Читать книгу Cruel City - Mongo Beti - Страница 13

What has become of the city of Tanga since the events described in this story? As if anything could really happen in so few years! Today, everything is racing ahead in Africa, yet what upheavals could the city have possibly experienced? One can only hope for some manner of change; it would simply be too painful to accept such downtrodden people unless the city were marching boldly toward a less ferocious destiny; unless it were feverishly crossing a night that will soon give way to the sharp brightness of day.

At that time, Tanga certainly looked like other cities in the country: corrugated iron, white walls, red gravel streets, lawns, and farther out, scattered about with no apparent order, little mud huts roofed with dull thatch, naked children in the mud, or on the grass of the courtyard, with housewives on the stoop. Yet, upon arriving in Tanga, the astonished visitor might say, though perhaps only to himself, “There’s something different about this city!” Tanga didn’t lack for distinction.

Imagine an immense clearing in what explorers, geographers, and journalists like to call the equatorial rainforest. Picture, in the middle of this clearing, a large hill bordered by smaller ones. Tanga, or what was in reality two Tangas, sat on the opposing flanks of this central rise. The commercial and administrative Tanga sat on one, while the other— the foreign—Tanga occupied the steep and narrow southern flank. This latter part of the city was cut off from the nearby forest by a deep dark river spanned by a reinforced concrete bridge. The river was one of Tanga’s main attractions, a kind of permanent circus. One only had to look and wait. Soon, a houseboat would sweep into view upstream. It would slide softly through the water, one man standing in the bow and one in the stern. Each would lift a long, a very long pole: each in turn would plunge that pole down into the water until it hit bottom. Then they pushed off with all their might, thereby moving the vessel along.

Inside the boat, bulging bags were piled up against the bamboo railing; a woman squatting on the deck washed tattered clothes next to a smoking kitchen fire. The crowd amassed on the bridge never got tired of this spectacle; these huts mounted on lashed-together canoes had traveled hundreds of kilometers. The craft would come heavily to rest on the sand, one next to the other.

Sometimes it was enormous logs of wood that had been lashed together. These rafts likewise came from far away. These were steered by men, usually naked, who were superbly indifferent to the catcalls that drifted down from the bridge. They calmly maneuvered their craft up to the log station. Once they had arrived, one of the two cranes stationed on the wharf would clatter into action. Panting and grinding, rolling along its track, it moved toward the river. Then it stopped and leaned dangerously over the water; it finally came upright again with a log clenched in its teeth. Then it turned and was gone. It was a monstrous object. It would be hard to imagine anything uglier.

This machine made an elephant look handsome. The crane proceeded to pile the logs in a lot where one could hear the angry snap of axes smoothing off the tree trunks, rounding out their rough edges, reducing them to dimensions fit for the factory and for civilization. A miserable wheezy little train arrived from a nearby depot without a station and picked up the load of newly squared logs. It carried them off, bleached and numbered, lying on the train cars in well-behaved rows, heading God knows where.

On this side of the town, everything seemed to live for these logs, all the way to the sawmill in the distance, where one could make out gangly chimneys rhythmically spewing forth clouds of smoke into the sky. Here the log was king.

Climbing up the hill, one entered Tanga’s commercial center. The “commercial district,” as it was known, could have just as easily been called the Greek district. All the store signs sounded Greek: Caramvalis, Depotakis, Pallogakis, Mavromatis, Michalides, Staberides, Nikitopoulos— and so forth. Their shops were built at ground level with verandas where indigenous tailors set up shop with their apprentices. You could find absolutely everything in these stores. Behind the counter, Black clerks and their assistants warmly, indeed, too warmly, invited you in. Theirs was the place where you would find the best prices. Theirs was the place where you would find the highest quality merchandise.

