To Hellholes and Back Page 8

  “It’s not such an uncommon solution to problems here,” Henri notes.

  The Belgian survived the attempted poisoning—he’d been sick at the time and was throwing up daily, and this is probably what saved him—but he was understandably alarmed enough by the attempt on his life to cut things off with his girlfriend. A wise move, especially when compared with his next one—taking as his new girlfriend the ex-girlfriend’s best friend, whom he’d been screwing on the side, anyway. Again, not so unusual a situation in the DRC.

  Amazingly, further complications ensued. Some weeks later, when the Belgian was discovered back in bed with the ex-girlfriend (the one who’d poisoned him) in what can only be imagined as a breathtaking hate-fuck extravaganza, the new girlfriend tried to poison the Belgian anew.

  This time the poison worked. Or almost worked. The Belgian spent two months in bed certain he was going to die. Finally, he regained the strength to fly home, never to be seen again.

  “He lost everything,” Henri says. “His business, his money, his women, his reputation, almost his life. This is Congo.”

  “What is he doing today? Do you keep in touch with him?”

  “When you leave Africa in such a way, you do not keep in touch with people. No one has any idea what became of him.”

  Henri plays the savvy foreigner routine a bit too convincingly for my taste. For example, instead of ignoring or handing small change to beggars, he prefers to antagonize them. A typical exchange, always in French:

  Beggar: “Patron, patron, I am so hungry. Nothing to eat for two days. How about a hundred francs? (This is about twenty cents.)

  Henri: How about you give me a kiss?

  Beggar: What!?!

  Henri: You can’t expect me to give you something and get nothing in return. I’ll give you a hundred francs and you can choose either to kiss me on the lips or kiss my ass.”

  This gets a few laughs from bystanders—you can’t go anywhere in Africa without bystanders—and an embarrassed smile from the beggar.

  Beggar: Oh, patron, please. Just one hundred francs. Henri: Monsieur! What species of pigeon do you take me for? I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you one hundred francs if you will give me one hundred francs.”

  Beggar: But I haven’t got one hundred francs. I need money only for food.

  When the argument stalls, Henri’s go-to move is to put a friendly arm around the beggar’s shoulder, begin rubbing his belly, and address the laughing crowd.

  Henri: It seems he has been eating well enough, no? I believe he wants my money to buy beer and cigarettes.

  In the face of the jeering crowd, the beggar—playing along in the expectation that good humor will earn him a handout—is defused. Henri walks away and the beggar is frustrated.

  Crudely tolerable as it might be once, the act becomes exceedingly obnoxious after you’ve seen it four or five times. But in Africa there’s always a new audience and Henri is a born showoff who never tires of attention.

  Once an important trading post filled with Belgian Beaux-Arts architecture, Matadi’s city center today remains surprisingly functional and handsome. (On the Congo scale, anyway, which is like the scale for all-white track teams and Polish cuisine.) The dramatic old buildings have inspired a sense of community pride and suggest comparable affluence. After Kinshasa, Matadi’s streets seem almost clean. Locals are polite and easygoing. Even small stores have shelves full of goods.

  Anxious to escape Team Congo for a day—the guys have been harder to get rid of than a pizza box and I’m no good without my Chuck time—I wake up early and set off for a walk through the city. After exchanging heartfelt “Bon jours” with a dozen or so strangers, I cross the street at a wide intersection. Bursting with good cheer, I step off the curb and feel on my shoulder the thinnest pretense of a tug. A vibration, really, as though a large insect has landed on my back.

  One of those unaccountable instincts—like the inner voice that warns you to avoid coed baby showers and Dane Cook movies—tells me to check the knapsack slung over my shoulder. I turn and find to my all-consuming horror that the zipper on the front pouch has been pulled wide open. The words “Holy Fuck!” blast through both hemi spheres of my brain. The sight of my valuables exposed to the entire African continent shoots a wave of nausea through me.

