O, Africa! Page 13

  “Do you ever wonder what it’d be like if everything were taken away?” Micah asks. “Money, family, love, the striving, the wanting, the things? All of it?”

  “You’re forgetting”—Izzy, digging his nails into cool grains of earth—“I don’t have all the things you do, Micah.”

  “Yes, that’s right.” Rising, smoothing dust from his pants, and melding into the night’s thick pudding. “You’ve been more successful at leading a life without complication.”

  ONE

  After rising early, eating a simple meal of porridge and juice, and wishing the Yedig farewell, the members of the company march back to the vehicles, reload their supplies, and begin the journey farther north, over calcareous white stone and great rectangles of sunlight, jungle greenery bristling in the distance as fine as fur. Mtabi was expert at discerning where they were and where they were headed, based solely on the direction of animal footprints, the position of the baking sun, and his uncanny reading of radiant objects and color.

  While the light was extraordinary—reminiscent of the greatest red and yellow ecstasies of Manet, Monet, and Matisse—Izzy recognized that the extreme dryness and heat were dangerous for the film and feared that their supply of stock would combust in its aluminum cans. During the drive he occupied dull hours cleaning his camera with an air gun and a soft camel-hair brush, trying out various hypotheses of how best to preserve the footage once they’d set up camp.

  “Reminds me of cornfields,” Till says after a four- or five-hour stretch of undifferentiated flatlands, “without the corn.”

  “No more driving today,” Mtabi calls from the lead car. “We leave the vehicles in Bundini, walk to Malwiki. A word of warning: Our laborer friends will likely have treated themselves to a small gratuity.”

  After killing the car engines, the men push the two Citroëns a few hundred more yards, cover them with tarp, and leave them in storage outside the grass hut of a friend of Mtabi’s who had received the balance of their equipment and provisions the day before. Inside the hut the brothers find much of the company’s canned food and costumes stolen. The bulk of the film equipment, however, though clearly having been sifted through, remains more or less intact. The crew then assembles the wheeled crates and carts into a kind of caravan held together by straps and begins the arduous work of hauling the heavy equipment on foot, Spiro out front, stripped to the waist, a belt gripped between his teeth, like an Eskimo dog pulling a sled.

  They come upon the Malwiki three hours later. On the outskirts of the village, the tribespeople are engaged in a great festival of warriors. Rather than interrupt the ceremony, the company decide to remain hidden behind a large tree several hundred yards away. There is a group of perhaps twenty grown men, several of whom are covered in a kind of ash-white paint, forming a wide circle. Musicians stand at readiness, fingers pressed to strings, mouths fixed to instruments. There is complicated drumming, and, viewed through the camera scope, a xylophone made of animal bones. The men begin stamping along with the drumbeat, and one village elder steps forward and begins dancing. Moving nimbly, he keeps his torso stationary while arms, head, and legs dart this way and that. Other warriors join him. The dance takes the form of a succession of attacks and retreats, spears flashing through thick clouds of dust toward the center of the ring, with fluttering robes, animal skins, and outlandish feathered wigs creating a spectacle unmatched by anything invented in Hollywood. There are bare-breasted women dressed in fantastic skirts of colored glass beads and younger girls whose small, firm breasts remain immobile as they dance, even when their movements grow increasingly provocative and wild.

  “Eyes, you getting this?” asks Micah, enraptured.

  “All of it,” Izzy answers, screwing a telephoto lens onto the Leica. “Mtabi, what can you tell us about what’s going on?”

  “Rain dance,” the guide answers, kneeling to the ground and coming up with a handful of parched earth. “Drought.”

  “Lookit,” Early says, spotting some felled cattle just off the center of activity, rib cages visible as fork tines through thin layers of fat, muscle, and skin.

  “Conditions not look good,” Mtabi tut-tuts as the dancing grows more unruly and desperate. At the conclusion of the dance, the village elder points at one of the men, the tallest and most muscular of the warriors, and indicates with a bangled hand the mountain range beyond the tree where the company is hidden. The warrior nods, accepting this dangerous commission, and begins walking directly toward the crew’s hiding place, spear held as erect as a radio antenna.

