Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (25 page)

Or showing me the irony of his life, maybe.

The lion suddenly gave a furious roar, abandoned his meal, and threw himself against the cage.

“He wants to play,” Andrew said, looking up and laughing. “Go, Mambo! Play with your crocodile.”

The lion snarled and scooped his paw under the cage.

Andrew said, “He wants to play with you,” and started to laugh again. He folded the shorts, wiped his face with the palm of his hand, and picked up another shirt.

“I know,” I said, not laughing.

“Go sit inside,” said Andrew kindly. “I’ll bring you some tea when I am finished here.”

By evening, when K and Mapenga returned from fishing, a strong breeze had picked up off the lake and we were able to sit down at the pavilion overlooking the water. The mosquitoes, we hoped, were being gusted off the lakeside and farther inland. The lion lay placidly on the rocks in front of us, tearing away at his gnawed slab of crocodile. A motorboat chugged into view over the pink-lit water and started to head past Mapenga’s island.

“Shit!” yelled Mapenga, leaping to his feet and running toward the cliff, waving his arms above his head. “It’s St. Medard. St. Medard! You have to meet this man,” he said to K and me. “Jesus, if you think you’re fucking crazy, you should see this bastard. I’d forgotten about him when I called you the craziest bastard I knew. This man is the craziest bastard you’ll ever meet.”

Mapenga danced around on the rocks like a man possessed. “St. Medard, you crazy bastard! Come and have a drink! Come and have a drink!”

St. Medard pulled up on shore and joined us at the pavilion. St. Medard shouted, rather than talked, in a way that required the use of his entire body, so that he jerked and thrashed about and there seemed a very real danger that he would easily set himself, or anyone else, on fire with the end of his convulsing cigarette. “I don’t want to see you,” he said. “I need to get home.” The lion trotted up to greet the visitor, rubbing himself fondly on St. Medard’s legs. “Hello, you miserable cat.”

“Dop?” asked Mapenga.

“Dop?” replied St. Medard. “Long dop. It’s been a shit couple of days.”

Mapenga and the lion went up to the house and left K and me alone with St. Medard, who punctuated his ordinary speech with microbursts of hoarse laughter and shouts of, “Mapenga, stop playing with that cat and bring me dop.
”
Hidden under the bluster and the mosaic of coarse, colorful language (English with smatterings of Shona, Afrikaans, and Rhodesian slang), St. Medard had an unmistakably cultivated British accent.

“Where are you from?” I asked when I got a chance.

“Tete.”

“Tete?”

“Ja. I’ve been stuck there for two fucking days.”

“No, I don’t mean where have you just come from today. I mean, where are you from originally?”

St. Medard eyed me levelly for a moment over the top of his cigarette and then asked, “You’re not one of those nosy journalist types, are you?”

“No,” I lied.

St. Medard looked out at the lake and cleared his throat uneasily. He didn’t say anything else until Mapenga finally arrived with the beers, then said, “Fuck you very much,” and swallowed the beer in a few thirsty gulps. He bit the lid off another and gulped that down too. “Ah,” he said when he had finished, “that’s better.”

Two days before, St. Medard had been in a car accident in which four people had been killed. “But I think the death toll is rising,” he said, almost choking on a laugh and turning a pale reptilian color that I associate more with geckos than humans.

“What happened?” asked K.

The beer had relaxed St. Medard’s tongue. He spoke more easily now. Or perhaps he felt safer talking to K, who was obviously from the same tribe as he was. “Beyond Tete there,” he said, addressing himself to the men, “a truck cut the corner and was coming straight for me, on my side of the road. I couldn’t get any farther over or I would have been over the cliff, you know. He was going to come straight up the bonnet. I thought, No. Cheerio, chaps. This is it, hey. Curtains for St. Medard.

“But instead of hitting me, he came at me sideways, clipped the side of my cab, then he does this”—St. Medard demonstrated the driver of the other vehicle wrestling the steering wheel violently from one side to the other—“and he flipped the thing arse over tit.” St. Medard flicked his cigarette off the pavilion wall and lit another one. “Then his vehicle rolls—squashed. My cab has a bloody face job. But his pickup hits an anthill on its way over, and it’s an old hill that’s been taken over by a nest of bees. Then the sports began! Ha! Let the games begin! I didn’t get out of the cab. Well, I got out and I got horned about thirty times in fifty seconds. I didn’t even look at the damage on the cab. I shot back in and shut the windows.”

