The Lunatic Express (9 page)

And then said, “People must live the way they must live. America must be a great country. I would like to see New York. My son is picking me up at the station in Dakar; someday I would like to take him there.”

As dusk fell we stood in the hallway leaning out of the window, while the train rattled slowly into Dakar. It was a world of sand and block houses and warrens clustered together, smoke and fires and drying laundry. We inched through it all at five miles an hour for almost two hours, and when the sun dropped it was all candlelight and kerosene lamps and market stalls pressed so close to the train we literally scraped against them. Oddly, I felt sad, sad that a grimy and uncomfortable journey was ending. Except that I’d become used to it, inured to it all, had made friends, connected to people, and it had ultimately become a pleasant sojourn through Africa that I was loath to end. But end it did. Somewhere in the suburbs Ly jumped off and asked me to pass him his bags through the window, and introduced me to his son. Half an hour later we stopped. No station—just sand and fires and smoke and cool Atlantic winds and thousands of dark figures pressing in on the train. I grabbed a taxi, and the minute the door closed I was enveloped in silence and stillness, and thought of all those people out there who would never get a break from it. And a few minutes later, in my hotel, I turned the shower as hot as it would go and stood under the water sudsing myself over and over again, watching a black stream of water swirl down the drain. It was a cheap hotel room—thirty dollars—but it seemed the most luxurious experience I could ever imagine. Yet a part of me wondered, imagining Ly in a noisy, cluttered home amid too many brothers and sisters and sons and uncles and aunts, who was happier.

I
’D TAKEN THE TRAIN
from Bamako not just because it was so famously bad, but because it brought me to Dakar, from which a ship named the MV
Le Joola
had sailed six years before—and sunk in the second worst maritime disaster in history. The
Aline Sitoe Diatta
, its replacement, was leaving at 2:00 p.m. the next day. Surprisingly for the Third World, things had in fact changed after the
Joola’s
sinking—you couldn’t kill 1,800 people even in Senegal without people noticing. At a barred window to a room built in the twenty-foot-high concrete wall of Dakar’s port, I bought a third-class ticket on the afternoon’s departure. The smell of the Atlantic Ocean, mixed with peanuts roasting on vendors’ carts, wafted by on a cool breeze. Reminders of the
Joola
were everywhere, I couldn’t help feeling: my fellow passengers and I were held safely in a departure lounge and taken in groups of twenty by bus the 150 feet across the concrete dock to the
Diatta
, and escorted up the ferry ramp to the ship. Which was not just brand new, but spotless. Ships, all ships, are in a daily struggle against rust and corrosion, and this one didn’t have a single flake of rust on her sides or rails or decks. The chaos I’d read about on the
Joola
was nowhere in sight.

I found my third-class seat—an airline-style reclining chair—three decks down, through a series of winding passageways all carpeted, and manned by stewards in white shirts and ties. Air conditioning made the room frigid, and a flat screen TV blared
“Al Hamdoulilaha”
—all praise be to God—over and over again, to revolving pictures of eagles in flight and snowy mountains and aqua icebergs and the Golden Gate Bridge at dawn. Men in
kufi
skull caps and flowing caftans, and women in turbans, plunked down and spread out, hoping to score a few extra seats. Two decks up, at the stern, I found a bar and white plastic benches overlooking the harbor, one of the busiest in the world. Tens of thousands of sacks of rice were piled on the docks, fifty feet high, and trucks were bringing more all the time; an army of men in robes and bare feet unloaded the trucks and stacked the pile higher. As the sun set, we edged away from the dock and steamed to sea. And, as everyone does on a ship, I leaned on the rail and watched its foamy wake as we rolled gently over the Atlantic.

“This ship, you know,” said a man next to me, “is the replacement for one that sank. And I have ridden that ship many times.” His name was Zaid Zopol. He was a wandering minstrel, a street musician who spent six months of the year in Barcelona and six months in Africa, and though he was originally from Patagonia, Chile, he could have been from anywhere. He had long black hair in a ponytail, topped with a black cap, and wore a short black beard beneath vaguely Asiatic eyes. He wore an orange T-shirt and was draped with beads of beans and wood and cowrie shells, loose, yellow cotton pantaloons, and he stood clutching the hand of his girlfriend, a six-foot-tall Senegalese beauty in blue jeans, named Animata. “She is very frightened,” he said. “She cannot swim and she remembers the
Joola.”

