by Rolf Potts
I was now at the red line on the floor where the word STOP was painted. The nurse spoke to me in French. I did not reply.
Ignoring isn’t a good strategy, but once in a blue moon it works and a problem will just—poof—disappear. I didn’t have a better plan.
When the Spaniard moved off, I stepped ahead and pushed my passport through the semi-circle into the window.
The young customs lady spoke in French. The hall was a swirl of sound, heat, smells, and voices. I stopped and pushed my forehead up to the glass.
“Repeat, please,” I said in French.
She wanted to know if I was a South African citizen.
“Non,” I said. “Americain.” And I pointed through the glass at my passport, which she was holding and on which were printed the words “United States of America.”
“Where did you receive this visa?”
“Embassy of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in South Africa. Johannesburg.”
She flipped through my pages. There were a lot of them. It was a jumbo passport. She took some time and punched at her keyboard. I straightened to find that I had left the print of my forehead on the window. I refused to look to my right, where the nurse was still hovering.
The passport girl lifted her face, spoke to me through glass and the smudge of my brow.
“You can not receive a visa in South Africa. C’est impossible.”
This seemed strange. I had a visa. It was there in my passport. Ergo, I can. But it would not do to have an attitude. So I kept to the facts.
“I have a visa. It is there.”
The nurse was now at my side. “Votre carte,” she said.
The Spaniard’s advice jumped into my head: Be strong. I did not know what that meant.
The kiosk girl was talking again. I had to push my ear closer. “Your nationality is not South African?” she said, fingering my American passport.
“No, it is American.”
“Applicants must apply for visas in their own country. You must apply in America.”
No doubt this was terrific advice for some. Less so for Americans at N’djili Airport.
“I applied in South Africa. And I obtained a visa. Here is the visa. In my passport. I am an American.”
This information seemed to irritate her, and she stood up and exited the back of the kiosk.
The nurse saw her chance and moved in again: “Your international carte of inoculations. Do you have it?”
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
“One moment. It’s on my computer.”
“No, you must have a carte.”
“Yes. I have a carte. I have a scan of the carte on my computer.”
“No,” she said. “You must have a carte.”
The customs woman re-entered the kiosk. “Go with him,” she said.
Now on my right appeared a blue-uniformed customs officer, my passport in his hand. He fanned it, in a gesture to fellow him. For a moment, my hopes rose as he led me forward—inexplicably past the line of kiosks in the direction of baggage claim—and deliverance. But then, just as inexplicably, we looped left to the far wall and around the crowd, crossing back again to end up at a row of small offices, only thirty feet from the kiosk where we’d started. At least we’d lost the nurse.
The office contained several desks and officials, a few passengers and not much else. Everyone was talking to someone. My escort said, “Wait here,” and he pointed at a chair facing a desk, then he went away. I sat down in the chair directly across another official, blue-suited and stubble-headed like the rest. But he was older, physically wider, more brooding in expression than the younger ones. He stopped the conversation he was having and looked me over. “What are you doing here?”
Forgive me for interrupting myself, but here is where the story might take a savvy twist:
Here I am in Kinshasa, Congo, facing off with a bureaucrat with beads of sweat on his pate. He wants to know just what I’m doing in a chair at his desk.
“Let me explain,” I say in excellent French.
I open my wallet. His eyes follow. I remove my Santa Clara County Public Library card, which really, is mostly blue, and doesn’t look like anything. But I get my finger on the word Library, which he will recognize from the French librarie, a book store, and I inform him that I have been sent to Kinshasa to ease the procurement of a shipload of children’s books from SCCL, which is a small but esteemed international organization that works indirectly with Livres Sans Frontiers—which I’m sure monsieur has heard of—and how I would love to get these books, tout de suite, to the noble but needy children of his country.
“Hmmm,” he says to me, rising. “This sounds so legitimate, well-arranged, and philanthropic that it would be a shame if we delayed your entrance into our country a moment longer.”
He extends his hand.
To be on the safe side, I slip him twenty ducats.
But I had no library card. So back to reality:
“What are you doing here?” the official wanted to know.
“I’m waiting,” I said. The closed-ended nature of the questions I’d been getting, coupled with the limitations in my French, necessitated absurdly literal answers.
But the wide man seemed to find this answer acceptable, and he resumed his conversation.
Soon my young official returned and asked me to sign a long form written in very small French print. After looking it over, I determined it to be an admission that despite all regulations and good sense I had premeditatively, with full knowledge that I was an American citizen, obtained a Congolese visa from Congolese diplomatic mission in South Africa. Was I certain about that? No. There could have been hidden confessions of treason and criminality. (It’s easy to understand how people can sign things under duress. It had taken me all of five minutes before giving in.) The young official went off with my document and passport.
Not long afterward, a new young official came for me. He was the most chipper I’d encountered. He took me outside the little office, back through the noisy hall and outside into the hot and seeping daytime. He said in English: “What is wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
And it was true. It was often the case in my travels, despite having visited a hundred countries and lived overseas for ten years, that I often didn’t know, that I was often just bewildered.
“Yes,” he said. “I see.”
