The Coup (6 page)

II

In the season the toubabs call fall, Colonel Ellellou returned to Istiqlal, his recessive mood deepened by an incident on the straight road south of Huhil, near the vanished city of Hair. The trinity of himself, Mtesa, and Opuku had been squared by the addition of Kutunda, whose unwashed female body brought to the interior of the Mercedes an altogether new fragrance, overlaid upon the oily distant scent of German workmanship, the clinging understink of camel dung, and the haunting aroma of the dreadful bonfire, which had crept in the windows and permeated the gray velour inexpungably as an evil memory. They were silent for miles, as each brain whirred its own wheels: Mtesa intent upon steering his marvellous machine, Kutunda wondering what would become of her and putting out through her shabby coussabe pungent feelers of fright and compliance, and Opuku apparently asleep, his round skull scarcely lolling on his muscle-buttressed neck as his dreams revolved (ellellou surmised from the man's moans of unease) images of violence, of flame, of lust for the pale, straight-nosed, black-clad nomad women. In Kush we never cease dreaming of intercourse between dark and fair skin, between thick lips and thin lips, between wandering herdsman and sedentary farmer. The Mercedes had driven all night, to erase the fire from the dark of our minds. Dawn had broken and passed. The landscape in the vicinity of Hair is pink and flat, salty and shimmering; a dot in the distance dissolves or becomes a blood-colored boulder the spaces themselves seem to hurl. Ellellou in his rumpled khaki was gazing forward through the windshield over the shoulder of his driver while the head of the oblivious Kutunda rested heavily on his shoulder. Then a dot placed at the unsteady apex of the triangle the road's breadth dwindled to-the horizon teetering upon its fulcrum, some bumpy paws of the Bulub foothills being retracted on the right, a thorn-mantled zareba just perceptible in the dusty depths to the left-this dot enlarged with a speed out of proportion to that of the Mercedes and declared itself, at a distance perhaps of two kilometers, to be another vehicle. Within a few seconds, of time stretched like rubber by the laws of relativity, the alien vehicle was by, quick as the shadow of the wing of a hawk. Ellellou marvelled, for the thing had appeared to be, not an explicable peanut lorry or piece of military transport, but a vehicle such as could not possibly be roaring along in Kush-that is, a large open-backed truck to whose flatbed were chained twin tacks of mechanically flattened bodies of once-bulbous, candy-colored American automobiles. Their engines had been removed, the space had been crushed wherein children had quarrelled, adolescents had made love, and oldsters had blinked mileage-mad holidays away. In jerking his head to follow the truck's swift disappearance into the trembling pink folds of the north, Ellellou awoke the fair Kutunda. For fairish, or merely dusky, she was, beneath the layers of dirt, with a moonish face and lips broad but not everted in form. Her lips as she attempted to respond to arousal seemed stuck by the mucilage of sleep to her small, rather inturned teeth. Her eyes widened, sensing Ellellou's alarm. The colonel had grasped Mtesa's shoulder and, in the barking, shrill voice with which, over the state radio, he would announce some new austerity or reprisal, he was asking, "What was it? Did you see it?" "Truck," the driver answered. "What kind of truck?" "Big. Fast. No speed limit out here." "Did you ever see any other truck like it?" The answer came after maddening deliberation. "No." "Where do you think it came from?" The driver shrugged. "Town." "Istiqlal? Never. Where would it get those-those things it was carrying? Where was it taking them?" "Maybe from Zanj going to Sahel. Or other way around." "Who would let it through the border? Who would sell it fuel?" Mtesa conceded, "Funny thing," but with no more concern than if he had seen an unusual bird at a water hole, or a bi-zarrely maimed beggar on the street. The ignorant see miracles every day. It occurred to Ellellou that Mtesa was bluffing, humoring him; he had seen nothing. He commanded, "Tell me what you saw. What funny thing?" "Big truck toting squashed voitures." "What kind of voitures?" "Not Benzis." Ellellou slumped back defeated. He would have preferred that the truck have been his private hallucination. Better his own insanity, he reasoned, than that of the nation. The vision, if actual, placed upon him an unwelcome necessity to act, to cope with a strange invasion, for he knew that the affronting apparition was a commonplace sight on the clangorous, poisonous, dangerous highways of the United States. Kutunda, who had been asleep, and to whom the thing had been invisible, felt to occupy the only undistorted quadrant of the car, and in his weariness Ellellou toppled into the comfortable vacancy of her fragrance of musk and dung, of