Zopol spoke Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Italian, German, and Polish. He had been a journalist for two years in Chile, “but I am free and in my country you couldn’t say what you wanted,” so he’d taken off. “It was in India that I was reborn. All my bags were stolen. I had nothing. Nothing. I was so poor. And India is even more fucked up than Africa.” He’d spent five years wandering overland from Cairo to Cape Town, and had tried to pass from south Sudan into Uganda to see the Blue Nile. “But the border guards had never heard of Chile. They said it didn’t exist, so they kept me in a room for three days.” In Dakar he had met Animata. “She was eighteen, a kid. I talked and talked to her for months. Just talking. I didn’t touch her for years. It was slow, so slow. But I love her so much, so deeply.” Now he divided his time between Barcelona and Dakar, and the two of them were taking the ferry to Ziguinchor and then going to the beaches along the coast.

“That ship, the
Joola
, was awful,” he said. “It was always so crowded. But she is so scared; she is stubborn and she won’t listen to me. This ship is good, safe, but she can barely breathe!” It was a weird sensation to be, once again, traveling on the replacement of the very same conveyance that had once been a disaster. The now dark, gently rolling Atlantic waves, the lights of the ship and the stars overhead and the fresh, humid air—they were the same ones the passengers had experienced on the
Joola
, only six years ago. A hair’s breadth, it seemed, was all that separated us. While I knew the basic story of the
Joola
, I didn’t yet know it intimately. I had the name and telephone number of a man in charge of the organization of survivors, in Ziguinchor, and I asked Zaid if he could help me find him and translate for me. My French was passable, barely, but not nearly good enough for such a nuanced task.

“I will buy you dinner,” I said, “if you’ll help me.”

“Deal,” Zaid said, sticking out his hand. The
Diatta
’s dining room was carpeted in red, with white linen tablecloths and waiters in ties and wine glasses on the table. Animata wouldn’t eat, though; she sat clutching Zaid’s hand, and every few minutes had to go outside to puke. The
Diatta
was hardly moving; it was seasickness as an expression of fear. Oddly, my cell phone was working, and when Zaid dialed Moosa Sissako, he answered. They spoke in fast French, and then Zaid handed me the phone. “Just tell him again who you are and what you want. I told him, but he doesn’t believe me; he thinks you are in the U.S.A. and he wants to understand that you are next to me. He speaks maybe a little English.”

I took the phone, said hello, and said I was hoping to talk to a survivor from the
Joola
. Did he know any? Could he find one for me to talk to?

“Yes,” he said, “I can find one for you. You must call me tomorrow afternoon.”

I tossed and turned in the night, freezing, squished in my seat, feeling that I might be better off, safer, if I wasn’t so far down below. But the benches on deck were sopping with dew, so I stayed put. And in the morning we zigzagged through a narrow channel into the Casamance River, passed Karabane Island, and arrived in Ziguinchor around noon. It was steaming, oppressively hot. Dusty. A garden had been built on the shore as a memorial to the victims of the
Joola;
its gate, under a green arch, was locked, though, and it was overgrown, the concrete paths choked with weeds, the benches broken, the fountain empty. Zaid called Moossa, and we followed his directions, walking through the dirt to the back end of town, past donkey carts and piles of dust and litter. Finally we ended up at a concrete office building that seemed to be falling down. Some of its windows had no glass; the front door hinges were broken, the plaster ceiling inside was crumbling and hanging and covered with black mold.

“Wait here,” a group of men said, and soon a tall man in a pink dress shirt and blue jeans arrived, carrying a notebook. “I’m Moussa,” he said. “Come.” We entered a closed office, piled with stacks of papers and file folders, its air conditioner humming, a man thumbing through piles of receipts and tapping at an adding machine. There was a knock at the door, and a survivor of the
Joola
named Pierre Colly came in. He was twenty-four, dark-skinned, sturdy, with an egg-shaped head and a white and blue striped polo shirt. I asked him to tell me about his trip on the
Joola
.

He looked down at the floor. Said nothing. Looked at us, and then at Moussa, who nodded. Colly started talking.

