The Last Train to Zona Verde

by Paul Theroux

  She held a chipped enamel bucket in one hand and a long pair of metal tongs in the other. Her hair was wrapped like a bowl in a yellow cloth, this turban making her an unusual presence, giving her height and dignity and a look of quiet anticipation. She wore a limp blue dress that fell to her ankles ending in a tattered hem, and an apron that had once been white. She was barefoot, but her feet — her only indelicate feature — were as big and battered as shoes. No one paid any attention to her or to what she was carrying. In fact, Camillo stood aside, gripping a Cuca beer bottle as though he were about to throw it. His eyes were empty, and he looked less than futile. His body seemed uninhabited.

  We had come north, crossing from Kunene province into Huíla province, but what did it matter? We were stuck for the night at least, and maybe longer. Light was leaking sideways from the sky from membranes of cloud, leaving purpled tissue just above the horizon.

  The old woman made directly for me. “Old” was probably inaccurate: she was undoubtedly much younger than me, sixty or less, but had the aged face of a kindly crone. I was standing apart from the others, who were drinking, and perhaps drunk. I looked for a log to rest on, but saw nowhere to sit, and the car seemed cursed.

  Holding the bucket up so I could examine its contents, the woman smiled at me and worked the jaws of her rusty tongs.

  “Boa tarde,” she said, but it seemed more like evening to me.

  At the bottom of the bucket were three pieces of chicken — legs attached to thighs. They were skinless, shiny-sinewed, and dark as kippers, as if they’d been smoked. Each one was covered by busy black flies, and flies darted around the hollow of the bucket. It was more a bucket of flies than a bucket of chicken.

  Squeezing her rusty tongs again, the woman asked, “Qual?”

  Which one?

  Though I was hungry, I waved her away, retching at the thought of eating any of those chicken legs. Yet I had not eaten all day, and it had been a long and tiring journey, of harassment, of the border crossing, of the sight of misery and naked children playing in dust, flies crawling on their eyes and in the sores on their bodies. The off-road detours had been especially exhausting from the bucking and bumping of the vehicle. And the checkpoints, the shakedowns, the roadblock dictators.

  The woman was smiling because I was smiling. The absurdity of “Which one?” had just struck me — three identical pieces of chicken in the dirty bucket, each of them specked by skittering flies; an existential question to the stranger in a strange land.

  “Não,” I said. “Obrigado.”

  Something in my smile encouraged her and kept her there, rocking a little, flexing her bruised toes, running her tongue against her lips to show patience. She was gaunt, and she herself looked hungry. But I said no again and, shoulders slackening in resignation, she turned away, making for the others, who were standing in a group still drinking bottles of Cuca beer.

  A muscle twisted sharply in my stomach and yanked at my throat: the whip of hunger.

  “Olá!” I said, and she turned to me, looking hopeful.

  “That one,” I said, pointing at the one with the fewest flies on it.

  “Frango,” she said in a gummy voice, as though naming a delicacy, and she wet her lips with her tongue and swallowed, as people often do when handling food. Then the word spoken all over Angola for cool or okay, “Fixe” — feesh.

  She folded my dollar and tucked it into her apron.

  I borrowed Camillo’s cigarette lighter and made a small fire of dead grass at the corner of the compound, and I passed the piece of chicken through the fire, believing like a Boy Scout that I was killing the fly-borne germs. Then I found the log I’d been looking for, and sat, and slowly ate the chicken. It was like chewing leather. The straps and thongs of sinew wouldn’t break down, and its toughness made it almost indigestible, my chewing turning the meat into a rubber ball. Queasy over a meal he called a “mess of bouillabaisse,” Henry James said that it was “a formidable dish, demanding French digestion.” Maybe I needed that. I was defeated by the food, and disgusted with myself for being in this position, and I mocked myself with a pompous phrase I’d heard a foodie use on a TV show: “I regret to say this dish is not fully achieved.” But it was something in my stomach, and that was a victory in this hungry province.

