The Uttermost Parts of the Earth Page 14

  “Will that work?”

  “Shit, no. If we go in, we’ll get sucked into this mess just like everyone else has. Only worse cause we’re bigger.” She stopped pacing and asked, “Is there a restaurant in this town? Can we get something brought in?”

  Kwame sent Anatole to the Mongo. While they waited, Pilar spoke frankly about her worries: mission creep, the moral nullity of Mobutu, the impossibility of a right US policy when serious objections could be raised to every option, the chaos toward which the country was edging.

  “We hate all this,” Pilar said, “every one of us. Because we want to help these people. But if we stop the killing, we’ll have to run the country. And ethnic hatred will still be there. We all know if we go in we’ll get our asses burned.”

  Anatole and two other men returned with tilapia sandwiches and Primus beer. Kwame tipped them all. “This stuff is shit!” exclaimed Pilar. “Do you eat this way all the time?” Kwame shrugged. He would not knock Mbandaka. “What about the branch post policy?” he asked. “Does that still seem—”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. Your center should be open. We could also close it next week. We know the Mobutu era is ending. Hell, it’s over. We just don’t know what the death throes look like. Or exactly when they’ll come.” She pushed her sandwich aside and drank her Primus. “It’s a pretty good guess that there’s going to be chaos.”

  They said nothing for a time. Finally Kwame told her, “I think maybe Mason just took off. To go see his wife. You know about her?”

  “How do you know?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What business was it of yours? If you needed to know, Mason would tell you.” Pilar lit another cigarette. “Some Foreign Service wives choose to stay home.”

  “That’s all you know?”

  “That’s all. When he was assigned to Rabat, she expected to be with him. When the assignment was changed—” Pilar shrugged. “She didn’t come. That’s all I know.”

  “Did she back out of the marriage?”

  “If it’s any of your business, you better ask Mason.”

  AS THEY shook hands on the tarmac, Pilar said, “I know you’ve requested leave over Christmas.”

  “My deal with Judkins was that—”

  “Judkins left a month ago. I’m in charge until a new bossman arrives. With this place about to explode, I can’t let you have leave. I’m sorry.”

  Kwame felt as if hit by a blow. He gritted his teeth. But he merely nodded.

  “We aren’t having any luck getting an officer out here to replace you. You may be staying here for a while.”

  “How long?”

  “Could be a year.”

  As he watched the plane disappear over the jungle, Kwame said to himself, “You fuckhead! You asshole! They’ll fuck you as long as you let them.” He understood why Mason had taken off. Every night he spent with Madame Van he wondered if he really wanted to get married in Paris. Now that he couldn’t, he was certain that he did. As he drove back to town, tears of frustration swam into his eyes.

  TEN

  When Kwame had drinks late that afternoon with Odejimi and Madame Van, he was in a foul mood. “What’s the matter with you two?” the doctor asked. “Madame’s in a tizzy and you’re ready to hit someone.”

  “They canceled my Christmas leave,” Kwame said. “I was going to Europe.” He glanced at the woman. “What’s the matter, Madame?” he asked. She abruptly left the hotel terrace.

  “You better sleep with her tonight,” Odejimi said. “I don’t want her in my bed.”

  It turned out that Madame was irritated that a woman from Kinshasa had come to visit Kwame. By the time the story reached her, Pilar was a white woman of extraordinary beauty. Rumor claimed that Kwame and Pilar were seen making love in the center.

  It had been a very long time since Kwame had encountered jealousy. He had never seen Livie inflamed by the green monster. Yet here was Madame Van raging that he had paid attention to Pilar Cota. Despite his anger about the canceled leave, he could barely suppress his amusement.

  He took Madame to dinner at the Mongo. He explained that the woman who had come to see him was his boss, his “patron,” his “chef.” Madame Van frowned; Kwame was bossed by a woman? He described Pilar Cota as a kind of ogre, breastless and foul-smelling, a man in a woman’s body, a creature no man would touch.

