The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men Part 11

The barge comes to rest about noon, impaling itself on half-rotten pilings near the inlet while the pa.s.sengers cheer and sing, a rich chaos of joy and relief. It all happens so slowly that they think they were safe. Kingfishers and spoonbills continue their feeding along the sh.o.r.e; even the tiny, nervous flycatchers in the overhanging branches give no more than a momentary flutter. No one in the market cries out. We simply stare. Even Verloc, the cafe owner, limps onto the portico carrying a pair of binoculars, counting his profit perhaps. Who can blame him? They are caught in the current, and we watch like dog-faced baboons while they gather at the rail and give the barge a heavy list, the three of us thinking they don't even know, they don't have any idea. Because at the first brittle crackling, at the slow shriek of wood upon metal, they cheer. And we watch. There is nothing you can do.

This is how they return from upriver sometimes, the pusher tugs as well as the barges. They do it without fuel or pumps or electric lights, steering for sandy shoals or the safety of mudflats or fragile pilings around some village where diesel fuel gets trucked in twice a month and then gets sold by the quart. Sometimes they drift farther down the main channel to Kinshasa or to us over here in Brazzaville, arriving like floats from some pathetic Mardi Gras, insanely populated, maybe four or five roped together, one leaky hulk after another sagging under secret cargoes and wild stories of Tutsi ma.s.sacres inland, tributaries choked with bodies that n.o.body wants to hear about anymore. They stink of fish meal and manioc. They carry hollow-eyed women along the rail, and amputees, and stacks of zebra hides as stiff as cardboard. And live monkeys strung together like convicts. Parrots. Stork-thin children. Diseased chickens. They bring all the groaning, moldering rubbish of the river plus a drunken crewman or two. Except sometimes. Sometimes they bring enough opium or uncut diamonds in someone's belly to make the whole rudderless voyage seem sane.

So I study Verloc's face while he refocuses the binoculars. His only movement is a slight twitch about the mouth when the linesman saves them, a stick figure who goes leaping and tying off before the current can catch the stern and send it spiraling into dark water. I want to applaud, but Verloc and Brawley remain silent, suspicious. Perhaps it's the disease. We wait until the barge is secure, then Verloc sighs slightly and makes his voice as wispy as the fog. "Clever fellows, de Bantu. Like monkeys when dey need to be."

But then someone is already mentioning the others, the abandoned ones, dark unopened metal boxes upon the water, and then immediately after that innocent remark Brawley is cursing, allowing the last of his energy to the proposition that someone is out of his mind.

"We need the money," I simply say.

"They're capsized, you fool, rockin' in the water like corpses. An' even if they got pockets of air, who would want to crawl inside a coffin? Jesus Christ! Tiniest thing'll send 'em into the mud like crab baskets. 'Cept you'd be inside, wouldn't you, drowning for a handful a beads."

"Or diamonds."

"Or nothing at all."

"I'm just saying that, technically, they belong to us."

"They belong to the river now."

"Listen to me. You're not drunk, you're infected. If you're not treated, you're going to die, same as me. That's all I'm saying. I'm just thinking about what it would take to have a future."

"I'm not infected. I'm sick of living li' a pig, that's all."

While they cheer. It's what they all do when they reach Brazzaville; they dance and cheer. It's their right. For some it is the first expression of hope in their lives. So why should we lie awake at night? Even horror has its limits. Something you would think G.o.d could learn.

Just before the first showers, a company of men draws the barge close to sh.o.r.e and shoves a plank out from the elephant gra.s.s while two freshwater crocs slather down the mudbank below us and drift out to investigate, low in the water, like ironclads from the last century. Then someone is helping Phoolan down the plank. Some ridiculous crewman who does it in the European fashion, with a slight bow as she sets foot on land. The most beautiful woman we have ever seen.

Brawley is picking a bit of tobacco off his tongue, snorting, "Over there, lad."

But I've already seen her.

"That one's lookin' for G.o.d, she is. Time to get offyer a.r.s.e."

Though of course I cannot stir. It's midday, and this is the well of lost souls.

She moves like music through the tumbling chaos, one hand holding a silk llasa over her head and shoulders, the other hand flickering among throngs of children, touching their faces, creating smiles. And they seem to know her. Even the beggars strain grotesquely for a pa.s.sing touch, and her name precedes her up the hill until she reaches the constable's stand and speaks to Old N'Reara in broken French. Something about a man, a lost husband, maybe a father, it's impossible to tell. And then for one moment, when she turns bright gleaming eyes upon me, I grow young.

