Brazzaville Beach (35 page)

“Where is everybody?” Amilcar wondered aloud. “What happened here?” He sounded baffled and hurt, as if this abandoned village and its profligate waste of weaponry were designed as personal slights.

 

We foraged farther and came across bags of rice and tins of pickled mackerel from Poland. The boys cooked up an oily stew of fish, rice, cassava and some leaf that Amilcar stripped from a bush.

Then Amilcar rearmed the Atomique Boum team, giving them each a new Kalashnikov and draping them with shiny bandoliers
of redundant machine gun bullets. “It looks good,” he said. “It makes them feel strong.” He sent October-Five out to the gun pit to keep watch on the causeway and the other two volunteered to accompany him. He was pleased at this development.

“You see,” he said, after they had gone. “Now we are home they will fight.”

We sat together in a hut, a lantern burning in the middle of the floor. We sat on piles of rubberized, olive-drab ponchos we had found. Amilcar was in a talkative mood, and reminisced for a while about his past ambitions. He would never have worked in the capital he said, not like the other doctors with their private clinics and Mercedes-Benzes, all lobbying for jobs in the World Health Organization so they could live in Geneva. He would have stayed in his province, he said, and helped his people.

“God will return me there,” he said simply. “When the war is over.”

“God?” I said. “You're not telling me you believe in God?”

“Of course.” He laughed at my astonishment. “I'm a Catholic.” He reached into his camouflaged tunic and pulled out a crucifix on a beaded chain. “He is my guide and protector. He is my staff and my comforter.”

“I never thought for a minute.”

“Are you a Christian?” he asked.

“Of course not.”

“Ah, Hope.” He shook his head sadly. He seemed genuinely disappointed in me. “It's because you are a scientist.”

“It's got nothing to do with being a scientist.”

We started talking about my life, what I did, what I had done before. I told him about my doctorate, my work at Knap, Mallabar and the Grosso Arvore project. I talked animatedly, in a succinct and authoritative way. It seemed to me as if I were recollecting a vanished world, that I was summarizing some historical research project I had completed a long time ago. Professor Hobbes, the college, the Knap field study, Grosso Arvore and the chimpanzees seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with me anymore.

As I talked I realized I was conversing with a freedom I had not enjoyed for a long time—not since the early days with John.

Amilcar's trusting candor and his genuine curiosity in me was almost like that of a lover. I appeared to fascinate him and this liberated me.

From time to time Amilcar would interrupt me to make a point.

“But Hope,” he said at one stage, “let me ask you this. All right, you know a lot. You know many obscure things.”

“Yes. I suppose so.”

“So let me ask you this: the more you know, the more you learn—does it make you feel better?”

“I don't understand.”

“All these things you know—does it make you happy? A better person?”

“It's got nothing to do with happiness.”

He shook his head, sadly. “The pursuit of knowledge is the road to hell.”

I laughed at him. “My God. How can you
say
that? You're a doctor, for God's sake. What rubbish!”

Amilcar smiled and shook his head slightly. “You think that if you know everything you can escape from the world. But you can't.”

“I don't.”

“You think that if you can prove everything, document everything, you can escape from the pressure.”

“What pressure?”

He gestured around him at the shadowy interior of the hut. He picked up some leaves from the floor. He threw a tin of pickled mackerel against the wall.

“That pressure,” he said.

We sat and looked at each other. I thought about what he was saying. He was right in a way, but I wasn't going to tell him so.

“Nobody believes
that
,” I said. “What I really feel is—” I stopped. I did not want to tell him everything, after all. He was right: I needed that rigor, that discipline, but it was not sufficient for me. Even more I needed the knowledge that proof and understanding were always going to fall short and falter in the end. Something else had to take over then, and it was that something I was prepared to trust—and it was that which gave me comfort.

Amilcar looked at me, the lenses of his spectacles flashing yellow momentarily in the lantern light.

“It's OK, Hope,” he said. “I know what you're thinking.”

