“In times past, when people wandered the world on foot, rode on horseback, or sailed in ships, the journey itself accustomed them to the change. Images of the earth passed ever so slowly before their eyes, the stage revolved in a barely perceptible way. The voyage lasted weeks, months. The traveler had time to grow used to another environment, a different landscape. The climate, too, changed gradually. Before the traveler arrived from a cool Europe to the burning Equator, he already had left behind the pleasant warmth of Las Palmas, the heat of Al-Mahara, and the hell of the Cape Verde Islands.
Today, nothing remains of these gradations. Air travel tears us violently out of snow and cold and hurls us that very same day into the blaze of the tropics. Suddenly, still rubbing our eyes, we find ourselves in a humid inferno. We immediately start to sweat. If we've come from Europe in the wintertime, we discard overcoats, peel off sweaters. It's the first gesture of initiation we, the people of the North, perform upon arrival in Africa.”
Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Shadow of the Sun
It is not the climate that shocks me but the place. It is just after six and the sun has set. The air is, relatively speaking, cool. It is humid and as I inhale I am reminded of a smell I cannot place. It is comfortable to breathe, vaguely comforting. It is not the acrid smell of burning garbage, nor is it the smell of cooking.
There are three of us: the person who has come to collect us, myself and another volunteer who is 30 years my senior. One of the parking lot's many guards stands straight, in the middle of the lane, a few steps from our van. The van is white, with large black lettering on the side, and reminds me of scenes I have seen on newscasts.
I am thrust into a place I do not know. In a mix of ignorance, conditioning and nostalgia, my body thinks it is returning to Tanzania. Abidjan's pristine airport, with its efficient officers and modern signage, do not belong in the place my body is expecting. We drive a short while to the hotel. Pharmacies are marked with flashing green crosses, reminding me of Italy. Women carry stacks of pots on their heads. This place feels much wealthier than I expected. We pass a police checkpoint but do not stop.
The hotel lobby is old but clean. We check in and are led through a maze of yellowing, abandoned corridors. Lights flicker. We reach the room and my heart sinks. It is musty, brightly lit by two bare neon tubes. Water has decayed the ceiling and the bleak, smudged walls. In the bathroom, pipes that lead nowhere stick out of the bathroom walls, their ends plied shut. A 40-watt bulb casts a yellow glow over a mouldy ceiling.
The style of the furnishings is in line with the style of the building: off-white, off-yellow, off-cream, with the occasional hardened wax puddle and many scratches. At the far end of the long room is a balcony, overlooking an outdoor parking lot filled with the now-familiar white vehicles with big black lettering.
I mourn my situation, repeatedly consider why I'm here and conclude it is best to sleep.
Do I detect the beginnings of a novel?
ReplyDeleteSomething like C.S. Forester, author of the "African Queen" and the "Hornblower" series, where he describes in "Long Before Forty" (1967) (not a who dunnit) how he gathered his ideas together before sitting down to write. I think it went something like this: "pieces of flotsam and jetsam sinking to the bottom of a lake...... where every once in awhile I would reach down into the depths to pull them up to see how things are growing....."