Six years earlier, on September 26, 2002, a day just like this one, he’d walked through Ziguinchor. It was painfully hot and humid. Chickens pecked in the dirt. Goats tethered to sticks nosed through piles of garbage. Under a hazy sky and a punishing sun, Ziguinchor had a forgotten, end-of-the-earth feeling—a place of unpaved lanes and palm trees covered with dust. Crumbling two-story stucco buildings with tile roofs and narrow balconies fronted the baking streets, a legacy of the town’s colonial Portuguese rulers. Lethargic donkeys pulled two-wheeled wooden carts, ignoring their driver’s cracking whips; the snapping seemed more habitual than insistent. He was nineteen, happy, privileged to be heading to Dakar that afternoon for another year of school with his older brother. Even better, this year they were taking the ferry up the coast, instead of making the punishing fifteen-hour overland journey packed in a battered Peugeot taxi. That trip could be harrowing: the taxis were old, crowded, and stifling, the roads unpaved and rough. And the drive required traversing the narrow country of Gambia, a gantlet of border guards and corrupt police and soldiers manning roadblocks, who routinely exacted bribes. Everyone wanted to take the ferry; Colly had spent three days fighting lines and cajoling at the ticket window. But finally he had them: two third-class seats on the
Joola
.

He and his brother kicked through the dirt streets toward the wharf on the Casamance River, past market stalls overflowing with blue jeans and T-shirts and CDs and padlocks and enamel bowls. Near the river the smell of fish, glistening on ice under the sun, mixed with the scents of smoke and overripe fruit. Beyond the gates of the ferry terminal floated the
Joola
. She was made of steel, built in Germany, 260 feet long and, for Africa, still newborn—only twelve years old—with a high, sharp bow and modern lines. There, Colly and his brother found chaos. The
Joola
had a rated capacity of 580 passengers, but thousands of people were crowding the concrete pier trying to get on the ship; among them were some 400 students heading back to the capital for the start of the new school year.

Colly and his brother grabbed a sandwich and walked up the ferry’s ramp at the stern. On deck, a rumor buzzed through the ship: a fisherman in a pirogue had bumped into the
Joola’s
bow, fallen overboard, and drowned. Sudden deaths are taken as omens in Africa; Colly had a funny feeling. He had never been on a big ship before, and as the
Joola
swung away from the paved mole and edged into the harbor, he leaned on the rail feeling the thrum of the engines under his feet, feeling excited and nervous.

For two hours the
Joola
plowed slowly up the ever-widening river toward the Atlantic, sliding past traditional Diola fishing villages on the beach, each a collection of thatched huts around a large, cylindrical central hall. Porpoises played in the ship’s white, foamy wake, diving and arcing over the waves. Just a mile shy of the Atlantic lay Karabane. The island wasn’t an official port of call, but the ferry always stopped there. When the
Joola
motored into the harbor, Colly watched as pirogues swept out, laden with mangoes and coconuts for the market in Dakar, and hundreds of people fought to board. The
Joola
listed so far to starboard that the doors on the lower side couldn’t be opened, and the surging crowds clambered up the port gunwales into the ship. Some, Colly saw, couldn’t make the climb and gave up. As the sun set, the
Joola
zigzagged through the twisting shallows and channels and swung north, up Senegal’s Atlantic coast, carrying 1,046 officially ticketed passengers. Later counts would show that at least another 717 had either bribed soldiers for passage or simply snuck on board.

At 10:00 p.m. the Joola radioed its office in Dakar. Seas were calm; all was normal. Passengers were drinking and dancing in the bar on the
Joola
’s top deck, and Colly and his brother were there. On ships you feel removed from the world. Time stops in a way it never quite does onshore. You relax; you have nowhere to go. A feeling of freedom sets in. A Senegalese musician played and sang, but there were so many people, the bar so crowded, Colly felt overwhelmed. He and his brother bought more sandwiches at the snack bar and went out on deck, gazing at the foamy wake in the darkness. “This makes me think of the
Titanic
!” Colly joked. “Can you imagine that happening to us now?” They laughed, shook their heads. Colly mentioned the
Titanic
because, deep down, he felt that tinge of anxiety we all feel on every ship passage, on every airplane flight. Who hasn’t walked down the Jetway and wondered if this flight will be his last? Who hasn’t boarded a ship and thought of the
Titanic
?