Love and Obstacles Read online

  One night I went up, but Spinelli was all dressed and ready to go, wearing an unbuttoned black shirt, reeking of shower and cologne, a gold chain dangling below his Adam’s apple. He lit a cigarette at the doorstep, inhaled, and said, “Let’s go!” and I followed without a question. It did not even cross my mind to let my parents know where I was going. They never came to check on me when I was upstairs, and the boredom I had endured certainly entitled me to some adventure. It turned out we were going to a casino around the corner.

  “The guy who owns the casino is Croatian,” Spinelli said. “Used to be in the Foreign Legion, fought in Katanga, then in Biafra. I don’t wanna know the things he did. We do business sometimes, and his daughter likes me pretty well too.”

  I could not see his lips moving as we walked, his voice was disembodied. I was vibrating with curiosity, but could not think of anything to ask him: the reality he implied was so solid as to be impassable. We turned the corner, and there was a splendid neon sign reading PLAYBOY CASINO, the S and O flickering uncertainly. A few white cars and military jeeps were parked on the gravel lot. On the stairs stood a few hookers in ridiculously high heels, neither climbing nor descending, as though afraid they might fall if they moved. But move they did as we passed them; one of them grabbed my forearm—I felt her long nails bending against my sweaty skin—and turned me toward her. She wore a helmetlike purple wig and earrings as elaborate as Christmas ornaments, her breasts pushed up by her tiny bra so I could see half of her left nipple. I stood petrified until Spinelli released me from her grip. “You don’t fuck much, Blunderpuss, do you?” he said.

  Three men were sitting at the roulette table, all plain drunk, their heads falling on their chests between the revolutions of the wheel. The heavy fog of masculine recklessness hung over the table, the green of the felt fractured by the piles of colorful chips. One of the men won, snapped out of his torpor to take the chips with both of his arms, as if embracing a child. “Watch the croupier steal from them,” Spinelli said with delight. “They’re going to lose it all before they get another drink, then they’ll lose some more.” I did watch the croupier, but could not see how the stealing happened: when they won, he pushed the chips toward them; when they lost, he raked the pile toward himself. It all seemed simple and honest, but I believed Spinelli, fascinated with abomination. I started composing a description of this place for Azra. The hallway of hell: the cone of smoke rising to the light above the blackjack table; the hysterical flashing of the two slot machines in the corner; the man standing at the bar in the attire of a plantation owner, light linen suit and straw hat, his right hand hanging down from the bar like a sleeping dog’s head, a ribbon of cigarette smoke slowly passing his knuckles.

  “Let me introduce you to Jacques,” Spinelli said. “He’s the boss.”

  Jacques put the cigarette in his mouth, shook Spinelli’s hand, then looked me over without saying a word.

  “This is Blunderpuss, he’s Bogdan’s kid,” Spinelli said. Jacques’s face was perfectly square, the nose perfectly triangular; his neck was less like a tree stump than a stovepipe of flesh. He bespoke the chummy ruthlessness of someone whose life was organized around his profit and survival; as far as he was concerned, I did not exist in the world of straightforward facts. He put out his cigarette and, in English marred with clunky Croatian consonants, said to Spinelli: “What I am going to do with those bananas? They are rotting.”

  Spinelli looked at me, shook his head in bemused disbelief, and said: “Put them in a fruit salad.”

  Jacques grinned back at him and said: “Let me tell you joke. Mother has very ugly child, horrible, she goes on train, sits in coupe. People come in her coupe, they see child, is very ugly, they cannot look, they leave, go away, disgusting child. Nobody sits with them. Then comes man, smiles at mother, smiles at child, sits down, reads newspapers. Mother thinks, Good man, likes my child, is real good man. Then man takes one banana and asks mother: ‘Does your monkey want banana?’ ”

  Spinelli didn’t laugh, not even when Jacques repeated the punch line: “Does your monkey want banana?” Instead, he asked Jacques: “Is Natalie here?”

