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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250116321 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 03/22/2016 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 276 KB |
About the Author
W.T. Tyler lives in Virginia, not far from Washington, D.C. He is also the author of The Man Who Lost the War, The Ants of God, Rogue's March, The Shadow Cabinet, The Lion and the Jackal, and Last Train from Berlin.
Read an Excerpt
The Consul's Wife
A Novel
By W. T. Tyler
Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 1998 W. T. TylerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-11632-1
CHAPTER 1
I first heard about African sorcery at a Catholic mission station on the Congo River below Bumba, a few hundred miles north of the equator. I was drinking beer with Frère Albert on the second-floor gallery just north of the river, and he was describing the local Budja tribe and taking a long time with it. I sat in the wicker chair opposite, listening, drinking, and not paying much attention to the rumble of thunder rolling in from the west. I'm a good listener. I've been a good listener all my life, the only talent I can claim.
Only ten minutes earlier the day had been luminous under a cloudless sky, but now the verandah was shrouded in gray. Rain hammered overhead on the tin roof and curtains of water surged across the compound, lashing the raffia palms, wetting our faces, and bringing a wintry chill to the premature dusk of late afternoon. A flash of lightning exploded nearby, then another, both so brutally unexpected I flinched, jarring the wicker table and spilling some beer. As the shock of thunder reverberated away, rattling the windows behind us and shaking the gallery floor, Frère Albert told me a local sorcerer had threatened the storm.
His voice was so gently matter-of-fact I thought I'd missed something. Day swallowed by darkness, night shattered by light? Only five weeks in the Congo, I wondered what the hell he was talking about and whether we were both half crocked or just me. We'd been out on the Congo River that afternoon on an old diesel-engined scow, taking on mail and truck parts in the powerful brown wash of an Otraco riverboat pounding upstream toward Kisangani. As we came alongside, the drunken mate high in the wheelhouse backed off the engines, and the surge lifting our bow almost capsized us. I was bone-tired from heaving an iron-shanked grappling pole and both of us were a little dehydrated.
"Esprit malfaisant? Esprit malin?" Bothered about something, his gray eyes roamed the rain-swept compound and lifted to the ugly sky as he tried to be true to whatever memory he'd conjured up. He frowned and I knew neither satisfied him. "It's enough to shrivel the soul," he said in despair. He was a very gentle, very devout, very scrupulous man.
He was in his late seventies, but I wouldn't have guessed. His eyes were as bright as the perching fish hawk's I'd seen that morning, unclouded by age. Born in Antwerp, he had a medical degree from Paris but had abandoned his practice for Africa, where he had lived for more than forty years. He was as thin as a reed, his face weathered to the texture of dried tobacco leaf except for the sunburn he'd gotten that day, which had colored his long, thin, aristocratic nose like a boiled lobster claw. His fingers were broken and scarred and the thumb of his right hand holding his briar pipe was a cherry-bright stump. He'd lost it years ago in an accident in the mission sawmill we'd toured that morning. Sockless, he wore leather sandals and gray khaki shorts.
He was describing the power of African sorcery, but I had the feeling he was defining a condition rather than a man, some shapeless presence that lay outside the sorcerer and those he corrupted, like the sinister gray fog that had hidden the river that morning as I'd walked along the bank before the sun was up, a pair of binoculars hanging like a cowbell from my neck. The only thing I could think of was spiritual evil or the contagion of spiritual evil, but I was kidding myself if I thought I knew anything about either, not then anyway.
So I was curious and a little confused, but it was only my third trip to the bush and I was confused about a lot of things, including what I was doing in Africa and whether my diplomatic career would finally dead-end there, like so many others. I was with Ken McAuliffe, another embassy officer who had been roaming the bush for eighteen months and had visited the mission station before. He was in the machine shed in the back with Brother Felix, an ex–bank clerk fled to penance after some unexplained fall from grace, trying to replace a clutch plate on a 1955 Fiat truck.
