Drums Along the Congo Page 8

  I swallow hard and tighten my seat belt. The airfield is less than a city block long and is surrounded by hundred-foot trees.

  Jean flies over three times to get a fix on termite hills and craters. The larger ones could easily snap the landing gear. On the second pass, a man trots into view and yanks an orange windsock up a flagpole. It droops, but Jean pays it no heed; instead he studies a plastic bag tumbling down the airstrip.

  “Southwest breeze. Seven, mmmm, call it six knots.” Jean says to himself. “Let’s see… I’ll bring her in at an angle. Got to watch those two big termite hills… Correct course once we’re past the trees and…”

  To one side of the clearing is the rusty carcass of an army helicopter, a tree rising through its roof, the rotors and windows gone. The colonel was in charge of the crash investigation.

  “The pilot told me that the jungle just sucked away the air. Usually, it’s an updraft.”

  “Not now, Colonel,” Jean snaps, and touches the feet of Saint Christopher twice.

  We touch down, bounce, touch down, bounce, touch down again, bounce, and finally stay on the ground, grinding to a halt in the shade of an ironwood tree. Jean exhales and taxis over to a dilapidated building with a bowed roof and walls covered with lianas. On its facade the greeting “Bienvenu” has been painted out with whitewash. Jean cuts the engine as four soldiers march out of the building and surround the plane. The payroll is weeks late, and they’re eager to secure it. The postmaster follows, dressed in blue cap and jacket but no pants.

  “Where are your pants?” the colonel demands.

  The man snaps to attention and salutes. “At the river being washed, sir!”

  The postmaster is all business, despite his attire. He refuses to sign for the mail pouch until he has thoroughly examined the bag and its seal. Satisfied that Jean hasn’t abused government property, he secures the pouch to the rear bumper of his moped with five bungee cords. He nods to Jean and salutes the colonel.

  “Work!” he announces before beeping the tinny horn and shouting out commands at imaginary obstructions. “Make way! Government business… Make way!”

  As the soldiers carry off the strongbox, a member of the town council introduces himself and gestures to a path crowded with people. Apparently all town activities have been suspended because of our arrival.

  “Everyone loves to watch the planes. Please go into the air and land again.”

  Jean declines, but the councilor persists: “Do it again. It has been a long time…”

  It turns out that we’re the first plane to land here in more than six weeks, and we may be the last for a while. The field requires three days of sunshine without rain to be usable, and that’s a rare occurrence in Epena.

  Jean can’t be talked into another landing. I try to ease the councilor’s pained look with a fifth of scotch, but the crowd surges forward, everyone reaching for a bottle.

  Innocent says something in Lingala that quickly soothes them. A few pat me on the back.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I promised them a big party, la grande fete. Tonight, my friend, you will be opening many bottles in honor of Marien Ngouabi.”

  Marien Ngouabi, the former Congolese president, was a northerner born into the Kouyou tribe, regional cousins of the local citizenry. His assassination in 1977 secured his place in contemporary mythology. In Brazzaville it’s rare not to see his portrait conspicuously displayed in a store.

  “Ngouabi is more than a hero in the provinces, he’s a saint… Remember, he’s the one who kicked out the Americans and closed your embassy.”

  I remind Innocent that it was Alphonse Massamba-Débat, not Ngouabi, who gave the Americans their traveling papers in 1965. A diplomat back in Brazzaville showed me the office where Consul-General Frank Carlucci camped behind barricades as an angry mob outside took potshots at the embassy.

  “Don’t tell that story around here,” Innocent advises.

  Jean notices a bank of dark clouds rolling over the western horizon, and he urges us to help refuel and unload the plane quickly so he can take off before the storm hits. I crawl into the tail section to man the hand-operated fuel pump as Innocent fills the wing tanks. The colonel issues orders to the cargo handlers with a well-practiced cadence. Jean checks the oil and conducts the preflight inspection.

  It’s sweltering inside the fuselage. Sweat is pouring off me, and I have to wrap my T-shirt around the pump handle to keep a grip.

  Jean checks the thermometer taped next to Saint Christopher. “It’s 118 degrees… Welcome to the rain forest.”

  Minutes later the pump is sucking air, and Jean helps me coil the hose. Quickly he opens a small leather bag and ex tracts a tiny wooden doll dressed in woven grasses, with two emerald sequins for eyes.