  I followed Spinelli through a bead curtain into a room with a blackjack table and four men sitting at it; they all wore uniforms, one of them sand-khaki, the other three olive-green. Natalie was the dealer, her fingers long and limber as she dealt the cards; her pallor was luminous in the dark room; her arms were skinny, no muscles whatsoever; she had bruises on her forearms, scratches on her biceps. On her shoulder she had a vaccine mark, like a small-coin imprint. Spinelli sat at the table and nodded at her, slamming a cigarette pack against his palm. Her cheeks rose, quotation marks forming around her smile. Having dealt the cards, she raised her hand, gently, as though lifting a veil, and scratched her forehead with her pinkie; her hair, pulled tightly into a ponytail, shimmered on her temples. She blinked slowly, calmly; it appeared that pulling her long eyelashes apart required effort. I stood in the dark enthralled, smoking, my heart beating fast, but calmly. Natalie was from out of this world, a displaced angel.

  From thereon in, for a while, there were the three of us. We went places: Spinelli driving his Land Rover reeking of dogs and rope, drumming on the wheel, slapping the dashboard instead of a cymbal, calling Natalie his Monkeypie; Natalie smoking in the passenger seat, looking out; me in the back, the breeze from the open window blowing the cigarette smoke intoxicatingly mixed with her smell directly in my face. The three of us: Spinelli, Monkeypie, Blunderpuss, like characters in an adventure novel.

  On July 27—I remember because I made another attempt at writing—we went to the Cité to look for Philippe, who still hadn’t shown up for work. Presumably, this was a means for Spinelli to expiate his drumming sins, arranged between Tata and him. Spinelli and Natalie picked me up at the crack of dawn; the light was still diffused by the residues of the humid night. We drove toward the slums, against the crowd marching in antlike columns: men in torn shorts and shreds for shirts; women wrapped in cloth, carrying baskets on their heads, swollen-bellied children trotting by their sides; emaciated, long-tongued dogs following them at a hopeful distance. I had never seen anything so unreal in my life. We turned onto a dirt road, which turned into a car-wide path of mounds and gullies. The Land Rover stirred up a galaxy of dust, even when moving at a low speed. Shacks misassembled from rusty tin and cardboard were lined up above a ditch, just about to tumble in. I understood what Conrad meant by inhabited devastation. A woman with a child tied to her back dipped clothes into tea-colored water and slapped the wet tangle with a tennis racket.

  Soon a shouting mob of kids was running after the car. “Check this out,” Spinelli said, and hit the brakes. The kids slammed into the Land Rover; one of them fell on his ass, others backed off and watched, scared, the Land Rover moving on forward. “Oh, stop it!” Natalie said. As soon as the car caught some speed, the kids were running after it again; they didn’t see a Land Rover in the Cité too often. Spinelli hit the brakes again, slapping his thigh with glee. I could see the face of the tallest boy smash against the back window, blood blurting out of his nose. Spinelli’s laughter was deepchested, like the bark of a big dog, ending with a sucking noise. It was infectious; I was roaring with laughter myself.

  We stopped in front of a church, where a choir was singing: thorough, somber voices. Spinelli went in to leave a message for Philippe; Natalie and I stayed behind. He pushed his way through the kids, who parted, murmuring: “Mundele, mundele.” I wanted to say something that would delight Natalie, but all I could think of was to ask: “What are they saying?” “It means ‘skinless,’ ” she said. The tall boy was still bleeding, but could not take his eyes off Natalie. She took a picture of him; he wiped his bloody nose and turned away from the camera; a few other kids covered their faces with their hands. I didn’t know what to say, so I closed my eyes and pretended to nap.

  “You gonna have to get yourself a new cook, Blunderpuss,” Spinelli said, climbing into his seat
. “That’s Philippe’s funeral they’re singing for. The man’s happily dead.”

  From the Cité we went to the market—Le Grand Marché—and wandered around; it was too early to go home. All the smells and colors, all the stuff of the world: snakes, bugs, rats and rodents, clucking chickens and plucked fowl, flat fish, long fish, square fish, and skinned mongrel creatures that seemed to have been slapped together in hell. Spinelli bartered in Lingala and English, plus hands and grimaces. He pretended to be interested in a dried monkey, whose hands grasped nothingness with unappetizing despair; he picked through yams but didn’t buy any. Natalie took pictures of terrified goats waiting to be slaughtered under the counter, of eels still fidgeting in a beaten pot, of worms squirming in a shoe box, which the woman who was selling them protected from the lens with a newspaper.

