Travels with Myself and Another (17 page)

Tomtoms began to beat in the jungle. Very loud, very insistent, and curiously frightening. I cannot describe their beat, which was varied; sometimes it gave the impression of a voice screaming a warning and sometimes of a voice mourning. The Kolars said it was just news being sent around; a wedding, a funeral, whatever was going. The blacks talk all day long, endlessly, to each other, about nothing: exact, trivial bits of information. At night, they continue to do so with drums. I see the point, though. If any country could make people frantic to keep in touch, it’s this one. You sense that the land is hostile and wants no one on it; it feels dark all the time. A kind of panic must be inborn, and people usually natter when afraid—until the point where fear is so great that it produces choked silence.

I should say at once and get it over with that I hate mosquito nets, both for themselves and for what they imply. And dread wriggling myself somehow inside and somehow tucked in and then, hot and stifled, realizing, in the dark, that something else is in with me—what?—a spider, an unknown flying or crawling insect, the insomnia-making mosquito? That’s my first and last report on mosquito nets; otherwise I’d talk of them daily.

January 28:
This is the 9th Annual World Day of the Lepers. I saw a notice to that effect in the Yaoundé post office, and Jean knows all about it. There is a handy Leprosarium; Africa apparently swarms with these wretched people. At 9.30 a.m.—which is late in the morning—we arrived at the leper colony. We turned off the main dust road on to a dust track and after a few minutes were in a small clearing in the bush. Around a central dust square, the lepers have their houses, square mud shacks with thatched roofs, crumbling. I think there were twenty such huts in all, though I went into a state of shock at the beginning and failed to see well throughout. We had missed the Mayor and other notables (who can they have been?) who made speeches in honour of the day; no one was left except the resident lepers and their visiting families. Apart from small children, everyone was drunk, cheerful to roaring.

Aya wore high-heeled white sandals and a pretty sleevless cotton bouffant dress, suitable for a garden party. Jean and she know many lepers well; they are clients of the pharmacy. (Lepers move about freely; no quarantine.) My hosts called greetings and shook hands. I was filled with a despicable cowardice; had worn my khaki socks, to keep my feet protected, and now could not touch anyone. I smiled and smiled, it must have looked like a jack o’lantern afflicted with the horrors, and bowed and began to feel that I was not really here, some disembodied part of me was moving around this fearfully hot and abominably smelling place. The lepers were in high spirits, and their visiting families showed no signs of disgust, dismay, nerves (contagion); they might have been at a party or reunion in a normal village.

The band sat in the shade of some matting held up on poles; four musicians as I remember. (No good going on with how blurred it all is.) Their instruments were hollowed-out sections of tree trunk, made into drums, and a small home-made wooden xylophone. On these, they beat such drumming as I have never heard, every sound different, very fast, very complex. (The musicians were tight too.) The special feature was that some of them had no fingers at all, but only stumps of thumbs; one, I seem to think, beat with the stumps of his wrists, being handless.

To this wild music, in the glare of this sun (veiled always in the oppressive white sky, but still bright and boiling), the leper ladies danced. The Grand Guignol never thought up anything like this. They were dancing the Twist. So here is where it comes from, traced to the source. They do it of course far better than the half-witted whites who now revel in it, and their music is infinitely better and more compulsive. The motion is the same, except that they also writhe and shake their upper bodies, when so inclined. They scream, howl, laugh, jerk, twist. They danced alone, facing us, the newcomers,
les blancs,
the audience.

There were old women, hags—no adequate word exists that I know of—with rouge dabbed in flat brilliant red circles on their cheeks, beat-up straw hats on their shaved black fuzz, and the shapeless dirty printed calico dresses which must be the missionaries’ legacy to African womanhood. Naked under these dresses, obviously; long flat breasts could be seen to bounce and flap beneath the clothes; when they turned round the protuberant native buttocks squirmed—but the buttocks look hard as iron unlike the breasts. Toothless mouths opened to shriek. They were as drunk as skunks. I could not look closely enough to see how leprosy had affected them, except for the too obvious ones—those without noses, just holes to draw breath in.

