What Am I Doing Here? (3 page)

A corporal came in and searched me. He was small, wiry, angular, and his cheekbones shone. He took my watch, wallet, passport and notebook.

‘Mercenary!' he said, pointing to the patch-pocket on the leg of my khaki trousers. His gums were spongy and his breath was foul.

‘No,' I said, submissively. ‘I'm a tourist.'

‘Mercenary!' he shrieked, and slapped my face — not hard, but hard enough to hurt.

He held up my fountain-pen. ‘What?'

‘A pen,' I said.

‘What for?'

‘To write with.'

‘A gun?'

‘Not a gun.'

‘Yes, a gun!'

I sat on a bench, staring at the skinny boy who continued to stare at his toes. The corporal sat cross-legged in the doorway with his sub-machine-gun trained on me. Outside in the yard, two sergeants were distributing rifles, and a truck was loading with troops. The troops sat down with the barrels sticking up from their crotches. The colonel came out of his office and took the salute. The truck lurched off, and he walked over, lumpily, towards the guardroom.

The corporal snapped to attention, and pointed to me. ‘Mercenary, Comrade Colonel!'

‘From today,' said the colonel, ‘there are no more comrades in our country.'

‘Yes, Comrade Colonel.' the man nodded; but checked himself and added, ‘Yes, my Colonel.'

The colonel waved him aside and surveyed me gloomily. He wore an exquisitely-pressed pair of paratrooper fatigues, a red star on his cap, and another red star in his lapel. A roll of fat stood out around the back of his neck, his thick lips drooped at the comers. He looked, I thought, so like a sad hippopotamus. I told myself I mustn't think he looks like a sad hippopotamus. Whatever happens, he mustn't think I think he looks like a sad hippopotamus.

‘Ah, monsieur!' he said, in a quiet dispirited voice. ‘What are you doing in this poor country of ours?'

‘I came here as a tourist.'

‘You are English?'

‘Yes.'

‘But you speak an excellent French.'

‘Passable,' I said.

‘With a Parisian accent I should have said.'

‘I have lived in Paris.'

‘I, also, have visited Paris. A wonderful city!'

‘The most wonderful city.'

‘But you have mistimed your visit to Benin.'

‘Yes,' I faltered. ‘I seem to have run into trouble.'

‘You have been here before?'

‘Once,' I said. ‘Five years ago.'

‘When Benin was Dahomey.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I used to think Benin was in Nigeria.'

‘Benin is in Nigeria and now we have it here.'

‘I think I understand.'

‘Calm yourself, monsieur.' His fingers reached to unlock my handcuffs. ‘We are having another little change of politics. Nothing more! In these situations one must keep calm. You understand? Calm!'

Some boys had come through the barracks' gate and were creeping forward to peer at the prisoner. The colonel appeared in the doorway, and they scampered off.

‘Come,' he said. ‘You will be safer if you stay with me. Come, let us listen to the Head of State.'

We walked across the parade-ground to his office where he sat me in a chair and reached for a portable radio. Above his desk hung a photo of the Head of State, in a Fidel Castro cap. His cheeks were a basketwork of scarifications.

‘The Head of State', said the colonel, ‘is always speaking over the radio. We call it the
journal parlé.
It is a crime in this country
not
to listen to the
journal parlé
.'

He turned the knob. The military music came in crackling bursts.

The colonel laid his jowls on his hands and sighed, ‘The Sombas! The Sombas!'

The Sombas came from the far north-west of the country. They filed their teeth to points and once, not so long ago, were cannibals.

‘. . . lunched a vicious attack on our Presidential Palace

I glanced up again at the wall. The Head of State was a Somba – and the colonel was a Fon.

‘. . . the population is requested to arm itself with stones and knives to kill this crapulous . . . '

‘A recorded message,' said the colonel, and turned the volume down. ‘It was recorded yesterday.'

‘You mean . . . '

‘Calm yourself, monsieur. You do not understand. In this country one understands nothing.'

