Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (35 page)

Maureen screwed up her face like she had swallowed something distasteful.

“I think I like sweat.”

“Gross!” Maureen squealed. “Well, what do you want to do?” she said. The boys got up then and walked out. As they went by, Jeff and Mark said goodbye politely, but the rest poked each other in the ribs, saying things like “Nice legs,” and “Oooh baby.” The door finally wheezed shut behind them.

“Of course boys can be pests too,” said Leslie.

“Just like flies.”

They watched the group walk down the sidewalk, then turned to each other and Leslie said, “Obviously, those two are desperate for a date, or they wouldn’t have asked us, a pair of strangers, to the dance. We could go with them and make their day,” she paused, “or we could say no and break their hearts. There’s power and then there’s power. It’s something to think about.”

Maureen considered her reflection in the window superimposed on the retreating boys. “You’re right. Not all changes have to be bad.” There was a moment of silent meditation as that concept sunk in, as they thought about not just these boys, but without realizing it, on a perfect subconscious level, all the boys in their futures.

Then they whispered it together, knowingly:

“Bang.”

The
Saint
from
Abdijan

T
hey say the port of Abidjan is beautiful with new buildings—a bustling, modern city—but when the tugs pulled the cacao freighter in I saw nothing but a long, filthy gray steel deck an inch from my eye. I couldn’t raise my head. I missed the horror in the interior. If I’d looked closely, would I have seen Seydou’s hand on my elbow? Could I have stopped myself from being the tool?

From the time we’d hit the deep sea swell out of Melbourne I’d been sick, and by the trip’s end I was reduced to dragging the thin mattress the Liberan first mate had begrudged me from one slip of shade to the next. The air smelled African hot, but it was cooler than in the hold. No relief, though, now the trip was almost done: the ship’s queasy pitching had been exchanged for uneven pulls from the two tugs.

It made me think of Ireland’s St. Brendan who fifteen hundred years ago wrote a book called
Navigation
describing his search for the Isle of the Blessed. Some people claimed Brendan discovered the Americas, but he never wrote about sea sickness, so I think he made it up.

I clamped my teeth tight on lunch from three days earlier, and concentrated on remembering I was going to Seguela’s diamond fields to save lives. We’d heard rumor of children toiling in the pits, digging with pikes and shovels for starvation wages. So I told my friends goodbye at Greenpeace Australia where I’d been interning and caught an empty freighter bound for Cote d’Ivorie and the port of Abidjan. You’re too young, they said, too inexperienced. Real activism, I told them, is an individual affair. They shook their heads, thinking my idealism hung on my sleeve. Among the fanatics, I stood out, but I’d always been that way. In first grade I collected crushed aluminum for the poor. My favorite magazine in middle school was the Red Cross’s in-house newsletter. The knowledge someone somewhere is suffering keeps me awake at night. Nothing is distant for me. It’s next door. It’s not religion. I’m not religious, but all my heros are saints.

He’ll mellow when he turns thirty, one said. But somebody has to record abuses. My cameras were buried deep in my duffle, along with a tape recorder and notebooks.

Immigration gave me a bother about my passport—too many stamps in six months. The introductory letter from Human Rights International didn’t carry any weight; neither did the pledge of cooperation from the Seguelan authorities, so I convinced them with smiles that a terrorist or drug runner would not go from America to Greenland to Brazil to Australia and then to Africa. A little cash under the table could have saved me twelve hours, but I preferred not to contribute to civil corruption. They interrogated me in an air-conditioned office high above the street. Everyone behaved civilly, very proper. Gray three-piece suits over white shirts. Red ties. “Stay out of Treichville and Adjame after dark. There are muggers,” the cinder-black custom’s official told me in French much better than mine as he handed back my visa. “What do you hope to do in Seguela?”

“Photojournalism.”

“Watch for the old people.” He grinned politely, white teeth flickering, as he okayed my papers.

I must have looked puzzled.

“Old people. The traditionals. We are near upon Dipri, the new year celebration. It’s a time for magical powers. There will be panther men.”

