“What…” I began, and then forgot the question I’d intended to ask. I searched for another and asked, for no particular reason, simply because it was the only thing that occurred, “The river…Is there something wrong with the river?”
Buma got to his feet. He stepped to the wall, knocked against it with the sides of his iron cuffs, dislodging a roughly triangular section of flaking whitewash, revealing a large dark patch beneath. “Do you see this?” he asked. “This is what is wrong with the river. With all things. No matter how pure the surface, beneath it lies insanity and dread. Some will tell you it is Mobutu who is to blame. Others will say something different. They are each right in their own way. Mobutu. Poison. Bacteria. Curses. These are merely names for the incurable cancer spreading from the heart of the world, the terror from which life itself springs. We are all fleeing it. We try to swim away, we travel far from home, we tell ourselves it is a dream, we imprison ourselves in palaces, we speak to God on the mountaintop. We can never escape it, however, because we are part of it. Yet we must try, because that is our nature.” He sat back down, making a dull rattle with his chains. “Crocodiles understand this more clearly than do men. They are simple creatures, and simple answers do not elude them.”
I was dancing with him now; he was playing me, and logic could not stand against him. His words, though scarcely original, a medley of bleak clichés, had tapped into the core of my weakness, and all the fear I had nourished over long years in Africa, all the peculiarly African fear, the apprehension of spirits, of lion ghosts and magical presidents and the long-legged, licorice-skinned, lickety-split demons of the talking drum dancing with arms akimbo on the margins of one’s campfire light, ready to pounce with their red-hot spears and golden teeth…all this was loose in me, raving like a storm inside my skull, and I had the unshakable presentiment that if I didn’t move I would be trapped with this man who claimed not to be a man in that little white cell forever. I scraped back my chair, staggered against the wall, the wall infected with blood and darkness, and as I moved haltingly toward the door, Buma smiled at me. The cracks in his wrinkled, youthful face seemed to deepen so drastically, I thought his skin would fly apart into a kind of weathered shrapnel, releasing the all-consuming, crocodile-reeking blackness beneath.
“Remember, Michael,” he said. “Have patience. No matter what befalls the world, whether fire or ice, if you have patience, you will thrive.”
• • •
Dusk came suddenly as I left the jail, dragged in—it appeared—by flights of crows that swooped just above the rooftops, screaming down harsh curses on the people below. I badly wanted a drink, and since I was now persona non grata with Dillip, I headed for the nearest shanty bar, a construction of warped boards alternately painted pink and yellow and blue, furnished with picnic-style tables and lit by a kerosene lantern, all topped off by a rust-scabbed tin roof. The bartender, an enormous woman in a flowered dress, her hair wrapped in a white cloth, provided me with a bottle with a Jim Beam label that did not contain Jim Beam, but something yellowish-brown and vile and strong as poison. I drank it gratefully. Soon the woman came to resemble a deity, marooned by a spill of lantern light in the soft darkness behind a two-plank countertop, her shiny black plump breasts the source of all fecundity, her broad round face as serene as those faces at the corners of antique maps that signify the east wind. At another table sat three men, all young, muscular, two of them wearing polo shirts and jeans, the other jeans and a pink T-shirt decorated with the image of a pony. Pink T-shirt was fiddling with the dials of a transistor radio, bringing in static-filled reggae. Now and then he would glance sternly at me, as if he disapproved of my presence. But I didn’t care. I was ablaze with the happiness that only a satisfied drunk can know, liberated from—yet not unmindful of—my troubles. They seemed manageable now. Even the pronounced possibility that I was experiencing mental slippage seemed a trivial matter, one that could be reconciled in due course. And what if I was perfectly healthy? That was a possibility, I realized, that I had not given sufficient credence. It was not utterly beyond the pale to think that Buma was the king of the crocodiles, or that Mobutu’s curse was despoiling the Kilombo, or that Patience was more than a simple virtue. Then, too, it might be true both that I was slipping and that the world was mad enough to support crocodile kings and rule by voodoo. But it was unlikely that anyone could decide these questions, so why worry about them?
