The Coup (11 page)

still have my morning prayers to do." The little Mosque of the Clots of Blood was obscurely placed in the east of Also-Abid, from which remote section the Palais showed its unfinished side, the unstuccoed mud bricks no crumbling cariously. Here the land becomes flat and the space between the square earth houses, the tembes, widens and tufts of dry grass where footsteps neglect to tread evoke the savanna that once flourished here, before goats and God killed it. The mosque has no minaret, and protruding support timbers stick from its sides like toothpicks from an olive. All civic prestige was a century ago transferred to the Mosque of the Day of Disaster; but within the vacant court a limestone fountain whose worn lip was edged with a raised inscription that could be made out to be the first verse of the ninety-sixth sura, Recite in the name of your Lord, the Creator, who created man from clots of blood, offered through all the hours of the days and nights of our drought fresh water for the ablutions of the pious. From what source? Touching my hands to the reverently incised stone, then to the startling running cool crystal of the liquid, then to my lips and eyelids in the prescribed manner, I thought of thirst, of its passion greater than any other save the passion for pain to cease, and of the unknown men, their names and bones now lost as thoroughly as grains of sand underfoot in Istiqlal, who had dug down to this undying spring, where so few chose to come. The interior of the Mosque of the Clots of Blood was empty, always empty but for the senile imam at the five appointed prayers of the day, between which appointments it stood open to the unpopulated peace of Allah. Turn up your eyes: can you detect a single flaw? The wall containing the mihrab had been covered with a pale-blue tile, patternless. I knelt; prostrated myself; repeated the rak'a thrice; then sat back on my heels, my hands at rest on my thighs, and let the meditative backwash of prayer move through me, purifying. In America my friends, late at night, confidential and searching on wine and beer, for hashish then was known only to musicians, would inquire about my religion, proposing the possibility-to their minds, an empirical certainty-that God did not exist, as if this possibility rendered futile the exercises of my piety, which to their minds appeared a wasted enterprise, a bad investment. My faith was not then beyond being troubled, and if in those small inebriated hours I gazed down within myself I saw many shifting transparencies and at the bottom of them no distinct and certain God. Indeed on the rational level many contra-indications could be espied. But then the God of our Koran is the last God to be born, a furious Last Gasp that set the tongue of the Prophet to whirling in terror and whose mystics have whirled ever since, a God Who cuts like a hot knife through the polyheaded pictorial absurdities of the Hindu and the Catholic, the Methodist and the fetishist, a God without qualities; so perhaps belief in Him also lacks qualities. Some of our Sufis have divulged that at the height of purity in which Godhead dwells existence and the lack of it are trivial quibbles; the distinction amid that radiance looms imperceptible. What can be purer than non-existence? What more soothing and scourging? Allah's option is to exist or not; mine, to worship or not. No fervor overtops that which arises from contact with the Absolute, though the contact be all one way. The wall of pale-blue tiles echoed the repose and equilibrium within me, a silence never heard in lands of doubt and mockery. Blue tile. A single fly, whose motions showed supernatural intelligence in their avoidance of repetition and any curve that might be broken down as geometric. My mind flowed with this fly into emptiness. I saw what I must do. It was a step along transparent stairs. All praise be to Allah, the Magnificent, the Merciful. A single small window, the scallops of its arch half-crumbled into dazzling dust, showed the depth and strength of the blue day besieging in vain the little mosque's thick walls. My gaze drank these tiles. Ezana looked up, surprised to see me, more surprised to see Opuku and Mtesa behind me. It was not our usual hour for consultation. In the hour of dusk, he had put on a sashed robe of paisley silk and was sipping from a tall glass in which a slice of lime floated, while the air conditioner purred at his ear. He was reading a book, an American novel, no doubt concerning the grotesque sexual misadventures of a Jewish intellectual or a self-liberated woman. Its contents were making him smile, and the smile was slow to leave his face. His manner remained mellow well into our conversation. He lifted his feet, slippered in Italian leather, from the Moroccan hassock where they rested and would have risen in greeting had I not signalled him to stay at ease. "I have come to be briefed," I said, "upon the negotiations with the Americans that I understand are proceeding." "Not negotiations, conversations," he said. "This fellow Klipspringer is rather hard to cut short, he is so-what do you Americans say?