by W. T. Tyler
Reddish felt obliged to correct him. Correcting him now would reduce the size of everyone’s expectations.
Smoking flambeaux flared in the shadows beyond the verandah of the district commissioner’s lakeside villa where the guests gathered on overstuffed chairs brought from the salon. Gabrielle sat with the women, across the verandah, Reddish to the right of the commissioner. His black tribal cane leaned against the table in front of him, where the drinks were being poured—great whacks of whiskey, uniced, dumped into tall glasses by native hands accustomed to serving up Fanta, lemonade, or beer. Both the commissioner and his wife were from a region far to the east, five hundred miles away, as much strangers to the local people as Gabrielle or Reddish.
The talk was about N’Sika, the new council, and the perfidy of the dead President and his regime. None mourned him, despite their appointments under his administration. Reddish was regaled with tales of malfeasance and murder. Why had the Americans waited so long, when a gentle push would have done in the old hypocrite years ago? A black cleric showed Reddish his scarred black wrists, lacerated by iron manacles from a month in the jail at Lutu.
The commissioner’s plump face was needled with tribal scars. He wore a dark Nehru jacket and trousers. Had Reddish been at Martyr’s Square when le président had made his speech? Incroyable! There was a great chief for you! What dignity! What courage! He’d given the Belgians a hiding, hadn’t he! Lashed the skin from their backs, broken the whip across their shoulders, and then thrown it at their feet! He’d taken back the country from the foreigners—no more vin rouge!
Slyly he touched Reddish’s hand with his fingers. “But he hadn’t done this alone, eh? The Americans had said, ça va, right?” He winked at Reddish. “‘Ça va?’ Isn’t that what the Americans had said?” The Americans were omnipresent, omnipotent. Weren’t they sending an astronaut to the moon?
During the dinner toast, the commissioner catalogued his needs—trucks, Landrovers, tractors, nylon nets, a freezing plant for the fish. The police needed jeeps. How could they patrol the old guerrilla trails bringing guns from the Cuban training camps in Brazzaville without vehicles? The new minister of interior must come to Benongo to see for himself how the district had been forgotten by the old regime. Reddish must persuade him. Then Reddish must persuade the new President to come. They must both come together.
As the commissioner bade Reddish and Gabrielle farewell at the foot of the front steps, he apologized for being unable to accompany them to the fishing cooperative at Funzi. He had been summoned to the provincial capital, as had all district commissioners. Regrettably too, since he’d not visited Funzi for almost six months. He shrugged. No vehicles.
It was after eleven when the commissioner’s car returned them to the mission guesthouse. Frère Albert’s light was out, and they silently carried their chairs to the far end of the gallery, facing the lake, away from the visiting sister’s window.
They had a nightcap, Gabrielle silent as she gazed off into the darkness. “Do they truly think you can do all that?” she asked finally. “That you can supply all those things he mentioned?”
“No, not really. But they feel they have to ask. It’s a ritual now. It also helps them explain why nothing gets done.”
“But they’re all strangers here. None of the wives I talked to was from this region. All of the officials are from elsewhere.”
He explained that the old President had managed the interior that way in attempting to break up the tribalism of internal politics.
The wind had risen on the lake; they could hear the sounds of the surf stirring against the beach. “In a way, they feel abandoned out here,” he continued, “like Roman consuls at the outposts of the empire. Antioch, Palmyra, Tyre. They don’t even feel that these lake people are part of their nation, unless it’s an inferior part—not Romans at all, just Syrians, Jews, barbarians.”
She sat in silence as he brought the two lanterns from their rooms. He filled their wells with the kerosene Frère Albert had left for him and set the wicks.
“That would never have occurred to me,” she murmured finally, lifting her head, “what you just said.”
He didn’t see the African at all, didn’t hear his footsteps down the gallery until he heard Gabrielle’s small cry. He turned and saw a man standing halfway between their chairs and the staircase. His face was hidden, blocked out by the wash of light from behind him.
“Mbote,” Reddish called.
“Mbote, patron.” He didn’t move. “Ozali Reddish?”