  Then I replayed my first glimpse of the bucket — the chicken, the flies, and the old woman asking “Which one?” It was the sort of choice you were faced with in Africa, but I had never seen it so stark, in the extravagant splashes of a florid sunset.

  From the moment we arrived, this nameless place had seemed no more than a roadside clearing, the sort where locals might gather and linger because of its great sheltering tree. But we were alone. Only we entered the bar, which had perhaps started as a shop and run out of things to sell; it was a bar counter of warped planks, with beer bottles warming on a wooden shelf on the back wall. The man behind the counter sat with his chin resting on the planks and his arms wrapped around his head, cradling it.

  What seemed vague and undefined in the failing light became distinct after sunset. In the dark, the kerosene lamp in the shed transformed the shed into a wide square lantern, sharpened its windows, casting bright shafts of light across the ground where a lame dog lay. The underside of the tree was brightened by the lamplight, and the road — which was a main road — was hidden in shadow. We were becalmed in the darkness of the bush, surrounded by chittering insects.

  In the thin woods behind the shed there was a village, more audible than visible, for though I could see only the topmost licks of a high flaming bonfire, I could hear the rhythm of drumming, first as a patter and then what seemed a reply to the stuttering thud on a thick drumhead. The drums and not the fire made the village come alive.

  The drumming was so insistent I needed only to jerk my thumb at its sound for the barman to reply, “Cerimônia,” and he smiled a little and caressed his head with his spidery fingers.

  Though the word was plain enough, I did not speak more than a few words of Portuguese. This was a handicap, not merely because the country was generally Portuguese-speaking, but also because of its isolation from the world. Angola was an anomaly: apart from Portuguese, nothing else was spoken except for its many tribal languages, and these differed from province to province. Swahili and Chichewa, both of which I spoke, were usable in the western and northern provinces, but here I was linguistically lost.

  Remembering that Cuban soldiers had fought all over Angola, and especially in the south, I said, “Habla Español?” The barman smiled. I said, “English?” He smiled again and patted his head. As a joke, I said, “Parla Italiano?”

  Behind me, I heard, “Io parlo.”

  It was Gilberto, one of my fellow passengers. I said in Italian, “Really — you speak Italian?”

  “Sono stato in Italia per sei mese,” he said. “Anno passato.” Six months, that was something. And his friends began to laugh because Gilberto was fairly drunk, and bare-chested, standing with his blue jeans tugged down so that his underwear showed. Whether this was street style or bush slovenliness I did not know. “A priest took me, with some other boys.”

  The priest was Italian, Gilberto said, a missionary in Angola, whose hometown was in Calabria, in the south of Italy, but whose friary was in Rome. Six boys went on the trip; Gilberto was about eighteen, and I assumed the others were the same age. They prayed at the Vatican, they visited the antique sights of Rome, they ate pasta, and they stayed at the friary.

  I asked Gilberto whether the other priests talked to the Angolan boys.

  “Yes. They were so nice to us! They took us to the beach” — to Ostia, the coast outside Rome. “They played football with us.”

  Sometimes a person tells you a story and you seem to hear it in stereo. The storyteller is enthusiastic and gives details and believes he is persuading you of its truth. But as the monologue continues, you hear a parallel story, translating the details differently, and in your imagining you see something else.


  Gilberto’s version was a jolly six months in Italy, paid for by the priest, a vacation from Angola. In my version, Gilberto was on a recruiting trip, the priest like a college coach showing football players around a campus, in order to dazzle them so they’d sign up for a place on the team. It is well known that parish priests are in short supply, and missionary priests even fewer, and that the next generation of Catholic vocations will not come from Europe or America but from Christian Kerala in south India, the Philippines, Latin America, and Africa.

  After Rome, Gilberto and his friends traveled by train to southern Italy and stayed on a small farm, where they worked in the gardens, prayed, and went to church. They studied Italian most evenings, and were encouraged to speak it in the daytime.

  “Lots of words in Italian are the same as Portuguese,” Gilberto said, “so we didn’t have a problem.”

