Upon reflection, Isookanga thought such a drastic law was commendable, given that Mongo women practice polyandry, the most harmful of all customs. They even dare to sing that “the male organ is merely a tenant in that of the female.” If, on top of having to hear that, the man were also to lose his marital supremacy, what would be left for the unfortunate ones born between Ikela, Mbandaka, and Monkoto? Except for the flavor of the animal, however, the young Pygmy wasn’t concerned with this part of the story, since he didn’t anticipate being married anytime soon. For now, he would rather become integrated into a wider environment, whatever that might be.
“Excuse me.”
Isookanga stopped looking at the animated show in the street to focus his attention on his left. A guy who resembled Deng Xiaoping—only younger and thinner—had just put down a large polystyrene box beside him. Standing there was Zhang Xia, who greeted him and bowed. “May I sit?”
“Go ahead,” Isookanga answered.
After getting settled, the man opened the box and took out a small packet filled with ice-cold water. He bit off one of the corners, then stopped and took out a second bag, which he handed to Isookanga, who thanked him. In a few gulps Zhang Xia greedily inhaled the water.
Isookanga broke off a piece of fish and gave it to the young man, who took it and put it in his mouth. For a moment he held it between his tongue and his palate; what was at first similar to dry wood regained all of its original quality. The young Chinese had just discovered the succulent taste of bowayo meat. “It’s delicious. I’m Zhang Xia. I’m from Chongqing.”
“My name is Isookanga. From the Tshuapa, mwan’Ekanga pire.”4
Sometimes it’s good to take your time, put things into perspective, and try to have a more poetic view of things as you clear your mind. It allows you to whisper. The noise surrounding the two young men raised a monstrous racket—cars moving around were creating a bullfighter’s dance; cops giving tickets a little farther down made swindling a lifestyle—but they were just taking a quiet break. Steps went up to the store on their left, and the flows of customers going in and out were paying no attention to the two.
Isookanga studied the man beside him who’d said his name was Zhang Xia. The polystyrene box apparently contained nothing but small bags filled with water. True, it was fresher than what he had been drinking before. The man certainly had to be making less profit, since he bought more ice than his competitors; they were fighting over the market of a product that with every passing year was growing scarcer on the planet.
Isookanga put the corner of the little bag in his mouth and took a gulp of the delicious liquid. “What do you do to your water? It’s not bad at all.”
“Lots of ice. I get it very early; during the night I cool what I sell in the morning, and I cool it longer than anyone else.”
“Oh, yeah?”
From the first sip Isookanga understood that the man was particularly shrewd in selling a highly appropriate product. Without a digital code, however, you don’t get anywhere. Isookanga mused as he chewed his piece of fish.
“Are you in globalization, too?”
“Unfortunately, yes. For me globalization is crap. I was doing just fine in China. I’m from Szechuan. Do you know Szechuan?”
Isookanga admitted he did not.
“I left my wife there. Gong Xiyan. She’s very beautiful. And left my son, too. I should’ve stayed, but trusting someone made me leave. I was working with Mr. Liu Kaï in Chongqing, where we did a lot of construction. A large city. Mr. Liu Kaï told me to come with him to build whole cities in Congo. I thought he was fair with me and so I went along. We were in Lubumbashi. You know Lubumbashi? Then the trouble began. We left and came to Kinshasa, and Liu forgot about me. I work a little, I sell water—the best water in Kinshasa, or at least I hope so. Pure water. You want some more?”
“You should go after that guy. He’s a crook. He should pay you damages.”
“You need a lot of money to take someone to court; it isn’t worth the trouble. I’m boycotting him. I’ll work it out and it won’t ever happen again. Experience is a lantern that only sheds light on the path you’ve already walked. I can’t do anything else; this is all I have,” he said, indicating the polystyrene tub. “How will I get back to China now? My wife is waiting for me. I told her that I wouldn’t be gone for long. She has a lot of problems being alone with our son.”
