Rogue's March (21 page)

The old truck drove east from Pointe-Noire, following the narrow tarmac road that ran parallel to the railroad track toward Brazzaville. The landscape was cold and stunted under the driving rain. The truck crew was Congolese. The leader described himself as a
militant
, but dos Santos knew what he was; even before the crates were loaded at dockside, he'd asked for money to pay the others. He sat in the cab with dos Santos and the driver, a morose little Bantu who didn't speak. Behind the cab two Congolese laborers in dark blue coveralls squatted under the tarpaulin on the truck bed, trying to keep dry. The gun crates were uncovered and loosely lashed to the bed, bouncing and shifting dangerously with each curve and pothole.

They climbed the eroded hills and onto the plateau. The cab was filled with the fumes from the overheated engine leaking up from the rusted-out manifold. As the truck descended to the Niari River valley, the rain fell harder, obscuring the dense landscape along the roadway. The dim headlights barely penetrated the murk. Some miles beyond, the truck slowed to a crawl, and the driver began arguing with the Congolese who was giving him directions, speaking in Kikongo. Neither seemed sure of the road, and the driver thought he'd missed the turn. They found the secondary road ten kilometers beyond, a narrow muddy track that wound along a steep riverbank. Twenty minutes later the truck turned into a long tree-lined lane carpeted with palm husks. An abandoned planter's cottage stood in a palm grove, elevated on brick piers above the grassless yard. The driver backed the Mercedes against the high porch, and as they began unloading the crates, a light stirred from the interior of the cottage.

A man carrying a kerosene lantern came down the central hallway and out onto the porch. He was a tall light-skinned mulatto from Cabinda, wearing olive twill trousers with pouch pockets and a khaki shirt with most of the buttons missing. It hung open across his bare chest, where a crucifix hung suspended by a silver chain. His reddish-brown beard was closely trimmed; he smelled of stale beer. With a lazy smile that betrayed a canine missing in his lower jaw, he introduced himself as Lieutenant Nogueira, MPLA deputy chief of logistics for the southeast military district.

Hungry, wet, and tired, dos Santos nodded, but said nothing. He had never heard of Lieutenant Nogueira.

The rain poured from the roof onto the truck bed as they moved the crates to the shelter of the porch. The Congolese workers were anxious to leave once the boxes were transferred, but Nogueira called the foreman back and stood arguing with him. Dos Santos watched as the worker took something from his pocket and gave it to the mulatto. The truck drove away, and Nogueira gave back to dos Santos the franc notes he'd given to the Congolese at the port. He said the truck crew was paid by Delbeques. The laborer would have pocketed the money. He picked up the lantern, and dos Santos followed him into the house.

“There's no one here but me,” Nogueira said. “What did you expect, a reception by the political bureau? They're all in Brazzaville this week—a meeting with the government. Someone tried to shoot the President last week, an ambush, and now they're nervous about guns. That's why we brought them here, out of the way. We'll move them later, after this latest business blows away. In the meantime, they're safer here.

“Did you bring any cigarettes? They're harder to find these days than guns. Now that you've come from Algeria, I suppose you're ready to start shooting Portuguese.” Nogueira laughed. “It isn't easy. They're three hundred kilometers away. You have to cross through the other Congo first, across the river. Don't worry about it. We'll get you there. In the meantime you'll have plenty of time to think about it—to lead the intellectual life. Nothing but talk and solitude. I've been here for two years, and the problems haven't changed. I trained in Algeria too. So you're dos Santos. I've heard about you. Going to São Salvador, eh? You can take any room you like. They're all the same, all empty.”