You rarely saw the Greek boss, except during the cocoa season, that is, from December to February (for if down below wood was king, here cocoa reigned supreme). So eight o’clock was ringing and Mr. Pallogakis—hair slicked back, olive-skinned, fresh looking, soberly garbed in white, lean, a hooked and paternalistic nose—was already at his post in front of a steelyard, surrounded by his men, beaters who cried out, vociferated, stamped about frantically, and slapped their thighs. From afar, they sang the praises of their boss with a few colorful and evocative words. If you appeared disdainful, they came into the street, grabbed you by the collar, and said, “Put down your load right there, on the sidewalk, we’ll put it back on your head if need be. Listen to us. Sixty francs a kilo . . . Think about it, brother. Where else will you find such a price?” And so it went. Mr. Pallogakis started the day with a rate that was higher than the official price: the news spread like wildfire. The peasants came running with their bags. And the more there were, the more came rushing in, the easier it became for Mr. Pallogakis to progressively and imperceptibly lower his price and commit various other forms of fraud.

The incessant traffic in Tanga gave it a distinct drama. For example, no day passed without someone being crushed by an automobile or a spectacular crash between two trucks. Indeed, there seemed to be too many trucks in Tanga. Perhaps this was simply because they came from the four corners of the earth: each factory had sent at least one such vehicle to represent it. There were long bony ones that looked like a prehistoric animal; others were gigantic and full bodied and made enough noise to drive you mad; still others were short and squat. They came from the North, the South, the East, and the West, all at insane speeds. Without slowing down, they barreled into the city, leaving a triumphant cloud of dust in their wake, or they splattered everyone and everything with red mud: the streets of Tanga weren’t paved at the time of this story.

This commercial district ended at the peak of the hill with a block of administrative buildings that were too white, too showy. They sparkled in the sun, the sight of them for some unknown reason giving off an implacable sense of desolation.

The other Tanga, the unspecialized part of the city, the Tanga to which the administrative buildings turned their backs—out of a lack of appreciation, no doubt—was the Tanga that belonged to the natives; this Tanga—of huts— fanned out over the northern flank of the hill. This particular area of the city was divided into innumerable little neighborhoods, though these were actually just a series of little dips in the landscape, each of which had an evocative name. You could see the same kinds of buildings that you might encounter along the road through the forest except that here they were more decrepit, squatter; they were constructed in a manner corresponding to the increased difficulty of obtaining materials the closer you got to the city.

Two Tangas . . . Two worlds . . . Two destinies!

These two Tangas held equal sway over the locals. During the day, the Tanga of the Southside, the commercial district of money and wage labor, emptied the other Tanga of its human substance. The Black population filled up the Tanga where it worked. The streets then came alive with workers, peddlers, cooks, servants, dishwashers, prostitutes, functionaries, underlings, beaters, con artists, the lazy, and forced laborers. Each morning, the peasants of the local forest would join the existing mass of people, either because they just wanted to broaden their horizons, or because they needed to sell the product of their work; among the locals, a particular mentality had arisen that was so contagious that the men who periodically arrived from outside were contaminated as long as they remained in the city. Like those of the distant forest who retained their authenticity, the people of Tanga were apathetic, vain, too playful, and overly sensitive. But on top of that, there was something else in them now, a certain inclination toward venality, apprehension, alcoholism, and everything that reflects a disregard for human life—as is the case in any country where material interests are paramount. The city held the record for murders . . . and suicides! One killed or killed oneself over everything, over anything, sometimes even over a woman. It even happened that a Greek would be gunned down because of his penchant for fondling women, as long as they were pretty and had entered his store. One day, the husband would burst into the store with a rusty old hunting rifle or, for lack of anything better, a bush knife, and without further ado, would punch his ticket.

The locals’ love of fighting and blood grew daily. When they had had enough of working each other over, they turned to the phenomenal number of merchants who lived there. They had quickly discovered that they could conduct this little game—of which nobody knew the tricks or rules—with impunity. One simply had to avoid confronting the French. But if the latter should happen, you knew what to expect. After all, isn’t that the most important thing? Out of bravado, certain people accepted the risk. The police nabbed these folks immediately, and that was the last one ever heard of them—unless they were still talked about decades later. As for the civilian members of the colonial administration’s hierarchy, they seemed to be paid to remain as invisible as possible.

The local population had therefore arrived from the four corners of the country. But they increasingly thought of themselves as inhabitants of Tanga rather than coming from the South, East, North, or West. One could observe them in the streets: they laughed, talked, and argued, all with exaggerated gestures that suggested that they were the masters of the universe. They ran, walked, bumped into each other, and fell off their bicycles, all with a certain spontaneity, all that remained of their lost innocence. They moved, danced, and sang under the nervous eye of the guardians of order whose rounds made the city look like it was in a permanent state of emergency.

