Lost Worlds Page 4

  “Is it always as hot as this?”

  “Tout le temps, man. All the time.”

  I shifted position to get a little more of the night breeze. The engine vibrations from the main boat ran through the metal deck and made my backside tingle. At least there were no mosquitoes up here. The breeze kept them away.

  A row broke out farther down the deck. One of the merchants from the dark alleys below stormed up the steep iron steps and across the warm metal plates pocked with rivets, scattering gamblers, knocking over one of those interminable boomboxes (and killing it, I think—or at least the Bob Marley reggae racket ceased abruptly), and stomping right up to a small wizened man wrapped in a grubby cotton cloak. He had been huddled with his wife, two children, and three baby goats, sipping a beer. The tirade was in that strange lingua-franca which seems to be the only way, other than the “lingala” river language, that the two-hundred-plus tribes of Zaire have found to communicate with each other.

  The merchant’s brawlings and cursings momentarily silenced the carnival-mood passengers. Dancers stopped, more boomboxes were turned down, and swigging ceased. Distractions of any kind were always welcome up here. Eight days of ceaseless travel is a long time and a good fight or shouting match was just the thing to break the beer-boozed, marijuana-mellowed monotony.

  Although I have a reasonable grasp of French as spoken in France, I have a hard time with its ethnic derivatives, Creole-inspired or otherwise. I couldn’t understand a word of the merchant’s roar, but it seemed to have little impact on the old man. He merely lowered his head and disappeared deeper into his grubby cloak. There were sniggers and giggles. The merchant was obviously losing this particular battle—and losing face too. In desperation he seized one of the man’s baby goats, raised it high above his head like a scimitar, paused to shout one more string of invectives at the old man, and threw the squealing creature overboard.

  The giggles ceased. The closest thing to utter silence reigned on the deck. No one moved for a few seconds and then there was a sudden rush to the side to see what had happened to the poor kid. I stood too and could see it in the boat lights, struggling gamely against the waves made by the prow, making for the now invisible shore at least a mile away. Surely it would never arrive. The creature seemed barely weaned. What a lousy thing to do.

  I was tempted to grapple with the merchant (Oh, when will I learn to mind my own business?) but he vanished in the surge of bodies, doubtless returning to the sweaty sanctuary of his metal-box “store” below. The old man still sat immobile, head down in his cloak. His wife looked miserable but seemed to accept the incident as some kind of just punishment for sins I couldn’t fathom. Only the children cried—both of them—tears pouring down their faces as they held the remaining two baby goats close to their thin bodies.

  I remembered a line from Naipaul again: “It was unnerving, the depth of that African rage, the wish to destroy, regardless of the consequences.”

  Two minutes later the whole incident was forgotten. Music blared again, bottles chinked, card games recommenced, and my compatriots returned to their interrogation.

  “Where in America you are from?” asked one of them.

  “Didn’t you see that?” I was outraged at all the nonchalance. “Didn’t you see what that guy just did?”

  Tolerant smiles and shrugs from my group. “Wait until the murders come,” murmured the man who had originally invited me over.

  “Murders—what murders?”

  “Aha, mon ami bon—these boats are very strange. Many things happen. It is a long way to Kisangani, over twelve hundred kilometers.”

  More giggles and shrugs. “Have another beer.”

  “No, no, thanks. I have to get back to my cabin. I’ll see you later. Maybe.”

  David in retreat. Not a happy sight. Not a happy man. Sensing a secret world here. Who knows what vendettas and feuds and drug-crazed attacks—even murders—might plague this floating Dante’s Inferno of three thousand hot, hungry, harassed—and drunk—citoyens.

  I needed rest!

  Only I didn’t get much. My stuffy, smelly cabin was now occupied by three other gentlemen, all large, all snoring and farting like flatulent hippos. I lay on my bunk, watched the largest cockroaches I’ve ever seen anywhere skitter across the floor in search of nighttime snacks. I stuck cotton wool in my ears and prayed for sleep. In the end I gave up and went outside onto the open passageway, lay down on the warm metal, and dozed fitfully, wafted by cool breezes which, once again, kept the mosquitoes away.

