by Tamar Myers
“I believe so, Mamu. But it is a terrible waste of space, just the same. You would do well to get some hens. They would lay many eggs on such a soft surface while you slept beside them. Everyone would benefit, I assure you. Even the young white mamu, for she did not like the gruel you set before her and called breakfast.”
“What? My oatmeal? How do you know this?”
“Because it was my job to wash the dishes, Mamu. And because you have no chickens, first I must scrape off all the food you white people waste so that we can then throw it over the cliff and feed the big crocodile.
“Anyway, Mamu Ugly Eyes, the young white mamu did not eat but a few spoons of the gruel. One could not blame her, given that its taste was of bird poop mixed with sand. However, the child within me was hungry and as of yet does not distinguish taste, so together we prevented this shameful waste of oatmeal, cow’s milk, and sugar.”
The white mamu closed her eyes tightly and stood silently for a moment, but her lips moved as if she were inwardly saying an incantation. Cripple hoped she wasn’t being cursed; life was hard enough without having an almost-Christian white person siccing one of her demons on you.
“That is not why we throw it over the cliff,” Mamu Ugly Eyes said. “What else am I to do with the scraps from their plates?”
“Mamu, is it not better to serve these people only as much as they will eat?”
“Yes, but—but—our village does not work that way.”
Captain Pierre Jardin badly needed something stronger to drink than a glass of grenadine sans alcohol, which was all the Missionary Rest House had to offer. This was exactly the kind of situation he had hoped to avoid by selecting a sleepy little town like Belle Vue as his first post eight years ago. Since then, he could still count on both hands—okay, throw in the toes as well—the number of times he’d had to deal with “situations” involving whites. Most of the occasions had featured the Consortium’s Le Club and, of course, liquor was involved. Only twice were the cases entirely of a personal nature: a wife beating, and “the love which dare not speak its name”—but which did, and loudly.
Of course this was not counting the diamond incident, which happened after the young American’s arrival. No doubt that one week alone shaved years off the young police captain’s life. What was it about Americans that drew trouble to them like they were magnets in a junkyard of scrap iron? Well, for one thing, they didn’t mind their own business. The Belgians—and the other Europeans, for that matter—stayed on the “white” side of the river, whereas the Americans insisted on getting their lease on the African side.
That was just one example, but a good one. Over the years the Missionary Rest House had been the drop-off site for orphans, the dying, the diseased, the starving, the homeless—and it wasn’t even a mission, but a vacation spot for missionaries hoping to escape just this sort of thing for a few days. Nobody dared drop off diseased and dying people on the steps of the Belgian-owned houses.
Mais oui, this white Mushilele girl was not the doings of Mademoiselle Amanda Brown, but she had offered to help with her rehabilitation. And now look, it was sheer madness. Like a Shakespeare comedy, yes? That huge American, Mr. Gorman, had him cornered in the kitchen, and was interrogating him right in front of the help. Interrogating him.
“Aren’t you going to do anything about it, Captain?” the American bellowed. That was another thing: Why did Americans always have to speak as loud as drunks?
“Mademoiselle Brown is speaking with the woman, Cripple, now,” Pierre said.
“But shouldn’t you be doing something,” Mr. Gorman said. “Aren’t you the one in charge?”
He heard Protruding Navel snicker, even though he was quite sure the man didn’t understand a word of English.
“Yes, Monsieur Gorman,” Pierre said, “I am in charge. It is precisely because this is the case that I must request that you—what is the English? Ah! Butt out, yes?”
“Captain!” Mr. Gorman growled. “I am shocked. You may be assured that I will speak to the OP immediately.”
“As you wish, monsieur, but it may interest you to know that the OP is not my boss.”
Pierre could swear that Protruding Navel snickered again.
“Then who is your boss?”
“Ah, monsieur, I shall leave that up to you to investigate in your spare time—now that you are on vacation. N’est-ce pas?”
Protruding Navel started laughing so hard that he doubled over at the waist. In fact, he was so far gone that he soon had to lean on the counter for support.
