The Poisonwood Bible (52 page)

As a white woman in Kinshasa I present possibilities, but even a black woman with my same purse and leather shoes would be approached on the street. It’s taking me forever to get used to this. Last week a young man walked up and asked me outright for three thousand zaires, and once again my jaw dropped.

“Mondele, he wasn’t asking for three thousand zaires,” Elisabet said quietly when we’d moved on to coveting the pineapples. He was opening the door for a transaction, she explained. He has something to offer, maybe inside information on black-market goods or the name of a telephone operator with unauthorized (therefore cheap) access to long distance. She’s explained this to me a dozen times, but it only sinks in as I come to see for myself what it is, this life. Anybody who needs anything in Kinshasa—a kidney-stone operation or a postage stamp—has to bargain for it, shrewdly. The Congolese are used to it and have developed a thousand shortcuts. They sum up prospects by studying each other’s clothing and disposition, and the bargaining process is well under way before they open their mouths to speak. If you’re deaf to this subtle conversation, it comes as a shock when the opening bid seems to be, “Madame, I request from you three thousand zaires.” I’ve heard foreign visitors complain that the Congolese are greedy, naive, and inefficient. They have no idea. The Congolese are skilled at survival and perceptive beyond belief, or else dead at an early age.Those are the choices.

I got some inkling of this from Anatole long ago, I suppose, when he explained why he translated Father’s sermons. It wasn’t evangelism.just full disclosure. Opening up the bargaining table to a would-be congregation. I multiplied my perception of Anatole’s intelligence by ten that day, and now looking back I have to do the same for everyone we knew. The children who hounded us daily for money and food weren’t dim-witted beggars; they were accustomed to the distribution of excess, and couldn’t fathom why we held ourselves apart. The chief who proposed to marry my sister surely didn’t dream Father would actually hand over his whining termite! I think Tata Ndu was gently suggesting we’d become a burden to his village in a time of near famine; that people here accommodate such burdens by rearranging families; and that if we found such an idea impossible we were perhaps better off somewhere else. Tata Ndu certainly had his arrogance in the ways of command, even calling down a vote in church to humiliate my father, but in matters of life and death, I can see now, he was almost incomprehensibly polite.

It’s a grief to see the best of Zairean genius and diplomacy spent on bare survival, while fortunes in diamonds and cobalt are slipped daily out from under our feet. “This is not a poor nation,” I remind my sons till they hear it in their sleep. “It is only a nation of poor.”

No paycheck tonight, of course, let alone the supplementaire. But Anatole came home excited about the general strike and spoke of it quietly through dinner, careful as always to use code words and false names. Any such knowledge could endanger the boys. Though I believe Pearl Harbor itself would have passed by them tonight, intent as they were on devouring the manioc. To make it last longer I pinched up little bites with my left hand while I nursed Martin on the right. With every gulp he drew, I felt more ravenous.

“One of these days,” I announced, “I am going to take my bow and sneak through the bars of the Residence” Mobutu’s Kinshasa mansion is surrounded by a park, where some zebras and one pitiful elephant paw at the grass.

Pascal was all for it. “Oh, Mama! Abattons I’elephant!”

Patrice soberly informed us he didn’t think an arrow could pierce an elephant’s hide.

Pascal was unconcerned. “Have you seen that thing? Mama’s arrow will knock it over,plaf! Kufwa!”

Elisabet asked thoughtfully, “Mondele, how would you cook an elephant?”

What we eat is manioc, manioc, manioc. Whether it’s tinted pink with a tomato skin or green with a leaf of cress, it’s still manioc. Rice and soy meal help when we can get them, to balance our amino acids and keep our muscle tissue from digesting itself in the process known picturesquely as kwashiorkor. When we first moved to Kilanga, I remember thinking the children must get plenty to eat because their bellies all bulged out. Now I know their abdominal muscles were too weak to hold their livers and intestines in place. I see signs of it in Patrice. Any food that reaches us in Kinshasa has to come over impossible roads in dilapidated trucks from the interior, so it costs too much even if you can find it. Sometimes Anatole reminds me of our long-ago conversation when I tried to explain how we grew food back home, in huge fields far from the people who eat it. Now I understand his dismay. It’s a bad idea, at least for Africa. This city is a foreigner’s premise of efficiency planted on this soil, and it’s a very bad idea. Living in it, no one could think otherwise. It’s a vast congregation of hunger, infectious disease, and desperation, masquerading as opportunity.

We can’t even grow any food of our own. I did try it, right at the metal flank of our back door, under the clothesline. Pascal and Patrice helped me scratch up a little plot that eventually produced a few bleak, dusty bouquets of spinach and beans, which were gobbled up one night by our neighbor’s goat. The children of that household looked so starved (as did the goat), I couldn’t regret this donation.

