O, Africa!

by Andrew Lewis Conn

  “You’ve got a good setup, Henry,” Micah encourages as the actor moves into frame. “Now earn your paycheck.”

  Till steps forward and begins shaking one tribesman’s hand, pumping his arm as furiously as a used-car salesman greeting the first customer of the day, while the other villager backs away and quits the scene in disgust. Till then pantomimes the suggestion that he might help the tribesman with the wall. Completely confused now, the tribesman stares directly into the camera, speaking loudly and pointing angrily at the brothers.

  “Okay, cut!” Micah calls. “Goddamn it, what’s he saying, Mtabi?”

  “He does not understand the making of work for show,” Mtabi translates. “He believes this to be a sign of rank dishonesty. That such grand gestures are reserved only for King Mishi at times of public speaking or storytelling.”

  Micah gallops into the shot. “Okay, okay, okay. Explain to our friend here, please, that this is the time of storytelling. That the time of storytelling is upon him. Explain that to him, will you, Mtabi?”

  The guide translates, then relays the response. “According to Malwiki philosophy, every effort must feed some result. Food feeds the mouth, music feeds the ear, sights of home and family feed the eye, the warmth of bodies feeds the genitals. He believes Mr. Till’s expenditure of effort feeds nothing.”

  “Tough crowd,” Till says, flipping quarters between his fingers like Jacob’s ladders. “Eh, tell him King Mishi sent us to help him put up the wall in earnest.”

  The tribesman agrees that Till can help with the wall and that the others can watch and record, so long as their efforts don’t impede his work. Benny comes up with the idea that Till will accidentally step on an anthill, triggering a procession of insects that go crawling up the funnyman’s leg. So is born the “ants in the pants” sequence, a career highlight that would find its way onto Till tribute reels. With both Till’s and the tribesman’s backs to the cameras, the comic’s upper half continues the work of building the wall—hoisting what is handed him, spreading silt, smoothing wet earth—while his posterior sashays, thrusts, and clenches in expressions of befuddlement, terror, and relief (this Saint Vitus’ dance a none-too-subtle jab at Chaplin, who—walking away from the camera in picture after picture—had the most famous ass in movies).

  “This is good,” Micah says once Till fully commits to his ass dance. “This is what we came here for.”

  “Eh, Micah,” Izzy says after the take is through, “we could use a couple of close-ups of our man here.”

  Micah sidles up to the tribesman, links arms with him, and begins leading him away from the retaining wall, closer to his cameraman brother, their postures mimicking the sharing of a private on-set moment between the director and a starlet.

  “He says he does not trust red rooster,” Mtabi relays after the tribesman violently breaks links with the filmmaker. “He demands to know the purpose of this machine. He believes the camera robs him of precious layers of muntu. He fears your cine-film machine to be a thief of souls.”

  The tribesman is now standing in front of the camera, staring into its black, inquisitive eye.

  “Do the Malwiki ever use spices to preserve food?” Micah asks.

  “Yes, sir. There is a smokehouse beside the granaries where they make the beef jerky.”

  “Okay, good, explain to him please: Just like salt preserves certain foods, we’re trying to capture an idea of him as he’s standing before us right now.”

  “He does not understand the making of him into jerky.”

  “Fucking actors! Everywhere I go!” Then, quietly to Izzy, “Can you use any of this?”

  “No, he’s staring straight into the lens.”

  “Listen, does anyone have any photos, program books, lobby cards, that sort of thing?”

  “I’ve got one,” says Spiro, producing from his trouser pocket a laminated photo of himself sandwiched between two naked ladies of the night. “This one’s called ‘Lucky Pierre.’ ”

  “He’s scared enough already!” Micah says, smacking Spiro atop the head. “Photos? Does anyone have any photographs our man here won’t mistake for dispatches from the underworld?”

  “This one’s called ‘The Rusty Trombone,’ ” says Spiro, volunteering another.

  “Leave us, dwarf!”

  “I have a copy of Photoplay back at camp,” Till answers.

