A Love Affair In The Heart Of Darkness - Without Savagery, Passion Is Pedestrian

Barton Ames, World Bank loan officer, old Africa hand, and world traveler, had had his share of affairs on the Dark Continent, some incidental, some circumstantial, and others temporary but telling. There was nothing like loosing the tethers that bind, heading off for the deepest, most remote and unexplored regions of Africa and, like Kurtz in Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, coming to grips with human savagery and engaging it. 

Of course Ames had a romantic streak, and his job as an international civil servant working at the behest of bank investors and canny loan beneficiaries offered little in the way of Mungo Park, Conrad, Rene du Chaillu, or Richard Burton; but he at least understood the nature of adventure and how it provided the context for more simple engagements.

He first experienced the strange complementarity between danger and sexual energy the last time he was in Haiti - a country disturbed, politically uncertain and calm before he arrived, but chaotic and violent a few days afterwards.  He and his lover, a Palestinian woman in Port-au-Prince for the United Nations Refugee Relief Agency, were on the balcony of their room at the Splendid, a Victorian gingerbread hotel, all mahogany, teak, and polished brass, when the shooting started.  They could hear the mortar fire by the port, and hear the rumble of tanks making their way in convoy from their barracks in Petionville to Duvalierville. 

Soon the hotel was surrounded by army troops, the first of which broke into the bar and carried out cases of Johnnie Walker, passing bottles around to their comrades in the half-tracks and armored personnel carriers stopped in the parking lot in front of the hotel.  

When  they received orders to proceed ahead and engage the rebel forces coming up from Avenue Toussaint de l'Ouverture, they were drunk and fired their old, Soviet-era single shot, bolt action rifles into the air, hollered and bellowed patriotic songs, and made their way south. 

Tires were burning everywhere, 'necklaces of fire' they were called.  Traitors were handcuffed and blindfolded while tires were put over their heads and set ablaze while irregulars hooted and hollered at the charring bodies. 

The night spent by Barton Ames and Emriye al-Mehmet was all the more uninhibited because of the intimidating, encircling violence.  Far from frightening it gave emotional cover and shared protection.  In bed, under the covers, holding each other for comfort and fear, their intimacy turned to sexual interest and then to irresolute passion. 

The coup was aborted, the President was still alive and well in the palace, and the rebels were executed by firing squad in the public square.  Barton left the next morning for Washington, and Emriye for Istanbul on the first flights available. 

One might think that such an adventure would bring them indivisibly together, but foreign affairs have a way of dissimulating. Lovers can never recreate the heady atmosphere of a dangerous tropical sexual rendezvous in their own, calm, quiet, and sedately peaceful home countries. Trysts in godawful places are things of fancy.  

At the same time Barton couldn't help but wanting to revisit the uncommon passion of that night at the Splendid.  It was unique, something out of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller; but undaunted and a sexual partisan, he knew that if the circumstances were right, it would happen again. 

Africa is a penitential miasma on every point on the compass - venality, autocracy, civil violence and unrest, corruption, and chaos.  Somalia is but the most current example of Africa's descent into tribal, religious, and ethnic hell.  It is a country defined by international boundaries only, an unruly and unrulable place unfit for human habitation; and the Congo is no different,  Kinshasa is a sinkhole of poverty, incivility, and misrule.  

Nigeria is perhaps the worst. International development consultants have No Nigeria clauses in their contracts, Americans have lost millions to Nigerian online fraud, and the fertile delta, area of vast oil resources is a gangland shooting gallery.  South Africa, once the bright light of the continent, destined to build on Afrikaner enterprise and wealth, now is only a desperate shithole of tribal rivalry and government corruption. 

Barton was drawn to Africa not because of Conrad but not despite him either.  The continent held a special place in the adventurer's heart -  a place still so primitive, uncivilized, intemperate, violent, and untamed that it had to be experienced.  He signed up for a sojourn in a Sahelian country recently in the news for its successful fight against ISIS and the rebellious Tuaregs in the North.  It would provide just the right blend of colonial French culture, Islamic Sufism, and African tribal warfare to be the right place at the right time. 

The trip started off well.  He chose a small hotel run by ex-colonial women from la France profonde, somewhere in the Dordogne, women who still recorded guests' accounts by hand, and where old Africa hands came in from the desert for their Pernod and canapes at the bar. 

As occasion would have it, he met a young German woman ready to embark on a solo journey far to the north, beyond Mopti and Timbuktu, toward al-Alamein and the Algerian oases serving the salt trade caravans. She, like many expatriates and European travelers were drawn by Africa's mystery.  

It was indeed a mystery why after over sixty years of independence the continent was far worse off than under its colonial rulers.  In the same space of time that South Korea went from a rural peasant society to a world economic power, Africa regressed.  While China went from Maoism to America's rival if not superior in a few short decades, Africa became basket case.  

It was this desire to explore a seemingly defiant primitivism that drew both Heidi and Barton Ames to the Sahel. Like attracts like, and after pastis and capitaine, they became lovers.  Anyone but expatriate drifters might question the ease and quickness of their affair, but those who have been about and around such Sahelian places would not question it. Temporary, fortunate sexual elisions are common and expected in otherwise uninhabitable, uncivilized places. 

The night was hot, long, and stifling. The hotel lost power by 6pm and never recovered, but with the windows to the street wide open, and secure under a canopied mosquito net, the two lovers were at ease. Both would never do with cooling, insulation, and  the security of Europe a l'étranger. It had to be this way, and the disturbing gunfire from the nearby desert rebel redoubts only added to the sexual tension.  

Baron and the German girl said their goodbyes the next morning.  He back to Washington and she to the interior.  His trip was subject to delays, hers was liable to Tuareg or ISIS raids, which is why both hoped that they would meet again under similar circumstances but knew that they would not.  Such love affairs do not survive light and air, 

Infidelity, fantasy, adventurism?  All the above and more.  Barton was near retirement.  Although he looked forward to a new, less complicated, and simpler life, he wondered how he would adjust to his new celibacy, his confinement, and his ordinary ways. Thomas Wolfe:

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermuda away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

 

Back home - Barton wouldn't want to go there if he could.  He was more than satisfied with an untethering of the ties that bind, a sojourn in a nasty place, love in the palms.