  Dreams came. Strange dreams of snakes. Huge liquid snakes with hundreds of glinting silver eyes. Possibly sparked by those lines from Conrad about his Congo (now Zaire) River:

  [It is] an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land.

  The name of the river and the country stems from a phonetic Portuguese mangling of the ancient Bantu language word rizadi, meaning “the great river that devours all rivers.”

  How appropriate. In my dreams I felt I was being devoured in the snakelike river itself. Things tumbled by in the churn, wash, and drag of the current—bodies horribly mutilated, bits of bodies, baroque curlicues of blood and gore, cows, decapitated crocodiles, creatures all encrusted in black burned skin like those “smoked” monkeys, bats, and tree squirrels, enormous fish heads with open mouths and teeth that flashed like scimitars, and, of course, poor struggling baby goats, bleating, shrieking in the surge of that endless river of my dreams….

  It was not a pleasant night.

  Morning came, not in the quiet purplings and pinks and slow tangerines one might expect, but in another jarring riot of churning bodies and screams and shouts.

  Scores of lithe, virtually naked men and youths were teeming up vine ropes and over the side of the barges like some kind of Hollywood-staged pirate invasion. What the hell was happening now?

  The other passengers were less surprised. Many had pulled out their folding seats and were enjoying a grandstand view of our slow passage by a small riverside town. High above on the bluffs I could see a church tower (vague echoes of hymns wafting through the thick air), faded pastel buildings, and three once-ornate but now-overgrown European-style mansions. Lower down a straggle of thatch and bamboo shacks stretched along the ocher-earth bank in both directions, before fading into the jungly scrub.

  The locals were out in their tree-trunk-adzed pirogues—dozens of them—all vying for positions close to the barges to allow their occupants to clamber on board with their trading bundles of trussed cocks and geese, turtles, huge manganza and catfish, crocodile tails, sacks of writhing live grubs, baskets of flailing eels, huge branches of bananas, bags of manioc and maize.

  Chaos once again: bodies tumbling into the water, pirogues overturning in the wash of our floating monolithic boat, their occupants cursing, laughing, yelling, and still managing to scramble onto the barges with their bundles.

  So this was how it worked. The merchants on the boat not only sold and traded with its passengers, but also with the occupants of river towns and villages as we moved slowly upriver. Smoked meats and fish and fruit exchanged for incense, baskets, blankets, beer, cassettes, and all the other junk heaped down below in the barges. A movable market. Rampant capitalism released in this vast nothingness. A Milton Freidman frenzy of barter and banter. Goods and money changing hands at a Hong Kong pace as the piroguistes tried to complete their transactions before the boat moved higher up the river into unfamiliar water, by which time they stood a good chance of losing their pirogues in the turbulent wake or having them (and themselves) crushed against the barges or ground into one of those insidious sandbanks that plague this ever-changing river.

  I struggled through the confusion of bodies to get closer to the action.

  The merchants were pure money machines now, fever-faced and slit-eyed—bargaining with Levantine dexterity, spraying handfuls of filthy bank notes like confetti, making
the villagers fight and grovel for attention, scything the piroguistes’ expectations of fair deals to panic-selling levels. Others were trading directly from their boats, hoisting up dripping gutted fish and clutching at the fluttering money tossed overboard, money which in a month or two would be almost worthless in inflation-wracked Zaire.

  On shore stood their wives and children, waving, cheering them on like spectators at a ball game, screaming encouragement—faster, faster! More, more! Shouts, curses, violent but brief arguments, spittings, fist waving, people tumbling on the slippery decks slick with fish scales.

