Brazzaville Beach

by William Boyd

  Mallabar had announced a few days previously that we were to visit the Nova Santos. This was something he had treated the team to periodically whenever he felt we could benefit from a day off and a complete change of scene. We had set off on the two-hour drive in good spirits, transported to the hotel in two Land-Rovers—the project members crammed into one, the cooks and the barbecue gear in the other.

  I could smell charcoal smoke now, as I lay in the sun. It made me hungry. I sat up and sipped at my beer, looking round at my colleagues. It was odd to see them all in their swimming suits—on vacation, as it were. These familiar people were, in their almost nakedness, made strange to me to me again. Apart from Hauser, of course. However repugnant his cerise thong might be it was a relief not to have to look at what it concealed. Mallabar wore absurdly boyish sawn-off jeans. He was lean and tanned (where and when did he sunbathe?) with a curious two-inch-wide stripe of hair running vertically from throat to navel. By contrast, Roberta was almost unnaturally pale. Her skin was milk white, with a subcutaneous blueness about it. She wore an old-fashioned, two-piece swimsuit—wide shorts and a top with a flap hanging down from it like a fixed curtain, that exposed only two inches of creamy, plump midriff. Her breasts were large and mobile. She appeared quite unself-conscious of the amount of cleavage she had on show. It was Ian who seemed embarrassed for her. He had been moody and taciturn all day, and had not even bothered to change into his swimsuit. He sat in the shade, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, some distance away, reading intently. He hated sunbathing, he had said, and the heavily chlorinated water irritated some skin complaint he suffered from.

  Ginga wore a minute, pea-green bikini. She was very thin, almost emaciatedly so; the twin triangles of her top appeared creased and empty. I noticed the luxuriant hair in her armpits, dense brown divots, and the tiny scrap of material over her groin could not hope to conceal the spreading scribble of pubis that underflowed onto her inner thigh. I knew that Ginga did not care: on the journey to the hotel, she had reminisced enthusiastically about the nude beaches on the Isle de Lerins off Cannes where she and Mallabar had spent some summer holidays in their early married life. The bikini was no more than a gesture to propriety.

  And me? What was Dr. Hope Clearwater wearing? I had chosen carefully. I was the earnest head girl, the keen captain of the school swimming team, in an opaque black one-piece that—I trusted—gave absolutely nothing away.

  The weather was fine, just a faint haze obscuring the perfect blue of the sky. We lounged around; the bridge game came to an end; we ate lunch. We had grilled chicken and some big, freshwater prawns, fried plantain and baked sweet potatoes, a huge tomato and onion salad and some rare lettuce. Plenty of fruit and plenty of beer.

  After lunch there was more sunbathing. As promised, I tried to teach Toshiro to swim but he refused to put his head underwater, so I gave up after ten minutes.

  I returned to my book but was distracted by the sight of Mallabar oiling himself. I had never seen anyone oil himself so fastidiously. He oiled every visible inch of his body: he oiled the crevices of his toes and the backs of his hands. Then he asked Ginga to oil his back but she said no—she was reading and didn’t want her hands to get greasy.

  “Ask Roberta. Ask Hope,” she said.

  Mallabar turned to look at me, eyebrows raised, questioningly. He read my answer in my expression and called out to Roberta instead.

  “Roberta? Could you do me a favor?”

  No one’s back was ever oiled with such lingering diligence. Mallabar lay face down on his towel, eyes closed, while pale, plump Roberta crouched over him as she massaged the lotion in, to and fro, to and fro.

  I walked over to Ian Vail, still under his umbrella, still reading. Half a dozen empty beer bottles stood on a low table beside him. I sat down on the end of his lounger. He drew his feet up to give me more room.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “How’re things?”

  “Fine. What about you?”

  “Fine. In fact I’ve quite enjoyed myself.”

  “So’ve I—getting mildly pissed on weak beer.” He held up his paperback. “Have you read this?”

  “No. After you.”

