To Hellholes and Back Page 10
This is unbelievable. We’ve been on the road for less than a week in a country where a hundred dollars pays the annual bills for most families. How do you come up three hundred dollars short in that amount of time?
“There are banks in Boma,” I say. “I’ve seen them.”
“It is Saturday. They won’t be open until Monday.”
Henri’s request obliges me to confront an obvious fact that I’ve been hiding from myself since arriving in Kinshasa—somehow I’ve placed my passage, my faith, my well-being, and most worryingly my four thousand dollars in the hands of a hustler. This isn’t a flattering realization for any traveler to own up to, but it’s particularly embarrassing for a “professional” who considers himself reasonably independent with well-sharpened instincts for trouble. The fact that I don’t even know the day of the week is a frightening indication of how dependent I’ve become on Team Congo and its chain-smoking, beggar-baiting leader.
Whether I trust or even like Henri any longer is hardly the point. In negotiations, he’s meaner than a cornered raccoon, and even in agreeable moments he’s the kind of guy who’d buy someone else’s kid a drum set for Christmas. But in an outpost like Boma, I need Henri and Team Congo more than they need me. Or my three hundred dollars.
After some cat-and-mouse questioning during which I play the role of prayerful United States and Henri plays evasive, nuclear-armed North Korea, we reach a delicate agreement. I’ll advance Henri three hundred dollars on the condition that not only will it be repaid upon our return to Kinshasa, but that a portion of my initial four-thousand-dollar payment will be refunded for the downgrading of my itinerary. Tellingly, the precise amount of “fair refund” is left unspecified—“It will be calculated at the end of our journey.”—but we’ve kept the peace for another day.
As far as sightseeing attractions are concerned, Boma makes Kinshasa look like Venice, but I need some distance from Team Congo. Despite the fact that there’s almost nothing of interest to look at, I take off after breakfast. In the center of town is a hollow balboa tree that I’m told famed explorer Henry Morton Stanley once slept inside. This is assuredly a fabrication. For starters, Stanley’s supposed entrance and interior carvings are at ground level, as though the tree hasn’t grown an inch over the past 140 years.
Nearby, the ruined hulks of an old Mercedes Benz and General Motors LaSalle are presented as the Congo’s first automobiles; another obvious fiction given that the cars are clearly from the 1920s and ’30s. But so what if they do carry some historic legitimacy? You know your town is as tedious as someone else’s dreams when the second stop on the city tour is a pair of decaying vehicles from colonial times.
On the grounds of a secondary school I do find one interesting detail—a faded rendering of Belgian king Leopold II painted above the main entrance. Given that he was responsible for decades of looting, rape, punitive amputations, mass slavery, murder, and other unspeakable terror in the Congo, the Santa-bearded despot seems like a strange figure to welcome children each morning. When I ask a few questions about the extant portrait, it becomes clear that none of the teachers, to say nothing of the students, know nor care much about the fiendish face that adorns the door they pass through each day.
At an abandoned Belgian-built hospital undergoing a desultory form of restoration, I’m shown the room in which a former Congolese president died, and I’m informed that after it’s fixed up, the room will become a museum. This means nothing to me, nor, apparently, to the Congolese. The old leader’s broken bed frame is shoved into a corner. Next to it, tilted on its side, his death mattress is spotted black with mold. Torn curtains lie in a heap on the floor and pieces of broken concrete cover gaping holes in the floor of the entryway like a game trap.
In late afternoon, Team Congo and I reunite for drinks at the hotel. The day apart has done us all good. Even the normally dour Gilles is chatty. Around sunset, Henri and I walk to an outdoor nightclub—plastic tables and chairs in the dirt enclosed by a low, concrete retaining wall—where four large speakers pump loud, rhythmic music. After a couple more Primus beers, my mood is so improved that I barely care that the presumably destitute Henri is spending his (my) money on pricey drinks to go with the most expensive dishes on the menu.