  The tribesman sits on the ground dejected until Till comes jogging back with the movie magazine. Micah flips through the periodical like a man at the racetrack scanning the morning tip sheet and quickly finds what he’s looking for: a photo of Till standing beside Babe Ruth accompanying the review of Quicktime.

  “Explain to him that this picture of Henry here was taken eight months ago,” Micah says to Mtabi, holding the magazine next to the actor, who assumes the same pose as his likeness in the photograph. “And he’s still here! He’s still here!”

  “Muntu going strong,” Till confirms, patting himself on the chest.

  Mtabi offers the magazine to the tribesman, who looks at the photo, to Till, and back again. He runs his fingers over the photograph’s glossy black-and-white halftone pattern. He examines his fingertips and rubs them together, bringing the photo closer to his eyes for inspection, registering with wonderment how the image of the man dissolves into a meaningless catalog of dots the closer it is brought near, then materializes into recognizability when held farther away. He attempts this same experiment with the person of Till standing before him—leaning in close and taking a step back—then offers his conclusion.

  “He insists there are two Mr. Tills,” Mtabi translates, “one standing before us, the other trapped in the photo. He is more scared now than before.”

  “A fucking close-up!” Micah howls, smacking Spiro atop the head with the rolled-up magazine, consigning the shredded and distressed thing to the coffee-colored earth. “Halfway around the globe and we can’t get a fucking close-up!”

  “Lemme straighten this joker out,” Spiro says, cracking his knuckles. “You’ll get your close-up.”

  Stepping out of the shade and into the light, Early takes up a position out of frame and immediately adjacent to the camera. “I want to talk to him,” he says. “Mtabi, help me out, okay?”

  And here, with the translator’s help, Early begins asking the tribesman questions about life in the village. Early speaks plainly about his own life of petty criminality in the great cities of the West—hustling for change, the squalor of gin joints and the numbers game, always feeling watched but not seen. Early compares himself unfavorably to the wall the tribesman has spent the day building. He suggests that his own foundation is rotten but that he’s working to repair himself from the top down. He shares, too, his sense of amazement over the Malwiki’s peacefulness and good-naturedness and how this experience, just days old, has enlarged his view of the world and his own sense of place in it. The tribesman is relaxed, intelligent, generous in both listening and response, and for the duration keeps his eyes fixed on the youth—that is, at a thirty-degree angle from the camera’s eyeline.

  “Get it?” Micah asks.

  “Got it,” Izzy answers. “Good.”

  “He still does not understand your interest in the Malwiki,” Mtabi says after a few minutes of this, once the sequence, close-up and all, is safely in the can, “but appreciates the conversation with the youth and thanks Mr. Till for his help with the wall.”

  “Don’t mention it,” says the actor, collapsed on the dirt, placing a fresh pair of horn-rims on the million-dollar face.

  “Nice work, Early. Now, Till, back up on your feet,” Micah orders. “Once more, with feeling, please.”

  The shoot breaks for the day; the wall remains standing. Micah looks out at the landscape that would serve as their back lot over the next weeks and months. Ale-colored hills and grounds the color of tea with too much milk poured in. Barren. In its way not unlike the city, crowded together with buildings, offering another kind of barrenness. He is exhauste
d after this first day of filming, eyes sunken and pouched with a papier-mâché puffiness. Things were worrying Micah, a new experience for him. There was Marblestone’s illness and the debt hanging over Imperial and what all that might mean for him professionally. There was Rose and her marriage to the barber taking place half a world away. There was Izzy’s growing independence and Micah’s sense that he was losing his ability to control his brother. There was the prospect of doing justice to the violence and madness of Mr. Waldo and Bumpy’s script. Micah had never had ambitions toward seriousness, about love or work or anything else, and he experienced all this worry like a physical object, a tethered ball he had to keep kicking in front of him, something he wanted to discharge but couldn’t rid himself of. He kept coming back to the threat and challenge of O, Africa! The wrangling of atrocity into images. This a job for Micah—who had twice failed history as a boy!