We argued on, good-naturedly. But now I sensed he was taking up positions for forensic effect, to prolong the debate, so I indulged him. Occasionally he would say things that made me pause, however. At one stage he asked me many questions about the chimpanzees, why we were studying them so intently. He seemed genuinely amazed—this time I don't think he was pretending—that I had spent month after month in the bush watching chimpanzees and recording their every act and movement.

“But why?” he said. “What's it for?”

I tried to tell him but he didn't seem convinced.

“The trouble with you in the West is…” He thought about it. “You don't really value human life, human beings.”

“That's not true.”

“You value a monkey more than a human. And look at you: I hear you talk about a tree, about some kind of hedge.” He pointed at me. “You value a tree more than a human being.”

“That's ridiculous. I—”

“No, Hope, you have to learn”—he kept jabbing his finger at me—“you have to learn that a human life, any human life is worth more than a car, or a plant, or a tree…or a monkey.”

THE WEIGHT OF THE SENSE WORLD

I went out walking on the beach today. It was fresh and breezy and my hair kept being blown annoyingly across my face. For some reason, my thoughts were full of Amilcar and his mad moral certainties. I was distracted from them, fairly ruthlessly, when I trod on a fat blob of tar the size of a plum. It squashed between three toes of my left foot, clotted and viscous like treacle
.

The next hour was spent in a frustrating search for some petrol or alcohol to clean it off. There was none in the house so I had to bobble through the palm grove to the village. I bought a beer bottle full of pink kerosene from one of the old trading women and eventually, with some effort and enough cotton wool to stuff a cushion, I managed to remove all traces of tar from my foot
.

Now I sit on my deck, feeling stupid and exhausted, looking dully out at the ocean, a strong smell of kerosene emanating from my left foot, my toes raw red and stinging from the crude and astringent fuel
.

The weight of the sense world overpowers me some days, today clearly being one of them. I seem unable to escape the phenomenal, the randomly human. It's at times like these that the appeal of mathematics, and its cool abstractions, is at its most potent and beguiling. Suddenly I can understand the satisfaction of that escape, savor something of the acute pleasure it gave to someone like John. All the itch and clutter of the world, its bother and fuss, its nagging pettiness, can wear you down so easily. And this is why I like the beach—blobs of tar notwithstanding. Living on the extremity of a continent, facing the two great simple spaces of the sea and sky, cultivates the sense that somehow you are less encumbered than those who live away from the shoreline. You feel less put upon by the fritter and mess of the quotidian. It is fifty yards from where I sit now to the foam and spume of the last breaker. There is not very much between here and there, you think, to distract you
.

I remember something Amilcar said to me that night as we talked. I asked him what would happen if UNAMO were defeated. He refused to admit it was possible
.

“
But what if?” I said. “Hypothetically
.”

“
Well…I would be dead, for one thing
.”

“
Are you frightened
?”

He pushed out his bottom lip as he thought about it. “No,” he said
.

“
Why not
?”

“
Because what cannot be avoided must be welcomed
.”

 

I was never sure, in our discussions that night, if he was simply trying to provoke me. We talked on and the subject changed. He started to tell me about a girl, a French girl, he had met in Montpellier, whom he had asked to marry. She had said yes, and then three weeks later had said no. He never saw her again. He
asked me if I was married. I said no. He smiled and screwed up his eyes.

“So. What about Ian?” he said.

“What about him?”

“I think he would like to marry you. Why don't you marry him?”

“You must be joking.”

He found this very funny. Still laughing, he went outside to check on the boys in the gun pit. Alone in the hut I thought about what Amilcar had said, and realized that we had blithely assumed Ian was still alive. If he was, I doubted that marriage to me would be on his mind.

When Amilcar returned I could see his mood had changed again. He was depressed.

“Those boys,” he said, sucking in air through his teeth to express his exasperation, “they are too frightened. I told them there was no danger. They would hear the federals from two miles away. Then they should call me. One shot. One shot and they would retreat.” He went on bemoaning their lack of spirit.