  “For luck,” he says, pressing the fetish into my palm. I open my juju bag to give him a charm in exchange, but he declines, saying that I’ll need all the help I can get.

  “Don’t cut your nails when the moon is full… Say a prayer every time you hear an owl… Don’t step on anyone’s shadow… Keep one fetish under your pillow at night… Put your left shoe on first…”

  The soldiers hustle everyone off the airstrip. Parents hoist children onto their shoulders. Two soldiers check to see that all dogs are restrained. The colonel says an unleashed dog almost caused a fatal crash at another airstrip last year. The village councilor gives Jean the thumbs-up signal, and the engines roar. The plane bounces down the field, clears the tree-tops with two feet to spare, and disappears.

  Most of the people straggle back to town, but a sizable group surrounds the colonel. “My family,” he explains, introducing Innocent and me to twenty-eight adults and sixteen children. He assigns the oldest boys to carry our gear, and they tote it off down the path. He then sits down for a moment on a dining room chair brought especially for him.

  “It’s a sign of respect,” Innocent says softly.

  Overhearing this, the colonel chuckles and corrects him. “They think I’m rich and want to butter me up before asking for loans… They even brought canoes.”

  Although Epena is only a half-mile away by foot, the river route is a two- to three-mile paddle ride. “But it’s the way chiefs and kings always traveled,” the colonel says.

  After posing for several Polaroids, we walk to the end of the runway, near the river. At the head of our procession is the regal chair, carried high by the colonel’s oldest brother. Their grandfather brought the chair home from Impfondo, where he traded animal skins for it. “Six kilos of skins for six kilos of chair.”

  We reach the edge of the Likouala aux Herbes, where three pirogues wait for us. Two of them are carved from kapok trees, but the third has been adzed from a blond, unfamiliar-looking wood.

  “What is this pirogue made from?” I ask one of the colonel’s cousins, who is struggling to push the boat off the shore.

  “Wood, of course.”

  “Yes, but what kind of wood?”

  “Tree wood.”

  “Hey, give us a hand,” Innocent groans.

  I grab the rail. As the pirogue slides down the bank, the colonel’s cousin speaks up: “It’s a kapok tree. We just finished it… In a few days it will look like the others.”

  The chair is placed in the middle of one canoe, its legs wedged against the topsides. The smallest wave makes the top-heavy pirogue roll a bit, but a crewman assures the colonel that it’s safe. The colonel gamely steps aboard, and the chair immediately topples over the side. The would-be throne is retrieved and stowed forward.

  A flock of piping horn bills streaks by as we climb aboard. Six of them hug the riverbank, their long-beaked shadows stretching across the water, leading the way to Epena. Two red-bellied paradise flycatchers flit nervously from tree to tree, repeating their silvery calls, “See-see, see-see,” until we shove off.

  “Yee-iip-pa!” the paddlers chorus as their blades dip into the water. The three canoes stagger forward until the paddlers find their rhyt
hm, and we glide along smoothly, the keel slicing through the water, raising little or no bow wave. I ride in the middle craft, following the colonel’s boat, several boat lengths in front of Innocent’s. Each canoe accommodates twelve, including four paddlers and a steersman. The strong-backed paddlers exhale loudly with each stroke, and it’s obvious that they’ve worked together for years. They pause at the same moment, letting the stem kick out around tight bends, and resume paddling as one. The steersman, standing on the outboard edge of the transom, makes minute course corrections with his push pole; his main activity, though, is keeping the pirogue on an even keel by thrusting his hips and shoulders one way or the other.

  The colonel’s niece sits in front of me, a toddler dozing on her lap and newborn twins nestled on her hips in artfully tied maroon sashes. The twins awake within seconds of each other and she asks me to hold the toddler while she nurses the babies.

  “Régine, je vous présente Monsieur Ami. Monsieur Ami, je vous présente Régine,” she whispers into the child’s ear as she passes the sleeping beauty to me.

  Without opening her eyes, Régine yawns and stretches, retreating into a deeper sleep with her tiny hands clasped to my shirt and her head snuggled against my chest. I, too, start to relax and surrender to the jungle.

  The paddlers keep to the shade and work their oars effortlessly. They no longer grunt; the paddles have become extensions of their arms. No one aboard speaks, and all cigarettes have been extinguished. It seems our lush surroundings have engaged everyone in conversation, one that doesn’t require words.