We, at least, have the option of leaving. In the back of my mind I think this—we could try again in Atlanta. And while we stay here for Anatole’s teaching and organizing, and live on the next-to-noth-ing that work earns, we still have a measure of privilege incomprehensible to our neighbors. I’ve taken my sons to the States for vaccinations that aren’t available anywhere in Zaire. I’ve seen them all born alive, and not one lost to smallpox or tuberculosis. We’re luckier than most. That’s what’s hardest to bear: the view out the window. La cite is a grim, dust-colored homeland, and I suffer nostalgia for our life in the interior. In Bikoki and Kilanga we could always pick something off a tree, at least. We never passed a day without seeing flowers. Epidemics sometimes devastated the village, but they always ended, not far from where they began.

I can have a good laugh at my former self, remembering how my sisters and I nervously made our list of prospects: oranges, flour, even eggs! At our low point as missionaries, we were still fabulously wealthy by the standards of Kilanga. No wonder any household item we carelessly left on our porch quietly found a new home in the night. No wonder the neighbor women frowned in our doorway when we pulled out the linings of our pockets as evidence of our poverty. Not another soul in town even had pockets. They must have felt exactly as I do now glaring at Mobutu on the doorstep of his fairy-tale palaces, shrugging, with his two hands thrust deep into the glittering loot of his mines.

“I thought you said the Congolese don’t believe in keeping riches to themselves,” I told Anatole once, inclined toward an argument.

But he just laughed. “Who, Mobutu? He is not even African now.” “Well, what is he, then?”   

 “He is the one wife belonging to many white men.” Anatole explained it this way: Like a princess in a story, Congo was born too rich for her own good, and attracted attention far and “wide from men “who desire to rob her blind. The United States has now become the husband of Zaire’s economy, and not a very nice one. Exploitive and condescending, in the name of steering her clear of the moral decline inevitable to her nature.

“Oh, I understand that kind of marriage all right,” I said. “I grew up witnessing one just like it.”

  But it dawns on me now that, in the end, Mother carried every last one of our possessions outside as a farewell gift to Kilanga. There are wives, and then there are wives. My pagan mother alone among us understood redemption.

The rest of us are growing into it, I suppose. God grants us long enough lives to punish ourselves. Janvier 17, Mort de Lumumba and Ruth May, that’s still the bleak day at our house. Anatole and I grow wordless and stare into the distance at our own regrets, “which aren’t so far apart anymore. On January nights I’m visited by desperate dreams of stretching myself out over the water, reaching for balance. When I look back at the shore, a row of eggs become faces of hungry children, and then comes the fall into blue despair, where I have to move a mountain that crumbles in my hands. It’s a relief to wake up drenched in sweat and find Anatole’s body next to me. But even his devotion can’t keep this weight off my shoulders. “Have mercy upon me, O God, according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies,” I catch myself praying, before I’ve fully awakened to a world where I have no father, and can count on no tender mercies.  Anatole says recurring dreams are common to those who’ve suffered seriously from malaria. When I’m nervous or sad I also fall prey to the awful itch from filaires, tiny parasites that crawl into your pores and cause a flare-up every so often. Africa has a thousand ways to get under your skin.            

Our life here in Kinshasa contains more mercies than most can hope for. I haven’t yet had to bump off Mobutu’s elephant. I even got to bring home a nice fat paycheck, for a time. I signed on to an American payroll, rationalizing that I’d scatter dollars over the vendors in nay little corner of la cite, at least, as it’s certain no foreign relief will reach them any other way.

Mrs. Ngemba, English teacher, was my new identity. It chafed me as much as the Benedictine habit, as it turns out. I taught at a special school in the compound for Americans who came to work on the Inga-Shaba power line.This was the great nuptial gift from the U.S. to the Congo—financing the construction of the Inga-Shaba. It’s an enormous power line stretching across eleven hundred miles of jungle, connecting hydroelectric dams below Leopoldville to the distant southern mining region of Shaba. The project brought in Purdue engineers, crews of Texas roughnecks, and their families, who lived outside Leopoldville in a strange city called Little America. I rode the bus out there every morning to teach grammar and literature to the oddly unpoetic children of this endeavor. They were pale and displaced and complained of missing their dire-sounding TV shows, things with Vice and Cop and Jeopardy in their titles. They’d probably leave the Congo never knowing they’d been utterly surrounded by vice, cops, and the pure snake-infested jeopardy of a jungle. The compound was like a prison, all pavement and block, enclosed by razor wire. And like any prisoners, these kids fought with anything sharp they could find. They mocked my style of dress and called me “Mrs. Gumbo.” I pitied them, despised them, and silently willed them back home on the first boat. I got “warnings time and again, for “attitude” as the superintendent put it, but he tolerated me for want of a replacement. I quit at the end of the second term.