  I watched one small boy—an apprentice piroguiste—trying to maneuver his thin and very wobbly craft between the others and shouting at the merchants to attract their attention. In his left hand he held three curled and crisp-smoked monkeys threaded on a rope. No one had noticed him and our boat was moving away from him, huge diesels churning the muddy water behind us, whistles blasting. Ever more frantically he waved his meager offering. I shouted at one of the merchants nearby and pointed to the little boy. He had just completed what looked like a highly lucrative deal and, a minor miracle, I saw him smile and gesture to the boy, who paddled his pirogue furiously to catch up with us and then hurled his blackened bundle at the outstretched hands of the merchant.

  It missed.

  It hit the side of the barge below the rail with a sad little bump and fell down into the churning water below.

  The look of despair on the boy’s face sliced right through my gut. His only trading item lost—and possibly on his first venture out into this wrenching, slit-throat man’s world where nimble hands and nimble brains were vital to success.

  The merchant laughed, shrugged, and began to turn away. But then—surprise—that hard-bitten, money-driven man stuck a grubby hand deep into a trouser pocket, pulled out a few notes, rolled them into a ball, and threw them like a major-league pitcher right into the boy’s hands. Then he smiled, waved, and vanished into the madness.

  The boy did the nearest thing to a jig that you can do in a pirogue, waved at me and the already-vanished merchant, and paddled frantically back to shore. Two little girls, maybe his sisters, came rushing down to greet him and ogle at the fistful of cash he carried with him proudly up the red sand beach.

  We were passing an island and the captain was steering a little too close to shore. A few of the pirogues became caught on roots and snags. Panic set in. Bodies leaping off the barges, splashing in the water between the pirogues. More swampings, more cursings and laughter. A few hardy men tried to keep up with us and make last-second deals, flailing frantically with their long paddle-poles, but soon they too dropped behind as our boat creaked and groaned out into the main channel again, back into the breezes, back into the limbo land of this vast and mysterious river.

  The hours slid by. The river widened, eight or nine miles now from bank to bank.

  I passed the time reading and sketching and even trying one of the meals in the restaurant for first-class passengers—an odd and tasteless concoction of manioc, beans, and old unsalted meatballs made of unidentifiable meat. I decided to stick to the snacks so lavishly displayed and cooked on the little stands down in the bazaars and decks of the barges. As a result I am now a still-living connoisseur of crisp-roasted caterpillars, sliced crocodile tail, monkey casserole, catfish stew, conchlike snails served with liquid fire, aka pepper sauce, and curried beetle grubs (not to mention tidbits of half a dozen or more smoked jungle creatures).

  In the scourge of afternoon heat people slept under tarpaulin canopies and anywhere else they could find shade. The river was misty, sheened in a humid haze, through which the sun was a silver shimmering blur leaching the color from the scene.

  I rarely went to my cabin. It was far too hot during the day and full of unwashed, rumbling bodies at night. I preferred the gangway, where I could follow the shadows, doze a little, smell the burning wood from the always-active barbecues, capture a breeze or two, and even imagine I heard drums—distant and echoing—from the line of jungled shore on the far horizon.

  Occasionally I’d spot a crocodile or a floating log—it was hard to tell the difference. At one point, as we followed a channel marked by more floating mats of water hyacinths (usually evidence of adequate river depth and lack of sneaky sandbars) I saw four large mounded creatures wallowing in the shallows by a river island. I had misplaced my binoculars and in the zoom lens of my camera it was hard to distinguish their shapes. I think they were hippos.

  Even in the sudden downpours that came out of nowhere in the middle of the afternoons I managed to stay outdoors under the broad canopies of the boat’s superstructure. The rain thrashed and pounded the river into submissive flatness and carried in it the smell of fires and wet earth and rotting jungle.

  As evening closed in, the earthy aromas were more intense and the breezes fresher. Then came the night (that all too quick transition from dusk to darkness one always experiences on the equator), with yet another surge of disco music and fights and dancing and boozing and all the other more illicit activities deep down in the subterranean dankness of the barge bottoms, where people sat and gambled and fought and loved and slept on tiny rectangles of straw matting. Our huge spotlights attracted brilliant flashing streams of moths and flying insects like endless fireworks displays.

