Peter Benchley had not expected war to break out any time soon, or he would have cancelled his trip. The central African country for which he, as senior program officer for the World Bank, was responsible had been involved in violent border skirmishes with its neighbor off and on for years, and no military analyst expected a full-scale conflict.
The Air France flight was full, and First Class passengers were treated to the Beaujolais Nouveau of the new season, a drink that brought back memories of his youth in Paris, at Rubis, a bistro in the Latin Quarter. 'Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé!' announced the posters on every lamp post on Rue Bouchard, and Rubis on opening day spilled out onto the sidewalk up; and down the avenue. Mme. Picot, the owner's wife made trays of canapes - caviar, foie gras, and Camembert - and M. Franchot, the baker at the boulangerie next door, supplied loaves of freshly baked baguette.
It was hard to leave the plane after it set down at the international airport after its long flight from Charles de Gaulle - the atmosphere had become just like Rubis or more like a Sunday meal at Le Rouge et Le Noir restaurant in Nouakchott, a redoubt of la France profonde in the middle of the desert, filled with all the ex-colons and their families who had found ways to stay on after independence. Live lobsters from Brittany, Belon oysters, and the best vintages of vin ordinaire.
The airport was as Benchley remembered it - dark, airless, rank and nasty, a chaotic jumble of lost luggage, shifting immigration queues, and fights for yellow immunization cards. He looked for his fixer, an African he paid well to meet him and facilitate his transit through immigration and customs. At first he didn't see him - a moment of anxiety - but then he was spotted pushing his way through the crowds towards him.
As always once he had made it outside to his waiting car, he felt relieved. Many were the times when the fixer had been restrained, held, arrested, and Benchley had to fend for himself, negotiating the most intimidating, brutal incivility never held in check, only delayed.
All along the route to the hotel there were military convoys and security checkpoint. At least five times his car was stopped, the driver pulled out and spread-eagled against a half-track while he handed over copies of his papers. No foreigner in Africa ever handed over the originals - the illiterate recruits would never know the difference.
The hotel was cordoned with a ring of armored vehicles and a phalanx of heavily-armed soldiers. Again he was asked for his papers, frisked and only then allowed to enter the hotel. He had sorely misjudged the situation and relied on sanguine appraisals from the Bank and the French Foreign Ministry. The US Embassy and the CIA had seen something else and were preparing for an imminent evacuation. The World Bank, affiliated with the UN did not routinely consult American sources, and so his trip had been approved.
The young woman standing next to him at the reception desk looked afraid, lost, and desperate. The hotel did not have her reservation and all rooms were spoken for. The air conditioning was not working, the small fans fitfully moving the increasingly stale, humid air made little difference, and the young woman's blouse was drenched with sweat. 'Perhaps I can help you', Peter said, and a look of absolute relief crossed her face.
The Bank always assured its official staff suites of rooms at this, the best hotel in town, and there would be ample room for the young woman to make herself comfortable until she was able to sort things out in the morning. Benchley assured her that she would be no burden and her privacy would be respected.
That is how the affair started, as most do - convenient circumstances, the immediate camaraderie of foreigners in a desperately foreign place, and the trust assured between European visitors. They had a simple dinner together and an early breakfast and parted company for the day.
It was only that evening after they both had come home from work that the gunfire erupted, convoys of tanks shook the foundations and rattled the ironwork of the buildings along their route, and the sky over the capital was thick with black smoke.
The city went dark, the hotel was without power, and the few guests who had not been evacuated sat on the poolside terrace. The employees of the hotel had all abandoned ship, and guests were on their own. The most enterprising found the kitchen and brought out cases of beer still cold. Talk was only of rescue - how long would they be isolated in the hotel before their embassies could manage to bring them out?
The only source of news was the BBC World Service short wave, intermittent and indistinct, but clear enough to state that full scale war had broken out and that France had not yet decided whether or not to intervene.
The young woman was Danish, sent by her national development agency to work at the capital's general hospital as a management consultant to help rationalize the inventory and supply chain system, woefully inadequate and inefficient. It was her first trip to Africa, and she was afraid.
An outsider - one who has never been either in Africa or in these situations, might well think that romance would be the last thing on anyone's minds; but nothing could be further from the truth. There is something unifying about being strangers in a strange land and even more so in times like these. Intimacy, whatever the level, is the emotional balm, the anodyne, the tranquilizer to give some reality to a world which seems hopelessly lost.
Suddenly the firing ceased and the grinding of tank tracks on the rutted streets was heard no longer. With no electricity and no traffic in the streets, all that could be heard from the dark terrace were the sounds of the surrounding jungle. No one knew which was worse, the awful sound of mortars and cannonade or the primitive sounds from the darkness beyond the perimeter.
It was at this moment that Benchley and the Danish woman went to their suite, undressed, opened the windows, and lay together under the canopied, netted bed.
The silence of the thousands of miles of jungle with only animal and wild bird sounds in the distance or a roll of thunder was stifling and frightening. The sound of gunfire was almost a relief - at least that meant civilization, or at least a consort of human activity - but as it increased in intensity, they wished for the quiet and peace of the forest.
They were both married, but time, distance, danger, and circumstances make such ordinariness remote. Affairs in the jungle are always about unalloyed irresponsibility. Home, family, children disappear; and then reappear as though nothing had happened.
Affairs in wartime are even more unique as Ondaatje wrote in The English Patient: 'Betrayals during war are childlike compared with betrayals during peace. New lovers are nervous and tender, but smash everything, for the heart is an organ of fire'.
Graham Greene set his The End of the Affair in wartime London, and the affair between Bendrix and Sarah Miles lives and dies under the blitzkrieg of London.
A temporary pause in military action brokered by France and Great Britain allowed for the evacuation of foreign nationals, and Benchley and Birthe said their goodbyes on the tarmac. As for Bendrix and Sarah it was the end of their affair, but as all those lived in foreign places, they would never be forgotten.
The heart of darkness - that primal, savage place so well understood by Conrad is the scene for the most human of all events. When Kurtz says on his deathbed, 'the horror...the horror', he has understood that his unholy, barbaric tribal world was simply an unfettered and untethered expression of human nature.
It was within that world that affairs begin and end. There is something unique, frightening, and irresistibly exciting about the jungle
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.