Sunrise with Seamonsters (5 page)

"This is your friend?" asked the Somali girl in Swahili.

The Watusi next to her ignored the question. He turned to me, "
C'est ma fille, Habiba
." When I looked at the girl he said in Swahili, "Yes, my friend Paul—
rafiki wangu.
"

"
Très jolie,
" I said, and in English, "Where'd you find her?"

"
Sur la rue!
" He laughed.

For the rest of the evening we spoke in three languages, and when Habiba's friend, Fatma the Arab, joined us the girls spoke their own mixture of Swahili and Arabic. Gestures also became necessary.

I did not know the Watusi boy well. We had spoken together, our French was equally bad, but it was interlarded with enough Swahili and English for us to understand each other. And that was a strange enough
patois
to create a bewildered silence around us in the bar. I knew he was from Burundi; he claimed a vague royal connection—that was one of the first things he had told me. I had bought him a drink. His name was Jean. His surname had seven syllables.

He leaned over. "She has a sister," he said.

At six o'clock we drove to the Somali section of town, a slum like all the sections inhabited by refugees. Even the moneyed refugees—the fugitive
bhang
peddlers, the smugglers—seemed to prefer the anonymity of slums. Habiba's sister came out. She was tall, wearing a veil and silk trousers, but with that sable grace—long-necked, eyes darting over the veil, thin, finely made hands, a jewel in her nostril—that makes Somali women the most desired in Africa. Jean talked to her in Swahili. I smoked and looked around.

There were about a dozen Somali families in this compound of cement sheds; they leaned against the walls, talked in groups, sat in the deep mud ruts that coursed through the yard, eroded in the last rain. Some men at the windows of the sheds sent little boys over to beg from us. We refused to give them any money, but one begged a cigarette from me which he quickly passed to a tough-looking man who squatted in a doorway.

Habiba came back to the car and said it was impossible for her sister to come with us. The men would be angry. The Somali men, forced by the curfew to meander about the yard of their compound, the ones sending little boys to beg from us and chewing the stems of a green narcotic weed (the style was the hillbilly's, but the result was delirium)—those refugees with nothing to do and nowhere to go might lose their tempers and kill us if they saw two of their girls leaving with strangers. They could easily
block the drive that led out of the compound; they would have had no trouble stopping our car and beating us. They had nothing to lose. Besides, they were within their rights to stop us. Habiba had a husband, now on a trip (she said) upcountry; technically these other Somali men were her guardians until her husband returned. Two dead men found in a drain. It would not have been a very strange sight. Corpses turned up regularly as the curfew was lifted each morning.

Habiba got into the car and we drove away. I expected a brick to be tossed through the back window, but nothing happened. Several men glared at us; some little boys shouted what could only have been obscenities.

Take a left, take a right, down this street, left again, chattered Habiba in Swahili. I drove slowly; she pointed to a ramshackle cement house with a wooden verandah pocked by woodworm and almost entirely rotted at the base. Some half-caste children were playing nearby, chasing each other. The racial mixtures were apparent: Arab-African, Indian-Somali, white-Arab. The texture of the hair told, the blotched skin; the half-African children had heavy, colorless lips. We entered the house and sat in a cluttered front room. There were pictures on the walls, film stars, a calendar in Arabic, and other calendar pictures of huntsmen in riding gear and stiff squarish dogs. And there was a picture of the ruler whose palace had been attacked. No one knew whether he had been shot or managed to escape.

Some half-castes and Arabs drifted in and out of a back room to look at us, the visitors, and finally Fatma came. She was unlike Habiba, not ugly, but small, tired-looking and—the word occurred to me as I looked at her in that cluttered front room—dry. Habiba was very black, with a sharp nose, large, soft eyes and long, shapely legs; Fatma was small, ageless in a shrivelled way, with frizzed hair and one foreshortened leg which made her limp slightly. Her eyes were weary with lines; she could have been young and yet she seemed to have no age. She was cautious—now seated and carefully smoothing her silk wrappings, not out of coyness but out of the damaged reflex of pride that comes with generations of poverty. Even the small children in that room looked as concerned as little old men. I felt like a refugee myself who, moving from slum to slum, took care in an aimless, pointless way. Fatma offered us tea.