A dozen skyscrapers blocked the noon light in the window behind him. Even through soundproofed glass, the afternoon traffic rumbled. This was
modern
Africa, the former Ivory Coast, among the most progressive nations on the continent. Poverty I expected, crime too, but not superstition. I nodded my head and thanked him, almost falling when I stood up. Funny, now I walked on land, the Earth still moved.

A train took me from Abdijan inward to Yamousoukro, about a three hour trip, which I thought would be a pleasant change from the freighter, but brightly dressed Ivorians overcrowded the car, the women in bold printed blouses; the men’s shirts unbuttoned to mid-chest. The windows were down, blowing in swampy air, hot as a sauna, like a steaming washcloth across the face. I breathed through my mouth, pressed between two huge women on a bench seat built for two. The one on my left languidly dipped her hand into a paper bag between her legs to dig out what looked like a dollop of peanut butter and smelled like rancid banana, then smeared it on her gums. She sucked at it for a while before going back to the bag. The one on my right lolled off to sleep as the train pulled from the station and fell against me. For charity’s sake, I supported her. She’d have flopped right to the floor if I moved.

From Yamousoukro, I took a two-hour bus ride to Bouaflé, where a representative from Seguela was supposed to meet me, but he didn’t show up. I decided to wait. The saints were patient. Many worked for years without success. Like St. Francis de Sales, they persevered. In 1600 he decided to convert 60,000 Swedish Calvinists. He brought 40,000 back to the church. I made my duffle into a pillow and rested. By then, late in the evening, there was no transport north until morning. I slept on the depot’s floor between a wall and a bamboo baggage cart. Something in a suitcase a foot from my head kept slithering. I drifted off anyway.

My contact found me in the morning. “Mr. Andrew Baily, of the bleeding heart liberal press, I presume,” he said pleasantly in English with a French accent. I saw his clay-coated boots first. He crouched before me, soiled blue jeans tucked into the boots, flannel shirt without sleeves straining to hold in his gut, sun-leathered face, maybe forty, sunglasses, a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. Brown teeth. “I am Marcel Devoe, of the blood sucking, imperialist European diamond cartel. Assistant to the assistant crew chief for Seguela mining. Can I get you some breakfast?”

He treated me to kedjenou, a chicken and vegetable jumble sealed and cooked in banana leaves. We ate in the depot’s café, sitting in bright orange, molded plastic chairs.

Devoe said, “This is not a good time for you to come. The celebration days are here, and the Mandés and the Wè tribesmen get lazy. They’re from Ghana, you know. No work there. They dig slower the closer we get to La Fête de Diamants.”

I raised my eyebrows.

He struggled for an English word, “A holiday . . . a vacation day . . . I do not know the word. On the new year’s day, the employees can keep one diamond they find. It’s a tradition from the DeBeer time.”

“That’s generous,” I said through a kedjenou mouthful. “A diamond for each.”

He smiled. His teeth were discolored.

“No, no, no. One diamond for all, the best one, except the Seguela mines have given nothing but industrial grade stones for years. Still, they hope for another Light of Peace.” He dismissed the hope for a worthwhile diamond with a derisive snort.

“I don’t know that one.”

“The last big stone, 434 carats in the rough, found in Sierra Leone thirty years ago. Nothing like the Cullinan, 3,106 carats, or the Excelsior at 995 carats. You’d think that must be huge. It’s not! The Cullinan was no bigger than a woman’s fist, a little glass potato. But who dreams of those? Diamond mining is ditch digging. So many hundred ore buckets produce so many tiny, flawed stones, only good for saw blades and polishing dust. No, the real money is in production, and the workers give up a good day to hunt for a grand gem to retire on. Listen to them; they already know what color BMW they will park in garages they don’t have. Every hut with a TV and microwave. Stupid workers. If they found such a stone, what makes them think the company would let them keep it?”

“Wouldn’t they?”

He shook his head, as if his mind already lingered on different things. Perhaps he mourned the lost work day.

His car, a rusty little coupé with a Korean name I didn’t recognize, rattled at even low speeds and had no shocks, so every pebble jarred us as we drove north. The de la Maraoué National Forest passed to our west, an impenetrable leafy wall exuding green smells and piercing monkey shrieks. To the east, though, stretched flooded coffee fields punctuated with occasional tin-roofed sheds as far as I could see. Devoe rolled a joint with one hand and held it out to me. I shook my head. He said, “I’m supposed to offer you a bribe, too, so you will write pleasing articles. It’s standard procedure. Money? Drugs? Women? No? Well, I thought not.” He didn’t look surprised or upset.

