Brazzaville Beach (40 page)

“I know, I know. But that didn't make it any less hard on him. And the fact that someone like you—I mean, a new arrival—should…” She made a flicking gesture with one hand. “Should turn everything upside down.”

“I suppose…” I checked my spontaneous British reasonableness. No lifelines were going to be offered here.

“He's not well,” Ginga went on. “Very depressed. It's difficult.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Can I see him?”

Ginga looked suddenly ashamed, all her poise and cool capability gone. I had never seen this emotion on her features before; it
looked absurd, wholly out of character, like a false mustache or a clown's red nose.

“He won't see you,” she said. “He refuses.”

“Oh, great…. So where does that leave me?”

Ginga's composure had returned. “Well, you understand…it's impossible to work on here, my dear.”

I closed my eyes for a second or two, then stood up and wandered round the room, behaving as if I had some choice in the matter, as if this were a decision that had to be mulled over, thought through. Ginga waited with perfect patience.

“You're right,” I said. “It's impossible. Under the circumstances.”

“I thought you'd agree.”

She took some papers out of her bag and laid them out on the desk.

“It's just a formal letter of release. If you could sign there…. And I have a check”—she tapped an envelope—“for what is due you for the rest of your contracted period of employment.”

“Very generous of you.”

She responded sharply to my sarcasm. “This is nothing to do with me, you know, Hope. We're friends, or so I like to think. But that doesn't matter. I have to help Eugene. Grosso Arvore has to keep going. Without him…well, you know how the place works.”

I wondered seriously, for the first time, about the true extent of Mallabar's nervous exhaustion.

I signed. Ginga smiled at me, sadly, I thought.

“There's one more thing,” she said. “I'm very sorry.”

“What?”

“This is your original contract.” She turned some pages of the document. “Do you remember this clause?”

I read it. I had to smile. All publications, its gist ran, based on original research carried out at Grosso Arvore, were the copyright of the Grosso Arvore Foundation, unless alternative permission was given. All data gathered was similarly protected and had to be surrendered to the foundation for its archives on termination of employment.

“No,” I said. “You can't do this. Forget it.”

“You will get full acknowledgment in the book. Eugene promises. I promise.”

“I don't give a fuck. You can't stop me.”

Ginga rose swiftly to her feet. “Don't say anything more, my dear. You'll just regret it.” She spoke in her capable, maternal voice. “I'll see you in the morning before you go. No, please, don't speak. Martim will drive you back to town.” She smiled bravely at me and left.

 

I went outside and smoked a cigarette. Moths bumped and skittered around the lantern that hung above the census hut's doorway. Three pale, liver-spotted geckos clung patiently, immobile, to the wooden wall waiting for insects to settle. The air was loud with stridulating crickets, and the noise of a laughing argument carried across on the breeze from the kitchen compound.

I felt an associated amusement—an oddly tearful, resigned amusement—shake my body in a weak chuckle. I paced around, smoking my cigarette ruthlessly, like a condemned man about to face a firing squad, wondering aimlessly what to do next, weighing up the few feeble options available to me. In a strange way I felt relieved, as anyone does who finally acknowledges defeat. At least one can stop struggling now, you say to yourself. At least this episode is over and a new one can start.

I sighed, I shook my head, I bayed silently at the stars in the black sky. A phrase came into my head that John had learned in America: screwed, blued and tattooed. Yes, I thought, that's what's happened to me, I've been screwed, blued and tattooed….

Hauser had invited me over for a drink later, if I felt like it. I did, now, and wandered across Main Street toward his bungalow. The starshine threw the fractured shadow of the hagenia tree across the dusty road. I was thinking: what should I do? Where should I go? Who would go with me?

Hauser opened his door, smiling.

“Ah, Hope,” he said. “Got a surprise for you.”

“No, please,” I said. “I've had enough surprises for one night.”

I stepped over the threshold. Toshiro stood by the meat safe
opening a bottle of beer. Sitting at the table were Ian and Roberta Vail.