“The only women you see here are prostitutes and girlfriends of married men,” he tells me while ordering a round of whisky shots with beer backs for four women and two men he’s befriended at the table next to ours.
The dance floor eventually gets crowded, mostly with guys, but the vibe is good. I have about ninety beers as another incredible African sky turns from blue to orange to purple to black. The music gets louder and more insistent. I soldier through broken conversations with drunken strangers. It feels great to be part of the local scene, and Henri is in a companionable mood, but at some point we split up and I walk around town for an hour looking for another bar.
Absolutely nothing is open, so I weave back to the hotel where a wedding reception has the lobby and bar packed with a couple hundred guests. Half in the bag already, I order a couple bottles of water to take back to my room, but the reception has soaked both the bar and restaurant of everything except beer and whisky. I stagger around the party trying to cadge a bottle of water off one of the tables. Even without a gallon or two of beer dehydrating you, it’s never wise to be caught short of drinking water in Africa.
For once, however, the exalted Caucasian visitor routine isn’t playing. Nobody wants me here. Hard glares let me know this is a closed party. Everyone is impeccably dressed. The women, in particular, look fantastic in their colorful dresses and big hairdos. By comparison, my dirty pants and T-shirt make me look like a Calcutta rag picker.
D. B. is outside guarding the car, but he’s no help—the hotel is out of water and there’s nowhere else to get any at this time of night. I offer a security guard five dollars to score me a bottle. You know you’re screwed when putting up a week’s wage for a bottle of water gets you shunned.
Back in the room I slur a fast prayer of thanks when I remember the two cans of Fanta stashed in my bag. I brush my teeth in luscious orange syrup, then finish off the can. I set the other one on the floor next to the bed for when I wake up in the middle of the morning dying of thirst and my heart racing like a chain saw.
I hit the mattress like Chinese leftovers—sad, withered, congealed. Making matters worse is that the hotel in Boma is by far the worst we’ve checked into. It’s impossible to escape the damp in the Congo, but this hotel seems designed to trap it. Mildew coats every surface—walls, curtains, sheets, pillows. A fog of moldy air hangs over your sleep like breath from a cancerous dinosaur.
For three hours I lie dead in bed until a series of abdominal cramps jab me into consciousness, twisting my innards and sending me reeling around the pitch-black room wondering where I am, half angry, half stupid. I figure this is dehydration setting in—nothing that can’t be gutted out till morning—but soon begin fearing worse. A sickly sweet brew of Fanta and beer creeps like pond scum across my tongue. My mouth fills with foamy saliva. With vibrant clarity I recall last night’s chewy meat and several other meals that have yet to pass through me.
A moment of relief arrives with a splendiferous, sputtering fart that sustains itself for so long—revving up and gaining momentum like an outboard motor lurching up to step speed—that I get a little freaked out. But its glory is ephemeral. Minutes later I’m teetering atop the porcelain donut splattering butt glop into the toilet bowl with such velocity that I can feel flecks of it rebounding off the water back up at my ass cheeks.7 (Perhaps the greatest ever description of Third World incontinence is William Sutcliffe’s memorable bit from the painfully funny Are You Experienced? about travel in India: “The second I had squatted, I heard a strange sound of rushing water coming from behind me. ‘What’s that?’ I fleetingly wondered, ‘Who could be running a bath at this time of night?’ Then I realized that it was me.”)
Between the second and third voiding epi
sodes, I reach for the light switch. After flipping it up and down forty or fifty times I realize the electricity in the hotel is off for the night. This forces me off the john and into the room to root around in the dark for the battery-powered camper’s headlamp, which, even though I’m no longer on safari, I keep handy for just such emergencies.
Wrapped like hand cuffs around my ankles, my pants nearly trip me. No wonder so many kids run around pantsless here! I whip off every stitch of clothing. Completely nude, except for the headlamp and its blood-constricting elastic headband, I pitch back toward the toilet like a one-legged coal miner, stubbing my toe on the bathroom threshold on the way in.
