The Coup (12 page)

met Kadongolimi here, when I saw she really existed, I nearly died. How could you dGo that to me?-have such a big fat wife. I thought you were making her up. We were in America. You were so touching, such a ragamuffin." Ellellou slapped her, so little did he like being reminded of the pathetic figure he had cut in those days. Lest she think the blow had been unconsidered, he repeated it; the pink stain on her cheek glowed wider than his hand as it deepened to red. She would have twisted quite away had he not held her shoulders. Her pose reminded him now of those thin-lipped, super-naturally cool Flemish Virgins impassive, with averted eyes, beside a pointed arch giving upon a tiny crowded turquoise landscape. The rift of sorrow in him widened. Terrible, he thought, that rebuke had come upon her not for any of her insults but for a moment of innocent openness, remembering a ragamuffin. "Believe this then," Ellellou told her harshly, in apology. "For your safety: you are my wife. For your comfort: this will pass. I will not always be President." Colonel Ellellou finally departed from Istiqlal in the last month, Dhii "1-Hijja, of that troubled year. The afternoon temperature in the square of the Mosque of the Day of Disaster was 112 dg F., 44.4dg C. The dictator took with him, along with the faithful Opuku and Mtesa, his fourth wife, Sheba.

IV

Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads Vacant as Libya. -Herman Melville, 1863 Ihe region called the Balak is the size of France, if Alsace-Lorraine had been permanently conceded to Germany and by the same treaty Belgium had been annexed. Arab traders as early as the year 400 a.h. noted a peculiarity of these barren heights which European adventurers of the nineteenth century a. d., such as Heinrich Barth and Gustav Nachtigal, confirmed: a local absence of color. The sky here is white, and the earth, in contrast to the vivid ochres, reds, and mauves of the northwest quadrant of Kush, shows in its rocks and dunes, its playas and wadis, its reg, erg, and hammada, only dreary varieties of gray. The valleys of molten glass have already been mentioned; the low xerophytic growth has, by the process of natural selection, subdued its natural green to a tint fainter than that of the palm leaves in a faded oleograph of the Holy Land. Here bloom, famously, the world's dullest flowers; here white scorpions and black snakes live off one another's eggs. Travellers have provoked skepticism by reporting how even the gaudiest goods and garb are gradually drained to monochrome in the slow climb through the Massif; dear Sheba, laden with gold and coral, copper and jasper, lapis lazuli and chrysoprase, her eyelids daubed with antimony and her fingernails with henna, her exquisite chocolat-sans-lait body wrapped in silver-embroidered indigo, scarlet, and turquoise, even her feet clad in sandals whose parrot green chimed with the parrot-belly pink of her toenails, day by day was overlaid with deeper and deeper layers of the dust of colorlessness. Her skin, glossy as coal, shed its purple highlights; the palms of her hands no longer lifted to release glimpses of lilac; even her tongue seemed no longer red, lolling in the velvet orifice her careless jaw revealed as she incessantly chewed kola nuts. Her teeth and the whites of her eyes in this atmosphere gleamed more brilliant than ever, and the flaring edges of her lips and nostrils were emphasized as by an ink-laden fine quill. The stem of her neck, the virtuoso arabesques of her sullen profile, and the perfect, burnished crimpings of her ears all looked limned and shaded by an artist whose effects the addition of color would have muddied. Sheba was petite, the only one of my wives smaller than I, and her beauty was sharpened to a blueprint precision, the immaculate mechanics of a butterfly husk, with this removal of the rainbow. Four hundred kilometers from Also-Abid the piste dwindled to an impassable trail between ashen rocks. We left the grayer-than-ever Mercedes to Opuku and Mtesa and joined, in the guise of a detribalized anzad player and her protector, a caravan carrying (we gathered) from Ouagadougou or Niamey to a contraband depot on the Zanj border a medley of sinister goods. The caravan leader was a hirsute, jittery brute of the Kel-ulli tribe; Sidi Mukhtar was his name and his person abundantly mixed what the intrepid Barth called the three traditional Arab qualities of rejela (valor), sirge (thievishness), and dhiyafa (hospitality). Sheba-who was kittenish at first-and I peeked whenever we could into the camel-bags, where we found such contraband as hallucinogenic khat, firearms of Czech and Mexican manufacture, plastic sandals from Japan, transistor radios assembled on such low-wage platforms as Singapore and Hong Kong, and boxes and boxes of Bic pens, Venus pencils, and Eberhard Faber typewriter erasers. There were also wooden crates of what Sheba thought would be bullets and grenades but when we pried a slat loose proved to be black ribbons on metal spools, white correction cartridges, and steely, spherical, UFO-ISH IBM type elements for not only the Arabic alphabet but for the 276 characters of Amharic and the antique squiggles of Geez. Had Sidi Mukhtar known of our prowlings he would have staked us to an anthill and left us to shrivel like banana skins cast aside. Or so he said. Actually, the caravan was a loose, good-natured federation of