He waved toward the jungle. “There’s a fortune in timber in there. If you bleeding hearts would leave us alone, we’d be rich men. The entire country used to look like that, impassable with trees. Gold mines with bark.” He pointed his chin at the fields as we passed five children sitting by the road, their black skin splotchy with mud. “Money when they knocked the trees down, and crop money every year since.”

I bit my tongue. My friends were involved in efforts to save the rainforest.

Soon the road climbed as we left behind both the fields and jungle, although vegetation choked every little valley and ravine. Savanna grass covered the hills. Dispirited telephone poles drooped with power lines for many miles, but they vanished behind as the car clattered on. We passed through villages, houses no more than plywood leaning on beat-up frames beneath ubiquitous metal roofs. But I also saw long expensive fences, and winding driveways, leading to beautiful ranch houses, their windows glittering in the mid-morning sun.

We turned west before reaching Seguela, into the high country.

“They ignore the curse, of course,” said Devoe.

“Excuse me?” The land fell away so steeply below my window that I’d been concentrating on what was road and what was air. Devoe drove carelessly, draping his wrist over the steering wheel.

“All the big stones are cursed. Evil follows the big ones. If you could get the diamond without the bad luck, that would be a trick. The man who first stole the Hope Diamond was devoured by dogs. Who would want that? It sank the
Titanic
, you know.”

“Uh huh,” I said. Tough looking brush, higher than our bumper, filled the middle between the two, ratty ruts our road had become, and it scraped the car’s bottom.

“Yes, an American millionaire owned it, and the Atlantic took him. His granddaughter committed suicide after wearing it.”

“So the workers don’t make enough money, and they hang on for La Fête de Diamants thinking it might save them?” I didn’t figure Devoe would give honest answers if there were abuses, but it wouldn’t hurt to put my cards on the table.

He downshifted to get us through a deep puddle, then jumped into the higher gear when we were through. My feet suddenly felt damp. Water drained through the floorboards.

“My great-grandfather told me when he lived in the Alsase, he plowed his fields with two horses who lived twenty years each. The first year he gave them sugar cubes from his coat pocket to reward them for their work.”

We crested a small ridge, and the land before us flattened. Low mountains shaped the horizon.

“What’s your point?”

Devoe laughed. “He only gave them sugar the
first
year. For the next nineteen, when he wanted them to pull harder, he put his hand in his pocket. They’d break their backs as long as they thought he’d bring something out. He never did. You know, someone writes a story about the pits every couple of years. It never makes a change. Africa is not like America.”

I made notes, resting the pad against my knee, the pen jumping with every jolt, recording my impressions. Conrad wrote about Africa, but he traveled on the Congo, beating up current in an underpowered boat, the vegetation crowding against his windows. Here, the grass rolled away, spotted with trees and brush. For miles nothing changed: no animals, no people, just hills and curvy road winding between them. We met no other cars.

“Is this the main road?”

“There’s a train and an airport, but it is easier this way for me.” Devoe nodded his head back to boxes piled where the car’s rear seat would have been.

“What is it?”

“A man has to make a living. An assistant to the assistant manager’s job, whew! The paycheck does not keep him in socks. I have family in Europe. They expect money every month.”

We turned a sharp corner around a thick cacao trees stand, and entered Seguela. Crumbling brick facades whipped by my nose, inches away. Pedestrians slipped into doorways as we passed. Then we hit a larger street, crowded with busses and rusty streetcars screeching down the middle. I had no time to form an impression other than dusty age. I saw no shiny thing. As quickly as we entered town, we left, climbing for several minutes on a path that tried to rip the transmission right from the car’s bottom. John the Baptist, the patron saint of roads, would have found nothing to like about this trail. One more good jolt and I figured
my
head would be on a platter. The clutch clattered while Devoe cursed the car up a last, rock-laden, rutted stretch that would have challenged a four wheel drive vehicle.