The Coup (27 page)

anonymity and silence." "You will get off cheap. No wife will come with me." "There is one, our intelligence-gathering arm reports, that you have not asked. But that is your affaire, as the French say." He bowed his head and read again the verses, "Let him that will, take the right path to the Lord. Yet you cannot will except by the will of Allah." Dorfu closed the Koran yet seemed in no hurry to go. Something lingered in the cell, with its jumbled relics and orange slant of late-afternoon sun, congenial to both men. "Strange," Dorfu said. "You took the name Freedom, and have been captive, until now, of your demons. Our capital is called Independence, yet our polity is an interweave of dependencies. Even the purity of water is a paradox; for unless it be chemically impure, it cannot be drunk. To be free of hunger, men gave up something of themselves to the tribe. To fight against oppression, men must band in an army and become less free, some might say, than before. Freedom is like a blanket which, pulled up to the chin, uncovers the feet." "You are saying, perhaps," ventured the prisoner, "that freedom is like all things directional. One of the magazines that Ezana abandoned, Les Mechaniques Populaires I believe, assures its credulous readers that all things move swiftly in some direction or other; even the universe by which we measure the separate motions of the earth and the sun itself moves, through some unimaginable medium, toward some unimaginable destination. How delicious it is, my President, to pause in movement, and to feel that divine momentum hurtling one forward!" "It must have been the rushing of your blood you heard. The wind does not feel the wind. To be within the will of Allah is to know utter peace. Once, in the course of my training as a member of the coercive branch of government, I parachuted, expecting tumult; instead there was peace beyond understanding as the earth lifted beneath me, offering as on a platter its treetops, the branching patterns of its dried riverbeds, the starlike dots of its herds, and the thatched rooftops from whose cooking-fires smoke drifted as I did. This was near Sobaville, and I noticed how perilously slender the road between the barracks and the capital appeared. One of my first acts, as Acting Minister of the Interior, was to have this highway made four-lane. In our infant governments, the connection between the head and the coercive arm must be close. Your wanderings as President perhaps should have included more visits to Sobaville." "I had some taste for battle," Ellellou allowed, "but none for the forced camaraderie, the latrine humor, of peacetime barracks. Men together generate unhealthy vapors. Am I free to leave, and, if so, when, Mr. President?" With a little pragmatic shrug Dorfu lifted his hands from where they gracefully rested, wrists on knees. "When you are free within yourself, to terminate." "I'd like to try it right now," I said. The main obstacle was my sensation that he needed me, and this, I saw, was a delusion. Dorfu smiled. "Do not forget Sheba's anzad." He added, "You should write some of your songs down." "The pension-is it to be paid in lu, or a less chimerical currency?" "On the strength of the projected peanut harvest, we are thinking of making the lu convertible and letting it float. However, if you would rather be paid in dollars-was "Dollars!" Ellellou cried, flaring up as when an evening breeze makes dark coals glow again. "That green scum which sits on the stagnant pond of capitalism, that graven pilfering of our sacred eagles and brooding pyramids, that paper bile the octopus spews forth! Pay me in francs." Dorfu nodded; the round top of his fez winked violet, floating like a momentary UFO in the horizontal, ebbing light. The four-color photograph Edumu had once upon a time framed, of a little girl and a presumed black man frozen in mid-tap on a make-believe staircase, had been removed from its sumptuous frame, the frame stolen for its gold but the paper image reverently tacked back up. It fluttered, as the evening call to prayer entered in at the green-silled window. Sittina's villa was one vast flower, all overgrown by the oleander, bottlebrush, hibiscus, and plumbago that flourished in our hospitable climate. She herself was not at home, though the sounds of her children squabbling and playing nostalgia-rock records arose from within. I looked through a window. Her Well-Tempered Clavier gathered dust on the harpsichord, its pages open to a fugue whose five sharps had stymied her. Our Chagall still hung on the far wall. The Ife mask looked tatty and askew. As I turned to leave, Sittina came along loping through the morning mists, through the shade of the fully leafed chestnut trees, clad in a blue jogging suit, her hair no longer held back by fish spines but cut close as a cap to her head. As she ran, she looked bow-legged in the manner of runners, the shins incurved so the resilient feet can