‘And what does he do?’ I asked, intrigued by the jealous care he inspired among them.
‘Oh! He’s a man of mystery, isn’t he?’
‘He’s a naughty boy.’
‘Oh he is … !’
No one actually came out with it but over time the whispers left no doubt.
HE NEVER TOLD me either. We became friends in spite of the little time we spent together. Sometimes my phone would ring and he would invite me bird watching. He seemed to love the creatures in the same way I do: not as collector’s items, not as trophies, but for exquisite things in themselves, for the way they focus the world around them, for the integrity of their magnificence. One day he proposed we take a bike ride over the mountains. It was exceedingly hot. He appeared with a van. Bikes were loaded in and he drove us up into the hills: I was struck by the speed and competence with which a proposal turned to action. We set off, riding towards the sky. He was very fit.
‘I don’t do any drugs now,’ he said, when the subject came up (a lot of our mutual friends did). ‘It’s like I found my calm. I do yoga. I’m into balance. And cycling. I’d like to do a really long ride, across countries. My girlfriend’s into it, too. It’s given her the perfect arse!’
We rode between white rocks, and along stony paths, and then the rocks were black. The sky was still and the hills shimmered. We stopped on a bluff, overlooking a green valley, and he began to tell me a story about a trip to one of the less secure parts of Africa where he fell into the hands of corrupt policemen. He described a cell, or some sort of holding room in some police station, in the throat of a hot mad night. Here and there the shapes moved in the gloom. Now and then they dragged him to the tiny light for more questions. Sweat ran down faces, down arms. There was the smell of bodies, breath and alcohol, the smell of smoke and men’s darkness.
‘I tell you…’ he said softly. He described fear. Fear of rape, of murder, of the kind of beating you carry all your life, if you escape with your life – they were all there, leaning against the walls, waiting for their signal. His captors spoke languages he did not know. The not knowing, the confusion, the frigid terror in the heart of that thick heat: I felt I could see it all, though he told it without drama.
Later, after we had parted, I thought about why he should have told that story. I think it was a kindness; a leveller. He knew I was a traveller so he told a traveller’s tale. He chose one that emphasised his vulnerability, describing the kind of nightmare I have occasionally fallen into, when your masculinity is nothing, when the strength in your arms is nothing, when your derring-do, your chutzpah and your cunning are all useless. You do not escape, so much as luck-out. They free you, by the grace of God and one of their superiors, when they have taken whatever they can get. In this way would I emerge from such a Hell, as did he, that time – but relying on luck to liberate him was not my friend’s usual method.
‘HE’S BEEN IN JAIL in about eight countries,’ someone said. ‘He had some very dodgy friends – I mean scary people.’
‘He escaped from a lot of prisons,’ said another. ‘He told me one story about when they were under arrest somewhere, being held in a hotel, waiting to be deported. He worked out that it was possible to get out of the room by jumping off the balcony into the swimming pool, and that you could climb back in. So they jumped out, went round the corner and stuck up a bank. They always used fake guns. Then they stashed the money and climbed back into the hotel. The police may have suspected them, but they had a good alibi…’
No doubt I should feel guilty for the amusement lurking behind the disapproval with which I listened to this story. Fake weapons or not, it must be horrific to have someone threaten you with what you believe to be a gun. For all that some bankers may not be admirable people (indeed, some are thieves enfranchised by lax laws and empowered by inadequate oversight, as entire nations have learned), for all that, bank tellers and clerks, surely, are innocent. They are merely employees doing an honest job for employers whose higher crimes and machinations are committed in those glittering dagger-towers which hover high over the hearts of the great capitals, rather than over the counter in some local branch.
But I fear that hearing this story made me picture it from my friend’s perspective, as he planned his raid. The only people who can actually be hurt (if indeed their guns are fake, and it is hard to see how they could not have been, if my friend was under arrest) are the robbers. They will take terrifying risks, which, if they are lucky, will be rewarded in bricks of cash. It will be horrible for the tellers, but the tellers must know that robbery is a possibility. They will have a procedure and follow it. The difference, of course, is that while I cannot contemplate holding up a bank, my friend apparently made a career of it.
