To Hellholes and Back Page 11
“It appears we will have rain tonight,” Henri says, looking blankly into the sky and breaking me out of my dismal reverie to face an equally dismal reality.
The drive back to Kinshasa is long and muddy. Another shitty hotel. More cops to negotiate. But essentially my last two days in the DRC pass like most of the ones before them. I’m not traveling; I’m surviving.
Though I do my best to discourage him, Henri insists on seeing me off at the airport. He arrives in a shirt and tie, indicating his readiness for battle over my nonexistent reservation. He tells me he’s been working the phones and that we must wait in the parking lot for some official friend of his who has agreed to come and grease the rails for my departure. Given that Henri has already shown up half an hour late and I’m antsy to get checked in, I rudely blow off the plan.
“I think I’ve got the hang of this by now,” I tell him, swinging a bag over my shoulder. “I’ll take my chances by myself.”
Henri shrugs as if to say, “There is no God, our lives are short, and none of this matters anyway.” We shake hands and say good-bye without emotion. I slide D. B. and Gilles handsome tips, receive warm embraces, and walk into the airport with the weight of the Third World off my shoulders.
Inside, a series of “helpers” bum-rush me between airline, security, and immigration counters. This costs me nearly an hour and fifteen dollars spread between various outstretched hands. The good news is that my reservation is intact (a false alarm from the nincompoop Jacques). But the first security counter is manned by a serious sergeant-at-arms type who instantly flags the visa discrepancy in my passport, then refuses to listen to my feeble French-English-Gibberish explanation of the situation.
After casting me aside and forcing me to fidget on a two-foot-high plastic stool for fifteen minutes, he summons me back to his counter and makes me go over the story again—my November arrival, erroneous September stamp, the money I’ve coughed up across the DRC as a result. This time he listens and bobs his head intently. When I finish he stares into my eyes and says in perfect English, “Do you swear to me that you are telling the truth?”
“Yes, I swear. The whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
The ivory whites of his eyes shine against his purple-black face with a deep, incomprehensible strength. A perpetual loser in staring contests, I sense a challenge—loser stays, winner goes free—and don’t so much as breathe or blink for at least ten seconds. Neither does he. Finally he mutters, “You may pass.”
No bribe. No handout. The last honest official in Kinshasa? The first one, anyway.
The next counter holds the grail, the immigration stamp I need for departure. This is my second trip to the counter, and one of the two men at the window—a guy I passed two dollars to a few moments earlier—smiles and says, “Kinshasa, many problems, yes?”
“Many problems,” I reply amiably, a smiling cohort in on the conspiracy.
This angers the other official who lashes out at me with Doberman rage.
“No! No! No! There is no problem with Kinshasa. It is up to you to check that the date in your passport is correct at the time you receive it! This is your responsibility! This is your problem! You created it! Do not blame Kinshasa!” He beats an emphatic stamp like a bruise into my passport and moves me along, his eyes radiating heat like hot briquettes.
At the next checkpoint I endure a comprehensive pat-down that includes full frontal dick grabs—two firm, reassuringly hetero squeezes—followed by a brisk hand knifing up the crack in my ass through my thin safari pants. A few seconds later the guy manning the X-ray scanner grabs my carry-on off the belt, sticks out his palm, and tells me he hasn’t eaten in two days.
“But you have a job. Aren’t you paid a salary?”
“Patron.” He smiles weakly. “At least buy me a Coca-Cola.”
“Are you kidding?”
He motions across the departure lounge to a kiosk with drinks for sale. “Please, buy me a Coca-Cola. I standing here all day. It is very hot next to the machinery.”
“Jesus Christ. Give me my bag and I’ll get you a Coke.”
He hands over the bag and I walk across the lounge and come back with the Coke. Then I return to the kiosk and spend the last of my Congolese francs on a plate of French fries in which four or five ants are crawling.
