In the Sixth Chapter of my diary, I’ll like you to meet more of my friends. There are those in class with me and those I meet at social gatherings in the city, Africans, for the most part. That is the case of Bassey’s friend, Jean Marie Mobutu, who, although no relation of the then Marshal Joseph Désiré Mobutu, the notorious dictator of the then Republic of Zaire, today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, sometimes suffers quite some injustice because of his name. So, what’s in a name? A lot, especially for our friend JM Mobutu.
Four days have gone by since I last wrote anything in my diary. Four cold days. The wind from the Sierra is still the master of the streets. School is more boring than ever.
Today is the tenth day in the month of January. The time is three o’clock in the morning. I have just come back from Avenida de las Americas where Susan Brown lives. She is from New York City, or somewhere out there. She had her birthday party last evening. Susan is in class with me. I was rather taken aback when she walked up to me yesterday and invited me to her party. She is one of those rather few students in my class I hardly even say “hello” to. Somehow she has something intimidating about her. That’s why her invitation came as such a surprise to me.
Her party was ‘nice’. Many of those present were Americans. They talked about their country, which is natural. They made jokes, which I didn’t understand, such as talking about movie stars, who are household names in their country and then expressing surprise that there could be people anywhere else who didn’t know or care to know about them. One dirty-looking fellow, wearing faded blue jeans, with chocolate-stained teeth, even said that he had thought only the Russians didn’t know of some Hollywood stars but that apparently he was mistaken as Africans too seemed not to know. If I had stayed there much longer, I might have said something that could have spoilt Susan’s party; and I didn’t want that to happen.
So I left, thanking Susan for a “most wonderful party”. She giggled happily and everyone joined in to say what a wonderful party it truly was. Wonderful party, my foot! What was that compared to “Brother Wolf” where, at that moment, the latest Afro-American rhythms were pumping 'life' around the room wrapped in a multitude of colours! But, by praising Susan for "a most wonderful party," I was simply telling the world that I, too, have now learned to line my talk with well-chosen hypocritical remarks which your host expects to hear from you as you are about to leave a party. That’s called getting entangled in the web of the society.
I was lucky to catch the last bus for the evening from Puerta del Sol. When I left Susan’s house, I took one bus down to Plaza Mayor and walked down to the bus station for Moncloa at Puerta del Sol. I was expecting a long wait when the bus unexpectedly swung around the corner. One man who was waiting with me also expressed surprise that the bus had come in so fast. He had missed the last bus by only a few minutes before. Had the Madrid bus service improved that much then? he wondered as we took our places on board.
As the morning streets were almost empty, it took us barely five minutes to reach Moncloa. As my feet hit the wind-swept pavements, the wind groaned noisily as it wrapped itself like a snake around my body. I looked left, then right, then left again before walking across the street.
A few minutes away and I was on Calle de Andrés Mellado where I live. I thought I was all alone when I suddenly had the impression that there was someone right there beside me. I turned around abruptly and realised that I was indeed all by myself, with my frozen breath coiling out of my mouth in vapour form, my boots echoing down the empty, winter-flogged pavement. For a few seconds, I thought I heard a familiar drum-beat somewhere far away in my ears. I stopped abruptly but realised that it was only my heart pumping away into the early hours of the frosty morning; an indication that I was still well and alive and ready for another day of dreams and cigarettes and beer and wine and books and women.
As I walked past my landlady’s house, I looked up at her apartment window and there was a light in her room. She probably was having trouble with her sleep. Poor Doña Maria.
Not far from her house is where I live. My room is nice and warm. In fact, once you open the main door into the six-storey building, a current of warm air leaps up to embrace you. I live on the first floor. Our mail-boxes are on the ground floor. The electric, gas and water metres are in the basement.
Our flat has four bedrooms. There is a small living room with a small, black-and-white television set facing the couch on which I sometimes sit to watch mainly the eleven o’clock evening world news. I’m not a good television watcher, but every so often when I’m feeling bored, I do sit in there for an hour or so, to watch old American westerns or some bogus love story, which Spanish television seems to take particular delight in screening.
Next to the couch sits an old telephone. It looks like something rescued from an antique shop somewhere. It has no dial on it, so we receive calls but cannot make any. Doña Maria told me that an American once lived there some years ago and made many long distance calls to his country. At the end of his stay, he simply sneaked out the back door and was never heard of again, leaving the poor woman with a long telephone bill to settle. She then asked the phone company to eliminate the dial on the phone.
There is a kitchen down the hall which I hardly use. I hate cooking, so I either eat at “Zara” or in one of the numerous cheap restaurants here in Moncloa. My face is well known there and I do get some friendly calls from some of those restaurant owners whenever I show up there. The waiters also know that my favourite dish is “pollo asado”, fried chicken with rice. Delicioso!