  “How can she be your ‘chef?’ ” Madame Van asked.

  “It is our way,” Kwame said.

  She gazed at him and shook her head. When he told her that Pilar had instructed him to open the center, she begged him to give her a job there. If he employed her, he explained, he could no longer see her. See her? She did not understand. He could no longer sleep with her. Her brow clouded with confusion. He explained that in America it was not acceptable—in fact, it was a crime—for a man to sleep with a woman he employed.

  Madame Van laughed. He must be joking. Any man who gave a woman a job expected to sleep with her. Why else would he give her the job? And if a woman wanted the job, she would accommodate her boss. This was simply a condition of the employment, nothing to get excited about. She asked Kwame to promise that he would not give a job to any other woman.

  “No, I won’t,” Kwame assured her. “There’s only trouble for me in hiring a woman.”

  “Americans are strange,” Madame Van observed. She asked if it were true, as she had heard, that American women killed their babies during pregnancy. Kwame explained that American women had that right; they had won it only after a difficult struggle.

  Madame Van frowned. “The right?” she asked, clearly perplexed. Kwame nodded assent. “But why would they want that right?” Kwame realized that he could not say they wanted it in the name of freedom, to show that they were the masters of their own bodies. She would not understand that. “Why would a woman want to kill her baby?” she asked. “Here not to have a child is—” She shrugged. How could she untangle the verities of African life to an American?

  “You want babies?” Kwame asked.

  Madame Van nodded. “It is very sad that I have no babies by now.” In a whisper she admitted, “Something is wrong with me. I sleep with men, but I don’t have babies.” Kwame reached across the table to take her hand. It often worried him that he did not use contraceptives with her. The experience was better without, but it did seem irresponsible. He did not want to give her a child and then leave her. He wondered if she cared who gave her a child. She looked at him strangely. “And American women kill their babies. I will never understand Americans.”

  He asked, “Will you try to understand me?”

  Saying nothing, she reached for the fiber bag on the chair beside her, pulled away its crown, and reached inside it. “Close your eyes,” she instructed. “Open your hands.”

  Kwame watched her. What was she up to?

  “Close,” she repeated. “Open.”

  He followed her instructions. He heard her fumble in the bag. Then she placed something—he had no idea what—into his cupped hands. He opened his eyes. In his hands rested a whatsis of fur, hair, and God knew what, a magic charm, the sort of thing he had seen tied around the waists of Anatole’s children. “This will protect you from your chef,” she assured him.

  He did not know what to say.

  “Wear this and it will give you long life.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “How do I wear it?”

  She took the charm, knelt beside him, and tied it to his ankle. His impulse was to kiss her, for she was not so much protecting him as safeguarding her interest in him, shielding him from the sexual witchery of his boss. But to publicly kiss a woman in the Mongo? That would have sullied her reputation. The charm felt awkward on his ankle, but he wore it the rest of the evening.

  AFTER DINNER Kwame drove Madame out beside the river and told her—quite truthfully—that she was the most beautiful woman he had seen in Africa. She laughed. “ ‘ You cannot eat beauty,’ ” she commented. “That’s wha
t the men of my village say. ‘Beauty is no use to a woman working in my fields.’”

  Kwame was fascinated. “Tell me about your village,” he said. She shrugged and said nothing. “Tell me about yourself. I know nothing about you.” She looked at him strangely as if he were the first of the men she had been with to ask about her life, to see her as more than a diversion. “What is your village called?” he asked.

  “Bolobe,” she said. “Near Bikoro.”

  “Tell me about Bolobe. About you.”

  When she realized that he was genuinely interested in answers to his questions, she explained that she was a Mongo, of the people who inhabited this part of the Equateur. She spoke Lonkundo. Bolobe lay on the banks of Lake Tumba, south of Mbandaka. She had attended secondary school at a convent run by French nuns at Bikoro.

  “Going to secondary school: that’s unusual, isn’t it, for girls? And it must have cost. Your father must be rich.”

