Mozambique: Getting Help

Roy Brown - Hard Luck Blues

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     The traffic rolled by like an empty song played on a rubber band stretched tight. I could feel its discordant twang in my guts. The snap was coming.

     Africa-time. No clocks, no bus schedules, no ETDs or ETAs. Time was a heart drum that I couldn’t play. The earth and my body, the sky and my soul are not pounding our feet against the dance floor in step.

     I missed the bus.

     I would say many minutes passed, but they could have been hours or they could have been seconds. Time passed and I stood at the edge of the road as the muck of the city started sucking me under.

     Gray, gray, everything gray.

     “Mother,” a little boy said, shoving sticky hands under my nose, “Give me my pen.”

     I shot the kid a sideways glance. “I’m not your mother and you don’t have a pen. I do, and it’s mine.”

     The words missed by a mile.

     He tried again: “Mother, give me my pen.”

     A “no” snapped quick across my tongue before I had a chance to feel the guilt-knife twist in my side. I have. He does not. I have seen this poverty for a while now and I have not grown numb to it. I have grown sick of it.

     Eyes still blank against the passing cars, I reached down and unzipped my purse but he was gone before I could hand him the tangerine.

What my backpack saw.

     I let the details float to the surface only one at a time. My brain felt fuzzy. There wasn’t enough of me to register the gravity of what I’d done so I just stood there in mud while my backpack made its merry way down to the capital, strapped to the roof of the bus. Speeding along without a hitch, no doubt.

     People buzzed by, moving at 8x.

     My computer was in that backpack. My money, my ATM card, my camera, my clothes.

     Above me, the last of the clouds had dissolved. I stood in the sunshine, but it was discomforting. Small pearls of sweat boiled out of my skin.

     My journal was in that backpack; the one I keep my notes and early drafts in. I’ve been known to pull a journal out of the jaws of a bear so you can bet I’m not about to let a bus run off with one. I just need to think.

Wonder if I could catch up with the bus in a rickshaw.

     Hot in the sun, I took hold of the zipper that ran around my right leg, just above the knee. Making the conversion to shorts would help me think. My mind needed air on my legs. I unzipped my pants.

     A woman a little older than me happened to be walking by at just that moment. When she saw me disrobing from the knee down she froze in her tracks. One outstretched arm reached towards the source of her astonishment. Here, it was not impolite to point, just so long as you used your whole hand to do it.

     Watching her watch me transform pants into shorts I tried to imagine how very strange this must seem to her.

     Then I remembered that I knew exactly how strange it was.

     An ex-boyfriend of mine rushed through the door, late for the Halloween party.

     “Don’t be hasty,” I tried to warn him, but he shooed me away with a butcher knife.

     “I’m a chef.”

     “Will you at least take your clothes off before you cut them apart?”

     A sleeve slipped to the floor.

     “I’m a chef. I know how to handle a knife.”

     Halfway around the pant leg.

     “You’re crazy.”

     “I’m not going to-OW! FUCK!”

     It took us a few minutes to stop the bleeding.

     I must have appeared at least that nutso to the woman, standing on a street corner, ankle deep in mud, taking off the lower half of my pants.

     Once she recovered her lower jaw from the floor and popped her eyeballs back where they belonged, she laughed for a long, long time.

     Deciding to use this episode as an icebreaker, I entreated her, in an impromptu game of charades to help me figure out the luggage mess I was in.

     Oh no!

     “I know!”

     What are you going to do?

     “Know anyone with a car? I have money if we can catch up to the bus.”

     And that’s how I met Lenny and George.

Mozambique, Getting Localized

“What time does the bus leave?” I ask, first in English, then in Portuguese.

The woman behind the counter shrugs. “You want a ticket?”

“Yes.”

The bus depot at the entrance to the market.

She hands a scrap of paper to me through the open window. My misspelled name and the number 3 are written on it. This is my ticket. No one will ever ask to see it. “Yellow bus. Over there.”

