Barbery Byfield was past the age of sexual conquest and even farther afield in her much later years when her only goal in life was filling time.
She had been married to Harper Byfield for many years - a rather dour but successful marriage. They had remained together despite infidelities and irresponsibility, and when Harper died and Barbery suddenly found herself alone in a house which once had company but now was as empty and echoing as an abandoned church.
'I wish there were bells to ring', she mused as she wandered from room to room wondering what to do with it all. She wasn't about to rattle around the old museum, using each room in organized but purposeless fashion, her goal of filling space just as she was beginning to realize the importance of filling time.
It had come to that, after all, a rather sad coda at the end of an active life. Boardroom, playroom, bedroom...that last a sore point, since there were many bedrooms on both sides of the aisle, his and hers, with his jealousy intruding on her desire to escape from the barebones sex of their marriage...and many other 'inner rooms of the heart', as pulp romance novelist Emily Carver Blount described the secrets of the female heart.
Barbery was no romantic and happened upon the Blount book by accident in the waiting room of her dentist; but it was one of a kind, a novel that jumped out of the genre and actually made sense. Her inner rooms had indeed been neglected for so long that they were now musty and cold, but it was too late for any Mr. Right to open them.
She was resigned to her age, her passed pull-date, and her consignment to routine. At least Harper got her out of the house on occasion, the occasional evening at the Old Ebbitt Grill for martinis and oysters, the Edgar bar at the Mayflower (named for J. Edgar Hoover who used to go there late at night with his longtime lover, given a quiet table in the corner, and Kentucky Bourbon on the house), and the occasional weekend on the Bay, and now she was on her own.
A woman of certitude, will, and ambition, she now found herself pondering the menu at the Four Seasons unable to decide between the veal hops and the flounder and was very angry at herself for her indecision.
'Why not a Danube cruise?', said a friend and former Vassar classmate also recently widowed and already an experienced traveler. 'The Harvard one is good, but so is Southern Comfort, a Lindblad cruise of the Mediterranean. Smart docents, good food, interesting people'; but for Barbery that would be the last straw - a depressing, floating widow's walk with each widow pacing the deck like the old whaling wives of Nantucket waiting for their husbands' ships to come in.
As time went on and the NY Times crossword puzzle became tedious, her excursions to the East Wing and the Corcoran dutiful and boring, and her walks along the C&O Canal only vaguely reminiscent of real woodsy outings, she reconsidered the cruise idea, but refused to consider the Danube or the Rhine, cattle-car excursions with their stops at the most ordinary and predictable places.
No, if she was going to travel, there had to be some oomph in it, and when she saw a brochure about a trip to the African savannah, she thought she might have something. Wild animals held no particular interest for her. She had always been inattentive at the zoo when taken by her parents as a young girl. It smelled bad. The animals never did anything, and there was nothing to eat. She could take them or leave them and accepted them and zoos as part of her education,. So an excursion to Africa just to see them? 'I don't think so'.
But Africa is not a neutral place and raises interest and passions in all comers. Barbery's graduate school classmate and former World Bank senior official was on one side of the fence. Africa was a pestilential shithole, a tribal, primitive, lawless, and corrupt place he was glad to leave. Her progressive friends said going there was a transformational experience, seeing the black man, the heir to humanity's original creation, a sensitive, highly evolved being attuned to the forest environment from which he came. And the few acquaintances who knew Africa only through the filter of tooth and claw couldn't stop themselves from singing the praises of the plains, the veldt, and nature wild.
The travel agency whose brochure Barbery saw was 'an alternate site' which catered to the adventurer, the path less travelled, those with the spirit of Burton, Mungo Park and Rene de Chaillu, those willing to take a chance in the Dark Continent and to 'see its secrets revealed.'
'What have I got to lose?', Barbery asked and proceeded to sign up for the trip.
The trip would be a mix of urban and rural - the 'real' Africa said the brochure, Kinshasa, a river trip up the Congo, Nairobi, with a final three days at the world-famous Treetops Lodge.
