reports of insurgencies in the interior, my imagination took fire. But my thoughts turned constantly to home. When the rains came, I retreated to the Palace Hotel overlooking the Congo River and wrote a novel as much to prove myself capable of the sustained and lonely labor demanded of any writer as to unburden myself of recurring dreams of my grandparents’ early married life after their migration from England to New Zealand in 1906. I imagined that in abandoning what they called “the old country,” they were oppressed by nostalgia as well as unsettled by the backwater town in which they now had to make their home. In their separation trauma I wrote about my own, for was I not both enthralled and intimidated by the vast hinterland out of which the great river flowed? And were not my dreams of New Zealand daily reminders of how deeply I resisted the ordeal of passing from the life I had known into this new but unknown life that I associated with Africa? Day after day I wrote in my hotel room as islands of hyacinth slipped past in the swift -flowing river and refugees gathered at a landing stage shaded by mango trees, waiting for the rusty ferry that would return them, by order of the Congolese government, to Brazzaville, whose white colonial buildings were barely discernible through the haze.
When you are starting out as a writer, you tend to write about the inner turmoil and difficulty of expressing yourself, even when appearing to be writing on some entirely objective topic. This was certainly true of my early piece called The Livingstone Falls that conjures the thunderous and unnavigable stretch of water between the Stanley Pool and the lower reaches of the Congo.
I cross a fragile and swaying bridge between two islands, buffeted by spray. I greet two women who are gathering driftwood, their babies asleep on their backs, their voices drowned by the noise of the river. I find myself in a disused quarry and wonder if I have stumbled on that “vast artificial hole” that Conrad describes in Heart of Darkness,5 whose purpose was “impossible to divine,” but whose remorseless excavation had cost the lives of countless Congolese, chained together in forced labor and in death. A dead Mamba lies on the trail, an embodiment of that old injustice. I drive back to the city and a café on the Boulevard du Trente Juin. Peddlers show me ivory ornaments, carved tusks from elephants slaughtered near Lac Leopold II, bone ornaments blackened with shoe polish, hand-painted postcards, black market cheese, canned fruit, and cigarettes.
One weekend, a Dutch friend and amateur lepidopterist asked me to accompany him to Pic Mensi, a forested uplands in the Bas-Congo. Hank laid out his baits in a forest clearing—fermented mangoes mixed with his own feces. We watched and waited as rare blues, every bit as brilliant as the ultramarine windows in Chartres Cathedral, fluttered and drift ed through shafts of sunlight before settling nervously to feed.
Hank netted several, and showed me how to handle them, gently squeezing the life out of their bodies before transferring them to a collection box. Each one, he explained, was worth a small fortune on the European market. But this was not why he collected them. He was enthralled by their beauty and fascinated that such beauty had evolved simply to attract a mate, so that in a lifetime of no more than a few days, these creatures were driven by little else than the exigencies of reproduction. Their own life had no other meaning than to create another life, to perpetuate their kind.
We camped that evening on a grassy plain. As night fell, a young man passed up the track, holding a mbira on his head and playing a melody that seemed to mingle with the stars. A warm wind murmured in the long grass.
In the middle of the night I woke to hear an animal splashing across a stream, crashing into the forest beyond. Unable to sleep, I walked out into the grassland and lay on my back, looking up at the stars. I was ecstatically happy. And yet, when I contemplated the conditions that had made that moment possible (Hank’s passion for butterflies, the fruit pulp and fecal matter that he carefully prepared to capture them) and the sheer contingency of things (the swallowtails that survived his net because they were far more common than the brilliant blues, the lives of insects, sustained only for as long as it took to breed, and the countless ants gutting the fallen bodies, tearing the veiled wings, filing away with them along the forest trail), all this conspired to suggest that my happiness had been won at someone else’s expense, and that simply by being in the Congo I was participating in, and perhaps perpetuating, a history of terrible wrongs. And I remember the longing I felt, as we drove past the village of Bibwe and onto the main road to Léopoldville—to live in such a village, to get to know its people, to give up trying to change the Congo for the better and suffer the transfiguration of myself.
Not long after my excursion to Pic Mensi, a dusk to dawn curfew was imposed in Léopoldville. At ONUC6 headquarters, several “nonessential” personnel packed up and flew back to Geneva or New York. Travel outside the city was banned. Some of the Haitian girls at Le Royal responded to the curfew by throwing all-night parties. It was fun for a while. A welcome distraction. I would drive my jeep home at dawn. Women would be walking along the side of the road with basins of manioc, firewood lashed with lianas, and bundles of clothing balanced on their heads. I felt like driving out of the city and into the interior, as far as I could go.
I had a companion for a while. A girl I met in a nightclub called Le Carousel—une fille de joie. We would spend the evenings drinking and dancing in the hotel bar, and the nights at cross-purposes. I tried to persuade Sophie to take me on a visit to her home, but her life was off limits, like her real name.
Lips caked with lipstick
and the smell of booze
you dance with the man with 10,000 francs
until the music moves him to
take you to the room where the rite will be.
Preferring him not
to put out the light
you remove a bonnet of dead women’s hair
beneath which you jealously preserve
stiff braids of an African coiffure.
Down to your silken underthings
and his own undoing scarcely seen
you are the cur under midnight heat
of a mad dog doing it
for what in Europe would have been love.
Then I met Dominique at one of the Haitian parties, and I thought I was in love with her. But love was as tantalizing and elusive as the villages I romanticized, the lifeworlds I longed to enter, the rites I wanted to see, the masks I wanted to try on, the drums I wanted to hear.
She was French, and married to an entrepreneur. They had an apartment in Parcembise—a suburb inhabited, in colonial times, by Léopoldville’s élite. Its streets were shaded by jacarandas. Villas were enclosed by high walls, topped with broken glass and barbed wire. Behind wrought-iron gates, guard dogs salivated, bared their fangs, and barked at Congolese passing up and down the street. The air was scented with frangipani and bougainvillea.
I was oppressed by the contradictions. The beauty and order that accompanied such entrenched inequality. The civilizing mission that masked racism, violence, and delirium. I thought of the rare blues in the forests of Pic Mensi, lured to their death by a white man’s feces.
How could I be in love with someone whose lifestyle seemed like a studied insult to the servants who made it possible? How could I attend the cocktail parties at Dominique’s when the man who served us drinks had to support his family on the pittance he was paid? How could I stand in the same room as the gangly Australian complaining about the roadblocks, telling us that the Congolese had been in the trees so long that they all wanted to be branch managers? How could I give friendly pats to the dog that had been trained to fly at the throat of