“Ehh. Nazali.”
The man nodded. “Buku na you.” He said he had Reddish’s book and came forward, his hands extended, head lifted, not bowing as he gave Reddish the book, the way most villagers would, but standing stiff and straight, his small shoulders thrust back. He was short and wiry, also barefooted. His tattered shorts and shirt smelled of smoked fish and gasoline.
Reddish looked at the book Pierre Masakita had borrowed from the flat in the capital. “Where’s the man who gave you this?” he asked. “Azali wapi?”
“Lobi—tomorrow we go.”
“Tomorrow I go to Funzi.”
“Namsima. After Funzi.”
“How?”
“Pirogue.”
“The man who gave you this book is your friend. Azali moninga na yo?”
“Ehhh. Ndeko—my brother.” He nodded to Gabrielle, then Reddish; he moved backwards as lightly as a shadow and went down the steps. They both went to the gallery rail and looked down into the darkness, but he was gone.
“What did he say? What did he want?” Gabrielle asked, still frightened.
“He wants to take me someplace.”
“Not tonight?”
“Tomorrow.”
The lights flickered for a moment, dimmed, and then expired. Gabrielle moved to the front of the gallery with Reddish, looking out over the lake. The generator had been turned off. As the seconds passed, the curtain of obscurity lifted and they saw the deep bowl of sky, the scattered stars, the broad silver lake lying under the moon, the milky strip of road, and the frosted trees.
On the lakeshore, they saw the small pirogue move away, sculled by the same little man who’d returned the book.
In the heat of the morning Reddish walked down the dusty lake road and found a Portuguese trader’s shop where he bought cigarettes, Chiclets for the children at Funzi, and bottles of mineral water. A few Africans stood mutely in front of the scarred wooden counter clutching coins in knotted scarves. The Portuguese owner sat on a stool behind the cash box, a cigarette in his mouth, a cup of coffee on the tray in front of him. His wife was a fat raven-haired woman with a tired face and deep shadows under her dark eyes. She fetched merchandise to the counter for her customers’ curiosity with silent impatience.
“You’re the American,” she said to Reddish as she waited on him. “It’s worse than ever. You were here before, eh? I remember. Now the army thinks it can steal everything from us, like they took the copper from the Belgians. They steal from our boats, our trucks—worse than thieves. Thieves you can punish.”
“Goods are scarce,” Reddish said, “especially here.”
She laughed. “What do you expect when they steal from our trucks. If we close down, where these people go, eh? You think I live in this hell-hole lake country for my health, my looks? I been here thirty years. Each year it gets worse.”
Her husband encouraged Reddish to pay in dollars, but he paid in francs instead. After he put the cash box away, he said, “You like the dinner last night? Whiskey, beer, wine—everything O.K., huh? Very nice.” He reached under the counter and pulled a thick wad of invoices from a cigar box, holding them up. “All right here—beer, wine, whiskey, coca. All for the commissaire. Last night, two hunnert dollar maybe. You wanna pay?” He threw the invoices back into the cigar box. “Who gonna pay this, huh? Six months maybe to get my money. Maybe I never get it. When you come to my house, you drink palm wine, coca maybe. Next time you come, bring plenty peop
le, O.K.? Plenty dollars.”
Gabrielle was waiting on the gallery steps, a leather camera bag over one shoulder, wearing a denim skirt and a sleeveless white blouse.
“I was worried,” she said. “I heard a plane take off.”
He told her it was the commissioner on his way to the provincial capital.
After lunch they drove through the village and out through the mangrove trees that fringed the lake along the track toward Funzi. The narrow dikelike road twisted through the marshes, left the swamps behind, and traversed the rain forest, impenetrable ten meters beyond the verges. In the shadowy green twilight, blue and yellow butterflies flocked by the hundreds in the wet ruts where the ditches had overflowed, fluttering before the rented mission jeep like a sheen of crystals. The jungle retreated and they emerged onto burned-over meadows where farmers were hacking at roots and burning stumps as their wives moved with hand hoes along the rows of silver-green manioc or the rot of decaying banana trees. They passed through a few isolated villages, none containing more than a handful of reed huts. The men sat smoking and talking under the reed sun shelters; the women glanced up from fire-blackened caldrons and manioc mills; naked children flocked out onto the track after they passed, waving their arms and shouting.
