Rogue's March

by W. T. Tyler

  Lutete climbed reluctantly from the jeep, followed by Major Fumbe. They moved too cautiously for N’Sika. “Go on! Are you afraid? Help them,” he said to de Vaux. “Go show them my uncle’s power. Yours too.”

  De Vaux helped his father-in-law from the jeep. He was still weak from the flu and coughed as he shed the heavy coat.

  “What is it?” N’Sika called, troubled, his smile gone. “He’s not sick, is he?”

  “It’s the night air,” de Vaux lied. He led his father-in-law across the gravel, but the old man moved slowly, wasted by fever and now frightened by the recent gunfire, an old man who understood nothing of what had happened, only that his strength was failing. He wanted only to return to his village far in the north to die in peace.

  When they were out of N’Sika’s hearing, de Vaux said, “Walk strongly now. He’ll be watching you.”

  “My power is dying,” the old man muttered in confusion, gripping de Vaux’s arm tightly. “Someone is taking it from me.”

  “Shhh. Don’t say that now. It’s the fever, that’s all. It’ll pass.”

  Gently, de Vaux led him up the steps and into the armory bay. The old man hesitated at the door, seeing the terrible carnage inside, white men’s power he knew nothing about. His thin bony arm reached for the door frame, but de Vaux steadied him.

  “What is it?” N’Sika called, standing up in the jeep.

  “He’s watching now,” de Vaux said. “Be strong now, like Kindu. You remember Kindu, when we drove into the town and you were in the back seat? You didn’t move, not a muscle. Do you remember how strong you were?”

  “Who are these men,” he asked, standing alone, sickened at the sight.

  De Vaux told him that among them were those who burned his village in the north and murdered his two youngest daughters and left them for the vultures in the coffee-drying sheds.

  The old man stood motionless in the bay door and for the first time in weeks de Vaux saw the dim light of recognition glow in his cloudy, troubled sight. It was N’Sika’s coup, but the old man was part of its power, the power to safeguard and protect. He moved forward alone into the bay, de Vaux following, the two majors also beginning to mount the steps behind them, their fears banished.

  Book Two

  Chapter One

  During the East German freighter’s voyage down the African coast weeks earlier, the weather was stormy. The African kept to his cabin aboard the Potsdam. Behind him spilled the cold green waters of the Atlantic—now violet, now indigo, now blue—as impenetrable as iron to the glaze of the weak autumn sun. His wrinkled twill uniform had been put away and he was dressed as any returning African student might dress after his years in Belgium or France: blue coat with flared woolen trousers, thin-soled black shoes with elevated heels and sharp toes, footgear suddenly made treacherous by high seas and the torrential rains that swept out from the coast.

  One stormy morning the freighter took on water amidships. The gangways were slippery and the African slipped on a ship’s ladder and gashed his knee. He was alone at the time but one of the crewmen saw the splashes of fresh blood. The ship’s doctor found the African in his cabin lying on his bunk with a pencil in his hand, a notebook at his side, his leg wrapped in a towel and elevated on a metal suitcase. The doctor dressed the laceration and, as they talked, discovered that the notebooks contained sketches of small birds and mammals. The African described them as sketches he’d made years earlier as a young student in São Salvador in Angola. He could remember the day he’d begun each drawing—the hour, the day, and the season; all this from the angle of the sun through the trees and the small window near his bench in the village school.

  As the days grew warmer and the storms passed, he would move about the deck during the late afternoon, ending his promenade on the fantail, from which he would watch the sun dissolve into the Atlantic. Petrels and terns swept in over the slick left by the Potsdam’s gliding passage; vaults of towering cloud, as black as anvils, traced the hidden African coast. When the stars were visible, he would bring his portable radio to the deck and sit on a winch cover, turning the dial until he found a signal from one of the coastal cities, bringing to him the African music he’d learned to live without. He would sit in the darkness until the sound of music was lost, drowned by the sound of the sea hissing past, in silence again, his isolation returned. But his isolation was less than it had been during the long years of exile, in the bidonvilles of Paris, in Rome, Cairo, and finally the Algerian guerrilla camp in the mountains. The recollection of those years was not so different to him from pain, but now it was eased by the knowledge that he’d survived to remember those moments, the recognition that in the very act of memory he would soon be released from them.

