The Coup (14 page)

intrusion of blue black and white. The black lover would lift himself on an arm, the white beloved would lift her head, to recall him to their act, their intimacy, which had nothing to do with the tumult of which a fragment had poured past, and of which other fragments-the pulsing red lights of fire engines or of an ambulance-would in a minute follow. In this minute the frames of the prints, the mirrors, the wallpaper pattern in this room showed gray, gray on gray, the brightest gray the rectangles of the window-panes that sealed them off from the world outside, whose murderous confusions swept by like the giant wings of a snowstorm. Their love, their mingled moistures, their breathing was suspended while the sirens passed. were the police coming for him? He was aware that in some of these States skins of different colors rubbing was a crime. For his penis in her vagina there could be a rope around his neck. Nor did the Black Muslims condone copulating out of the faith, let alone with a blue-eyed she-devil. It was a conflict-making delight of his years here, being driven by Oscar X through the white man's fat landscape in a battered but capacious and powerful "49 Oldsmobile, while the radio poured forth Dinah Washington and Kay Starr, heading toward a temple of Islam in the slums of some Midwestern metropolis, where they might be frisked by grim Irish police or held up at knifepoint by unconverted juvenile delinquents of their own color. Dangers everywhere, slipping and sliding by. Felix had perceived through the shadows a stain of blood on the bedsheet. Indeed, she had felt different tonight, not her usual just-tight-enough lubricity, but her wetness somehow rougher than usual, clotted. Unclean. Involuntarily he had grimaced, and had been told, "You should thank God. Up to this morning I was afraid I was pregnant." "Wow," he said, Americanized. She wanted to squeeze even more intimacy out of the revelation, to win more praise, for a fear endured. "Is that all you can say? You know, it's a rotten thing, to be a woman. You can't run away from your body. And the worst thing-was "The worst thing, dear Candy?" "Never mind." "The worst thing was, you didn't want to be carrying a black baby?" "No, I'd rather like that, as a matter of fact." "Then what was this worst thing?" "I won't tell you." She left the bed to get a cigarette. In the room whose dimness seemed a cubic volume of smoke, her body, crossing to the bureau, was pale, loose, lithe. She struck a match. A red glow formed the center of her voice. "I wasn't sure who the father was." A police car bleated in the white night, more distantly. It did not take very many minutes of verbal struggle, as he remembered the incident, for him to elicit from her that the other possible father had been Craven. Sheba had been too stoned to feel much alarm during the raid. As the spanking, whining sound of rifle fire receded, and violent silhouettes ceased to be projected through the dim prism-shaped volume of the tent, she bit my shoulder to suggest that I could withdraw the protective mass of my body from on top of hers. She shook some of the sand from her elaborate coiffure of tiny braids pinned into parabolas, and to revive herself for the night's trek popped a kola nut. With slack-jawed rapture she chewed, dying the inside of her mouth a deeper shade of gray. Along with her supply of Liberian kola nuts she had a bundle of Ethiopian khat and, for back-up, some Iranian bhang. Her gentle spirit rarely descended to earth. Her robes hanging loose, her squat showed me between the parted roundnesses of the thighs her exquisite genitals, underparts profiled in two bulges, the cleft barely masked by the gauze of a thousand perfect circlets. Seeing me stare, Sheba laughed and, without abandoning the rapture of kola-chewing, urinated on the desert sand. In my madness of thirst, of love, I reached forward with cupped hands to rescue some of the liquid, though I knew from tales of other travellers that urine was as acid as lemon juice. It haunted my mouth for a burning hour. I went outside to discuss the raid. Sidi Mukhtar showed me the vodka bottles in the sun, their highlights hot as laser beams. I returned to the tent, where sweet Sheba, mellower, sang to the melancholy creak of her anzad: "Do it to me, baby, do it, do it. Take that cold knife from its sheath, stick it in me underneath, backwards, frontwards, down my throat, this trip has gone on too long." My responsive song, to which I kept time by tapping the pummel of my camel-saddle, concerned oranges, an orange imagined this time as shrivelled, and so infested by insects it hums like a spherical transistor radio, until its substance is consumed and the shell, brittle and stippled, shatters, like a clay myrrh-holder from ancient Meroe. Our fellows in the caravan, wearying of cursing the raiders and vowing highly anatomical revenge, gathered at the tent-flap, and tossed in to us fistfuls of obsolete coinage, cowrie