Authors: Francine Prose
“And last fall, that dream came true. Ethel and I closed up shop, got our passports, made about a million phone calls. And before you could say Jack Robinson, the big day came. We walked out the front door, got onto that Air Afrique jumbo jet, and were off to the People’s Republic of the Congo. Ethel, take it away!”
After a brief dance in which Ethel steps forward and Carl do-si-dos back behind the projector, a blur appears on the screen that, after much anxious mumbling from Carl, sharpens into a small tidy house, a small tidy lawn. Anywhere Street, Anytown, USA. Carl and Ethel stand before it, each toting a giant suitcase and more cameras than Vera’s ever seen on anyone but Solomon. Ethel’s saying, “Carl makes taking off lock, stock, and barrel for Africa sound easy. But I’ll tell you: it isn’t.”
A knowing laugh now; Ethel’s listeners suspected as much. She’s got them in her pocket, tucked in with her scented, scalloped hankie, intoxicated by her Yardley’s English Lavender and by the old-fashioned yin-and-yang symmetry they’ve missed since Gram and Grandpa’s day: Ethel’s shaky, sincere woman’s heart played off against Carl’s cheery, brave glad-handing. Vera wishes she weren’t so jaded. These Poteets aren’t pitching anything. And yet she’s holding back and analyzing their technique as if they were hawking Japanese steak knife sets on TV.
“First off, it was ages before we knew we
could
go. Everybody kept warning us, the Congolese government wasn’t letting anyone in,
certainly
not Americans. But really they couldn’t have been sweeter…” Ethel goes on, listing the Congolese’s kindnesses like a small-town society page; next she’ll be describing the cleverest little pygmy table decorations and what they served for lunch. “Carl’s going to have my hide for saying this,” she confides. “But by the time we were packed and ready, well, we were plum scared to death…”
It’s an interesting moment, the Poteets’ perky smiles unmasked as grimaces of terror. Vera thinks of the photo of Dave’s Lincoln Brigaders. The audience strains forward, anxious to see what fear looks like. But Carl hurries through the next slides: Carl at the airport, Ethel in the doorway of a 747. Carl and Ethel reunited with their luggage at customs. Then nothing. The screen’s gone blank. Carl clicks the switch.
Then this: Ethel in the prow of a canoe, mugging for the camera as she ducks some little brown objects falling from the sky. In the next shot, the camera’s moved closer, revealing the brown things—still falling, with some accumulation on the floor of the canoe—to be, unmistakably: frogs.
“Carl,” says Ethel. “We’re getting ahead of our story.” The slide whips off the screen, leaving an afterimage on Vera’s retina that vanishes too fast for her to be sure if what she’s just seen was really a rain of frogs.
“Sorry,” says Carl. “I just wanted to show the folks what we mean when we say the trip was one thing after another. Give ’em a little taste of what I’d call pretty darn unexpected.”
“In time, dear,” says Ethel.
Perhaps Vera’s imagining this, but even the projector’s click sounds obedient, subdued, and the next slide sets history back on its chronological track. Now the Poteets are posed in front of an airport tower, flanking a handsome, young black man who comes up to Ethel’s armpit.
“That’s Willy!” cries Ethel, with such heartfelt pleasure you’d think she was seeing him in person after a long separation. “Willy Nkbngnge,” she says, or some last name that’s all consonants. “Willy’s one of the BaMbuti people, as they prefer to be called…” There’s a significant pause during which you can practically hear Ethel wrestling with her weaker self and winning, deciding not to say they no longer like being called pygmies. It’s the same pause one often hears in the speech of people who’ve learned not to say someone’s Jewish or black or Italian unless it’s relevant.
“Willy was our interpreter,” says Ethel. “Though ‘interpreter’ wasn’t the half of it. Willy did everything. Chief cook and bottle washer. Nature guide. Handyman. Navigator. And entertaining? The stories he could tell! The first night, over dinner at our hotel, Willy started in about the Mokele-Mbembe, the creature his people tell about that sounds so like the…?”
“Sauropod,” says Carl.
“Sauropod,” says Ethel. “Anyway, Carl got so enthralled, he started sipping from his water glass even though our doctor at home made us swear not to touch it, not even to brush our teeth. I kept signaling, but poor Carl didn’t notice. And the next day…” The next slide shows Carl and Ethel in front of a rundown building painted with a Red Cross and “pharmacy” in half a dozen languages. Carl’s grabbing his stomach, grinning self-consciously, but the fact is, he’s holding his body peculiarly and looks about ten years older than he did leaving home.