 

It turned out fine, not bad, considering, not nearly as awkward or tense as I had imagined it might be. We talked for hours about the kidnap, about Amilcar and Atomique Boum, the mission school and the attack. I told them about the last days, about the elegant gun and its too-small lilac shells, of Amilcar's stupid death and the puzzled courtesy of the Belgian mercenaries. And it was a strangely heartening, cheering conversation too, after my depressing encounter with Ginga Mallabar. There was a mild spirit of reunion in that room that night, which was encouraging. Hauser and Toshiro kept supplying us with beer, and the two new researchers—Milton and Brad, I think—were invited over to hear our war stories. Hauser's radio was tuned to a mid-European, shortwave station playing fifties jazz. Roberta smoked two or three of her menthol cigarettes, unreproved by Ian.

Ian himself looked thinner, and it surprised me for a moment to see his face clean-shaven again. He managed to maintain a convincing front of composure and self-confidence but I could sense his unease and insecurity massing edgily beneath it.

He waited until the party broke up, which was after midnight. We all stood outside Hauser's bungalow, chatting, reluctant to have the conviviality disperse abruptly. Seeing Roberta talking vivaciously to Brad or Derv, Ian chose his moment and drew me a few paces to one side.

The lantern light cast long shadows across his face. I could not see his eyes.

“Listen, Hope,” he said quietly, his voice deep, half strangled. “That night, when I ran.”

“Yes.”

“I was trying to divert them. I was trying to lead them away from you. I wasn't—” He cleared his throat. “You mustn't think I was running away. Leaving you. It was to lure them. Otherwise we'd—”

“I know,” I said simply. “Don't be stupid. You saved me.”

I could sense rather than see his entire posture relax. This easing—of his soul, I suppose—seemed to emanate from him like
a sigh. He was about to say something more when Roberta interrupted him with a called question about some dean or head of department they had known at Stanford. I touched Ian's arm reassuringly and turned away. I said good night to Hauser and Toshiro and the others, and walked back across Main Street to the census hut. I had told no one I was leaving the next morning.

 

As she had promised, Ginga was there to see me go. Alone. She was firm but sweet to me, like a fond but wise headmistress obliged to expel her favorite pupil. Stay in touch…. What will you do?…Let's meet in London…. We behaved in an exemplary, civilized, adult way. Ginga let her guard drop for a moment and that strange embarrassment reappeared when she hinted that, when Eugene was “well,” perhaps something could be worked out. I did not ask her to specify what that something might be.

She held both my hands, kissed my cheeks and said, with almost Eugene-like sentiment, “Ah, Hope, Hope,” and then let me go.

I decided to drive and Martim moved across to the passenger seat of the Land-Rover. I wanted to experience to the full, and for the last time, that moment when we bumped onto the paved road south at Sangui. I asked Ginga to make my farewells to the others, started the motor, waved and drove off.

In Sangui I stopped outside João's house. It was shuttered and closed.

“Where is he?” I asked Martim.

“They have moved him, Mam,” Martim said. “He don't work for the project, so he can't live in the house.”

I looked at him uncomprehendingly. “Where does he live, then?”

Martim led me down a rutted lane to an old mud hut with a matting compound on the edge of the village. João was there, sitting at the front door with a cloth wrapped around his waist, chewing on a stick of sugar cane. It was oddly upsetting to see him idle, and out of his khaki uniform. His thin chest was covered with a scribble of gray hairs. He looked suddenly ten years older.

But he was pleased to see me and became genuinely angry when I told him I had been sacked also.

“This bad time, Mam,” he said, darkly. “Very bad time.”

“Yes, but why
you
, João?”

“He say there is no job for me now. Now all the chimps are gone.”

“
All
?” I was shocked. And ashamed. I realized I had given no thought to my surviving southerners.

“Except Conrad,” he said, then shrugged. “Maybe.”

He told me that Rita-Mae had gone missing shortly after I had left. At which point Rita-Lu had joined the northern group, now firmly and apparently permanently established in the southern core area. João himself had found Clovis's body two days later, minus both legs, he said, and “very torn.” He had continued to spot Conrad periodically, up to about a week ago. But since Mallabar had sacked him he had not gone into the forest. Alda had left also, to try and find work in the city.

