“Un coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hasard”
Stéphane Mallarmé
Preface
No one has ever called me Charlie or Chuck or Chas. I have always been known as Charles, that’s all. It’s not that I care either way, it’s just that none of my exceedingly few friends or acquaintances can bring themselves to call me by any other name.
“That’s okay. You’ve convinced me – whoever the fuck is listening – I may be slow but now I think I’ve got the message. You want me dead. You want me to forget all that this wretched life has dumped on me. That I can do...” I muttered to myself.
What’s the big deal? What do any of us know about death? Nothing – absolutely nothing. I don’t feel either way about dying – it is entirely indifferent to me and, so, I think no more about it than about brushing my teeth or combing my hair.
That would make this my last will and testament.
All I can see is the desolation of this litany of ennui, day-after-day, this droning lamentation of failure – and the attendant helplessness. If you ask why I’ve come to this decision I’ll spell it out for you:
It’s because things are what they seem!
What is finally left is your own ragged, bug-eyed, beat-up face in the mirror, aging like a browning pear lying in a rotten crate. And as you ponder those senseless, eternal questions, keep in mind that the universe is indifferent.
I guess in lieu of a real testament, I’ll leave you this story. If, after reading it, you’ve thought of a way to save me it’ll only help to further prove my point, since I’ll already be dead.
The supreme paradox.
Some seem to remember a period in their past that might be called the best time of their lives. I own no such memories. My entire history, since the events narrated herein, has been no more than a blur. Some earlier episodes can be vaguely called to mind, but these were neither good nor bad. They were just images seemingly left to float loosely through time.
It has been said that the definition of insanity is to repeat the exact same action again and again, each time expecting a different result. If that is so, I’m a lifelong member of the madman’s choir.
So be it.
I’ve
met many strange people in my protracted lifetime. Some bark like dogs.
Some grunt like pigs. Some purr like cats. Some speak from the highest
tower, others from the lowest dungeon. I speak from the gutter…
The Ritual
Now, to the point: I was financially encouraged to work in East Africa for a British contractor on a road construction job. I was hired as a language assistant; I could translate to and from Kiswahili and English.
The project was a road starting from no place and leading nowhere. How it ever got financed has always puzzled me. Be that as it may, I found myself right in the middle of Tanzania and this road was forging ahead through an endless thicket of insects and sand. Savannah interspersed with jungle. Dry red soil rising to heaven every time a car passed by; sweltering afternoon heat followed by chilly nights. This was the routine, day in and day out; this was reality.
One day, driving along a dusty, dirt road, (the only kind there was), I saw a young girl – she couldn’t have been more than twenty years old – hitchhiking.
The road was deserted; the average traffic was one car every four hours. I stopped to pick her up, knowing beforehand what I wanted. Perhaps she also knew; her despondent look pierced any feigned attempt at subterfuge. Her features were typical: neither pretty nor ugly, just a girl with a round face and a listless, blind stare into the empty, forsaken space that surrounded her.
I motioned for her to get into the front seat. I said nothing and she responded with a subdued silence; we had nothing to say and conversation would have been futile, a simple waste of time. We had nothing but time, yet still we saw no reason to waste it.
I drove for a while and then purposefully steered the car into a grove, abruptly stopping and turning off the engine of the white mini station wagon, now thoroughly coated in red earth.
She hardly looked at me. I motioned for her to get into the back seat; she nodded quietly and I believe I gleaned a trivial smile flash across her glowing face.
If the kind reader would like to know what happened next, I recommend you shut your eyes and think about two people who both knew that it mattered absolutely not what they did in that car, or even that they were in the car. There was no place for desire or love or tenderness… just passion for flesh. Why should it matter with whom? If solitude, whose voice is ever as clear as day, were one’s only friend, then why not, with eyes firmly shut, devour?
… I slid up my pants, and she adjusted her tattered kanga. Neither of our faces yielded any significant expression; it was as if nothing had happened. In fact, I must, to this very day, strain my memory to be sure that any of the things I am about to tell ever really took place.
She resumed her seat in the front. We drove away in the same unabashed silence that had marked the initial phase of the encounter. My knees were shaking, making the act of driving slightly more pleasurable. She pointed to the scattered mud houses; I pulled over on the grassy embankment. Opening the door she stepped out as lightly as a butterfly alighting on a delicate flower.
She walked toward the village with a sensuous sway. I revved the engine and drove away watching the red dust rise from the rear view mirror.
Some hours later, back at the main camp, I still had work to do. Sitting in the rancid-smelling, squalid little wooden office, I looked over the coffee-stained papers spread across the scratched, wobbly desk. There was a memo from the Engineer informing of how the road was to pass through an ancient tribal burial ground. No markings, no headstones, just a very old cemetery, dating back to the eighteenth century.