“Ethel,” says Carl, changing slides again, and now the whole audience catches its breath as a shot of the river comes on—green and wide, surrounded by jungle so lush and moist, you’d think if you touched the screen, your hand would come back wet. “Tell the folks a little about the Mokele-Mbembe, so they’ll know what we’re looking for.”
Ethel goes bashful, like a child called on to recite a party piece that even she knows is silly. When she speaks again, it’s in questions:
“All the tribes in that part of the world tell the same story about this creature—half elephant, half dragon? They say it inhabits caves in sharp bends of the river? And it’s smooth and has one horn and kills hippos and anything else it can get its hands on? Hands? Feet, I guess you’d say? Or claws? What else? It’s a vegetarian? And they all say it eats this little, pink, applelike fruit they call…help me, Carl.
“Molombo,” says Carl.
If Ethel’s trying to make them believe in some elephant-dragon crossbreed, she’s got to do better than this. “Of course, we knew this before we even got there,” says Ethel, resting her case. “Though Willy confirmed it and more. That first night at dinner, when poor Carl got so sick, Willy told us the most wonderful legend about a BaMbuti girl who got fed up with all the men in her village and went off to marry the Mokele-Mbembe.”
I MARRIED THE MOKELE-MBEMBE
. Now even Vera scoots forward. But that’s all they’re going to get of the dinosaur’s bride. The next image is of the Poteets and Willy and four young blacks in their canoe. Two of the men wear T-shirts and shorts, the others, army fatigues. “That’s Kampamba and Sabani, our bearers,” Ethel sings out. “Auru and Mkembe, our security guards; the government was
so
lovely…” The boat is loaded with gear and seems to be riding dangerously low in the water. Behind it is a pier, a ramshackle port, and, in the middle distance, those boys who pop up everywhere, shoving their palms at the camera.
“That’s us at Mounguma,” says Ethel. “Shipshape and ready to sail.” In fact Carl looks somewhat less than shipshape. Set off by the glossy ebony skins around him, Carl’s face is the milky blue-white of the sky. “And for a while it
was
smooth sailing: Big herons and parrots and crocodiles, whole armies of monkeys. Then two days out of Mnganga, the going got thicker.”
And so it must have. Now the river’s so choked with weeds, you’d think the boat had been plucked out of the water and beached in some Kansas cornfield. Dark green, bamboolike, the vegetation suggests young corn shoots, except that a cornfield is planted in rows and this is chaotic and everywhere. Carl holds the shot for longer than anyone wants to look at it. There’s grumbling when the same slide blinks off and on again. But it isn’t exactly the same—the boat’s moved a few inches up toward the right of the screen. So. There’s not even the hope that Carl’s projector’s stuck.
“This one was taken about twelve hours after that last,” says Carl. “We’d been pushing all day.”
“Day two!” says Ethel, and the same slide with slight variations comes on. So one image follows another, swamp and more swamp with only the most miniscule changes to indicate progress. Carl lingers over each one till the boredom is maddening, and Vera feels like she’s slogging through the muck herself.
“Day three,” says Carl.
“The worst part was knowing we had to come back the same way,” Ethel says. “And that there’s no rushing it. I kept thinking, suppose something
happens
…”
“That’s one way to learn patience,” says Carl. “No emergencies on that part of the Aruwimi. Life moves slow.”
By day five, the plant life’s got nowhere to go but up, winding itself around vines, roots, moss; and where can the Poteets go but deeper into the jungle? There’s so little light the only sign they haven’t underexposed all their film is the barely discernible little boat and, in the foreground, the bearers, pushing, toting, and puffing their cheeks as if miming some embarrassing pre-black-consciousness rendition of “Ol’ Man River.” Vera thinks of Bogey pushing The African Queen, getting covered with leeches. What a punishing way to make the Katherine Hepburn character come to tend to the needs of the body!
“I thought we’d had it,” says Carl.
Vera’s had it, too. Suppose Carl makes them go through this again, documenting the trip back. Then in shot after slow, boring shot, the growth begins to thin; light shines through. Shown at a merciful speed, it might look like special effects: Charlton Heston dividing the Red Sea. At last! The river’s wide and brown, and Willy’s pointing thumbs up at the camera.
“Well, you can imagine,” says Ethel. “I’ve never been so relieved. Was it that day, Carl?”
“Yes,” says Carl.
“That day was the rain of frogs,” Ethel says. “First it clouded up and started drizzling, and the drops got bigger until after a spell it wasn’t water, it was frogs! Like something from the Old Testament. Moses and the plagues.”
