I saw his stables once, in a palm forest outside the city. Nine white horses: splendid Arabs. The way he knew them, the way he stroked them! Papa may have shouted at his wife but with his horses he was as tender as a lover. He led one out. ‘The best horse in all Africa,’ he said, despairingly, because it had an incurable wound on its pastern. All the horses had wounds of this kind, and the stables were slowly dying out. For him this was a tragedy greater than the loss of millions. Once the horses died, his one passion would go unrequited. There were days when he could not visit the stable, and he became irritable and couldn’t be calmed until he was back in the palm forest, watching the stable boys walking past him, leading one swift Arab with bloodshot eyes after another.
Papa never shows his wife the horses. He treats her sharply and unpleasantly. She often sits silent and motionless in a chair, smoking a cigarette. I once asked her, ‘How old are you?’ ‘Twenty-eight,’ she answered. But she is as white-haired as a dove, pale and wrinkled. She has borne four children. Two live in Lebanon and two in Accra. Sometimes she brings her daughter along, a sickly, handicapped little girl who throws herself on the floor and creeps around on her hands and knees, screaming. She is ten years old and can’t walk or speak. She crawls to a corner where a record-player stands, raises her head and begs with her eyes. The mother puts a record on; Dalida sings and the girl’s screams mix with the song. She is happy, her face becomes radiant. The record ends and a moan rises in the girl’s throat. She is asking for more.
The little one clings only to the Premier. He alone is able to make her smile. She hugs his legs, fawns on him, purrs. He strokes her head and tugs at her ear. We call him the Premier because he is always dropping the names of acquaintances in the Guinean government. He once lived in Conakry and traded something there. ‘If anybody’s going to Guinea, just let me know,’ he boasts. ‘I’ll give you a letter to Sekou Touré. My pal. Ministers? Who cares about ministers? Don’t waste your time talking to ministers.’
The Premier and I are in cahoots. He takes me aside and buys me a beer. ‘Listen, Red,’ he begins, ‘you’ve travelled all over the world, so tell me, where can I get a big business going? My operation in Ghana is small-time. Very small-time.’
I look at that fat little man, at his sweaty face and his hangdog expression. What could I tell him? I think to myself: he’s a petty capitalist, not a financial shark, another little man in the ranks of the army of little shopkeepers — why not toss him an idea? I ponder: Burma, Japan, Pakistan. Everywhere it’s crowded, everywhere there’s a crush.
‘Maybe India?’ the Premier asks.
Oh, no, India’s tough. There are monopolies everywhere. ‘Too many monopolies,’ I say. ‘Damned capitalism.’
He nods and admits gloomily, ‘Damned capitalism.’ The Premier moves from country to country, trying to break into the market, to get off the ground; he has pitched his tent under many skies. Nothing doing. A sterile waste of time, an embittering struggle. ‘Isn’t there any country for a big business?’ he asks.
‘Perhaps not,’ I say. ‘The way I see it, there isn’t.’
The Premier walks around, mulling things over, asking the same questions. He bought himself a globe and he runs his fingers over it. He calls me: ‘What about here, Red?’
I look. He’s pointing to the Philippines.
‘Uh, no,’ I say. ‘The Americans are there.’
‘The Americans?’ he assures himself with foreboding. ‘Only small business, right?’
I show him with my fingers: ‘Small for sure. A tiny business.’
He thinks it over for a while and confides: ‘I would very much love a big business. More than women.’
‘Don’t you like women?’ I interject.
‘Of course. They’re good too. Now the most beautiful women are in Dakar.’
On this subject the Premier is always arguing with Young Khouri, the son of Big Khouri (also Lebanese). Nadir, Young Khouri, is a true man of the world. He has a car in London, a car in Paris and another one in Rome. A complete dolt. Talking with him is the summit of amusement for me.
‘Come to Australia with me,’ he proposes.
‘But I don’t have any money,’ I answer.
‘Write to your father. He can send you some.’
‘My father’s rather tight-fisted,’ I explain. ‘He won’t give me money for a flight to Australia.’
Nadir knows no limits in dissipation and squandering. He has everything. He is always getting cash from his father. Big Khouri loves little Khouri. The old man lives in a small house in a hamlet outside Accra. The house is rotting and the furniture is falling to pieces. A threadbare homestead. Yet it is the residence of perhaps the wealthiest man in all of West Africa, the multimillionaire Big Khouri. This street trader from Beirut has capital but no needs. He eats simple Arab rye bread, baked on a stove, while his profits mount to dizzyingly high sums. He is an old man and could die this year. In Beirut he owns a whole street of houses. He has never seen them.
Big Khouri is illiterate. A confidant writes his business letters, a man who lives with us in the Metropol and to whom Young Khouri always defers. ‘He’s an intellectual,’ he would tell me. Gregarious, witty, the intellectual can shake jokes out of his sleeve. He showed us a photograph of a sweet, old lady under an umbrella. ‘This is my fiancée,’ he explained. ‘She lives in California. She has been waiting for me for fifteen years. She’ll wait fifteen more and die. But death isn’t so terrible. You just have to be very tired.’ And he burst out laughing. The intellectual drank in secret, never on the veranda. He said that drinking in front of others showed lack of culture. In the middle of the conversation he stood up, went to his room and drained a bottle greedily. Then we heard the thud of his body hitting the floor: somehow he never manages to make it to his bed.
When he is not writing letters for Big Khouri, the intellectual argues with Napoleon. Napoleon is a tiny creature with a well-rounded belly. ‘I long for home,’ Napoleon says. ‘I long for home.’ But he never budges. He marches round the veranda as though on parade, back and forth. He takes out his mirror and counts his wrinkles. ‘I’m sixty, and look how young I am, how strong. I can walk and walk and never get tired. Come on, how old do I look?’
Papa answers, ‘Twenty.’
‘So, you all see,’ Napoleon exalts, pulling in his belly until the veins on his temples bulge. He might have a screw loose. He will go away one day. The sound of his tramping will stop. It will be quieter.
You can see the veranda from the street, illuminated by several weak lightbulbs. By the light, shadows moving along the raft are visible from below. The shadows belong to no one. Their mute pantomime, their slow dance, takes place in the heart of Kokompe. But that quarter, black to the core, does not acknowledge their existence. Kokompe has its own life, foreign and inaccessible to the Metropol. In the opinion of the quarter, the shadows on the raft belong to a different world, one occupied by the bungalows of white administrators and business representatives, the Cantonments district. That’s where you belong, Kokompe says.
But the shadows do not exist in the eyes of the Cantonments either. God forbid! The Cantonments quarter turns its back on the raft with contempt and shame. The raft is a disgrace that the Cantonments prefer to see hushed up. The Cantonments — that rich, elegant, snobbish, bureaucratic, European, bourgeois dame.
So the raft is not hitched to anybody’s boat — the shadows exist for themselves. They could multiply or disappear — it wouldn’t mean a thing. ‘Does anything have meaning?’ Uncle Wally asks. Nobody answers him.
How did I end up among the castaways living on the raft? I would certainly never have met them if it had not been for a chance meeting with a young woman who did not desire an Arab.