  As quickly as I can choke back the rancid taste of fear, however, a miracle reveals itself. Nothing has been taken. My passport and enormous wad of francs are dangling half out of the bag—another tremor of weakness courses through my body as I riffle through the wreckage—but they remain in my tenuous possession. Nothing is missing. For the moment.

  Yanking the zipper shut with trembling fingers, I spot a young guy—fifteen, sixteen tops—approaching purposefully from behind. Our eyes lock for a telling instant before he peels off in the opposite direction. In front of me, a kid in a blue T-shirt with “Wildcats” silk-screened in white script across the front whips around, looks at the kid, then at me, then back at the kid.

  From Munich to Mumbai, here’s how the scam works. Picking out a tourist rube with a knapsack in a congested street, a thief approaches from behind. With a single, nimble motion, he whips open the zipper of the pack and keeps moving in front of the mark. Trailing a few yards behind, an accomplice then sticks a hand into the open pouch and grabs whatever he can while making his pass. Oftentimes, a third confederate will make another pass-and-grab, walking off with whatever the second guy couldn’t.

  In Matadi, the heist doesn’t go off as planned. Maybe the zipper whipper wasn’t a pro. Maybe the thieves didn’t count on the sturdy double-stitching of the Jansport.5 Maybe I actually do have the superhuman powers of perception I’ve always suspected myself of having. Whatever the explanation, I duly praise the sweet and bleeding Jesus for his righteous intervention. A potentially devastating robbery has been averted.

  Sensing trouble, the kid in the Wildcats shirt turns to me again. This time we share a millisecond of you-guilty-motherfucker eye contact. Plainly busted, he makes a theatrical check of his watch, then takes an abrupt U-turn through onrushing traffic, as though he’s just remembered an urgent appointment or spotted an old friend directly behind him.

  Pickpockets in the Congo are generally presumed to be in cahoots with local police, who get a generous cut of the take in exchange for leaving the thieves alone. Although I wouldn’t necessarily be afraid of a wiry shit like Wildcats in a normal situation, I’m at an eye-of-the-tiger disadvantage in any altercation with someone of a desperate criminal mind-set. And Christ alone knows what friends he’s got lurking nearby.

  Despite all this, I make a U-turn in the middle of the street and follow the kid—unleashing car horns, shouts, the whole African ruckus—and begin closing the short distance between us. When Wildcats quickens his pace, I double-time mine. What I plan to do if I catch him I have no idea, but with my heart thrashing in my chest like a marlin in a boat and flush with confidence from my street-fightin’ tutorial with D. B., pursuit feels like a viable option.

  In the end, the adrenaline rush is all for nothing. The moment he sees me closing in, the kid breaks into a dead sprint down a crowded sidewalk, hairpins into an alley, and disappears forever.

  In 1879, at the age of fifty-eight, African explorer and scholar Sir Richard Burton—easily among the top twenty stallions ever to trod the Earth—was set upon by thugs in Alexandria. Biographer Edward Rice wrote of the incident: “In the old days Burton would have knocked his assailants’ heads together, or even better, killed them, but now he collapsed on the street and was left for dead…. If any lesson came out of the episode…it was that he was getting too old for excursions into dangerous and now-strange worlds.”

  Getting rolled by scofflaws was a disheartening turning point in Burton’s career. The valiant participant in unspeakable sexual rituals of the African jungle; the mighty linguist who’d written dictionaries and translated ancient poetry; the first Englishman to pierce the secret world of Mecca; after Alexandria, an unshak
able gloom descended that remained with him for the rest of his years, though being denied promotion by pissant bureaucrats back in Old Blighty and spending his golden years with a harpy Victorian wife bent on payback for years of neglect certainly didn’t do anything to salvage the old wolf’s pride.

  Regrouping from my near miss in Matadi, I reflect on Burton’s tragic denouement and consider our depressing parallels. True, at fifty-eight Burton had nearly two decades on me at the time of his encounter with African riffraff, and he endured a fairly severe beatdown. Still, in world’s-most-virile-adventurer years, I figure fifty-eight is equal to nineteen or twenty mortal years.

