The Diamond Lane (5 page)

“Now don't go putting this in your bloody screenplay,” she said, smiling, twisting the bottle shut.

“Sorry, poppet, going to be the opening scene. A lyrical moment 'tween a girl and her nail polish.”

“I'll sue.”

“On what grounds?”

“Emotional stress caused by the revelation of all my beauty secrets.”

“Is that a threat?”

“A promise,
bwana
.”

Mouse was opposed to fiction of any kind. She was against many things that documentarians did all the time to get the damn thing shot and over with. She was against going back and filming reaction shots. She was against staging events, against editing a sequence dramatically and passing it off as reality,
against scripting people's lines. She was a purist. Tony teased her about it all the time.

It made her job and her life difficult. For example, the recent BabWani wedding shoot. An hour before the wedding, the bride had backed out.

Marie-Claire was only twelve years old. She'd sat huddled against the mud wall of her mother's hut, her skinny legs pulled up to her chest, her chin thrust between kneecaps as bony as elbows. Everything was wrong. First her hair. Then her face. In truth, the groom.

“Ayyyyyy-ayyyyyy-ayyyyy …” Terese, the bride's mother, moaned. She stood over her daughter, slapping her shoulder with the backs of her wrinkled fingers. Get with it! the slap said. You should feel lucky anyone wants a skinny girl like you!

Marie-Claire said the groom was a drunk and a glutton. She said it was well known in the village that he was cruel to his other wives. He beat them silly. He poked their buttocks with the sharp quills of porcupines, which he was supposed to sell, but would instead drag into the forest and eat all by himself.

All this was told to the translator, Ovumi Obrumba, who turned and translated it into English for Mouse and Tony.

As a single woman who thought marriage was dicey under the most ideal circumstances, Mouse couldn't blame Marie-Claire for not wanting to spend the rest of her life yoked to some palm wine-guzzling sadist twice her age; however, as a documentary film producer who had spent the better part of a year trying to get this shoot off the ground, Mouse wanted to strangle her.

“So the wedding's off?” asked Mouse, instantly regretting her words. It hadn't come to that yet. Perhaps this was just part of the BabWani wedding experience. Perhaps all BabWani girls went through this. She didn't want to give anyone any ideas. “What's going on?” she amended.

“The man not good,” sniffed Ovumi. “He have pygmie wives also.” The BabWani, who shared the Ituri forest with the Bambuti
pygmies, thought the pygmies were stupid and odd. They had pygmie jokes like Americans had Polack jokes.

“We don't want to interfere, but we need to know. We're leaving tomorrow, tell her.
Nous partirons demain
. So if the wedding's
off
…”

Mouse tried not to think of the money they'd spent just to get this far, but she couldn't keep herself from the cash register in her mind. It was huge, an ominous old-fashioned cash register, the kind which exists in the mind of every documentary film producer.

Travel expenses.
Ca-ching!
Food.
Ca-ching!
Ovumi, who received a salary and expenses.
Ca-ching!
The BabWani guide, Tanisa, who'd brought them through the forest from the Catholic mission.
Ca-ching!
In addition to the cigarettes and clock-radio, Tanisa was receiving a daily wage out of petty cash.
Ca-ching!
The
matabeesh
, to secure a reliable Land Rover from the Office des Routes, the highway department, to get to the Catholic mission.
Ca-ching!
The film stock.
Ca-ching!
The audio tape.
Ca-ching!
A new magazine for the camera.
Ca-ching!

Ca-ching! Ca-ching! Ca-ching!

Thousands of dollars, hundreds of days, dozens of arguments. Mouse saw the production flash in front of her eyes. She told herself: Get a grip. It can still work out. Never forget that hardship filmmaking is your specialty.

