We three could but look on in stupefied awe at the primitively powerful display of faith. The shaman continued to prance about with the dog while shaking the blood-soaked branch over the verdant terrain. The hound began to wail and the village leader joined in, howling like a coyote with a wounded leg, almost limping yet never missing a beat in the disbursement of the blood.
Some thirty or forty minutes had passed since the beginning of the ceremony when a dead silence enveloped the crowd. The sage and his sextons stood statue-like around the fire.
I looked at MacDonald and Moraes, but I must confess my overall inability to produce anything even vaguely similar to a human sound. Their eyes seemed to be popping from their sockets and I suspect mine looked no different.
When I awoke I was staring at MacDonald’s big, oval, smiling face.
“What happened?” I muttered.
“Dunno Charles, seems like you passed out or something,” he replied, still grinning like an overgrown, mischievous kid.
“Or something…” I shook my head, trying to clear it.
“How long have I been out?”
“’Bout twenty minutes or so. You just collapsed.”
The cemetery was empty; just the three of us staring at each other in disbelief. They helped me to my feet and practically dragged me back to the car. I sat in the front and Moraes drove with Mac in the back seat.
He was driving so fast, I was forced to ask him, “How do you see in this darkness?”
“I just keep my eyes on the line – look ahead and see the line,” he stated matter-of-factly.
The night sky was opaque; I was petrified. The car seemed to hurtle through the night like some phantom sled slithering along a trail of ice. The trees swayed in slow motion, distorted and out of sync with the velocity of the automobile.
The little white station wagon stopped in front of my blue and white prefabricated, wooden house with a vine climbing up the rope tress tied to the porch. I tumbled out of the car and wobbled toward the front door. Mac hollered out that he’d bring back the car in the morning.
The next day we traded notes – Mac and Moraes informed me of what I had missed:
“Not much, Charles,” said Moraes, twisting his Rudolph Valentino type moustache like they did in the old, silent movies.
“The old guy continued to stare at the ground and repeated that same chant a couple o’ more times. Then everybody started to shout and scream somethin’… what was that Mac?” Mac smiled.
“Mkono mmoja hauchinji ng’ombe, which loosely translated means ‘One hand cannot slaughter a cow.’ It’s an old African saying and the implication is pretty obvious.”
I
scratched my head, as if the obvious significance to which Mac alluded
was escaping me.
MacDonald
The giant yellow bulldozer trundled backward and then thrust forward, shuddering and wheezing black smoke until the air was infected. The huge front blade hit the ground, filling the shovel and rising like a victorious pugilist’s fist brandished at the muggy, gray sky. I stared at the reddish-brown dirt, dripping like powdery blood through the shark-like teeth. My eyes discerned pieces of bone and what must have been remains of flesh mixed in the dirt – an eerie sight. A skull here, a femur there, a few ribs scattered in the heaps of soil. The dozer then twisted like a scourged animal and lumbered to the ditch that had been dug some 400 yards from the burial site. The villagers just looked on, muted by the roar of the engine and by sheer disbelief.
Mac, Moraes, and I followed with our eyes the robotic, menacing gyrations of the giant yellow contraption. The stench of diesel and rotting flesh reminded us that words would have been superfluous. How many trips would it take to fill the ditch? I tried, in vain, to predict the answer to that question.
A warm breeze whistled through the bush not unlike some alien form of speech. I wanted to decipher its code. I wanted very much to understand its mystery and its charm. As we headed back to the main camp, my thoughts hung suspended in such musings. I was sure that we had witnessed an event capable of changing our lives. I didn’t know just how much.
I hadn’t seen Mac for two or three weeks, when one very hot, sticky day I got a call on the radio. It was Masasi, my field-lieutenant, asking me to go to the village where we had excavated the burial ground. He didn’t say why, but from the tone of his voice I knew not to hesitate. I got into my car and drove as fast as the bumpy dirt road would allow. When I got to the clearing, which lay precisely in the center of the village, I saw from a distance the white Volkswagen beetle, immobile, with the driver’s door ajar. I could make out the silhouette of a black giant sitting behind the wheel.
As I approached the car I could distinguish my friend, Mac, with a smile that seemed to be frozen on his face. Masasi ran toward me, a look of despair clouding his features, and began to babble in Kiswahili.
“It’s Mac… he’s frozen solid… we can’t get him to budge… he won’t say a word…”
“What happened? Was it an accident?”
Masasi made an effort to compose himself: “He was driving through this spot, right here where the graveyard used to be, and he just froze up. The car shut off by itself and we can’t move him.”
“Mac, look at me, man…” I could not discern the least hint of movement – his visage actually resembled the ebony statues that were so commonly sold along the roadsides.