“You are an American Negro, I believe,” said Pink T-shirt, who without my notice had come to stand by my table, his pals at his shoulder. I could not deny the fact, though I found the word “Negro” rankling. Pink T-shirt introduced himself as Solomon, and he and his friends, whose names I promptly forgot, joined me.
“Are you a student of history?” Solomon asked, enunciating his words with the profound dignity and slow precision of the very drunk. His friends did not appear capable of speech. Drifting, eyes rolling, almost on the nod. I told Solomon I was a student of snakes, but he did not respond to this; his impassively handsome face was arranged in a contemplative mask. “I am a student of history,” he said, “at the university in Kinshasa. I have studied the history of the American Negro.”
“I see,” I said. “And what have your studies taught you?”
He nodded, as if I had made a statement and not asked a question. Tiny yellow circles of reflected lantern light lensed his pupils. “I am curious about the American Negro’s perspective on Africa.”
Having been elected the American Negro for purposes of the conversation, I felt a responsibility to offer something cogent in reply. “It’s a complex subject,” I said. “After all, Africa is not one thing, but many. And the American Negro is a term that embodies a number of perspectives.”
In the gathering dark outside, two little girls in pale smocks came chasing after a huge sow, one of them flicking at her rump with a long switch.
“It is my thesis,” Solomon said, regarding me with what I suspected he thought was an imperious stare, “that because he both venerates and despises the African, the American Negro stands closer to a white perspective on the continent than to the African. In effect, he is no longer part of the black race.”
The black race, I thought. A mystery novel. A description of the River Styx. A nighttime cycling event. I wanted to feel respect for Solomon…or if not respect, then sadness. I suppose I felt a little of both. He had, after all, managed a university education—not the easiest thing to achieve in the Congo—and his simplistic take on his subject implied an unfruitful and outmoded agenda that was, in its historical context, sad. It was also sad that Solomon was apparently unaware of his subtext, in which—if he examined it—he would find reflected a specific variety of self-loathing endemic among failed or inadequately prepared African intellectuals. But what I mainly felt was annoyance. I had been involved in far too many of these spurious philosophical discussions to feel challenged by them, as Solomon—I believed—wanted me to feel. Though it was possible to gain insights from indulging in such quasi-intellectual pissing matches, the type of insight one gained was in essence judgmental and inclined to make you feel superior to the Solomon-of-the-moment. And even if those judgments were relevant, even if they illuminated some twist of African behavior, some intricate contradiction that in turn illuminated a fragment of colonial history or post-colonial politics, they tended to make you think that you understood Africans…and if you believed that, then you had fallen into the same sort of simplistic trap as had Solomon, as had many journalists and sloppy novelists, who transformed such encounters into pithy anecdotes. It was impossible to avoid making judgments, but why bother to deify them? No, annoyance was the proper reaction. Solomon was spoiling my drunk.
“You know,” I said, as one of his friends slumped against the wall and began to snore, “I used to believe in approaching subjects like the American Negro and his perspective on Africa from an academic standpoint. But now, I guess I think that all this shit—y’know, life, Africa, the rules of che
ss, love, all that—I guess I think the best way to understand it is just to feel it along your skin.”
Solomon took a moment to absorb this. “You are laughing at me,” he said.
“Not at all. I’m speaking to you exactly as I would speak to anyone who said what you said to me. If what I say doesn’t validate you in the way you’d like, I’m sorry.”
Two young women entered the bar and began chatting with the bartender. One was pretty, wearing a simple yellow dress; she looked over to our table and smiled.
“Whores,” said Solomon, following my gaze. “Perhaps you would rather talk to whores.”
“I’m only human,” I told him; then I asked, “Here’s something I can approach from an academic stance. Tell me what you think of Mobutu.”
Solomon pursed his lips. “I’m not disposed to discuss this with you.”
“That’s fair.” The woman in the yellow dress was peeking at me over her friend’s shoulder; she caught my eye, covered her mouth to hide a smile, and whispered in her friend’s ear.