Certainly, as the morning wore on, the colonel understood less and less. He did not, for example, understand why, on the nine o'clock communique, the mercenaries had landed in a DC-8 jet, while at ten the plane had changed to a DC-7 turboprop. Around eleven the music cut off again and the Head of State announced a victory for the Government Forces. The enemy, he said, were retreating
en catastrophe
for the marshes of Ouidah.

‘There has been a mistake,' said the colonel, looking very shaken. ‘Excuse me, monsieur. I must leave you.'

He hesitated on the threshold and then stepped out into the sunlight. The hawks made swift spiralling shadows on the ground. I helped myself to a drink from his water-flask. The shooting sounded further off now, and the town was quieter. Ten minutes later, the corporal marched into the office. I put my hands above my head, and he escorted me back to the guardroom.

 

It was very hot. The skinny boy had been taken away, and on the bench at the back sat a Frenchman.

Outside, tied to the papaya, a springer spaniel was panting and straining at its leash. A pair of soldiers squatted on their hams and tried to dismantle the Frenchman's shotgun. A third soldier, rummaging in his game-bag, was laying out a few brace of partridge and a guinea-fowl.

‘Will you please give that dog some water?' the Frenchman asked.

‘Eh?' The corporal bared his gums.

‘The dog,' he pointed. ‘Water!'

‘No.'

‘What's going on?' I asked.

‘The monkeys are wrecking my gun and killing my dog.'

‘Out there, I mean.'

‘
Coup monté
.'

‘Which means?'

‘You hire a plane-load of mercenaries to shoot up the town. See who your friends are and who are your enemies. Shoot the enemies. Simple!'

‘Clever.'

‘Very.'

‘And us?'

‘They might need a corpse or two. As proof!'

‘Thank you,' I said.

‘I was joking.'

‘Thanks all the same.'

The Frenchman was a water-engineer. He worked up-country, on Artesian wells, and had come down to the capital on leave. He was a short, muscular man, tending to paunch, with cropped grey hair and a web of white laugh-lines over his leathery cheeks. He had dressed himself
en mercenaire
, in fake python-skin camouflage, to shoot a few game-birds in the forest on the outskirts of town.

‘What do you think of my costume?' he asked.

‘Suitable,' I said.

‘Thank you.'

The sun was vertical. The colour of the parade-ground had bleached to a pinkish orange, and the soldiers strutted back and forth in their own pools of shade. Along the wall the vultures flexed their wings.

‘Waiting,' joked the Frenchman.

‘Thank you.'

‘Don't mention it.'

Our view of the morning's entertainment was restricted by the width of the doorframe. We were, however, able to witness a group of soldiers treating their ex-colonel in a most shabby fashion. We wondered how he could still be alive as they dragged him out and bundled him into the back of a jeep. The corporal had taken the colonel's radio, and was cradling it on his knee. The Head of State was baying for blood — ‘
Mort aux mercenaires soit qu'ils sont noirs ou blancs
. . . ' The urchins, too, were back in force, jumping up and down, drawing their fingers across their throats and chanting in unison, ‘
Mort aux mercenaires!
. . .
Mort aux mercenaires!
. . . '

Around noon, the jeep came back. A lithe young woman jumped out and started screeching orders at an infantry platoon. She was wearing a mud-stained battledress. A nest of plaits curled, like snakes, from under her beret.

‘So,' said my companion. ‘The new colonel.'

‘An Amazon colonel,' I said.

‘I always said it,' he said. ‘Never trust a teenage Amazon colonel.'

He passed me a cigarette. There were two in the packet and I took one of them.

‘Thanks,' I said. ‘I don't smoke.'

He lit mine, and then his, and blew a smoke-ring at the rafters. The gecko on the wall hadn't budged.

‘My name's Jacques,' he said.

I told him my own name and he said, ‘I don't like the look of this.'

‘Nor I,' I said.

‘No,' he said. ‘There are no rules in this country.'

Nor were there any rules, none that one could think of, when the corporal came back from conferring with the Amazon and ordered us, also, to strip to our underpants. I hesitated. I was unsure whether I was wearing underpants. But a barrel in the small of my back convinced me, underpants or no, that my trousers would have to come down - only to find that I did, after all, have on a pair of pink and white boxer shorts from Brooks Brothers.

