Novellets; Summer Romance and Adventure
Novellets; Summer Romance and Adventure
By J. McMahon
Published by J. McMahon at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 J. McMahon
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The Titsou of H’you
John McMahon
“You have come from H’you?” I looked up from my scotch into his gaunt face, the color of an overripe mango, a sort of yellow bruising to purple. A very unhealthy looking color for a human. He towered over me so that I had to strain my neck to meet his dark shrouded, sleepy eyes. He looked as much like Svengali as any cinematic representation ever created.
I was already jittery when the man sat down next to me and started asking questions. It had been an unnerving four days in H’you and then a long hot and uncomfortable bus trip back to the capital, Mendu.
I had avoided the empire club when I was here before. It seemed seedy in a depressing way. The kind of place that sucks time from your life and offers nothing in return. I was discomforted, hot, confused and aching when I got off the bus and immediately thought of the place, it seemed the perfect place to pass through this state of mind.
I entered through the crumbling door way out of the blazing heat of the day into the dark interior only able to see spots where strings of ferry lights were draped from the bar and around the walls. I stood at the threshold until my eyes adjusted to the dank and I could see the layout clearly. There isn’t much to the place, a bar where five bodies are bowed over unseen glass’s. Each drinker sitting with an empty stool to either side of him as a buffer against conversation. Two abused ceiling fans strained slowly to churn the air, heavy with smoke and the heat of mid-day. Along the walls a few paintings depicting hunting scenes hang; badly rendered daubs of horses bounding through briar thickets, of hounds and men in tight red waist coats, vestiges of the Empire clubs more distinguished past.
Mismatched tables and chairs filled the rest of the interior, and draped across these in various states of repose where an equally mismatched selection of young women who were either snoring lightly or staring bedazzled into the screens of ten year old cellular phones. They all wore baggy shorts and T-shirts and I couldn’t help but to think how much more attractive they would have been if they were dressed normally in sarongs and silk shirts as their sisters and mothers would be.
I took a seat at the bar with the fancy idea of drinking four or five icy gin and tonics. I could feel the alcohol in my throat, burning coldly into the empty pit of my stomach. I would be just drunk enough to wander off to a dark room and sleep for twenty hours.
It was a nice plan, and one that would have to wait for another bar because all the Empire Club had was the cheap, sour national beer and bottles of the same third rate scotch with labels from three different distilleries. The barkeep attended to me in polite if evasive English while I picked one of the three identical whisky’s.
He poured a niggling sip of scotch into the bottom of a glass, looked over his shoulder and asked me ‘doulbin?’ I eyed the drop and said ‘quintupin’. He pursed his lips and shrugged. ‘Four doulbin’ I said. ‘English pour’ he laughed and filled the glass near to the brim with booze and ice.
I force swallowed the first taste of the stuff knowing that it would get better as I worked my way down. Taking a deep breath to settle the whisky I caught his smell. It was the smell of the markets in the afternoon when all of the meat is starting to break down in the hot sun, giving off the odor of rot mixed with that of a Chinese apothecary; musty wood, dried roots, powders and old age.
I met his eyes above me but he quickly looked away, staring straight ahead. If I hadn’t just returned from H’you I would have thought he was talking to someone else. The bartender put a small glass of some dark colored, sweet smelling liquid in front of him but he made no move towards it.
I turned back to the whiskey and took another large pull from the glass. This went down without the grumbling protestof the first. “Did you meet the Titsou?” His accent was hesitant and muddled but the uncertainness of it was plainly a ruse. He was clearly faking the Yurmanese tone and lilt.
I turned to him but he remained staring straight ahead at the mirror in front of us through which he was watching me. I met his gaze in the reflection and saw myself as well. Disheveled, dirty and exhausted looking.
“It interests me that you were able to go to H’you and leave it again.” He spoke to me through the glass. I shrugged and took a very large gulp of the now watery scotch. “Where?” I asked. He said nothing.
He must have been nearly seven feet tall when standing upright but his shoulders hunched over and his back bent as if the sheer size of his body had crippled itself. His face was thin, the bones created deep hollows in his cheeks and under his eyes. He was dressed in a black robe or cassock and wore strings of ornaments and idols around his neck. Particular to this age and place in the world his eighteenth century mystics garb was offset with the digital gee-gaws of the twenty first. Ear phones hung around his neck almost invisible among the teeth and vials clasped to chains. On his wrist was a thin and very expensive looking nautical watch and in a leather case stuck inside the rope he used to cinch his vestment was the unmistakable red flashing light of a cellular phone.