  “You are full of questions,” she said.

  “I want to know you,” he told her. “As more than Odejimi’s girlfriend.”

  “I am more than this doctor’s girlfriend,” she said. “I am your girlfriend.”

  As they watched the river flow past, Madame Van explained that her father was Bolobe’s teller of stories. When she was younger, he had a friend, also a storyteller, older, more experienced and richer. He helped with the school fees. In Bolobe it was the custom for people to form special, lifelong friendships and for friends to help each other. When she achieved marriageable age, her father’s storyteller friend had also become her friend. “A friend of this kind,” she said, “helps to instruct a girl in matters pertaining to marriage.”

  “You mean—”

  Madame Van smiled. Of course she meant that.

  Kwame felt a sudden, Puritan sense of outrage that this trusted friend of her father, a man certainly more than twice her age, had seduced her.

  She smiled indulgently and Kwame felt that she regarded him as very foreign, very American. “We met secretly,” she said. “I felt grown-up. Like a woman.”

  “But little is secret in a village,” Kwame said.

  “Better to learn from a man who knows such things,” she said. “I had been with boys. They knew nothing.” Kwame made no reply. After a moment she commented, “It is our way.” He nodded.

  When young men and their fathers came asking for her, the father’s friend insisted that she was too young to marry. He was a Christian, a Catholic, and arranged for her to have a place at the convent school in Bikoro. He even agreed to pay the fees. She had stayed at the school four years. In the final year when the nun in charge of the refectory fell ill, she helped the sisters run the kitchen. She ordered food, prepared menus, and cooked; she enjoyed the work, but did not know where it would lead. In her society cooks and chefs and eating place owners were men—although in his home a man never prepared food; that was a woman’s work.

  Then Vandenbroucke had appeared at the convent, a young, Catholic Belgian in his late twenties. He was seeking a wife he could take to Mbandaka. The sisters suggested several candidates; he chose her. She’d been uncertain about him and about going to Mbandaka. One of the sisters, however, was his distant cousin; she vouched for the family. Moreover, her father wanted to take a second wife and needed money. He persuaded her that Vandenbroucke represented an extraordinary opportunity.

  When her father’s friend endorsed her father’s advice, she agreed to marry the Belgian. She assumed that, as tradition required, bridewealth would be given in livestock. But Vandenbroucke offered only cash. That humiliated her; she was not being sold, after all! She objected, but her father accepted the cash, deepening her humiliation. She must be a modern woman, he told her. More and more these days cash was being offered and accepted as bridewealth. She must not take offense. She made no public objection and was married to Vandenbroucke.

  “He took you to Europe?”

  She smiled. “I wanted so much to see it. I studied about it at the convent. Van took me there to live with him.”

  Kwame wondered if this were true. Odejimi had termed the trip Vandenbroucke’s farewell gift to her. He also claimed that Vandenbroucke had passed her around. That seemed not to be true. “You didn’t like Belgium? Was that the problem?”

  “His family objected.” She shrugged. “I could have lived in Brussels. There were many Congolese.”

  “And in Flanders. Could you—”

  “Not with people like his family.” They smiled together. She went on, “It’s different from here, you know. I was always cold. The air smelled bad. They call it—pollution?” Kwame nodded. “The food had no taste. And the noise. Always, always noise, never silence.” She put a finger on Kwame’s lips. For a moment they listened to the silence. “And it was so crowded. Everywhere you looked—”

  “White people,” Kwame said.

  She laughed. “When they looked at me, they saw only black.”

  “Not beautiful. That’s what I see.”

  “Now and then a man saw something. If he had money, he would whisper, ‘Let me take you to a hotel.’ If he had no money, he would grab my arm and pull me toward an alley. ‘Come in here with me,’ he’d say. ‘I’ll make you happy.’”

  Kwame observed, “Men are men.” Madame shrugged ironically. “I’m sorry.”

  “When Van’s brother came to put me on the plane, it was the same thing. It was hard for him to ask, but he did. ‘Will you show me why my brother is so fond of you?’”