Jacques was wearing green string pants. We must have looked a pretty couple — my back welted all over with mosquito bites, he with his paunch flopping over the elastic — as the corporal marched us out, barefoot over the burning ground, and stood us, hands up, against the wall which the vultures had fouled with their ash-white, ammonia-smelling droppings.

‘
Merde!'
said Jacques. ‘Now what?'

What indeed? I was not frightened. I was tired and hot. My arms ached, my knees sagged, my tongue felt like leather, and my temples throbbed. But this was not frightening. It was too like a B-movie to be frightening. I began to count the flecks of millet-chaff embedded in the mud-plaster wall . . .

 

I remembered the morning, five years earlier, my first morning in Dahomey, under the tall trees in Parakou. I'd had a rough night, coming down from the desert in the back of a crowded truck, and at breakfast-time, at the café-routier, I'd asked the waiter what there was to see in town.

‘Patrice.'

‘Patrice?'

‘That's me,' he grinned. ‘And, monsieur, there are hundreds of other beautiful young girls and boys who walk, all the time, up and down the streets of Parakou.'

I remembered, too, the girl who sold pineapples at Dassa-Zoumbé station. It had been a stifling day, the train slow and the country burnt. I had been reading Gide's
Nourritures terrestres
and, as we drew into Dassa, had come to the line ‘
Ô cafés — où notre démence s'est continuée très avant dans la nuit
. . . ' No, I thought, this will never do, and looked out of the carriage window. A basket of pineapples had halted outside. The girl underneath the basket smiled and, when I gave her the Gide, gasped, lobbed all six pineapples into the carriage, and ran off to show her friends — who in turn came skipping down the tracks, clamouring, ‘A book, please? A book? A book!' So
out
went a dog-eared thriller and Saint-Exupéry's
Vol de nuit
, and
in
came the ‘Fruits of the Earth' — the real ones – pawpaws, guavas, more pineapples, a raunch of grilled swamp-rat, and a palm-leaf hat.

‘Those girls', I remember scribbling in my notebook, ‘are the ultimate products of the lycée system.'

 

And now what?

 

The Amazon was squawking at the platoon and we strained our ears for the click of safety catches.

‘I think they're playing games,' Jacques said, squinting sideways.

‘I should hope so,' I muttered. I liked Jacques. It was good, if one had to be here, to be here with him. He was an old Africa hand and had been through coups before.

‘That is,' he added glumly, ‘if they don't get drunk.'

‘Thank you,' I said, and looked over my shoulder at the drill-squad.

‘No look!' the corporal barked. He was standing beside us, his shirt-front open to the navel. Obviously, he was anxious to cut a fine figure.

‘Stick your belly-button in,' I muttered in English.

‘No speak!' he threatened.

‘I won't speak.' I held the words within my teeth. ‘But stay there. Don't leave me. I need you.'

Maddened by the heat and excitement, the crowds who had come to gawp were clamouring,
‘Mort aux mercenaires!
. . .
Mort aux mercenaires!'
and my mind went racing back over the horrors of Old Dahomey, before the French came. I thought, the slave-wars, the human sacrifices, the piles of broken skulls. I thought of Domingo's other uncle, ‘The Brazilian', who received us on his rocking-chair dressed in white ducks and a topee. ‘Yes,' he sighed, ‘the Dahomeans are a charming and intelligent people. Their only weakness is a certain nostalgia for taking heads.'

No. This was not my Africa. Not this rainy, rotten-fruit Africa. Not this Africa of blood and slaughter. The Africa I loved was the long undulating savannah country to the north, the ‘leopard-spotted land', where flat-topped acacias stretched as far as the eye could see, and there were black-and-white hornbills and tall red termitaries. For whenever I went back to that Africa, and saw a camel caravan, a view of white tents, or a single blue turban far off in the heat haze, I knew that, no matter what the Persians said, Paradise never was a garden but a waste of white thorns.