No one else took any notice of him, or me, as we sat there uttering incomplete sentences at one another through the mirror. The men gazing into their warm beers didn’t lift their heads and the bar tender had gone back to the state of semi sleep that I found him in on arrival. The girls neither woke from their impossible attitudes of sleep nor looked away from their old phones.
“I have many question concerning the Titsou, perhaps you would have the time for visiting my shop and speak with me.” It occurred to me again that his over formal third world English was an affectation. That he was forcing the incomplete sentences and odd tense forms. The fact that he was putting up a verbal front was another reason to want nothing to do with him.
I finished my drink and fished in my pocket for some thin, worn notes. It was impossible to estimate what the drink might cost so I laid out way too much and got up grabbing my new bag holding all my new clothes by the strap. “Don’t know ‘em” I said as I turned away from the stooped figure. I could feel his eyes on my back all the way to the door. When I had walked a little ways away from the Empire Club, squinting in the harsh light; I looked back and saw him standing in the entrance, filling it completely, watching me from just inside the dark room.
I didn’t know what I could tell this guy that he probably didn’t know already. No one who dresses like that would have any questions about the Titsou.
I walked on past the Ulster Hotel which is the one remaining spot of luxury in the city. A city that was once famous the world over as a stop off for the filthy rich and morally handicapped. Once, these pitted and broken streets would have been the strolling grounds for swells in high fashion suits accompanied by dames with legs to kill for.
Today the only people walking it are the locals; carrying bundles wrapped in cloth on their heads. Their faces caked in turmeric paste against the fierce radiation of the sun. Thin old men with youthful, muscular bodies glistening with sweat. Fat women wrapped in colorful sarongs spat flumes of blood red beadle juice into the creases of the foot paths.
What had happened in the last forty years of Yurma’s history explains everything I can see. From the bare wires dangling from long dark light posts to the sewage trickling down every street. No nation could survive forty years of constant civil war without becoming a behavioral sink. No peoples could stand the reality of dying at any time, of seeing every one they know killed or maimed in the name of some abstract political movement without losing some degree of its collective humanity.
But none of this explains the Titsou.
I found an old style Chinese Hotel where a dirty room with a fan was the price of a beer in New York. The woman who walked me up the tight stairs talked without pause in Yurman or some southern Chinese dialect of which I am happily ignorant. I followed her, one step behind, my eyes level with her bony old ass struggling under the light sarong she wore. Straggly gray hairs wisped around her thin blue veined legs which reminded me of the man in the bar who had the long black hairs dangling from moles on his face that the Chinese are so proud of.
The old woman showed me a hot room which consisted of a bed accompanied by a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling and a fan that stood on the floor. The walls were single sheets of thin laminate board which would make the place an echo chamber of the other tenants’ intimate noises, but there were no other tenants and I badly needed the sleep. The bed sheets seemed clean, there were no visible insects. The shower she showed me actually had water running through it; it was a place to rest
Once I had showered the grease, blood and dirt of four days roughly spent from my body I tucked myself between the sheets of the hard bed with the light off and stared at the chinks of day showing through the imperfect corners of the dark little room. I was physically and mentally exhausted and could feel my body going limp as I lie there. My head throbbed with the ache of sleep deprivation exacerbated by the cheap scotch. My eyes closed on their own, refusing to open, almost instantly I was taken with the sensation of falling that marks the descent to sleep but my nerves had been torn raw in H’you and the subconscious fright startled me awake. I lay in bed moaning with fatigue but sleep would not come again.
This trip to Yurma was meant to be an intrepid expedition. I wanted the discomfort, the inconveniences and multitude of unexpected side adventures that have become so difficult to find in the rest of the underdeveloped world. I wasn’t looking for the apple pie trail or pagan beach raves or organized jungle treks. I wanted to slide into a country where there was no tourism structure and just see how it would be to live. What it took for these people to pull through day after day mired in an existence of impoverished futility.
I told people I was going to Yurma and those who knew that it existed scoffed and shook their heads. Why not Pakistan, or Iraq they asked. Why not three weeks in East Timor or Georgia. And they were right, any of those would have been right. But Yurma wasn’t a flash in the pan trouble spot. Georgia would be finished one way or another in a couple of years. East Timor will flare up and dissipate and flair up again. But Yurma is a stalwart, ongoing disaster with more than forty years of uninterrupted civil war under its belt.
