She said, “I’ve been thinking of you all morning. I haven’t been able to get you out of my head.” And as though she had entered the sitting room only to leave it, as though her arrival at the flat was a continuation of the directness of her telephone call, and she wanted to give neither of us time for words, she went into the bedroom and began to undress.
It was as before with me. Confronted with her, I shed old fantasies. My body obeyed its new impulses, discovered in itself resources that answered my new need. New—it was the word. It was always new, familiar though the body and its responses became, and as physical as the act was, requiring such roughness, control and subtlety. At the end (which I willed, as I had willed all that had gone before), energized, revivified, I felt I had been taken far beyond the wonder of the previous afternoon.
I had closed the shop at twelve. I got back just after three. I hadn’t had any lunch. That would have delayed me further, and Friday was a big day for trade. I found the shop closed. Metty hadn’t opened up at one, as I had expected him to. Barely an hour of trade remained, and many of the retailers from the outlying villages would have done their shopping and started back on the long journey home by dugout or truck. The last pickup vans in the square, which left when they had a load, were more or less loaded.
I had my first alarm about myself, the beginning of the decay of the man I had known myself to be. I had visions of beggary and decrepitude: the man not of Africa lost in Africa, no longer with the strength or purpose to hold his own, and with less claim to anything than the ragged, half-starved old drunks from the villages who wandered about the square, eyeing the food stalls, cadging mouthfuls of beer, and the young trouble-makers from the shanty towns, a new breed, who wore shirts stamped with the Big Man’s picture and talked about foreigners and profit and, wanting only money (like Ferdinand and his friends at the lycée in the old days), came into shops and bargained aggressively for goods they didn’t want, insisting on the cost price.
From this alarm about myself—exaggerated, because it was the first—I moved to a feeling of rage against Metty, for whom the previous night I had felt such compassion. Then I remembered. It wasn’t Metty’s fault. He was at the customs, clearing the goods that had arrived by the steamer that had taken Indar and Ferdinand away, the steamer that was still one day’s sailing from the capital.
For two days, since my scrambled-eggs lunch with Yvette at her house in the Domain, the magazines with Raymond’s articles had lain in the drawer of my desk. I hadn’t looked at them. I did so now, reminded of them by thoughts of the steamer.
When I had asked Yvette to see something Raymond had written, it was only as a means of approaching her. Now there was no longer that need; and it was just as well. The articles by Raymond in the local magazines looked particularly difficult. One was a review of an American book about African inheritance laws. The other, quite long, with footnotes and tables, seemed to be a ward-by-ward analysis of tribal voting patterns in the local council elections in the big mining town in the south just before independence; some of the names of the smaller tribes I hadn’t even heard of.
The earlier articles, in the foreign magazines, seemed easier. “Riot at a Football Match,” in an American magazine, was about a race riot in the capital in the 1930s that had led to the formation of the first African political club. “Lost Liberties,” in a Belgian magazine, was about the failure of a missionary scheme, in the late nineteenth century, to buy picked slaves from the Arab slave caravans and resettle them in “liberty villages.”
These articles were a little more in my line—I was especially interested in the missionaries and the slaves. But the bright opening paragraphs were deceptive; the articles weren’t exactly shop-time, afternoon reading. I put them aside for later. And that evening, as I read in the large bed which Yvette a few hours earlier had made up, and where her smell still lingered, I was appalled.
The article about the race riot—after that bright opening paragraph which I had read in the shop—turned out to be a compilation of government decrees and quotations from newspapers. There was a lot from the newspapers; Raymond seemed to have taken them very seriously. I couldn’t get over that, because from my experience on the coast I knew that newspapers in small colonial places told a special kind of truth. They didn’t lie, but they were formal. They handled big people—businessmen, high officials, members of our legislative and executive councils—with respect. They left out a lot of important things—often essential things—that local people would know and gossip about.
I didn’t think that the papers here in the 1930s would have been much different from ours on the coast; and I was always hoping that Raymond was going to go behind the newspaper stories and editorials and try to get at the real events. A race riot in the capital in the 1930s—that ought to have been a strong story: gun talk in the European cafés and clubs, hysteria and terror in the African cités. But Raymond wasn’t interested in that side. He didn’t give the impression that he had talked to any of the people involved, though many would have been alive when he wrote. He stuck with the newspapers; he seemed to want to show that he had read them all and had worked out the precise political shade of each. His subject was an event in Africa, but he might have been writing about Europe or a place he had never been.
The article about the missionaries and the ransomed slaves was also full of quotations, not from newspapers, but from the mission’s archives in Europe. The subject wasn’t new to me. At school on the coast we were taught about European expansion in our area as though it had been no more than a defeat of the Arabs and their slave-trading ways. We thought of that as English-school stuff; we didn’t mind. History was something dead and gone, part of the world of our grandfathers, and we didn’t pay too much attention to it; even though, among trading families like ours, there were still vague stories—so vague that they didn’t feel real—of European priests buying slaves cheap from the caravans before they got to the depots on the coast. The Africans (and this was the point of the stories) had been scared out of their skins: they thought the missionaries were buying them in order to eat them.