The storm passed and the rain eased off. McAuliffe appeared out of the creeping mist and climbed the wooden steps to join us. Thin and blond-bearded, he was carrying an old carburetor wrapped in rags and a green wine bottle filled with gasoline. The bell rang from the cook house. Frère Albert and I emptied our glasses, McAuliffe brought a bottle of wine from his room, and we crossed the standing pools in the courtyard to join Brother Felix for dinner in the refectory. The Jesuit fathers were away that week for a conference with the archbishop, and we had the refectory to ourselves. It was a long narrow room with a vaulted ceiling and stone floors and smelled of woodsmoke and baking bread. The glimmering light from the mission generator dimly illuminated the long tables and sent our shadows flickering eerily against the whitewashed walls. We might have been in another century, and in some ways maybe we were. Against the far wall was a seven-foot cross carved from African mahogany and lit by tall white candles in metal sconces cut from powdered milk tins.
Brother Felix, as plump and bald as a eunuch, stood to say a prayer and serve our plates from steaming bowls of chicken, rice, and peas. McAuliffe poured the wine. We were tired and hungry and nothing more was said about the sorcerer or his storm. After dinner Brother Felix drank the last of the wine, rolled up his sleeves, gathered up the plates, and disappeared into the kitchen. McAuliffe returned to clean the carburetor he had left on the gallery and I sat with Frère Albert, drinking freshly ground coffee as he indulged my curiosity about local witchcraft.
The Africans of the savannahs and rain forests feared the sorcery of the lightning-maker more than any other, convinced he could invoke the storm and bring down the lightning the way some herbs from the riverbanks drew poison from an infected wound. His instrument was some sort of box hidden near the hut or village that had drawn his fury. Frère Albert had never seen one (it was rarely seen by a white man) but had heard them described.
The belief seemed simple enough at the time, but like everything else I learned about Africa, it wasn't simple at all. The deracinated bush traders I met on the track in the months that followed tried to sell me everything else from the slough of African tribal life, whether wooden carvings, ceremonial raffia, wooden fetishes, bone and iron weapons. But even after a few cigarettes, a bottle of beer, or a ride in my Land Rover, when I asked about local sorcery they wouldn't admit they knew what I was talking about, much less scout out a sorcerer's box for me for Blakey Ogden, the consul's wife. I picked up anything I could for her during my bush travels. The uglier a fetish or a ritual mask, the more authentic it was for her.
Except for Ken McAuliffe and me, few embassy officers ever traveled the bush and no one cared much about native art. If they bought something it was usually off the street in Kinshasa, a tourist shop or an ivory market fake. Not Blakey. The more fetishes and masks I brought back, the more her knowledge grew. She kept them in a rear closet, all tagged and identified. Her Little Boos and Big Boos I called them, as if they were just another of her odd indulgences, like me. But collecting can become an illness, whether it's Byzantine icons, New England scrimshaws, Flemish, impressionist, or pop art you're chasing, first a pastime, then a passion, and finally a sickness. Blakey wasn't that way. She planned to donate the most valuable to a Connecticut museum.
As it turned out, during my later wanderings on the savannahs of the Kasai, an old wizard tried to work his magic against Ken McAuliffe and me. One of the Bena N'Kuba, or bearers of storms, so a Presbyterian missionary I met near Tshikapa told me. He had once seen the sorcerer's mysterious box outside his rural chapel after Sunday evening worship services and remembered it as a crude twig box held together by dead vines and half covered with shards of broken mirrors attached by tar or pitch. Hidden inside was a hodgepodge of repellent animal, reptile, and human viscera whose mysteries only the sorcerer could explain. He was never identified. The missionary remembered the lightning and the storm that swept in as the worst he'd ever seen. No one was killed but two huts were struck and his congregation didn't return for six weeks or so. The Jesuits had once made bonfires of the idolatrous relics, but the Presbyterians tried in gentler ways to drive the belief from the savannahs in East Kasai, first of all by trying to persuade the villagers to move their huts from the hilltops where they'd be less exposed to the foraging fire and thunder of tropical storms. The incident had happened long ago but he said the tradition still survived, as I later discovered for myself. After twenty-eight years in Central Africa the missionary was a weird old bird, half blind with glaucoma and just as dim in his recollections. Like many Westerners too long in Africa, I wasn't sure he still knew what he believed. If he did, understanding somehow defied his capacity for words, as it had Frère Albert that stormy afternoon.