Later, after Verloc opens the cafe, I can see the humor of it all. The Americans are here in their canvas vests and straw hats that wilt in the heat. They think the sickness was wiped out along with yellow fever and smallpox, but the joke's on them. And there are European women who take pictures from odd angles, struggling to get bougainvillea into every shot, their long legs glistening, b.r.e.a.s.t.s and b.u.t.tocks shaped by sweat and all the time thinking, dear G.o.d, that they are in jungle. Food for flies. They believe I'm a picturesque drunk, some minor character left behind after the film crew's retired. I try not to disappoint, but I'm losing focus. I have the West African variant of the disease, the kind that lingers in the blood for years while you watch yourself waste away. Hallucinate. Sleep. And that brings, oddly enough, long periods of wakefulness during which you cannot stop chattering. Chattering. There's a drug called Suramin.... And she is so beautiful, so remarkably out of place, that someone must be dreaming.

I see bobbing black figures swarm over the barge, taking bit by bit the color and the cargo like a string of ants. I can't be sure; I'm floating where the clear bubbles float, just this side of consciousness. I can see that they are leaving behind a wreck, bilges weeping rust, sheet metal buckling around the pilothouse. I can see that. I think I am talking to someone too. I tell her that the last item is an okapi, one of the slender, short-necked giraffes that live in the upper basin near Kisangani. Gentle animals inhabiting dense forest where their larger cousins can't live. Better get a shot of this; they're extremely rare. No, I say, okapis don't have the spots or the long neck of the plains giraffe. Yes, they look a bit like llamas with short hair and intelligent faces. Most don't survive the trip to Western zoos. This one is a young female who's already sensed the crocodiles gathering beneath the stern; she's stamping and straining in fear, wearing a raw place on her neck where the twin ropes rub. When the men try to lead her away, she goes into a frenzy, kicking and thrashing like a horse, drawing the reptiles half out of the water, jaws levered wide and hissing in antic.i.p.ation.

Brawley ambles over to us while the fat woman is snapping furiously, and he begins a running monologue over her shoulder. "It's got no animal language, you know, the o-kapi. Lives its whole life in silence like your true giraffe of the savannahs. 'Cept for that kind of barking sound that you hear. Prolly just trying to get its bref. I mean if you had six blokes on you an' a rope around your neck, right?"

"What if it falls over the side?" her husband asks.

"Not b.l.o.o.d.y likely. Live o-kapi's worth a year's pay to any of them black fellows down there, dead one's not worth beer money."

Finally the barking becomes no more than a hoa.r.s.e cough, and the animal lets them tie its legs together and wrestle it to the deck. Four of the men hold her while two others try to drive away the crocs with long poles, poking them and provoking a grotesque, churning dance beneath the stern. After a half hour nothing has changed. One of the men goes below deck and returns with a pipe, giving half a dozen two-handed blows to the okapi's head before it slumps. Then they carry their prize to the warehouse with no further trouble and lay her beside the other supplies.

I'm inexplicably angry. My hand shakes. I remember Brawley reaching for the flies and hate him with surprising suddenness as I sink toward sleep. It's early afternoon, and the beautiful safety of sleep. It's coming, I can feel it, the leafy shade like a familiar blanket slowly drawn up to the shoulder and nestled beneath the chin. I can barely hear them now, the fat German tourist in a tirade, Brawley's smooth cynicism; and I would not take the Suramin if a priest offered it as communion. I'm almost there. A slow blink gives me the beautiful woman once more, how she stands out among the jostling bodies below us. Like royalty. They won't even step into her shadow. And I can smell the rain now, thickening, preparing itself while the voice I can't escape whispers, "Lovely face, absolutely lovely. Don't need a sharp eye for that, eh? Wonder what she's brought to market. I mean besides the obvious." And when I awake, she's there on the portico with Verloc, his hazy image snickering and bobbing just like the toothless old men who shield their eyes and lift the open palm.

Brawley's trying to drag me awake, hoa.r.s.e with the hilarity of his message. "Hey Pogue," he seems to be saying. "Hey Pogue, guess what? She's a thief."

I blink, still lost within a world of green.

