Stringer (4 page)

The boy and Guy pushed each other, quickly becoming violent. “Thief! Thief!” Guy accused. The boy raised his hands and hit back. “Confession!” screamed Guy. “I refuse!” They pushed each other for a while; after this the boy looked at me vacantly. His name was Patrick.

The girl came around, dirty but pretty, with brilliant eyes large like leaves. Her name was Sylvia, and she looked older than the boys. All of them seemed in their mid-teens. Guy and Patrick stood at attention. “Confession?” Guy said. Sylvia scowled. From his pocket Guy drew out a joint that he lit with a match. He smoked with compressed lips. Sylvia looked around appearing bored and suddenly pulled the roll from his mouth; she put the joint in her nose and inhaled it to half the length. Her eyes had turned red.

The boys fell upon her, pinching her body. She rolled, laughing. They fondled her breasts, felt in her shirt. She pulled away. Guy produced another joint but Sylvia snatched it while he searched for a match. She stuffed it into her bra and took two steps back. The boys didn't pursue her.

I wasn't sure if I should be shocked: it seemed natural,
innocent—merely play. Guy now showed Sylvia something on his palm. Patrick lay on the ground. The sky was dark. The breeze had stilled. Worried the taxis would stop running, I announced that I would leave. To where? Sylvia asked. Victoire. How? By taxi. She suggested we take a ride. The boys agreed. Patrick disappeared, all jumping, and returned pushing a two-wheeler. The motorbike looked new—and almost certainly stolen. Guy pulled me on, between him and Patrick, the driver, in front of whom stood Sylvia. We pushed with our feet over the garbage, rolling out of the Quarter. What about gasoline, Sylvia said. I gave money for one liter, which we bought at a garage.

Too heavy to move fast, we trundled through the main road, dark, and then through a street colored caramel by wicks in kerosene. My legs sweated from dampness in the air. The night felt ripe. An occasional taillight reflected in a red patch on the road. It seemed provocative to engage Kinshasa so directly and in the company of its outcasts; it felt reckless to enjoy the wind against one's face. Patrick drove steadily. We had covered almost the full distance home when we passed the tall iron gate of the Stadium of Martyrs. Suddenly the bike swerved. We're going inside? I didn't hesitate. From here the house was only a walk, even if at night I would be less sure of the way.

Behind the gate we passed a fire that a homeless man sheltered by cupping his hands. The fire was small, about the height of my ankles. A child slept beside it. They could not take refuge in the sentry post, a cement cabin with grilled windows that was vacant but locked.

The stadium loomed: a giant coliseum with tall archways and corridors wide enough for tanks. The immensity of the place—pillars thicker than my body, the towering roof—felt like the presence of a government. And so our trespass produced a perverted excitement, as though we defied the highest authorities. We climbed the flights of stairs, wide, and made of concrete. Patrick grabbed my hand, and with the other I held Sylvia's. Guy
stumbled and fell and scrambled to his feet. We pulled each other up, as a chain, toward the end of the corridor that opened to the sky.

Circle upon circle of seats we climbed on all fours until we reached the topmost row and the stairs became a wall. We turned. The stadium seemed impenetrable, totally black.

Joints were rolled and passed around. It was as though we had reached a summit; there was that kind of exhilaration. For a moment I wondered if we could be seen or heard. The children chattered, insensitive. And Patrick killed all my inhibitions by screaming into the blackness.

The echo came garbled. Patrick mimicked it by mumbling. The air felt heavy, liquid almost, as though it rippled. He bowed like an orator. Sylvia clapped. He pointed in the air; Guy laughed. Patrick spit above himself, saying,
“Congo na bísó! Ezalí bosóto!”
He stepped forward and backward like in his own private theater; he screeched; he shouted at Guy; he turned on me. His face seemed charged with anger and bitterness; the boy seemed consumed by some interior emotion. His mouth opened and saliva stretched between his gums. With a cry he fell over Guy.
“Fou!”
Sylvia yelled.

She told me to ignore him, saying he had lost his mind during the war.

Patrick slammed Guy in the chest. “No!” Guy shouted, reeling, but he laughed, then punched Patrick. They hit each other. Suddenly their laughter seemed unreal; it transformed into cries and screams. The violence grew; the boys seemed unhinged. Guy buckled. Patrick coiled his arm and hit him on the back so hard that his head hit his knees. Patrick punched the air. I stepped away. He punched like a madman. He would not stop. Guy leaned toward the stadium and shouted, “Congo!” Patrick stopped, waiting for the echo; “Oo . . .” They laughed.

