The Last Train to Zona Verde (30 page)

Off the road, weaving among the trees, we seemed to make good time. On the road, we were stopped by policemen or soldiers manning roadblocks. These were not the jolly, I-want-to-go-to-Chicago sort of sentries I’d seen in Namibia, but mean-faced, in some cases drunken, and well-armed men to whom Camillo — normally so jaunty and offensive — groveled.

“
Tu-passaporte,”
one of them always said to me, with a clawing of his greedy upraised fingers.

When we pulled off the road, the occupants of the car got out to relieve themselves. No one went far, not more than ten feet or so, all elbow to elbow, like a pissing contest, men with their feet apart and their pants open, women squatting with their skirts hiked up, the spattering sounds against the roadside gravel like water splashing from an old faucet and rivulets running from under them. Amid all this drizzling I saw Camillo conferring with the cops, handing over his papers, covertly passing money to one of the soldiers or policemen. Then I was given my passport back, and off we went.

This happened eight times, and Camillo, whom I had seen as an irritating person and a bad driver, shrank to a pathetic cringing size, and more toothless and poorer with each shakedown. Bribery is a way of life in Angola — the petty intimidation on the dirt road in the south being a reflection of the million-dollar bribes demanded by government ministers of the oil companies and the gold and diamond concessions. For a bribe you get nothing but a perfunctory assurance of safe passage, more like an entry fee or a toll than a payment for services. The sight of bribery on the back road of any country is a clear indication that the whole place is corrupt
and the regime a thieving tyranny, as Angola has been for the thirty-five years of its independence — and likely much longer, since Portuguese colonial rule was also an extortion racket.

“Roadblock dictators,” the brave journalist Karl Maier calls these men at checkpoints in his account of Angola’s recent history of conflict,
Angola: Promises and Lies
(2007). “The [Angolan] checkpoint consists of two small red ‘stop’ signs facing opposite directions, two pieces of string.” And the man there “sports that arrogant half-smile that is typical of Africa’s roadblock dictators who have the power to decide whether unfortunate passers-by escape with their money, clothes and even their lives. From his swagger, he would be at home in Liberia, Nigeria, Mozambique or a dozen other countries where the line between police work and banditry is very fine indeed.”

The roadblocks and bribes were blatant crookery, but they served a useful purpose too, because I was able to get out of the car, stretch my legs, and check our progress on the map. We had not gone far — I always asked the policemen where a certain town was, and I was surprised at how slowly we were going, how far we were from Lubango. I doubted we would get there anytime soon — certainly not tonight.
I want you to take over control, take over control …

All this while we were passing the residue of the war — blown-up and burned tanks, tipped-over army trucks, rusted-out jeeps. The Cubans had been here, so had the South Africans, and the Namibians with their liberation army, SWAPO, the South West Africa People’s Organization. Battles had been fought along this road and in various small towns. The South Africans had held some of the towns for long periods, and so had the Cubans — the Fidel Castro 50th Brigade. And with what result? Death on a huge scale, of course; thousands in Kunene province had died. Destruction too. And this twisted metal, the sort of expensive junk you see in the aftermath of all wars — the litter of it always seems like a deliberate memorial,
left there to indicate the uselessness of the whole business. But no, it’s just a junkyard with no larger significance, and in time it will all rust to nothing. The young men in this vehicle, Gilberto and João, told me that they had no memory of the war except the loud noises of artillery in the distance.

Then, as we made another stop — “
Cerveja!
” Camillo shouted — I was sure we wouldn’t get to Lubango that day. At a small shop, a blockhouse faced with yellow stucco, under a spreading acacia tree, Camillo parked the car and bought a Cuca beer. I bought a soft drink, and would have bought more but there was nothing else, no other drinks, nothing to eat.

It was about five in the afternoon, the sun beginning to slant through the trees, dribbling gilded tints on the leaves and cones of light filled with gold dust. As we stood in the shade of the shop, Camillo began to curse. He walked angrily toward the Land Cruiser, and now I noticed that the Afrojack music had stopped, the idling engine had cut out, and apart from his cursing and the hum of insects we stood in unaccustomed silence.

This Land Cruiser had a diesel engine, was not easily pushable, and was perhaps impossible to restart without another battery. I saw Camillo at the wheel and the others kneeling behind and heaving. They put their shoulders against the rear of the vehicle and shoved it around the bare ground. The engine did not even flutter.

“
Ajuda!
” Camillo called out to me, asking for help, wanting me to kneel and push.

I shook my head and smiled. Sorry, pal.

They kept at it, failing at each attempt. There were no other cars nearby to boost the battery. I was not dismayed. I was sick of this trip and hated the music and now saw that Camillo was half drunk.

The day had gone quiet, the air was mild, the sun dimmed as it had dropped beneath the trees. I knew from the map that we were perhaps at a village called Uia, about thirty miles north of the settlement of Xangongo, which had been no more than a blur when
we’d passed it. Too far to walk. Using what remained of the light, I walked to the road, hoping to flag down a car to take me south to Xangongo or north to Cahama — anywhere out from under this tree. But night was falling. I saw the man in the shop light a kerosene lamp, and I knew we were stuck in the bush.

12
Three Pieces of Chicken

I
N THE LAST SLANTED
softening of late afternoon light, against the squealy repeated note of one small insect’s
cheep
, under the bird-haunted acacia tree towering over the bare trampled compound, and near Camillo’s derelict-looking car — dirt footprints on its doors: Camillo had been kicking it barefoot in fury for its refusal to start — an old woman approached through the sunlit risen dust.