  “It’s not bad.”

  “Talking about books…” I paused. “How’s Roberta getting on with Eugene’s?”

  “Nearly finished, I think.”

  “Have you read it?”

  He colored slightly. “No. I’m not allowed to. Eugene prefers it that way. And you know Roberta…”

  “Sure. No, I suppose I can understand that.” I wondered if he had seen her oiling the master, her white hands smoothing Mallabar’s brown back.

  I looked away and watched Hauser pad doggedly across the concrete toward the diving board. You’ve done that trick already, I said to myself; we’re not going to find it quite so amusing second time around.

  “What do you think,” Ian Vail said, lazily querying, “what do you think our chimps will be doing today, now that we’re not there to observe them?”

  I nearly told him, almost a reflex answer to an idle question: killing each other. But I checked myself. Hauser had reached the topmost diving board and he stalked to its end, chest inflated, every inch the champion, and spread his arms wide.

  “Oh no, not again,” I said wearily. Then, to Vail. “See you later.”

  I strolled back to my seat, my eyes on Hauser and his pantomime.

  Hauser leapt out into space, almost swooped, in a perfect butterfly dive, horizontal for an instant, then—in a kind of midair check—his arms came together, his head dipped, and, with a precise and practiced effort, he hitched his tubby legs into a vertical plane and sliced cleanly into the water with hardly any splash. Bubbles seethed.

  “My God,” I said, in tones of cheated astonishment, and joined in the applause. Hauser surfaced, and waved.

  I reached my lounger and took off my sunglasses. I saw that the cooks had almost finished dismantling the barbecue. The coals had been doused in the halved oil drum that acted as the grill, and it was being carried off to be emptied somewhere. A boy was packing the plastic plates and knives and forks away in an orange box.

  I walked to the poolside and climbed down the chrome ladder into the turquoise water. I pushed off and glided under. There, I opened my eyes wide and I felt the chlorine begin to sting almost at once. I swam a little more, surfaced and climbed out. My eyes felt raw and peeled. I toweled myself down and rubbed my eye sockets vigorously. I put on my sunglasses and collected my bits and pieces.

  “Eugene?” I spoke to Mallabar as he lay basking. He turned and held up a forearm to shadow his eyes. “I’m going back with the cooks,” I said. “Chlorine’s got to me.”

  He stood up. I raised my sunglasses and showed him the damage.

  “Ouch,” he said. “I did warn you.”

  “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Wash your eyes with milk,” Ginga said. “They’ll be better in a couple of hours.”

  I took her advice. When we returned to camp, I fed my smarting eyes on a weak solution of powdered milk and it seemed to work. Within ten minutes my world was still deliquescent but I could see without it stinging.

  I stood in the middle of Main Street, alone, thinking. It was by now about five in the afternoon and I reckoned I had a two-hour start on the others. It was curious to be the only person in the camp, with the shadows lengthening and none of the usual sounds from the canteen or the kitchen area. I was standing opposite Hauser’s lab; to my left was the huge tree and beyond it, round a curve in the road, were my own—still unreconstructed—quarters. Diagonally to my right, through a gap between a neem tree and a grove of frangipanis, I could see the purple bougainvillea on the end of the Vail bungalow. I took one more swift glance around, crossed the road and walked confidently toward it.

  The front door was unlocked. We never locked our houses. I pushed the door open and stepped into the sitting room. It was neat and tidy; even the papers on the desk were arranged in piles, no
tebooks stacked, edges flush. For some reason I was sure that Roberta wouldn’t keep Mallabar’s proofs there. I went through to the bedroom. It was simply furnished and smelled fresh and perfumed. There was a bright Mexican-looking coverlet on the bed and a vase of zinnias on a table beside it. Clothes were hung in an unattractive zip-up plastic wardrobe printed with a fish and shell motif. Along the wall beneath the window was a row of boxes and trunks. I checked them all: full of papers, back numbers of journals, old log books. One trunk was locked. I looked under the bed. I unzipped the wardrobe. No sign of any proofs.