“What is that boy up to?” Mr. Gorman demanded, and rightly so.
It really was unacceptable for a houseboy to behave like that. Pierre had been asked to overlook cases in which adult houseboys had been whipped for being too cheeky to their employers. Upon occasion the whippings got out of hand, or the whip came in contact with an eye, and compensation had to be made—sometimes to the houseboy’s extended family, sometimes to his entire clan. One was free to read between the lines there.
In a nutshell, if one put a stop to insubordination in its early stages, quite possibly it could amount to the same thing as having to put down tribal unrest later down on the path.
“Protruding Navel, come with me,” Pierre snapped, using his most official voice. “Maintenant!”
Still laughing, the Lulua houseboy followed him outside. Pierre led him away from the house and the woodshed, to what some might say was perilously close to the edge of the river gorge. Here the roar of the falls was loud, but not so loud as to preclude a shouted conversation. A third party trying to listen in, however, would not have been able to hear.
But it was only when Pierre got the man to stand right alongside the gorge that the fool quit laughing.
“Muambi,” the houseboy said, suddenly quite solemn, “do you not agree that our waterfalls here at Belle Vue are the most splendid in all of the Kasai?”
Pierre was astounded at the man’s cheek. “Pardon?”
“Of course I have not had the opportunity to see as many waterfalls as you, given that I lack your means of transportation. Nonetheless, based on all the comments I’ve heard throughout the years of my employment, I stand by my conclusion.”
Captain Pierre Jardin was a young man of twenty-eight, but unfortunately, he was no longer naïve. It may have taken him a moment, but now he had caught up with the sly houseboy, Protruding Navel, son of a minor Lulua chief. Somewhere, somehow, Protruding Navel had learned to speak English, and had been so amused by the preceding conversation that he had been unable to contain himself.
“Where did you learn to speak English?” Pierre asked. It was no surprise that the second he opened his mouth to speak English, the houseboy turned his head away from him.
No matter, Pierre thought; there were ways. “I will pay you a week’s salary if you tell me,” he said.
The arrogant man snorted, but wouldn’t take the bait.
“Very well. I’m sure that I will find another Lulua monkey in the village who knows how to speak English. How about your wife? Is she a monkey too?”
“Nkima? You call us monkeys?” It was the worst insult in the book; it was the worst thing Pierre could have called an African, because the word had a history. Macaque! Monkeys. That’s what Belgian housewives said—sometimes to their faces—of the Africans they encountered on the streets of Leopoldville, Luluaburg, and even Belle Vue. It was the Belgian equivalent of “nigger.” It was worse than “shit.” It was a fighting word—except that you weren’t allowed to fight if you were a black.
But Protruding Navel was on fire now. The veins along his temples twitched. His dark eyes flashed, and yes, he was looking at Pierre now, looking at him as if he wished to throw him over the cliff, throw him to his death on the rocks below, so that ultimately Pierre would become crocodile food along with the table scraps.
“Ah,” said Pierre, “a thousand apologies. But I did not call you, or your wife, a monkey. I asked if she was one. Clearly the answe
r is no, because in order to be a monkey, she would have to be Flemish, n’est-ce pas?”
The two men stared at each other, as if they were engaged in a contest, and then suddenly it was over and they were laughing and shaking hands. But no more, of course. No backslapping—after all, Protruding Navel was still a black.
“Yes, Captain, I do speak a little English,” he said in a very heavy African accent.
“So then, one more time please, where did you learn?”
“Monsieur, I learn this from just my ear, comprenez-vous?”
“No teacher?”
“Just listen to missionaries. They very funny sometimes. Like now.”
“Yes. But excusez-mois, Protruding Navel. How was Muambi Gorman very funny just now?”
“Because, monsieur, he thinks progress is to be made by investigating the little Muluba woman, Cripple. Yes, progress—if one is a stick of dynamite.” He paused, and both men laughed. “Can you not see it now, monsieur? Cripple and Muambi Gorman matching watts?”