  He allows his eyes to rest on the wall, baking like a piece of pottery in the late-afternoon sun. Stare long enough and it doesn’t look solid at all. Seems flat against its surroundings, like a notebook sitting on a desk or a kite hanging against the sky. He blinks, returning the structure to substantiality. There’s mud with roots and weeds mashed in and tangled up like a woman’s hair with too much shampoo. Micah picks up a smooth stone, a tan pebble, and places it in his mouth to stimulate saliva production. He begins to suck, with his tongue running the rock between the underside of his bottom lip and his lower teeth. Stone on stone. Empty your head. Don’t think. Be like the villager over there. Be the day laborer. Be the bricklayer. Put up your wall. Think no more than taking a brick from one pile and putting it on top of another. Then another. Then another. Until the wall is up and you can go home. Exhausted. To sleep. And awake to another pile of bricks. Repeat.

  “You look like a Rodin sitting there like that,” says Castor of the frozen-profiled filmmaker.

  “Trying my best not to think, actually,” says Micah, spitting out the stone.

  “I’d forgotten how much I missed the physical part of filmmaking,” Castor volunteers. “It’s like carpentry or athletics—the thinking comes through doing.”

  “You’re right,” Micah says, rising from the ground and making a loop around the perimeter of the retaining wall. “But I feel lousy about today. That close-up of our man there, he thought we were stealing something from him. I wonder if he doesn’t have a point.”

  Castor considers this, taking a swig from a silver flask. “It was never really a matter of logistics, was it? What I mean to say is, once the place was decided upon and the paperwork squared away, it’s all about establishing trust. They don’t have to understand what we’re up to exactly, but if they’re not with us on some basic level, it’s going to show.… Look here, I’ve made some notes about how to attack this O, Africa! scenario.”

  Micah accepts from Castor the pages along with an oily helping of liquid heat and in silence begins circumnavigating the wall once more. He walks in a line, avoiding cracks in the parched ground, careful to maintain the integrity of his mother’s back, thinking to himself how little usable footage they’d managed to shoot that day.

  He ambles over to Early, who since their arrival has proved himself a marvel of feline unobtrusiveness and an indispensable camera assistant to Izzy, the pair of them working hand over hand like teammates bound together in a tug-of-war.

  “I’m going to let you in on a secret, kid. No matter what the specifics, the making of every picture’s really always the same.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Well, at the outset you imagine it to be like some fantastic ocean liner. It’s perfect and gleaming and full of passengers, and its course is charted flawlessly. And then you set sail, and first the compass cracks. Then the boiler blows. And then the cargo hold gets waterlogged. And then you have to start throwing wardrobes and supplies and engine parts overboard. And the farther out you get from shore, the more you come to realize that the ship is just this crummy old vessel and the whole endeavor becomes about how you can guide the leaky goddamned thing back to dry dock.”

  Early wipes his face and neck with a soiled T-shirt. “Sounds like anything else. You plan what you can and do your best with the rest of it.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Anyway, you did good out there today, kid. You were the only one who knew how to read the situation.”

  “Just doing my part.”

  Micah lights a cigarette and inhales, smoke meeting and lifting his flagging consciousness, intoxicants slotting into thought patterns as comfortably as a car sliding into a perfect parking space. “Did you mean those things you said? About life back home and the rest?”

  “Listen”—Early spits on the ground—“whatever these jungle boogies need to hear from us to get the job done.”

  FIVE

  “It’s a hundred and twenty degrees, Mr. Grand,” Early teases Izzy. “Take your jacket off.”

  “I can’t,” says the tweed-covered cameraman, tugging at his vest buttons. “It’s melded to my skin.”

  “I never knew there was such a thing as a seven-piece suit.”

  “Well, live and learn.”

  The cameraman and his assistant are wandering under a blue enamel sky about four miles from camp, disturbing eggshell silence as they crackle across twigs and dried brush. Traveling light, with a handheld field camera and a minimum of supplies, the two set out that morning determined to knock off as much B-roll footage as possible. After walking awhile, Izzy sets down his equipment, plants himself on a hot rock the size and smoothness of an automobile hood, and unfolds the crude map that Mtabi provided for them. He serves himself a cup of coffee from an aluminum thermos, removes from a pocket four packets of sugar, rips them open, and pours.