keep pace on an invisible straight line. "Felix," she said to me, scarcely panting, and continuing to jog up and down as she talked, "why-are you wearing-a three-piece business suit?" "It's what they give you when you leave prison," I told her. "Also a beggar's disguise gets you arrested. Begging has been declared non-existent by the government. Long life to Dorfu! Death to extremists of both rightist and leftist tendencies!" "Don't make me-laugh," she said, "it throws-my breathing off. It's ecstasy-once you hit-your stride. I've lost-five pounds. Unfortunately-it's all come off my ass-instead of my belly." "That's middle age," I told her. "I thought-you were-evaporated." "Demoted," I said. "Can't we go inside? I'm getting a headache watching you jiggle." "I've been offered a job-calisthenicist for the work teams-being organized in the refugee camps-over at Also-Abid." "You want the job?" "No. You know me. I hate being-tied down. But I need the lu- since you blew the dictatorship." In addition to cropping her hair, she had minimized her wind-resistance by substituting for her great hoop earrings little sleepers of agate. Her narrow Tutsi skull offered to the air as compliant an edge as the prow of a yacht to the waves, as the profile of Nefertiti to the oceans of time. Sittina showed me this profile, saying over her shoulder, "Come on in"; she swept back a shaggy branch of feathery bamboo and tugged open her swollen front door. "The house's a mess," she apologized. "The last au pair I had took a cushy government job, in the Bureau of Detribalization. The Tuareg are all busy being house-guards for the people who got rich during the famine, and the government's trying to retrain the slum-dwellers to become nomadic herdsmen, because the nomads are good for the ecology. Mind if I take a quick shower? Otherwise the leg muscles cramp." Her children had gathered around me curiously, solemn appraisers of a line of lovers. One child had orange hair-a sign, it relieved me to see, not of kwashiorkor but of Celtic sperm. "What is your name?" I asked him. "Ellellou." "Do you know what that means?" "It means solidarity." "No, that is wrong. It means freedom." "I don't care," the child told me, and turned on his heel to hide a trembling lip. He was gleefully pounced upon by his siblings as he sought to control his humiliated sobbing. They jostled and tumbled him like hyaenas at a hamstrung impala; but when they let him up, he was laughing. It was right, that I had not intervened. In the skirmish I had counted six heads, which totalled up, in welfare's new arithmetic, to two full pensions. My vest hugged my belly with premonitions of bourgeois comfort. A child slightly larger than the frizzy redhead, a girl in a Gucci pinafore, with a Nilotic slant to her eyes, asked me, "You love my mommy?" "I admire her speed," I said. "You going to take care of us?" Before I could frame another evasion, Sittina raced through the living-room wet and nude. Her long tapered thighs, her bean-shaped buttocks. "Damn towels are in the dryer," she called over her shoulder. "Tell the kids it's time for the bus." One of her children had been watching through a window, where the crowding flowers permitted a peephole; when he shouted, the others scrambled for their books, their slates, their hand-computers, their spiral-bound notebooks and supplementary cassettes. I helped them through the door, through the tangle of their rubber boots and clinging pet patas monkeys. The bus, imported yellow but overpainted with the national green, lurched to the shady corner and held its stop long enough to receive their noisy, needful bodies. Even the three-year-old was enrolled in a Montessori beadwork group. I breathed, in amplification of the salat as-subh with which I had ceremonialized the dawn, a silent prayer of thanks for free public education, the cornerstone of participatory democracy and domestic bliss. Sittina had returned to the living-room still naked. Her sharp small breasts, her high central pocket of soft curls. "Weren't in the dryer either," she said. "I remember I put them out on the line to save electricity. But nothing dries outdoors anymore. I'd go see, but some lousy American tourist'd take my picture. Really, they're so awful. The women in the souk, with those long red fingernails and blue hair in bandanas and those cracked whiskey voices. The West Germans are worse-all straps and fat and hiking boots. Remember how I used to complain about the Albanians? I'm sorry, you were right. I was wrong. We should have stayed isolationist. There are nice things in the shops now but who can afford them except the tourists? The boutiques up under the Gibbs Center are chic but they're always full of lepers." Noticing my eyes upon her body, she spun, in that room of incompleted curves, and asked. "What do you think? Don't tell me. I know. My ass is too skinny." As usual, she had raced on ahead of me. Later, when, with trembling legs, I went to the