like-minded individual mercantile entrepreneurs, in the best traditions of African humanism; the sole severity came in the distribution of the water, which was done with an iron hand. Our days began at night. We were awakened beneath the stars-the stars! in the midnight absolute that arched above the Balak the constellations hung inflamed like chandeliers-and made our way, tinkling and sighing and snorting, toward the pearl dawn whose blush was as delicate as the pink tinge in nacre, to that point in mid-morning when the camels began to squat down simply of despair. The camel is an engaging creature spiritually: he proceeds steadily to the breaking-point beyond which he cannot go at all, and then, like as not, he is apt to squat down, blink, take one more breath through his rubbery nostrils, and die. We were supposed to sleep in our tents through the torrid mid-day, but in fact it was difficult, with the whistle of the wind in the peg-ropes, and a sense of restless activity outside (presences of sand that yet muttered and cast man-shaped shadows on the translucent tent-sides), and our thirsty anticipation of the water that would be dispensed at dusk. The water skins, the zemzimayas, were brought around by an evil-smelling henchman of Sidi Mukhtar's; he determined our quotas by counting the bobs of our Adam's apples, and never failed to jostle Sheba's succulent breasts in tearing the leather canteen from her hands. To pass the dazed, insomniac afternoons Sheba and I would attempt to make love, but grains of sand interposed and abraded our venereal membranes. The sand here was strange, black and white like salt and pepper, and at moments seemed an immense page of print too tiny to read. She would lie with her head on my belly, gently blowing me, or else play the anzad and sing, while I softly beat time on the hollows of my abdomen: "Do it to me, baby, do it if you can. If 1 can't have a drink of water, I'd as soon suck off a man." The sun beat upon the squares of camel hide above us so hard as to render them thin as oiled paper held up to candlelight; in our writhings we sought the shadow of each other's bodies. There would enter my mind these streams and shady gardens old, harried Mohamet conjured up in the after-hours babble of his mid-life crisis to lead the mulish Meccans away from their stony idols and female deities, and, more persistently still, of the soda fountain of the Franchise drugstore, named if I remembered correctly Oasis Pharmaceuticals and Sundries, where I had first met Candace, amid that frightful hectoring of brightly packaged newnesses, beside the baleful tree of sunglasses. And while Sheba's dear head, the lustrous hair of which she braided no two days with the same intricacy, rested stickily on my stomach and her ash-colored, thirst-swollen tongue loyally teased my absent-minded penis, my thoughts would swim through rivers of lemonade rickeys, lime phosphates that dripped their fizzing overflow into the chrome grate below the taps, Coca-Cola brewed out of syrup upon chips of ice, 7-Ups paler than water itself, and that mysterious dark challenger to the imperial Coke, the swarthy, enigmatic Pepsi, with whom I felt an underdog's empathy. Milkshakes were in those days of plenty so lavishly prepared that the counter-boy, ingloriously dubbed the "soda jerk," served them in two containers, one of cloudy, hefty glass and the other of the chill futuristic metal in which the sudsy marvel had been churned. These "soda jerks," I came to understand, were recruited from the adolescent ranks of the "townies"-that is, the permanent residents of Franchise, refugees from subsistence farming in the main, every last one of them white and Gentile, as opposed to those of us smuggled in academic gowns into the community as students at McCarthy College, whose brick pinnacles and massy treetops hovered above the gravelly flat roofs of the "towny" business section like the upper levels of a ziggurat, where only gods and priests feeding dead kings dare venture. Emerging, blinking, from Oasis Pharmaceuticals, my mind's eye confronted, between me and that ivy-shaggy campus corner opposite, the breadth of Commerce Street, with its dangling traffic light and surging traffic of opulent automobiles. Everything in America, through that middle bulge of the Fifties, seemed to this interloper fat, abundant, and bub-blelike, from the fenders of the cars to the cranium of the President. Franchise was a middle-sized city of 35,000. Its main street ran straight as an arrow, disused trolley tracks still embedded in its center. Its few factories, mostly devoted to paper manufacture, were out of sight down by the lake, whose breezes they tainted with the chemical overflow of the pulping process. The lake had been left, with that romantic douceur the Americans trail in the wake of their rapacities, its Indian name, Timmebago, though the bestowers of that name had been long since scourged from its shores by gunfire, firewater, and smallpox. In the summer, the brightness of which lasted into October, the merchants of Franchise lowered awnings above their storefronts, and the virtually continuous strip of scalloped shadow laid along the dazzling wide sidewalk now merged with the stifling shade of the tent as I lay there flooded in my thirst by remembrance; my mind's eye, hesitantly, fearfully, looking both ways twice, crossed the dangerous street and hustled into the deep green closures of