- giving." "You Americans?" "Forgive me, my President, the Americans. You have just walked into this book I am reading, full of these poor benighted bourgeoisie struggling to psychoanalyze the universe. I am tasting this trash the better to understand our enemy. They are a strange lost race, poorer than they know. I wonder if we of the Third World might not have eventually to welcome them among us-they too have a deficient balance of trade, a high unemployment rate, an agricultural bias in the national temperament, and the need for a protectionist tariff if their struggling native industries are not to be overwhelmed by the superior efficiency and skill of the old Axis powers. Indeed, Comrade President, at a time when the Arabs have all the capital, the Siberians and the Brazilians all the undeveloped resources, and the Chinese all the ideological zeal, one wonders if in the interests of global stability a grant of aid to the United States might not be a prudent apportionment within our next year's national budget. I jest, of course." "Of course. Yet it does sound as though this Klipspringer has all too amiably insinuated confusions into the mind of my chief minister. These people are pirates. Without the use of a single soldier their economy sucks wealth from the world, in the service of a rapacious, wholly trivial and wasteful consumerism. My order was, in answer to their overtures, no answer." "But no answer is an answer, which goads the interrogator. By discussing, we are delaying, and dissolving. This wretched Gibbs has not been mentioned for days. We cannot pretend the Americans do not exist; they have leverage upon the French, and if the French cease to underwrite our peanuts we cease to exist in the world." "Or begin to exist in a better world." "Also, as my Colonel knows, some reactionary elements evaded our revolution and took refuge in Sahel; an infusion of American arms might turn these ridiculous dissidents into an invading force, which would find our borders permeable and our population, however loyal to the name of Ellellou, desperately weakened by drought." "Hungry men make good soldiers," I pointed out. "When it comes to battle, the poor retain a golden weapon: they have little to lose. Their lives are a shabby anteroom in the palace of the afterlife. The Prophet's vivid Paradise is our atomic bomb; under its blast the poor toubabs shrivel like insects clinging to soulless existence. Of the life to come they are heedless. As to the French, they are too busy stuffing their money down the throat of the Concorde to look up; the entire wealth of a nation of misers has been swallowed by this aeronautical goose. Forget the infidels, they are mired in materialism and its swinish extinction of spirit. Defiance is our safest as well as noblest policy." "Even your shy friends the Soviets," Ezana pursued, "are not exempt from American influence, now that the unspoken standoff has been translated into detente." "What has driven you, Comrade, so low, into this slime of Realpolitik? I will save you from the demon you have inhaled. If another call from this Klipspringer is honored with courtesy, the cables to the Palais shall be cut on my order." His face, all hemispheres and highlights, went dull with disappointment. His gold tooth winked out; his lower teeth showed in a grimace of grief. "But tomorrow we were to discuss the possibility of an addition to the Braille Library, a leprosarium dedicated to the memory of my father. Yours, I know, was a whirlwind, a pinch of fertilizing dust; my father I knew and loved. He had been a warrior, then, as the French pacification spread, a ferryman, at a bend of the Grionde where the banks draw close. Perhaps because of his ventures to the southern side, he contracted leprosy in mid-life, turned silver and perished limb by limb. His nose, his fingers. I watched it transpire. My present dignity and the indignation that enrolled me in the Revolution alike stem from a vow he extracted from me with his final breaths. I vowed that I would climb high into the order of things, that other citizens of Noire would never have to endure suffering and humiliation as unmitigated as his." "Better, perhaps, to have vowed to face your own end with less complaining than, from the sound of it, your progenitor." Ezana blinked away this insult to his father. He leaned forward from his easy chair, to confide his message urgently, to press its warmth into the sinuous channels of my ear. My comrade in his foppish accoutrements became more naked to me than since the fury and fear of L'Emergence, and that aftermath in which we conspired together to do away with the empty-headed Soba. Ezana said to me, "The world is not what it was. There is no longer any deep necessity to suffer. The only lesson suffering ever gave was how to