She held a chipped enamel bucket in one hand and a long pair of metal tongs in the other. Her hair was wrapped like a bowl in a yellow cloth, this turban making her an unusual presence, giving her height and dignity and a look of quiet anticipation. She wore a limp blue dress that fell to her ankles ending in a tattered hem, and an apron that had once been white. She was barefoot, but her feet — her only indelicate feature — were as big and battered as shoes. No one paid any attention to her or to what she was carrying. In fact, Camillo stood aside, gripping a Cuca beer bottle as though he were about to throw it. His eyes were empty, and he looked less than futile. His body seemed uninhabited.

We had come north, crossing from Kunene province into Huíla province, but what did it matter? We were stuck for the night at least, and maybe longer. Light was leaking sideways from the sky from membranes of cloud, leaving purpled tissue just above the horizon.

The old woman made directly for me. “Old” was probably inaccurate: she was undoubtedly much younger than me, sixty or less, but had the aged face of a kindly crone. I was standing apart from the others, who were drinking, and perhaps drunk. I looked for a log to rest on, but saw nowhere to sit, and the car seemed cursed.

Holding the bucket up so I could examine its contents, the woman smiled at me and worked the jaws of her rusty tongs.

“
Boa tarde,”
she said, but it seemed more like evening to me.

At the bottom of the bucket were three pieces of chicken — legs attached to thighs. They were skinless, shiny-sinewed, and dark as kippers, as if they’d been smoked. Each one was covered by busy black flies, and flies darted around the hollow of the bucket. It was more a bucket of flies than a bucket of chicken.

Squeezing her rusty tongs again, the woman asked, “
Qual?
”

Which one?

Though I was hungry, I waved her away, retching at the thought of eating any of those chicken legs. Yet I had not eaten all day, and it had been a long and tiring journey, of harassment, of the border crossing, of the sight of misery and naked children playing in dust, flies crawling on their eyes and in the sores on their bodies. The off-road detours had been especially exhausting from the bucking and bumping of the vehicle. And the checkpoints, the shakedowns, the roadblock dictators.

The woman was smiling because I was smiling. The absurdity of “Which one?” had just struck me — three identical pieces of chicken in the dirty bucket, each of them specked by skittering flies; an existential question to the stranger in a strange land.

“
Não,”
I said. “
Obrigado.”

Something in my smile encouraged her and kept her there, rocking
a little, flexing her bruised toes, running her tongue against her lips to show patience. She was gaunt, and she herself looked hungry. But I said no again and, shoulders slackening in resignation, she turned away, making for the others, who were standing in a group still drinking bottles of Cuca beer.

A muscle twisted sharply in my stomach and yanked at my throat: the whip of hunger.

“
Olá!”
I said, and she turned to me, looking hopeful.

“That one,” I said, pointing at the one with the fewest flies on it.

“
Frango,”
she said in a gummy voice, as though naming a delicacy, and she wet her lips with her tongue and swallowed, as people often do when handling food. Then the word spoken all over Angola for cool or okay, “
Fixe”
— feesh.

She folded my dollar and tucked it into her apron.

I borrowed Camillo’s cigarette lighter and made a small fire of dead grass at the corner of the compound, and I passed the piece of chicken through the fire, believing like a Boy Scout that I was killing the fly-borne germs. Then I found the log I’d been looking for, and sat, and slowly ate the chicken. It was like chewing leather. The straps and thongs of sinew wouldn’t break down, and its toughness made it almost indigestible, my chewing turning the meat into a rubber ball. Queasy over a meal he called a “mess of
bouillabaisse,”
Henry James said that it was “a formidable dish, demanding French digestion.” Maybe I needed that. I was defeated by the food, and disgusted with myself for being in this position, and I mocked myself with a pompous phrase I’d heard a foodie use on a TV show: “I regret to say this dish is not fully achieved.” But it was something in my stomach, and that was a victory in this hungry province.

Then I replayed my first glimpse of the bucket — the chicken, the flies, and the old woman asking “Which one?” It was the sort of choice you were faced with in Africa, but I had never seen it so stark, in the extravagant splashes of a florid sunset.

From the moment we arrived, this nameless place had seemed no
more than a roadside clearing, the sort where locals might gather and linger because of its great sheltering tree. But we were alone. Only we entered the bar, which had perhaps started as a shop and run out of things to sell; it was a bar counter of warped planks, with beer bottles warming on a wooden shelf on the back wall. The man behind the counter sat with his chin resting on the planks and his arms wrapped around his head, cradling it.

What seemed vague and undefined in the failing light became distinct after sunset. In the dark, the kerosene lamp in the shed transformed the shed into a wide square lantern, sharpened its windows, casting bright shafts of light across the ground where a lame dog lay. The underside of the tree was brightened by the lamplight, and the road — which was a main road — was hidden in shadow. We were becalmed in the darkness of the bush, surrounded by chittering insects.

In the thin woods behind the shed there was a village, more audible than visible, for though I could see only the topmost licks of a high flaming bonfire, I could hear the rhythm of drumming, first as a patter and then what seemed a reply to the stuttering thud on a thick drumhead. The drums and not the fire made the village come alive.

The drumming was so insistent I needed only to jerk my thumb at its sound for the barman to reply, “
Cerimônia,”
and he smiled a little and caressed his head with his spidery fingers.

Though the word was plain enough, I did not speak more than a few words of Portuguese. This was a handicap, not merely because the country was generally Portuguese-speaking, but also because of its isolation from the world. Angola was an anomaly: apart from Portuguese, nothing else was spoken except for its many tribal languages, and these differed from province to province. Swahili and Chichewa, both of which I spoke, were usable in the western and northern provinces, but here I was linguistically lost.