The trip began in London where the tour was to meet at Gatwick, not Heathrow, and the flight was not a non-stop but due to fuel considerations and union rules would make a short stop in the Azores and then proceed to Kinshasa. The plane was a reconditioned 737 with passenger instructions written in Arabic, and old Sudanese Airlines boarding passes in the seat pockets. There were two crew members who had been seconded from Sudan until the tour company could recruit and train their own staff.
Kinshasa was a nightmare. The airport was a chaotic, malarial, miasma. Touts, hawkers, cab drivers, facilitators, and fixers shouted for attention, bullying their way to the arriving passengers, grabbing hand luggage, promising safe passage through immigration, customs, and security, shoving, pushing, clearing a path forward through sprawling families, tethered goats, guards with automatic rifles, and inoperative luggage carousels.
The tour agency Kinshasa man who was to meet them had been detained by airport police and could be seen, handcuffed and cossetted behind the glass partition between the arrival lounge and the outside concourse, his hand-painted sign, N'GOMO TOURS, ripped and held like a standard by one of his police handlers.
The hotel Far Horizons was a fleabag, an old wooden three story structure built over a sewage drainage canal and on the commercial street beside it. The rooms were airless, windowless, and unairconditioned, the bed linens grey and unwashed, and the locks on the doors had long ago been broken off.
There was nowhere to turn, not one European in sight, the N'Gomo tour representative, released from custody in time to rescue the group and take them to the hotel in an old Bluebird school bus, had disappeared. They were alone, desperate, frightened, and anxious.
'I am here', said Alphonse, the tour guide who appeared in the lobby early the next morning, 'and off we go'.
The passengers huddled on the foredeck of the steamer as it made its way up through the choking tangle of water hyacinths, its 1960s-era diesel hammering away, smoke belching out of the single stack amidships. It was Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn on the African Queen all over again, and for all intents and purposes they were heading into the heart of darkness.
Engine trouble, a stop or two at village outposts, manioc and monkey meat ('Our traditional, local cuisine'), and bitten alive, was the routine; and no group of travelers was more happy than Barbery and her fellows when they returned to Kinshasa.
For most World Bank officials Lagos and Kinshasa were considered to be the very worst places in all of Africa. Like the N'gomo Tours passengers, all arrivals are met at the airport, accosted, harassed, intimidated, and bullied; and the only survivors were diplomats met by embassy armed guards and carried off in armored convoys.
Little did the credulous and naive Barbery know of this, and so desperate was she to shift her life into another gear and travel down unexplored roads, meet unusual people, and experience life in the raw, that she found herself in the hands of a fly-by-night, sham agency, in one of the most pestilential hellholes on earth, and with no sign of respite or relief.
She looked up at the wall-sized poster of the Chief of the Congolese Armed forces pasted high on the riverport customs house where they landed and began to cry.
Somehow they made it to Nairobi and were settled in a new cement block hotel in the center of town. The N'gomo guide told them that they were not to go out of the hotel for any reason, for gangs of Sudanese ex-combatants, Houthi gunrunners, and common carjackers and kidnappers ruled the streets at night. The sound of gunfire, sirens, and shouts from every direction kept them awake all night.
Thinking that a tour-ending stay at the Treetops Lodge, one of Africa's famous wildlife preserve hotels, would be the place retained in the group's memory more than any of the other more challenging parts of the tour, they arranged through tribal connections and dash, a few rooms in the new, yet unfinished wing. The annex was an afterthought, a kind of Quonset hut/trailer park, and management had already decided to tear it down as unproductive, and so the tour spent another uncomfortable, hot, stifling, and mosquito-ridden night.
Despite Barbery's indifference to wild animals, she delighted in the giraffes, wildebeests, antelope, elephants and tigers they saw on the Serengeti. She still didn't care about them per se, but it was all so clean and pristine, a Disneyland theme park preserved and isolated from the 'real' Africa.
'So, how was it?', asked her Vassar classmate, a well-turned out Georgetown matron used to Nantucket and St. Bart's and had never given even an idle thought to setting foot in the jungle.
'Were the black people there anything like ours here?'
What more was there to say?
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