After a ninety-minute delay in the baking departure lounge, all 182 passengers on South African Airways Flight 51 are herded to the tarmac for another security search. This requires standing in the midday heat for thirty minutes before being allowed into the even hotter aircraft. A tall, attractive young security agent paws through my bag like she’s late for a job interview and can’t find her car keys. At the bottom of the bag she finds the scattered remnants of the international goodwill I’d conceived back in the States, each still individually wrapped in colorful paper.
“What is this?” She holds up a little square.
“Starburst,” I tell her. “Candy.”
She turns the square in her hand.
“Sugar?”
“Yes, sugar. Sweet. Candy.”
“It is very good?”
“Delicious.”
“You give to me.”
“Excuse me?”
“You give to me.”
“I’m not allowed to take candy on the plane?”
“You give to me.”
“You want my candy?”
“Yes. You give to me.”
Her voice occupies a territory between threat, order, and request.
“Go ahead,” I say, by now practically laughing at this absurd finale. “I was going to give them away anyway. Take them all.”
She pushes around my camera lenses and safety undies and comes up with a handful, graciously leaving me a couple candies for the road.
“Thank you very much.” She smiles at me and pauses as though waiting for a kiss at the end of a first date.
“My pleasure,” I say, briefly wondering what she’d do if I actually kissed her before deciding to save it for the ground in South Africa.
Did I feel threatened or physically imperiled during my month in Africa? The rip-off attempt in Matadi was dicey, but overall, no, not really. Aggrieved by the petty demands of public corruption and aggressive beggars? Constantly. Insect bites? Despite my best efforts and gallons of bug dope, I came home with dozens. Malaria? So far none of the brain matter behind my eyes seems to be liquefying, which is how Shanghai Bob once described his experience with the disease. AIDS? Not unless you can get it by dropping beer money on bored prostitutes.
I wasn’t attacked by a wild animal, swept away in a flash flood, or killed by monkey feces, though in truth I worried about those things the same way I worry about winning the lottery. Which isn’t to imply that it’s not unnerving to hear hyenas and hippos in the middle of the night snuffing and grunting within inches of your soft, malleable skull while you lie in your tent as still as a sack of bricks, trying to breath through your eyeballs. Shortly after I returned from safari, a tiger named Tatiana leapt over a fifteen-foot moat and twelve-foot-high wall at the San Francisco Zoo and killed a teenager named Carlos Sousa Jr. Had I known about this incident at the time I might not have experienced those nocturnal visits with such surreal detachment.
I carried five hundred dollars in cash through the mean streets of downtown Johannesburg without incident. I walked unmolested through Soweto, still a hopeless slum but also a tourist attraction. I got sick once, in Boma, but that was probably my fault.
I read a lot of books and met with a lot of people while prepping for the trip, but what turned out to be the heaviest insight came from Dr. Bahr, who more than most kept his eyes open during his two-year Peace Corps stint in Cape Verde: “Africa is human nature stripped to the raw bones; life at its most basic. You find a lot of human traits out in the open there that we prefer to hide—sex, violence, love, hate, sickness, strength, greed, compassion, sadness, humor. It’s all right there, with no pretense, and this is what makes it both
attractive and repellant to Westerners.”
Most of Africa wasn’t repellant, just maddening, like trying to put together a bike or figure out a board game with an incomplete set of instructions. The worst joke, or maybe just the historic inevitability, was that, not counting bribes, nearly every injustice I suffered in Africa came at the hands of white people. The ceaseless nattering of the Europeans in the presence of safari animals wrecked what should have been numerous special moments. Henri made off not just with my money, but my trust. For those keeping track of account deficits, I got my three-hundred-dollar loan back, but that “fair refund” turned out to be “no refund,” and I ended up eating the nine hundred dollars in prepaid airfare for the trip to Mbandaka that never got off the ground, which in part explains the cold comfort of my snub of Henri at the airport.
