but generally only when approached: few actually offer money, unsolicited, to the men. Many refuse altogether, in a sternly passive manner: eyes straight ahead, and windows rolled up, they simply ignore the claims of the attendants. And a rare few even chide, or chastise, the attendants: in Worcester, I watched a man yell heatedly at the attendant, who slowly retreated, with the patience of one who's seen it before.

Occasionally, the scene can be rather heart-wrenching: a few days ago, near Rockland Park, I watched one of the attendants, clearly famished, miss a departing driver as he poked through trash of an adjacent pizzeria. Coins or food? How to choose? But even had he approached that driver, he might well have gotten nothing: four consecutive drivers, in fact, pulled away without responding to his gestures and pleas.

That's their choice, of course, as things stand. But the choice is given a certain sharpness, due to the fact that most of those drivers had just spent, in the adjacent cafe, at least 20 rand on coffee and snacks. Indeed, Cleo and I had just downed, after playing, an 18-rand fig smoothie. How can one be so generous, one moment, to one's healthy child, and so coldly frugal, the next moment, to a stranger clearly in need?

Perhaps the most concrete answer I know to such a query is the sociobiological one - the sort forwarded by Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene. When we're altruistic, we tend to give to kin, or to those genetically similar to ourselves. By sharing smoothies with our kids, we extend our own genes' life; when we give to strangers, we do a good deed in the abstract, but do nothing to further our own immortality.

Or do we? Coincidentally, in the next 24 hours I came across two very different discussions of love, and both suggested, in their own way, that Dawkins' view is hardly the only one. So meet Creina Alcock, a white woman who moved with her husband to rural, black Msinga in the 1970s, and gave the remainder of her life to the local community, and land - only to lose her husband to cancer, to watch their cooperative gradually erode, against a backdrop of local warfare, and to fall victim to a number of personal robberies - some by an orphan she had informally adopted. "If you're really going to live in Africa," she told Rian Malan in the 1980s, " you have to be able to look at it and say, This is the way of love, down this road: Look at it hard. This is where it is going to lead you. I think you will know," she concluded, "what I mean if I tell you love is worth nothing until it has been tested by its own defeat." Smoothies, in short, are easy stuff; giving until one can give no more, in the knowledge that the problem will always overwhelm one's own resources: well, that's something else entirely.

And, second, in Njabulo Ndebele's 2003 novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela, a female Sowetan, abandoned by her politicized husband, quotes, rather bitterly, this maxim: "Selflessness is the essential condition of love." She mocks the idea, gently, noting that it could work as a lyric in a pop song, but she's also attracted to it. What else can she do, in the long absence of her untrue husband? Her notion of self has dissolved - and yet she still loves.

All right, then. I'm not sure how to add all of this up, but it might go something like this: when we buy snacks for our children, after an hour on the playground, we do so lovingly, but not entirely unselfishly. When we give to parking lot attendants whom we may never see again, however, we move into some other realm of generosity - and one that may qualify, too, as love. So, then: sociobiology and pop song - two models of kindness that can be enacted on a single city block.