“Uh? Do you mean ‘wits’?”
“Perhaps. But this English is not the speech of your peoples. Am I correct?”
“Touché.”
“So maybe for now, we are both right.”
Pierre nodded and extended his hand again, but Protruding Navel was no longer in the mood for pleasantries. He took off like a virgin from a French monastery, or, perhaps because he was sure now that he was no longer wanted on official police business. Oh well, Pierre could understand that as well; if he were in the houseboy’s shredded cloth shoes, he would do the same thing. He wouldn’t fraternize with the enemy one more second than he had to, that was for sure.
Alone at last, Pierre stole a few precious moments of solitude. The arrogant man was right; there was no finer setting for a city in all of the Congo, except perhaps up in the mountainous Kivu Province. A horseshoe-shaped falls could not compare with the Mountains of the Moon, with their fabled gorilla bands. But then again, those mountains probably couldn’t compare with Everest. It was all relative, wasn’t it?
And wasn’t relative just another word for perspective? So what if Cripple and the headhunter’s daughter were really communicating somehow. Ultimately, that was a good thing. In the meantime it was merely a puzzle that needed to be worked out. More worrisome was discovering Protruding Navel’s propensity for acquiring languages. This was just the kind of thing that had probably never occurred to the stuffed shirts in Brussels; quite possibly there could be other secret geniuses like Protruding Navel. Who knew what that might mean as the days dwindled, and independence for the Congo loomed closer?
Taking hold of a jacaranda sapling that clung to the very edge of the precipice, whether by design or by nature, yet not quite trusting it, Pierre edged as close to the drop-off as his stomach would allow. From his vantage point, the cliff plunged straight down—even undercutting him somewhat—for at least sixty meters. What was that in feet? About two hundred, maybe slightly less? Then below that the land continued to fall steeply in a jumble of rocks and debris for another fifty meters. At the very bottom was a wide, seasonal sand bar, one that would be under water in another month if the rains continued on schedule.
C’est incroyable! Ce crocodile est deux fois grand comme il etait la derniere fois. Captain Pierre Jardin gazed respectfully down at the largest reptile he had ever seen. All right, so it couldn’t be the same crocodile, since it was twice as large as the last one he’d seen there, but mon Dieu, where were these monsters coming from? Usually only man-eaters got this large. The Missionary Rest House was going to have to stop throwing its rubbish over the side of the cliff; Pierre had been trying to get them to compost it for years. Maybe now that Amanda was in charge, things would change.
He made a mental note to check with some of the villages along the river to see if there had been an unusual number of fatalities amongst women laundering clothes in recent years. In the meantime, he would remember to be thankful that Amanda lived high above the canyon walls.
Chapter Thirteen
When Amanda returned to the sitting room, she was greeted by a gang of demanding eyes. Yes, that’s what they were: a gang. They were all trained on her, and they all wanted to know the same thing: Were Cripple and the white Mushilele girl communicating together in Tshiluba? What was going on? Were they somehow being duped?
“I’m afraid I didn’t learn very much,” Amanda said.
“But she’s your—what is this crippled woman to you?” Mr. Gorman asked.
Amanda felt her cheeks redden. “She’s my maid, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“He’s only asking this because most houseboys are men,” Mrs. Gorman said. “And if they’re young, you can spank them.”
“Why, I never!” Amanda said. “It wouldn’t occur to me to spank an African. Aren’t we called here to shine a light in this, the heart of darkness?”
“The child is right,” Dorcas said, “although I haven’t heard it put so quaintly for quite some years.”
“Humph,” said Mr. Gorman, as he gave the old woman a look of moderated sourness.
For some reason his expression reminded Amanda of putting sugar on grapefruit. She’d never much cared for this fruit before coming to the Congo, but now she adored it. Maybe if she dumped enough Christian love on crusty old Mr. Gorman she could at least learn to tolerate him.
“What are they doing now?” Mrs. Gorman asked.