We walked away from the terminal directly toward South African Flight 50, on which I’d arrived.
Was it conceivable that some junior official would suddenly escort me back to the plane, without even a whiff of a chance for bribery? In fact, I realized, even though I’d had exchanges with five or six Congolese officials at this point—as brief and tautological as they’d been—not one of them had made the slightest overture that a payment might resolve matters. Nor had they left any obvious pause in negotiations in which I was to explore that avenue. Or if they had, I had completely missed them. No, everyone had for the most part been wandering to and fro in a way that, like worker ants seen from outside the society, appeared to be chaos but must have had some kind of purpose.
“Everything is good,” my young man said, practicing his English. I liked that. And I liked the South African plane sitting there. It was comforting. If everything went to pot here at the airport, if they refused my visa, or they demanded to jab me with a needle, I could just refuse, jump ship as it were. O.K., some money would be lost by the agencies sponsoring my week of teacher training in Kinshasa, but governments are accustomed to that. I could be on that plane. In two hours I’d be in Jo’burg. In another two hours I’d be back at my apartment in Cape Town where my Belarusian girlfriend was waiting. Maybe there was even some sherry left in the cupboard.
Everything is good.
Without any conscious understanding of my actions, I put my hand on the young man’s shoulder. And since my hand was on his shoulder, I called him “mon ami,” which I hope did not sound as corny or captious as “
my friend” would in English. “Everything is good.”
This was not calculated to achieve anything. It was not a play. I didn’t know what I was doing. But the stress and uncertainty was gone, replaced by a wonderful apathy. I suddenly didn’t care.
My ami looked around the tarmac, and then not seeing what we wanted, turned and walked us back to the terminal. He got my passport from somewhere, guided us to the same kiosk as before, and handed it to the unhappy woman behind the glass. She looked things over, took a stamp, and pounded my passport. And that was that.
Except the nurses hadn’t forgotten. Most of the other passengers were gone by now. They were waiting.
“Votre carte,” the main one said.
I was not nervous in the least. I was happy to fly back home to South Africa if need be.
“Bonjour mademoiselles! Ne vous inquiétez pas—ma santé c’est extraordinaire. I have a scan on my computer. I will show you.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. Stern.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “It’s a nice photo. Tres beau.”
“No. Carte.”
“I have many photos. You will like them as well.”
“No, you pay a fine.”
“Ah hah. Les jeux sont faites.”
“I will give you a receipt,” Mademoiselle Nurse said.
“You really know how to sweeten a deal,” I said in English.
The Mademoiselle Nurse took me into a little one desk-office cubicle, three other nurses following us. They offered me a seat at the little desk.
“How much must I pay?” I was already fingering a five-euro note, and putting on an air of magnanimity.
“Fifty dollars.”
“And in euros?”
“Forty euros.”
“Unacceptable!” I said. “Exchange rate—terrible. Pas juste. Pas juste.” Outraged, I slapped my five-euro bill on the desk. “D’accord. Vous avez gagné. Cinq euros.” You win. Five euros.
“No,” she said, “Fif-ty.”
“Oui, oui,” I said, “Fifty,” and pointed at my fiver.
The nurses were looking at each other and wondering what was wrong with me. Mademoiselle Nurse got out a piece of paper. In large letters she wrote “50.”
I leaned forward to examine the figure. “Exactement!” I said. And with one finger I tapped at the digit five.
“No, fifty!” She used two fingers to touch both of the digits. We went back and forth on this for some seconds until everyone thought I was a complete moron. But they had started to smile about it.
Finally, I produced forty U.S. dollars, which aside from my five euros, was all that I had—visibly at least.
“Fifty!” I said, pointing at it.
“O.K.,” she agreed. “Fifty.”
She took the forty dollars and wrote up a receipt. She even returned my five-euro note. Everyone seemed happy.
Mademoiselle Nurse gave me her email address. I took her photo, we said our goodbyes, and I entered the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Kevin McCaughey is a traveling teacher-trainer. He began wandering a week after his eighteenth birthday, alone and shy in Europe. Since then he’s been to more than one hundred countries.
AMBER PAULEN
The Spinster of Atrani
Life stories from the old can change the direction of life for the young.
Someone called my name and a figure came toward me—a shadow against the yellow lamplight of the road, and beyond that, of Atrani. It surprised me that someone knew me. I had been in the small town for only three hours and spent most of that time sitting in a damp cove where hearts and initials were etched into stone, watching the gray sky become night and the sea turn black and shimmery.
It was a midwinter evening obscured by loneliness, as the clouds earlier had obscured the blue of afternoon. But what could be done about loneliness? I had left my family, friends, and country with the finality of a one-way ticket. I was twenty-two and thought I could take on anything. After five months of lugging a backpack through Europe, I should have been buoyed up by my independence.
Yet here I was feeling sorry for myself, upset that my efforts to see my ex-boyfriend in Rome had proven fruitless. I told myself I wanted to see him because I needed a break from the anonymity of traveling alone, a conversation with a familiar person. But he hadn’t replied to my email during the five days I was in Rome, so I traveled south. The only plan I had made before traveling was that there was no plan; where I went, what I did, was guided by my whims and desires, precarious things.