  He was going home. His name was Bernardo dos Santos. He was a lieutenant in the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, returning with weapons to infiltrate the savannahs of his native São Salvador in Angola to liberate it from the Portuguese.

  Rain shrouded the Congolese port at Pointe-Noire the afternoon of his arrival, the steaming green hills hidden in the mist. In the harbor freighters lay like ghosts in the drizzle, their lights on. The wooden crates were swung to quayside, where they sat in the rain outside a warehouse, ignored by the Congolese customs officials as dos Santos waited nearby, his green uniform hidden beneath a dark poncho glistening with rain. A chief inspector finally arrived, examined his documents, told him that the shipment had already been cleared, and directed him across the port area to the administration building. Dos Santos spent an hour in the cramped overheated office, where a score of European and African traders competed for the attention of the few overworked clerks, waving their manifests and shipping forms, stuffed with francs or dollars, across the wooden counter.

  Afterward, he was sent to immigration, where a suspicious clerk studied his passport, pored over his confidential ledgers, and finally waved him upstairs to the security office. He was interrogated for an hour before the clerk finally grunted his approval and stamped his passport. Downstairs, he telephoned the local office of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola but was told by a sleepy clerk that the office was closed for the day. He telephoned the freight forwarder Bernard Delbeques. A truck would be sent immediately.

  He walked back to the warehouse where the guns still lay at dockside among standing pools of water. He waited in the door of the warehouse, listening to the rain drum against the roof and watching the mist roll down from the hills, his hunger as keen as his despair. A dozen meters away, the Potsdam stood at dockside, its ventilators blowing the galley smells of the evening meal in his direction. Its world inside was warm, reassuring, habitable, like the Algerian commando camp in the mountains. His wasn’t. He remembered both now with affection and regret. Thinking of the crowded customs office and the insolent clerks who knew nothing of guns transshipped through their independent nation to Portuguese-occupied Angola, he knew that he would grow to despise this country if he remained here too long. He smelled misery and hunger about him, as sharp as a serpent’s tooth. Darkness fell. An old Mercedes truck with broken fenders loomed through the mist, its ancient headlights gleaming as feebly as kerosene lanterns. As it stopped near the East German freighter, he read the hand-lettered words on the door: BERNARD DELBEQUES, FRERES.

  The old truck drove east from Pointe-Noire, following the narrow tarmac road that ran parallel to the railroad track toward Brazzaville. The landscape was cold and stunted under the driving rain. The truck crew was Congolese. The leader described himself as a militant, but dos Santos knew what he was; even before the crates were loaded at dockside, he’d asked for money to pay the others. He sat in the cab with dos Santos and the driver, a morose little Bantu who didn’t speak. Behind the cab two Congolese laborers in dark blue coveralls squatted under the tarpaulin on the truck bed, trying to keep dry. The gun crates were uncovered and loosely lashed to the bed, bouncing and shifting dangerously with each curve and pothole.

  They climbed the ero
ded hills and onto the plateau. The cab was filled with the fumes from the overheated engine leaking up from the rusted-out manifold. As the truck descended to the Niari River valley, the rain fell harder, obscuring the dense landscape along the roadway. The dim headlights barely penetrated the murk. Some miles beyond, the truck slowed to a crawl, and the driver began arguing with the Congolese who was giving him directions, speaking in Kikongo. Neither seemed sure of the road, and the driver thought he’d missed the turn. They found the secondary road ten kilometers beyond, a narrow muddy track that wound along a steep riverbank. Twenty minutes later the truck turned into a long tree-lined lane carpeted with palm husks. An abandoned planter’s cottage stood in a palm grove, elevated on brick piers above the grassless yard. The driver backed the Mercedes against the high porch, and as they began unloading the crates, a light stirred from the interior of the cottage.

  A man carrying a kerosene lantern came down the central hallway and out onto the porch. He was a tall light-skinned mulatto from Cabinda, wearing olive twill trousers with pouch pockets and a khaki shirt with most of the buttons missing. It hung open across his bare chest, where a crucifix hung suspended by a silver chain. His reddish-brown beard was closely trimmed; he smelled of stale beer. With a lazy smile that betrayed a canine missing in his lower jaw, he introduced himself as Lieutenant Nogueira, MPLA deputy chief of logistics for the southeast military district.