I suddenly knew exactly what I wanted to do. I went back to the Land-Rover and told Martim to wait behind in the village for me. I told him only that I was going somewhere with João and would be back in two or three hours. He looked puzzled, but was perfectly happy to oblige. I made him promise not to return to the camp.

João and I then drove to the goalpost village. It was just beyond here, João said, that the final sightings of Conrad had been made. He seemed to be lurking around the southernmost slopes of the escarpment, not far from the village. Village boys had caught him once or twice in the maize fields, and had driven him away with stones.

When we reached the village, João still refused to accompany me into the forest. Dr. Mallabar had banned him from it, he insisted, and he did not wish to find himself in further trouble. When they built the new research station there might be a job for him there; it was not worth antagonizing the doctor.

So I left him with the Land-Rover and trekked off up the slopes of the escarpment to search the areas where Conrad had last been seen.

I walked the bush paths that meandered through the trees above
the village looking for suitable chimpanzee food sources. If Conrad was confining himself to this precise area there was a reasonable chance of finding him feeding. It was both pleasing and melancholic to be back in the forest looking for chimps for the last time. It was midmorning by now and the sun was close to reaching its full strength. The paths were spattered with coins of sunlight and a faint breeze coming up from the valley floor made the dry leaves rattle in the treetops and the blond, bleached grass sway with a parched, rustling sound. The rains were very late this year.

I walked from food source to food source, following João's directions, but with no luck. After an hour and a half of wandering, some of my sentimental confidence began to evaporate and I began to rebuke myself for hatching such a preposterous plan. What was I hoping to achieve exactly? What was the purpose of this nostalgic revisiting of the southern area? And if I found Conrad, what then?

Just after noon I stopped walking and sat under a tree to eat the fish-paste sandwiches that the canteen had prepared for me. I debated whether to carry on for another hour or so, or simply make my way back to the Land-Rover. This was futile and silly, I thought, this sentimental farewell, this Last Glimpse….

I was about twenty minutes from the village when I heard the furious screaming of some colobus monkeys not far away. I ran along the path until I saw them, flinging themselves with reckless ease through the branches above and ahead of me. There were a dozen or more chasing a clumsily brachiating chimpanzee, which was hooting and yelping in fear and panic.

Conrad thumped heavily to the ground in a flurry of torn leaves, and bounded off through the undergrowth. The monkeys gave up their pursuit and returned to whatever fruit tree they had been feeding in. I followed Conrad as best I could.

I found him minutes later sitting in the lower branches of a tree scanning a small valley that lay below. He was thin and wasted-looking, and he had a red, glistening sore on one thigh, like a shiny tin badge. He looked round nervously as I approached, and I at once sank to my haunches and pretended to scrabble for seeds in the dust and dead leaves around me. I looked up fleetingly from
time to time to meet Conrad's fixed and disconcertingly human gaze. His brown eyes never wavered from me. I saw also that he had two scabbed-over cuts on his forehead and muzzle.

Finally he ceased to be alarmed by my presence and resumed his scrutiny of the valley.

The valley was small, cut by a stream that trickled sluggishly through livid green grass on the valley floor. At one stage the stream ran over a sharp, gray, inclined wedge of rock and fell a few feet into a shallow, pebbly pool with a noisy patter that I could hear even from my position high on the valley side.

I saw that Conrad was gazing at a clump of mesquinho bushes that grew around the pool. The mesquinho is a tall, dense bush that has small, sharp leaves with silvery undersides, like an olive tree. Their fruit was out, loose bunches of button-sized black seeds which, when cracked, yielded a fuzzy salty-sweet kernel. I had eaten mesquinho fruits before. They split neatly when squeezed between thumb and forefinger. You sucked the paste off the kernel to reveal a shiny brown pip. They were good to eat when you were thirsty—some chemical in them stimulated your saliva glands.