While Zhang Xia was pouring out his heart, Isookanga examined him carefully. This man—you’d say a reincarnation of Comrade Deng—had taken a flight with China Airlines from Dubai. From there, after a stopover in Addis Ababa, another with Ethiopian Airlines straight to Lubumbashi, and now he was stuck somewhere in Kinshasa. It just wasn’t right!
“I also felt stuck in the village for a while,” Isookanga thought, “and I managed to get away. The canopy, the trees, they tried to hold me back in every possible way. Uncle Lomama tried what he could, but no luck. Thanks to the computer and the Enter key, I was strong enough to leave that trap of forest and village life. Becoming a chief … without any raw materials? Without any service industry? There has to be a way out for this guy.” Zhang Xia’s was a Far Eastern story and he was, after all, at the heart of the globalized system. Weren’t they the ones to whom the Whites referred as tigers?
“Do you have a computer?”
“No, all I have is this,” Zhang Xia confessed, pointing to the box.
“With a dual processor you could straighten out your problems in no time. You’ve got to try. I’ll come back before long with my machine. I hope to pick up something where you are. Where I am now it’s hard. Where do you live?”
“Not far. Avenue du Commerce, with Mr. Tshitshi, at the fabric store.”
“Listen, I’m an internationalist like you. I’ve tasted your water. I don’t know any other that’s as cold as yours; it’s like water from the forest spring at home. But something’s missing from yours. It could have an extra flavor of the land. Like what we have at home. I’ll make you a proposition: you and I, we’ll join forces to think things through. Together we’ll be a veritable dual-core, you’ll see. We’ll maximize the sales curve. This evening we’ll get together, we’ll check the computer, we’ll study the situation according to the principles of volume retailing.”
Zhang Xia had listened to Isookanga without any real conviction but told himself that, after all, it would change the rut he was in. And besides, after being so gutlessly abandoned by Liu Kaï, this was the first person other than Old Tshitshi in whom the young man had confided.
“All right.”
Zhang Xia stood up, picked up his tub, balanced it on his head, smiled at Isookanga, and said, “Come see me.”
“No problem.”
“Pure water! Maï yango oyo!5 Pure water!”
With a rolling gait, caused by balancing the box of water on his head, Zhang Xia went off to continue his trade, broadcasting the slogan most frequently heard in the city. The young Chinese offered an essential, sought-after product, especially at this time of day, when the rays of the sun, with the dust as their prism, burned skin and neurons in a jumble that encompassed a concert of car horns, an unrelenting crush, and the stale smell of station wagon diesel, which was worth twelve hundred dollars a barrel on the Shanghai stock exchange just then.
1. “Trésor, wake up!”
2. “You are next!”
3. An illicit street vendor who sells a variety of things: cigarettes, tissues, ties, condoms, etc.
4. “Pure child of Ekanga (Mongo land).” Here, the mythical village of the Batwa.
5. “I have water here!”
INAUDIBLE SCREAMS
听不到的呼喊
The insistent horn of a 4 × 4 seemed to make no impression whatsoever on the throng that indiscriminately crowded the sidewalks and the road and, furthermore, had to be begged to move away from the bulky hood.
“Bloody people, they don’t hear a thing! And then they’re surprised that we have to use force, always more
force,” the passenger sitting in the back on the right was thinking.
After a few unctuous words from the driver, the car finally managed to get parked. The doors opened, bodyguards in combat fatigue and armed to the teeth stepped out. Kiro Bizimungu fell in behind them and entered a building on Avenue Tombalbaye. An imposing figure with a shaved head and dark skin, he took the elevator to the fifth floor accompanied by two bodyguards.
His office was sparsely furnished; there were no huge piles of documents to be seen. Bizimungu shut the door, sat down, loosened his tie, and wondered how he was going to spend the day. Kiro couldn’t stand inactivity anymore. Peace accords had been signed in Windhoek, Namibia, and he had been given to understand that he was needed in Kinshasa: the country required new administrators and Commander Bizimungu had to be one of them. Somewhat grudgingly he had left the Kivu maquis and traded fatigues for a suit and tie. But he still couldn’t see what he’d gained by the exchange. He had acquired a position, so what? Despite the prestigious plate attached to the wall in the lobby of the building, “Office of Conservation of the Salonga National Park,” Kiro Bizimungu realized on a daily basis that a natural park would never compensate him in any way whatsoever. He and his armed group were fighting for power.