The bougainvillea along the south sh.o.r.e of our inlet begins at the water's edge and rises in a tangle so thick that the Sangha people call it monkey puzzle after a tree that grows along their own tributary in northern Zaire. Creepers and mango build canopy upon canopy in bewildering variation until there's no way to distinguish the surge from anchoring earth; it's simply a green swell that hovers over the last few stalls of our pitiful Casbah and threatens the cafe itself. During my first year in Africa I would sit on Verloc's deck waiting for one of those autumn storms that gives the impression of being lost at sea and imagine myself on a doomed voyage where drowned sailors mysteriously appear from the depths and speak meaningless clues before being washed overboard again. Ghostly strangers uttering nonsense. Once Verloc himself stepped out into the rain babbling incomprehensibly about teak, insisting that it was not an African wood, did not grow within a thousand miles of Congo. So intensely that for weeks afterward I thought he was insane. Brawley had to rea.s.sure me that he was merely drunk. So I'm not surprised to wake inside a dream and hear a ghost croaking, "... one of us actually, come to make our for-tune I believe."

"What are you saying?" I manage.

"I'm saying it's time to wake up. Grab opportunity by the b.a.l.l.s and all that."

"I don't ..."

"Looks a bit Chinese, don't she? I mean up close and all, not the color of your ordinary bush babies. One thing for certain, she ain't local. That little trick she's got on looks like a sari? You don't see nothing like that south o' Cameroon. Makes you wonder, don't it?"

"She's a thief?"

"Well, she wants summit off one of them wrecked barges you was yamming about. Wants it bad enough to negotiate if you get my drift."

"And she doesn't speak English?"

"Look at that face, Jocko. That look li' an English face to you?"

"So how did she know to come to us?"

"Anybody could've pointed her this direction; we're not a secret enterprise, you know. This is opportunity, Pogue. Some smiles before she slips away. Besides, what was you saying about needin' a housekeeper now, one that can get by in French, eh?"

"What exactly does she want?"

"Look. All I know's she spent an hour at the pink hotel. Where the diamond merchants are, right? And then the G.o.ds, the G.o.ds, Pogue, set 'er down here at which point you start playin' detective. That don't go in this part of the world."

"What's her name?"

He turns to Phoolan for the first time and addresses her in halting French. "You got to forgive the reverend, miss, he's been a bit paralyzed since his big discovery. But no need to worry; we got all the records and the salvage rights. You come to the proper place."

She does not seem confused or frightened.

"We deal with all the big companies, we do. Import, export, whatever. My partner here has just temporarily lost his capacity for astonishment. He's actually very glad to make your acquaintance."

She sits in the rattan chair and studies me, rather like a queen. Her face is unwrinkled, the dark brown of the river itself but not the ebony of inner Africa. Her eyes are neither kind nor cruel but simply ancient, while the lips seem unnaturally thin and serious. She wears her hair like the Arab women of the north, long and straight, almost like another garment. When she moves, her bracelets make a tiny musical response. And she says to me, "Very well, I will stay."

Brawley breaks in before I can speak. "Of course there'll be a slight fee. You know, for the recovery itself and the tax we got to pay to, ah, local authorities."

When she does not flinch, does not take her eyes from me, we know that it's diamonds.

It's early morning, and I am alive. I see shadows as sharp as zebra stripes and hear the drone of a single fly. The fog will be rising soon, but for the moment there are no ambiguities, and I know that there is someone in my house. I smell her. It's such a welcome certainty that I simply walk toward the ktala, where we cook and eat during the rainy season, and she is there. Like magic. But I am not sleepwalking. I am not dreaming. She is there, and I am acutely aware of her face, the familiar beauty of it and also the mystery. I see her rocking over a wooden board, kneading in the Western manner, pushing the dough with the heel of her hand and turning the ma.s.s into itself, keeping her arms straight and rolling the wrists so that the bracelets chime delicately and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s are shaped into loaves.

Who is she?

I try to remember and see a kaleidoscope of changing shapes.

It is such a clever disease, forever changing its mind. At times I hear colors and see sounds that no sane man can imagine. At other times I simply sleep. Some days I babble to invisible beings, and some days they babble back. It's no fool for consistency. And today I am here, alone, in the moment. Have no memory at all.

There is a woman in my house. I see her. I feel her every movement from across the room, the warm dough yielding to her hands. It is impossible, I know, but I hear her hair rustling against itself and the soft exhalation at her lips. She is there. So intensely there that the walls give way and blur.

Is she my wife?

What is her name? I open my mouth, but it's no use.