The sink doesn’t work (huge surprise there), but there is water in the toilet tank. Each time I think I’m finished purging I remove the ceramic lid and use some to wash up. I rinse my face with little handfuls, so overcome with cottonmouth that I allow incidental splashes to pass through my lips and cool my burning throat. In normal circumstances I’d sooner chug antifreeze than let Congolese tap water defile me, but at this point I’m forced to make nice with the local bacteria. A degrading tableau, I admit, running the sluices at both ends and freshening up with toilet water, but in situations like this you cling to whatever comfort you can find. Now seems as good a time as any, by the way, to note that of all the advice I collected before coming to Africa, “Bring your own toilet paper!” ranks at the top of the good-call list.
Having exhausted the attractions of Boma and unable to face the hotel staff with my usual éclat in the wake of the ostentatious all-night ralphing, I rise at noon and, after two emasculating, sit-down hangover pisses that go on forever, begin lobbying Team Congo for a change of plans.
“Boma is awful,” I say. “Let’s get back out into the countryside.”
“But we have only just arrived after a long journey,” D. B. complains.
“The toilet in my room may no longer be in service,” I inform him.
Still at a political disadvantage over the three hundred dollars, Henri is forced to offer a compromise.
“Zongo,” he says behind a floating pillow of cigarette smoke. “We will visit Zongo.”
It’s surprising how quickly you can clear out of a hotel after debasing yourself in front of a wedding reception and entire staff. Within an hour we’re packed and back on the red dirt tracks that pass for roads in rural Congo. Brick and mud huts with grass roofs soon give way to radiant grasslands and rolling hills covered with emerald jungle. Alive again with something approaching cheer—my emotions on this trip are about as reliable as the Italian government—I appraise the loose dirt road, lean toward Henri, and say, “Great ride, but if it rains before we head back we’re fucked.”
“The rain will not hamper our progress,” he says. “What we worry about are other vehicles. Large trucks can become stuck in the mud. The road here is wide enough for only two small vehicles. If a truck becomes frozen in mud, there are few places to go around. Traffic in both directions will stop, sometimes for several days.”
I see his point. In most places the track is no more than fifteen feet across. Both sides are lined with thick jungle. But we see only one other vehicle all afternoon, a Red Cross Land Rover driven by a white man presumably on his way back to town from a final supply run to a remote village before the heavy rains strike.
The afternoon is broken up with a superfluous stop at the goddamn Inga Dam, a detour Henri insists on making despite it by now having become a thorn in my side. “I have obtained the permit to visit the dam, and it must be used so as not to incur suspicion,” Henri explains.
Personally speaking, as long as the electricity works I couldn’t give a shit about dams. Modern marvels, fine, but nodding appreciatively at acres of poured concrete gets tiresome in about two minutes. It’s all hydro everywhere I’ve lived, and I never missed a field trip to marvel at the great turbines that have obliterated native salmon runs so that we can power up Guitar Hero and microwave popcorn in our heated homes that burn more lights than a surgical theater.
Try hard enough, though, and you can make a shit sandwich taste good. Once inside I force myself into a peppy mood, mostly for the benefit of David, the chubby Inga tour leader, who seems thrilled for his first excuse in months to get away from the guys in the welcome shack with the AK-47s propped against the desk.
The tour is OK, but it makes me tense when volunteer cultural ambassadors ask if there are any questions and not one of the deadbeats in the crowd (in this case, Team Congo) has one. So I lob David a couple easy ones. I’m going to forget whatever he tells me about integrated pump units and underground aquifer afterbays, but because I know from experience the slow death that comes from being in front of an audience that gives you nothing in return, I’m sensitive to the needs of guides. This is standard operating procedure for me, making up questions to let tour proctors know that we’re still with them in the back of the bus, still engaged in the product. At times, though, it can be an incredible emotional burden being the kind of traveler who goes to Africa and ends up paying more attention to the self-esteem of local service-industry minions than to the pride of lions feasting on a bloated elephant carcass or a massive torrent of water rushing through French-built turbines sunk a hundred feet below the surface of the earth.