My room is like the other three. A small bed at one corner, a plank wardrobe at another, a table next to the wardrobe with a reading lamp. Next to the table stands a small moveable book-shelf with five books on it: three poetry anthologies, one history book and one geography book. I only open those books when I go to class.
High up the wall, at one corner, hangs a crucifix which Doña Maria polishes from time to time because, says she, “the Lord must shine”. I have tried to have her take it down and out of the room but she says “No way; it has a bigger claim to this room than you do, Señor Basha. Never ever forget that!” she says in all seriousness.
The other three rooms are occupied by three Spanish boys. There is Enrique, a tall, calm-looking bloke whom I met only once when I moved in here in October. I hear he is in the northern city of Valladolid on military service. Then there is Carlos, a carpenter who leaves so early each morning and comes back so late at night that I almost never see him.
Paco is in the other room. He is a fat, round-cheeked fellow with a weakness for sweets and sugar. One reason I never use the kitchen is that Paco will eat anything he finds in there, whether it belongs to him or not. I once bought a packet of sugar and it was gone in two days! Then I bought some grapes and apples and when I came back from school the next day, they were gone! When I asked Paco what happened to them, he merely said he had eaten them in the mistaken belief that he had bought them himself. Before I could ask him why he always ate things that never belonged to him, he was already excitedly telling me about this very sweet cake which I really had to try. It was really sweet, he said, smacking his lips noisily. With that, he was gone, running down the wooden stair-case like a madman, scaring the hell out of one octogenarian neighbour, Don Felipe.
I often see the poor man brandishing his impotent walking stick at the door long after the rascal has fled. What can one really expect from a teenage school drop-out with eyes so deeply buried in their sockets you’ll feel like fishing them out with a hook? Not to mention those inflated ever scarlet cheeks that are never idle as Paco munches on one thing or another. Just like a goat chewing its cud.
****
The time is eleven o’clock at night.
This is always the time to take a backward look at the day’s events and record those worth recording. The house is wrapped in silence; so are the streets. From time to time, a car speeds past by and then silence again throws its cloak over the streets. Occasionally, I hear lonely footsteps on the pavement below my window-sill. A man or woman oscillating between the loneliness of a crowded city and insomnia. At times I hear a drunk plodding along and loudly challenging humanity to a duel and claiming victories over enemies he alone can see. After him, the shroud of silence again falls over the city and over my mind.
Then it is time for reflection. Time to mentally rummage through the folds of thought in my mind. Time to sift the yield, discard what I think unpalatable, then spread the rest out on paper.
****
School is becoming more and more boring these days. Today, I left the class long before closing time. Before walking out, I un-capped my pen and added a few words onto the graffiti-ridden benches of the stuffy amphitheatre: “Here, I died of boredom”. I picked up my bag, slung it over my shoulder and walked out. The wind gave a groan as I stepped on the pavement. Then it began to caress my vaseline-coated lips noisily and voraciously. Near the market, the stench of petrol and rotting cabbage was thick and heavy in the air. I bought the day’s paper from my favourite newspaper stand, went back home and read it.
****
I called Bassey on my way home from Zara to exchange notes on what happened during the day, especially as we didn’t have the time to get together for a chat and a drink.
“By the way”, said Bassey, “did I tell you Jean-Marie Mobutu, the chap from Zaire, is getting married?”
“Married! No, who to?”
“Believe this or not, his wife-to-be is Spanish.”
“What! Mobutu getting married to a Spanish girl! I don’t believe that.”
“I didn’t want to believe it either”, Bassey said, “but he told me so himself.”
It was indeed unbelievable that a chap like Mobutu could get married to a Spanish girl. That fellow must be one of the most disgruntled Africans I’ve ever met. He seems to have lived in nearly all countries of Europe, although he has never seemed at ease in any of them. While a student in Brussels, his name had opened him to ridicule and sometimes outright verbal or even physical attacks from some of his compatriots who wrongly mistook him for a relative of their country’s old dictator. He had, at one time, even flirted with Communism, planning to settle down in Eastern Europe or Cuba just to be as far away as possible from “capitalist dogs and their black lackeys”.
However, something happened to change his view of Communism rather radically. He fled from Warsaw, Poland, after barely six months of what he had claimed would be a ten-year stay in the land of “socialist freedom”. No one knows exactly what happened to him there but the effect on him was so strong that whenever anyone mentions the word Communism near him, he always explodes like a bomb of rage.
We had met him for the first time two months ago or so, in Brother Wolf. For well over two hours, he shouted his discontent of the white man’s world above the ear-splitting music.
“Africa is our land. That’s where life is; that’s where things really work out the way they should be”, he said, sounding unconvinced himself.
“Then why don’t you go back to Africa?” Bassey asked.