I arrived in Yurma from the Chinese boarder and spent two weeks picking my way south through the occupied territories of the controlling drug cartels who produce opiates in the west and amphetamines to the east for the first week. Then less significant though as dangerous, the territories held by the weapons producers and the small areas still being protected by what’s left of the indigenous tribes of the north including the fierce Naga; legendary for the taking of heads and the hats they adorn with human teeth.
I went slowly across the borders of what amount to feudal states in the north. Riding on local buses with my small bag I was un-molested from town to town. Sleeping in little boarding houses and eating in ramshackle cafes that served food ranging from delicious avocado salads to fish that was obviously rotten and visibly diseased cuts of pork, all of it powerfully spiced to kill the parasites living in the local water supplies and accompanied by heaps of white rice to make up for the small portions.
I sat on shaded platforms for hours with Yurman peasants waiting for busses. At first they would play at ignoring me in weary and nervous attitudes like a mongrel dog with a tell tale ring of foam around its muzzle. But after a few hours of sharing the same spot of shade their curiosity would over ride their instinct for self preservation. They would produce betel boxes and urge me to take one of the wads of leaf rolled with lime and the slightly narcotic betel nut meat. I would share with them whatever I had with me, some chocolate, or whatever food was in my bag and we would laze on the platforms spitting the red juice into the dirt.
A lot of the old Yurmans speak English very well, if in some ways comically formal. I was consistently referred to either as sir or master and often old women would prostate themselves in front of me.
Most told me that they almost never saw white people traveling anymore and were finally more curious then afraid by my small bag, lack of camera and the fact that I was waiting for local buses. They said when white people came they were driven from Mendu to the old cities and temples in huge white trucks with body guards at high speeds and stopped for nothing and no one against being kid napped and executed.
Most of the people I met worked indirectly for one of the drug lords as mules or in the chemical factories where they cooked speed, or they worked for the munitions producers and smugglers as donkey labor. They asked when America or Australia or some part of the UN was going to come and liberate them. Come and crush the Junta who had driven the country so far away from what is considered humane conditions in the rest of the world that it seems it would be almost impossible to set it all right. How many years would it take to de-mine the country, to pry the guerrilla factions from the mountains, to crush what is the largest private standing army in the world financed by the huge profits of heroin and methyl amphetamine?
By the time I had made it to Mendu slowly winding my way over a third of the country I was more than a little sick in my stomach and in my soul. The deprivation, poverty and ignorance of the people had worn through me.
In Mendu I spoiled myself and checked into the Ulster Hotel where there were clean sheets, warm showers and cool balconies where uniformed staff brought cold drinks in clean glasses while I lay on a wicker chaise lounge and took in the vista of the cracked and filthy capital.
I spent several days there relaxing and recovering my health as well as my enthusiasm. There is no way to prepare oneself for spending time in a place like Yurma when you come from a world of instant gratification. With high speed connection to Japanese pornography and home delivered fast foods and overnight package delivery to anywhere in the world.
From a land with fast acting pills to relieve the discomfort of over eating and anti- depressants to temper the stress of pampered house pets it is very difficult to suddenly accept buses that flume diesel smoke with seats of ply wood, eating only twice a day and calling yourself lucky at that or when government troops kick in the door of a bamboo hovel and massacre a family of eight for planting a banana tree outside the limits of their allotted home plot in front of fifty witnesses who suddenly find the sky very interesting.
It was when I was relaxing at the Ulster that I came across the pamphlet written some sixty years before by a French anthropologist about his discovery of a stone aged tribe living deep in the jungle where Yurma, Loas and Thailand all meet somewhere between Ken Tung in Yurma and Laos Prabang in Laos. I was fascinated, the pamphlet was only a page long but what it described was worthy of an entire book.
The author, only twenty five at the time, undertook an expedition to follow the basis of the myth concerning the ghosts of the white trees known to missionaries from the tribal peoples they were duping with tales of Jesus. Accompanied by two Shan guides he left for the dense jungle where these spirits had been most frequently seen and returned months later to the small town of H’you with three men from the tribe who came willingly and stayed with him for several months.
In that time they absorbed French as well as English and the local Yurmanese dialects. I looked on the map that hung on the wall of the hotels fools lounge and found that the town was only four or five hours from Mendu straight into the mountains that form the Thai-Yurma border.
I had no idea what I would find there, if there were any descendants of the three tribesmen who the French anthropologist had named the Tistou, since they had no name for themselves. I didn’t know if the Frenchmen were still there or if there was any real record of the discovery in the town at all. It was an adventure, plus the town was in the mountains which in its self was appealing, to get out of the lingering, oppressive heat of the plains.
