The Coup (17 page)

of Allah, and, by way of parting compliment, confided, "Unbeknownst to you, you have been transporting, in the guise of two mendicant musicians, the President of Kush and one of his First Ladies. Je suis Ellellou." u Je sais, je sais" Sidi Mukhtar responded out of his bag of tongues, his face in merriment twitching like the skin of a sand lizard just emerged from his hole. "Otherwise, I kill. We see Benzi following us before mountains become too bad. Super car, gives ride free of sway." "Why would you have killed me?" It is perhaps part of my inheritance from the communally tender, multi-generational, intra-supportive village of my upbringing to be always astonished that any real harm lurks in the world. The third component of Sidi Mukhtar's personality, his sirge (thievishness), shuffled cheerfully to the fore. He answered me, "To sell Madame to the Yemenis. Good posh black girls, with correct long neck and hollow back, very hard to come by. Only shoddy slaves come on market now. Mostly drug addicts from bourgeois European families, decadent riffraff looking for security. Yemenis, Saudis need intelligent slaves, to operate electrical appliances." Here, too, I doubted the mercantile tall tale, and distrusted the note of socialist snobbery he had injected, presumably to please me. His men loaded our camels with sacks of dried dates and sloshing skins of water. We exchanged farewells: my "Allah Ma'ak" for his "Aghrub 'Anni." The caravan, our home for these moons, shuffled, clanked, and sighed its way out of sight, as the tepid dawn washed away the shadows of the night and, with them, the stars. An hour later, we discovered that the villain had given us not water in our zemzimayas but wine, which our religion forbade us to drink, though from its bouquet it was a fair vintage; a lot of sturdy Bordeaux found its way into our trade routes, brought back to Dakar in the peanut-oil tankers as ballast. Glimpses of rock doves led us upwards and leftwards, into a porous region of caves. At this height color crept back, first by way of iridescent hints in the birds" feathers, next in the rainbow-shimmer on the oil-smooth face of an overhanging rock. We passed through pastel moments much as Esmeralda and I had paced a gallery of neon auras on the way to our betrayal of pale Candace. Sheba rode a camel of the coveted azrem shade-a pinkish eggshell, dun toward the tail and white in the huge eyelashes that fringed the iris of glacial blue. My own steed was a mud-brown gelding with a worrisomely depressed hump and a nagging habit of clearing his throat. The pads of their feet, evolved for the erg's slipping sands, split on the rocky trails, and as the days wore on we often dis- mounted and walked beside them, winding our way upwards, led by the bubbling coo of coral-footed doves. The geology was strange. Certain summits appeared to have been molded by a giant, ill-tempered child, finger-furrows distinct and some petrified depressions holding the whirling ridges of what seemed a thumbprint. The terrain felt formed by play, of an idiotic sort that left no clues to the logic of the game. A frozen bulbousness-double-dip, Reddi-Whip accumulations of weathered lava topped by such gravitational anomalies as natural arches and big boulders balanced on smaller comgave way to cleavages and scree as geometrically finicking as the debris of a machinist's shop. Amid these splits and frolicsome tumblings, caves abounded; where the caves multiplied, so did the paintings left by the mysterious happy herdsmen and hunters of the Green Sahara. Centuries of calm sunlight had not faded their sheltered ochres and indigos. Wild buffalo bore between their horns little round marks like shrunken halos; their hunters were depicted with skins the color of oranges and enlarged heads round as the helmets of space travellers. In a deep cave a galloping goddess, daintily horned, a shower of grain between her antennae like static, rose to the domed ceiling, carrying up with her the steatopy-gial silhouettes of naked mortals, running also, overlaid and scattered like leaves in agitation slipping from a tree. Brown, gray, custard, pepper, cinnamon: the colors of our African cookery depicted, with the primitive painter's numinous, nervous precision, the varieties of cattle, as the herding culture replaced the hunting. These very herds, no doubt, had helped turn the grassland from green to tan, to dust, to nothing. Sheba, gaunt now as a ballerina, her sumptuous costume in tatters from which color had forever fled, her intricate necklaces of lapis lazuli and jasper and of coral from a shore where milk-warm waves lapped life into quivery barnacles fallen bit by bit along our way, wanted to stay in a cool dim cave, and die. We had drunk the sardonic wine on the second day, blaspheming against our bodies, and had vomited accordingly. The dried fruit stuck in our throats like ash; her dear tongue was swollen like the body of a frog in the dried mud of an