shells and tiny mirrors, and pre-devaluation lu with its Swiss-tooled profile of King Edumu, his head as bodiless on these coins as it was in reality. The caravan drivers, porters, guards, navigators, blacksmiths, leather-workers, translators, accountants, and quality-controllers all lusted growlingly after my Sheba, who contrived while laying double- and triple-stopped fingerings upon the neck of the anzad simultaneously to expose one bare foot and brace-leted ankle. These men, their faces mere slivers of baked skin and decayed teeth showing through the folds of their galabiehs and keffiyehs, crowded too close, and, feeling challenged, I pushed one. He fell like a stick lightly stuck in the sand, and fainted; so weakened were we all by the hardships of the Balak. Then came at last the water bag, the swallowed streams of paradise, the rogue's lascivious nudge of my wife's pendulous breasts, the sunset prayers, the saddling up, the by now automatically deft repacking of our armful of effects into capacious khoorgs, the tying fast of the rolled tent-hides. Our camels suffered their cinched burdens with a thirupping of their lips and a batting of their Disneyesque eyelashes. From afar Sidi Mukhtar hallooed. The moon showed its silver crescent. The night's advance had begun. These details are not easy to reconstruct, as I write where I do, with its distractions of traffic, its ombrelles and promenading proteges, its tall drinks of orange Fanta and seltzer water braced with a squid-squirt of anisette. But in the listening half of my brain a certain jointed, clanking rhythm of our days remains, a succession of ordained small concussions, refastenings, bucklings, and halloos as they passed down the line, avowing our readiness to march, with certain death the penalty for falling out of our musical chain of snorting, swaying camels and cajoling, whirling guides. But O the desert stars! What propinquous glories! Tremulous globes overseeing our shadowy progress with their utter silence. More than chandeliers, chandeliers of chandeliers. Urn al-Nujum, the Mother of Stars, ran as a central vein, a luminous rift, within a sky, black as a jeweller's display velvet, that everywhere yielded, to the patient, astounded eye, more stars, so that the smallest interval between two luminaries was subdivided, and subdivided again, by the appearance of new points, leading awed scrutiny inward to a scale by which the blur in Andromeda became an oval immensity whose particle suns could be numbered. Under such a filigree our papery line of silhouettes passed, camel-bells softly chuckling, through the nocturnal escarpments and craters, wearily disturbing the undisturbed sand. Sheets of lava rose around us like apparitions, eruptions through a crystalline mantle whose splinters had lain for aeons where they fell. Abundant sandstone testified to a Paleozoic ocean; deeply cut dry canyons proved that once in some ghostly humid time great rivers had watered the Massif. Scaley defiles, of shale a-gleam as if wet, suddenly gave way to giddying views, immense gray bowls of emptiness sweeping to the next jagged, starlit range. What meant so much inhuman splendor? But when the earth is crushed to fine dust, and your Lord comes down with the angels in their ranks, and Hell is brought near-on that day man will remember his deeds. My life by those lunar perspectives became a focus of terror, an infinitely small point nevertheless enormously hollow, a precipitous intrusion of some substance totally alien and unwelcome, into these rocks, these fantastic orbs of fire, this treacherous ground of sand. I could not have withstood the solitude, the monotony, the huge idiocy of this barren earth, had not Sheba been by my side, sullen and warm. I loved in her what the others, the cruel illiterates of the desert, scented-her vacancy. Where another woman had an interior, a political space that sent its emissaries out to bargain for her body and her honor, Sheba had a space that asked no tending, that supported a nomadic traffic of music and drugs. Such a woman is an orphan of Allah, a sacred object. Sheba never questioned, never reflected. I said to her, "The stars. Are they not terrible?" "No. Why?" "So vast, so distant. Each is a sun, so distant that its light, travelling faster than the fastest jinni, takes years to reach our eyes." "Even if such a lie were true, how would it affect us?" "It means we are less than dust in the scheme of things." She shrugged. "What can be done, then?" "Nothing, but to pray that it not be so." "So that is why you pray." "For that, and to reassure the people of Kush." "But you do not believe?" "For a Muslim, unbelief is like a third eye. Impossible." We swayed in silence. Our fatigue was a tower to which each night added another tier. I said, "And do you know, there are laws all about us? Laws of energy and light, laws that set these rocks here, and determined their shape, and their slant. Once an ocean lay down many grains