“Cripple is giving the girl a bath,” Amanda said.
Mrs. Gorman recoiled in shock. “A bath? That’s impossible; it’s utterly unchristian.”
“I don’t understand.”
Young Peaches rolled her eyes dramatically. “You can’t have an African looking at a white girl’s baby-maker.”
Her baby-maker? What century were these people living in? This was almost the nineteen-sixties, for crying out loud. Had they even heard of Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis? If Amanda were to use the scientific word for that part of a girl’s anatomy, every other female in the room would faint dead away, and as for Mr. Gorman, he’d probably have a heart attack.
Nonetheless, Pierre had put her in charge of the girl’s rehabilitation and she would do the sensible thing. “Black or white, a woman is a woman. Y’all have babas here in the Congo, just like we have mammies in the South, and my mammy saw me without my clothes on plenty of times.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Gorman said, her face as white as froth on the falls, “but you were a little girl. Am I right?”
“She is trying to be delicate,” Dorcas said. “She is afraid to reference pubic hair.”
“Dorcas!” Mr. Gorman exploded.
“Oh Mama,” Peaches whined, “and I’m just an innocent child.”
“Bother you are,” Amanda said, using a Briticism she had learned in the movies and of which she was rather fond. She was suddenly fed up to the gills with her guests. She would have thrown them all out, except that of course that she couldn’t, because strictly speaking they weren’t her guests; they were the guests of the Missionary Rest House. They were hardworking servants of the Lord, and her job was to give them a place to rest and refresh themselves; not to judge the narrowness of their minds.
“Why, I never!” Mrs. Gorman said crossly, or was that a sly smile playing around the corners of her lips?
“Oh come on, everyone,” Dorcas said. “The girl is right again; this foundling—for that’s really what she is, is not our business. By the way, I have decided to go across the river this morning, instead of after dinner. Would anyone like to ride along? I’ll be going to the general store and then to the garage to have some work done on the car. One can walk from there to the company club grounds and have a soda by the pool while one waits.”
“Will there be any boys my age there?” said Peaches.
“Yes, I’m sure there will be,” Amanda said, and then she caught herself. “Well, there usually are. The Gaston twins are fourteen and their parents are keeping them home this semester.”
“What did they do?” Mr. Gorman boomed. “Get thrown out?”
“No—I mean, yes,” Amanda said. “It really isn’t my place to talk about it.”
How ironic was that? Back home, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Amanda had loved nothing better than to gossip with her friends. It was a skill she had learned at her mother’s knee. As one grew older, one perfected one’s craft until, as a fully integrated adult woman in the community, it was possible to gossip with impunity just as long as one spiced it with wit, and then sugarcoated it with charm. But Amanda had come to Africa to atone for her sins, not to revel in the sins of others.
“Hmm,” said Mr. Gorman, sounding not at all convinced.
“Mama, can I please go with Auntie Dorcas? Daddy, please? Pretty, please, with sugar on top?” Peaches was a ball of energy. No doubt she could have run all the way across the bridge if given permission.
“Well, I—” Mrs. Gorman started to say, speaking slowly.
“You ladies go ahead and enjoy yourselves,” Mr. Gorman said, giving Amanda quite the shock. “I never did see much sense in dabbling about in a shared bath and then cooking in the sun like a wiener on a stick.”
The three ladies looked at Amanda, but of course she had to refuse the offer to accompany them. Not that she would have seriously entertained the offer for a second, anyway. How often did one get the chance to study a real-life Tarzan—make that Jane? In this movie, however, there would be no need to hire men in chimpanzee suits to play the part of the apes; those parts went to the white community of Belle Vue.
Harry Gorman thrived on being a contradiction. After all, he hailed from a town named North, South Carolina. Having been the victim of an armed robbery when he was just six years old—his parents were shot in a home invasion, right in front of his eyes—Harry grew up as an ardent pacifist. However, his was a hunting culture, and Harry was able to delineate quite clearly between the killing of animals for sport and the taking of human life.