The Coup (22 page)

happy, follow me." And some did, though many did not, and some others were drawn along with the crowd, attracted by its promise of excitement, its air of destination, for they led lives of relative prosperity yet were kept by the very nature of the economy, its need to justify production by exciting consumption, in a low fever of dissatisfaction and ill-defined hopefulness. This little brown man, with his attractively fanatic military bearing in his crisp and absurd costume, fed that hopefulness, as does a comet, a mass murderer, a state lottery, an albino camel, or any other such remission from the hunger pains of the ordinary. With a mob at his back Ellellou demanded admission at the main gate. Wadal must have alerted his employers of impending trouble, for a number of armed, uniformed guards were assembled behind the padlocked pipe-and-wire gates, and a toubab had been produced from within the insidious alchemy of the oil works. He was short and pink and flustered; he wore a button-down shirt with rolled-up sleeves and had several pens clipped to the pocket. In the past, some had leaked, leaving blue spots. This was a mere desk-worker, a timid engineer, an agent of agencies in distant cities of glass. He was no taller than I, and his eyes peered levelly into mine through his rimless spectacles and the electrified mesh. "You want work?" he asked. "I want justice. We want reparations." "Uh-think you've come to the wrong place. Hasn't he?" He made this inquiry of a tall black Nuer who had appeared beside him, clad in a three-piece checked suit of some slithery synthetic summer stuff, his shoulders wide as a buzzard's wings, a clipboard in his hand. "You bet the punk has," this black man said, and told me, "I'm in P-R here. What's the story, buddy?" His brow bore the Nuer scars but his American English was smooth. "I am Ellellou," I told him. "Sure, and I'm O. J. Simpson. You don't look so easy to love to me." "The shirt is not my message. My message is, Justice, or Destruction." "How about that? What sort of justice you have in mind? Big justice, little justice, or justice of the peace?" "Justice for all. These citizens of Kush behind me claim to be imperfectly happy." "So that's news? They sure as hell busted their asses to get here. Look, I don't know how well you know the local situation, but it's not exactly a hotbed of alternatives. We don't ask "em to come to us, we fight 'em off. This is a pilot project, we're trying to keep it low-profile." Ellellou wearied of looking upwards at this slangy front man; he spoke to the plump white devil. "By whose authority was this project established?" "Everybody's, as I understand it. We deal with the Ministry of the Interior, mostly. The President's a canny type who's lent his name but keeps his distance otherwise. The initial contacts were finalized before my time; they only keep us here a year, it's considered hardship duty. My company's cut of this operation is peanuts, but the top brass back in Texas has a soft spot for the Third World. The chairman of the board came up from a turnip farm." "This isn't business," the P-R man interposed, a bit stiffly, in unspoken rebuke of his superior's garrulity, "this is philanthropy." Ellellou asked the toubab, "You are yourself not top brass? What is your title?" "Engineer's my title; recovery's my racket. A new strike like this is an oddball at this late date, better recovery in the established fields is the name of the game. Hydraulics and fluids have been my life. It's a miracle, what you can squeeze out of a rock if you know where to pinch it. There's enough water down there in domes to flood the Hulul." "And the oil? Is it O.k.?" "Beautiful," said the engineer, chattery with the relief these infidels feel when discussing their work in avoidance of emotional or ideological issues. "It comes up so sweet you could gargle it. Prettiest sludge I've seen outside of Oklahoma. You know oil? When you crack most crude by the Burton process-was The P-R man interrupted. "You are wasting your time with this man. He is a terrorist. He has no interest in real information." "Anyway," the toubab lamely concluded, reluctant to leave his specialty, "your Mr. Ezana, he's pleased as punch, and he's got reason to be." The crowd, bored by a technical conversation they could not hear, was beginning to chant, "Ellellou, Ellellou..." The P-R man with his winglike shoulders and Nuer brow scars correctly scented danger in the situation, though he pretended not to recognize his President. At his command a small army of harried, bearded boys had appeared bearing a tangle of wires and an assortment of electronic boxes-loudspeakers, transformers, tuners. This system was set up on the parched earth. When the connections had all been made, he took up a hand mike of the phallic type, with a glans of soft black rubber, ivhoofed into it experimentally, and, satisfied, spoke: "Ladies and gentlemen, workers and independent tradesmen, all