endure more suffering. What gives men pain, with some lingering exceptions, can now be cured. Smallpox, even in our bedevilled land, is being encircled and exterminated. We know what children need in their bellies, even when we cannot put it there. The fading of an afterlife-for it has faded, my friend Ellellou, however you churn your heart-has made this life more to be cherished. When all is said and done about the persisting violence on our planet, and the pronouncements of SCRME are set against the fulminations of Nouvelles en Noire et Blanche, the fact remains that the violence, relatively, is small, and deliberately kept small by the powers that could make it big. War has been reduced to the status of criminal activity-it is no longer the sport of gentlemen. This is a great thing, this loss of respectability. We feel it everywhere, even in the vacancies of Kush. Hatred on the national scale has become insincere. The self-righteousness has vanished, that justified great slaughter. The units of race and tribe, sect and nation, by which men identified themselves and organized their youth into armies no longer attract blind loyalty; the Cubans and Belgians, the Peruvians and Indonesians, all mingle at our Palais receptions, lusting after one another's wives and complaining alike about the tedium of the diplomatic service in this Allah-forsaken penalty post of a backwater. Such interplay betokens an increase of humane pragmatism and a decrease of demented energy that makes my vow to redeem my father's life inevitable of success." "These units you disparage," I said, "were mankind's building blocks. If they dissolve, we have a heap of dust, of individual atoms. This is not peace, but entropy. Like all comfortable cowards, Comrade Ezana, you overvalue peace. Is it possible," I asked, "that some principle of contention is intrinsic to Nature, from the first contentious thrust of bare existence against the sublime, original void? The serene heavens, as witnessed by astronomers, shine by grace of explosion and consumption on a scale unthinkable, and the glazed surface of marble or the demure velvet of a maiden's eyelid are by the dissections of particle physics a frenzy of whirling and a titanic tension of incompatible charges. You and I, for additional example, have long been at odds, and the government of Kush has been born of the dialectical space between us. Out of the useful war between us, a synthesis has emerged; a synthesis, for a while at least, does package the conflicting energies that met within it." Ezana's fingers, forced apart by the thick rings upon them, spread wider, in careful thought, upon the glass of his desktop. "I sometimes wonder, my President, if even the fruitful diagrams of Marx do schematic justice to the topology of a world where the Soviet proletariat conducts a black market in blue jeans while the children of the capitalist middle class manufacture bombs and jovial posters of Mao." "Or where," I added, "the chief minister of a radical junta holds subversive conversations with the American secret intelligence and attempts to infect his own President with the false, sentimental, atheistical pluralism acquired thereby." Ezana's rejoinder was aborted, for Kutunda, her secretarial suit concealed, as per government regulations, in a flowing boubou, burst into Ezana's office accompanied by an oval-faced young man whom I recognized, through the veil of his formal blandness, as the young Fula policeman who had read the Koran to the king. He still wore his plum-colored fez, but the white vest and pantaloons of the high-servant caste had been exchanged for a tapered shirt of needle-fine stripes and taupe slacks of indecently close tailoring about his hips yet so wide at the cuff only the square enamelled-looking tips of his shoes were unenveloped. Both Kutunda and he were holding full glasses and returning to a species of party. She also held a box of those salty biscuits called HiHo, and her young escort a red-rimmed crescent of Edam cheese. They had returned, however, to witness their host's being taken into custody by Mtesa and Opuku, at my command, as a traitor to the state, and as a wearer of silk. Ezana was confined to the king's old rooms in the barracks wing of the Palais d'Administration des Noires, above the floor occupied by the People's Museum of Imperialist Atrocities and within earshot of the shrieks of the Istiqlal Anti-Christian High School for Girls volleyball team. His protests, his pleas, would fatigue me to scribble. One of them was, "My President, if you incarcerate your Chief Minister, and simultaneously proceed with your individualistic, entrepreneurial pilgrimage to the rumored cave in the Balak Massif, you will leave Kush without a head of state!" I doubted that Kush would notice, but to be on the safe side, and to demonstrate to Ezana my liberated, inspired powers of decision, I turned to the young fez-wearing spy and appointed him Acting Minister of the Interior, Chief of the