At that moment I changed my seat. I moved into a chair with my back to the wall. I know why I did it: I was sitting in front of a window and I had the feeling that I was going to be shot in the back of the head by a stray bullet. During the curfew there was always gunfire in Kampala. That was four years ago, and in Africa, but I am still uneasy sitting near windows.

"No time for tea," Jean said in Swahili. He pointed to his watch and said, "Curfew starts right now."

Fatma left the room and Jean nudged me. "That girl," he said in English, "I support her."

"
Comment?
"

"
La fille est supportable, non?
"

We had only fifteen minutes to get back. We drove immediately to a shop and bought some food and a case of beer, then hurried back to my apartment and locked ourselves in. It was precisely seven when we started drinking. The girls, although Moslems, also drank. They said they could drink alcohol "except during prayers".

As time passed the conversation lapsed and there was only an occasional gulp to break the silence. We had run through their life stories very quickly. Habiba was eighteen, born in Somalia. She came to Uganda because of the border war with Kenya which prevented her from living in her own district or migrating to Kenya where she was an enemy. She married in Kampala. Her husband was away most of the time; in the Congo, she thought, but she was not sure. Fatma's parents were dead, she was twenty-two, not married. She was from Mombasa but liked Kampala because as she said, it was green. The rest of the conversation was a whispered mixture of Arabic and Swahili which the girls spoke, and the French-English-Swahili which Jean and I spoke. Once we turned on the radio and got Radio Rwanda. Jean insisted on switching it off because the commentator was speaking the language of the Bahutu, who were formerly the slaves of Jean's tribe. That tribal war, that massacre, that curfew had been in 1963.

Jean told me what ugly swine the Bahutu were and how he could not stand any Bantu tribe. He squashed his nose with his palm and imitated what I presumed to be a Hutu speaking. He said, "But these girls—very
Hamite.
" He traced the profile of a sharp nose on his face.

The girls asked him what he was talking about. He explained, and they both laughed and offered some stories. They talked about the Africans who lived near them; Fatma described the fatal beating of a man who had broken the curfew. Habiba had seen an African man stripped naked and made to run home. She mimicked the man's worried face and flailed her long arms. "Curfew, curfew," she said.

Jean suddenly stood and took Habiba by the arm. He led her to a back room. It was eight o'clock. I asked Fatma if she was ready. She said yes. She could have been a trained bird, brittle and obedient. She limped beside me into the bedroom.

At eleven I wandered into the living room for another drink. Jean was there with his feet up. He asked me how things were going. We drank for a while, then I asked him if he was interested in going for a walk. If we went to sleep now, I said, we'd have to get up at four or five. We switched off all the lights, made sure the girls were asleep, and went out.

The silence outside was absolute. Our shoes clacking on the stones in the road made the only sound and, at intervals, the city opened up to us through gaps in the bushes along the road. Lights can appear to beckon, to call in almost a human fashion, like the strings of flashing lights at deserted country fairs in the United States. The lights cried out. But we were safe inside the large compound; no one could touch us.

When we were coming back to my apartment an idea occurred to me. I pointed to the dark windows and said, choosing my words carefully, "Supposing we just went in there without turning on any lights ... Do you think the girls would notice if we changed rooms?"

"
Changez de chambres?
"

"
Je veux dire, changez de filles.
"

He laughed, a drunken sort of sputtering, then explained the plan back to me, adding, "
Est-ce que c'est cela que vous voulez faire?
"

"
Cela me serait égal, et vous?
"

Habiba was amused when she discovered, awaking as the act of love began, that someone else was on top of her. She laughed deep in her throat; this seemed to relax her, and she hugged me and sighed.

Jean was waiting in the hallway when I walked out an hour later. He was helpless with suppressed giggling. We stood there in the darkness, our clothes slung over our shoulders, not speaking but communicating somehow in a wordless giddiness which might have been shame. At the time I thought it was a monstrous game, like a child's, but hardly even erotic, played to kill time and defeat fear and loneliness—something the curfew demanded.

Consider the following quotation, from
The Man-Eaters of Tsavo
by Lt.-Col. J. H. Patterson, D.S.O.