  Hungry, wet, and tired, dos Santos nodded, but said nothing. He had never heard of Lieutenant Nogueira.

  The rain poured from the roof onto the truck bed as they moved the crates to the shelter of the porch. The Congolese workers were anxious to leave once the boxes were transferred, but Nogueira called the foreman back and stood arguing with him. Dos Santos watched as the worker took something from his pocket and gave it to the mulatto. The truck drove away, and Nogueira gave back to dos Santos the franc notes he’d given to the Congolese at the port. He said the truck crew was paid by Delbeques. The laborer would have pocketed the money. He picked up the lantern, and dos Santos followed him into the house.

  “There’s no one here but me,” Nogueira said. “What did you expect, a reception by the political bureau? They’re all in Brazzaville this week—a meeting with the government. Someone tried to shoot the President last week, an ambush, and now they’re nervous about guns. That’s why we brought them here, out of the way. We’ll move them later, after this latest business blows away. In the meantime, they’re safer here.

  “Did you bring any cigarettes? They’re harder to find these days than guns. Now that you’ve come from Algeria, I suppose you’re ready to start shooting Portuguese.” Nogueira laughed. “It isn’t easy. They’re three hundred kilometers away. You have to cross through the other Congo first, across the river. Don’t worry about it. We’ll get you there. In the meantime you’ll have plenty of time to think about it—to lead the intellectual life. Nothing but talk and solitude. I’ve been here for two years, and the problems haven’t changed. I trained in Algeria too. So you’re dos Santos. I’ve heard about you. Going to São Salvador, eh? You can take any room you like. They’re all the same, all empty.”

  He took the cigarette dos Santos offered and lifted the lantern higher to illuminate the small room halfway back the long center hall. He continued talking, reminiscing in a mocking, unguarded way, like a man long accustomed to talking to himself and bored with it, as if existence itself had perished in the sound of his own voice. On the floor of the room were a raffia mat and several straw mattresses. Cigarette butts, broken glass, and dry palm hulls littered the floor. The rain blew softly through the broken window. Against one wall was a table and above it a primitive map of Cabinda. On the table were a dozen or so leaflets, and dos Santos picked one up and looked at it in the light of Nogueira’s lantern. On one side was a picture of the red and green Portuguese flag and beneath it a crude message in Portuguese and Kikongo:

  SALVO-CONDUTO

  APRESENTA-TE ’A TROPA COM ESTE PAPEL E SERA’S BEN

  TRADUTO UIZA KUSUNZULA KUA MASOLADI LE PAPELA

  LAI IBOSI O MONA VO O TOMA LUNDUA

  On the other side of the flyer, the Portuguese-printed safe-conduct appeal read:

  ENTREGA ARMAS E MUNIÇÕES

  E RECEBERÀS DINHEIRO.

  “Bring guns and ammunition and receive money,” dos Santos read, looking at the drawings beneath showing a revolver and bullet, four types of automatic weapons, a hand grenade, and a small land mine. He looked again at the front of the leaflet. “Present this to the soldiers and you will receive good treatment.” He looked up. “Where did this come from?”

  “Angola. Cabinda. The Portuguese helicopters have been dropping them,” Nogueira said. “Those came from São Salvador. An old man brought them. He couldn’t read them. Most of them can’t. The Portuguese are wasting their time. We won’t sell our guns. You can leave your suitcase and radio here if you like.”

  The other rooms were similar, except for Lieutenant Nogueira’s, which contained a wooden cot and above it a wooden frame from which hung torn strips of mosquito netting. On the floor near the bed lay dozens of books, some piled atop one another, others lying open, face down on the unswept floor. There were books on geology and hydrology, physiological texts, a handbook on fluid mechanics, a biography of Marx, a treatise on imperialism and colonialism, guerrilla tactics, French erotic novels in paperback, a book on theosophy, and a translation of Lenin in Portuguese. Nogueira said that he’d studied in Paris on a scholarship given to him by a French petroleum consortium, but had left the university to enlist in the MPLA. He led dos Santos into the kitchen at the back of the house. The room was chilly and damp. Thunder echoed from the nearby hillside; the rain beat down on the roof. In the far corner a dozen beer crates were stacked against the wall. Nogueira took four bottles, opened each in turn, and put them on a wooden table in the center of the room.