  Physically and intellectually, on my best days I couldn’t approach Burton with both legs broken and half his brain tied behind his back. Even for the most intrepid, though, there comes a point when the impromptu let’s-hop-in-a-brakeless-Mercedes-with-total-strangers-in-the-Congo vagabonding has to stop. After certain experiences—narrow brushes with thieves, hotel rooms that smell like wet dog—the meditative outrider has to wonder if, like Burton, he’s simply getting too old for this shit—and whether this unspoken fear might have been at the root of his self-inflicted year of challenge travel all along.

  Knapsack snatchers thwarted and composure more or less regained, I resolve not to let one negative experience color my opinion of the entire town. Pressing on, though with newfound caution, I find a mellow dude behind a table stacked with CDs. Needing souvenirs for friends back home, I ask, “What’s new in Congolese music?”

  After a debriefing on the contemporary Central African music scene—females in loincloths specializing in spiritual numbers are big this year—I settle on a pair of CDs by a chubby, middle-aged dude named Madilu System, a local legend who’s recently passed away. The salesman pronounces my taste in music top-notch. My faith in African humanity takes a tiny step toward recovery.

  The CD purchase draws a small crowd from which emerges a twenty-year-old named D’jino who wants to try out his English. Despite my general dislike of nonnative speakers looking for gratis conversation hours—I was once a professional in the ESL racket and can still get on my high horse about freeloaders—D’jino turns out to be a pleasant guy.

  I agree to a guided walk through town. We start with a short climb to the top of a bluff overlooking a glorious stretch of the Congo River. Well-preserved colonial-era houses amid swatches of lush jungle dot both banks. There are so few postcards in the Congo that you appreciate views like this the way Detroit Lions fans appreciate touchdowns.

  I didn’t haul two Canon bodies and lenses all the way to Africa for nothing, but just as getting in the shower or sitting down on the john is guaranteed to make the phone ring, whipping out a camera in the Congo brings the cops running. The Congolese have a weird pathology about cameras, an almost Soviet suspicion of anyone taking a photograph of anything other than a crime scene. Sensing a shutter about to fall, a police officer awakens inside a building two blocks away and rushes toward us.

  The cop jabs a finger in my chest and screeches, “Terroreest! Terroreest!” D’jino laughs the way you would at a crazy uncle. He explains that the two of us are friends from school. Given the two decades that separate us, perhaps I’m being portrayed as a kindly visiting professor. It’s impossible to know. The drama ends with the cop smiling, shaking my hand, and shoving off without demanding a friendly payoff. D’jino is smooth. Henri could pick up a trick or two from this guy.

  Back in the city center, we wind up in front of a heavyset, middle-aged woman selling beignets off the top of a wooden crate. I buy one for each of us, which, with D’jino handling the transaction, cost five cents apiece. Pressing the change into my hand, the woman tells me how much D’jino and I look alike. This is a patent load of caca, but the woman goes on to tell me that D’jino could be my son if only I was the type of man who went around screwing lonely black women and fathering bastard children. I wouldn’t by any chance be that kind of man, would I? In the States this sort of cheek from strangers would be offensive, but in Africa it seems sort of normal, even charming, especially since the woman gives my leg a warm squeeze when she says it.

  D’jino and I split up in front of the Hotel Metropole. I give him a five-dollar tip, a couple dollars more than I would have had he asked for one. Feeling good about myself—survived robbery attempt, hooked into local music, evaded bribe, made new friend, felt up by beignet lady—I walk into the lobby to find D. B. looking at me the way a dad looks at his teenage son sneaking in through the garage door at two in the morning.

  “Henri is looking for you,” he says. “There is a problem.”

  D. B. and I drive twenty minutes across town to the local office of provincial immigration. We pay two dollars to the soldiers guarding the main gate before we’re allowed through. A woman in traditional African dress meets us in the lobby and walks us to the second-floor office of the director. Inside this august chamber, Henri is already sitting in a plastic chair. (If you haven’t already clued in, “plastic chair” describes 99 percent of the furniture in the Congo.) Across from him, behind a large wooden desk, sits the living embodiment of the shady Third World official cliché.