Did I have fun? Sometimes. Having drinks at outdoor bars with stars shining like little flashlights and drum-heavy music blaring and people dancing was cool. For a history geek who’s traipsed through World War II battlefields around the planet, meeting a local survivor of the Africa campaign was a thrill. Team Congo pulled Zongo Falls out of its ass for a trip-saving finale. I communed with cheetahs on my birthday, though I have trouble admitting the timing was a huge deal given that I’m one of those people who prefers to ignore birthdays; not just mine, yours, too, especially if we’re celebrating it with cake and ice cream in the admin conference room on the fifth floor.
What really made the Congo such drudgery was its lack of complexity. There’s beauty in simplicity, but in Africa I started to miss things like baseball box scores, unnecessary kitchen gadgets, gin vs. vodka martini debates, diehards who file their Morrissey CDs under “S” for The Smiths, coming back from picking up Korean barbecue and sitting in the driveway listening to the end of a This American Life story on the radio about a guy in Seattle who got over his wife’s death by wearing a Superman costume in public, and scouring YouTube at 2 a.m. for old Tenpole Tudor videos. I missed hearing about my friends’ problems—the problems of architects, land surveyors, real estate appraisers, attorneys, doctors, construction grunts, tax accountants, graphic designers, social workers, bankers, defense contractors, salesmen, musicians, soldiers, students, teachers, cube monkeys.
One of the big troubles in the Congo isn’t just that there aren’t many jobs available; it’s that there are almost no good jobs available. Aspiring writers can’t go to school and return home to work the city beat for the local newspaper because there is no local newspaper. Entrepreneurs can’t get businesses off the ground because there’s virtually no consumer market for anything beyond necessities. Ex-jocks can’t become local golf or tennis pros because there are no local clubs. I don’t know for certain but I’d wager the annual income of the average Congolese that there are more bookstores in my hometown than in the entire DRC.
Not that the Congo lacks for intellectualism. Checking into my hotel in Kinshasa on my first day in country, the young clerk who introduced himself as John D. handed me a room key and asked, “Don’t you have an English novel?” I understood the words, but not the meaning.
“A novel,” he repeated. “An English book. Something to read. Do you have anything at all you can give me?”
The hordes with their hands out are one thing. You want to help them all, but eventually you have to hold out against the sea of futility. When a guy asks you for a book, however, you’re thrilled for the opportunity to give, as well as the chance to pass along evidence of your impeccable literary taste.
I handed John D. my half-read paperback of Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man. If I really needed to finish it, I knew I could walk to a store ten minutes from my house back home and find a copy.
“It is good?” he asked, brightening like a sunrise.
“So far.”
Lest I paint too charming a picture of John D., it should be noted that after I turned over this freebie he hounded me like an Egyptian fishmonger for more handouts every time he saw me. I suspect now that he was probably more interested in selling my books than reading them. Such are the ravages of global capitalism.
I never abandoned my quest for the funniest joke in Africa. The best one came at, of all places, Inga Dam. Among the employees there was a middle-aged, beak-nosed French engineer with wine-stained teeth. Alain was working on contract at the dam through 2011. He’d been in Inga for a year already and confided that the place was much better than Zambia, where he’d first come to Africa to live in a local village for three months as a sort of cultural warm-up.
“Eating with them, sleeping with them, to first experience life in Africa exactly as the locals do, not as a privileged foreign engineer,” he explained.
Alain lasted seven weeks in Zambia, during which time he lost twenty-two pounds and became exhausted, sick, morose. Returning to France, he checked himself into a rest home for a two-week stay. There he discovered that his best friend from the Zambian village had stolen his credit card, run up a massive bill, and drained most of the euros out of a bank account he’d also stolen the numbers to.
Alain told his story in the cleansing way you’d speak about an awful breakup or terrible hangover suffered years ago. Seeing that he’d more or less picked up the pieces—though he still pronounced the name of the friend who betrayed him like a snake hissing at a rat—I took a shot and asked if he had any good Africa jokes. Amazingly, he had one that sent him into a fit of laughter before he could blurt it out.