  The water sweeps by, gurgling sweetly under the myriads of jungle voices. Simple melodies float out from somewhere in the forest; closer to shore, warblers sing counterpoint. Barbets loose one-note schreeps, and gray parrots whistle. Every once in a while a hornbill joins in.

  This section of the Likouala aux Herbes is fifty yards wide, half in jungle shade and half in sun. The slow-moving current barely ripples the reflections of the clouds in the water. Off to port, baking in the sun, the riverbank rises only a foot above the water, its top edge notched with animal paths. Behind it a wide strip of tropical grasses sways in the breeze, tickling the foot of the tremendous forest wall behind.

  Watching me stare out over the floodplain, one of the paddlers says softly, “In the wet season the grass is under water and the fishing is good.”

  The right bank climbs high above the canoes, its soft face riddled with burrows of various shapes and sizes, suggesting a host of tenants. The trees on the bank are two hundred feet tall and are covered in a riotous tangle of creepers and epiphytes. Some of the vines dangle like monstrous tentacles groping for sunshine, others spiral around their hosts, content in the shade, and still more reach out for their own kind. Each arbor crown is a hundred feet in diameter and studded with small animals, birds, and nests. Millions of insects, I suppose, populate every tree. More often than not, the flora and fauna living on a rain forest tree outweigh the tree itself.

  The river whispers psst-psst each time a paddle breaks the surface. Wherever there’s a hole in the canopy, the sunshine dances through the foliage below and dapples the water. In small pockets scooped out of the jungle wall, tender half-lights glaze a leaf or gloss the bearded edges of a liana. Within every boat length, jade turns to emerald, emerald gives way to shamrock, shamrock turns back to jade.

  I dangle a hand over the rail and dip my fingers in the warm water, letting all lingering tensions float downstream. Slowly I feel the river and its surroundings draw the poisons out of me, accomplishing what Fortunado, the witch doctor, tried unsuccessfully to do with potions and incantations.

  A shoal of swallowtail butterflies rushes out from an acanthus bush. A few are attracted to the cool, damp interior of the canoe, and one lands on the rail next to me. Careful not to wake Régine, I reach out to pinch its thorax. Its distinctive green median marks it as a Graphium gundenusi. Certain Buddhist sects regard butterflies as chosen creatures sent to inspire and enlighten the human condition. They believe that Lepidoptera are often entrusted with messages from gods and spirits, but when I hold the butterfly to my ear, I discern only the soft flutter of wings struggling to be free. My fingers curl open, and the swallowtail vanishes into the sunshine.

  We round a big bend in the river and see a small fleet of pirogues along the shore. “Epena,” one paddler calls out. With home in view, the rowers pick up the pace and resume grunting.

  The noise wakes Régine, and she looks up into my unfamiliar white face. “Wahhhhh,” she bawls, tears streaming down her cheeks. My attempts to soothe her fail miserably. Her father, one of the paddlers aboard Innocent’s boat, takes charge as we land. He can’t be any older than twenty-five, so I’m surprised when he points out his six other children.

  I follow the others along a mud path snaking up the riverbank. After years of anticipation, I’m about to step into an authentic village carved out of the rain forest. My pockets bulge with small gifts to hand out; from fishing hooks and small knives to pencils and packs of bubblegum cards featuring an American rock star.

  “Epena. Bienvenu,” the colonel says as we reach the top of the bank.

  “Merci,” I say, staring across an expanse of freshly mowed lawn. A gardener is operating a noisy weed-whacker around the base of a sago palm tree. Tidy houses fringe the far side of the lawn.

  “This way,” the colonel says, ushering me and Innocent into a manicured courtyard where cement statues of elves and frogs are surrounded by ornamental plants. Even by American suburban standards, the whitewashed brick house is large, and from somewhere inside, a tape player thumps out a heavy metal riff. I think it’s Ozzie Osborne.

  “Make yourself comfortable. Take a look around,” the colonel says, excusing himself to visit his sister in the house.

  Wanting to walk a bit, Innocent and I head up the nearest footpath and come to another open field; this one, though, is mostly dirt. Goats and chickens are wandering about, and children are playing soccer. Off to one side of the field is a junked Land Rover, its interior stripped. There’s no sign of a road, and Innocent wonders how the vehicle got here. For centuries the main route to Epena has been the river.