Mouse and Tony, who was rolling sound, and Ovumi, the interpreter, stood in a circle around the stubborn bride and her keening mother. Between them, on the floor, at Marie-Claire's feet, stood an avocado-green enamel fondue pot, bottom scorched, handle missing. The fondue pot held a handful of maroon powder, which the bride was supposed to apply to her upper face and scalp. It was made from the dried blood and hair of the groom. The powder was sacred. The fondue pot had been culled from the rubbish at the mission, obviously brought to Father Vanderboom, the Catholic missionary, from some
cuisine-savvy American trader. Mouse stared down at the pot, trying to collect her thoughts.

Terese's hut was low-ceilinged and dank. It had the cockeyed look of a structure that had barely survived an earthquake. The mud walls all leaned in one direction, like handwriting. The thatched roof stopped several inches short of the top of one wall, admitting a shaft of green forest light. The BabWani were not known for their architectural prowess.

What they were known for, among anthropologists, among the government officials in the Office of Native Affairs in Kinshasa who'd commissioned
Marriage Under Mobutu
, was their unusual wedding ceremony. Despite the persistent influence of the Church and the kitchen-utensil-toting Westerners who were lunatic enough to venture this far into the forest, it had remained unchanged since Mary and Joseph of Nazareth had tied the knot centuries before.

“What Mouse is trying to get at,” said Tony, “is whether it's off or off off.”

“Off?” said Ovumi. “Off off?” He sounded like someone at a cocktail party doing an imitation of a barking dog.

“You know, whether it's officially off, or the bride's just saying she can't go through with it, when in fact it's only a case of cold feet.”

Ovumi, confused, stared down at Marie-Claire's wide dusty toes.

“You see, Ovumi, we're in rather desperate straits here,” said Tony.

“It's important to show the world how her people live,” said Mouse. “Tell her we've got a Bantu ceremony and a Pitishi ceremony.

“Certainly she wants the BabWani represented among their countrymen,” said Tony.

Female giggles. Mouse and Tony turned to see a gang of old women peeking in the doorway. All morning they had been pounding manioc for the wedding feast. They wore dull cotton
wraparound skirts. A few wore T-shirts. The university of this or that, the ubiquitous Harvard and UCLA.

Mouse looked up at Tony, imagining how he looked to them, imagining what they saw or heard to make them laugh. Beyond, of course, the obvious hilarity of being white.

The BabWani, like the pygmies, were small people. Discreet. Mouse could move around them with ease. But Tony seemed extraordinary, as colorful as a parrot. An orange-spotted giant with red skin and orange hair. Eyes a color only a few of them had ever seen, a blue that didn't exist in their green and brown world, but only in pictures of a thing called an ocean, which Father Vanderboom had hanging on the wall at the mission.

White women found Tony extraordinary, too. Mouse had watched them eye him in Nairobi. Embassy wives, giggling Peace Corps girls, the stray, mooning professional researcher, all bowled over by his strawberry-blond curls, six-foot-plus frame, imperious nose, and Oxbridge accent.

“…tell her it's
imperative
that we film this ceremony –” Tony smiled. Even in the greenish gloom, Mouse could tell it was sardonic. He shook his head. “– Christ. This is no good.”

“Wedding
dead
,” said Ovumi impatiently. Ovumi had had it with this women's business. Besides Tony, who didn't count, he was the only man around for miles. Following the BabWani tradition, the groom had been spirited away by the men of the village for a few days of drinking and hunting. After the ceremony, which only the women attended, the men would return, and the groom would join his new wife.

Ovumi had been forced on Mouse and Tony by the Office of Native Affairs. Some Byzantine initiative having to do with getting tribal men in the cities back to work. They had no idea where he picked up his English. He was a dandy. They called him Ovumi Wilde. He had two identical changes of clothes. Brown flared slacks, black plastic ankle boots, white dress shirt, and gold cuff links. He sported a thin black eyepatch held on to his head with a sanitary-napkin belt. Mouse admired his
ingenuity. Another example of the African ability to make absolutely anything do.

Ovumi fiddled with the cuff links of one sleeve, then the other, like an impresario.

“Did they say that, or is it your interpretation?” asked Tony.

Ovumi shrugged. “Wedding dead.”