ANY BOOKSHOP OR DVD RACK tells you how our culture regards bank robbers. We may couch it in ‘moral’ tales, in which they get their ‘just deserts’, but as long as they are played by handsome actors, as long as the good end happily and the bad unhappily, we adore this sort of criminal. An old-fashioned, glamorous sort of villain is the bank robber, in popular culture at least. How else to account for the millions of words and weeks of film we devote to heists?
Ideally, we want the bank to be owned by someone unequivocally bad and robbed by someone unrelentingly ingenious. Perhaps the most perfect example is Spike Lee’s Inside Man, in which Christopher Plummer’s ex-Nazi-turned-banker is stripped of his evilly-gotten diamonds by Clive Owen’s anarchically moral thief. It seems a ludicrous, contrived scenario, but having met an otherwise entirely decent and moral person who happens to have been a thief, and knowing, now, how banks have been conducting themselves, one does begin to wonder whether it is necessary to distort and contrive in order to tell a story that reflects our ambivalent relationship with financial crime.
On a book tour in America I travelled the eastern seaboard at the height of the credit boom. In towns like Greenwich, Connecticut and Wilmington, Delaware, my hosts pointed, with breathless admiration, to the greater-than-Gatsby’s palaces of their local heroes: hedge fund stars and credit card chiefs whose wealth was wild beyond dreaming. In Delaware my hostess was an employee of a credit card company. She drove me through the white streets of Wilmington and proudly presented her skyscraper, the global HQ of a corporation called MBNA.
‘I know you!’ I exclaimed. ‘You used to send me credit card applications every other month. I never had any money and I never knew how you got my address but you never stopped sending the application forms. They’re still coming, in fact.’
‘Well,’ she said, and dropped her voice, ‘that’s actually our secret. We just don’t take “no” for an answer. And we never give up.’
It was true. For a decade the offers of silver credit cards, gold credit cards, even black credit cards, promising terrifying spending power and limitless status, should I choose to draw one, shining, from my wallet, slid through our letter box (which is pretty well hidden by ivy, and located in the depths of Wales). I buckled once, wanting insurance for a long journey. When the expedition was over I paid off the bill and asked the provider to cancel the card.
‘I can’t actually do that,’ said the man on the phone.
What did he mean, can’t?
‘I mean,’ he said, ‘I have no way of taking you off the system.’
I complained to my bank, which had provided the card, but there was nothing they could do. I was in the hands of their sub-contractor. My credit card, and therefore the details I had given to obtain it, belonged to MBNA. I do not mean to imply that this company is especially devious: it just happens to be the one that I encountered. I am sure there are others from which there is no hiding, which do not take no for an answer, and which never let you go.
IS THERE A MORAL HERE? We have two entities which have both made money by immoral means. One, by ruthlessly exploiting people’s desires and gullibility; the other by pointing a cucumber at them, wrapped in a paper bag. Let us imagine both have seen the error of their ways. Suppose
they have both reformed, and now go about their business in a moral and plain-dealing fashion. Disregard the comparative numbers of their victims: do not try to measure the relative terror of a dozen bank clerks against the misery of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, living near or beyond bankruptcy. Only answer me this: which entity, do you suppose, gives the greater portion of its wealth and time to charity? I do not know the answer, but I have reason to sadly suspect.
Now that the credit boom is over, and my friend retired from crime, it might be instructive to know how our principals are behaving today. The banks and credit card companies have a double strategy: put on the frighteners and apply for bail-out. So hundreds, perhaps thousands of householders no longer answer the door or the phone, while bailiffs’ calling cards pile up on their mats. At the same time, the companies appeal to the courts to bankrupt their creditors, which will trigger corporate insurance pay-outs.
As for my friend the villain: you will not drive past any villa of his on the Costa del Sol. But you just might find him in a far country, in a dilapidated town, in an anonymous house. He gives to charity and does voluntary work with the sick and the old. This is all perfectly true.