I asked at reception if they could buy me a ticket to H’you in the morning. The woman behind the desk looked at me as if I had asked her if she would mind giving me a hand raping her daughter. Her eyes went wide with shock and disgust. She said nothing and went back to work. I rang the service bell for the day manager and asked him the same question. At first he gave me a startled glance, then motioned to meet him at the end of the desk. He held my forearm and asked quietly ‘what do you want in H’you?’ ‘I want to go there, to have a look. I read about it.’ I told him. ‘Excuse me sir but what did you read about H’you?’ I showed him the pamphlet that I had planned on stealing as a keep sake. He took it and scanned it quickly then handed it back to me. ‘That was a very long time ago sir, there is nothing for you in H’you, it is a very dangerous place.’ He was gravely serious and if I hadn’t heard this about every town I had been in since I entered the country I might have taken him seriously. I nodded in agreement and decided that I would just make it there the way I had come from the north. Go to the bus station and hop a local bus, I didn’t realize at the time that this was the only way to get there.
In the morning I checked out of the luxury of the Ulster and reentered the world of penury that is Yurma. Just in front of the Hotel I was called to and waved at by a mob of rake thin trishaw drivers who creaked up to me on their ancient tricycles. They looked like some giant troop of insect life with their skeletal frames, the decrepit mechanisms that seemed an extension of their bodies. I hopped into the first one to make it across the street which didn’t stop the others from giving chase as we silently pulled from the curb. The old man used all of his weight standing into the pedals to get it started, puffing on his green cigar, he asked with a smile over his shoulder ‘where will you go master?’
We moved slowly through the hot crowded streets. I watched from the shade of the passenger’s seat as sweat poured down his black back. I could see every muscle, every sinew ripple back and forth across his torso as he peddled. Women moved along the streets in single file lines, their flower print sarongs, their long black hair braided in a tight pony tail hung to their asses and swished as they moved under the big wicker baskets balanced on their heads.
We reached the huge gravel parking lot that made up the bus station, it was crowded and the air stifling, heavy with diesel fumes. I paid the old man off and was immediately surrounded by teams of urchins who simultaneously begged, hawked goods and made attempts at shaking anything that might come out my bag, pockets and pant legs. I kicked at them and they laughed good naturedly as they tried to sell me Viagra, boot leg whiskey and cartons of knock off cigarettes. I bought a carton for the price of a bottle of water in the west to use for bartering and bribes further on. As soon as I did that I was assailed by the rest of the children. They pleaded in English and told me it was unfair to buy from one and not all. I laughed and kicked one softly in the ass to let them know I wasn’t a total fool.
I walked around the various tables selling bus tickets but I couldn’t see any signs for H’you. Every thirty seconds a man would grab me by the forearm and yell into my face ‘you, where you go?’ as he dragged me towards whatever bus he worked for, ‘you go Mallady? You go Pagon? You go Peo.’ The three most popular destinations in the country, hundreds of kilometers away from one another but his bus was going to them all.
As soon as I would lose myself from one another would latch on repeating the same litany of destinations. I kept walking and seeing the same signs the same buses but nothing for H’you so finally I asked one of the men who had attached himself to me. ‘H’you?’ He looked at me like a degenerate criminal. Then, pulling me by the arm he walked me around the outside of the busses and the food stalls, behind the open air toilet to where an old, old even by Yurmanese standards, battered bus sat low on broken springs and spat ‘H’you’. ‘Ah’ I nodded and tried to hand him some money. He looked at me with the same disgusted air and walked off without a word.
It was an ominous looking machine. The windows were all knocked out of the broken moldings and the tires seemed to be only half inflated. It sat lop sided and was painted with five different layers of the same sick green, one peeling from the other like some reptile shedding multiple layers of rancid skin all at once. When I found the bus driver asleep on a piece of card board under the front end I bent down and asked him ‘is this the bus to H’you’. He looked up out of one eye from the shadows and murmured ‘H’you’. I didn’t know if this was a question or an affirmation. ‘H’you’ I said shaking my head up and down. ‘H’you’ he repeated shutting his eye and paying me no moreattention.
There was no one else in the area, no one else going to H’you. I sat on the rear step of the bus and opened my bag. I had a map of the country that was probably twenty years old which I had bought in China. Most of the names were spelled wrong using a Chinese English transliteration. I looked in the area where I found the town on the map in the hotel but there was nothing there. The sun was getting truly hot now and I started to wonder about the wisdom of this trip. What was I looking for, and if I was able to make it to H’you what would I find there. I sat, moving up into the bus step by step every few minutes to avoid the sun and started to doze in the hot shade myself.