He took the cigarette dos Santos offered and lifted the lantern higher to illuminate the small room halfway back the long center hall. He continued talking, reminiscing in a mocking, unguarded way, like a man long accustomed to talking to himself and bored with it, as if existence itself had perished in the sound of his own voice. On the floor of the room were a raffia mat and several straw mattresses. Cigarette butts, broken glass, and dry palm hulls littered the floor. The rain blew softly through the broken window. Against one wall was a table and above it a primitive map of Cabinda. On the table were a dozen or so leaflets, and dos Santos picked one up and looked at it in the light of Nogueira's lantern. On one side was a picture of the red and green Portuguese flag and beneath it a crude message in Portuguese and Kikongo:

SALVO-CONDUTO

APRESENTA-TE 'A TROPA COM ESTE PAPEL E SERA'S BEN

TRADUTO UIZA KUSUNZULA KUA MASOLADI LE PAPELA

LAI IBOSI O MONA VO O TOMA LUNDUA

On the other side of the flyer, the Portuguese-printed safe-conduct appeal read:

ENTREGA ARMAS E MUNIÇÕES

E RECEBERÀS DINHEIRO.

“Bring guns and ammunition and receive money,” dos Santos read, looking at the drawings beneath showing a revolver and bullet, four types of automatic weapons, a hand grenade, and a small land mine. He looked again at the front of the leaflet. “Present this to the soldiers and you will receive good treatment.” He looked up. “Where did this come from?”

“Angola. Cabinda. The Portuguese helicopters have been dropping them,” Nogueira said. “Those came from São Salvador. An old man brought them. He couldn't read them. Most of them can't. The Portuguese are wasting their time. We won't sell our guns. You can leave your suitcase and radio here if you like.”

The other rooms were similar, except for Lieutenant Nogueira's, which contained a wooden cot and above it a wooden frame from which hung torn strips of mosquito netting. On the floor near the bed lay dozens of books, some piled atop one another, others lying open, face down on the unswept floor. There were books on geology and hydrology, physiological texts, a handbook on fluid mechanics, a biography of Marx, a treatise on imperialism and colonialism, guerrilla tactics, French erotic novels in paperback, a book on theosophy, and a translation of Lenin in Portuguese. Nogueira said that he'd studied in Paris on a scholarship given to him by a French petroleum consortium, but had left the university to enlist in the MPLA. He led dos Santos into the kitchen at the back of the house. The room was chilly and damp. Thunder echoed from the nearby hillside; the rain beat down on the roof. In the far corner a dozen beer crates were stacked against the wall. Nogueira took four bottles, opened each in turn, and put them on a wooden table in the center of the room.

“There's nothing else to drink. After a time, discipline goes to hell, but who notices? Maybe the termites and the cockroaches, no one else. Are you hungry? The beer isn't bad, and we've got plenty of that. It keeps your kidneys working. When they stop, you're dead.” He pushed a bottle across the table.

“We had twenty recruits here last month from Cabinda, school kids, most of them, but we couldn't feed them. Hungry bastards. We sent them up to the training camp near Poto-Poto, where the Cubans have a mess. They ate well, and now everyone wants to go to Brazza and Poto-Poto. Do you think they came to fight the Portuguese? Shit no, for the free feed and then to learn Spanish. Get a scholarship to study in Havana. They'll go anyplace—Havana, Moscow, Paris, Brazil, Brussels, you name it. Just for the scholarship, that's all. After two years, so would I—back to Paris when I get the chance. The Cubans took fifteen last month, put them on a boat and sent them to Havana to study in the sugar refineries. Technicians, engineers. That's where the future is.” He laughed.

“How many men do you have in São Salvador? Did they tell you? Already trained or is that up to you? Maybe I'll come join you. Angola's not easy these days. You have to get there first. The guns make it harder. The fascists in Kinshasa won't let you take the guns across. You can bribe them, but then the cocksuckers take your guns, your money, and shoot you in the back. It's easier dealing with the Portuguese.”

Dos Santos had moved to the window. Lightning flashed through trees, and he saw a small muddy rear yard where the embers of a cook fire still smoldered under a lean-to thatched over with palm boughs. The thunder came again an instant later, shaking the windows and wiping out Nogueira's voice. The voice came back, as steady as the rain: “A woman from the village does the cooking, but she won't stay after the sun goes down. Afraid of her father's ghost. He worked here in the old days. A boiler split a seam in the cooking shed and scalded him to death. For a hundred francs she'll send a girl or woman from the village, but you have to be careful she doesn't send one of her sisters. The pretty ones have all gone to Brazza. Those that are left are as ugly as she is—meat for the maggots. If you're interested, the dogs will show you the way. That's another reason we moved the training camp higher on the plateau—the people around here. They're savages, worse than baboons. It's a pygmy plantation, that's what it is.”