The Zoo from the Outside
TOM BULLOUGH (born Hereford, 1975) grew up on a hill farm in Radnorshire. He has worked as a sawmiller, a travel writer and a Zimbabwean music promoter, and is the author of three novels: A (2002), The Claude Glass (2007), and the forthcoming Celestial Mechanics, based on the life of nineteeth-century Russian space pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. He lives in the Brecon Beacons with his wife Charlie and their son Edwyn. www.tombullough.com
The Zoo from the Outside
TOM BULLOUGH
Gito-Bass stood near the back of the narrow stage. A thick-built man in jeans and a neat black T-shirt, he played with eyes sealed, the coloured lights dancing from the streaks of sweat on his big, shaven head. Around him, unseen, the horns blew skin-tight waves, the backing singers howled, the guitar chopped Afro-beat through the reeling thunder of his bassline. Down on the dance floor, the drag queens shrieked in netting vests and beehive wigs, while women girned and touched their toes and the men behind them mimed sexual ecstasy.
It was four o’clock in the morning when Xitende finished their final set. Aside from the taxi drivers who had woken to service the emptying club, Maputo was quiet. The windows of the bakers’ and hardware shops on Avenida Eduardo Mondlane reflected the yellow streetlights – a body or two among the shadows in the doorways – but with the police as much of a danger at this time of night as any tsotsi, Gito-Bass, my friend Selemane and I turned into an unlit alley and worked our way between the small white houses of the back streets, the shed-like churches built by officials looking to salve their souls, the yards where women still shook their hips and men with battered acoustic guitars played skipping marrabenta: the great dance music of Mozambique.
Gito-Bass lived on a square of white-socked trees and straggling piles of rubbish. In the hallway of his tower block, three old women were sitting round a candle, giggling and gossiping, each with a plume of loaves in a basket on her head. It was hard to tell how many floors we climbed. Once, in the faint grey light that leaked from the derelict lift shaft, we met a woman coming the other way, who screamed invisibly and fled towards the ground. At last, we emerged on the flat, tarred square of the roof, where a concrete hut once used by the building’s janitor stood alone above the streaming, rippling lights of the city.
The hut was small but homely, with a single chair, three cassettes, a battery-powered cassette player and a narrow bed where a boy of about fourteen was asleep with an electric guitar. Smiling hospitably and gesturing for us to sit down, Gito-Bass prodded the boy awake and set him to work on a long and complex jazz scale. He removed his T-shirt to reveal a glistening belly and the words ‘Gito-Bass’ tattooed on his right bicep, threw his arms around my neck to make it quite clear that I was welcome and retrieved a bottle of vodka from underneath the bed. Then, to the skittering grooves of Wes Montgomery, we settled down to consider which bands to include in my chapter in the Rough Guide to World Music.
At dawn, the three of us went outside onto the roof. We stood unsteadily a few feet from the edge and stared past the silhouettes of the treetops at the blossoming sky, the end of the headland where the Presidential Palace met the pink-fringed Indian Ocean. On one building, a beige-skinned woman was laughing into a mobile phone. On Avenida Eduardo Mond-lane, a taxi passed the Taqwa Mosque, moved slowly between the jacaranda trees and the still-burning streetlights and vanished into the darkened reaches of the ghetto.
Gito-Bass said something in low Portuguese, which I had to ask Selemane to translate. ‘He say,’ said Selemane, after a moment. ‘He say that here we just care about the music. That is why it is so hard.’
‘I FIRST HEARD the word marrabenta in 1946,’ recalled Dilon Djindji, leaning back in his plastic chair. ‘Back then, I was young and strong. I was always invited to play at parties, and at the end of the party I would always come home with one or two women… It was then that “Marrabenta” became my nickname, because the marrabenta was the one who was always last to leave the party. The word comes from rebentar – “to break” in Portuguese – but in our slang it also meant to party. So, I was the one who never got tired, who would always go until it was morning!’