  Fat, self-important, and sweating profusely—despite cooling himself nonstop with a plastic geisha fan—the director of provincial immigration clasps my hand like a church deacon and tells me he’s privileged to welcome me to Matadi. A lackey fetches me bottled water. We stumble through a moment of niceties—“Enjoying your stay in Congo?” “Very much.” “Excellent.”—before the big man sucks a raspy breath between clenched teeth, the universal signal that official negotiations are about to begin. From the top drawer of the desk he produces my passport and begins thumbing through it.

  “When did you enter the DRC?” he asks me in Ivy League English.

  “November seventeenth,” I say. “Five days ago.”

  “Where was your Congo visa issued?”

  “The Congolese Embassy in Washington, D.C. I sent off my passport for the visa in October.”

  “At least one of your statements must be false.”

  I turn to Henri and ask, “How did this man get my passport?”

  “In order for us to pass through the Inga Dam site, it is necessary to gain official permission,” Henri replies.

  “But we’re not going to the Inga Dam. We’re going to Boma.”

  “Inga Dam is a tourist attraction.”

  Leaving aside the issue of why I would want to pass through the site of Inga Dam, I turn back to the immigration director.

  I already know what the “problem” is. On the day of my arrival, an immigration official at N’Djili Airport “inadvertently” stamped a September 15 arrival date into my passport. The date conflicts with the November start date on the visa issued to me by the DRC embassy, not to mention my actual arrival date. Though I hadn’t noticed it at the time, the clerical “error” makes it appear as though I entered the country illegally, a federal offense that’s seized upon by eagle-eyed officials all over the country. Several spot the inconsistency so quickly that it almost seems like they know it’s coming. In Matadi, the director of immigration wants to know, like all the others, how I managed to enter the country without a valid visa and escape detection for two months.

  “I have no idea why September 15 was stamped into my passport, but I’ve done nothing illegal,” I say. “I was in the U.S. in September. It’s a simple mistake. Obviously no official would have let me in the country in September if my visa wasn’t valid until November.”

  “Where is your vaccination card?”

  I hand over the International Certificate of Vaccination with my yellow-fever inoculation dated October 2, pointing out that it would have been impossible for me to enter the country without this vaccination—proof that I couldn’t have been in the Congo in September. Over the top of his fan, the director regards me like a sink full of dirty dishes. Some people (public officials often as not) are simply born immune to reason.

  I reach for my ai
rline ticket and show the director my itinerary, still more evidence that I’m telling the truth. He reaches across the desk and the ticket disappears into his massive paw. Along with my passport and vaccination card, he stuffs it into his shirt pocket. All these years of travel and I continue to astonish myself with my own stupidity.

  “I want to help you,” the director says in a semibelievable way. “But I am compelled by law to prosecute anyone who has entered the DRC illegally. The only solution I can see to this problem is to invalidate your original visa and personally issue you a new visa and entry stamp, both bearing today’s date.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “The cost for the new visa will be U.S. five hundred dollars.”

  For the duration of this petty drama, Henri has been brooding in uncharacteristic silence, but with this new demand his outrage boils over. Uncorking one of those extravagant, saliva-gushing Gallic dressing-downs normally reserved for poor table service and reviews of subpar Gérard Depardieu movies, Henri rises to my defense with a pair of inspired albeit highly dubious arguments. In the first place, he informs the director, as he (Henri) is close, personal friends with the national minister of tourism, he (Henri) is on the verge of making a phone call to Kinshasa that will surely cost the director his job. If this insignificant parasite wishes to continue his sleazy charade any longer, he (the director) may rest assured that Henri will shortly have his head or balls (the director may choose which) in a pretty little guillotine. Second, as a government functionary, the director should be aware that he is harassing a citizen of the United States of America whose leader, the eminent George W. Bush, has recently made known his country’s full financial and military support of the Congolese government in their fight against the well-armed rebel faction based in Kivu.