No. 4 Imperial Lane

by Jonathan Weisman

The leadership of the agricultural outpost, including João, Elizabeth, and Angélica, all attended the funeral in Contuboel later that morning. They walked down the dusty grade, past the desultory checkpoint and into town, where Fula in long white robes had gathered in a great outpouring of grief from villages throughout the area. The Portuguese crew, even Angélica, looked blindingly white amid these Africans as dark as ebony, their skin smooth but for the ritual scars on some of their faces. The crowd was gracious, jovial even, with the newcomers, and Elizabeth smiled and felt fortunate to be there.

  They surged forward, toward a particularly large compound where six small bodies lay wrapped in white linen under the eaves of a house. Ululations filled the air as mothers and mourners wailed over the lost children. But another spectacle had caught Elizabeth’s eye. On the periphery of the gathering, two men, sheathed from head to toe in ragged orange strips of cloth, bark, and tree fiber, their faces masked in carved wood, menaced the crowd. Accompanied by a small group of young men with drums, the men in orange clanged machetes together and lunged. The villagers shrank from their approaches, feigning fear, but did not run. The two men circled the crowd, pouncing, ducking back, lunging again, brandishing their long knives, then drifting to the next cluster in a ritualized assault that touched no one. The thumping of the drums added a soundtrack that heightened the drama.

  “They are spirit people, protecting the village in such bad times,” Menges said quietly, leaning in to Elizabeth’s ear when he caught her fascination. She swore he grazed it softly with his lips.

  As the men approached her part of the crowd, Elizabeth felt a wave of panic, not knowing what was happening or how to respond.

  “What do I do?” she asked Menges.

  “Watch the others. Do as they do.”

  Nobody laughed or even smiled as the orange men leaped and leered and showed the fierceness of the protecting spirits. The townspeople played along in deadpan seriousness. It was an elaborate, ritualized performance, more than a game but somehow less than a religious rite. Elizabeth tried to follow suit, to cringe in serious silence, but she could not suppress a giggle, a noise that provoked stern looks from the Guineans around her, and in turn from her husband. Those looks wiped the smile from her face quickly. She could not keep her eyes off the spectacle. One of the orange men broke away from the group and ducked into a mud-walled house, disappearing into the blackness of the unlit home.

  “Look. That orange man has gone into his house,” Elizabeth told Angélica in an unsubtle stage whisper, using her best, careful Portuguese and pointing after him. “He must be hungry or need to use the loo.”

  Menges turned quickly toward her, grabbed her upper arm, and tore her away from her friend with surprising vehemence. In English, he hissed in Elizabeth’s face, “What did I tell you? Do as the others do. Show some respect. We are guests here.”

  He dropped her arm, as if she were a child misbehaving in church, and turned away angrily. João glared at his wife with a meanness she had rarely seen. Not disappointment, but shame.

  Elizabeth was stunned and wounded, unsure of her offense. She stayed quiet for the rest of the morning. For once, she knew she understood nothing that she was seeing, that the plainest action—a blessing, a tearful moan, an offering—was quite beyond her realm of comprehension. The simple joy of discovery that she had felt as she joined the throng of Africans was gone now, replaced by timidity and confusion and shame like she had never felt before.

  “Do not challenge custom here,” Angélica whispered in her ear as the crowd dispersed and they headed back to the outpost. “Who is to say what those men or spirits are? There are powerful beliefs out here. Remember what Senhor Menges said: Dangers are everywhere.”

  In the weeks that followed, Elizabeth became attuned to the drumming in the town below and villages beyond. On some days, in the heat of the afternoon, a cluster of women, wrapped in their best, most garish prints, would surge up the hill onto the flat high ground of the agricultural station, ululating wildly, beating drums, with spirit men dancing around them. Then they’d retreat back to Contuboel just as quickly. They appeared to seek nothing with these forays but visibility. They smiled, chanted, and disappeared.