  I returned to the sitting room and went through the desk drawers—nothing. I began to feel foolish: If the proofs were in the house she would be bound to keep them locked up. For all I knew she might collect them from and return them daily to Mallabar himself. I wondered if I had time—if I had the courage—to search Mallabar’s bungalow….

  I walked over to the bookcase. Piled beside it was a great stack of papers, folders and two bulging concertina files. I opened a folder: it was full of data from the Artificial Feeding Area. I put it down. There was obviously nothing here. I looked out of the window and sighed.

  I saw Roberta Vail walking up the path to her front door.

  I carried it off well, I must say. When Roberta opened the front door I was standing by the bookcase with a book open in my hand, like a browser in a shop.

  “Hi, Roberta,” I said with huge nonchalance. “I thought I heard you.”

  She was very surprised. As her expression moved rapidly through shock, outrage and suspicion to feigned good manners, I turned away and carefully replaced the book on the shelf.

  “Must borrow that off you sometime,” I said, smiling. “Where’s Ian?”

  Ian was right behind her and came in just at that moment.

  “Hope?” he said, stupidly, and looked nervously at his wife.

  “Hope was…Hope was waiting for us,” Roberta explained to him.

  “Oh,” he said knowingly, as if this were an everyday occurrence.

  “I popped round to borrow that article,” I said to him.

  “What article?”

  “The one you were telling me about the other day,” I said, very directly.

  “Ah yes,” he said, slowly, obviously lost. “The article…”

  “What article?” Roberta said.

  “The one about sexual strategies,” I said, getting impatient at Vail’s obtuseness. As I uttered the words I regretted them. Roberta looked at me sharply.

  “In chimp society,” I continued.

  “Oh that nonsense,” Roberta said, with heavy sarcasm.

  “I’ll dig it out,” Ian said, finally catching on. “If I can still find it.”

  “That’d be great,” I said, walking to the door with a smile. “See you later.” I left.

  There was no meal in the canteen that night as the cooks and kitchen boys had been given the evening off. I spent the time alone in the census hut reviewing my plans for the next day. I reread the article I had sent off to England, and wondered how Mallabar would react when it came out. I realized that, with Mr. Jeb’s death, its conclusions had already been superceded.

  Later, I stepped outside for a breath of fresh air and stood alone in the dark for a few moments listening to the crickets and the bats. I was about to go back inside when I saw the light of a torch nodding down the road. I crept over to the hibiscus hedge and in the dim backwash from the beam saw that it was Roberta Vail. She went to Mallabar’s bungalow, knocked on the door and was admitted.

  The next morning, I was up early and off before any of the others had emerged. I took João to the site of Mr. Jeb’s killing. I told him only that I had found Mr. Jeb badly injured, and that he had crawled away into the thorn bushes to die. We stood peering into the undergrowth. There was a distinct reek of putrefaction in the air.

  “Look,” João said and pointed. “Conrad.”

  Conrad sat in the lemon-flower tree, looking down at us, and the spot where Mr. Jeb was decomposing.

  “I think leopard,” João said grimly, spitting on the ground. The smell was bad. “We get leopard here.”

  “No,” I said. “I think it was chimps.”

  He looked at me as if I were mad.

  “I think,” I went on carefully, “that I saw chimps—the northerners—nearby. I heard the noise of a fight.”

  “I don’t think is possible, Mam,” he said respectfully, but with complete conviction.

  I took out my notebook. “Well, we’ll just log it as ‘unknown predator.’ How’s that?”

  João remembered something. “Oh yes, Mam, Dr. Mallabar wants my papers. All the notes I gave you.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes, Mam.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “He say for the archive.”

  Mallabar had talked vaguely about this project in the past: a storehouse of all the work done at Grosso Arvore since its inception. All his own papers would be gathered there as well as those of the other researchers. It would be the greatest repository of primate lore anywhere in the world, he claimed. At the same time, its potential as a money-earner was not overlooked: it could be sold to some university or institution, a benefactor’s name could be added…anything was possible.