smoke and hunger, of Kush. Evidently upon his return to Istiqlal Ellellou established Kutunda in an apartment above a basket-weaving shop whose real dealings were in hashish and khat; her presence here, and his suspicion of a conspiracy whose headquarters were in the capital, reinforced his habit of venturing disguised into the city, especially the disreputable section known as Hur-riyah, which rises, like heaps of mud boxes stacked for removal, against the eastern wall of the vast Palais d'Administration des Noires, with its sixteen pilasters representing the sixteen most common verbs that require etre instead of avoir as auxiliary in all compound tenses. Its facade is topped with eight marble statues of an unreal whiteness, uneroded in this climate, that symbolize the eight bourgeois virtues- Assiduite, Economie, Mediocrite, Conjugalite, Temperance, Optimisme, Dyna8nisme, and Mo d emit every. Its blank side glows in the dawn like the flank of an eternal, voluptuous promise heaving itself free of the earth, above the little roofs of thatch, cracked tile, and rock-weighted tin. So it loomed in Ellellou's eyes, as he blinked from the pallet he shared with Kutunda. In sleep her stringy, lustreless hair-so different from the soft and wiry curls that adorned, cut close or braided in ornate patterns, the skulls of Ellellou's Salu sisters, and three of his four wives-had drifted stickily across her face; her hair held red streaks amid the black, and the kohl with which she had beautified her eyes had smudged. The dusty brown of her cheeks showed in the slant light linear shadows of a single diagonal tribal cicatrice, one on each cheekbone. The noises about them in the slum, the banging of calabashes and scraping of warm ashes and the unwrapping of hashish packets concealed in fasces of rattan below and the buzzing of children's recitation from the Koran school across the steep ochre alley, made it hard to return to sleep, his salat as-subh performed, and Ellellou lay there beside her hard-breathing unconsciousness like a thirsty man lying on the lip of a well, conscious that the nation was dying, that the beginnings of its day were the leavings of the night, that the dry sounds he heard, of rattling, scraping, unwrapping, reciting, were hopeless sounds, scavenging sounds, of chickens too thin to slaughter pecking at stones that would never be seeds. Allah Himself was dried-up and old, and had wandered away. When Kutunda awoke, he asked her, "Would it help, to kill the king?" She performed her duties in a pot and went about the room naked, carelessly mingling her limbs with the swords and sentinels of sun the horizontally slatted windows admitted in impalpable ranks. Shafts of radiant dust swirled like barber poles. The room was irregular in shape, with rafters of twisted tamarisk. The walls of hardened clay mirrored her skin, flickeringly, as, with the quickness of greed, with the slowness of delight, my mistress assembled the decorations and ornaments-the dab of antimony on each eyelid, the manacles of gold about her wrists, the heaped necklaces of fine beads tightly strung on zebra-tail hairs-allowable to the dictator's concubine. As a perquisite of this position, my waif set her jaw to give advice. Removed from the shadows of the tents and ditches of the north, Kutunda appeared older than when I had seduced her. Determined creases in her brow and about her pursed mouth betrayed some previous years of taking thought; vexations had worn their channels; perhaps a decade had passed since her first uncleanness. She had a squint; perhaps she needed glasses. "Tell me about this king," she said. "He is feeble but clever, my captive and yet my protector, in some sense that made me reluctant to order his execution when L'Emergence broke forth, and when his violent death would have seemed unexceptional. All of Edumu's political and cultural conditioning tended to estrange him from the working classes and the peasantry. His regime was corrupt, in regard both to his personal tyranny-he was carelessly cruel in the antique, sensuous manner-and to the bourgeois ideology of his ministers, who to maintain their own prosperity within the pathetically unrepresentative elite were selling to the Americans what their fathers had sold to the French, who for that matter thought they still owned it. Their only maneuver, in the nation's war against misery, was to solicit, with much incidental bribery, another foreign concession, to build another glass hotel to function as a whorehouse for the kafirs. The difficulty with government in Africa, my dear Kutunda, is that in the absence of any considerable mercantile or industrial development the government is the only concentration of riches and therefore is monopolized by men who seek riches. The private vices of Edumu would have been trivial had his political orientation been correct, that is, had he offered in any way to overthrow the ancient patterns of adventurism and enlightened self-interest