St. Medard shook his head. “These ous from the other vehicle—there must have been about thirty of them sitting in the back when the thing rolled over—were deezering. I mean, the lame and injured—forget about the pain and the dying—when the bees started, everyone was running. Ha! Ha! The lame shall walk, the dead shall rise again—that’s what it was like.

“Some of those ous were covered. When those bees smelled blood they must have thought, No, there’s a serious problem here. I’ve never seen it like that. It must have been a size colony because you’ve got thirty or forty munts running in all directions,
all
covered with bees, hollering.” St. Medard took off across the pavilion to demonstrate, lifting his knees in the high step, swiping his ears, and roaring. The exercise left him breathless and a bit shaky, so he lit another cigarette. “Then they tried to get in the cab with me! I was slapping hard, hey. I was shouting, ‘You’re not getting anywhere near me covered with bees.’

“I was stuck in the cab for five hours with the window up. I couldn’t get out to fix the damage because of the bees. In this heat, hey. It makes a chap lonely for a beer. And I think I killed Connor’s foreman—I was giving him a lift into town when the crash happened and ay, he didn’t look too lively when I dropped him off at the hospital, poor ou
.
Connor isn’t going to be very pleased with me.”

Mapenga disappeared again to check on supper. I asked St. Medard how long he had been in Mozambique. His manner suddenly became shifty and imprecise again, as if he hoped that by swallowing his words into his enormous ginger-gray beard, he could scramble his answers. “Thirty years,” he told me.

“Thirty years?”

“Thirteen.” He took a pull off his cigarette. “Or eight. Ten.” He shrugged. “After the hondo anyway,” he said obscurely.

I suspected then that he had been a soldier of fortune, spilling from the Rhodesian War to other wars that had erupted in surrounding countries.

St. Medard, of anyone I had ever met in my life, was the person least afraid of death, or maybe the least afraid of losing life—which might amount to the same thing. It seemed to me that he had become numbed to violence, accustomed to horror. He expected the worst from life, and the worst was delivered. As a result, he looked much older than his forty-seven years: a beer belly stretched over powerful, stout legs, his beard was grizzled, and his skin looked oxygen-deprived. But he was, I had no doubt, still terrifyingly strong and robust. His visible body, abused and shattered and alcohol-soaked, was the shell within which a powerful memory of survival—a kind of wild intuition and an ability to seek out weakness in others—burned strong. St. Medard had a special gift that allowed him to continue living against all odds, even while others died like flies around him.

Mapenga came down from the kitchen. “I’ve asked Andrew to make steak for us,” he said.

“No, Mapenga,” K said. “Not for me, hey. I don’t graze nyama anymore.” He looked at me. “Neither does she.”

I said, “That’s okay, really. I’ll be fine. I don’t want to put anyone to any trouble. I don’t need supper.”

Mapenga stared at me. “You don’t eat meat.” He looked at K. “Not even you?”

K shook his head. “It’s a fast,” he explained.

“A fast what?” asked St. Medard.

“A
fast,” explained K. “When you give up eating something for religious purposes or something.”

St. Medard shook his head and blew out a cloud of smoke. “What’s fast about that? Seems slow to me.” His laugh erupted from the bottom of his lungs and tore at his throat until it shook his cheeks a mottled shade of purple.

“And you,” said Mapenga, “what’s your excuse?”

My vegetarianism suddenly seemed strident and self-indulgent in a country where the opportunity to eat a whole rat is, for a great percentage of the population, a rare treat. Out here the threshold for insanity and murder is high, but the tolerance for anyone who could be perceived as sanctimonious is zero. I tried hard to think of the best way to boil down the reason for my fourteen-year-long rejection of meat, in a way that would be least likely to lead to my automatic crucifixion. “I won’t eat anything that I wouldn’t, in theory at least, have the guts to kill myself,” I said lamely.

There was an appalled silence. St. Medard broke it. “Well, shit,” he said at last, “I hope no one expects me to eat all those gondies in Tete.” And he burst into a hail of choking laughter.

Another round of drinks was brought from the house. Talk turned to fishing. St. Medard said he would take K fishing the next day, if he liked, but he didn’t want to fish with Mapenga. “He’s too restless. You park in one spot, switch off the engine, and about five seconds later Mapenga says, ‘There’s no fish, here. Come, let’s move.’ ” St. Medard looked at his friend. “I am not going fishing with you, Mapenga. That’s flat.”