Despite my reservations, it is arresting to see the massive Inga I and Inga II facilities in the midst of forbidding wilderness. The two dams, spanning just a small corner of the mighty Congo River, supply power to the majority of the DRC. If completed, the planned Inga III and Inga IV dams are expected to send electricity all the way to Egypt and South Africa. How ironic that Conrad’s highway into the heart of darkness now creates light for the entire Congo and could soon illuminate the Dark Continent from top to bottom, perhaps drawing the country a bit closer to burying the dreary sobriquet hung upon it by the old master cynic.
Zongo Falls saves the trip. Not counting Kinshasa destitution, it’s the most spectacular natural attraction in the Congo. After a short, sweaty march through twisting, suffocating jungle, we reach the falls, an expanse of sheer rock face more impressive for its width than its height. It’s only a seventy-five-foot drop, but from the churning death pool below, explosions of water send mushrooms of mist hundreds of feet into the air.
For several minutes, Henri, Gilles, D. B., and I stand in awe of the falls’ power. These are my kind of nature lovers, able to revere the wild in respectful silence rather than feeling compelled to offer beer-commercial hoots and hollers. At Zongo Falls, I feel closer to Team Congo than at any point in the trip.
Taciturn Gilles surprises me by drifting into the brush to pick a bunch of blue and yellow flowers. He arranges the blossoms against a miniature fern, then snaps a picture with his Nokia cell phone. He shows me a series of close-ups of flowers and plants I hadn’t noticed him compiling during our trip.
“It’s nice to look at, to remember each place,” he says while I flip through the shots.
The Zongo capper is dinner of chicken moamba, the famed national dish cooked in a thick, brick red sauce of palm and peanut oil. It’s got a mild, nutty flavor, and for hangover food is every bit the equal of Taco Bell. I horse down two large pieces of chicken and bogart the last of the sauce to go on top of a third plate of rice.
Since our Come to Jesus meeting about the three-hundred-dollar loan, Henri hasn’t bothered me with any “There is a small problem” preambles to yet more distressing disclosures, but the moamba puts him back on his game. The latest crisis concerns my flight to Johannesburg, now fewer than forty-eight hours away.
“You have a confirmed ticket to leave Kinshasa, yes?” Henri’s face is dark with concern.
“Of course. I bought the ticket months ago.” I produce the ticket from the sack of valuables that’s been connected to me like an extra organ for the past month.
“I’ve just spoken with Jacques in Kinshasa. It seems when he called to reconfirm your flight, there was no record of your reservation or ticket purchase.”
“That’s impossible,” I say. “I have a confirmation code. I have a seat assignment. I have a receipt. I have a ticket right here. I confirmed all of this in Johannesburg the day I left for Kinshasa.”
“Flights out of Kinshasa are not frequent and are always full. It takes no more than fifty dollars to have someone at the airport remove your name from a computer and insert a different one. It happens all the time.”
“But this is South African Airways.”
“But this is Kinshasa.”
“You’re saying my reservation has been stolen?”
“I have no idea. But, in any case, we must present you in person very early at the airport to fight it out. We will have to leave Zongo tomorrow.”
“But we drove all day to get here.”
“And skip the visit to the crafts market on the way home.”
I could give fuck all about the crafts market. The real issue is Henri. Even in Zongo, the nearest approximation the Congo has to paradise, the man actively courts trouble. He’s like the nightmare boyfriend or girlfriend who’s never content, who’s always looking for problems and when there are none to be found invents a few just to keep things interesting.
Henri lives for “the daily fight.” It gives him the chance to show off, to perform, to prove to the locals, and himself, that he can’t be intimidated. Hooray for him, but for me it’s a different story. In the Congo, I’m like one of those National Guardsmen who signs on to get dirty in the woods for a couple weekends a year only to find himself hunkered behind a bombed-out rampart in Tikrit dodging sniper fire and screaming for the corpsman to pump thirty cc’s of morphine into his downed buddy.