exhausted water hole; she spoke indistinctly, but I understood her to say that she was dizzy, and that her skull had a sun of pain in it. Begging her to rise and stumble another kilometer forward with me, stooping down and with my own depleted strength tugging at her resistless limbs, I thought of all the women I had led into such a wilderness, a promised green land of love that then had turned infertile, beneath the mono-maniacal eye of my ambition, my wish to create a nation, to create a nation as a pedestal for myself, my pathetic self. The whites of her eyes, rolling upwards in a delirious faint, had become an astonishing golden color, as in the hollow head with which a mummified Pharaoh is helmeted for his space-flight, the golden eyes inset with onyx irises that have been stolen. "Do it to me, baby, do it, do it," I crooned, to tease her back to life, to bring her back from mummification into the moist full skin of the girl I had met strolling the alleys of Istiqlal, her svelte jaws methodically chewing uppers and downers, kola and khat, her ear pressed to a transistor radio tuned to the perfidious pop-rock stations of Brazzaville, the same Flus Haute Quarantine over and over. I had been in the disguise of a gum-seller, little packets of Chiclets that sold two for a lu, or for a kiss in lieu of that. At the first touch of her lips I knew Sheba had the mouth for me. Now those satin cushions, the upper even more generously stuffed than the lower, were split, the skin at the edges of the split blackened as if deliberately singed, and the pale inner lining, next to her gums, blued by the onset of cyanosis. "My... Lord," she pronounced. "Divorce ... me." "Never," I said, and managed to work her limp body onto my shoulders. I carried her from the cave to the camels, who were waiting with that impeccable poise of their species, conserving their inner resources. But as I dropped her diminished weight across the embroidered saddle cloth of her beautiful azrem mount, the creature died. It did not even keel over, but held in death its sitting position; the head on its long neck simply rested on the rocky trail, and twisted gently as the muscles relaxed. Its albino lashes lowered like drawgates. Was this the end? Never, I repeated to myself. All of the nubile women in our land of Kush, above the lowest social stratum, carry a dagger with which to stab their own hearts if their honor is compromised, ere the rapist can work his will. My mother, alas, had had no such implement, but Sheba did. I plucked it, its blade of Damascus steel and handle of polished chalcedony, from the bindings of her bosom and cut open the dead camel's stomach, so we could drink the brackish green water secreted there. With this liquid I called Sheba back to life; she shuddered and wept, and as her strength returned cursed me in the astonishingly vile language which flows so easily from the lips of even the prettiest of the younger generation. As she gave out these signs of restored vitality, I loaded our baggage onto our surviving camel, my mud-colored mount, with his housemaid's knees and smoker's hack. He accepted Sheba's weight- Takbtr!- and I shuffled beside them on foot. Vistas loomed, through clefts and apertures worn by wind erosion, of a hazed sea of sand so far below us as to be another planet; the prospect was westward, to the Ippi Rift Valley that runs north and south through the center of my great land. Closer to our eyes, petrophagous lichen silvered the relative damp of some shadows, and an inverted dwarf species of thornbush (alhagi inversum) adorned the underside of ledges. The quality of the rock-paintings, too, was subtly changing; daubed ground ochre and charcoal paste gave way to a furry, swirling technique of primary colors sprayed from a can. Swastikas, stylized genitals, and curious forms involving circles attached to crosses or arrows or circumscribing a kind of airplane replaced the magical representations of Green Sahara's vanished animists. Some of the hieroglyphs could be read: Rockets, Class of '55, Gay Is Good, Revolucion Ahora, Quebec Libre, Helter Skelter, Fat City. The letters of this last were themselves fat; this style was prevalent. Many of the inscriptions had been overlaid: the simple sign STOP had been amended to STOP WAR and then an anti-pacifist had scratched out the S. Some inviting surfaces were muddy with a mad tangle of colors, defying all decipherment, even if Sheba and I had had the stomach for it, which we did not. For our drink of camel bile had turned our bowels queasy. She had become the gray of the cardboard that stiffens a fresh ream of paper. I too, at this oxygen-scant altitude, under the vertical gaze of noon, on this leaden planet, could go on no farther. We half-toppled, half-crawled into the scribbled mouth of a cave, that seemed to be the entrance, a kind of kiosk, to a subterranean system in whose depths, unless my senses of smell and hearing betrayed me, cold flowers were being sold and pinball