I had no idea, until I read Raymond’s article, that the venture had been so big and serious. Raymond gave the names of all the liberty villages that had been established. Then, quoting and quoting from letters and reports in the archives, he tried to fix the date of the disappearance of each. He gave no reasons and looked for none; he just quoted from the missionary reports. He didn’t seem to have gone to any of the places he wrote about; he hadn’t tried to talk to anybody. Yet five minutes’ talk with someone like Metty—who, in spite of his coast experience, had travelled in terror across the strangeness of the continent—would have told Raymond that the whole pious scheme was cruel and very ignorant, that to set a few unprotected people down in strange territory was to expose them to attack and kidnap and worse. But Raymond didn’t seem to know.
He knew so much, had researched so much. He must have spent weeks on each article. But he had less true knowledge of Africa, less feel for it, than Indar or Nazruddin or even Mahesh; he had nothing like Father Huismans’s instinct for the strangeness and wonder of the place. Yet he had made Africa his subject. He had devoted years to those boxes of documents in his study that I had heard about from Indar. Perhaps he had made Africa his subject because he had come to Africa and because he was a scholar, used to working with papers, and had found this place full of new papers.
He had been a teacher in the capital. Chance—in early middle age—had brought him in touch with the mother of the future President. Chance—and something of the teacher’s sympathy for the despairing African boy, a sympathy probably mixed with a little bitterness about the more successful of his own kind, the man perhaps seeing himself in the boy: that advice he had given the boy about joining the Defence Force appeared to have in it something of a personal bitterness—chance had given him that extraordinary relationship with the man who became President and had raised him, after independence,
to a glory he had never dreamed of.
To Yvette, inexperienced, from Europe, and with her own ambitions, he must have glittered. She would have been misled by her ambitions, much as I had been by her setting, in which I had seen such glamour. Really, then, we did have Raymond in common, from the start.
THREE
The Big Man
12
I often thought about the chance that had shown me Yvette for the first time that evening in her house, in that atmosphere of Europe in Africa, when she had worn her black Margit Brandt blouse and had been lighted by the reading lamps placed on the floor, and every kind of yearning had been stirred in me by the voice of Joan Baez.
Perhaps in another setting and at another time she would not have made such an impression on me. And perhaps if I had read Raymond’s articles on the day Yvette had given them to me, nothing would have happened the following afternoon when she came to the flat. I wouldn’t have given her cause to show me her profile against the white wall of the studio-sitting room; we might instead have simply gone to the Hellenic Club. Seeing her house in the light of midday had already given me a little alarm. To have understood more about Raymond immediately after might have made me see her more clearly—her ambition, her bad judgment, her failure.
And failure like that wasn’t what I would have chosen to be entangled with. My wish for an adventure with Yvette was a wish to be taken up to the skies, to be removed from the life I had—the dullness, the pointless tension, “the situation of the country.” It wasn’t a wish to be involved with people as trapped as myself.
But that was what I had now. And it wasn’t open to me to withdraw. After that first afternoon, my first discovery of her, I was possessed by Yvette, possessed by that person I never stopped wanting to win. Satisfaction solved nothing; it only opened up a new void, a fresh need.
The town changed for me. It had new associations. Different memories and moods attached to places, to times of day,weather. In the drawer of my desk in the shop, where Raymond’s magazines had once lain forgotten for two days, there were now photographs of Yvette. Some of them were quite old and must have been precious to her. These photographs were her gifts to me, made at various times, as favours, rewards, gestures of tenderness; since, just as we never embraced when we met, never wasted the sense of touch (and in fact seldom kissed), so, as if by unspoken agreement, we continued as we had begun and never exchanged words of tenderness. In spite of the corrupt physical ways our passion had begun to take, the photographs of Yvette that I preferred were the chastest. I was especially interested in those of her as a girl in Belgium, to whom the future was still a mystery.
With these photographs in my drawer, the view from my shop had a different feel: the square with the bedraggled trees, the market stalls, the wandering villagers, the unpaved roads dusty in the sun or running red in the rain. The broken-down town, in which I had felt neutered, became the place where it had all come to me.
With that I developed a new kind of political concern, almost a political anxiety. I could have done without that, but it couldn’t be helped. Through Yvette I was bound to Raymond, and through Raymond I was bound more closely than ever to the fact or the knowledge of the President’s power. Seeing the President’s photograph everywhere had already made me feel that, whether African or not, we had all become his people. To that was now added, because of Raymond, the feeling that we were all dependent on the President and that—whatever job we did and however much we thought we were working for ourselves—we all were serving him.