  Elizabeth remained baffled, but her trepidations subsided. She took walks into Contuboel with Angélica. She learned that beyond the simple, one-road, no-intersection town was a maze of trails leading through lush grasslands, fields, and forests. She could spend hours wandering these well-worn routes, smiling at villagers, men and women, watching the girls in the field hoeing with their baby sisters slung onto their backs, or the young men who scrambled up towering palms to pluck coconuts or check the palm-wine fermentation. She felt no threats at all. Secrets were all around her—the roundup of prepubescent twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys who were marched into the bush for weeks on end to undergo ritual circumcisions and unspoken rites of passage into manhood, the whispers about clitorectomies undergone with no such fanfare, the deaths, the births. She understood none of it, and no one offered to explain. Menges did bring a shaman up to make Elizabeth a leather juju to protect her against ill winds. The old man scribbled something on a torn piece of notebook paper, placed it in his palm, uttered an incantation, blew into his closed fist, then encased her blessing in a delicately fashioned leather pouch. She took to it immediately, wrapping the leather cord around her neck for what she vowed would be forever.

  One morning, Elizabeth and Angélica sat on crude wooden chairs beneath a banyan tree going over a Portuguese lesson. Elizabeth saw Angélica as a true friend, maybe the closest she had ever had. She could confide in her, express her doubts, her worries about João, and Angélica always listened. There had been Vicki, but she was a cousin. A certain obligation came with that. Angélica could have refused to accompany her to the interior, Elizabeth thought. She had made a choice, for her.

  Angélica felt differently. She liked Elizabeth, was flattered by her attention, her genuine affection, but what did this woman know of her? What did she know of a life on the verge of nothing? If anything, Angélica saw herself as a teacher, one who was fond of her pupil, to be sure, but distance had to be respected.

  Guedado came slinking up behind them, eyes darting to the honeysuckle bush behind Elizabeth’s chair. “Sssst, sssst,” he whispered, but vehemently, his eyes wide, his hands gesticulating wildly but in small, emphatic motions. Angélica understood first, rising slowly, her eyes locked on the honeysuckle as she backed away, leaving her friend alone but beckoning to her in compact, conservative gestures. Elizabeth sat dumbly for a few more seconds, then lifted herself just past a crouch and moved toward Guedado, her eyes searching his.

  “What?” she said in a strained whisper.

  “Morte negro,” he muttered, pointing to the bush. Elizabeth turned to follow the direction of his finger. There, curled around a twig, was a snake not much thicker than two of Elizabeth’s fingers, olive green on the back, shifting to a yellow-green belly. Its eyes seemed to smile.

  “It’s cute.” Elizabeth smiled. “It’s harmless. C’mon.”

  Angélica grabbed her upper arm. “That is a black mamba, ‘black death.’ Didn’t you hear Guedado?” she asked, as the watchman scurried off to alert Menges and to get his club.

  Menges came around quickly but showed no more alarm than Elizabeth had.

  “Shoo,” he said with a laugh, grabbing a long stick and poking at the snake. The serpent calmly slid from its perch into the grass and silently glided away, its full length, nearly six narrow feet, stretching gracefully before the group. Guedado returned with his staff, but it was too late. He was furious. His rants in Fula grew louder and louder, incomprehensible to the other three.

  That night, Luis, a staff member known mainly to Elizabeth as the guy who fetched the station’s French bread on dashes into Senegal, slid next to the group at dinner as they wrestled with canned sardines over palm oil–drenched rice. He leaned forward.

  “Senhor Director,” he said in a low voi
ce, addressing Menges. “The staff wishes to inform you of its unhappiness at the events of this morning.”

  Menges looked back at him quizzically. “What? The snake?”

  “Senhor Director, when a Guinean is lucky enough to be that close to a black mamba and not dead, he kills it.”

  There were other surprises too, less mysterious for Elizabeth perhaps, but far more momentous. She had stopped getting her period, for one. She was not ready to tell the only doctor around, her husband—not yet. But she knew she was pregnant. She was deeply happy, happier still to keep it a secret, even from Angélica.