  These people had no abstract concept of evil, Spinelli said, like we did; for them it was black magic coming from a particular person, so if you wanted to get rid of the evil spell you eliminated the guy. The same thing with the good: it was not something you could aspire to, like we did; you couldn’t get it, either you had it or you didn’t. He delivered his anthropological lecture while bargaining over an enormous, baroque cluster of bananas; he bought it for nothing and loaded it on his shoulder. You could not die of hunger here, he said, ’cause bananas and papayas grew like weeds everywhere. That was why these people never learned to work; they never had to harvest and store food to survive. And their blood was thicker too, which explained why they slept all the time.

  Nobody slept in the Grand Market; everybody was yelling, heckling, bargaining. A mass of people followed us, offering things we could not possibly need: toilet brushes, knitting needles, figurines carved out of what Spinelli claimed was human bone. I ventured to buy a bracelet made of elephant hair and ivory, but only after he had inspected it. It was supposed to be a gift for Azra.

  Later that same day, we went to the InterContinental. We trod the leopard-patterned carpet to the lounge, where a ponytailed pianist played “As Time Goes By.” We got colorful cocktails with tiny umbrellas stuck in unknown fruit. There were men in Zairian attire: wide collars, no ties, bare chests with a lot of gold, hands bejeweled. Spinelli called them the Big Vegetables; they liked to stick out of Mobutu’s ass. And those expensive white whores with them came from Brussels or Paris; they spread their legs for two or three months, then took a little pouch of diamonds back home to live it up for the rest of the year. And that man over there was Dr. Slonsky, a Russian who had come twenty years earlier, when you had to import ass-wipes from Belgium. He used to be Mobutu’s personal physician, but currently he did only the Big Vegetables—Mobutu had a Harvard graduate taking care of him. Slonsky was constantly depressed, because he liked to shoot up.

  Natalie sucked at her straw, not listening, as if she had heard it all already. “Are you okay, Monkeypie?” Spinelli asked her. I wanted to show, in solidarity with her, that I could not be fooled by Spinelli’s gossip, but in truth I was mesmerized.

  Then there was Towser the Brit. His was a garden of earthly delights, with flowers you could not begin to name; his wife worked at the British embassy. And that scruffy youngster sitting next to him was their Italian boyfriend. They were talking to Millie and Morton Fester. They were New Yorkers, but liked to spend time in Africa; they dealt in tribal art, that kind of crap, most of it pilfered away from the natives by the Big Vegetables. Millie wrote fancy porn novels; Morton used to be a photographer for National Geographic, trawled the dark continent for images of bizarre animals. He had a full head of hoary hair, and huge glasses that extended beyond his sunken cheeks; she had the yellow teeth of a veteran smoker. Spinelli actually waved at them, and Morton waved back. Somehow, the waving confirmed Spinelli’s stories; he conjured them into existence with the motion of his hand.

  Then we were joined by Fareed, a Lebanese whose head was smooth like a billiard ball and whom Spinelli affectionately called Dicknose. He bought us a round of drinks, and before I could even agree to it, we went up to Dicknose’s room, where he opened a black briefcase for us. There was a velvet cloth in it; he unwrapped it and proudly exhibited a tiny heap of uncut diamonds, sparkling like teeth in a toothpaste commercial. The diamonds had just arrived from Kasai, Dicknose said, fresh from the bowels of the earth. Natalie touched the heap with the tips of her fingers, worried that those nuggets of light might vanish; her nails were bitten to a bloody pulp. “All you need to make your girl-friend here happy, Blunderpuss, is twenty-five thousand dollars,” Spinelli said. Natalie looked at me and smiled, confirming the price.

  From the InterContinental, we drove to Spinelli’s place through the haze of my exhilaration and the local humidity, past the American embassy, an eight-story building surrounded by a tall wall. Bored guards smoked behind the iron-grille gate. On the top of the embassy was a nest of sky-begging antennas. I imagined a life of espionage and danger; I imagined letters I would send to Azra from behind enemy lines; they would be signed with a false name, but she would recognize my handwriting: When you get this letter, my dear, I will be far beyond the reach of your love.