Since he had arrived in Kinshasa, he’d come to the conclusion that true power was found in wealth, obtained thanks to infallible pragmatism and firepower that needed to be kept going. Only with these key elements was it possible to conquer vast territories overflowing with minerals buried just below the surface of the earth: all the gold one could wish for, Kisangani diamonds, cassiterite aplenty, but, above all, columbite-tantalite, also known as the metallic ore coltan. Controlling a region also meant helping oneself to taxes, to exploiting the labor force, to the women his men would need, and to blood, a commodity one could let flow as a pledge of total submission.
Cargo was transported without a break from the other side of the border in Rwanda, having instantly become the authorized crossroads of strategic minerals. Everything turned into a deal down there. Business was running smoothly, an exchange in raw materials working at full capacity. The war in Congo had started in 1996 in Kivu, and Kiro had participated in it, as had many Tutsis living in the region, ensuing from the recurrence of pogroms at home in Rwanda. The ties to their country of origin remained strong, and when the Tutsi genocide by the Hutu erupted in April 1994, their services were quite naturally called upon. They fought in the ranks of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) to stop the holocaust taking place just on the other side of the border.
Two years later, calls had come in from former RPF comrades-in-arms who in the meantime had taken power in Kigali. They asked Kiro, as well as other men, to help make the land and riches of Kivu accessible in order to ease the lack of resources and the demographic pressure that had come down on Rwanda to some extent. Rapid development was perceived as the only way out of the latent barbarism. Under supervision of the APR—the new Rwandan Patriotic Army—an alliance of rebels was created from a vague assortment of nationalities, calling itself the AFDL,1 and started off on a war footing to accomplish the grand work of regional development. The pretext for starting the horror was the threat that the members of the former Rwandan army and other genocidal folks present on Congolese soil had been posing for two years. For a pretext was certainly needed to bring such a project to an end. One needs an alibi when preparing a great crime, and this was nothing less than a crime: the systematic and methodical eradication of a population based on criteria that, with a little patience, would certainly be revealed one day.
Since then, under names that could change at any moment, Kiro—now Commander Kobra Zulu—and his men had spread terror and woe among the Ituri in Maniema for years. That part of Congo had become a zone of lawlessness, where human flesh was churned out like meat in a slaughterhouse and where only firearms still had any say in the matter. Those who were born there had to understand that their fields, their homes, their wives were at the disposal of the new conquerors and of the multinationals working in the sectors of high technology and the mines.
Kiro Bizimungu sorely missed that time. He and his faction had turned themselves into globalization’s zealous auxiliaries, and the international community had compensated them accordingly. Some of his comrades-in-arms—a combination of Rwandans and Congolese—named by the United Nations, had become vice presidents, ministers, chiefs of staff, or brigade commanders. He, however, was appointed as CEO of the Office of Conservation of the Salonga National Park. It was a joke, because the man couldn’t have cared less about flora and fauna, just as he hadn’t given a damn about his first bullet in an enemy’s head. What was above the soil—whether that be men, women, children, old people—barely mattered to him; what counted for him was what lay beneath it.
His phone rang, interrupting his thoughts. It was one of the bodyguards in charge of his wife’s security. “Yes.”
“Commander, Madame wishes to go out; she has a day of deliverance at the church.”
“Again!” A pause. “All right, then. Take her there.”
Kiro despised these services and prayers to which people devoted themselves on a daily basis. His wife attended the church of the Reverend Jonas Monkaya, the Church of Divine Multiplication, in Ndjili. As had so many others, she had caught faith like a virus, and all she lived for were evenings of prayer, days of fasting, acts of mercy, retreats, and offerings without end. The pastor said this, the pastor said that. The activity was starting to seriously exasperate Kiro Bizimungu; it was turning into a compulsion. Yet, at the same time he couldn’t prevent it. You don’t forbid someone to pray, and she really did need to get out.