A few spoonfuls of cold rice and chicken lay in the bottom of the bowl Nogueira had put in front of dos Santos. He ate slowly, remembering the Algerian mess in the mountains, the smell of charcoal, and the chill morning air before the sun lifted over the broken peaks. He rolled the cold rice and chicken into pellets between his fingers and washed his mouth with warm beer as he chewed. The rice had been cooked many times. Lightning flashed as he ate, igniting the bare walls, the broken plaster, and the small geckos that crouched on the ceiling stalking the night-flying insects. Dos Santos finished the rice and pushed the bowl away as he drank from the beer bottle.

“… It's the boredom most of all,” Nogueira continued. “After that, the local Congolese. They don't trust us, never mind what they say. The other Congo across the river is worse. Everything takes money these days—buying off customs, the police, the army. If we want to move a company of infiltrators to the Cabinda border, the ministry of interior has to be told two weeks in advance. The French advisers are everywhere. Do you think they don't know what we're telling the Congolese? If the French know, so do the Portuguese. That's the way it is with the metropoles. Don't tell me there's any difference between Paris and Lisbon. It's the same money, the same shit. You get fed up after a while—”

“I know Pierre Masakita,” dos Santos said finally, resisting Nogueira's cynicism. He took a packet of French cigarettes from his pocket and pushed it across the table. Could he trust Nogueira? If not, what was left for him? “We were in Paris together,” he continued. “In exile. Now he's in the Kinshasa government across the river. I'll talk to him.” He emptied the bottle and Nogueira gave him another.

“Masakita? I don't know him. Isn't he the former rebel, the turncoat?”

“I sent him a letter, maybe a week ago. I told him I was returning to São Salvador and would need his help.”

“Don't trust any of them. None of them. They're all the same, those bastards across the river. I told you, the Portuguese are easier to deal with. The regime over there is rotten, corrupt.”

“Not Masakita,” dos Santos said, smiling at Nogueira's reaction. His cynicism was only a reflex; he'd been alone a long time. The rain drummed against the roof. The thunder rolled away to the northeast, down the valley. Dos Santos drank another bottle of beer as he listened to Nogueira's melancholy monologue. The empty house and the sound of the rain no longer seemed the symbols of his imprisonment. Listening to Nogueira and knowing the solitude that lay behind his words restored that continuity that had been lost to him as he stood alone in the rain at the port.

He could now think of the future again. The guns were on the porch, sheltered from the rain. Mers-al-Kabir was only a brief momentary memory: the rocking boat, the fierce sunlight, the splintered mirror of the sea. In this cottage a Frenchman had once lived. He had sat with his wife and perhaps his children in this same room; now they were gone. The windows were broken, the plaster fallen, the roof sagged; but there were lizards on the ceiling and finches in the trees outside. It was a beginning. To forget the past and restore the future would take time.

He remembered something Masakita had once told him in Paris when he was alienated from everything around him, like Lieutenant Nogueira, and existence no longer meant anything but the sound of his own voice. Masakita had told him of a Frenchman who'd written of that moment in history when the Roman gods had disappeared and Christ had not yet come, a unique moment in which neither past nor future existed. Men stood alone. Dos Santos had remembered it many times. Each time he thought of his own country and of Africa, of Western capitals like pagan Roman gods and of African exiles like himself, waiting in the slums and catacombs of Europe and not living as men at all.

He now told Nogueira of that moment, and they sat in the kitchen drinking beer until the cigarettes were gone.

The morning mist still lay within the grove of palm trees when dos Santos awoke. The house was silent, Nogueira asleep under the mosquito netting in the next room. Dos Santos went quietly out into the rear yard, stopping near the lean-to where the ashes were wet and cold under the palm boughs. He walked back through the palm grove. Standing among the trees at the rear, he could see the mist thinning over the valley below. On the heavy air he detected the fragrance of blossoms and ripening citrus. Turning his head, he saw a dozen lemon trees a few meters down the slope, their gnarled limbs still heavy with fruit. He moved down through the wet grass toward the trees.