The place spooked me. I’d step up onto the bus at my street corner at the end of 17 Janvier, doze bumpily through half an hour of predawn, then open my eyes in another world. The compound had row after row of shining metal houses and dozens of liquor bars glittering at daybreak with an aura of fresh vomit and broken glass.

The bus would hiss to a stop just inside the gate for a bizarre shift change: we teachers and maids would step down, and the bus would take on the weary, disheveled whores. Congolese girls, with bleached orange hair and a crude phrase or two of English, and the straps of expensive American bras sliding down their shoulders from under skimpy blouses. I could just imagine them getting home, folding this uniform, and wrapping themselves in pagnes before going to the market. As we all stood blinking at each other, getting our bearings, the compound trucks would roar past us into the jungle, carrying crews of men who apparently (judging from the whores) never slept.

In the course of a year I watched these rough-and-ready foreigners go out to build thousands of miles of temporary roads for carting cable, machine tools, and sheet metal, past villagers who’ll live out their days without electricity, machine tools, or sheet metal.The Shaba Province, incidentally, roars with waterfalls, more than enough to generate its own electricity. But with all the power coming from the capital, the mines could be lit up by Mobutu’s own hand, and shut down at the first sign of popular rebellion. Katanga had once tried to secede, after all. At the time I was working there, we believed that was the justification for this strange project.

Since I quit, we’ve learned more, enough for me to curse my small contribution to the Inga-Shaba. It was not merely a misguided project; it was sinister. The power line was never meant to succeed at all. With no way to service a utility stretching across the heart of darkness, the engineers watched the monster’s tail crumble as fast as the front was erected. The whole of it was eventually picked clean in the way a forest tree gets gleaned by leaf-cutter ants: nuts, bolts, and anything that might serve for roofing material trailed off into the jungle. Anyone could have predicted that exact failure. But by loaning the Congo more than a billion dollars for the power line, the world Export-Import Bank assured a permanent debt that we’ll repay in cobalt and diamonds from now till the end of time. Or at least the end of Mobutu. It’s a popular game, wondering which will come first. With a foreign debt now in the billions, any hope that was left for our Independence is handcuffed in debtor’s prison. Now the black market is so much healthier than the legitimate economy I’ve seen people use zaires for repairing cracks in their walls. Foreign bootlegging of minerals is so thorough that our neighbor the French Congo, without a single diamond mine in its borders, is the world’s fifth-largest exporter of diamonds.

And whatever hasn’t left the country is in the King’s pantry. If my sister Rachel and Mr. William Shakespeare put their heads together to invent an extravagant despot, they couldn’t outdo Mobutu. Now he’s building a palace modeled on the one his friend the Shah has got in Iran. It’s in his native village of Gbadolite. They say he’s got fat peacocks strutting around in a courtyard, protected by high walls, pecking up grain from silver plates inscribed with Moorish designs.The gasoline generator that lights up the palace makes such a horrid bellowing, day and night, that all the monkeys have fled the vicinity. The air-conditioning has to run all the time so the jungle heat won’t damage the gold leaf on his chandeliers.

I can just imagine. Outside the palace walls, the women of Gbadolite are squatting in their yards, boiling manioc in salvaged hubcaps, and if you asked them the meaning of Independence they’d scowl and shake a stick at you. What a nuisance, they’d say. The towns all have new names, and if that weren’t enough to remember, now we’re supposed to call one another dtoyen.

In downtown Kinshasa, where a lot of the bars have television sets, Mobutu in his leopard-skin hat blinks on every evening at seven o’clock for the purpose of unifying our nation. “How many fathers?” he asks again and again in this recorded pageant, and his recorded audience responds, “One!”

“How many tribes? How many parties?” he continues. “How many masters?”

Each time his loyal congregation screams,”Mookoo! One!”

The image flickers and the citoyens drink their beer or go on about their business. Mobutu is speaking in his own tribal language. Most people out there can’t even understand.

Rachel Axelroot DuPree Fairley

THE EQUATORIAL JANUARY 1978

LISTEN, don’t believe in fairy tales! After that happy-ever-after wedding, they never tell you the rest of the story. Even if you get to marry the prince, you still wake up in the morning with your mouth tasting like drain cleaner and your hair all flat on one side.

That was poor little me, suddenly a diplomat’s wife on the edge of the forest prime evil, wearing my Dior gown and long black gloves to embassy parties in Brazzaville, French Congo.That was the fairy-tale part, and sure, it was fun while it lasted. I felt like a true-life Cinderella. My hair did just wonderfully in the humidity, and I had my own personal French hairdresser (or so he said, but I suspected him of being Belgian), who’d come to our home every Tuesday and Saturday. Life could not have been better. Never would anyone have believed that merely a few short years before I had been living with my family over on the other side of the river—me, the very self-same Rachel, slogging through the filth! Ready to sell my soul for a dry mohair sweater and a can of Final Net hairspray. Hoo, boy! I received quite an education about politics, as an embassy wife. The French Congo and the newly independent Republic of Congo are separated by one mere river and about a million miles of contemporaneous modern thinking. It’s because they tried to go and do it all for themselves over there, and don’t have the temperament. They’re still struggling to get decent telephone service. Whereas in my duration of diplomatic service in Brazzaville, French Congo, the worst I ever had to do was fuss at the servants to cut back the scraggly hibiscus on the lawn, and clean the mold off the crystal.