  “Did you tell Dr. Mallabar I had your papers?” I asked João.

  “Yes, Mam.”

  I saw from the rota on the bulletin board in the canteen that Ian Vail was supposed to be doing the next provisioning run. I drove up to the northern area straight away and one of Vail’s assistants told me where I could find him.

  It was midafternoon and the humidity had built up considerably. The air felt heavy and moist. The seasonal rains were not far off now. Over the last week, from the mountains beyond the escarpment, we had heard the distant rumbles of thunder as the clouds darkened and the weather fronts massed. I walked up a baked, well-worn path through waist-high grass, dry and bleached blond, waving at the flies that buzzed around my head. There was no wind or breeze at this hour of the day, and every leaf and blade of grass in the scrub on either side of me seemed to hang limp and exhausted.

  I saw Dias, Vail’s chief assistant, sitting in the shade of a fitinha palm. He put his finger to his lips and pointed at a grove of trees. I peered into the dappled gloom and saw Ian, about forty yards off, sitting in front of a tripod-mounted camera with a long telephoto lens. I picked my way carefully toward him, trying not to step on twigs or dead leaves. It was very quiet under the trees and, for all the shade, it felt hotter and more oppressive.

  Ian Vail looked round when he heard me coming. His face did not exactly light up in his usual shy smile of pleasure. I felt a little guilty: I hadn’t spoken to him since that afternoon Roberta had caught me in their bungalow. Still, I thought, I could cope with his bruised feelings.

  I crouched down beside him. Thirty feet away two chimps were feeding at a termite’s nest. I recognized Pulul; the other was a young chimp, barely adolescent. Pulul was delicately inserting a long stem of grass into the termites’ nest, wiggling it around, withdrawing it, and then eating the swarming termites that were clinging to its length.

  After a few more goes, he stopped and let the adolescent chimp try to copy him. But this chimp was using as its tool a blade of grass which, as it was thrust into the nest, kept buckling, and could not reach the ant-rich depths of Pulul’s thin stem. The adolescent’s fishing attempts only rewarded him with a rare termite or two.

  Soon, he threw his blade of grass away and then searched the ground for a more suitable implement. Pulul watched him silently. Ian started photographing. The adolescent found a twig about eighteen inches long with a few dead leaves attached. It stripped the leaves off and inserted the twig deep into the termites’ nest. When it was extracted its tip was busy with ants.

  Ian turned and looked at me. “Every time I see that, it amazes me,” he said, somewhat formally, jerking his thumb in the direction of the chimps. He appeared edgy and a little embarras
sed. I told him what I had come for and he agreed to exchange places on the rota with me.

  “But why do you want to go in again?” he asked. “Hell of a drive.”

  “I have some things to do that can’t wait.”

  “Oh.” It didn’t satisfy him, I could see. He began to dismantle and pack his camera.

  “Listen, Hope,” he began. “About the other day…it was very awkward for me, all that stuff about the article.”

  “It was all I could think of.”

  “But what were you doing there in the first place?”

  I paused. Perhaps now was the time for candor. “I was looking for the proofs of Mallabar’s book.”

  “Jesus Christ…” He shook his head in astonishment. “But why? What difference—”

  “I just wanted to see what he had written. What his line was.”

  “I still don’t—”

  “I think he’s gone badly astray.”

  Ian Vail looked at me patronizingly. “Oh come on.”

  “There are fundamental…misconceptions, I’m sure.”

  He picked up his camera and tripod and stood up. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Oh yeah? What would you say if I told you chimpanzees were capable of infanticide and cannibalism?”

  His face went bland for a second as he took this information in.

  “I think,” he said cautiously, “I think I’d have to say you were mad.”

  “Fine. Now, what would you say if I told you one group of chimpanzees was capable of attacking and brutally killing another chimpanzee.”