Patrick became still. The boys calmed down.

We sat in the stadium's silence. Our breaths made fog in the
air, from the cigarettes. From time to time Sylvia would say something to the boys; she spoke in long phrases, properly enunciating words. She had been educated. The boys mostly communicated with motions of their heads, in rude bursts.

Our silence was sometimes broken by a cry from the city; when it was a dog you could tell by the barking that followed: one bark after the other and then a chorus. But sometimes it was like a woman's screech: unaccompanied, piercing.

Sylvia sat cross-legged, folding her long legs and exposing her satin-covered crotch. She drew the joint from her brassiere and had it lit. It passed from her to Guy to Patrick to me. “Do you live at the cemetery?” I asked. “I live with the boys,” she said. “And sometimes with white people.”

After some time Guy crawled over and lay on her lap.

The ride home was short. The motorbike started uncertainly but found its rhythm, bumping over the mud roads near Victoire and veering dangerously. This was the city that had rejected the children—and in turn the children had rejected it. I reached Bozene between night and morning and banged on the door and stamped out the joint, which they had given me “for the road.” It glowed before dying out. I had never been up in Kinshasa beyond zero o'clock, as the Congolese called it. I went to the back room, past the public toilets outside the house, and hissed. “Jose!”

He fumbled with the padlock. I apologized, staggering into the house in a daze and falling over my bed. I writhed on the mattress, succumbing to all the aggressors: the heat, the mosquitoes, the stabbing bedsprings. The choristers started again. I felt I had collided with reality.

At the time what struck me was the freedom I had felt around the children—they were free to seek pleasure; and they did, in sex and intoxication. Their lives were unbridled by the constraints and the repression of society. Yet almost every journalistic
report, NGO statement and academic paper I found perverted their expansive lives and obvious pleasure, depicting everything as a wretchedness. It was important to me that the children be able to express themselves, in terms near their own, and not be described by a moral or even sympathetic prejudice imposed on their experience.

I would experience such incongruity repeatedly: in miserable places I would find the most exuberant
joie
. It seemed to me both extraordinary and implausible, and at first I imagined it to be cosmetic cover-up, a mask worn to hide the suffering, or to help overcome it. That may have partly been true. But I also felt that the Congolese in their delirium truly forgot the misery, that they spoke in verse and caricatured their misfortune in genuine comic spirit and not for farce; it was their way of taking distance, I thought, of suspending the destruction of time. To a degree that exceeded any people I had known I found the Congolese able to isolate the present, and be satisfied. Theirs was a sort of amnesiac solace.

“Fockoff! Fockoff!”
The children's last words to me kept coming back.

I woke up scratching the blisters on my shoulders. They had bled. The night had been a frenzied experience, and all morning the nostalgia lingered, making the house seem dreamlike, dreary, looming, like a part of the Quarter, or as though I were still there. That was my first adventure. Good morning, Kinshasa.

3

A
fter this, Nana changed to me. Bébé Rhéma had been woken by my door-rattling in the night. Jose had escaped to the living room but Nana had been forced to stay up and feed her. Angry and tired, she reproached me at the dining table, in full view of the courtyard. The neighbors listened. I apologized. But Nana's irk seemed to run deeper. Whether she now thought I was infected by a diabolical spirit or if it was simply that I had been irreverent and naive, she became morose and began to behave as if she needed to prove that evil lurked in children.

Her behavior was unusual—for she had a child and a nurse's training. But this belief in evil seemed to be something Nana was taught not to reason with, and in which she believed so powerfully that even having a child did not change her.

The new frustration showed one day as I watched a cartoon. It was a Portuguese production dubbed into French about a schoolboy who turned into a superhero and saved the planet. But to Nana it was proof of her convictions—for the boy, transformed, could fly and laser blast a giant octopus. From behind my sofa she hissed, “Turn that off, it's fetish!” But I stayed at the television,
watching cartoons, until Jose came home and switched to the news channel.