Solomon now began discussing American Negro writers he admired. In his opinion, James Baldwin, though a degenerate, was the most African of them all. I couldn’t decide if this bespoke a startling new comprehension on his part, or was absolute bullshit. Soon, accepting that I did not want to play, Solomon and his friends left the bar, but not before the man who had been asleep, who had heard nothing of the conversation, turned back to the table and, with shy formality, extended his hand to be shaken.
A few minutes later, the woman in the yellow dress—Elizabeth by name—was sitting beside me and had placed my hand between her legs, separated from her secret flesh by a thin layer of cotton. “Do you feel it?” she whispered. “Beating like the heart of a little bird?” Her eyes were large and beautifully shaped, her features delicate, her small breasts perfectly round. She had a strange spicy scent. The rains had begun—late, that day—and the drops drew a tremulous droning resonance from the tin roof; the bartender switched on her radio, and a man with a hoarse romantic tenor sang in French a song about a boy torn between lust for a city woman and longing for his village sweetheart. At that instant, my perspective on Africa was pervaded by dizziness and desire. Even when Elizabeth asked me for money (“You know, you will have to give me a present”), she did so sweetly, almost apologetically, in keeping with my mood, with the mood of that place and moment. And when I gave her more than the present she had expected, she slipped my hand beneath the yellow cotton and offered me access to the proof of her own desire.
There was a room attached to the back of the bar, just big enough for a cot and a table bearing a lantern, with a window covered by a plastic curtain imprinted with red roses. When the curtain was pulled back, you could see a banana frond caressing the pane, like the green foreleg of some large, gentle insect. Fucking Elizabeth made me think of Patience, though not with guilt or any negative emotion. She simply reminded me of Patience in her playful exuberance and—all things being relative—her guilelessness. I didn’t doubt that she might try to rob me, yet I knew that if she did it would not be premeditated, but the result of a whim, an irresistible impulse. One way or another, I wasn’t concerned. She already had almost all of the cash I’d brought from the hotel. And so, once I was happily spent, I felt not the least compunction against falling asleep in her arms.
If I had remembered Buma’s promise that I would finish my interrupted dream, I might have fought off sleep; but I did not, and the dream took me unawares. The glowing patch of blue in the depths of the river toward which I had been heading…I was past it, I had gone through it and was swimming up toward the surface. Swimming had always been second nature to me, but now it took all my strength, and I found I could not breathe, that it was necessary to hold my breath as I strained toward the light. I couldn’t remember very much of what had happened to me within the patch of glowing blue, but I did recall that it had been painful, and I was certain that whatever had happened was responsible for the physical changes I was experiencing.
At last I broke the surface, sputtering and coughing, so weak I could barely swim to shore. When I reached the bank, I scrambled up the side and to my amazement, I discovered that I was standing on my hind legs. Standing upright as did those slight dark creatures upon whom I sometimes fed. Then I glanced down at my body. My arms were smooth and unwrinkled, my hands clawless, and my chest was smooth, covered with a fuzzy growth. Tatters of my old familiar skin clung to my hips and legs, but it was apparent that my legs were much longer than they had been. I let out a bellow of fear and rage, and was stunned by the frailty of my voice. Then I noticed others of my kind ranged along the bank, their condition the same as mine—changed, enraged, frightened. And hungry. I had never been so hungry in my life—it was as if I had never eaten. I bellowed again, and my brothers and sisters joined me, making an outcry that altogether might have equaled in volume the cry that one of us could have sounded before the change. But it was loud enough to attract the attention of creatures like ourselves yet not like us. Five of them. Fishermen on their way home.