Bureau of Transport, Co-ordinator of Forests and Fisheries, and Chairman of the Board of Tourism. Kutunda, I said, would instruct him in his duties. Duties, duties. Before I could depart it was necessary that I visit my second wife, that I press my little thornbush to my bosom. She lived, the Muffled One, in a shuttered villa in the most venerable part of Les Jardins, where the plane and chestnut trees imported by the colons had grown tall in the fifty wet years prior to 1968, only to falter, droop, and die in the five years since. Their blanched skeletons, brutally cropped in the Gallic manner, lined the curving avenues. Candace's villa had been rankly overgrown, but the drought had done some work of pruning where the hand of man had been idle; a sapless, leafless Petrea volubilis made its desiccated way along cracks in the stucco facade, clutching the shutters with splintering fingers and spiralling up the little Ionic pillars of the front portico. The vine had been prying loose the tiles from the portico roof when its life had been arrested. My ring of chimes produced a strange rustling noise within, but Candace was at the door quickly, as if she had been watching my approach through the blind walls. Or perhaps she had been about to go out, for she was muffled head to toe in a dull black buibui with the addition of a face-veil that covered even her brow. A scattering of holes smaller than the holes in a cabbage-grater permitted her to see, in speckled fashion. Perhaps some retrograde corner of Afghanistan or Yemen still holds a crazed old spice merchant, sheik, or bandit who keeps his concubines thus; but in Istiqlal, where socialist progressivism had reinforced the traditional insouciance of African womanhood, such a costume had to be taken as an irony, a sour joke upon me. "Holy Christ, look who it isn't," her voice exclaimed through the layers of muslin. Behind her stood a big Songhai maid with a basket on her arm. This girl's face showed alarm at my visit; to her I was the ghost of authority, and her ultimate employer. Candy had no other servant, and not because of any penuriousness of mine. In the early years of our marriage, when I had lived with her half, then a third, of my time, the household was appropriately staffed. As my visits dwindled, she bade the attendants drop away, racing through the housework once a month, even poking in the vegetable patch, until the sun nearly smothered her. Now she and her girl were going out shopping; but since Candy almost never purchased anything, preferring to order all non-perishable goods from the United States by mail-order, I could only conclude that the purpose of these expeditions was to display herself, muffled, as a mystery and, among rumormongers, a national scandal. People said that Ellellou had mutilated this wife in a passion, or to satisfy a perverse sexual need had married a monster of deformity. "You have your fucking nerve," she continued, "showing up here in your little soldier outfit as if I owe you anything but a-a good kick in the balls." Her native inhibitions had given pause to the phrase that her native freedom of speech and, now, her feminist consciousness of genital oppression had suggested. But Candace was not a ball-kicker, she was a heart-stabber. "My adored," I said, "I have come to bid thee good-bye. I am about to walk the edge of my fate, and may fall off." My Islamic courtesies of course infuriated her. "Don't give me any of this Kismet crap," she said. "I knew you when you couldn't tell the Koran from the Sears Roebuck catalogue." As if in recoil from this stab, she angrily turned, my pillar of cloth, and it was alarming, how closely her back resembled her front. In full purdah she seemed less a person than a growth, a kind of gray asparagus. Candace waved the frightened Songhai away, with that jerky embarrassed roughness of those who think their servants should be their friends, and let herself drop wearily into an imitation Chippendale armchair ordered from Grand Rapids. She had tried to recon- stitute, in this French villa spun of sub-Saharan materials, the rectilinear waterproof comfort of a Wisconsin living-room. But the tile floor, the banco walls, the rattan furniture betrayed the illusion, which termites and the breakage occasioned by our terrible dryness had further undermined. Without removing any of her wrappings, Candace put her sandalled feet up on a curly-maple butler's tray table whose leaves had warped and loosened in the weather. Where her parents might have had a pair of painted-porcelain mallards with their hollow backs bedding narcissus bulbs rooted in pebbles, she had set an earthen dish holding some unshelled peanuts. I took one, cracked it, and ate it. There is a sweetness, a docile pithy soul-quality of taste, to our Kushian goobers that I have never met elsewhere. "Well, chief," my wife said, "how's top-level tricks? Chopping old Edumu's noggin off didn't seem to raise the humidity any." "These