Rogue's March (33 page)

In the courtyard outside the window four small boys were kicking a loose cotton wad back and forth against the wall. The sunlight touched the yellowing thumb-worn pages of the old Gallimard paperback edition of Camus, and he pushed it forward into the shadows. Two pages were missing, like the front cover, and he'd lost the narrative thread. He frowned and dropped his chin closer to the text. In the dark eyebrow above his right lid was a sickle-shaped scar which curled to the hairline, the result of a soccer match on a stone and glass-filled clay lot.

The cloth ball had flopped into a mud puddle, no longer usable, and the small boys were now flinging it against the building, shrieking from just below the window. Crispin lifted himself out of his chair, seized the sill, and pulled himself forward. “Get out of here!
Go on
! Get out—
out
!”

The boys fled across the clay yard and he sat down again, picking at the crust of manioc in the bottom of the bowl, but he'd again lost the thread. He pushed the book and bowl away abruptly, took his dirty towel from the foot of the bed, and went down the passageway and into the sunlit courtyard.

He shoved his way through the gaggle of women gathering at the faucet with their pails, bottles, and pans, gossiping idly as they waited in line. Two younger women with black babies hanging from their shoulders like marmosets were at the faucet. Crispin pushed through them, bent over, and rubbed his face and hair with cold water, then splashed his chest and arms.

A middle-aged woman in a dark, filthy cotton
wax
watched him cunningly, head cocked, picking her teeth with a straw, her plastic pail at her feet.

“What are you looking at, old grandmother?”

She clucked to herself, removed the straw, and told the other women he'd been hiding in his room for days, like Kimbi the basket maker, except for a different reason. The wife of his cousin Kalemba, the postal clerk, fed him each day like one of her five children. The woman leaned forward, sucking rapidly with her lips, eyes closed like a suckling child, as she told Crispin to climb onto her shoulders and hang there like one of her infant grandchildren.

“Green mamba.” A young woman laughed, holding a naked child on her cocked hip.

“Listen, mama,” Crispin cried, pointing to the older woman. “I saw you burning your son's green uniform. I saw you!”

She laughed. “They're coming to get you,” she told him, pointing across the compound toward the wooden door opening into a back alley of Malunga. “N'Sika's soldiers. Coming through the wall. Mamba.” She clucked contemptuously. “Mamba.
Ntoka
. Green serpent.”

Crispin hadn't left the compound for days, hiding in his room since that evening he'd returned from the soccer game to find the party headquarters in flames.

“Mamba!
Ntoka
! Green mamba!” two small boys shrieked as they followed him back across the yard, lifting their knees like soldiers, voices raised in those cries of derision that followed the
jeunesse
through the lanes of Malunga, but only after they were out of sight: “
Ntoka
! Green serpent!”

He turned savagely, but they bolted and fled in opposite directions like frightened pullets.

Inside his room he pulled the green twill uniform of the
jeunesse
from beneath the pallet, searched the flap pockets for cigarettes, found none, and flung it under the bed. He sank down at the table again, swept the paperback aside, and took a ten-franc copybook from the table drawer. His name was carefully printed on the cover:
CRISPIN MONGOY.
On each inside page he had entered chapter headings, usually in the form of questions that had occurred to him while reading Franz Fanon, Nkrumah, or Lenin: “What is the Revolution?” “How is it Won?” “What is Discipline?” “What is the Bantu Proletariat?” “What is the Bantu Bourgeoisie?”

Under the chapter headings he had entered those thoughts that had occurred to him as he was walking the lanes of Malunga, as he sat selling Kimbi's baskets in the
grand marché
and the Ivory Market, or as he sat here at this table night after night long after the lamps were extinguished. “You are the Revolution,” he had written under the first entry. A dozen or so lines preceding it had been scratched out; only this sentence had satisfied him. He had added to it as the months passed: “You are the Revolution—your skin, your hopelessness, your anger, your pride, your humiliation!”

The words had excited him when he'd first discovered them. They excited him now.