Still, he would have liked to stop her. It had been almost two years since he’d brought her from the East. A change he didn’t understand had started to take place in him recently. For several months now he was no longer able to take Adeïto the way he wanted to. Even when his head was burning with the desire to force open her thighs, pounding them as he heaved himself up and down, his body wouldn’t follow suit. He didn’t get hard where it was needed. The problem had sneaked up on him. Precisely because of all that praying. Adeïto was in the habit of reciting a long invocation just before going to bed. Uttered with her extraordinary fervor, promises of divine absolution, convictions worthy of the International Court of Justice, the seed of the seductive serpent, the blood that Jesus shed when he was executed—every one of these words had begun to echo in Kiro’s mind in spite of himself. And while he was listening to them as he lay on the bed—waiting for Madame to finish—it disrupted the steps needed to produce his hormones without his realizing it. When at last her luscious, warm body pressed itself against him, his mind, unsettled by the strong words she’d delivered on her knees, seemed incapable of connecting with the lower part of his body. The more Kiro Bizimungu thrashed around to get inside her, the more he felt his power abate only to vanish completely until he tried again the following night.
The situation persisted. Adeïto pretended not to notice anything. After he struggled with himself for a while, she would grab a pagne, wrap herself up in it tightly, turn her back, and switch off the bedside light without a word. Surely he could blame it on a lack of action, Kiro Bizimungu consoled himself. He was in a rut, no longer reaping his ten or twenty thousand dollars a week. Now he had to wait for a salary at the end of the month like everyone else. And the suit and tie didn’t flatter his ego either. In his beast-of-war gear he had sensed that he was being noticed. When he was the rebel commander Kobra Zulu, when he would appear with his men, he was the devil himself. When he wore the perfume of gunshot fragrance and swooned at the scent of blood, his sex would swell and harden until it hurt.
Depressed, Kiro Bizimungu told himself he was going out to get a drink somewhere. But where? The looks he got in this damned city these days had nothing to do with what he’d previously known; they were rarely welcoming looks, and he much preferred to see eyes full of fear, which was far more in keeping with
his inner soul—his service record could attest to that.
For a moment Kiro Bizimungu, dismissed warlord, observed the graphics, maps, and posters pinned to the wall. Salonga National Park stretched out mainly over Équateur Province. On the photographs in front of him there was nothing to be seen but a tangled dark green cover over the entire center of the country. They called it one of the lungs of the earth. But what good did that do if he, Commander Kobra Zulu, was no longer able to breathe properly? It strangled him with rage. The man despised a great many things, and the only one he deemed worthy of his esteem was the United States of America. To take hold of Vietnam they had turned to Agent Orange! Who had complained? If at least he could manage to get hold of that, even if just a small amount, all of these trees would be done for. Ultimately, he was the boss of that space. With oil proliferating below, what was one supposed to do with all that green stuff? Not to mention the diamonds and other invaluable products. Kiro dreamed of a Congo made peaceful by napalm, where all that needed to be done was to exploit the riches of the subsoil. The labor was there, all that was missing was the political will.
Having scrutinized what looked like a display of broccoli, Kiro felt sick and then decided he would down two or three beers—even if admittedly it was a bit early—which would do him a world of good. He abandoned the views of the damned park, got up, and called out, “Déo!”
“Commander?”
“To ende!”2
It wasn’t by accident but by necessity that the street children had made the Great Market their stronghold. First of all, they had to eat and the place was the city’s granary. Then, too, they could earn a little money by helping regular customers carry their shopping on their heads in cardboard boxes. Other activities consisted of black-market sales, watching cars, petty theft, or even pickpocketing. Sometimes they also managed to work for an intelligence service, monitoring and tailing subversive individuals. They could report on citizens.
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