  “At least it was graceful.”

  “He was sweet. So young. Embarrassed by the way his mother and sisters treated me. I kissed him out of gratitude. That’s when he looked at me so shyly and asked. So eager for me.”

  “You weren’t offended?”

  She shook her head, remembering the difficulty the brother had getting those words out. “I couldn’t help liking him,” she admitted. “And I needed a friend. If I’d suggested it, he would have come to the Congo with me. Instead I kissed him.”

  “Lucky him.”

  “He spent two nights with me.” She gazed at Kwame for a long moment, put her hand on his cheek, and drew a line there with her finger. She no longer wanted to talk about Belgium. “Tell me,” she said. “Are there villages in America? Where do your people come from?”

  “Originally from Africa,” Kwame told her. He did not know precisely where, would never know. They had been enslaved; he did not know under what circumstances. From what he had been told, his people were always in the northern part of the United States. They had never been plantation slaves. “That is very important to my mother,” he said. “She always insists that we are people of the mind. The BaBrainy.” Madame Van laughed. Kwame felt witty and pleased that she had gotten his joke. She seemed more attractive than ever.

  Holding her, her back against his chest, Kwame had an impulse to kiss her. It was the same impulse he had often felt with Livie. The difference was that Livie would have shared the impulse and would have expected to be kissed. Madame Van did not expect a kiss and, as he held her, did not seem totally relaxed. He told her once more how beautiful she was. “In America,” he said, “a man eats a woman’s beauty—with his soul. A beautiful woman never has to work in a field. She has others do that kind of work for her.”

  When he took her to his room, he wooed her with more compliments. He untied the charm and placed it carefully in the ashtray beside his bed. He forgot his anger that he would not be marrying Livie at Christmas. They made long, slow love in the night and when he brought her to a climax, she cried.

  To Kwame’s surprise he was moved. He held her gently and the thought occurred to him that he would like to have a child with Madame Van. He would like to be the man to give her the gift of full womanhood among her people. His male vanity would be pleased that his Power Loins had done what no others had managed.

  Then he thought, what! These ideas startled him. Where had they come from? They were not his! He did not want a child. Not now. Certain
ly not with Madame Van! She was just a toy he shared with Odejimi. He did not want to leave a child behind in Africa.

  THE NEXT morning Kwame tried to telephone Livie. He could not get through. He felt oddly relieved that nothing in the middle of nowhere seemed to work. He cabled Livie: “Leave denied. Impossible phone you. Letter follows. I love you.”

  Kwame began a letter to Livie about Pilar’s denial of his leave and the panic she manifested over growing American involvement in the chaos at the Lakes. The words read like a report; they conveyed little emotion even when he felt it, when he expressed regret and frustration that they would not be marrying at Christmas. He wondered if this lack of emotion would raise a question in her mind: Had he found a woman in Africa?

  KWAME TOLD the Badekas about Pilar Cota’s instruction that he open the center. He asked if they could recommend a student to serve as a library assistant. He would open the center provisionally at first, he said, from three to five in the afternoons. It was a time when a student could learn the work without compromising his education. The Badekas suggested several candidates. Kwame remembered one from the lecture he had given about Camara Laye and Théa called him out of class.

  Kwame interviewed Lofale. He explained the work: enrolling members into the library, checking out books and making sure they came back; showing one video documentary every afternoon in a room where Kwame would set up a video monitor and some chairs. Kwame himself would introduce the films. Once Lofale became familiar with them, he could introduce them himself. The young man seemed overjoyed at the prospect of a job. Kwame hired him. Immensely proud to be employed at the American center, the young man began his work.

  Good to his promise to Pilar, Kwame had the center open by the end of the week.

  KWAME SPENT most of the following Monday at the post office trying to get through by telephone to Pilar Cota in Kinshasa. Late in the day he succeeded. She was just leaving for a cocktail party. “I’m calling to tell you the center’s open,” he reported.