I was woken from my stupor by the rumblings of an old truck bellowing towards the bus. It was churning dust from the dry powdery gravel and darkening the air with a steady cloud of diesel exhaust. The gears ground down as it slid to a stop just in front of me. Five Yurmans jumped out of the cab and quickly began unloading baskets and bundles from the box onto the bus, brushing by me. I managed to catch one of their eyes while he staggered under a large wet looking roll, ‘is this going to H’you’ I asked as he took the steps shirtless and sweating with the bundle dripping pink water over his torso. He didn’t answer but I could here him in the bus calling to his friends and laughter erupted among them.
The three came down together and the last stopped in front of me. Without taking the cigar from his mouth he asked ‘you go to H’you?’ ‘yes, I want to go to H’you is this the bus’. He didn’t answer but he pointed and made a couple of high pitched sounds pointing up the stairs while looking to his friends who joined him, making the same noises. He pointed in quick jabs ‘uh, uh’ the muscles rippled across his torso and bulged in his shoulders and arms. ‘OK, H’you, eh?’ lunged into the cab of the truck and ground the thing into gear spitting gravel from the rear wheels as he wove back through the bus station.
While I stood watching the truck speed away the bus started up in an explosion of noise and smoke. The driver must have crept from beneath the engine while it was being loaded. He revved the bus hard for ten seconds, the exhaust blowing directly on to me so I could taste the diesel and engine oil in my nose. Before I could get to the front he slammed the transmission in to first and the bus started to roll slowly towards the street. I walked along it, knowing it wouldn’t actually go anywhere until it was full.
When we had entered the mal of the station, the bus inching along, me walking in the cloud of black smoke the driver started to blow the weak sounding horn constantly. All the way through the crowd he still had no passengers and made a left onto the street. I jumped onto the rear step holding the rail which vibrated loosely under my grip. We made a couple of turns; still empty the bus rattling at bottom speed clogging traffic behind it, the horn eeking again and again. One then two then four and a steady stream of people caught the front handle from the narrow cracked streets and hefted themselves aboard.
When there were enough people aboard that the driver gaining confidence increased his speed I climbed the stairs to look for a probable looking English speaker. What I saw was a collection of what so far were the sorriest, most impoverished people in a country defined by just those terms. They were all wrapped in layers of cloth despite the already stifling heat. In make shift hoods and under tattered knit caps were faces drawn and old irregardless of age. Eyes bulged from hollows creased by thin hard cheek bones. Lines cut deep from nostrils and mouths. I bumped from seat to seat along the narrow aisle. Faces, instead of looking up and staring as they had so far on the trip, turned away or withdrew into the shadows of their layers. I caught the rail that ran the length of the bus’s ceiling and squeezed myself into a tiny seat opposite a small family occupying the opposite seat.
‘Are you going to H’you’ I asked slowly. ‘Is this the bus to H’you’, I repeated dumbly not waiting for a reply. The four faces I was staring at disappeared into the depths of their rags their eyes lowered to just visible slits of white.
‘This is the bus to H’you sir, do you go there?’ It was a tremulous but educated voice, spoken by an old man four seats back dressed in a tattered suit. I had stumbled right past him. He held his hand up inviting me to join him.
We sat close, our legs and shoulders pressing together. He smiled at me not saying anything else so I asked him ‘do you live in H’you?’ He shook his head, ‘I am not going that far’ continuing to smile but saying no more. The bus picked up more speed as it was almost full now. ‘How far is it?’ I had to almost shout over the deep thrumming of the engine and the grinding of the transmission under our feet. ‘It is quite far.’ A typical answer, maybe due to the fact that there were almost no maps available of Yurma that its people are extremely vague when discussing distances. Even within towns distances are like some unfathomable mystery. They answer with very close, not so close, quite far, very far, but without knowing. Up until this point I had never had a Yurman tell me, I don’t know, even when it was plainly obvious they had never heard of the place and had no idea where it was or how to get there. I suppose it’s all part of the Asian face saving ploy.