As I crossed the road, I saw that the figure was Bernard, the talkative painter who lived alone up the mountain in Ravello: the guy I had met on the bus.
“This is great!” Bernard exclaimed when I stood before him, his curly russet hair filled with light. “I just left Grosdana’s to find you. She wants to meet you. She agreed. You can stay at her place.” Bernard took off walking and I followed. “I had a feeling you would be on the beach and I think you’ll really like Grosdana. She’s a superb woman. Su-perb!”
I kept pace with Bernard, under the brick arches, through the empty piazza, as I had done earlier that day when we got off the bus together and he led me to the hostel. He had told me not to stay at the hostel but with a friend of his who needed money. I hadn’t expected anything to come of the imperative, but now we were standing at Grosdana’s door. Above the apartment, its neighbors ascended the steep hill like a picture on a postcard of the Amalfi Coast. Bernard rapped, and light from the open doorway poured around the shape of a woman. “Bernard? You’re back. And Amber? Come in.”
A heavy green shawl hugged Grosdana’s shoulders. Her hennaed hair sprang on end. She walked deliberately to a long couch that consumed most of her studio apartment and lowered herself onto the cushions, which seemed to absorb her on contact. I sat next to her. Under the lamp, gold veins glinted in Grosdana’s ash-green eyes, tired and alive. She pulled a cigarette from a light blue pack labeled Ms and offered me one. Bernard sat on my other side, his hands gripping his knees, bouncing.
“Bernard says you’re staying at the hostel,” she said and lit her cigarette. She passed me the lighter, then leaned against the couch’s bolster. As I would learn, Grosdana’s every action was mirrored by inaction.
“Yes.” The hostel had white walls and a long row of empty beds. It was part of what had driven me out to the beach in such a gloomy, lonely mood.
“Who owns that? Ah, yes, the Guarellis? Right, Bernard? I don’t trust them completely. They’re charging you more than it’s worth, I think. Stay here with me for a week for one hundred euros. A good price for Atrani in the winter.”
I agreed. But it wasn’t up to me, I knew; the decision had already been made.
“Come here at eight to pick up the keys. And now, are you hungry? Bernard, stay and talk to Amber while I make pasta.”
“That’s O.K.,” I said. “I was planning on getting a sandwich.”
But Grosdana insisted I stay for dinner. I think I gave her the impression that I needed to be cared for: months of eating on a budget had intensified my thinness, and my clothes were frayed and worn. After dinner we three retired to the couch, where she and Bernard filled the apartment with conversation of the war in Croatia, Grosdana’s homeland. Their presence and words were blankets I wrapped around myself, a warmth and temporary respite from the effort of moving alone through the world.
The next morning, I left the hostel early and met Grosdana at her door. She handed me a ring of keys and went off to work. When I returned in the evening from exploring Atrani and Amalfi, she was already home. I handed her a 100-euro bill, and with the note balled into her palm she headed across the piazza to the tiny alimentari. Grosdana would insist on making me dinner every night of my stay.
Like the night before, once the table had been cleared, we went on Grosdana’s lead to the couch. Her studio apartment had no windows and the open room was sparsely decorated with ethnic knickknacks, such as a long-necked wooden woman w
ith breasts that hung from her chest like long goat teats. But her stories filled the space.
Now, I have trouble pulling apart what she said and what I have since imagined.
“I’m a spinster,” Grosdana told me. Pleasure animated her aquiline face, sparked a flare of wrinkles around her eyes. “Which means I can do whatever I want, whenever I please.” A cigarette vacillated between her mouth and the ashtray. Occasionally, Grosdana’s soliloquy would suffer a fit of interminable coughing, followed by a minute of silence as her breath came back. I waited in silence.
“The old men of Atrani think I’m crazy to live alone and they tell me. A few have asked, ‘How can you possibly live without a man?’ And as they talk, I watch their fake teeth bumping in their gums. I laugh at them and ask back, ‘What can you offer a woman at your age?’ They think a woman’s happiness depends on a man. Ha! I tell them, ‘I’m happier alone than stuck with a wrinkled prune like you.’ I don’t mind them thinking I’m a little crazy. Their wives aren’t any happier than me.
“The longer a woman is alone the longer she’ll be alone. You see, I can never live with a man again. Imagine, if along came an old prune! Maybe, if we lived in separate houses and he provided for himself, cooked his own dinners and if he had money. Money would be good. The problem with old people is they get stuck thinking people need to be one way. They’re so rigid. And me too! I don’t have patience for men anymore. Men are like children, wanting to be taken care of, and that’s part of why I never married.
“I was with a man for many years though. I was in love with him. We had a son. When you are in love, then you’ll do anything for a man, even pretend to be someone you’re not and that’s fine, but be careful. How you are in the beginning creates a habit in the relationship. Then, years later, the man still expects you to be like you were—and that, of course, goes for your expectations of him, too.
“When this man and I were living together, I liked to read in bed. One night, when the man came to bed, he asked me to put down my book, turn and pay attention to him. He wanted to make love but I wanted to keep reading. Then he closed my book.