was being played. The camel accompanied us inside, and was the first to fall asleep. Then Sheba succumbed to oblivion, her head, that little snug sack of loyalty, resting on my arm. The green demon of nausea churning within kept me from sleeping instantly; as my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw that our shelter and, it seemed likely, tomb had once been a bower of love, and still was love's memorial. Tex loves Rita, a wall opposite proclaimed, and from this same wall, and those adjacent, the names of many more thronged like clouds of the damned to my attention, not all of them written in the flatfooted alphabet Roman imperialism marched through Europe, but many in our own incomparably dancing Arabic script, and some in the chunky formations of St. Cyril, the flowerets of lower-case Greek, Asia's busy bamboolike brushstrokes, and the staring, rectilinear symbols of Tiffinagh, that traces Tamachek onto the sand. So many names, so much love, so many cries uttered on the verge of la petite morte, so much sperm; my stomach sickened, and the blood ebbed from my head. But before I lapsed, in tune with Sheba's breathing, into the sleep that might be our last, I noticed, on a rock above her head this indelible legend: Happy loves Candy. "What did your father say?" "It's not as if he talks about you a lot, he doesn't. He used to ask a lot of questions, he was very interested in you. He thought you could tell him the secret, of how the blacks can be the way they are, of why they don't love this country the way he does." "His and theirs aren't the same country. They're as different as Heaven and Hell." "I know that, Happy, don't argue with me. I'm just trying to be him for a minute. My goodness, you're touchy these days." "Pre-partum blues," he suggested, in his lover's weary voice. The snow had melted, refroze, and finally receded for the last of the four times he would witness this beautiful North American relenting; their graduation approached. "And carping," Candy continued, unmollified. "At times you sound exactly like Esmeralda. Fucked her lately?" He said nothing. He realized that to assure her that he had not slept with Esmeralda after the occasion that Candy had, with the astonishing nose that white women have for infractions of their property rights, sniffed out and goaded him to confess, would be to repaint in newly vivid colors this baleful lapse, and to renew Candy's hyperbolic anger and grief. Her overreaction had baffled and then frightened him. He had tapped, all innocently, a source of passion, of human power, unknown to Africa. In the village, the bushes had every night quivered with casual pairings. He had taken Kadongolimi's many previous lovers into his arms along with her tattoos. The episode with Esmeralda had been painless, instructive, more healthful than another beer, and on the whole less intimate, in terms of penetration of his nervous system, than would have been a trip to her father the dentist. Really, Candy had punished him too severely for this walk through the snow; her copious tears over the event had dried to an unending sarcasm, a baring of fangs in her voice. These toubabs were indeed poison; he had less trouble believing, as W. D. Fard has proclaimed, that these blue-eyed animals, once engendered, had to be banished, a race of snarling, howling wolves, to the icy caves of Europe. Candy would get a wolvish look at the thought of his infidelity. Her lips would go parched; her eyes would turn lifeless, cold, and small. She would begin to talk about the sacrifices she had made for him. Her whole life had been ruined, it seemed, by the injection of his sperm. Yet, paradoxically, not a drop of that sperm must be spilled out of her body. She had rights. She had put herself in great social peril. She, she. She told him, "I can't trust you at all anymore. You two can sneak off into the bushes any time. You have such wonderful things in common. You both hate whites. You both have rhythm. I bet you talk about me, don't you? You call me pinktoes." "Please," he said, embarrassed for her. She did not notice this, in her zeal to embarrass him. "Don't you find her bony?" she asked. "And pedantic? And-well, dreary? So just barely middle-class? Think of her father, drilling all those teeth." "As opposed to glorious yours, selling all those policies." "Sneer at Daddy if you must, he'd do anything in the world for Mother and me. He'd kill for us, if he had to." "Or just for the pleasure of killing." Tears turned her eyelids pink. She set her arms stickily around his neck, proud of those tears, of her hot close breath. "Happy, this isn't us. What's gone wrong?" You have gone wrong. You must let go. He suppressed these words, patiently asking once more, "What did your father say, exactly?" "He was horrible," she sobbed. "Just horrible." Holding her, he was reminded of how, in an intermission of soldiering, he, a young husband not out of his teens, had held one of Kadongolimi's babies, that had