There were also little girls, dancing in this awful gathering. I saw no signs of disease on them; either they were visitors, or uninfected children of lepers. One little girl was lovely; I think she was four years old, round face, baby fat arms, tiny turquoises in her ears, a narrow blue ribbon tied around her shaved head and a short blue dress, a proper western kid-die’s dress. She danced the Twist faultlessly, deadpan, torso steady, not sweating, solemn, and competent.

I felt faint from the smell, aside from the sight. Jean pointed out several men with a withered stump instead of a foot; more without hands, noses. I think these must all have been arrested cases, though I don’t know, but I saw no sores, bandages, blood; and no leonine faces (at what stage does that occur?).

Beyond the dancers, arrayed in an impressive row on the ground, were about eighty bottles of red wine—for continuing the celebration. Jean said they would drink, eat and dance themselves into unconsciousness, as the day wore on. But if you have leprosy, my God what could be better than to dance and drink oneself into unconsciousness as often as possible? I very much hope that charitable funds, contributed throughout the world for the care of lepers, went into buying the booze.

Wringing wet (I was), we left. There is no moving air; even in the car the false wind is hot. I thought that I smelled myself now, and smelled as the blacks do. I spoke of this, still deeply ashamed. It seems at once sissy and inhuman to be so violently affected. Aya and Jean said one never got used to it; you just put up with it, learned control or something. I said that if they smelled so revolting to us, it stood to reason that we must smell in some disgusting way to them. Yes, said Aya, they say we have the “stale odour of corpses;” they find it sickening. This cheers me; fair’s fair; I don’t feel so mean-minded and soft. But I still think no one has yet sufficiently considered this aspect of the fact that all men are not brothers. All men, I think, could hardly be more different, alien, hostile; we are one biological genus, since any of us can cohabit with any of the opposite sex and produce offspring. But I don’t believe we are of one species; the definition is too simple.

We drove from the lepers to the Catholics. A priest, called Père Moll, has created this world and it is imposing. He has been architect and chief builder (literally, physically) of a large brick church, a hospital, a convent, a girl’s boarding school, and a day school. With such parishioners as he could collect, he cleared the jungle himself, and goes on doing so now, for their crops. It is a little kingdom, seized from the jungle, and created by will and sweat.

Mass was taking place; we stood at the door of the more than half empty church. Females on one side, with their heads properly covered; males on the other, properly dressed in shirts and long trousers. The choir was nice. Père Moll, invisible at that distance, preached the sermon which I made out vaguely through the echoes: he was telling them some story from the life of Christ and drawing a moral. It sounded rather like the lecturing I remember from Girl Scout days, but with an added, supernatural sanction. I am allergic to church-going when I can understand the words, so Jean and I moved off to the priest’s quarters, with Aya and C. coming after us.

They made themselves at home in the shabby little room that Père Moll and his adjutant priest use for home. It was furnished with a few worn leather chairs, a table with a dusty lace doily, and magazines, photographs of something religious on the walls. No one could suggest that these men live in luxury.

The adjutant priest, a big, stout, red-faced, quiet, beaming Dutchman, came in. They wear white robes and sandals and topees; I do not know what their order is. He was teased by my friends, who are on terms of great intimacy with the two priests and call them
“tu;”
what was he doing ambling around, not working on a Sunday morning, and furthermore joining us in a drink (which the Kolars had ordered, without ceremony, from the priests’ affable black boy). He had been taking mass since 6 a.m. and had been up before then; now Père Moll arrived, High Mass being over.

Père Moll is tall, lean to emaciation, with sunken cheeks and a beautiful vertical line down them, very bright grey eyes, thick, wiry, short-cut grey hair. He is a handsome man, aged fifty and an Alsatian peasant. He must be made of solid muscle and is unlike any priest I have ever before seen; his most striking quality is his tough maleness. The conversation was entirely joking; Père Moll’s Alsatian accent is a treat. I am perplexed by the clergy; do not know the right tone; and besides I now feel so rotten that I could hardly be good company with anyone. We drank whisky and soda (surely madness in this heat), and departed. That evening the two priests were to come to the Czechs’ house, as usual, for their weekly bridge game.