  “Eh, you will allow me, please,” Mtabi whispers to Micah, “to do the talking.” Taking a deep breath, the guide steps from behind the tree and greets the tribesman as casually as if he’s just run into a neighbor on the sidewalk, trying to ignore the business end of the spear pointed at his groin. Mtabi speaks, faster and in coarser tones than he’d used with the Yedig, while the tribesman frowns through the conversation, pointing with the spear for emphasis. The commotion draws the attention of the dancers many yards away. The drumming slows and comes to a halt, as one, then another, then the entire group of village members crane their necks to see what’s happening.

  “We’ve been found,” says Early.

  “What we?” says Spiro, mapping escape routes, committing to one, and shimmying up a tree trunk.

  The entire congregation, forty or fifty of them, converge upon Mtabi, spearheads glinting in the sun. The guide’s speech becomes more rapid and desperate—the pleading tones of a crumb-covered kid discovered next to a toppled cookie jar. Micah, Izzy, Early, Castor, and Till emerge from behind the tree, hands raised, palms up, a clumsy gang in a heist gone wrong.

  “Mtabi, explain!” Micah orders as a spear inches closer. “Talk to them!”

  “Just a moment please, to formulate the proper response.”

  “Words,” says Till, who has said so little since they’d first arrived, rendering a dismissive single-syllable verdict against everything that threatens his world-conquering fame. In his white safari suit and shiny desert boots, the silent-movie star looks like a specter, a dignitary from beyond the clouds. The translator turns to Till at once, exclaiming that near-universal word of negation, “No, no, no, no! No, sir! No, no, no, please, sir, allow me first to introduce!”

  But it is too late, and a spear is brought to the neck of the sixth-best-paid actor in Hollywood. The warrior, hair shorn in a decorative pattern and trunk covered in that strange ash-white stuff, lowers his weapon, leans in with suspicious eyes, and inhales the air surrounding the visitor. He sniffs Till’s neck, then pulls back, sniffs a shoulder, then pulls away, reaches for the man’s hand and sniffs that, too, continuing to circle him, inhaling the foreign body and frowning the entire time, jerking himself away from the actor like he’s a hot stone. Till, skin papery thin and patchy in the unrelenting sunshine, licks parched lips. He reaches into his jacket and removes a red handkerchief, holding it halfway out of his breast pocket for effect. The color delights the young girls in the circle, as most of their beaded dresses are a similarly sanguine shade. Sensing a softening in the crowd, Till removes it to its full length.

  “Christ on a bike,” Micah mutters, “he’s doing a magic trick.”

  Till brings the red kerchief to his forehead, dabbing here and there at perspiration. He continues pulling it from his pocket until a yellow kerchief, tied to the first, announces its arrival. Feigning surprise at this improbability, Till gives another tug. A green kerchief tied to the yellow, then a purple after that, then blue, an endless stream of color and fabric, which he yanks from his pocket hand over hand over hand, an entire rainbow-colored bolt of fabric emerging from his quickly deflating jacket. One of the girls emits a shriek of laughter from the back of her throat, a high, trilling la-la-la-la-la-la sound that could be interpreted as a signal of either horror or approval.

  Till reaches for the warrior’s spear. At first the tribesman withdraws, but then—with twenty or more spearheads pointed in the dir
ection of the star’s jugular—through a gentle laying on of the hands Till is able to persuade the warrior to allow him to make an inspection. Once in possession of the spear, which is perhaps four feet in length, Till considers what to do with the prop. Using the weapon as a baton, he begins playing parade bandleader, twirling it in front of him, behind, tossing it free in the air, windmill style, catching the stick and landing on one knee.

  “Tough crowd.” Till sighs at the lack of response.

  “Mtabi, explain to them please that we’re artists,” Micah says, “here at the pleasure of the king, that sort of thing.”

  “Malwiki want to wrestle,” Mtabi translates. “When strangers arrive, before they meet the king, Malwiki determines character through sport.”

  “I’ll wrestle the bloody savages,” calls Spiro from above, springing out of the tree like a squirrel and revealing himself in all his bare-chested glory. “Lemme at ’em!”