of sand; once the bodies of more small creatures than there are stars above us laid down their skeletons to form islands, great shoals, which volcanoes lifted up, and then the wind wore down again, and water that rained, and flowed, and vanished. Once all this was green, and men hunted elephants and antelope, and drew pictures of themselves on the rocks." "Show me such a picture." "They are hard to find. I have seen them in books." "Things can be made up and put into books. I want to see a picture on a rock." "I will hope to show you one. But what I am saying is more than that once men hunted and even fished here. I am saying that perhaps again this will be true, and we will be forgotten, all of us forgotten, of less account than the camels whose hides make up our tents. Past and future are immense around us, they are part of the laws I speak of, that are more exact than anything you know, they are like those rocks that when you split them come away exactly flat. Everything obeys these laws. Things grow by these laws, and things die by them. They are what make us die. We are caught inside them, like birds in a cage-no, like insects in a cage that is all bars, that has no space inside, like a piece of rotten wood, only not rotten but hard, harder than the hardest rock. And the rock, one single rock, stretches out to those stars, and beyond, for in truth they seem very close, and there is a blackness beyond, where those same laws continue, and continue to crush us, finer than the finest dust, finer than the antimony you use to make your eyelids gray. Help me, Sheba. I am sinking." "I do what I can. But you make what I do seem very little." "No, it is much." After a pause, while the feet of our steeds slithered on the cold sand, she asked me, "When do you think we will reach our destination?" "We will reach it," I told her, "when there is no farther to go." "And how will we know when that is?" "The drought," I told her, "will have ended." In the home of Candace's parents, where she took me late in our freshman year, the white woodwork was like a cage also. I marvelled at the tightness, the finish. Her father came toward me from rooms away, a big man with Candy's beryl eyes and gray hair so thin and light it wandered across his skull as he gestured. I had the impression that his bigness was composed of many soft places, bubbles in his flesh where alcohol had fermented and expanded; he shook my hand with too much force, overcarrying. "So you're the young man my daughter has been raving about," he said. Raving? I looked at Candy's pointed polite face, whose straight fine nose had come from her mother; I had just met the lady, who seemed afraid. Maybe the something bloated and patchy about the Dad was fear too. We were all afraid. I was alarmed, as the house opened to me-its woodwork interlocked like the lattice of an elaborate trap; its pale, splashy, furtively scintillating wallpaper; its deep, fruit-colored, step-squelching carpets; its astonishing living-room, long and white, two white sofas flanking a white marble coffee table bearing porcelain ashtrays and a set of brass scales holding white lilies whose never-wilt lustre was too good to be true. And what were these little saucers, with tiny straight sides and bottoms of cork, scattered everywhere, on broad sofa arms and circular end tables, as if some giant had bestowed on the room the largesse of his intricate, oversize coinage? "Daddy, I wouldn't say "raving," was Candy corrected, embarrassed, her face, that I now perceived as a clash of genes, blushing. "Rave is what she does, Mr.- I don't want to mispronounce." "Call me Felix," I said, Anglicizing the every. I wondered if I should sit, and would the sofa swallow me like some clothy crocodile? Often in America, in drugstores and traffic jams, I had the sensation of being within a bright, voracious, many-toothed maw. The Cunninghams' living-room had puddles of cosmetic odor here and there. As in the old cinema palace on Commerce Street, a heroic stagnation had overtaken decor. Seating myself on the edge of the bottomlessly spongy sofa, I touched the brass scales and, sure enough, discovered a refusal to tip. Once an honest artifact, it had been polished, welded, and loaded with plastic lilies. Fixed forever, like that strange Christian heaven, where nothing happened, not even the courtship of houris. "Asseyez-vous" Mrs. Cunningham had suggested, with a smile touchingly like her daughter's, only somehow uneven, as if Candy's quick smile had been crumpled up and then retrieved and smoothed and pasted over a basic frown. But when I responded, in textbook French, complimenting my hostess on the beauty of her room and its florid and cinematic appointments, her visage went as blank as that of the enamelled shepherdess on the mantel, frozen in a pose of alert unheeding vis-a-vis the fluting shepherd in the exactly corresponding mantel position. Between them stood an impressive clock with a pendulum of mercury rods, and