“We’ll give him double doses of his medication to calm him down,” K suggested.

Mapenga started laughing. “Ja, once I told St. Medard he has exactly the same problem as me. He’s ADHD for sure. So when I went to see my psychiatrist in Harare I told him, ‘Listen, man, I have a friend who needs the same stuff as me. Can you give me some extra?’ So the doc gives me extra and I give St. Medard a month’s supply of Ritalin.” Mapenga paused. “Ja well, the mad bastard took the whole lot in two days. Thirty Ritalin in two days.”

“That’s terrible stuff,” said St. Medard. “The more pills I took, the worse I felt. I didn’t sleep for days. I was walking up the walls, man. It started out like this—I took a pill and I waited half an hour and I didn’t feel any calmer, no different than usual, so I took six or seven and then I felt worse, so I took another ten and then I felt really kak and before I knew it I’d taken all the pills and I’ve never felt so mad in my life. Horrible stuff, that.”

It became obvious, at least to me, as the evening wore on that the four of us, and the lion, were going to be stuck on the island together for the night. The sun had set long ago and had wrapped up what was left of the daylight with an impatient flourish, like someone folding up a picnic blanket at the end of the day. And even had there still been enough light (the moon was waxing nightly), St. Medard now looked far from sober enough to negotiate the passage back to his island, which was apparently an hour or two from here. And still we had not eaten.

“I’m not staying for supper,” said St. Medard, less than distinctly. “Can’t remember the last time I ate a fucking vegetable and I’m sure as hell not going to start now.”

More drinks were brought from the house. The breeze died down and mosquitoes sighed out of the grass and whined around our ankles. I decided to take my chances with the lion, who was perched up on the pavilion wall and who seemed momentarily distracted by his hunk of crocodile, rather than risk the certain deadliness of Mozambican malaria, and fled to the cage. K and I were being billeted in single beds along the wall of the house behind the cage, like soldiers or children at boarding school. Mapenga had said that he would sleep in the pavilion with the lion.

I sat on my bed under a mosquito net straining my eyes to read in the undulating light of a single bulb that gleamed out from the kitchen. I could hear shouts from the pavilion, and gusts of laughter. The lion, obviously missing my company, sauntered up to the outside of the cage and settled down on his belly, head on his paws, to watch me. His lips were greasy. The tip of his tail twitched.

It was close to midnight by the time we ate. K said grace, which was wasted on everyone else. St. Medard looked as if he was approaching alcoholic collapse. He swayed over his plate blearily and occasionally took swipes with his fork at the food, some of which made it into his mouth, but most of which ended up in his beard. Mapenga was sounding insistent and argumentative about something—or perhaps a series of things. Whatever it was, Mapenga was right about it and everyone else was wrong. K ate steadily, calmly. Andrew had cooked an extraordinarily good vegetable curry, although it was harder to appreciate the meal than it otherwise might have been because, aside from everything else, it was impossible to escape the clammy, ever present odor of rotting crocodile flesh (the generator-run deep freeze was obviously incapable of keeping several full-grown crocodiles fresh).

St. Medard wiped his plate clean with a slice of bread and then gave a soggy hiccup.

“That’s the thing you fuckers don’t understand,” Mapenga was saying, jabbing his fork at K. “Because people are afraid to see the truth . . .”

Suddenly, St. Medard pushed his plate away, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and said, “Right. I’ve had enough of this. You!” He hooked his finger under Mapenga’s collar. “I’ve had enough of your shit. You’re talking shit.”

Mapenga blinked with surprise, then got quickly to his feet. His chair crashed to the floor. He grabbed St. Medard by the beard. “Fuck you.”

“Let’s go.”

The two men supported each other unsteadily out of the cage. They were swearing loudly as they crashed past the kitchen, through the swing door, and out on the lawn.

Andrew came to clear the plates.

K was picking his teeth discreetly with his penknife.

Andrew asked if I’d like some fruit for pudding.

St. Medard suddenly lunged into view on the lawn with Mapenga’s head gripped in the crook of his elbow. Both men gleamed in the light of the fat silver moon. Between here and there, they had somehow managed to shed every last stitch of clothing.