“Maybe we should withdraw a bit,” I suggested. “Maybe the UNAMO troops are farther down the road?”

“No. We will make our stand here.”

He did not want to talk further, I could sense. He picked up the lantern and went to check on the abandoned materiel. I pulled some ponchos over me and settled down to sleep.

 

I woke very early. There was a faint light outside, a pale misty gray. Amilcar was nowhere to be seen. I sat up, stiff and sore. I had been badly bitten in the night on my neck and forearm.

Outside it was very still. For the first time I could see the full extent of the disarray of the village: everywhere there were piles of abandoned cardboard boxes and packing cases. I wondered where Amilcar was, and wandered through the village toward the causeway looking for him. Slowly a pale citron began to infuse the monochrome light around me; there was a low cover of thick cloud and it was cool.

As I drew near the gun pit I saw at once that it was empty. The
boys had gone. Propped against the sandbag wall were their new guns, their bandoliers coiled beside them. More tellingly, three track-suit tops were hung over the antitank gun's barrel. Team Atomique Boum had finally disbanded.

I folded the track-suit tops and laid them on top of the sandbags. I sat down on one of the gun's tires and wondered what to do. The gun itself, I thought, my mind wandering, was rather a beautiful object. The long tapered barrel, blistered with dew, looked out of proportion, too long for the compact breech and the neat carriage. There was a booklet encased in a plastic bag hanging from one of the handles on the sight. I tore it open. It was a set of instructions on how to operate the gun—written in French.

I looked down the barrel and the long perspective of the causeway. Banks of mist lay over the marsh. It was all very placid, eerily beautiful. A few birds were beginning to sing. I heard the plangent fluting of a hoopoe.

“They've gone,” Amilcar said.

I turned round. He stood there, slumped yet tense, his jaw muscles working.

“Look.” He pointed at the neatly stacked guns. I think it was only then that the impossibility of his situation—its farcical unreality—struck home. He put his hands on his hips and looked up helplessly at the sky.

“Those boys,” he said, trying to chuckle. “A great volleyball player makes a bad soldier. Now I know.” He looked back at the mess in the village. “Look at this. Terrible.”

I felt cold and shivered. I picked up a track-suit top. “Can I have this?”

“Take anything. Help yourself. Have an antitank gun.”

I pulled on the top. Amilcar was looking incredulously at the instruction booklet for the gun.

“In French…can you believe it? How do you think they knew that the one man left to fire it had been to Montpellier University?” He threw the book away. “How much would a gun like this cost?”

“How would I know?”

“Two hundred thousand dollars? Half a million?”

“What can I tell you? It's brand new. Who knows how much these things cost?”

“Somebody from UNAMO bought this for us in Europe. I wonder what his commission was?”

He levered off the top of one of the flat wooden boxes. Inside, on a polestyrene rack, like wine bottles, were three thin shells with lilac, onion-shaped tops, like domes on a Russian church. He removed one and held it out: it was a rather beautiful object, well designed, like the gun. The lilac shone with a luminescent glow in the Yellow light. Amilcar opened the breech of the gun and offered the onion nose to the opening. It slid in easily. It was far too small. He pulled the shell out.

“How much would one of these cost? Five thousand dollars? Ten?”

I didn't answer him this time. I zipped up my Atomique Boum top. He sat down on the sandbag wall. I felt so sorry for him, in his new uniform—it had acquired a few extra creases but he still looked dapper and neat—with all this redundant sophisticated weaponry. He looked down at the ground without speaking.

The cluster of bites on my neck itched. As I scratched them I realized they were in exactly the same position as Amilcar's curious scar. I thought if we had more time, and the occasion was right, that I would tell him about my port wine mark, splashed across my skull.

“Hope,” he said suddenly, “would you help me a little? I need your help. It will save time. Then we'll go back to the airstrip, get you out on a plane tonight. But I just have to do one more thing and if you help me it'll save time.”