  But Portuguese — notoriously nasal and slushy — lacks the crisp dentals and subtle labials of Italian, even if it shares an approximate Latinate vocabulary.

  “You speak it well,” I said. “Did the priest want you to join the missionaries?”

  “He mentioned it a little. He said for us to think about it. Doing good work, helping Angola. God would tell us the rest.” But Gilberto said this in passing. What he loved about Italy was the food, and he recounted the meals he’d eaten with such energy, describing the ingredients, that the others with us — João, Ronaldo, Camillo — listened with hungry, drunken impatience. I looked for Paulina but did not see her.

  “What did you think about becoming a priest?”

  “Angola is a Christian country. Most of the people are Catholic. We have so many churches!”

  “Do you want to be a priest?”

  He laughed. “I can’t, because of this.” He wagged his bottle of beer. “And I like women!” He repeated this in Portuguese for his friends, making them laugh.

  We were standing outside, in the light that shot from the windows of the shed, the darkness all around us, the smell, which was a sharp hairiness of foul and turdy dirt. Cars had ceased to pass on the road as soon as night fell, though now and then someone wobbled by on a bicycle, the chain rattling in its sprockets.

  “Ask that man where we are,” I said, indicating the barman. “What town?”

  He asked, the man explained. Gilberto said, “No town. We are near Uia. The big market and the petrol station are at Xangongo.”

  Camillo said, “Zona verde.”

  I understood that, and liked it as a euphemism for the bush. Zona verde — everything that was not a city — summed up the Africa that I loved.

  “What about the music?” I couldn’t remember the Italian word for drumming, but he got the point when I imitated the sound: it was still loud. “Where is that coming from?”

  “The village,” Gilberto said, after conferring. “They are having a celebration. He told me what it is, but I don’t know the word in Italian. It is Efundula” — and he spoke to the other boys. “Even in Portuguese we don’t have the word Efundula. It is Oshikwanyama. These are Kwanyama people.”

  “Is it circumcision?”

  “No. They don’t do such things to girls here. Efundula is just for girls.” He spoke again to the barman for guidance. “It goes on for four days. Yesterday was the last day, but they are still dancing. Sometimes they dance all night.”

  “Initiation?”

  “Something like that.”

  The barman went on talking, and his explanation became elaborate, because he had unwrapped his hands and arms from his head and was gesturing, speaking in his own language and in Portuguese. Gilberto was smiling, the others were listening with interest, and then Gilberto put up his hand so he could tell me what the man had said.

  “The dancing is strong because if a girl is pregnant, she won’t be able to continue, and she will stop.”

  “They don’t want pregnant girls?”

  “Not for this Efundula, no.”

  “Ask him if we can go to the village and see it.”

  Gilberto didn’t ask; he knew what the answer would be. “It is just for them. But you can listen.”

  We drank beer, we muttered, we listened, and then it occurred to me that if I didn’t claim a place in the car I would have nowhere to sleep. While they were talking I went to the Land Cruiser. I cranked the seat back into a reclining position, covered myself with my jacket, and to the drumming in the distance and the muttering of the boys sitting on the steps of the shed I subsided into sleep. From time to time I awoke, and I was surprised by the gusto of the drumming, but in the darkest hours of the morning it ceased, and the silence, which was like apprehension, kept me awake until sunlight and heat filled the clearing.

  In daylight the place was ugly, more littered and beat-up than it had seemed the day before. The boys had tossed their empty beer bottles aside and they lay scattered in the dust. Some grease-stained plastic wrappers were stuck to withered tufts of grass. And the tree that had seemed noble in its height and overhang looked vandalized — the lower trunk had been hacked at and carved with initials and numbers and names.

  The look of Angola was not just the ugly little town and the slum of shacks but also the ruin of a brutalized landscape, of the stumps of deforestation and the fields littered with burned-out tanks, of rivers and streams that seemed poisoned — black and toxic. And not the slightest glimpse of any animal but a cow or a cringing dog. In most parts of the southern African bush you at least saw small antelopes or gazelles tittuping in the distance on slender legs. The impala was everywhere, and it was almost impossible to imagine a stretch of savanna without the movement of such creatures. And wherever there were villages, there were always scavengers, hyenas or intrusive baboons.