Well. That is all water under the bridge now. Diplomatic service or not, a man who leaves his wife for his mistress is no catch, I was sorry to find out. Well, live and learn. Like they always say, the rear-view mirror is twenty-twenty.

Remy, my third husband, was very devoted. He was an older man. My life has been 101 calamities with at least half of them in the marriage department, but finally I got lucky in love, with Remy Fairley. He at least had the decency to die and leave me the Equatorial.

With Remy resting in peace I was free to express my talents, and I have built this place up from what it was, let me tell you. The Equatorial is now the nicest hotel for businessmen along the whole northern route from Bra2zaville to Owando. We are about a hundred miles north of the city, which is considerably farther in kilometers, but still we get the tourist trade. There are always French and Germans and what not stopping in on their way up north to oversee one project or another, or just escaping from the city to see a little of true-life Africa before they finish up their foreign assignment in Brazzaville and go back home to their wives.They usually tend to be oil men or interpreners.

We’re on the premises of what was formerly a plantation, so the house is surrounded by lovely groves of orange trees and coconut palms. The mansion itself has been converted to twelve comfortable rooms of various sizes, all quite luxurious, with two full baths on each floor. The restaurant is in a large open portico on the ground floor shaded by bougainvilleas. There is nearly always a breeze. We recently put in a second small covered patio with a bar so that while my guests are enjoying a meal, their chauffeurs “will have a pleasant place to bide their time. The restaurant is for paying guests only, which is, needless to say, whites, since the Africans around here wouldn’t earn enough in a month to buy one of my prix-jixe dinners. But I certainly am not one to leave anyone sitting out in the rain! So I built them that shelter, so they wouldn’t be tempted to come in and hang about idly in the main bar. I’m famous for my love of animals, too, and have created quite a little menagerie in the compound between the garden and the restaurant for everyone’s amusement. Any time of day you can hear the parrots chattering in their cages. I taught them to say “Drink up now! Closing time!” in English, French, and Afrikaans, though I have to admit they’ve picked up a few depictable phrases from my guests, over the years. The clientele at the Equatorial is always the highest caliber but, nevertheless, they are men.  

My proudest achievement is the swimming pool, patio, and gardens, which I put in entirely by myself. The pool took the most spectacular effort. I got it dug by paying a whole troop of local boys for each and every basket of earth they moved. And of course, watching like a hawk to be sure they didn’t stuff the bottom of the basket with leaves. It is hard work running a place like this, don’t you believe it. My help would rob me blind if I didn’t keep every single thing locked down, and punish the culprits with a firm hand. Most women would not last a week in my position. My secret is: I like it! I really do. In spite of everything, I stroll through the restaurant in my bikini with my platinum-blonde hair piled high, jingling my big bunch of keys, cheerfully encouraging my guests to drink their martinis and forget about their workaday cares back home. And I think: Finally, Rachel, this is your own little world. You can run it exactly however you please. Who needs a husband when I have more handsome gentlemen around than you can shake a stick at? And yet, if ever I don’t like the way someone behaves, out he goes! If I want chicken curry for dinner, I simply say to the cooks: Chicken curry! If I want more flowers, I snap my fingers and have them planted. Just like that. Oh, I work myself to the bone, keeping this business open seven days a week and the weekends. My rates might be a little higher than average, but my guests do not have a single complaint. Why should they go and get swindled at some other establishment when they can come here!

I will probably grow very rich and very old at the Equatorial before any member of my family ever visits me here. It’s true! They never have. Leah is right over there in Kinshasa, which is just a hop, skip, and jump away. When they had that fight down there with Muhammad Ali and George Foreman we had tons of tourists from that. They came over to Africa for the fight and then crossed the river and toured around in French Congo, since the roads and everything are so much nicer in general over here. I knew we’d get a slew of people, the minute they announced they were having that fight. I’ve always had a sixth sense for spotting a trend coming, and I was right on the ball. I finished up the second-floor bathroom I’d been having trouble with, and redecorated the bar with a boxing theme. I even went through hell and high water trying to get an authentic advertising poster from the fight, but sometimes you just have to make do with what you have. I got one of the boys to fashion little miniature boxing gloves out of dried plantain leaves sewn together, -which turned out very realistic, and had them dangling down from all the lights and fans. I hate to brag but if I do say so myself they were cute as a button.