citizens of Kush irregardless of tribe and tint: return to your homes and places of business. This madman, no doubt inspired by religious impulses he deems genuine, has misled you with a vision of unreal happiness. Your hopes of real happiness, that is to say, a relative absence of tension and deprivation, lie not with absolutists and charismatics but with an orderly balance of capitalist incentives and socialist mediations. Joyously allow foreign capital and expertise to com- bine with your native resources and ingrained cultural patterns." He consulted his clipboard, and continued: "The African humanism of your forefathers, as over against the ant-like societies of Asia and the neurotic sublimations of the Christian West, urges upon you the ideals of patient cheerful labor, intuitive common sense, and a many-stranded web of kinship ties that reinforces rather than dilutes individuality. Do not, ladies and gentlemen, yield your priceless personhood to destructive gestures by alleged saviors. There is no God, though you are free to worship as you wish, as you are free to indulge in bizarre sexual practices with another consenting adult." The speech went on too long, not so much for the crowd, which, ceasing to chant "Ellellou," had fallen under the spell exerted by oratory in our still predominantly oral culture, as for the American, who, natively impatient, of short attention span, and anxious to make an impression of himself as a genial and forceful fellow not prone to "stand on ceremony" and permeated with a sense of "fair play," took the microphone from his eloquent assistant and awkwardly boomed into it: "Open the gates, we're not afraid of these good folks. Industry's been a fine friend to this oasis, and by golly we intend to continue to be!" The gates were swung open, the mob laughingly pushed through. The young technical crew hastily relocated their equipment and unsnarled the wires, and in the confusion Ellellou-gently, as if lifting a little burden from the pink hand, a flower or libation proffered in homage-took up the microphone himself. It was as if he had seized a gun; he became potent; the crowd halted, conceding him a little stage of bare earth. His heart was pounding; his hand, holding the instrument, looked to his own eyes small and magically withered. He was beset by variable mental winds. The thought of Sheba returned to him-her dull betrayed eyes sought his from within a crush of cloth and coral-and with it a weary soft awareness of his lack of a woman, a woman who would lull him out of anger and put him to bed. But then he began to talk, and the breath of his throat as it leaped the inch between his lips and the spongy tip of the microphone was in his ears taken up by an amplified echo that seemed to blanket the world and impose a hush upon all its multitudinous contra-indications, and his heart was at peace in the center of the storm of his voice: "Citizens of Kush! You have been grievously betrayed! You have been led by the atmospheric machinations of Roul the desert devil, in league with the dead hand of Edumu the Fourth and the living perfidy of Michaelis Ezana, to dwell in this pestilential hellhole called Ellellou! still am Ellellou! still am freedom!" He took off his pith helmet, to show his visage. The cheering was less than he expected. The P-R man had made a move to grab the mike, but now stood idly by, close, checking the integrity of his manicure, whistling through his teeth in an impudent attempt at distraction. "What is freedom?" Ellellou went on. "Can you put it on with chains, can you hold it within stone walls, behind steel doors, in the circumference of electrified fences?" "The fences are electrified for the safety of juveniles and stray dogs," the P-R man swiftly whispered. Ellellou spurned the clarification, urging into the amplifying system the swollen self-answer, "No. These heavy material things do not bestow freedom, they bestow its opposite, bondage. Freedom is spirit. Freedom is peace within the skull. Freedom is righteous disdain of that world which Allah has cast forth as a vapor, a dream. The Koran says, The mountains, for all their firmness, will pass away like clouds. The Koran asks, Have you heard of the Event, which will over- whelm Mankind? Freedom is foreknowledge of that Event, whose blazing light is the only true light, whose fire melts our chains and evaporates the walls of our impoverished lives!" The P-R man muttered at his side, "Make your pitch. We can give you five more minutes." Ellellou said, and the microphone turned his words into clouds, scudding above the choppy black sea of the faces of the crowd, "You see at my side a bought black man, dressed in a white man's suit and taught to mouth the white man's glib tricknology. You see at my left an authentic pink devil, as apparently mild as the first suck of milk a baby lamb takes from its mother in the misted dawn pasture, but in truth as poisonous as the sting the scorpion saves for the adder. You