I finally tracked down a sorcerer's box. It was shown to me in a dusty bush town along the Kwilu River by a middle-aged Portuguese trader and mechanic named Ferrera who'd patched my Land Rover's leaking radiator hose. He was a short, bullnecked man with the arms of a blacksmith and a few faded purple-and-red tattoos on his forearms from his boyhood sailing days with the Portuguese White Fleet, fishing for cod off the Grand Banks. His bitter comments on the territorial administration and the government in Kinshasa told me his contempt for the postcolonial Africa had led him to despise everything else about the continent where he'd lived for so many years. He kept the box under the workbench in a half-collapsed battery shed at the rear of his weed-grown compound.
He led me into its shadows where it lay on the dirt floor. No more than eighteen inches long and half as wide, the box was made of Primus beer crate slats. Once painted black, it was termite-eaten and gnawed by dry rot, the broken mirrors that had decorated the sides were missing, and it looked like a small garden tractor battery. One of the dreaded Bena N'Kuba had made it, he said, moving aside the rotting lid with a screwdriver to show me the desiccated relics inside. He invited my exploration but curiosity led me no further. The smell was as powerfully corrosive as the smell of sulfuric acid in the battery shed. I didn't touch it. As he returned it to the shadows, I didn't think to ask why he kept it there among the carcasses of six- and twelve-volt batteries. I soon found the answer, supplied by a British Baptist missionary from Manchester who ran a Bible bookstore on a sand street in Kikwit and had invited me for dinner one night.
Ferrera's African wife was a Mupende woman with unusual healing powers, or so the Englishman explained as we sat in his gloomy dining room, his voice barely rising above the click-clack of soup spoons against discolored crockery. Her father and uncles had been fetisheurs. The missionary — his name was Stanhope — was a dried-up weed of a man with skin as pale as parchment. He and his wife spent their lonely evenings translating the Bible and psalm books into local tribal languages. "He suffers from migraine, suffers terribly," she told me in the kitchen as the two of us were washing dishes and he was getting his violin out of the closet and setting up his Victrola (they rarely had guests). I wondered if his migraine was brought on by all those African tribal dialects rattling around in his wispy Anglo-Saxon head. During my later visits I never saw a soul in their hot, dusty little bookstore, never once saw an African looking in the windows from the sand street, and I wondered if their lonely vocation didn't describe a kind of demon possession right there.
After the dishes were put away we sat in the parlor and he played his violin accompanied by the crank-up Victrola. I think it was Bach, but I wasn't sure. I wanted a cigarette but tobacco and alcohol weren't tolerated in their parlor. After his opening piece, his wife spread her knees, opened up her accordion, and joined in, but maybe it was a concertina. I don't remember. It was a very long, very dry, very tedious night. But I had my answer: Ferrera's African wife was born to the tradition. Despite the contempt that had poisoned her husband's memories of old Africa, his European rationalism had its limits. Mine too. I didn't mention the box to Blakey, knowing it was too menacing for her gentle curiosity.
But the foul little box and the sorcerer's reputation are only two of the elements that make it so terrifying. The other two are natural enough anyplace in the world but in Africa take on a malevolence all their own. One is the boundless energy of an African thunderstorm, the other the impenetrable darkness of the African night, and both are the sorcerer's apprentices.