For that brief moment when I had believed Raymond to be as Indar had described him—the Big Man’s white man—I had been thrilled to feel so close to the highest power in the land. I felt I had been taken far above the country I knew and its everyday worries—the mountainous rubbish dumps, bad roads, tricky officials, shanty towns, the people coming in every day from the bush and finding nothing to do and little to eat, the drunkenness, the quick murders, my own shop. Power, and the life around the President in the capital, had seemed to be what was real and essential about the country.
When I understood what Raymond’s position was, the President had once again appeared to zoom away and to be high above us. But now there remained a link with him: the sense of his power as a personal thing, to which we were all attached as with strings, which he might pull or let dangle. That was something I had never felt before. Like other expatriates in the town, I had done what was expected of me. We hung up the official photographs in our shops and offices; we subscribed to the various Presidential funds. But we tried to keep all that as background, separate from our private lives. At the Hellenic Club, for instance, though there was no rule about it, we never talked of local politics.
But now, taken deep into the politics through Raymond and Yvette, and understanding the intent behind each new official photograph, each new statue of the African madonna with child, I could no longer consider statues and photographs as background. I might be told that thousands were owed in Europe to the printers of those photographs; but to understand the President’s purpose was to be affected by it. The visitor might snigger about the African madonna; I couldn’t.
The news about Raymond’s book, the history, was bad: there was no news. Indar, in spite of his promise to find out about the book (and that farewell hand on Yvette’s thigh on the steamer), hadn’t written. It didn’t console Yvette to hear that he hadn’t written me either, that he was a man with big problems of his own. It wasn’t Indar she was worried about; she wanted news, and long after Indar had left the country she continued to wait for some word from the capital.
Raymond in the meantime had finished his work on the President’s speeches and had gone back to his history. He was good at hiding his disappointments and strains. But they were reflected in Yvette. Sometimes when she came to the flat she looked years older than she was, with her young skin looking bleached, the flesh below her chin sagging into the beginning of a double chin, the little wrinkles about her eyes more noticeable.
Poor girl! It wasn’t at all what she had expected from a life with Raymond. She was a student in Europe when they had met. He had gone there with an official delegation. His role as the adviser of the man who had recently made himself President was supposed to be secret, but his eminence was generally known and he had been invited to lecture at the university where Yvette was. She had asked a question—she was writing a thesis about the theme of slavery in French African writing. They had met afterwards; she had been overwhelmed by his attentions. Raymond had been married before; but there had been a divorce some years before independence, while he was still a teacher, and his wife and daughter had gone back to Europe.
“They say that men should look at the mother of the girl they intend to marry,” Yvette said. “Girls who do what I did should consider the wife a man has discarded or worn out, and know they are not going to do much better. But can you imagine? This handsome and distinguished man—when Raymond took me out to dinner for the first time he took me to one of the most expensive places. He did it all in a very absent-minded way. But he knew the kind of family I came from and he knew exactly what he was doing. He spent more on that dinner than my father earned in a week. I knew it was delegation money, but it didn’t matter. Women are stupid. But if women weren’t stupid the world wouldn’t go round.
“It was wonderful when we came out, I must say that. The President invited us to dinner regularly and for the first two or three times I sat on his right. He said he could do no less for the wife of his old professeur—but that wasn’t true: Raymond never taught him: that was just for the European press. He was extraordinarily charming, the President, and there was never any hint of nonsense, I should add. The first time we talked about the table, literally. It was made of local wood and carved with African motifs at the edge. Rather horribly, if you want to know. He said the Africans had prodigious skills as wood-carvers and that the country could supply the whole world with high-quality furniture. It was like the recent
talk about an industrial park along the river—it was just an idea to talk about. But I was new then and I wanted to believe everything I was told.
“Always there were the cameras. Always the cameras, even in those early days. He was always posing for them; you knew that, and it made conversation difficult. He never relaxed. He always led the conversation. He never let you start a new topic; he simply turned away. The etiquette of royalty—he had learned it from somebody, and I learned it from him, the hard way. He had this very abrupt way of turning away from you; it was like a piece of personal style. And he seemed to enjoy the stylishness of turning and walking straight out of a room at the appointed time.
“We used to go out on tours with him. We appeared in the background in a few of the old official pictures—white people in the background. I noticed that his clothes were changing, but I thought it was only his way of wearing more comfortable clothes, African-style country clothes. Everywhere we went there used to be these welcoming séances d’animation, tribal dancing. He was very keen on that. He said he wanted to give dignity to those dances that Hollywood and the West had maligned. He intended to build modern theatres for them. And it was during one of those animations that I got into trouble. He had put his stick on the ground. I didn’t know that had a meaning. I didn’t know I had to shut up, that in the old days of the chiefs, to talk when that stick was down was something you could be beaten to death for. I was close to him and I said something perfectly banal about the skill of the dancers. He just curled his lips in anger and looked away, lifting up his head. There wasn’t any stylishness in that. All the Africans were horrified at what I had done. And I felt that the make-believe had turned horrible and that I had come to a horrible place.
A Bend in the River Page 21