The notebook had been his conscience and mentor, born of necessity. The party meetings and debates left him confused and tongue-tied, humiliated by his lack of education. His lack of education hadn't been an embarrassment when he'd been a well-known player with the local soccer team, a sure candidate for the national team if a torn Achilles tendon hadn't ended his career. He was recruited to the party
jeunesse
at a time when his life seemed over, assigned to the disciplinary brigades not for his scholarship or mental ability but for his popularity and leadership. He'd transferred to the party the hunger for recognition that once nourished his soccer ambitions. Daydreaming about his success and that of the party, his fantasies continued to define themselves in the regalia of his old soccer days—the party triumphant; Crispin and his colleagues ascending the victor's box at the stadium to be acclaimed by a wildly grateful nation; Crispin in cleated shoes, leg stockings, and shorts, holding a soccer ball.

He knew how immature were these fantasies which one day would expose him to ridicule before those far better educated than he, clever in ways he wasn't. As he succeeded in the party, he would be expected to make speeches, chair meetings with members far more agile than he, and prepare programs for younger members with secondary school degrees. The notebook had been his tutor.

His first speech had come a month earlier, after he was chosen deputy chief of the disciplinary brigade. He spoke to an incoming group on party discipline and social responsibility. He'd drawn upon his notebook for his remarks, but his delivery had been faltering, his phrase-making lacking any larger intellectual context, his embarrassment evident.

After the larger meeting, a private critique was held in the party committee room. Dr. Bizenga, the party ideologue and deputy, chaired the critique, flanked by the
jeunesse
executive secretariat, most of them university undergraduates who disdained the green twill of the disciplinary cadres.

Dr. Bizenga was critical of the speech in a lengthy discourse of his own, employing the same poisonous epithets of which he was so fond and which made his monthly address to the assembled party plenary so obscure—“oligarchic parasitism, monopolistic capitalistic combines, obscurantist revanchism.”

Pierre Masakita, who had wandered in searching for the party librarian, was intrigued by Dr. Bizenga's remarks, and sat down to listen. The
jeunesse
secretary gave him a copy of Crispin's speech. Bizenga told the group that Crispin's speech was amateurish. What was its origin—
vanity
? A wounded vanity? Bitter, yes, but the social conscience was still embryonic, now punishing words in place of a leather ball. Perhaps it was what might be expected from an ex-soccer player. A wounded vanity had little to do with the struggle for political, social, and economic justice.

“I think it's a good speech,” Masakita had disagreed. “Vanity is useful. Even humiliation is a revolutionary impulse, isn't it? Who said that. Marx, I think. What matters is strong roots, not the soil that nourished them. So humiliation can make strong roots too. No, I think Mongoy has made a good beginning.”

Dr. Bizenga disagreed violently and launched into another tirade as Masakita listened patiently.

“Well, it's not my business,” he said finally, “but you have to be careful about these speeches of yours—careful that your words don't become an end in themselves. Otherwise they'll soon be bought up by the bourgeois press, by the broadsheets where salon intellectuals purge their literary consciences.” He seemed to be smiling as he spoke, but Dr. Bizenga wasn't amused. “But the end of humiliation isn't words,” Masakita continued. “It's action, social action. ‘Clowns, they chase after words!' Who said that?” He looked at the students who sat at the table with Bizenga. “Was it Lenin? Possibly. But that's not important either, identifying authorship. Does the fact that it was Lenin make it any more true? No, of course not. Pedantry becomes an end in itself, doesn't it?—like words? No, I think it was a useful speech, and I'm sure Mongoy has learned from it.”

After Masakita had left, Dr. Bizenga had again disagreed. As an ex-soccer player, Crispin had understood.

But now Masakita had disappeared along with Dr. Bizenga. Many of his friends were dead. Had he found a gun too, he would have joined them, fought as they fought, and won his martyrdom in the streets of Malunga as they had won theirs. In the bottom of his tin suitcase under the bed was a small nickel-plated Belgian revolver he'd bought from a young boy in the Ivory Market, a pursesnatcher, to add to the cache of small arms concealed at the compound; but even if he'd had it with him, it would have been of little use. Only four rusty cartridges were in the chamber.