Dilon was a small, white-haired figure with a Latin moustache, a baggy grey suit and sharp little eyes which would emerge from their wrinkles whenever a woman passed on the neighbouring footpath. We were sitting outside his bungalow in Marracuene – a village fifteen miles north of Maputo – and ever since Selemane and I had arrived in this dusty, overlooked patch of bush Dilon had been lauding himself, libelling his manager, slating the government for paying him insufficient attention and keeping a very close eye on posterity. The claims of singers like Fany Pfumo, Maekwana and Xidiminguana to a place in Mozambican musical history had received not a mention. Dilon was the King of Marrabenta: an ‘elephant’ of strength and endurance. He railed, cursed and boasted. He slipped randomly between Portuguese and Shangaan, and even when Selemane and I picked back over my recording that evening it proved far from easy to decipher.
‘I am original music!’ Dilon declared. He received a file from one of his thirty-two grandchildren – several of whom were milling around us – and rifled through a pile of old 7-inch record sleeves until he found a thesis from the University of Vienna. ‘Look! You see? The Austrians understand, even if the government doesn’t!’
He jabbed a finger at a list identifying the seven key figures in twentieth-century African music. There was Fela Kuti. There was Franco. There was Thomas Mapfumo. And there too was Dilon Djindji, who had, it seemed, invented marrabenta in 1952. Dilon brandished the paper triumphantly, then collected a steel-string guitar which was leaning against a tree and picked his way through a jaunty tune.
Besides the milling of the grandchildren, not a lot seemed to happen at Dilon’s house. Back in 1982, the Congolese superstar, Sam Mangwana, had made a kind of pilgrimage here – his song ‘Marrabenta’ was written in Dilon’s honour – and Dilon mentioned the fact so often that it might have happened that morning. A hundred yards away, the EN1 fed north towards Xai-Xai – the link between Maputo and the rest of the country – but only the footpath made its way to Dilon’s door. On our journey from the city, Selemane and I had had to walk over a mile from the nearest bus stop.
‘So when did you first learn to play?’ I asked him.
‘I started to play in 1938,’ Dilon replied, concluding his song. ‘Back then I had a guitar made from an oil can, with only three strings, and when I wanted to practise I would have to go off into the bush because my father didn’t like it. As a boy, I would carry the instruments for musicians at parties. I would sit there all night, just watching them. Those musicians were playing traditional music, of course. It was not until 1947 that I began to play a five-string guitar, and that was when I invented afina cãomatola, my own tuning syst
em, which is the basis of marrabenta…
‘In those days, I had a very sexy style!’ He sprang to his feet and performed a series of pelvic thrusts. ‘Later, when I came to play in bars in the city I had to learn to behave, but back then I would rebentar all the women! You see that sexy style in the clubs? Well, that was me who started it! Back then, I was the greatest because only I had the marrabenta juice, and the same is true today!’ Again he jumped up. ‘Even at this age, I am still Marrabenta!’
LEAVING THE TIDES of Japanese saloons and minibuses on Avenida Vladimir Lenine, the building sites and the salesmen waving ground nuts and plastic dogs with marching feet, Selemane and I passed beneath a sign reading ‘Associação Moçambicana de Músicos’ and arrived in a garden of fruit trees and gaudily painted walls, where a hundred or so musicians sat on rows of metal chairs, eating chicken, drinking beer, nodding along to a knocked-together band, which was playing ‘Georgia On My Mind’ on a low concrete stage in the corner.
The craze for these public jam sessions had begun in Maputo back in the late 1990s, with the Big Jam at Club Tchova Xita Duma – birthplace of Kapa Dêch and Timbila Muzimba, two of the biggest groups in the country. At the time, Mozambique was the poorest country in the world – crippled first by a ten-year war of independence, then by a fifteen-year civil war in which a million people had been killed. Like all of its industries, many of which had been destroyed by the Portuguese colonials on their departure in 1975, Mozambique’s music industry was almost non-existent: a handful of clubs and a single, state-owned recording studio. With the jam sessions, the musicians of Maputo had found a place to play, to fraternise, to innovate, for the first time in a generation.
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