At night, activity changed headquarters. North Tanga brought its people home and suddenly it became incredibly alive. Every night, it celebrated the return of these prodigal children. It seemed as if North Tanga needed to quench their thirst for something they might soon lose forever: joy, naked and real; happiness. But this they couldn’t understand. They could no longer say where they came from except by naming their village or tribe. They didn’t know where they were going or why. Indeed, they were surprised to find themselves part of such a crowd, and no less astonished at the strange sense of isolation produced by the surrounding tropical forest in which they felt themselves individually.

In North Tanga, one out of five huts served as a bar: watered down red wine, poorly stored palm wine, and corn meal beer—usually the best choice—flowed liberally. Those in the know could also find Africa gin, a famous local beverage with a very high alcohol content. The administration had officially made the pretense of outlawing its sale . . . and its distillation. An illegal network of distribution, purchase, sale, and transportation of this rare beverage had accordingly been set up. In any case, they couldn’t actually prohibit its fabrication since they didn’t bother to look at what was happening in the forest.

The dance houses also represented an irresistible attraction to inhabitants of both sexes and were violently lit, melodious, and, more often still, cacophonic, percussive, and full of a singular fauna. Dressed up in detachable cardboard collars, or stuffed into poorly tailored dresses and skirts, they wore clothes that were stiff, gaudy, borrowed, and fake. Luckily, they didn’t cost much. The dancers also frequently gathered by twos, threes, or more, around a cala-bash of wine, beat an empty crate for lack of drums, while someone picked at a guitar or banjo, thereby improvising a party where fantasy was the rule despite the locale’s barrenness.

It goes without saying that there was no public lighting in Tanga. The numerous local thugs took advantage of this to transform the streets into a place where scores could be settled. That is why the darkness constantly echoed with the sound of heavy steps, frenetic chases, and blows that popped like a Browning pistol. These episodes of brutality, by force of habit, had come to be of interest only to those they directly impacted; the rest of the population remained completely indifferent. Because good fiscal management and a sense of prudence dictated a total absence of policing in this part of town, to a stranger, these fights could last a disconcertingly long time.

So, how many souls called North Tanga home? Sixty, eighty, one hundred thousand, how could you tell? No census had ever been taken. Besides, the population was in a constant state of flux. Men left the forest for financial or sentimental reasons; or often out of a need for change. They stayed for a while, testing out the city. A few decided that it was unthinkable to dance in one hut while the neighboring house was mourning someone whose body remained unburied, and, disgusted, they simply returned to their village, where they spoke of the city with sadness, wondering what the world was coming to. Others, convinced it would just take time to get used to such odd customs, settled down for good. These men sent for their wives and children or, if they were young and single, brought their younger brother or sister along as a constant and living reminder of the village they might never see again, and then, little by little, as the years went by, they forgot it, instead focusing on problems of an entirely different nature. Some, deciding that they couldn’t fulfill their ambitions in Tanga, moved on to another city.

All the same, this instability couldn’t justify the absence of a census, since the administration was completely unaware of these movements. It was equally unaware of this semi-humanity’s joys, its sufferings, or its aspirations, all things, which, no doubt, it would have found confusing. It had never tried to discern, to understand, or to account for any of this. When it did finally deign to pay any attention to these people, two categories appeared to be particularly sought after. First, those who, having made it past innumerable stumbling blocks, had somehow achieved a semblance of social ascendance: the treasury suddenly decided that for this group a little taxation might be appropriate. Second, those who, from close or afar, consciously or unconsciously, by deed or by word, threatened the order of things, a particular conception of the world deemed necessary for certain reasons, or for that matter a particular group’s interests; in the case of this latter type, things were simple: they were given full room and board somewhere and all would be back to normal, for the greater glory of humanity.

Tanga, North Tanga that is, was a true child of Africa. It had barely been born when it found itself alone in the great wilderness. It grew and developed too rapidly. It moved and evolved at random, its inhabitants like children abandoned to their own devices. Like them, the city didn’t question its own fate, even when confused. No one could say what the city would become, not the geographers, not the journalists, and even less the explorers.