“Look, take my word for it. You won’t see me here next month. I would’ve gone back already had my air-ticket been here earlier. Now that I have it”, he claimed, hitting his breast-pocket to show us that he did indeed have it, although he wouldn’t show it to us. “I’m on my way out. There’s a job waiting for me in our Ministry of Justice”, he lied.
We knew, and he also knew that we knew he was lying. We knew as well as he did that he would have a hard time convincing his namesake, who was busy crushing the slightest show of opposition to his dictatorship, that his short-lived flirt with Communism hadn’t made of him an untouchable who was better off as meat for the alligators of the tropical swamps. Another reason he wouldn’t really want to go back home is that over the years, he has been writing home to friends and relatives telling them how, after the white man had pleaded with him for months on end, he had reluctantly agreed to take a teaching position in a renowned Belgian university he could not name.
However, were it to be known that he had dropped out of the first year of law school to embrace Communism “just to be with the masses and the oppressed of the world”, the shame would have been too much to bear.
He is like many of the Africans one meets here in Madrid. It is always easy to spot the new-comers in town. They walk about bunched up in groups of three or four, noisily complaining to anyone who would listen of the heartless nature of the white man’s society. They are especially vocal in their denunciation of what they say is the racism of white women. They would rival each other with tales of great seduction of women in Africa; a prowess which, they wouldn’t say why, seems to be neutralised by the whiteness of the women here. They all talk dreamily of the fantastic society that is the African. How warm and human it is! They leave behind them wherever they go a thick trail of insults against this “heartless European society.”
But, with time, you begin to notice a change in their attitude. When, and if, they do finally overcome their initial shyness and, especially when they realise that some women here, especially in some of the seedy night spots, do not hesitate to take the initiative in sex and related issues, they begin to atone for their earlier unfavourable judgement of this society and its women.
You now hear some of them telling you how women here are by far superior to ours back in Africa, especially as the white women won’t even let you pay a drink for them.
One of them, a Diallo somebody, asked me the other day, “can you believe, my good friend Leinteng, that the woman you saw me with last night, you remember her, don’t you? That very corpulent, you know!!” his hands made a vague gesture to his own chest to show how well endowed the woman’s chest was. “Yes, she won’t even let me pay her a drink!”
“With our women,” he continued, shaking his head negatively, “it’s you, the man, to pick up the entire tab. That’s pure mental under-development, if you were to ask my opinion,” he concluded with a hollow laugh. “When a woman expects you to foot the entire bill of an evening outing simply because you are a man and she a woman then you’re nowhere near the threshold of development, my friend. Would Europe and North America be what they are today had their own women been loitering about with their arms crossed over their bosoms, tapping their toes on the floor and waiting for their men to pay for a drink for them? No way, my friend!!” he concluded, mistaking the astonishment in my eyes for ignorance.
I was all the more astonished because this fellow had never hidden his extreme dislike of Africans who, in his own words, ‘polluted’ the African race by going out with white women. There he was, vaunting the qualities of white women simply because one of them, whom he dated, would not let him pay a drink for her.
That’s how those once timid Africans are. Once they succeed to break out of their shell of shyness and begin to date white women, they become overzealously eager to show you how well integrated they are now in the city life here. You now see them parading their latest conquest for all to see and, before long, one of them is already inviting you to his wedding with a señorita so-and-so.
When Bassey reminded Mobutu that he had once vowed he would never ever date a white woman, not talk of marrying one, our friend merely sighed and said that his wife-to-be was not like the rest of them.
“No, man, Maria-Carmen is very different”, he said, pensively.
“What makes her so different?” asked a sceptical Bassey.
“She’s just like one of our own women, see what I mean? Take a look at her picture,” he said, pulling out from his breast pocket, a small black-and-white picture of his wife-to-be.
“What of your journey back home? It’s over a month since you vowed you were leaving”, Bassey inquired.
“I know, but see how full my hands are right now. I had to wait to clear things up before leaving. But once my wedding is behind me, my wife and I will pack our bags and off we go. By the way,” he continued, a smile at the corner of his meaty lips, “won’t it be more fun to go back home with a wife than alone?”
“Why is that so?” Bassey asked.
“I don’t know how it is in Nigeria, and I’d be surprised if it were any different from what’s happening in my own country, but it’s not easy to get married there these days.”
“Why do you say that?” Bassey wondered.
“Inflation has hit the dowry system, man. I’m sometimes astonished at what people ask from a poor man as bride price back home. That’s just stealing, pure and simple. In fact, many of our people should be in jail for selling their daughters. That’s indeed what they do, sell them. But here, you won’t believe what my in-laws have given me instead”, he said, smiling broadly, satisfaction written all over his face.
What else could Bassey say? Mobutu had won the day and my friend accepted the invitation to the wedding set for a week’s time.
****
In Chapter Seven, I’ll introduce you to my new girl friend, Lupe.
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