bathroom, there were plenty of towels there, fluffily clean and shockingly white, white as new snow, as raw salt. She, scenting the eschatological drift of my call, had chosen to sustain her side of our exchange in elemental, traditional costume. "Not too skinny," I answered numbly. "Just right." The numbness-Livingstone's in the mouth of the lion, the pious man's in the grip of his fate-I had experienced before in the course of this narrative, at most of its crucial turns. "Still?" Sittina asked flirtatiously, in profile, the long round brow of the Tutsi royal line as erotic, as meek and glistening, as the twin bulges of her taut buttocks. Her nipples were long and blue. "Still," Ellellou said, adding, "I must go away." "To the Balak with Sheba again?" "No." "Back to the Bulub with Kutunda?" "I think not." "Down to the underworld with Kadongolimi?" "This is a cruel litany." "Off to the States with Candy?" "She's left already. We're divorced. None of our friends was surprised; mixed marriages have a lot of extra stresses." "Any marriage is mixed. Where will you go now, poor Felix, and who with?" "With you? It's just a scenario. We could go somewhere where you could paint more seriously." "Not sure seriously's my style," she said, striding on long legs into her long living-room, with harassed-looking waves of both arms indicating the fibrous brown masks and musty Somali camel saddles that overlooked like a baffled animal chorus her twinkling furniture of smudged glass and scratched aluminum. Among the Africana she had hung or propped canvases more or less eagerly begun but left with blank corners and unfilled outlines. "I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting. Or a finished anything, in this climate. Maybe it's palm trees and clay houses. You slave away, and what do you have in the end? A picture postcard from Timbuctoo." "The South of France," Ellellou said, "has very paintable trees." He had taken a step after her, she had grown so slender with distance, and Sittina answered his step by striding back to him, brown between her brown walls, and draping her long arms lightly on his shoulders. Tufts of armpit hair, still wet from the shower. Mustache traces above the corners of her smile, at the level of his eyes. "You smell like you want something," she said. "I want to consolidate," Ellellou confessed. "Then we ought to try us, as a starter." She did still coo, when she spread her legs. The mats on the floor, once they cleared away the children's toys, seemed in their marital haste soft enough. Beds are for toubabs, whose skins Mr. Yacub bred to lack the resilient top layer. Ellellou was excited by the five-petalled faces of the audience of oleander at the windows. He in her-his pelvis cradled in her elegant thighs, his hand cupping the firm ellipses beneath- Sittina rolled her eyes in wild Watusi display of the bloodshot whites, taking in the furniture and wall ornaments upside-down. She moaned, "My God, think of the packing! And the children's dental appointments!!" The good citizens of France no longer look up at the sight of noirs strolling down their avenues. Their African empire, which a passion for abstraction led them to carve from the most vacant sector of the continent, backed up on them a bit, like those other cartographic reservoirs for a century flooded with ink of European tints, and doused the home country with a sprinkling of dark diplomats, students, menial laborers, and political exiles. Even in Nice, along La Promenade des Anglais, which becomes Le Quai des @ltats-Unis, amid the singing of the beach pebbles and the signing of autographs by topless young leftovers from the Cannes Film Festival, an ebony family, decently attired, draws only that flickering glance with which a Frenchman files another apergu in the passionate cabinets of his esprit. Africa has been legitimized here by art. Delacroix skimmed the Maghrib and Picasso imported cubism from Gabon. Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet... noire est belle. The woman is extremely chic: tall as a model, with a little haughtily tipped head and a stride that swings the folds of her rainbow-dyed culottes. The man with her is relatively unprepossessing, insignificant even, shorter than she, half his face masked in NoIR sunglasses. He does not appear to be the father of the variegated children who march at their sides. From his carriage he might have been a soldier. The boys from their look of well-fed felicity will never be soldiers, or will make bad ones. The girls, the girls will be many wonderful things-dancers, mothers, strumpets, surgeons, stewardesses, acrobats, agronomists, magicians' assistants, mistresses, causes celebres, sunbathers, fading photographs in mental albums, goddesses glimpsed like cool black swans amid the glitter of an opera house, caped in chinchilla, one gloved hand resting on the gilded balcony rail as they turn to go. The pagans pray to females. It gladdens the writer's