The memo requested my presence in the project manager’s office.
“We have to convince them to allow us to dig up the graves and bury them someplace else,” said the stately, albeit friendly, pock-marked chief engineer.
“I can’t see why we don’t just go around it?” I replied with certain aplomb.
Felix retorted dryly: “We tried to calculate how much of a detour we would have to make. As it turns out, we would need about a kilometer and a half of lateral terrain and we just don’t have it…” He rubbed his lips with his thumb.
“What do we tell to them?”
“Just say that we can’t avoid the cemetery and we’d be happy to move the remains to any other site of their own choosing.”
“Alright – I’ll see what can be done.”
After a week of what seemed utterly futile negotiations with the village chieftain (such is the way of negotiations with villagers, you never really know where you stand) we finally struck a deal. They gave us a new place to lay the mortal remains and, after showering the chief with such coveted gifts as jeans, tee-shirts and moonshine, we were allowed move ahead with the expropriation.
All that was left to do was to call a cleric from each of the religions represented in the gravesite and have them consecrate the bones: a Protestant minister, a Catholic priest, a spiritualist.
Since I had already witnessed, in one fashion or another, the first two, I decided to attend the latter ceremony out of mere curiosity. Two other friends had asked to observe the ritual as well: MacDonald, the chief surveyor, and Moraes, the accountant. So one cool, mid-July night we three set out for the village.
We had already been told that there was going to be a sacrifice – they needed blood from a bull. The village supplied the unfortunate beast and we threw in an askari, a ragged, underfed member of the people’s militia who helped guard our camp; they were the only people permitted to carry weapons.
The whole thing got off to a bad start.
When the mendicant-looking, half-consumed askari aimed at the big bull’s skull from only five or six feet away, he missed, wounding the bovine in the front leg. The frightened, limping creature ran with an agility that one would never expect from such a bulky, injured beast, and hid in the nearby brush. The shaman – a slight old man with stubby white whiskers protruding from his aged, wrinkled face – ran after the animal, trailed by an entourage punctuated by the askari. When they finally caught up with the dying bull the ragtag soldier put him down with a point-blank discharge to the head.
Now he needed to be transported back to the clearing where the ritual was to be held. We were asked to provide a tractor, which caused yet another delay of some ninety minutes or more.
Finally underway, the ceremony began with the bull’s blood mixed together with that of a chicken and that of a goat. This pottage, all stirred in a wooden bowl and seasoned with foliage gathered from the surrounding bush, supplied the crucial unction of the ritual.
The quartet of sextons on either side of the old man formed a curious bunch. One fellow, who could not have been less than eighty years old, and a woman who must have been pushing a hundred, both lepers, with varying parts of their anatomy missing – mainly fingers – presented a spectacle of ranting that only intensified the repugnance of their gnarled limbs. Another man, considerably younger, leaned against a baobab trunk, thoroughly disheveled, while ragamuffin shreds of what once had been very cheap clothes fluttered in the cool breeze while clinging scantily to his already sagging bones. Yet another, younger woman, with a brightly colored green and yellow turban wrapped around her head, did not stop talking, not even for a fraction of a second. Regrettably, none of us were close enough to understand what she was saying, but the few words that made some sense sounded something like damu and safi and maisha, that is: blood and pure and life.
Without warning the elderly diviner hoisted a twig-like branch from the floor and dipped it repeatedly in the wooden basin. The young woman suddenly quieted her chatter. The sea of gaslights that bejeweled the absolute darkness around the old cemetery twinkled and sputtered in tiny jerking movements. The hoarse, deep voice of the shaman pierced the black silence with a shrill invocation of the Goddess of Death:
Óia Matamba ê, tata eme/ Óia Matamba ê, tata eme/ Sinha vanju/damuringanga/ Ê tata eme/ Oiá, óia Matamba/ Ê tata eme/ E dambure, senza quenda é maiongue,/ Banburussenda, senza quenda é maiongue/ O sinha vanju, o sinha vanju ê/ O sinha vanju, o sinha vanju ê/ Ae Banburussenda, o sinha vanju ê.
“Kikapuni mna mayai”, chanted the crowd, “in the basket has eggs” with an enthusiasm very unlike their habitually lethargic character. The lights seemed tremulous as the roar of the chant overwhelmed the senses and left the three of us with a sensation of impending disaster.
After invoking Matamba several more times the crowd abruptly silenced.
The mystic deftly picked up the front legs of a stray dog that, I suppose, just happened to be wandering the grounds and started to dance with it around the fire enclosed in a circle of stones. The dog appeared to know each step as the old man led the way.