  João, too, was happy much of the time. The adrenaline rush of trauma care was gone, replaced by the deeply more satisfying job of attending to the gratefully ill. In the little clinic, the unadorned waiting room was always full. Simple benches outside held the overflow. There were plenty of patients who came with hideous, untreated cancers, degenerative diseases that João had no equipment to diagnose, let alone treat, heart diseases that were death sentences so far from a proper hospital. But so many more came with ailments easily remedied with penicillin, eased with aspirin, or cured by simple rehydration salts. Their gratitude overwhelmed him. It seemed that everyone left his clinic content that this young Tuga had worked wonders, or at least had tried.

  Elizabeth began spending more time at the clinic. She spoke in her rudimentary Portuguese about boiling water to women who did not understand even good Portuguese. She tried to dispense iodine tablets for plastic gas cans of water brought to the fields. The women didn’t like the taste or the brownish water, cleansed of its bacteria. Elizabeth would laugh.

  “But you are alright drinking water that tastes of petrol?” Angélica tried to translate to Kriolu, which she herself was only just starting to pick up.

  “Oh, you get used to that,” the women replied.

  She had much better luck with the children. Many suffered from debilitating diarrhea, but the impact of rehydration salts, UNICEF-issued, with the bright blue UN logo stamped on the bag, was immediate and undeniable. The nausea and lethargy of dehydration would give way in an instant. The joys of childhood would return in a day. Mothers would beam.

  João watched her, sometimes overcome with affection. She made him laugh, with her abrupt, nervous gestures, her clumsiness, her genuine need to please these people. Better still, she completed the picture. In the days before their flight to Bissau, this scene had played in his fantasies, with only small, insignificant variations, the doctor and the doctor’s wife, easing suffering in war-torn Africa. He loved her, he thought.

  “Old Spínola warned us you’d take to this,” João said, laughing. “The coot knows a few things.”

  “‘An honorable murderer, if you will,’” Elizabeth replied with a smile.

  It was not yet daybreak when the thumps began, or more like thuds. The sound first entered a dream, a dull knock on Elizabeth’s bedroom door back in Houndsheath, Mother coming to call: thud, pause, thud, pause, thud, thud. The thwacks on the tin grate just below the roof line, the thumps on the stucco wall, the rustle of grass outside her window, the noises went on and on, not very loud but steady, arrhythmic, and inscrutable.

  She listened for what must have been an hour, choosing not to awaken João. Then, as the sun rose in earnest, the sounds faded. All was silent but a delicate rustling of grass. She evaded João’s searching hands, jumped out of bed, threw on an unflattering African shift, newly tailored in Contuboel, and went out.

  “Noite estranha,” Guedado was saying, as he poked his walking stick at something in the grass. Strange night.

  At his feet was a dying bat, feebly lifting a wing and letting it drop. Elizabeth’s gaze focused on the grass around the building. Black splotches compressed the blades, some moving, most not. Hundreds of bats had not made it home to the daytime safety of the attic. The little corpses were all over the compound, in the thousands.

  Guineans were practical people. They saw omens in such events, but they also saw the malice of the Portuguese overlords. The bats kill the bugs. The bugs kill the people. The bats are good—and now dead.

  “Guedado wants you to talk to Senhor Menges,” Angélica told João. “He wants to know what happened.”

  João disappeared into the little administration building as the two women dressed properly for breakfast.

  The doctor looked troubled as he sat down with a plate of Senegalese French bread and Portuguese jam. Angélica and Elizabeth had gnawed through their baguettes already and were nursing cups of Nescafé as they awaited word of the bat holocaust. They looked expectantly at João, who remained silent as he gathered his thoughts.

  “The station has been working on a defoliant, fifty-four percent arsenic. The army wants it for the elephant grass along the roads that hides the guerrillas. They sprayed it last night. They wanted to see whether dew would make it more potent or less potent. I guess they got their answer.”

  “I don’t understand,” Elizabeth said. “It’s a defoliant, for plants, right? Kill the plants, not the animals?”

  “It looks like it affected the insects as well. The bats ate the insects. By the time they returned home, the arsenic had taken its course.”

  “Have they tried to figure out how this stuff affects people?” Angélica asked. Her drawn face looked more severe than usual.

  “That, apparently, was not part of the assignment,” João responded.