I follow the direction she’s pointing in and see that my backpack is already climbing aboard—so much of my time travelling is spent chasing after my luggage.

Splashing through the sloppy grey muck into the barefoot crowd, I follow my bag. When I reach the bus, the driver holds open the passenger door for me.

“Please,” he indicates, offering the coveted shotgun seat, “Please, it is raining.”

“What time do we leave?” They strap my backpack to the roof, covering it up cozy under a waterproof tarp next to a basket of chickens.

He shrugs as well. “When the bus is full.”

I never get a straight answer about how many tickets there are left to sell. We could be waiting on one; we could be waiting on sixteen. We could be waiting here in the gray marketplace all day and into tomorrow. A wait of no less than an hour (and probably no less than five) seems likely, so I wander off into the muck in search of something to eat.

This isn’t my first time in this town. The gloomy streets carry a familiarity; a sense of coming home. I’d arrived in the country a month earlier and set up camp for the first time on the other side of that big red and white building. This was where I first braved street food (it was midnight, I was wasted) and where I slid behind some boxes and into some benevolent stranger’s home to watch the football match on an eight inch black and white TV. I’d felt welcomed here. I couldn’t have picked a better jumping off point for this strange new land. Perfect but for the mud.

That red and white building, there.

It doesn’t often go a day without rain in this part of the country. It’s a cold misty rain, too, like back home on the ever wintery slopes of Mauna Kea. Neither the vibrant paint slapped up on leaning shacks nor the eclectic cloth the women wrapped themselves in could put a dent in the gray. When it rained, the colors melted.

I try to find the hole in the wall I ate at last month, the one with spicy, boiled egg soup. I remember giving directions to a friend who’d lingered in the market that day: “Walk towards the hotel. Okay. Now, look for a green door. No, there isn’t a name. There’s no sign. A green door, yes. Turn into the alley and come in through the opening in the wall. Okay, I see you.” How had I even stumbled inside?

Up and down the familiar foreign street I walk and yet no sign of soup. I slip inside another unmarked restaurant and order up a bowl of what they have.

I call the waitress-chef-owner-mother back once more. “And a beer?”

She laughs at me, a strange woman drinking alone, and happily delivers what I need to fend off the rain.

To say that time does not exist in this place is incorrect. There is a rhythm to life here that escapes me because I am too stupidly dependent on a watch to tick the seconds of my life away. Technology has superseded my heartbeat.

I sit and eat a bowl of rice, dipping into my small allotment beans every few bites. I try to slow down to Africa Time as I do on every visit to this continent. The beer helps. It dulls the sharp edges of my otherness.

From somewhere deep within me: How long has it been? I should check on the bus.

Relax. You’re on Africa Time now. Have another beer.

It really does taste good.

I listen to the second set of instructions and ponder the cookbook I’ll write for my favorite chef back at home. I even snap a few photos of the meal in between swigs of beer.

It strikes me as odd that a people so small in stature should only bottle alcohol in extra-large, village-sized containers. Are they hiding giants?

Beside me, a young man about my age starts chattering in English. How many houses do I own? How many cars? How many servants do I have? How much money do I make? The myth that American streets are paved with gold persists. It’s our own fault: tourists arrive, reach into magical pockets and pull out handfuls of money and candy and pens: wizardry.

I ask him to teach me the names of the animals and he laughs uproariously each time I try. He could be telling me the words wrong, telling me that the word for leopard is lion or suitcase or sex, but I think he just sees it as yet another magic trick. Step right up, step right up, fifty cents to view the woman with white skin who speaks Swahili. Genuine, real live, Swahili speaking American.

What time is it?

Sh.

I take his picture; show it to him. He wants me to come back and give him a copy. I lie and tell him I’ll try.

Finally, full to the brim with two beers that equal five, I slosh my way back outside, spilling lager from my joints.

The bus has left.