We ran them down in the bush and threw them to the ground and fed. My mouth was not wide enough for proper biting, my teeth too small and blunt, but I managed; and as I fed, fear vanished, and in its place came understanding…understanding such as I could never have imagined. The world, it seemed, was larger and stranger than I had known, and now that my home had been corrupted by dark forces, I would have to leave it behind and seek another home—it was for this reason I had been changed. But changed by whom? By what? That knowledge was gone from me—though I believed I once had understood it, the space in my head where it had been seated was now filled with curious information, theories, schemes, languages, and systems, things I would not have believed existed. Yet my grasp of them was total, and I realized that, armed with this knowledge, and with my old knowledge that—though I had forgotten much of it—still empowered me, I had the opportunity not merely to survive, but to rule. Men, I perceived, were not only frail of body, but of mind, easily swayed and easily broken, and I was convinced that I could dominate them.
There were six of us on the bank, one a young woman—with my human eyes I saw that she was lovely. Five of us understood all that had happened and what we must now do, but the woman was so young, so new not only to this world, but to the previous one, she remained confused. I instructed her to go into the city and to find someone who would take her to a safe place. In my mind’s eye I saw a man from a distant country. I described him to her, told her where he lived, and sent her on her way. Then I, along with my four brothers and sisters, set out into the country we could not have imagined, but that we now meant to make our own.
I woke from the dream to find Elizabeth straddling me, holding me down by the shoulders, a terrified look on her face. She told me I had tried to leave the room while still asleep, but she had pushed me back down. I assured her that I was fine, but I was not fine. I could taste blood in my mouth, I remembered the sensation of ripping off a strip of human flesh and chewing it juiceless, I heard again the crack of a neck bone. These things, and not the mad logic of the dream, the idea that crocodiles were changing into men in order to escape some magical pollution of the Kilombo, persuaded me of the dream’s validity. Even the irrational notion that Buma, newly human, had sent me a crocodile girl to protect seemed possible in light of these horrible memories. I could not overlook the possibility that Buma’s power was merely the power of suggestion, or that my mind had been wired for madness by my years in Africa, conditioned to accept the most insane of propositions and to create improbable scenarios from the materials provided by a fraudulent witch man so as to explain away dysfunction. But for the time being I preferred the prospect of supernaturally transformed crocodiles to that of insanity, and I let Elizabeth console me.
I was thoroughly involved in the process of consolation when I heard voices raised in anger from the bar, and shortly thereafter the door to the little room swung open, and Rawley—hi
s face flushed, his shirt and hair drenched with rain—stepped into view. “My God, Michael!” he said, averting his eyes. Elizabeth squealed, rolled off me and covered herself. “Are you mad?” Rawley said. “You know these women are all fucking diseased! What the hell were you thinking?”
I sat up, pulled on my briefs, and said sullenly, “Don’t worry about it.”
“Fine! I won’t worry. But we did have a meeting scheduled. I trust you won’t mind too much if I express some concern over the fact that you fucking failed to show up!”
I buckled my belt, shrugged into my shirt. “Just go easy,” I said. “I’ve had a rough day.”
“Oh, really? Yes, I suppose you have. Few of life’s difficulties compare to the arduous nature of an evening spent drinking and whoring.”
It was amazing, the amount of loathing I felt toward him—this bloated blond bug in his signature golf shirt and chinos, with his political dabbling and his tight-ass fiancée, who was he to berate me? “I don’t think,” I said tightly, “that my information has been degraded by tardiness.”
“Degraded,” he said. “Interesting choice of terms, that.”
I finished buttoning my shirt; behind me, Elizabeth struggled into her dress. “Gee, what crawled up your ass, Jimmy? No, don’t tell me. I bet the lovely Helen has something to do with it. What’s the problem? She having trouble prying her knees apart?”
“You bastard!” He glared at me, puffed up with anger. “Here I throw you a bone for friendship’s sake, and what do you do? You…”
“A bone?” I said. “I’m not your fucking dog, Jimmy. I’m your boy. Whenever you get into trouble, you come running to rub my nappy head for luck. You did it at Oxford, and you’re doing it now. Trouble with a Classics exam? Hey, Michael! Mind coming over and letting me knuckle your head bone? I’ll stand for the drinks.”
Eternity and Other Stories Page 12