  Children were given a few cans of sardines as payment for the grim task of putting the bat carcasses into woven-plastic rice sacks. The arsenic-laced corpses were mixed with the great compost piles of the agriculture station. Whether those corpses would contaminate the soil…well, that would be another experiment.

  After several weeks, another Portuguese military convoy rumbled through Contuboel and up the hill to the agriculture station. This time, the armed jeeps flanked a Unimog painted white with a large red cross. Renato Marsola Araujo bounded out smiling broadly as João moved to greet him.

  “You didn’t think I would let you have all the fun, did you?” he asked, putting an arm around João’s shoulder. “Come to think of it, you didn’t think I would let you have any fun, I’m sure.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” João replied, his smile fading.

  Araujo shrugged. “Let’s go meet this Menges. Then we’ll talk.”

  As the doctors walked amiably toward the administration building, Araujo talked of trauma patients in Bissau, life on the base, the crazy ideas of António de Spínola.

  “He’s going soft, you know. He speaks of equality for the ultramar, something real, you know? Not Caetano’s bullshit. We may be winning the battles, he says, but we’re losing the war.”

  João shrugged.

  “It’s not just here,” Araujo continued. “I tell you, João, it’s getting ugly in the ultramar. The PIDE are flooding into Angola. The South Africans are bombing Mozambique with French Mirage jets. We’re using herbicides on cassava fields. It’s out of control, like Vietnam, I swear to you. The wars are metastasizing. The world hates us.”

  “Is that what you came here to tell me, current events?” João asked as they arrived at Menges’s office. Araujo knocked gently and waited for the director to open the door. When he did, the two men hugged.

  “Good to see you, Renato,” Menges said heartily. “Our first doctor, João. He loved this place. Then he abandoned us. Ambition got the best of him. You really should take a walk down to Contuboel, Renato.”

  “Perhaps I will, Aleixo. Maybe I can answer this question myself. Tell me, Senhor Director, how safe is it out there? The PAIGC has camps all through the Casamance now. They own the routes from Dungal and Cuntima into Farim and almost down to Mansôa. A few more kilometers east, and I’m afraid they’re heading your way.”

  “Doctor Araujo, what’s gotten into you these few months in Bissau? You talk like a military man, not like a medical one.”

  “The professions are merging, my friend. I want our friend Doctor Gon�
�alves here to hit the road in the next few days. Winning the hearts and minds in little old Contuboel isn’t going to win this war. The Tugas can’t show fear.”

  “And you are asking what, General Spínola?” Menges said, his eyes now leery.

  “If you would look out your window, you would see a freshly painted mobile medical unit. I don’t imagine Cabral’s men pay much attention to that big red cross. They’re communists, you know, not much into crosses. The roads north to Cambaju and Sare Janque, into Senegal, are they safe?”

  “How else would we get French bread for breakfast every morning?” Menges laughed.

  The assignment shouldn’t have been a surprise to João. He was in the army of a nation at war, ostensibly with itself. Spínola’s counterinsurgency tactics were to become legendary, studied in war colleges, written up in textbooks as infallible, tried and refined in low-intensity conflicts the world over. His strategy: Don’t seek out the guerrillas for a fight. They are too elusive. Protect the local populace from their would-be liberators, and make them love you.

  With Cabral and the PAIGC pushing in from their bases in Senegal and Guinea, it was time for João to join Spínola’s war for hearts and minds. Not even Fulani territory could be taken for granted; the area north and east of Contuboel soon would be contested ground, a blank spot on the PAIGC’s territorial map, surrounded on three sides, east, west, and north, by rebel-held territory. Dr. Gonçalves wasn’t to fight for it. He was to minister to it. He was to roll back Cabral’s gains without firing a shot, though he might administer some injections.

  The mobile medical unit sounded more impressive than it was: two cots and a dispensary of drugs and first aid. But as he had seen from the clinic in Contuboel, a very little goes a long way. Along with him, the unit would be staffed by an army medic and protected by two jeeps, one in front, one behind, manned by four soldiers each, lightly armed with G3A3s. Anything more would make João’s professions of beneficence suspect. They weren’t expecting trouble.