Read The Fight Online

Authors: Norman Mailer

Tags: #Non-Fiction, #History, #Biography, #Classics

The Fight (3 page)

BOOK: The Fight
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2. THE BUMMER

W
ITNESS ANOTHER
Black man’s taste: It is the Presidential Domain of President Mobutu at Nsele on the banks of the Congo, a compound of white stucco buildings with roads that extend over a thousand acres. A zoo can be found in some recess of its grounds and an Olympic swimming pool. There is a large pagoda at the entrance, begun as a gift from the Nationalist Chinese, but completed as a gift by the Communist Chinese! We are in a curious domain: Nsele! It extends from the highway to the Congo over fields in cultivation, two miles to the Congo, now called the Zaïre, the enormous river here a disappointment for its waters are muddy and congested with floating clumps of hyacinth ripped loose from the banks and thick as carcasses in the water, unromantic as turds. A three-decker riverboat, hybrid between yacht and paddle steamer, is anchored at the dock. The boat is called
President Mobutu
. Next to it, similar in appearance, is a hospital ship. It is called
Mama Mobutu
. No surprise. The posters that advertise the fight say
“Un cadeau de President Mobutu au peuple Zairois”
​(a gift of President Mobutu to the Zairois people)​
“et un honneur pour l’homme noir”
(plus an honor for the Black man). Like a snake around a stick, the name of Mobutu is intertwined in Zaïre with the revolutionary ideal. “A fight between two Blacks in a Black nation, organized by Blacks and seen by the whole world; that is a victory for Mobutism.” So says one of the government’s green and yellow signs on the highway from Nsele to the capital, Kinshasa. A variety of such signs printed in English and French give the motorist a whiz-by-the-eye course in Mobutism. “We want to be free. We don’t want our road toward progress to be impeded; even if we have to forge our way through rock, we will forge it through the rock.” It is better than Burma Shave and certainly a noble sentiment for the vegetation of the Congo, but the interviewer is thinking that after much travel he has come to an unattractive place. Of course, the interviewer is also looking green. He has caught some viral disruption in Cairo before coming to Zaïre and has only been in this country for three miserable days. He will even leave for New York just this afternoon. The fight has been postponed. Foreman has been cut in training. Since it is over the eye, the postponement, while indefinite, can hardly be less than a month. What a bummer! The day he landed in Zaïre was the day he heard the news. His hotel reservations had, of course, been unhonored. There is nothing like failing to find a bed when you land at dawn in an African capital. Much of the morning was lost before he was finally assigned a room at the Memling, famous for its revolutionary history. A decade ago, correspondents lived on its upper stories at a time when protagonists were being executed in the lobby. Blood ran over the lobby floor. But
now the Memling looked like itself once more, a mediocre hotel in a tropical town. The famous floor of the lobby was more or less equal again in cleanliness and good feeling to the floor of the Greyhound bus station in Easton, Pennsylvania, and the natives at the desk spoke French like men with artificial larynxes. They were nonetheless as superior in their attitude toward foreigners as any Parisian. What pride in the inability to comprehend your accent! What a lobby to be executed in! The Zairois officials who passed through these precincts wore dark blue lapelless jackets and matching blue pants called
aboscos
(from the slogan
“à bas le costume”
— down with formal dress) and that was the approved bureaucratic revolutionary wear. Since some of these officials even spoke English (with accents more tortured than the Japanese — words catapulting from their gut as they popped their eyes) irritation teemed in every dialogue. Between white and Black, arrogance massed against arrogance. The decision of the press was that the Zairois had to be the rudest people in Africa. Quickly, relations between Zairois and visiting whites became mutual detestations. To obtain what one desired, whether a drink, a room, or an airline ticket, a surly Belgian tone was the peremptory voice to offer. If, for example, you hung up the phone after waiting twenty minutes for an answer, be certain the hotel operator would call back to revile you for discommoding him. Then one had to get into the skin of a
cultivateur Belgique
defining reality to plantation hands.
“La connection était im … par … faite!”
Manners became so bad that American Blacks were snarling at African Blacks. What a country of old knots and new.