It was midafternoon when they left the main track and turned back toward the lake. The forest thinned and the trail grew steeper. After an hour they saw figures ahead of them hiding behind shrubs and trees along the track. As the grinding jeep approached, they would turn elusively and sprint up through the wild palms toward the fishing village. Most were young children. The jeep gained the final grassy knoll on the crest overlooking the lake, and they saw the green palm fronds, freshly cut, stuck in the sandy soil to give welcome. At the edge of the village they drove under a green archway of palm boughs tied with vines and garnished with red flowers.
A hundred Africans were waiting in the center of the village, moving rhythmically in front of a wizened old chief and his wife who stood with wooden dignity in red robes awaiting the jeep. The territorial administrator in a European suit bustled here and there, like the director of a mummers’ pageant.
“Notre proconsul,” Gabrielle murmured, watching him rudely shove aside a few old women to make way for a pair of younger village girls bearing flowers.
The women looped a wreath of yellow blossoms about Gabrielle’s head, the children pressed bouquets of wild anemone into her arms. Seeing her bowed head, her smile, and her affectionate embrace of the young children, the crowd spontaneously swept away the administrator’s hand signals and he was swallowed up.
Behind the chief’s hut the lake sparkled and bickered like an enormous iced mackerel. The breeze fluttered the pennons of red cloth atop the thatched huts. Gabrielle’s face and blouse were wet as they moved into the cool shadows of the chief’s hut, but she seemed exhilarated, still holding the anemone. The yellow wreath had been lifted; a few yellow petals still clung to her hair.
The chief took the seat of honor at the table, flanked by his wife and brother. About his neck was a leather thong on which hung four leopard teeth, polished like old ivory. On his head was a red cap beaded with cowrie shells. After he was seated, he folded his dark arms against the table and didn’t move, following the administrator’s stage management with his ancient red-veined eyes with the same mute primal indifference with which a caged lion follows the antics of a peanut or popcorn vendor beyond the bars. In the shadows of the room his dark face was as blue as gunmetal; the four leopard teeth shone like pearls against his wet black chest.
Clay pots of peanuts and watermelon seed were set out. Beer, soft drinks, and palm wine were brought from the scullery hut. The chief drank palm wine from a wooden goblet, staring silently through the sun-filled doorway and into the yard, where his tribesmen still plunged back and forth, goaded on by the administrator’s factotum. Their thudding feet sent warm dust as fine as talcum back through the seams of white sunlight to settle on the damp faces of those inside the hut.
The chief didn’t speak; the administrator spoke for him, requesting more financial help for the US AID-sponsored fishing cooperative—more boats, more motors, more nylon nets. After he finished, he took a petition from his attaché case and presented it to Reddish on the chief’s behalf. It was typewritten and in French.
After the feast, Reddish wiped the mwamba paste from his fingers, washed his dry throat with beer, and made a brief speech in Lingala thanking the chief for his hospitality. The chief and his retinue retired to the cool shadows of their family huts.
The administrator took them for a tour of the fish-smoking kilns, the docks, boats, and pirogues. As they climbed back up the hill toward the jeep, Reddish stopped, identifying the small figure squatting alone down the shore near a beached pirogue.
“Where are the outboard motors?” he asked the administrator.
He told Reddish they were out on the lake.
“In this heat?” The solitary figure near the pirogue got to his feet, dusted his trousers, and climbed toward them. Following Reddish’s eyes, Gabrielle saw him too, puzzled, her hand to her eyes, shading the sun. “They don’t fish in this heat,” Reddish continued. “Where are the motors?”
“En panne, broken down, most of them. There may be a few on the lake.”
Reddish pulled his kitbag from the jeep, but left Gabrielle’s flight bag on the front seat. “It’s the man from last night,” he told her.
“You’re going with him?” she asked, startled.