  At the sight of the midget—twin cobra tattoos slinking across his back, tracing the blades of his shoulders, and meeting at the base of his neck—the village children erupt in screams, running around in circles with arms flapping like chickens. Mtabi quickly explains that Spiro is no underworld demon and that his bodily decorations are the rough equivalent of Malwiki cicatrix patterns.

  Held at spearpoint, the company and its equipment are brought to the center of the village—a far bigger and more complex arrangement than that of the Yedig, with large retaining walls, a series of wells, perhaps seventy or eighty cinnamon-colored thatched huts, two or three granaries, and several more complicated linked edifices farther away. The ash-covered warrior—whose name is Yani and whom the company, even terror-stricken, recognize as a model of human perfection—stares in bewilderment at Spiro.

  “Let the bastard know,” says the enraged midget, “that Queensberry rules most definitely do not apply.”

  “No translation for that in Malwiki.”

  “Keep things copacetic, will ya,” Castor says. “We’ve got to gain their trust.”

  “Eh, Izzy,” says Micah, recalling from Spiro’s résumé a three-year stint with Sam Spectacular’s Magic World of Midget Wrestling, “I think the time to summon the movie camera is upon us.”

  Lifting the lid of the brass-handled trunk, the cameraman feels like a priest in biblical times entrusted with safeguarding the Ark of the Covenant, the device in its sarcophagus a cool and indifferent God, happy to wait things out a millennium or two. Mtabi explains that Yani, who is now waving a flag around the wrestling circle, is one of the best wrestlers in the tribe, flag holder being an honored position. A village elder intones an incantation and sprinkles ash onto the fighter, who moves about calcimined in his coat of chalk, peculiarities of light making him appear as white as a wedding sheet.

  “He looks to be a fighter of great competence,” Mtabi warns, noting around the warrior’s waist a belt made from goatskin tails. “A man of many feathers.”

  “Feathers?!” Spiro says, bouncing on the balls of his feet, fists flying before his face, fastening his gaze on Yani, taking the measure of the man. “He’s nothing but a peacock!”

  Two pubescent girls trace on the ground a large circle of chalk while others begin stamping their feet and uttering syncopated cries. Yani spits on the ground, claps his hands together three times, sending plumes of powder high up into the pungent day, and positions himself in a squatting stance, while Spiro springs about, jerking his neck from side to side, working out knots of tension and bad vibes. The village elder blows into long antlers—five low shofar blasts—and the match begins.

  “Eyes, how’re things looking over there?”

  “Working as fast as I can,” Izzy answers, unzipping a lightproof black changing bag, steadying the portable darkroom flat on his lap, and bringing inside the camera and a sealed film can. He pries open the tin disk and feels for the start of the filmstrip like peeling a roll of masking tape. Finding it, he opens the film chamber’s door, snaps the supply reel into place, and seats the magazine. Then he threads the crinkly stuff between the film-gate aperture and pressure plates, wraps it around the sprocket wheel, slots it into a notch in the take-up reel, winds things tight, shuts and locks the chamber door, and lifts the camera from the bag. “Got it. Early, tripod.” Wooden legs are brought out and umbrellaed open, camera screwed atop stand, eye pressed to optic, hand clamped to crank, and the shutter begins flicking open and closed sixteen to eighteen frames per second, just as the wrestling match begins.

  “Dwarf!” Micah warns from the sidelines as Spiro stays true to his word as a gifted dirty fighter. Feet are stomped upon, hands are bitten, eyes are gouged, hair is pulled, and delivered above and below the belt are a series of titty twisters and crotch punches. “Play nice!”

  Yani protects himself by making full use of his height advantage, using his long limbs to leap over the diminutive technician, eluding bull-like charges with fast feet and in one instance, if midday vision wasn’t fooling them, palming the midget in one hand and spinning him like a basketball.

  Izzy lifts the apparatus, moves a few yards closer, jams the insectoid legs into the wrestling circle’s perimeter, and wheels the turret around to the wide-angle lens. In the private movie temple of his mind, the place he frequented most often, Izzy can imagine these mad visions projected in black and white on Broadway screens, the events unfolding before him already receding into the past.

  “Henry,” Micah says to Till, “whenever you’re ready to join the action.”

  “Oh, no, sir!” begs Mtabi. “Wrestling sacred to the Malwiki. Must not be made into mockery.”