“It’s useless!” Masasi bleated.
I carried on this way for about twenty minutes. He did not so much as blink. The more time passed, the greater my apprehension grew. I shook him, slapped him, and shouted at him; nothing altered his hypnotic, trance-like state.
Finally I gave up, I turned to Masasi: “Listen, we’ve got to get him to a hospital. Now…”
Masasi, not waiting for me to finish my sentence, turned to the workers who had rallied around the car and commanded them to help lift him into the jeep: “Tunahitaji daktari kwa haraka!”
These sullen fellows were not accustomed to doing anything quickly, but sensing the urgency of the moment, I suspect they were driven by some heretofore unknown force of solidarity, and rushed to get the company vehicle parked some yards away. Following great physical exertion, we managed to get Mac from the front seat of the VW to the back of the jeep, still in the same motionless state. Masasi took the wheel and, with the speed of insanity, we headed to the hospital at Kilosa, forty some odd miles from the village.
The wine-red African dusk was settling over the rolling grassy plains. We pulled into the rock-strewn patio and cut off the engine. Masasi ran into the hospital and, almost instantaneously, emerged with two young nurses in starched white uniforms. All I could think was ‘What are they going to do?’ A few moments later two large, surly men followed, and the four of us pulled the unmoving gentle giant from the back seat. I saw my friend being carted away with the help of a twisted wheelchair.
After slamming the car door, I trailed into the lobby of the white stucco building that would never have been recognized as a hospital anywhere else in the world. Mac had already been taken to the x-ray room, where they would take black and white pictures of his skull and find nothing. They would scan and probe his body for two full weeks, only to discover that they had no explanation for his ailment; explanation, indeed!
When
he was first struck down by this
malady Mac weighed over two hundred pounds; he died
skin and bones, one hundred and nineteen pounds of wrinkled black flesh
and crumbling white skeleton. He never emerged from that coma-like
state, and one very hot, clammy day he just stopped breathing. Just
as bafflingly as he had taken ill, he had died. We were never
notified of any funeral; I don’t even know if he had family. He
simply vanished from our view.
Moraes
Roughly two months after Mac’s premature end, Moraes was slated to return home, which in his case meant Lisbon. Moraes, the methodical, disciplined, logical, bean-counter had finished his contract. He had never brought his wife and her little daughter to the job. All the while, he worked and they remained safe and sound back in their cozy home in Portugal. He had only gone to Europe twice during his two year stint, and both times he returned to work gloomier and more circumspect than before. Neither of us had commented the death of our friend; a few words were exchanged right after we learned about it, and then, all we could do was nod our heads.
He stopped by the house the afternoon before his flight. His customary gloomy demeanor was more accentuated than usual. We spoke briefly about his homecoming and all the things he missed. It was odd; at the time I didn’t take notice, but he never mentioned his wife or her daughter. He spoke about the food he wanted to taste again, the smell of the streets in his hometown, the sooty windows in his living-room and the furniture that had seen better days.
“Hey,” he said, coming as close to a smile as I had ever seen, “don’t you let anything happen to you. When you come to Lisbon we’ll get together.”
“Yeah, you can count on it.” I boasted a confidence that I surely did not have.
The sun shone at oblique angles on the concrete floor of the office that was, and always had been, spattered with that infamous red dust. Juma, my assistant, tapped lightly on the glass pane that was the top half of the door. I could see him carrying a dirty white envelope with international postage affixed to the top right-hand corner.
“Barua, ndugu,” he said rather flatly, fanning himself with the letter. Juma called me ndugu which technically meant close friend but, at the time, the country’s afro-socialist government had adopted it as a synonym for comrade.
From time to time I received letters from friends and family. I expected to see my father’s fluid scribble on the face of the envelope, but I was wrong. The handwriting was new to me, piquing my curiosity. As I stared at the Portuguese stamp my heart dropped. I felt a sinking in the pit of my stomach.
As
Juma turned to leave, I took the ivory letter-opener from the mug on
my desk and inserted the dingy blade in the soiled, white paper; the
weight alone told me that there was more to this letter than I first
imagined.
Dear Charles,
You don’t know me; I’m the cousin of Antonio Moraes, whom I believe was your friend, more so because he asked me to write you concerning what has happened here. Please excuse my English; I will try to be as clear as possible.
As you know, Antonio returned not ten days ago from Tanzania. We all went to pick him up at the airport, Celeste, his wife, Sandra, her daughter, and myself. All were glad to see him and he appeared to be as content as he ever was, which as you must know, was not saying much.
After a long, quiet dinner I left them seated around the dinner table, in utter silence, and went home.