Reddish asked the administrator if he had a driver. If he did, he’d pay him to drive Madame Bonnard back to Benongo.
“But you’re not going back now?” the administrator asked.
“Later. The fisherman over there has a sick child. I said I’d look at him.”
“I see—yes. But in a pirogue?”
“No,” Gabrielle pleaded suddenly, guessing Reddish’s purpose.
“I have my car,” the administrator explained. “I could drive her—”
“Impossible,” Gabrielle insisted. “I’m going too.”
The administrator, still puzzled, said, “But I can take you. I’m returning now. You are welcome.”
But Gabrielle had already snatched up her bag and was running down the long sloping hillside to where the pirogue was beached.
They followed the edge of the lake, skating across the silver shallows, the blunt nose pointed north. Gabrielle sat forward on a small wooden stool, her hands gripping the ax-hewn gunwales, Reddish amidships. The boatman crouched in the stern, hand on the tiller of the ancient paintless outboard motor lashed to the stern by a pair of planks. The sun sheeted the lake with silver, blinding them as they looked west. In the reeds and rushes, they sometimes passed small thatched lean-tos built atop pilings only a few feet above the lake where solitary fishermen slept, their pirogues drawn alongside and lashed to the pilings, waiting for the sun to go down.
No sound came except the throb of the old motor drifting blue-gray smoke out behind them. The sky was a metallic blue, with a soft batting of clouds to the east. They passed other dugouts, black slivers of matchwood far out on the lake, sculled by single oarsmen, heron-slim in the stern.
The dugout at last began to veer toward a hidden river channel overgrown with weeds and hyacinths. In the early morning and at dusk, hippopotami would cruise for water plants among the reeds; but they saw only a few egrets, as motionless as cattails. The river narrowed a mile beyond its mouth, and the thickening canopy of cypress, umbrella trees, oaks, and wild nutmeg blotted out the sky. The air was heavy and foul; the river blackened in the shadows; yellow snarls uncurled where the current moved against rotting trunks.
As the channel narrowed, Gabrielle turned and looked at him anxiously, her face small and frail against the towering backdrop of purple tree trunks, massive ferns, and trailing vines. The channel narrowed further. The fluted tree trunks glistened with dampness and were scrawled with yellow and gray lichens. The water ahead of them was motionless in the
dense green light, then abruptly wrinkled here and there by some devouring jaw hidden far beneath the surface. Flies, gnats, and mosquitoes swarmed in gray shrouds. From his trouser pocket the boatman took a thin fly whisk with a polished bone handle and began to twitch it back and forth unconsciously, with that sure muscular knowledge of a nervous system trained to precision by years of discomfort. Not once did he move his yellow malarial eyes from the channel ahead of them.
The dugout slackened, sending a yellow tongue of water ahead of them into the small slough where white film lay over its surface like scales on a dead skin. A few meters beyond, the helmsman guided the dugout between two water-filled pirogues beached on a mud bank. Two small Africans were waiting, crouched silently on the bank, each holding a thin switch with its bark peeled, moving it constantly across shoulders, neck, back, and ankles. Their legs, arms, and bellies were thinly covered with wood ash. At a nod from the boatman they scrambled into the water and helped pull the dugout onto the beach. Neither looked at Reddish or Gabrielle. Reddish helped Gabrielle onto the bank, shouldered the packs, and followed the boatman through the screen of bamboo thicket and up the narrow path. He had guessed by then who the boatman was: the polished bone handle of the fly whisk hinted at it; the silent obedience of the two men on the bank and their refusal to look at the two strangers confirmed it—he was the village chief.
The village lay a quarter of a mile above on a promontory overlooking the swamp and river, surrounded by dense trees whose foliage forty to fifty feet overhead sheltered the dozen thatched roofs like an umbrella, shutting out the sky and admitting only a chiaroscuro of brilliant light here and there on the black earth. The village itself was bathed in a green submarine dimness. The women were naked except for bolts of dirty raffia cloth about their hips; the men wore raffia skirts or cotton shorts; their children sat with swollen bellies and ruptured navels, looking up with fly-blown faces as the procession passed.