spiritual balances are not easy to strike. I have put Michaelis Ezana into the king's old cell, which might make the difference. He has been compromising the honor of our country with your ex-compatriots." "Poor guy, probably just trying to bring a little rationale into Ellellou's heaven on earth." "Tell me," I countered, "the rationale of the Universe, and I will order my heaven accordingly." "Don't undergraduate on me," Candace said. "That's how you got me into this hellhole, being all winsome and philosophical, building the no-nations up from scratch. Scratch is the word. Scratch is where you start, and scratch is where you end. God, it's hot in this damn bag." "Take off the veil," I suggested. "Your joke is wasted on your forbearing husband." "Joke, my ass," she said, and my own nervousness eased at the hardening of her voice, certain as daybreak to go harder and higher. "Who was it who smuggled me in in wraps in the first place? Who was it used to tell reporters I was a zaiviya Berber too pious to be seen? And then after those rotten Pan-African games leaked it around that Sittina was his second wife instead of his third? Who was it, Mr. Double-still double-i oo, who put me deeper into wraps when came the Revolution and every Yank in Istiqlal was shipped back to Ellis Island? Christ, if you don't think I wouldn't have been over-goddam-joyed to go back with the rest of them where you can have a drink of water without lifting out the centipedes first and bowing toward smelly Mecca five times a day and having to kick starving kids out of your way every time you walk the goat, you have another think coming. But oh no, not me, crazy old Candy, all A's in Poli Sci but loyal as a mutt out of class, crazy, conditioned to be some man's slave, sitting here watching my fucking life melt away, and you call it a joke. You would" Candace said, and undid her head wraps with furious counterclockwise motions. A trembling white hand unclasped her veil. Her face. Much as I had first seen it, without the mirroring sunglasses, the receding aisles of evil goods, her cheeks still round and firm, her chin pointed, her nose bone-white, bone-straight. She even smiled, her fierce quick smile, in relief at her head's being free. "Christ, I can breathe," she said. Flaxen wisps looped in damp deshabille onto her flushed brow; from the corners of her blue eyes, the milky blue-green of beryl, fanned vexed wrinkles that could have been produced, in another life, by laughter. Her powder-pale skin was still young; it had not suffered in my country as it would have in her own, had not been baked and whipped by the sun of golf courses and poolside patios and glaring shopping center parking lots in these years when, as the Wrapped One, she had sheltered herself amid the mysteries of Istiqlal. I was glad of this. Watch- ing her unwind her headshawl, and then unveil, I remembered how I had seen her naked, and the memory of her body moving pale, loose, and lithe in the neon-tinged darkness of an off-campus room numbed me so that had all the world's sorrow been at this moment funnelled into my poor narrow being I would not have felt an iota more: I was full. With the air she could now breathe she had launched a bitchy monologue. "How is dear Sittina? Still chasing cock and playing Bach? And my big momma Kadongolimi? You still mosey round to your old aiva for your fix of tribal juice? And that other idiot, little Sheba-has she learned to chew with her mouth shut yet? But you like that, don't you? You like these dyed-in-the-wool down-home Kushy types, don't you? Hakim Happy Ellellou, de mon ob de peeple. De mon what om, right? Well here's one cunt that hates your guts, buster. You better stick a stamp on me and send me home." "You belong here." "Divorce me. It's easy. All you have to do is say "TallaqtukVery three times. Come on, say it. One, two- Divorce me and you'll have a slot for this new twat, what's her name." "Kutunda. Our connection is entirely official. As to you, my beloved Candace, my personal attachment aside, you serve a purpose for the nation. There is pressure on our borders. When the Day of Disaster comes, I can point to you as proof that the President of Kush is anti-imperialist but by no means anti-American." "You don't know what you are, you poor little spook. You are the most narcissistic, chauvinistic, megalomaniacal, catatonic schizoid creep this creepy continent ever conjured up. And that's saying a lot." Her clinical epithets reminded me of her book-club books comthe warping, fading, termite-riddled stacks and rows of volumes imported from her native land, popular psychology and sociology mostly. How to succeed, how to be saved, how to survive the mid-life crisis, how to find fulfillment within femininity, how to be free, how to love, how to face death, how to harness your fantasies, how to make dollars in your spare time-the endless self-help and self-exploration of a performance-oriented race that has never settled within