After a delicious lunch, we separated for naps; I fell into a dazed sick heavy sleep. It was cool in the late afternoon, and again we sat under the tree, chatting. Jean is too dogmatic for me; this is because I am dogmatic myself. I have a sudden notion of why history is such a mess: humans do not live long enough. We only learn from experience and have no time to use it in a continuous and sensible way. Thus I know the thirties and forties of this century, but have only been peeking at the fifties and sixties. Jean starts where I leave off. Naturally our conclusions, based on our experiences, are radically different. It is as if the human race was constantly making new road maps, unable to guide itself due to changing directions. Jean has given up hope for his country and his countrymen, finally, since the behaviour of Czecho during the Hungarian revolt in 1956. C. does not speak of himself at all; I have no idea where he came from, what his life was before Africa; and why Africa and the career of a trader. He listens marvellously, the sort of listener who makes everyone talk better and whose laugh is a reward.

We waited for the priests and a last drink before driving back to Yaoundé. The natives had told Jean of a gorilla, living nearby (place-names mean nothing to me) in the jungle. The said gorilla had kidnapped two girls, at different times. The first was dead when found, the second lived long enough to say that the gorilla had been
“très tendre,”
had built her a nest in the trees and brought her bananas, but he “broke her” and she died of it. I said flatly that I did not believe it; Jean believes it absolutely. I said what nonsense; it’s against nature. Père Moll, grave for once, said,
“C’est contre tout.”
(Did he mean God’s plan?) Jean insisted. (N.B. Months later, I asked Solly Zuckerman about this. He roared with laughter. “Do you know how big a gorilla is?” He held up his pointer finger. “A gorilla has hardly enough energy for a lady gorilla, let alone strange black girls.”)

Père Moll began talking of medicine and the blacks. Their stories are unlimited. The blacks, for unknown reasons, believe that gasoline is a splendid cure-all, taken internally. A boy asked Père Moll’s permission to give some gasoline to a man with fever. Père Moll naturally refused. The boy stole it; the sick man swallowed it happily and died. This apparently is not infrequent.

Schweitzer is not regarded locally as a hero and great thinker. His medicine is thought to be backward and his life not unique, or saintly, but only highly publicized. The feeling is that others, unknown and unsung, do better and harder jobs.

Jean showed me an elephant’s tooth; I wish I had seen more of their trinkets. I cannot judge weight and size but I’d say this one tooth weighed at least three pounds and was four inches square. It made me realize the size of elephants more than anything else has.

They all advise me to go north, where there are wild animals and real natives, the naked pagans, the Kirdis.

In the darkness one cannot see the dust on the road, but only choke on it. C. and I dined and talked a bit. He knows a great deal about the blacks, from observation, but says no white understands them. He himself has an infinite capacity for patience, and treats the blacks with quiet, slow good humour. I think he is a man who does not judge; combined with intelligence and gaiety, this makes a rare creature.

In the night, the sickness, which has been building in me from my first day in Africa, exploded like a fierce intestinal storm. I have decided to call it ptomaine poisoning, for the comfort of a known name and known ailment, but it passes in violence any previous attack. Pain, aches throughout, insides turned to water, sleepless night. I am in despair with myself; imagine caving in, so quickly. Am I simply not going to be up to Africa, appalled by the heat, smells, dirt, and now sick?

January 29:
Up at dawn, no breakfast, do not dare even drink water, since I have to sit on the plane to Garua for a couple of hours. C. saw me off and found another R. and W. King representative, bearded, stout, young, a travelling inspector or some such, at the airport; consigned me to him as a precious package. Plane journey hot, unpleasant with muffled thunder in my stomach and shooting pains. The airport at Garua is modern and elegant, a false front for the town. There is even a cement highway from the airport to the centre. But once in Garua, Africa has come closer than at Yaoundé.

There is one hotel, a collection of
bucaroos
(the native hut—round, thatched roof) improved for European use which is to say with cement floors, screens on the windows, and a bathroom. The huts are dirty, the central building—eating place, kitchen, and lounge—is dirty; and there was no room. I half reclined in the shaded lounge from morning until about 2 p.m. longing for a bed or death. At last the proprietor, a loud, bullying-to-blacks, smarmy-to-whites, mixed-up character gave me a bucaroo. Huge spider in the loo, which loo fills by pouring water into it from a pitcher; cement floor under shower slimy; all vile, all stifling, but a bed.