Worse than that. To be in the Congo for the first time
and know its name had been changed. More debilitating than cannibalism was this contribution to anomie. To reach the edge of the “Heart of Darkness,” here at the old capital of Joseph Conrad’s
horror
, this Kinshasa, once evil Leopoldville, center of slave trade and ivory trade, and to see it through the bilious eyes of a tortured intestine! Was it part of Hemingway’s genius that he could travel with healthy insides? Who had ever wanted so much to be back in New York? If there were charms to Kinshasa, where to find them? The center of town had all the panache of an inland Florida city of seventy or eighty thousand people who somehow missed their boom — a few big buildings looked at a great many little ones. But Kinshasa did not have eighty thousand people. It had a million, and it ran for forty miles around a bend of the Congo, now, yes, the Zaïre. It was no more agreeable than passing through forty miles of truck traffic and car-stained suburbs around Camden or Biloxi. If there was an inner city full of squalor and color called La Cité where natives lived in an endless tumbledown of creeks, lurching dirt roads, nightclubs, wall shops and hovels, our traveler was still too queasy with the internal mismanagement of his life to pay a visit, and thought only of getting home. Of course, living in such duress, the bile-producing emotions proved most satisfactory. What pleasure in the observation that this Black one-party revolutionary state had managed to couple some of the oppressive aspects of communism with the most reprehensible of capitalism. President Mobutu, the seventh (by repute) wealthiest man in the world, had decreed that the only proper term for one Zairois to use in addressing another was “Citoyen.” On his
average per-capita income of $70 a year, a Zairois, any Zairois, could still say “Citizen” to the seventh wealthiest man in the world. Small wonder then if the interviewer detested the Presidential Domain. These little white villas (reserved for the press) and the large white Congressional Hall (reserved for the training of the fighters) were a Levittown-on-the-Zaïre. Stucco buildings painted the color of aspirin were set behind lacy decorative open-air walls reminiscent of the worst of Edward Durrell Stone, a full criticism — since even the best of Edward Durrell Stone is equal to taking a cancer pill — no, this pretentious Nsele with its two-mile drive and its hordes of emaciated workers in the watermelon fields (one could pass a thousand Blacks on the road before one glimpsed a man with the faintest suggestion of girth) was a technological confection equal to NASA or Vacaville, a minimum-security prison for the officers of the media and the visiting bureaucrats of the world. One high white and chromium tower with the initials of the party — MPR — stood up as a pillar to mass phallic rectitude. It was a long way from Joseph Conrad and the old horror. Maybe it took a mind as extreme as his own to be ready to argue that the plastic niceties of Edward Durrell Stone were still equal in odium to the Belgian Congo of 1880:

They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now — nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on
unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air — and nearly as thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees. Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. The man seemed young — almost a boy — but you know with them it’s hard to tell. I found nothing else to do but to offer him one of my good Swede’s ship’s biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers closed slowly on it and held — there was no other movement and no other glance.

At Nsele, Ali was ensconced in a villa just across the street from the banks of the Zaïre. The interior of his house had been furnished by the government in style one might expect. Large rooms twice the size of motel rooms but identically depressing in mood commanded the air. Long sofas and chairs were covered in green velveteen, the floor was a plastic gray tile, the cushions were orange, the table dark brown — one was looking at that ubiquitous hotel furniture known to the wholesale trade as High Schlock.

It was nine in the morning. Ali had been sleeping. If he looked better than at Deer Lake, the hint of a lack of full health still lingered. In fact, there had been news stories that his blood sugar was low, his energy poor, and he had been placed on a new diet. Still, there was no large improvement in his appearance.