itself the fundamental question of what a man is. A man is a clot of blood. Hopeful books, they disintegrated rapidly in this climate; she had run out of shelf space and stacked this literary foreign aid on the floor, where our great sub-continent of insects hollowed out the covers from underneath, their invisible chewing a rerun of the chewing of her eyes as she read away the monotonous succession of her days, weeks, and years. Candace was on her feet and speechifying. "I hate you. I hate this place. I hate the heat, the bugs, the mud. Nothing lasts here, and nothing changes. The clothes when you wash them dry like cardboard. A dead rat on the floor is a skeleton by noon. I'm thirsty all the time, aren't you? Happy"-the nickname she gave me in college-"I'm sinking, and I can't do anything about it. I'm seeing the only shrink in Istiqlal and he shrugs and says, 'Why don't you just leave?"'" I tell him, 'I can't, I'm married to the President!" his Her straw-blond, straw-bright hair fell forward as if to veil her sobbing; my impulse to reach and offer comfort was checked only by my certain knowledge that this offer would fail, that my loving touch would feed her anger as the books on how to be happy fed her unhappiness. She lifted her head, her eyes red-rimmed but abruptly dry. In the simple bold style with which she had once asked me, "How do I look?", she asked, "Can't you get me out of this?" "This, as perhaps your friend the Freudian marabout has already suggested, is you. You have chosen. I am powerless to alter your choices. When we were in your land, not mine, it was you who courted me, and I in my poverty, my strangeness, my blackness, was slow to respond. I was afraid of the consequences. You were heedless. Your heart demanded. So be it. Here you are. Had you allowed me, fifteen years ago, to give you the children I then wanted, your son would be taller than you now, and your daughters would be cheerful company." "Shit on that," Candace mumbled. "I wasn't sure. You weren't either. We didn't want to take on that responsibility, everything was difficult enough, we knew what we were doing might not work." "You didn't wish," Ellellou told her, histo become the mother of Africans." "It's not that simple, and you know it. You were different once we got here, you didn't make me feel secure. Big Momma had you half the time, and then you got so thick with the king. Anyway, I didn't always use the diaphragm, either, and nothing happened. Maybe one of us is sterile. Your other wives, are those children yours? We should have discussed things like this years ago. Where were you?" "Tending to duty." The primness of Ellellou's answer indicated that the conversation had exhausted its usefulness for him. He had suffered enough recrimination to fuel his departure. Sensing him about to slip away, Candace clung and asked, "If I tried to go home, would you stop me?" "As your husband, I would indulge you in all things. As father, however, of all the citizens of Kush, I would feel obliged to discourage defection. In this time of crisis and dearth, our human resources must be conserved. Border patrols have been instituted to confine the nomads. Every peanut caravan as it departs includes a quota of spies and enforcers. I wish the imperialist press, which describes our socialist order as a squalid police state, to receive no malicious hint confirming rumors of maladministration within Kush. Your presence," Ellellou told his wife, "is especially cherished here. Let me add that Opuku's brother, whom you have not met, nor would I wish it, has in his patriotic love of order developed a number of interesting ways to inflict discomfort without leaving any mark upon the bod -. I confide this to you in a spirit of tenderness and affection." The white woman's eyes blazed; the rims of her lips wrinkled with tension. "You sadistic little turd. When I think of what I wanted to give you. You know what everybody at college used to say to me? They said I was crazy to put myself at the mercy of a Negro." "You needed to prove them right," Ellellou said, bothered by a certain poignant twist in her body, as in some late-Hellenic robed statues, implying the erotic axis of the body within, and within that an ambivalent torque of the soul-in Candace's case, between taunting and plea, a regret that even in her extremity of rage she should taunt her husband with the blackness that had made him fascinating and herself noble and the two of them together undergraduate stars at McCarthy College, in that distant city of Franchise. "I shouldn't tell you this, but you know what Professor Craven used to say to me? I won't say it." "Say it, if it will help you." "He said, Today's slave, tomorrow's tyrant." "Excellent. By the same token, Today's liberal, tomorrow's bigot. You could have had Professor Craven, you could have been for a time his reigning student concubine, but you chose to slight him." "He was married." "So was I." "I couldn't believe it. When I