  “You want some coffee with that?” Early asks, watching the granules waterfall into the cup.

  “Leave my sweet tooth out of it and concentrate on what you’re supposed to be doing,” Izzy says, having demonstrated to Early that morning how to load a fresh roll of film with the camera in a changing bag. “Can you feel the lead?”

  Early works his fingers inside the black canvas tote. “Got it.”

  “You’re dexterous.”

  “What’s that?

  “Good with your hands.”

  “Mr. Waldo says so, too. He and Bumpy brought me ’round to the warehouse in Jersey the other night, showed me how to work the Bunsen and tubing. ‘Lead burns red and makes you dead.’ ”

  “I imagine making moonshine’s not so different from working in a darkroom.”

  “Suppose not,” Early agrees, securing the lid on the camera and removing it from the bag. “Mr. Waldo and Bumpy aren’t only interested in whiskey and running numbers, though. They’re looking to diversify. That’s why they sent me—to ensure they make a righteous entrance into the entertainment business. Speaking of diversification, you spend much time around Micah and Rose?”

  “No, but they don’t exactly make a point of being seen out together.” Looking at the boy, Izzy recognizes for the first time in Early his sister’s skeptical, frowning face, only blacker. The nose is rounder and less aquiline, the hair more densely woven, but still the siblings have been manufactured from the same human stuff. There are womanly traces in the boy, too, of Rose’s extravagantly long eyelashes, elfin ears, and pillowy lips. Looking at Early, it occurs to Izzy how hopelessly beautiful Rose is; that Micah had the wit to uncover her heartens Izzy enormously.

  “What do you suspect they see in each other?” Early asks.

  “What does anyone see in anyone?” Izzy says, attempting a seen-it-all tone that doesn’t come natural to him.

  “I mean”—talking mostly to himself—“Rose knows her way around. She’s got to know there’s no future in it.”

  “Micah’s never really talked to me about your sister, if that’s what you’re asking. But listen, Micah’s someone who likes having a lot of balls in the air.” Izzy recognizing the observation to be true even as he formulates it in speech. “He’s
one of those people who need to create disorder around themselves in order to think clearly.”

  “I guess that’s all beside the point now anyway,” Early says, consulting his wristwatch. “If I’ve got my math right, she’s married already.”

  Looking like a lost groomsman, a small, slender animal coated in black-and-white fur comes out from hiding, slinking its head around the corner of the rock formation. Eight or nine inches long, with a wet nose and a striped tail like a gondolier’s shirt, the thin little creature looks unabashed, happy to share the space and the sunlight with the strangers.

  “What is that, some kind of rat?” Early asks.

  “I think you’ll find it’s a lemur.”

  Early mounts on his shoulder the Akeley and screws a macro onto the lens turret. “He’s got a funny face. I’m going to get in close.” Early squats to the ground near the lemur, which rises on its hind legs as if readying to take a bow. When the animal pivots to the left, Early shifts to the right; when it bobs its head forward, Early pulls back, the two locked together like expertly matched boxers in a ring. Watching from this short distance his apprentice’s hands, eyes, and feet working together in concord with the mechanical apparatus, Izzy marvels anew at how picturemaking combines the technical and the artistic, the industrial and the athletic, the modern and the atavistic. How it’s not every day that new modes of experiencing the world come into being. He returns his attention to the map.

  “So Mtabi promises this is the spot, that if we’re patient, we’ll spot herds.” Looking up, Izzy sees perhaps a hundred yards away three gazelles standing stiff and proper as small-town matrons posed on a church step. The antelopes are preternaturally calm, the three-member tribunal staring unblinking across the expanse at the filmmakers, unable to speak yet communicating nonetheless in that pristine and urgent way that animals sometimes have.

  “They’re making me nervous,” says Early.

  “Good actors are like that sometimes. Really still.”