  “This is where I defend freedom so I can pursue happiness,” Spinelli said. “One day I’ll take you there, Blunderpuss.”

  As we climbed the stairs of our building, I walked by the apartment where my family should have been having dinner, but it felt as though they were not there, as though our place were empty. It could have been frightening, the absence, but I was too excited to care.

  Straight from the doorstep, Spinelli went to his magneto-phone and turned it on. The reels started revolving slowly, indifferently. “Ladies and gentlemen, ‘Immigrant Song,’ ” he hollered, and then howled along with the music:

  “AaaaAaaaAaaaaaaAaaa Aaaa . . .”

  I put my hands on my ears to exaggerate my suffering, and Natalie laughed. Still screaming, Spinelli rummaged through the debris on his coffee table until he found what I instantly identified as a joint. He interrupted his howl to light it up, suck it in briskly, and pass it on to Natalie. I was innocent in the way of drugs, but when Natalie, holding her breath so that her eyes were bulging and, somehow, bluer for that, when Natalie offered it to me, I took it and inhaled as much as I could. Naturally, I coughed it all out immediately, saliva and phlegm erupting toward her and Spinelli. Her laughter was snorty, pushing her cheek apples up, dilating her nostrils—she had to lie down and hold her tummy. A chenille of snot hung from my nose, nearly reaching my chin. “If you can’t stand the heat, Blunderpuss,” Spinelli whinnied, “stay out of the oven.” Well, I was enjoying the oven, and once the cough subsided, I sipped the smoke out of the joint and kept it in my lungs, resisting the devilish scratching in my throat, waiting for the high to arrive.

  Spinelli sat at his drum set and grabbed the sticks. He listened intently to a different song now, waiting, only to hit the timpani hard, playing along with the music, biting his lips to express passion.

  “The greatest goddamn bridge in the history of rock ’n’ roll,” he said. He attacked the timpani again, even though the song moved on, and he kept doing it. I recognized the beat: it was what had frightened us the first night.

  “What’s the name of that song?” I asked.

  “ ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ ” Spinelli said.

  “It sounds so African.”

  “That ain’t African. That’s Bonzo, white as they come.”

  Natalie took the joint from my hand; her fingers were soft and cold, her touch eerily gentle. I leaned back and stared at the fan revolving frenziedly, as if a helicopter were buried upside down in the ceiling. Spinelli stopped drumming to get a hissy puff.

  “See,” he said, exhaling, “you’re just an innocent kid, Blunderpuss. When I was your age I did things I wouldn’t do now, but I did them then so I don’t have to do them now.”

  He was rewinding the tape, pressing the Stop and Play buttons alternately, trying to find the beginning. The tape squealed and yelped until he pinpointed the moment of
silence before “Stairway to Heaven.”

  “There’s so much you don’t know, son. Do you know what you don’t know?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You have no idea how much you don’t know. Before you know anything, you have to know what you don’t know.”

  “I know.”

  “The fuck you do.”

  “Leave him alone,” Natalie said, dreamily.

  “Shut up, Monkeypie.” He took another puff, spat on the minuscule butt, and flicked it toward the ashtray on the coffee table, missing by a yard. Then he asked me:

  “Why are you here?”

  “Here? In Kinshasa?”

  “Forget Kinshasa, Blunderpuss. Why are you here on this goddamn planet? Do you know?”

  “No,” I had to admit. “I don’t.”

  Natalie sighed, suggesting she knew where it was all heading.

  “Exactly,” Spinelli said, and smashed a cymbal with the sticks. “That’s exactly your problem.”

  “Are you okay, sweetheart?” Natalie asked me, extending her hand to touch me, but she couldn’t reach me and I couldn’t move.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  “Listen to him: ‘Yeah, sure,’ ” Spinelli said. “He sounds like an American.”

  “Let him be.”

  But “Stairway to Heaven” was picking up, the drums kicking in. “That’s the way.” Spinelli leapt in excitement. “There is always a tunnel at the end of the light.”

  By this time he was leaning over me, blocking the view of the ceiling fan.

  “Steve,” Natalie said without conviction. “Leave him alone.”

  “He is alone,” Spinelli said. “We live as we dream. Fucking alone.”