  But no wild animals existed in the whole of Angola. One effect of the decades-long civil war here was that the animals that had not been eaten by starving people had been blown up by old land mines. The extermination of wild game had been complete. Now and then cows in pastures were shredded by exploding mines, and so were children playing and people taking shortcuts through fields.

  A country without wild animals seems inconceivable, because many animals in Africa, antelopes especially, are prolific, reproducing in such large numbers they are able to establish sustainable herds in the unlikeliest places. But the long war had wasted them, the hungry Angolans had eaten them, eaten the hippos, even the crocs, and if there were snakes, I did not see any. Oddly, the bird life was thin too. Even where the landscape was not picked apart, where some trees had been spared, the absence of animals — and the presence of squatting, oppressed, if not defeated-looking, humans — made these places in zona verde seem mournful, violated, with an After-the-Fall atmosphere. Something inexplicably deleted from them had sapped their vitality.

  In the land without animals, humans were more conspicuous and seemed to exist in greater variety, many of them, in their destitution, taking the place of wildlife, living at the edges of settlements in low simple shelters that were like the twiggy brakes that some animals huddled against.

  Walking around this compound in the early morning saddened me and made me impatient. With the sun striking from above the tall grass, the heat took hold, and I had the fugitive thought again: What am I doing here?

  I heard the dull clink of metal against metal, and saw the old woman in the yellow turban approaching with her bucket and tongs. I welcomed the sight of her, and said good morning. She swung her bucket up and lifted her tongs over it with the panache of a magician producing a little miracle out of the container.

  “Frango.” The two remaining pieces at the bottom were more flyblown than the day before, perhaps because I had eaten one of them and the flies, deprived of their meat, had settled on the other two pieces: less chicken, more flies.

  I gave the women a dollar and clumsily asked her name.

  “Ana Maria,” she said.

  Seeing that Gilberto was up and stumbling, I called him over to translate.

  He greeted the wo
man politely and smiled at my brushing flies from the chicken leg in my hand.

  “Gilberto, ask her if she knows about the ceremony in the village.”

  “She knows,” he said, translating my question. “She says it is the Efundula.”

  “Did she see the dancing and drumming?”

  “She heard it. It is for the girls. But the important person is an old man. This old man comes from another village.”

  “What does Efundula mean?”

  The old woman’s explanation in Portuguese was lengthy, but Gilberto listened with recognition. He said, “We have this in my home village, but it has a different name. It means the girls become women — ready for marriage. They are decorated, they dance, they sing, sometimes they cook some food.” Now I couldn’t tell whether he was describing the ceremony at his village or the one here. “The girls wear special clothes, they rub them with a certain oil from a tree. They decorate their hair, they wear shells in the hair.”

  “Ask this woman how long the ceremony lasts.”

  “It is four days.”

  He hadn’t asked the woman. He was speaking from his own experience, so I encouraged him to ask the woman for details.

  “Four days,” he said, after she explained. “Each day has a name. She tells me in Oshikwanyama, but I don’t know the words.” He conversed with her some more, nodding as she spoke, then he nodded and said to me, “Yes. The first day is ‘the Sleeping of the Chickens.’ Yesterday they call ‘the Day of Love.’ The music we heard was that.”

  To have arrived by accident in this remote and stricken place and to have discovered myself in the presence of a traditional initiation rite was just wonderful, the kind of luck I had always depended on in travel. I knew nothing of the region. I did not know then that the Kwanyama people were related to the Ovambo in Namibia, and that they dominated this province. All I knew was that the war had been fought here — the wrecked vehicles were everywhere; that the villagers had been routed and the towns destroyed; that South Africans, Cubans, and the guerrilla army of Jonas Savimbi, UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), had crept back and forth, torching villages, massacring and beheading civilians; and that this had gone on for almost thirty years.