  “Welcome,” says a man approaching us. His name is Guillaume, and he quickly offers his services as a guide. He wears a white shirt, black pants, and laceless black oxfords. Around his neck is the largest juju bag I’ve ever seen.

  “It arrived on a barge one day,” he says, pointing to the Land Rover. “Brazzaville issued a vehicle to every police district without checking a map. The commandant took everyone for rides around the field until it ran out of gas.”

  Guillaume invites us on a short tour of the town, and we follow him along dusty paths flanked by shrubbery and simple brick houses with galvanized roofs and gutters feeding into water barrels.

  “My neighborhood,” Guillaume announces proudly as we turn down a shady lane.

  In ten short minutes, thirty years of daydreaming have been washed away. This part of Epena could pass for my parents’ retirement community near Palm Beach. Hedge clippers and rakes are propped under the eaves of almost every house, the yards trimmed and pruned with care. The only stick houses are those being built by children with authentic Lincoln Log sets.

  Innocent meanders over to a herd of goats penned in by a remarkable fence assembled from helicopter rotors, sticks, wire, and parts of the Land Rover. Guillaume shows me his garden, with flowers neatly laid out in geometric patterns, a circle here, a triangle there, its formality in stark contrast to the disorder of the jungle. I ask if his plants have medicinal or ritual uses. I once lived with a Berber tribe that grew roses in their desert compound, and although it was a twelve-mile ride to the well, the roses were essential to certain rituals.

  “No, nothing like that,” Guillaume says. “The designs are from an important book on gardens. This is a class project based on the work of Monsieur Rene Descartes. Do you know of him?”

  “Je pense, ah…”

&nb
sp; “Done je suis,” Guillaume coaches.

  Guillaume, it turns out, teaches a high school course called “Great Thinkers of the World.” Naturally, they’re all French males. I suddenly realize that I must quickly derail him or we will be recapitulating several hundred years of Parisian cafe rhetoric. I ask him where to buy soap.

  “What brand?”

  We round up Innocent and stroll down a path lined with coral trees, the first I’ve seen in bloom. Innocent picks up one of the large, fleshy fruits that have fallen to the ground. Their sap is caustic, I warn him, and he drops it before his skin blisters. Several New World species of coral have leaves that can be eaten and flowers that are considered delicacies, but this particular species is cultivated for its poisonous properties. Fishermen grind the seeds of Jatropha multifida into a powder and sprinkle it on the water, stunning any fish in the area.

  Guillaume veers off the path toward a saltbush tree, where a pile of roots has been stacked to dry. “Here, try this.” Guillaume hands us each a piece of root.

  Innocent works the root around in his mouth like a toothbrush. The sap stimulates the gums, and the root fibers bristle into an effective brush.

  We make our way to one of the few wooden buildings in town, a giant lean-to with rough-hewn boards on three sides, a tin roof, and an open front. A glass display case runs the entire length of the store. The owner is hunched over a Donald Duck comic book.

  The shop is called Jamie’s, but the owner’s name is Idrissa.

  “So many people are named Jamie that I thought it would be a good name for my store,” he explains.

  Idrissa isn’t from Epena. He belongs to the mixed-blood mercantile class that operates similar establishments from here to Brazzaville. The colonial French trading companies usually manned their outposts with Senegalese, who often ended up marrying local women. After the French left, the tradition of Senegalese store owners and managers continued. His father is from Dakar, and his mother’s family is from Mossaka, on the Congo River.

  “Look at these beautiful knives. Genuine steel,” he says, showing me a set of low-quality Chinese blades that carry Tiffany prices. The shop is stocked with a large assortment of items, from Sony Walkmans to paper clips. There are rows of dry goods, beans and cereals of all types, cake mixes, tins of pate, several brands of instant potatoes, and various canned vegetables. Next to an arrangement of biscuits are cartons of fishing hooks, all of a better quality than those in my pocket. More tinned goods fill two long shelves; batteries are piled in tiers that reach the ceiling; hanging pots and pans clang in the breeze; socks and underwear are folded in boxes wrapped in cellophane. One advertisement over a perfume display reminds us, “We all want the smell of love.” Directly behind Idrissa, in the men’s toiletries section, are numerous brands of talc, colognes, deodorants, condoms, old French Playboy magazines, and six kinds of soap. Idrissa grabs a bar of Palmolive for me and plops it down next to his cash register, a wooden bowl.