Vera’s startled; she’s just been thinking of Charlton Heston. “Except that it didn’t feel like a plague,” Ethel’s saying. “It wasn’t scary. And I don’t like frogs. We were so glad to be clear of that swamp, and I kept thinking: even if nothing else happens, we’ll have this. The truth is, it seemed like a miracle. Though really there’s a simple explanation.
“Apparently there’s a species of African frog—Carl knows the Latin name—that doesn’t go through the tadpole stage. And every so often a storm picks up masses of frog eggs and sets them down hatched.” Vera considers this newborn-frogs’ version of
The Wizard of Oz
, but in the end pays it no more mind than froggy’s Latin name. She thinks it’s a miracle, too, as do Ethel, Willy, and the bearers, who, Ethel’s saying, “just went crazy. Before that it was Bwana and Memsahib hunting the Mokele-Mbembe; who could blame them for not taking it seriously? But maybe the frogs were some omen in their culture. Because from then on they stopped joking and rolling their eyes when we asked them to do something. After that, they hopped
to
.”
Joking and eye-rolling and humoring Memsahib and Bwana? That’s the first they’ve heard about this, and it lends a new perspective: five days in the swamp knowing everyone thinks you’re a jerk. “That woke them up a bit,” says Ethel. “They started looking a little harder. And so…” Ethel pauses so long even Carl catches it and moves on to the next slide: a bend in the river and, at the curve, a scooped-out hollow in the bank.
“Then suddenly it was like
King Solomon’s Mines
, the guys all jabbering at once and pointing at a cave in the bank. ‘See there,’ says Willy, ‘that’s where the Mokele-Mbembe lives. And growing on the bank above it, the molombo…See?’” It’s a long shot taken from so far away it’s hard to see much of anything. Squinting, Vera can nearly make out blossoms, like some species of Congolese dogwood. Dinosaur food?
“That’s where we decided to camp. And it wasn’t till then that we realized we hadn’t been off the canoe for five days.”
What Vera wants to know is, how did they go to the bathroom? At first she can’t picture Ethel squatting over the edge of the boat; then she can. In the slide that flashes through Vera’s mind, Ethel’s behind floats upriver like some enormous, white flower, not bawdy at all but vulnerable and rather touching.
“What’s hardest to imagine is how enormous it is,” Ethel’s saying. “How vast. I think that’s what upset Carl. On the scale of things out there, a giant dinosaur’s no bigger than a mote in God’s eye. So seeing that cave with the molombo tree above it was very encouraging, like searching for someone who’s lost till you’ve nearly given up and then finding a footprint—”
“And speaking of footprints,” says Carl.
Cut to Ethel standing on a red clay bank, sunk a foot or so below ground level in what appears at first to be a crater but is—if you look hard enough—a footprint. Once you’ve seen it there’s no mistaking the webbing, the talons ending in sharp points. It’s so large Ethel and Carl could lie down in it and take a few pygmies in with them. The audience is as silent as if they’d just discovered it themselves.
“Well, I just thanked God,” Ethel says. “What a lift! What confirmation! Fine, I told Carl. Let’s go home. A rain of frogs and a dinosaur footprint is enough for one lifetime! But not for Carl. ‘Quit when we’re just getting close?’ he says.” Ethel’s chest swells when she says this, and Vera’s reminded of the way Carmen talks about Frankie the Lizard. Has Vera ever spoken like this about Lowell? Yes, she thinks. She still does.
Carl says, “We’d come that far; I figured we might as well stay and see if whatever it was came back.”
Over your stock natives-hacking-with-machetes shots, Ethel says, “It took the boys a whole day just to clear room enough to pitch tents. Then we made camp and then…well, then we waited.” Click, click. Images go by: Ethel reading; Carl sitting on a log; the bearers playing some gambling game reminiscent of Queegqueg and his bones. “I’d brought a crossword book and a mystery; I did all the puzzles and read the Agatha Christie twice. Carl kept asking if I thought someone else would turn out to be the murderer the second time. So I teased him back, I said, ‘Carl, if you’d been as patient with me as you are with this Mokele-Mbembe, our whole lives would have been different.’”
What was
that
about? wonders Vera, but it goes by so fast, no one seems to have noticed; nor is it likely that these cryptobiologists’ antennae would twitch at the first hint of anyone’s marital discord, except perhaps Mona Miller’s. “Even the boys got bored,” Ethel says, “And Willy asked if he could take off for a while. Turns out his village wasn’t far from there. Lord, who would have thought, a human habitation near that!