see at my back a monstrous pyramid, foul in its smell and foul in its purpose, a parasite upon the soil of Kush and a corrupter of its people. As your President I command you, as your servant I beg you, to destroy this unclean interloper. A few well-aimed bullets should do it. The conflagration will lighten your hearts forever, and become the subject of a song you can sing your grandchildren!" "He's advocating violence," the white man said, behind Ellellou's back. "He's got to be kidding," the P-R man reassured him. He held up three fingers where Ellellou could see them, to indicate to the orator that, by some arcane rigor of technology, only three minutes were left to him. "The beast behind me, drinking the sacred black blood of our earth, belching smoke and blue flame, and defecating the green by-products of petroleum," Ellellou enunciated into the microphone, "is a mortal creature like any other, and I advise that my soldiers direct their first bullets into its jugular vein-that is, the exposed conduit removing the volatile gasoline vapors from the top of the fractionating tower, below the condenser ball." He wondered at himself, that he could spout all this; it was like holding live coals in the mouth, all it took was saliva and faith. Yet the soldiers did not shoot. They stood in their green uniforms within the motley crowd, innocent bemused boys from herders" tents and grass huts, waiting for an apparition they could take an order from. Ellellou strove to become that apparition, with only his voice and two more minutes of electricity to lift him above the mass. The crowd, in its still good-humored bafflement and wishing perhaps to touch the fabulous electronic equipment, which in flaking gilt bore the name of a now-dismantled, drugs-scuttled rock group, called Le Fuzz, crowded closer, menacingly close. As he tried to gather his inner forces to speak, he was aware at his back of the P-R man and the white engineer scratching quick memos-contingency plans, "scenarios"-to one another and also of, high in his nasal passages, an incongruous odor overriding the chemical stenches of industry. The smell had a penetrating sweetness, it carried with it woolen clothes and falling leaves and rosy Caucasian cheeks, it was, yes, the fresh glazed doughnuts the Off-Campus Luncheonette peddled to students as they sought a refuge from the sub-zero Wisconsin cold on mornings between classes. The doughnuts were laid out on waxpaper, still warm from the baking, their dough so cunningly fluffed it melted to a sugary nothing in the mouth, leaving flakes of glaze on the lips-how could that scent, forerunner of the taste, be present here, so vividly that Ellellou, in this pause of his oration, salivated? No snack-cart for the workers was visible; yet the scent lived in his nostrils. And in his ears the scratching pencils of his enemies. These distractions joggled the fragile chalice holding the distillate of his message, his cosmic indignation, and prevented, perhaps, from being as good as it should have been this, the last speech of his public career. He returned, in a low-pitched, factual voice, to the theme of petroleum by-products. "What does the capitalist infidel make, you may ask, of the priceless black blood of Kush? He extracts from it, of course, a fuel that propels him and his overweight, quarrelsome family-so full of sugar and starch their faces fester-back and forth on purposeless errands and ungratefully received visits. Rather than live as we do in the same village with our kin and our labor, the Americans have flung themselves wide across the land, which they have buried under tar and stone. They consume our blood also in their factories and skyscrapers, which are ablaze with light throughout the night and as hot as noon in the Depression of Hulul! My people: in my travels, undertaken only for love of you, that I may better bear your burdens, I have visited this country of devils and can report that they make from your sacred blood slippery green bags in which they place their garbage and even the leaves that fall from their trees! They make of petroleum toys that break in their children's hands, and hair curlers in which their obese brides fatuously think to beautify themselves while they parade in supermarkets buying food wrapped in transparent petroleum and grown from fertilizers based upon your blood! Of your blood they make deodorants to mask their God-given body scents and wax for the matches to ignite their death-dealing cigarettes and more wax to shine their shoes while the people of Kush tread upon the burning sands barefoot!" A new scent, also sweet but astringent, had arisen; he groped to identify it, while returning to larger, more spiritual themes: "Such are the follies of a race that scorns both Marx and Allah. The world groans beneath the voracious vulgarity of these unbelievers. They suck dry vast delicate nations in the service of the superfluous and the perverse. The earth, misconstrued as a provider