There are few sights more ominous than that of the most powerful of tropical thunderstorms rolling toward you across the African savannahs. American homesteaders crossing the Great Plains in their Conestoga wagons to confront for the first time an endless horizon of rampaging buffalo under a black Nebraska sky must have known the feeling. The first growls of distant thunder from anvils of billowing cloud rising fifty to sixty thousand feet above the savannah come like a premonition, suspending the day. As the storm sweeps in, a different light, odor, and texture displaces the familiar. The air comes alive with an energy that soon invests grass, trees, metal, canvas, and hair and skin. As the dark curtain descends, thunder and lightning pour down from all directions, filaments of bloodred fire on the forward edge, great jagged white flares behind as the sky explodes and the earth seems to disintegrate in a devouring conflagration of wind, thunder, fire, and rain.
And then there's the darkness itself. On a moonless night the darkness was like no other I'd ever known, not in the Syrian Desert or the mountains of eastern Turkey. After the sun goes down domestic life retires to its huts and what stirs outside is as unimaginable as the phosphorescent shapes oceanographers search for from their bathospheres in the deepest trenches of the Pacific. In that world anything is possible. Traveling on such nights along the savannahs and the interravine forests, I could smell the smoke of the village fire on the evening wind long before I could find its embers.
I remember my second trip to the Kwilu with Ken McAuliffe. It was after nine o'clock at night and he stopped the Land Rover on the track, knowing from the woodsmoke the village was near but unable to find it. He'd been there many times but never so late. My arm and head were out the window searching the track ahead. I heard the quick scrum of bare feet nearby and dark hands gripped my shoulder before I knew they were there. They scared the hell out of me but McAuliffe only laughed. He had seen too much and I was still the embassy greenhorn. The villagers had recognized our cockeyed headlights, but I'd seen nothing and couldn't identify them, even then, when a half-dozen men from the village had surrounded us, shadows in a darkness without shadow, come to guide us into the firelight.
Others can imagine what they will — ethnologists, historians, foreign policy intellectuals, museum curators, or the Afro-American brotherhood in Washington — but most African traditions make no sense until you understand their complicity with the absolute darkness of the African night. So these are the sorcerer's apprentices and Africa is his theater: on such a vast continent on such a night, a sorcerer's box found in the trees behind the village, rumors of his sinister threats whispered by the women in the manioc patch, and then the light suddenly gone as the darkness descends, a familiar world torn apart by grotesque rituals of wind, thunder, rain, and fire. If you can imagine this maybe you can understand why its animus, like the chilling onset of some Hitchcock or Stephen King thriller in our own Tom Thumb popcorn theaters out in the suburbs, might seem a little personal to say the least.
I didn't know anyone at the embassy when I arrived at the Congo. I knew little about the country beyond what I read in the press during those earlier years of anarchy and bloodshed. I was in Beirut when the telegram came from Washington, living a lazy, comfortable life in promiscuous, laissez-faire Beirut, not the murder-torn, rubble-filled war zone that followed. From my fifth-floor office I could see the Mediterranean shimmering in the distance. Beyond the Bay of Jounieh were the white-peaked caps near Mt. Lebanon.
I had the first floor of an old mud-colored building dating from the Ottoman days that faced the green sea shallows between the corniche and the St. George Hotel. Moorish archways separated the four shadowy, high-ceilinged rooms. The deep balcony looked down on the turquoise-blue Mediterranean spilling over the rocks. The century-old building was owned by a Sunni who worked in the Ministry of Public Works. Tall, courtly, and French-educated, with a large balding head, thin gray hair, and heavy jowls, he looked more like an English Tory than a Lebanese Arab and was more a rentier than a civil servant. He owned a number of buildings in the quarter. He dropped by once a month to ask about my comfort and collect the rent. He always apologized for his poor English but insisted on speaking it with me, the only American in his many properties. He wanted to speak English like an Englishman, he confided one afternoon, bringing out a copy of the Spectator. He bought it regularly at the St. George Hotel. "One must take advantages of opportunities," he apologized, and I gave him his. He was my first lesson in Beirut's cultural mimicry, that thick, osmotic acculturation that had shaped so much of the Levant's history — Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Arab, French, and now American.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Consul's Wife by W. T. Tyler. Copyright © 1998 W. T. Tyler. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Contents,Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Epigraph,
Begin Reading,
Also by W. T. Tyler,
Copyright,