“The biggest joke of all in Africa,” he said, “is that I actually agreed to come back to this fucking place.”
If that punch line loses something in the translation, it’s probably because you’ve never had a grasshopper wing stuck in your throat.
In the weeks following my return I thought a lot about Africa, but the early conclusions were convoluted and disappointing. I’d survived, met a lot of nice people, a few dickheads, and nothing was as life threatening as it might have been. I’m not sure that I found the funniest joke on the continent—I’m still waiting on any shred of humor from my Peace Corps contingent—but people laugh in Africa as much as anywhere else I’ve been, and I doubt my reputation will suffer for saying so; if down-in-the-dumps Joe Conrad hasn’t precisely been forgotten, it’s safe to say not many locals are carting his books around.
That said, I didn’t have to travel halfway around the planet for a “we all know that people are the same wherever you go” lesson. Those are much more easily obtained at home. All you’ve got to do is flip on the Disney Channel.
Months afterward, however, other mental images from Africa began resurfacing—derelict public services, stacks of worthless currency, out of control government, and lunatics like Henri who insisted that all of this dysfunction was somehow normal and simply something to get used to. These thoughts nagged me so insistently that over time I began to sense that Africa might have exposed me to some buried dread that would turn out to be much more complicated than the superficial fears I’d originally conceived.
It would take more confrontations with the horsemen of doom to drive these ideas into the open. But even if I didn’t yet fully appreciate it, Africa had put me on a heading for a rendezvous with worries far greater than burrowing tapeworms and conclusions far more difficult to reconcile than Henri and Team Congo.
Part II
Country
India
5
Heretics in the Temple
There’s no good time to visit India. I discover this when I begin consulting friends, family, guidebooks, and Web sites, laying plans for my assault on the subcontinent. May? Fatal dust storms. July? The heat will bury you. August? Nothing but rain. October? Even the mosquitoes can’t fly through the humidity. December and January, the only good weather months, are ruined by tourist hordes that turn every attraction into a massive rugby scrum. Even in the summer low season the hip-to-hip shuffle through the Taj Mahal is a lot like the cattle call misery of the Louvre. Except at the Taj, you have to leave your shoes at the door and h
ope nobody steals them while you’re inside.
It’s not just that there’s no good time of year to visit. There isn’t even a good year to go. In the words of one inspirational poem I’d later find scrawled on the wall of a derelict palace:
Land of Sorrow
Ocean of Tears
Valley of Death
End of Life
A historic place of misery and half literacy, India is as formidable a dream crusher in the information age as the rousing verse above suggests it’s always been. Having survived the privations of eternal Africa with somewhat less pain than expected, I saw now India anew as the bellwether for nearly every global calamity that had ever kept me awake at night. Among them:
Terrorism
Maybe because that “subcontinent” designation implies a retiring, almost deferential piece of land, few people associate India with Islamic fundamentalism. But with 120 million Muslims—12 percent of its population, making India in absolute numbers the second-largest Muslim country in the world—the nation that shares borders with Pakistan and China has become a favorite proving ground for mad bombers. Consider the following highly abbreviated list:
June 2009: Swarms of protestors enraged over the alleged assassination of a political candidate in Mumbai ransack six railway stations in the state of Bihar, setting fire to trains and stations.
November 2008: Coordinated attacks against ten Mumbai sites, including the traveler favorite Taj Mahal hotel, kill at least 170 and injure at least 230.
May 2008: Nine synchronized bombs kill 63 and injure 216 in Jaipur, capital of the state of Rajasthan and, as a pivot in the Golden Triangle, one of India’s most popular tourist destinations.
February 2007: Railway bombs on a train bound for the Pakistan border kill 66, injure 13.
March 2006: Blasts in the tourist city of Varanasi kill 21, injure 62.