  Thunder rumbled in the distance and surges of sheet lightning flashed across the silent jungle shores, reflected in the dark waters.

  And then the dawns. Those slow cool dawns, as we eased up the still river, bathed in winey morning air, watching the striations of color push away the stars and the Africa-black night and bathe the boat and its sleepy-eyed occupants in liquid essences of gold and amber and lemon before the first smack of heat and the beginning of another long day. Edging ever deeper into the heart of darkness….

  Life on the boat, at least on our section of the main boat, settled into a series of lazy reveries. Occasionally Paul and I would meet and chat and introduce ourselves to other passengers. But for long periods I just sat and watched the slow brown-silver river, sometimes broad and vast as a desert, sometimes broken in a filigree of channels between mud-shore islands. Except for the occasional fisherman and his family living in straw huts shaded by palms, bamboo, and papyrus fronds, the islands were devoid of visible life. Torrents of sounds came from their jungled depths, particularly in the evening, but I rarely saw any of the sound makers. Like so much in this vast country, they were invisible—their presence indicated more by suggestion than perception.

  The journey eased on, days slipping into nights and slowly into days again. The heat was still merciless, but I’d found ways to alleviate its impact—sleeping, moving around to find choice, shady places fanned by river breezes, dousing myself regularly in water and letting it evaporate slowly, or, when really necessary, uplifting my mood with a glass of almost lethal “Whiskey-Zairois,” whose moonshine contents I can only guess at. Sex had been offered me in a multitude of variations but not accepted. How could any sane individual consider hearty couplings in this torpor? A slow, gentle Thai-style massage maybe, after a cold shower—but no one thought to offer that.

  I should have known all this calm and languor was too good to be true.

  The unpleasantness began innocently enough one afternoon as we passed a series of small fishing villages beyond Mbandaka. We were cruising calmly up the western side of the river quite close to the bank. Drums echoed occasionally in the forest—an ancient system for indicating the progress of the boat to piroguistes farther upstream. I was doodling rather ineffective sketches on a pad stained with beer and sweat.

  A thin, weasely-faced man, perhaps in his mid-forties, with a skin the color of cold cappuccino, edged up the long, open veranda near my cabin. There was something officious about him, tinged with an undoubted penchant for forelock pulling in the presence of appointed superiors. His dress was innocuous enough. He wore a rather grubby white shirt, pink tie, creased gray trousers stained at the cuffs, and plastic, imi
tation-leather shoes. His smile, when I looked up and nodded a good afternoon, was exactly what I thought it would be—tight and false. In fact, downright unpleasant. The very epitome of Uriah Heepishness.

  “Parlez-vous Français, monsieur?”

  “A little, yes—but I prefer English.”

  “Ah—I am not so good by my English.”

  “Ah.”

  I was hoping that might be the end of our little chat. Rarely do I take such an instant dislike to newly met individuals, but this particular one exuded mistrust and guile.

  “J’pense que—I am sorry—I will try the English…. I see that you are artist.”

  “I’m sketching—yes.”

  “Ah—yes, artisting.”

  I smiled. His new word had an amusing ring to it. Unfortunately, he took my smile for encouragement and crept closer (I mean really crept, as if he sensed that at any second I might take a swing at him with my pencil).

  Then he was peering over my shoulder.

  “Ah, les villages—the villages. Yes.”

  He began a flurry of noddings. Either that or he had a very bad attack of the tics.

  “You are very good, monsieur. Your artisting—c’est trés bonne!”

  “Thank you.”

  “You have many like this?”

  “Quite a few, yes.” Looking back, I should have shut the sketchbook and shut myself up too. But instead I flicked through a few of my other quick doodles, including a few I’d done when we were invaded at that little town with all the pirogues.

  “Ah, yes. You have many. Very good.”

  He stood—or rather stooped—for a while and was silent. When he started up again I could have sworn he almost reached up to pull his forelock.

  “I am sorry to interrupt you.”

  “No, no—that’s fine.”

  “Excuse me, monsieur, but do you have a beer?”