I try twice again. There's nothing there, until finally I realize that I don't need a name because the air is heavy with bread, as moist and inviting as earth's womb, and that I'm a willing prisoner. I am happy. This is the opposite of what I fear. She is real, but my memory of her is lost in the past. I'm standing in the present, listing the things I know, counting them off in my mind, one through four, until I have to shrug and smile. Because there is a woman in my house, so beautiful that she creates the world around us.

Her voice, I think, is a voice I've known all my life. She says, "Why does he call you that?" Without prelude, without looking in my direction, the way a wife should say it. "Why does he call you a priest?" In English.

And something possesses me. I feel words forming, tumbling out in perfect order, and I am not dreaming, not remembering. I'm being born. I say, "It's his little game."

"A game?" she says. "It is his little game?"

"I'm not a priest, but a long time ago, when I came here, I was a missionary. A Mormon missionary."

"Roland Pogue." As if the two names don't fit together. "You are no longer missionary?"

"No."

"But American?"

"I don't know."

"Both of you are nagana-sleepers?"

Now I'm chuckling, like a drunk trying to untwist his tongue. "I'm not anything at the moment. I buy and sell unclaimed freight. Is that what you want to know?"

"You are making a joke?"

"Yeah. I'm making a joke."

"A Moslem cannot do such a thing. It is forbidden."

"Not Moslem, Mormon."

She considers but does not reply for a time. Finally, she says, "You steal from the dead?"

"No, His Excellency Chundai Boraka, second cousin of the Interior Minister, steals from the dead. We just get a cut for keeping the books straight and tidying up a bit."

"You are a joking man, Roland Pogue."

"Not really. Let me tell you something: a human being will do any d.a.m.n thing in the world for a nickel. I know. It's what I've come to believe. Anything to survive. And that includes me and you."

"You mock us. You mock the G.o.ds."

Without knowing her name I know what will happen. I realize now. I feel peace. I feel a tranquility that I've not felt for years, as deep and comforting as sleep. Because I remember what is happening. That soon she will turn and take me into her arms, drawing every fiber of my being into her. Like the first man who fell on his knees before the first woman and pressed his face against her and knew it was a taste of the eternal.

"Who are you?" I whisper.

And not yet turning, she tells me, "I am the G.o.ddess Phoolan."

It is a strange disease. There are times when I am content to call it reality and times when I think I will go mad without the treatment. It comes and goes. I see things. I hear voices. I doubt the world, and the world doubts me. But at this instant I am certain of one thing, that she is in my house. And one thing more. That I am awake. And yet one more. That this eternal moment is all I need. "I'm not sure I understand."

"I don't require your understanding," she says. Kneading the dough, rolling her wrists the way they do, and lifting her b.r.e.a.s.t.s to me.

"I don't think she trusts me," says Brawley.

It's afternoon. I'm saying to him, "What makes you think that?"

And he is telling me, "Because she wants you to go into the hull. Alone."

"When did she tell you that?"

"Yesterday. While you was spreadin' goodwill among the less fortunate of the earth."

"What exactly did she say?"

"She said she knew which barge it was 'cause o' the numbers on the side. That most of it was above wa'er and she'd tell you when the time was right."

"She'd tell me?"

"Right."

"I'd be going in alone?"

"Lissen to me. Lissen! You can go crazy when this's over, right? You can go to sleep. You can go native. You can go to h.e.l.l or Hi-waiee, don't n.o.body care. But I seen this much with my own eyes-are you lissenin' to me!-I seen 'em smuggle out diamonds big as your f.u.c.king 'ead. Right? Now the question is wha' are we gonna do-ask one of your pi'aninny friends to go in for you?"

"I was delivering medical supplies. Yesterday I mean. I was delivering medical supplies out at one of the squatter camps."

"Don't you go babbling off on me, Pogue, I'll smack you three days from tomorra."

"I went back to the mission for a while. I took them some supplies. That's all."

"Fine. I'm not worried about yesterday or the day before that. An' I don't mind your porkin' the missus or followin' her around like she was the Queen of the Nile, but this 'ere is business. And good enough business means we get out o' this h.e.l.lhole forever. Make a clear start."

"I'm not going inside one of those barges."

"Yesterday you was interested. Three days ago you'd dive into a sewer for a dime. Now you got scruples."

"Forget it."

"Lissen to me, Pogue. She's a thief. In this part o' the world a thief is a profession, not a crime. Survival. That's wha' we talkin' about, innit? Survival."

"I said no."