the college. Beneath the stately arches of the elms and the more horizontal branches of the oaks and copper beeches the spaces appeared subaqueous and we students, elongated as by refraction, silent swimmers. In this aquarium light the academic buildings seemed plaster temples lowered into our element as ornaments, with solid insides and painted-on windows; the pillared Classics building looked especially fake. Then the wheel of North American weather turned and there came an elemental change: the roof of elm-leaves was golden, and falling, and letting in sky, and the leaves were burning in great piles tended by the college grounds crew, grizzled old townies who ogled our girls; the autumnal fragrance of leaf-smoke overpowered the caustic emissions of the paper mills and recalled to young Felix the patches of brush that were cleared for cassava and maize by the women of his village. They would sing, chopping, uprooting, bending from the waist in unison beneath that African sky whose vastness was so subtly distant a brother to the vastness of the farm-country sky the straight main street dissolved into, past the hedges, the lawns, the Victorian-Gothic faculty housing. Above silver silos and corn rows and rolling meadows studded with fat cows, the platinum clouds piled one on top of another in a triumphant, vaporous wealth. In Africa, the clouds ran like herds of wildebeest, strung-out and gray, hastening, always, to get somewhere else, in this savanna that had to be vast, for in any one place it was poor. Then, the carousel of seasons turning again, fire became air, the leaves blew all away; all was black and white, black twigs on white sky, black men on white earth, and Candy was waiting, waiting for her Happy, at the dark cave mouth of Livingstone Hall, her snow-bright bangs set off by a knitted scarf the red of Christmas ribbon. Her mother had knitted this scarf, and the matching red mittens with which Candy was hugging her mold-colored notebooks and big Ec text with its slick cover of smiling blue tighter to her chest as if for warmth. Snow was all about like a mirage, a liftingness in the bottom of Happy's vision that made the automobiles sing in chains and lowered windowsills to the level of the ground. This was truly another world, that had bred another race of men to make their way, barking joyously, through this illusory element, this starry mud. One handful of those tiny ice-feathers would bite into his face now, would dissolve his lips and open his throat again, so he could croak a word of love to Sheba. Kissed, Candy would hurry him into the cave, where the radiators were hurling heat recklessly against the cold that entered with them through the double doors, the linoleum floors dirty with melted footprints and tracked-in fragments-matches, gum wrappers, the little red strip that pulled open a cigarette pack comofthe culture of paper and radiant waste around them. I must have dozed. When I awoke, Sheba's head was heavy on my sandy belly or my Ec textbook was open in my lap to the dour visage of Adam Smith or a chart of the decline in the purchasing power of the guilder since 1450. A few more minutes, the lecture would end, and I could have my noon beer in the Badger Cafe. There were luncheonettes, ice-cream parlors, and bars in the city blocks around the campus; in these we would gather, these islands of warmth in the ocean of cold, and talk, Candy and I and her friends. A number of her friends were American Negroes, then beginning to be called Afro-Americans; she was one of those white women who cannot leave black men alone. No mark of Cain or Ham identifies such a female, but some questing chromosome within holds her sexually fast to the tarbaby. Candy's parents in her childhood had had colored cooks and maids, and at the side of these corpulent, didactic, floury-handed mammies the child had felt a cherishing and security absent from the hysterically neat rooms of the house beyond the kitchen. This had been in Chicago; at about the time of what in Africa they call a woman's first uncleanness her father moved his insurance agency to Oshkosh. Chicago's black circumambience thinned to an off-center pocket of paperworkers, ex-slaves whose escape had stopped short of Canada. And in all-white Franchise any dark faces must belong to McCarthy students: flip, coffee-colored Barry Little from Kalamazoo; Muslimized, bitter-black Oscar X from Chicago's South Side; quiet, cin-namon-and-ginger Turnip Schwarz up the river from East St. Louis. Med Jhabvala, with his pointed beard and fluting, female voice, and myopic, beautiful Wendy Miyamoto, from San Francisco, who got 99's on all her exams and rarely said a word, completed our shadowy circle. There was even an Indian on campus, a Dakota called Charlie Crippled Steer, who stalked along in fur-lined earflaps and threw things at track meets; he sat at our table once in a while, but did not like us. He did not like anybody, striding the snowy diagonals of our walks with a frozen grimace, his mouth a sad slash, his eyes small as currants. These marginal Americans fascinated me. But amid the maddening slapping of the tent flaps in the mindless wind, the overheard snuffling of stoic camels and the clangorous harangues of desperately bored camel-drivers, my flickering memories of that exotic Wisconsin seemed bits of a Fifties movie, with its studiously recruited cross-section meant to emblemize the melting pot, the fertile