  “Fair enough,” says Micah as Spiro is tossed out of the ring. “Thanks for keeping things kosher on the cultural front.”

  Yani circles the ring, working out kinks in his shoulders and thighs, taking inventory of his injuries, making a careful study of his pint-size opponent. His expression is relaxed, superior, languid. Looking at the wrestler’s musculature, Izzy gains a better understanding of how bodies work, how tissue connects to bone, limbs to trunk, the whole marionette business.

  Kicking up dust with hooflike feet, his face contorted in expressions of midget rage and indignation, Spiro charges headfirst for the African. Instead of dodging, Yani squats and takes up the position of a baseball catcher, aiming to cup Spiro’s head with both hands, flip him over, and bring him down hard on his back. Anticipating this maneuver, Spiro uses the wrestler’s limbs as a stepladder to climb up his forearms, bound off his biceps, scale his shoulders, and slide down his back. Getting between the warrior’s knees, Spiro grips his ankles and brings the champion down flat on his face. Spiro then rolls onto his opponent’s back, straddles the powerful spine, grabs both of the man’s ears, and brings him facedown into the sand. Shocked and gagging on dry earth, Yani is incapable of thrusting Spiro off his posterior, and the latter begins mashing the champion’s face into the earth. After a while of this, a village elder enters the ring to signal that the match is over. Spiro dismounts and begins jumping up and down, an openmouthed dwarf, the whites of his teeth as prominent as that of his eyes, chanting, “I am the greatest! I am the greatest!”

  “He calls it official—little fellow has defeated Yani,” Mtabi translates, “a champion not beaten in six harvests.”

  “The greatest,” Spiro taunts, “of all time!”

  “Not since Tunney and Dempsey have I seen such a display,” says Castor.

  “Even more significant than the result, sir,” Mtabi explains. “The king confers upon the new wrestling victor a private meeting and the granting of a wish.”

  Yani rises dustily. He looks at Spiro with neither bitterness nor resentment but admiringly, a smile whistling across his face like a teakettle. One of the girls brings Yani his spear, which he presents to Spiro, laughing and smiling the whole time. Then Yani speaks.

  “He says you must be members of a great warrior tribe,” Mtabi relates, “from lands beyond the mountains.”

  “Tell them we’re fr
om America,” Micah says, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, “great land from the West. Now, enough pussyfooting around. Take us to their king.”

  TWO

  They are brought to the far end of the village, past the lawapa, or village center, which opens up like a dam once they have passed the square to encompass dozens more huts than they’d originally spotted. Leading them is Talli, a long-faced counselor who oversees the tribe’s trading with foreign parties and the distribution of goods to the village. Dressed in flowing wizard’s robes, Talli possesses the close-set, unblinking eyes and pursed lips of an inquisitive goldfish. During the walk Mtabi warns that the counselor, like the king, has been educated abroad and is a fluent speaker of English.

  Walking through the greater village, Izzy appreciates the screwy logic of nature—how the relentless repetition of forms allows the alien to rhyme with the familiar. Just days before leaving for the trip, Izzy had come across an uprooted downtown city street, its surface made rubble, construction workers and electricians having excavated and exposed networks of pipes and wires like surgeons working on a varicose leg. Izzy stood for a moment peering into the pit, experiencing anew the recognition of how it’s the cording together of sewage, electricity, and subway systems that make the city run, a complicity of inner workings that mimics the body’s own circulatory, nervous, and respiratory systems. Systems within systems—the city resembling the body, the body resembling the city.

  And so it is here. Taking in the village, Izzy spots a series of shapes and structures that wouldn’t be out of place along a row of Lower East Side tenements. Sheets of fabric hanging from clotheslines drying in the sun. Bison horns like bicycle handlebars parked outside huts. Kids playing some ancient version of stickball. Giant flower buds popped open like umbrellas in a thunderstorm. Recognizing the familiar so far from home, Izzy wonders whether things precede forms or forms precede things, whether he exists in a world of things or has finally been delivered to a world beyond them. After a few minutes of walking, Talli leads them through a gate to an enclosed compound and into a large, dark building adjoined by smaller ones stacked together like dominoes.