"... Shortly I saw scores of lights twinkling through the bushes; every man in camp turned out, and with tom-toms beating and horns blowing came running to the scene. They surrounded my eyrie, and to my amazement prostrated themselves on the ground before me, saluting me with cries of '
Mabarak! Mabarak!
' which I believe means 'blessed one' or 'Saviour'... We all returned in triumph to the camp, where great rejoicings were kept up for the remainder of the night, the Swahili and other African natives celebrating the occasion by an especially wild and savage dance. For my part I anxiously awaited the dawn..."

There is a human shape that stands astride this description and a thousand others like it. It is the shape of Tarzan, prime symbol of Africa.

My knowledge of Tarzan is that of a person who, fifteen years ago, spent Sunday afternoons on the living room floor on his elbows reading that serious comic inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels. Tarzan may be gone from the comics; I have no way of knowing. But I do know that he is here, in Africa, in the flesh. I see him every day.

The Tarzan I remember was a strong white man in a leather loincloth, always barefoot; and he was handsome, a wise mesomorph, powerful, gentle and humorless. The animals all knew him. He spoke to them cryptically, in a sort of private Kitchen Swahili (two of the words he frequently used were
bundolo
and
tarmangani
). The animals replied in bubbles which only Tarzan understood. Although he was known as Tarzan, "The Ape-Man," he was undeniably a man and bore not the slightest trace of simian genes.

There was Jane. She aroused me: her enormous breasts strained the makeshift knots on her monkeyskin brassiere; she was also barefoot, an added nakedness that in the case of a woman is certainly erotic, and she walked on the balls of her feet. She was watchful, worried that Tarzan might be in danger. When she sniffed trouble she had a sexy habit of thrusting out those breasts of hers, cocking her head to the side and cupping her hand to her ear. Boy, the odd epicene child, appeared on the
living room floor one week and stayed, as pubescent as the day I first laid eyes on him: slender, hairless little boy scout with his child-sized spear.

And my Tarzan, real or the result of a dim recollection dimmed even further by my being remote in time and place, defined his society and implied its close limits when he said, pointing, "Me Tarzan ... You Jane ... Him Boy..."

In spite of the fact that there was a green parrot with his claws dug into Tarzan's shoulder, a monkey holding his hand and a lion faithfully dogging his tracks, Tarzan did not admit these creatures to his definition. In the most politic way, by not mentioning them, he excluded the animals from the society of the intimate white three. There was no question of equality: the fact remained that the animals simply were not the same and could therefore never have the same rights as the humans. Tarzan did not aggravate the situation; he asserted his authority over the animals very passively. When there was trouble the animals rallied round, they served Tarzan, grunted their bubble-messages and assisted him. Except in a time of jungle crisis Tarzan had little or nothing to do with them. Distance was understood. Tarzan never became bestial; he ate cooked food and, to my knowledge, never bit or clawed any of his enemies or buggered his functionaries. Yes, of course he swung on vines, beat his chest and roared convincingly, but these gestures were not an expression of innate animalism as much as they were the signal of a certain solidarity with the animals; as gestures they demonstrated futility as well as sympathy, and it was this sympathy that made them seem genuine. But, still, even the skillful pose which the gestures ultimately comprised was not a pose which anyone could bring off. Only Tarzan could beat his chest and win respect. Others would be laughed at.

Having defined his society (a small superior group; white, human, strong) Tarzan still recognized that he was in the jungle. His definition therefore was an assertion of exclusiveness which, coupled with the fact that he did not want to leave the jungle, seemed to indicate that he wanted to be a king; or, if "king" is objectionable, then he wanted to be special, lordly, powerful. We have established the fact that he was not an "ape-man" and we know that he was above the lion and the elephant, both of which are known as King of the Jungle, according to who has faced them (the lion-hunters plump for the lion, the elephant-hunters for the elephant). Above all, he had conquered the animals with an attitude, an air; no force was involved in the conquering and so it was the easiest and most lasting victory. This gave rise to Tarzan's master-servant relationship with the animals rather than a master-slave relationship (the slave does not know his master, the servant does; the servant is overpowered by an attitude, the slave by a whip).