  “There’s nothing else to drink. After a time, discipline goes to hell, but who notices? Maybe the termites and the cockroaches, no one else. Are you hungry? The beer isn’t bad, and we’ve got plenty of that. It keeps your kidneys working. When they stop, you’re dead.” He pushed a bottle across the table.

  “We had twenty recruits here last month from Cabinda, school kids, most of them, but we couldn’t feed them. Hungry bastards. We sent them up to the training camp near Poto-Poto, where the Cubans have a mess. They ate well, and now everyone wants to go to Brazza and Poto-Poto. Do you think they came to fight the Portuguese? Shit no, for the free feed and then to learn Spanish. Get a scholarship to study in Havana. They’ll go anyplace—Havana, Moscow, Paris, Brazil, Brussels, you name it. Just for the scholarship, that’s all. After two years, so would I—back to Paris when I get the chance. The Cubans took fifteen last month, put them on a boat and sent them to Havana to study in the sugar refineries. Technicians, engineers. That’s where the future is.” He laughed.

  “How many men do you have in São Salvador? Did they tell you? Already trained or is that up to you? Maybe I’ll come join you. Angola’s not easy these days. You have to get there first. The guns make it harder. The fascists in Kinshasa won’t let you take the guns across. You can bribe them, but then the cocksuckers take your guns, your money, and shoot you in the back. It’s easier dealing with the Portuguese.”

  Dos Santos had moved to the window. Lightning flashed through trees, and he saw a small muddy rear yard where the embers of a cook fire still smoldered under a lean-to thatched over with palm boughs. The thunder came again an instant later, shaking the windows and wiping out Nogueira’s voice. The voice came back, as steady as the rain: “A woman from the village does the cooking, but she won’t stay after the sun goes down. Afraid of her father’s ghost. He worked here in the old days. A boiler split a seam in the cooking shed and scalded him to death. For a hundred francs she’ll send a girl or woman from the village, but you have to be careful she doesn’t send one of her sisters. The pretty ones have all gone to Brazza. Those that are left ar
e as ugly as she is—meat for the maggots. If you’re interested, the dogs will show you the way. That’s another reason we moved the training camp higher on the plateau—the people around here. They’re savages, worse than baboons. It’s a pygmy plantation, that’s what it is.”

  A few spoonfuls of cold rice and chicken lay in the bottom of the bowl Nogueira had put in front of dos Santos. He ate slowly, remembering the Algerian mess in the mountains, the smell of charcoal, and the chill morning air before the sun lifted over the broken peaks. He rolled the cold rice and chicken into pellets between his fingers and washed his mouth with warm beer as he chewed. The rice had been cooked many times. Lightning flashed as he ate, igniting the bare walls, the broken plaster, and the small geckos that crouched on the ceiling stalking the night-flying insects. Dos Santos finished the rice and pushed the bowl away as he drank from the beer bottle.

  “… It’s the boredom most of all,” Nogueira continued. “After that, the local Congolese. They don’t trust us, never mind what they say. The other Congo across the river is worse. Everything takes money these days—buying off customs, the police, the army. If we want to move a company of infiltrators to the Cabinda border, the ministry of interior has to be told two weeks in advance. The French advisers are everywhere. Do you think they don’t know what we’re telling the Congolese? If the French know, so do the Portuguese. That’s the way it is with the metropoles. Don’t tell me there’s any difference between Paris and Lisbon. It’s the same money, the same shit. You get fed up after a while—”

  “I know Pierre Masakita,” dos Santos said finally, resisting Nogueira’s cynicism. He took a packet of French cigarettes from his pocket and pushed it across the table. Could he trust Nogueira? If not, what was left for him? “We were in Paris together,” he continued. “In exile. Now he’s in the Kinshasa government across the river. I’ll talk to him.” He emptied the bottle and Nogueira gave him another.