He felt physically ill, denied first the heroism of dying in Malunga and now denied his future as well. For a second time his life had been taken from him. This afternoon, N'Sika would speak in Martyr's Square. The captured
jeunesse
and their guns would be shown to the nation.

It was almost noon, and the heat beyond the window was hellish, the yard nearly empty. Flies drifted out of the scalding light of the dusty courtyard and into the hot shadows. In the deathless, sterile silence, his despair knew no bounds: body and mind floated free. The universe floated like dust around him; the thin, weak life-giving aromas of cooking manioc and rice that stirred from the dark doorways where the midday meals were being prepared made him giddy and nauseated.

He peeled off his shirt and went out to the courtyard again weak with vertigo, to bend to the faucet to drink, and then to slap his body alive with cold water.

As he returned, an old woman stirred indolently through the heat to gather up the clothes that had been spread to dry in the sun over a small leafless shrub near Kalemba's door. She was chewing on a piece of goat meat, isolating the fatty gristle as she chewed without touching it.

He looked at her with loathing. She spat the meat into her hand. “Is the green mamba changing its skin to a fish?” she asked, looking at his wet shoulders and face—“to a strong wet fish,
mbisi makasi
?”

“One day you will talk the gold out of your teeth, old grandmother. Why do you eat my feet like this?”

In his room he changed into a clean shirt, slipped into a pair of rubber thongs, pulled a pair of sunglasses on, and went down the corridor to the room of Kimbi, the basket maker. Kimbi sat as he always sat in the darkened room, his back to the door, facing the gauze-covered window, the powerful stump of his body rising from the burlap mound, his strong fingers weaving the mats, baskets, and imitation tribal masks which vendors bought from him to sell in the tourist markets. Next to the burlap mound was the wooden dolly on which Kimbi sat when he left his dark room, his weaver's hands protected from the gravel, concrete, and laterite by a pair of rubber pads cut from old automobile tires.

He only left the room at night. The same lorry accident that had amputated his legs had taken away his face. The flaming gasoline had left only the skull, the bone covered by the sheerest membrane of pink flesh and scar tissue. The stubs of his teeth stuck out at odd angles, like stumps in a burned-out field.

Kimbi didn't turn as Crispin entered. His hands stopped. He waited as Crispin took a few baskets and mats from the rear wall, reached behind him to take the numbered scraps of newspaper that Crispin pulled from each item, and didn't move again until the door had closed.

The old woman laughed as she watched Crispin, the ex-soccer player and
jeunesse
militant, carrying the baskets across the yard like any girl or old woman, off to the Ivory Market near the foreign embassies to sell his wares to the tourists and
flamands
.

“
Mbisi
!” the old woman called. “Don't let the fishermen catch you!”

In the gathering dusk thousands gathered in Martyr's Square under a sickle moon, some carrying placards and banners, others with wares to sell, like Crispin, but all of them eager and restless. The soldiers came first in trucks and weapons carriers. The speed and recklessness of their arrival terrified those close to the barricades near the wooden platform in the center of the square. They surged away, pressing wildly against those who were crowding forward, many of them clapping their hands rhythmically, urged forward by the paid political hucksters who moved through the throng. The soldiers restored order with their gun butts.

The motorcycle brigade followed the trucks, gliding eerily through the dusk without sirens, lights on. Military officers emerged from the sedans and dispersed themselves along the platform, but only a single figure climbed the steps and stood in the glare of the strobe lights, his voice amplified a hundredfold by the sound trucks which surrounded the open square and sent it reverberating far into the dark streets and boulevards.

He spoke in Lingala, not French. The crowd throbbed and chattered, straining from the rear ranks to better see the distant lonely figure who confronted them. The voice brought him closer:

“… learning of the insurrection in Malunga, we went to the President, who'd locked himself away in the palace with his lackeys, terrified of the news that the
jeunesse
had guns, but even more terrified of what the poor wretches in Malunga might do, those whose daily companions weren't guns but misery and deprivation. So what did we find? A President terrified by the misery of his own people …”