Nana took me aside and told me tales about her nephews and cousins and the children of her friends—a cast of characters who had caused miscarriages, orchestrated poisonings and magically dissolved marriages by infecting fathers with lust for girls. Nana had experienced the evil when she was young. She said children could grow large at night, into giants, and come and eat us. I asked questions—she answered excitedly, as though hoping I would agree with her. Then she overheard me discuss the Quarter with Mossi. She loudly snorted. I began to ignore her remonstrations.

But the standoff was broken one week later when Nana found an opportunity to make a scene. It was a day on which I had woken late and then spent an hour in bed. As I walked to the front of the house, passing the tiny storeroom extension, I saw Nana's two nephews and Corinthian, her preacher cousin, ironing socks. How nice of her to give me a full room, I thought. But I decided not to thank Nana for as long as she was displeased with me—in case she took it away. Then the neighbor's boy, who was again waiting in the living room while Nana grumbled about having no money no sugar no milk, was found eating her hair cream.

The boy seemed in some ethereal happiness. His fingers were covered in the pale-green fluid and he smelled the cream pot, smiling, as though pleased with his discovery. And ignorant of the danger approaching he turned about, hands in the air, searching, presumably for a cloth. Nana came into the living room, her hair undone, stiff, scattered like the rays of a sun. And her eyes opened large with satisfaction. “There! Look at him!” In a shrill voice—urgent and authoritative—she summoned Corinthian.

The preacher appeared: calm, humming a choir song. His
clean white chemise was buttoned to the top so it pinched the skin on his neck. Corinthian gave sermons at the Bozene Evangelical Church, and Nana often nudged Jose as if to say, “See what a benediction my family is to this house.” Corinthian had no place of his own, as I understood, so he spent his days at the church, a tall brown building at the street's entrance, and shuttled between families grateful to harbor a man of God.

“He was
eating
my hair cream,” Nana said. One could sense the merriment in her vindication. “Just see and you'll know, Corinthian. You know these boys.”

The child seemed unsure of what the fuss was about. He smiled stupidly and appeared to enjoy the attention—he looked at us one by one, as if someone might give him a candy.

Corinthian kneeled to the level of the boy's face and quietly asked if the child wished to confess. All at once the small face contorted. The smile vanished. And the boy recoiled and looked around the house as if he was trapped. His mouth opened inertly, speechless. Nana nodded. “That's right.” And in a sweet voice she said, “Come now. Uncle Corinthian wants to help you.” With wide eyes, a terrified expression, the boy concentrated on Corinthian.

In Kinshasa troublesome children often confessed. The evangelists recommended it on the radio, and Nana faithfully listened—the noise expelled all peace from the house. The sermons were screamed and replete with warning: “The devil is among us, we must protect our infants and our families!” “To go to heaven we must climb, but the path to hell is a slippery slide!” The pastor would wheeze hallelujahs. His anger would seem unending. And at the end he would call for the faithful and their families—especially the troubled souls—to be purified.

There was a trick in this, for the signs of the troubled soul need not manifest in the soul itself. They could appear in the parents, in an aunt or uncle, even in distant family. A misfortune—of
which there was no shortage—could therefore be imputed to almost anyone in the family. The only way to certify a person's purity was by ecclesiastical examination.

When a mother brought her child before a pastor it often marked a rupture within her family, but also in her society and in the child's life. Many children on Kinshasa's streets had been seen by a pastor—sometimes even in a famous church. The stories surfaced only years later, in radio reports and from the city's few orphanages. Courageous children related how the pastors had beaten them, deprived them of food, water and sleep and psychologically manipulated them until they had confessed to working for the devil. Once the evil was confirmed, with the community's approval, the child was beaten more by the family—so as to render the rupture complete—and then usually intoxicated, trussed like an animal and left in a place far from home. The child knew not to return.

Of course, the treatment could also be less cruel. It depended on the gravity of the mother's accusations and the depth of the family's misfortune. But the exorcisms happened all the time, in the
ville
and in the
cité
and on Bozene; even in the best households.

If Nana had acted from an impassioned desire to prove a point—or from some past anguish—she succeeded in ridding herself of the boy as well. He bolted off, startling Corinthian, into the sunlit street. Never again did he come asking for sugar. Nana seemed satisfied: “You see?” Corinthian claimed to be concerned for the child. But he refused to let me witness his exorcisms. He first said they happened too late, then that I was a nonbeliever, and finally that my presence would need approval from America.

And ever since, when the sopranos begin each night, I wonder for whom they sing.