This morning he was twice depressed over Foreman’s
cut. The fight had been hardly a week away. A TV correspondent, Bill Brannigan, who spoke to Ali just after he heard the news, was to remark, “It’s the first time I ever saw Ali have a genuine reaction.” How he was upset. “The worst of all times,” said Ali, “and the worst thing that could have happened. I feel as if somebody close to me just died.” Could it be the developing determination of his body that had just died, his difficult approach to good condition? But even to speak of good condition is to confront the first mystery of boxing. It is a rare state of body and mind that allows a Heavyweight to move at top speed for fifteen rounds. That cannot be achieved by an act of will. Yet Ali had been trying. For months he had trained.

The irony was that there had been a time when he was always in such shape. Before his second fight with Liston, you could catch him in the middle of any gymnasium session and he was superb. His body could not betray him. You would define happiness by his estimate of his own condition. But that was a decade ago. In the three years after his title was taken for refusing to go into the army — “No Viet Cong ever called me ‘Nigger’ ” — he had every kind of life but a fighter’s; he lectured, was onstage in New York as an actor, traveled, lay fallow. He had fun. Ever since, he trained with an eye for the fun he would have just so soon as training each day was done. On the night before his first Norton fight, hands aching with arthritis, his ankle injected with cortisone, he went nonetheless to a party. The next night, Norton broke his jaw. Afterward Ali forced himself to train a little harder, but it was the chore of his life. Only for the second Frazier fight and now for Foreman had he
been ready to submit to the depressing grind of trying to get into top condition. How many months had he labored at Deer Lake! And even ate fish for his arthritis and avoided meat. His hands healed. He could hit the heavy bag again. But then his energy diminished. After that long season of training, his energy still diminished! Something in the cosmic laws of violence must be carnal and command you to eat meat. So he had given up fish, resumed the flesh of animals, ate desserts, and his blood sugar came back. He might even be ready at last to enter the fight which would test the logic of his life. Now the postponement must have felt like an amputation. What a danger. Every cell in his body could be ready to mutiny.

He was, however, philosophical on this morning forty-eight hours later. “A real disappointment,” he said, “a real disappointment. But Allah has revealed to me that I must look on this as my
private
lesson in disappointment. This is my opportunity to learn how to convert the worst of disappointment into the greatest of strength. For the seed of triumph can be found in the
misery
of the disappointment. Allah has allowed me to see this postponement as a blessing,” said Ali, and finger in the air, added, “The greatest surprise is always to be found in one’s own heart.”

Only Ali could make this speech at nine in the morning and lead you to believe he believed it. “Nonetheless,” said Ali, “it is
hard
. I am tired of training. I want to eat all the apple cobbler and drink all the sweet cream.” Then — was it because they were standing through this speech? — the interviewer was now formally introduced to Ali’s Black associates as “a great writer. No’min is a man of wisdom,” said Ali. A serious hindrance to the interview. For after
such an introduction how can Ali not wish to read his poetry? In turn, a man of wisdom may wish to be courageous but obliged to face such verse, he will take up the cult of the craven. How No’min dodges Ali’s desire for a critique on the poems. Every literary principle is swallowed as Ali recites — it is equal in aesthetic sin to applauding the design of Nsele.

Once again, however, the poetry is not doggerel but derives from Ali’s mysterious source. From a sheaf of some hundred pages, each page so covered by his large handwriting that not fifty words make a page, Ali speaks of the heart. It is a curious poem. Again, it is difficult to decide how much of the language is his own, but it is certainly a poem on the nature of the heart. He declaims it like a sermon, sounding indeed like a bright thirteen-year-old admired for the ability to stand at the altar and speak as loud as a grown-up. The poem explores the categories of heart. There is the heart of iron which must be put into the fire before any change can be made in it, and the heart of gold which reflects the glory of the sun. As one’s attention begins to wander, so one only hears in passing of hearts of silver and copper and rock and the craven heart of wax which melts before heat (although it can be given any useful shape by superior intention). Then Ali speaks of “the heart of paper that flies like a kite in the wind. One can control the heart of paper as long as the string is strong enough to hold it. But when there is no wind, it drops.”

BOOK: The Fight
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