“It's just marital jitters,” said Tony, bailing water on the
Titanic
. “Quite typical. Tell her. Tell her she'll get used to him. It'll all come right in the end. She's just gone off her head a bit. It's all the excitement.”

“Let it go,” sighed Mouse, picking up the camera, which had been resting against her shins. “The guy's a wife beater anyway.”

“I don't know,” said Tony. “A few pokes in the bum with a porcupine quill doesn't sound like wife beating to me. All brides go through this anyway. It's a universal thing. Like smiling.”

“All brides do not go through this,” said Mouse.

“So says noted marriage expert Mouse FitzHenry.”

“Let it go,” said Mouse through clenched teeth.

In the past four years Tony had proposed marriage twice. Twice Mouse had refused him. It worried her that he kept asking. She thought marriage was something a couple resorted to only after they'd run out of other things to do.

MOUSE SAT ON
a dead rubber tree and stewed. At her feet ran a tributary of the Congo, whose sunlit banks were choked with deep-red poinsettia blooms and white lilies.

It was five-thirty. In half an hour the abrupt equatorial night would drop on them like a theater curtain. There would be no chance of filming anything now, even supposing Marie-Claire suddenly changed her mind. Then tomorrow they would leave. Two days overland to the mission. Three days from the mission down the rutted road by Land Rover to Kisangani. A day by air to Nairobi. An apologetic phone call to the Office of Native Affairs in Kinshasa. The wedding was off. Nobody's fault.

Mouse felt by turns exhausted, angry, doomed, deprived. A familiar feeling.
Documentarius interruptus
.

Thousands of dollars, hundreds of days, dozens of arguments. She was hot and sticky. She could smell herself. The river looked inviting. But sixteen years in Africa, and a doc she'd done for the World Health Organization on bilharzia, had taught her a sweet brook like this one was teaming with invisible organisms, evil micro-water polo players, treading water with their cilia, waiting for an unsuspecting human to happen by so that they might launch their offensive. So that they might bite her, shit on her, lay their invisible evil eggs upon her, sprint up her most private orifices, where they would snack on her vital organs. She would remain oblivious until, one week or twenty years later, she would die from a horrific, disfiguring, lingering, utterly incurable disease.

But wasn't she a taker of ridiculous risks? Wasn't this what she excelled at? What she got paid for? She'd already had malaria, amoebic dysentery, the green fingernail fungus.

“I'm going for a swim,” she said, standing. So I die, she thought. We could film it. Do a thing on the young (ish) documentary filmmaker who risked getting a gruesome tropical disease for Her Art. The problem was, if she went swimming, that wasn't exactly in the line of duty. She wasn't swimming in infested waters in order to get the shot of a lifetime, for example. She paused.

For the past week, while they'd been in Ibonga waiting for Marie-Claire's wedding – strategizing on how they would cover it, planning lighting, following Marie-Claire around with an empty magazine, pretending they were filming, so that she might get used to the camera – they had lived in a tent by the river. When they didn't join the BabWani for manioc bread and bananas and monkey, they cooked food in freeze-dried packets on a butane camp stove.

“I'm going swimming,” she repeated. “Don't stop me. Here I go.”

Tony sat on an overturned kerosene can by the tent,
hunched over his notebook, writing on his infernal screenplay. He wouldn't tell her the subject. She suspected it was some cop thing. Several months before, one of their friends in Nairobi had gotten
Beverly Hills Cop
through the diplomatic pouch. Tony and the friend recited lines back and forth from the movie until Mouse threatened to move out. Even their night watchman, a cinephilic Kikuyu with his own VCR, rolled his eyes when he saw Tony launch into his Eddie Murphy impersonation.

“Nn-hn,” he said. He scratched along the page, nodding and smiling at the notebook balanced on his knees, as though it was telling him a great joke to which he already knew the punch line.

“Any ideas what we're going to do?” said Mouse. She sat down next to him on a piece of tarp. She watched while two dung beetles rolled a piece of goat dung into the bush. She thought they looked like a small pair of animated black patent leather shoes.