which were tolerable when moderated by the personal interplay of the small tribal unit but which are sheerly brutalizing when that interplay is outgrown. His conservatism, which I would rather describe as a feckless impotence, was masked by considerable personal charm, even kindliness to his chosen intimates, and by the smiling obscurantism of the hopeless cynic." "The king," Kutunda said, her squint drawing her cheek-scars up, underlining what I perceived as a recalling of me to the business at hand, away from the rhetoric of "Poli Sci," with a seriousness that made me shudder in fear for Edumu, for this wanton woman (her odorousness now enriched by the spices and perfumes of the black-market shops) had a hard head for men's affairs, "the king is old?" "Older than anyone knows, but not likely, I fear, to do us the favor of dying." "That would be no favor," Kutunda said. "It would deprive the government of whatever appearance of incentive might be gained by his execution as a sky-criminal." She used here a technical Sara term referring to an offender not against his fellow men but against the overarching harmony of common presumptions: "political criminal" might be our modern translation. Naked but for the bangles and unguents of beautification, Kutunda began to strut with the importance my ears lent her words. Her heels firmly struck the floor; her toes seemed to prolong her grip; her stride, back and forth in the little room, gave me cause to remember that her grandmother had been a leopard. Her legs were thick and slightly bowed; her buttocks had that delicious wobble of maturity. I began vaguely to long for sex. It stretched my bones, to think how much of my life had been spent listening to naked women talk. "One must look for the center of unhealth," she explained. "This center lies not, I think, within the king, who cannot help being the type of man he is, but within your mercy toward him." "He took me up when I was less than a grain of sand, a soldier with falsified papers, and set me at his side. He made me a son, when he had fifty sons already. I would sooner spill the blood of my true father, a Nubian raider whose face vanished with the wind, than this old tyrant who forgave me everything, and still forgives." "What have you done to forgive?" "I was born of a rape. And now I govern a starving land." "Why were your papers falsified?" "Because the truth would have done me no good, nor will it benefit you." Her sable eyes, that seemed to strain for focus, slid toward me, seeing that she had presumed. Her tongue moved on, more humoringly. "We must locate the center of the evil that makes the sky avoid the earth. They are lovers, the earth and the sky, and in the strength of their passion fly apart as quickly as they come together. They are like one of the white men's mighty machines; a single speck of evil will bring it to a halt. Now a demon does not occupy the entire body, but a pinhead point within it, for a demon has no necessary size, and must be small to fly. It may enter by a nostril or the anus, and take up residence in the gizzard or the little toe. Have you tortured the king, to find a spot where there is no pain? There the demon likely resides, and a heated dagger, thrust smartly in, will drive him out. But the surgery must be exact. Fingers make favorite burrows for the bad spirits; a reasonable precaution would be to slice off the old king's hands. I see you do not like that plan." I had said nothing, merely attempted to visualize the event- the wrist veins pumping like the mouth of a jug, the eerie Dasein of the severed hand, still bearing its fingerprints, and the life-lines of its palm, though lifeless as wax. Kutunda's head disappeared in her new green coussabe, one of several that had replaced the rags in which I had found her. Golden stitching of ecstatic concentricity stiffened its sleeves. Clothed, she became flirtatious and slimmer, and her gravely politic air dissolved into suggestions that were plainly malicious and jealous; she was jealous of my love for the king. "Cut off his testicles," she suggested, "and display them in the scales of the statue of Justice above the main portal of the Palais. Wanjiji" she scornfully pronounced. "There has been no Wanjiji since my grandfather's time, and even then its men were famous for their cowardice and gluttony. In war they waited till the men of the other village were gone and then came in and butchered the children. Tear out his eyes and stuff them up his rectum, so they can spy out where his demon lives." "A demon has come to live in you," I observed, grabbing at the gaudy cloth as she swirled by. Her ankle-rings of bronze and silver tintinnabulated. "God has nowhere to alight in Kush!" She dodged me, her lips snarled back from her inturned teeth. "On the highest peak there sits a wrinkled old man in a cell, guarded by a soldier in khaki who wishes to hide in the dust. So the Compassionate One flies on, His river flows on, the sky remains