‘Where will you get off’ I asked the old man. His face, a complex collection of wrinkles and folds, adjusted to hear what I was saying, contorted in understanding and then rearranged itself into a look of concern. ‘Why do you need to go to H’you?’ he asked with his lips so close to my ear that I could feel his hot breath and smell the pungent beetle he was sucking on. I shrugged, ‘I don’t need to go there, I want to, I read about the Titsou.’ His eyes popped wide open with disbelief. He put his bony old hand on my shoulder and spoke some declaration but the bus was down shifting to climb a small incline in the road so I couldn’t hear what the old man said but the look on his face was one of clear warning. I nodded understanding and we said no more, deafened by the racket of the bus.
As we banged and jolted along the broken road, windows rattling in their casements and the exhaust coming through the floor, people wilted into sleep around me. The heat was terrific; the air coming in through the windows was little relief and brought clouds of choking dust blown up from the dry barren fields around us.
There was no life on the road to H’you. There were no animals; no famished looking cows watching mournfully from the fields as I had seen in the rest of the country. No feral dogs sleeping in the shade of huts, no huts. There were no bands of squalid children waving and chasing after the bus. After two hours I saw a lone man standing idle in a dry patch of weeds staring into the full strength of the sun, I took him to be mad.
The man I had sat down with fell into a deep sleep while I watched the parched scenery so I moved to an empty seat where I could stretch out a little. I watched dumbly our slow progress over the hard plains approaching the mountains steadily but never seeming to make any progress towards the stacked green hills over hung with grey, white rock face.
I must have slept or just lost myself to the rhythm of the bus or fallen into a stupor from the heat because suddenly we were winding around a tight bend on a narrow road surrounded by green. The air was cooler which might have woken me, and felt fresh and fine in my nose after the weeks of dry dust.
The bus was now all but empty; only a bundle of people wrapped together against the cold air instead of the heat were heaped in one seat, the driver and I remained. The transmission was whining against the steep incline of the road and now the mountains loomed directly overhead.
I was suddenly anxious to see the town I had been warned off of. I wondered if this would be just another false warning. Another case of people fearing those over the mountain or across the stream. Towns ten kilometers from one another often mistrusted each other more vehemently then opposing nations half a world away. Was it the knowledge afforded by close proximity that allowed them to know each other’s wickedness so well? Or is it just the natural fear of what we can see but not understand?
We wound around the mountain roads. The jungle was a dense wall just at the edge, brushing the windows as we rattled by, the old machine laboring hard. It was impossible to tell in what direction we were headed. There was only rock wall on one side and jungle slanting off to the other. The driver geared down for the inclines and pulled the clutch in for the decline as the bus descended in free fall down the hills and skidded around the tight corners. My stomach dropped a few times as the old vehicle felt as if it were riding on two wheels. The other passengers never stirred. Either they were asleep or just took all of this senseless danger for granted.
We veered right at a y in the road and the gradient flattened out. Shacks started to Appear along the side. The sun was setting beyond the hills but in the fading light people could be seen like specs working in the rich green patty fields that now stretched to the horizon along the right. This road led straight into the town.
The shacks became more frequent, and then they were attached to one another. The road widened a little as it became the high street of town. There were no signs. There were no visible electric lines or motor traffic. People walked single file on either side of the road, the bus erupted in a fit or horn blowing as a herd of water buffalo were being led from paddy to pasture. Then we stopped in a wide dusty parking lot surrounded by shops and serviced by a tea house.
I got off the bus aware that I had only an hour or so to find a place to stay before the sun would set. In every town I had visited no matter how small I had been met by at least one tout; trishaw driver or relative that had directed and cajoled me to a small hotel or guest house. But here there was no one.
Men rushed to the bus in order to unload the boxes, wrapped bushels and dripping packages that were loaded in Mendu. The other passengers departed and silently disappeared into the heavy shadows of the narrow streets that opened at both sides of the tea house. I stood a short distance from the bus for a couple of minutes looking around, trying to get a feel for the place. The men unloading worked at a furious pace hefting whatever was handed to them and then almost running in a squat jog under the weight away into the gloom of evening. It was so unlike the normal rhythm of work I had seen carried out so far.
Normally there would be a long line of lanky men and boys wrapped in the long sari or sarong portaging with a slow and easy pace, puffing on their green cigars and laughing or singing under their burden.
Standing dumbly in the dirt was getting me nowhere. I walked to the tea house and took a seat at an empty table. There were six others tables and four had groups of men sitting at them. They sat silently sipping their glasses of creamy sweat orange tea. No one spoke, there was no music, there was no television and no one stared at me. They seemed deliberately to avoid recognizing my presence and as I sat no one came to serve me.
At the center of the table was a cheap tin pot of the weak bitter tea used to thin out the thick orange kind. I was suddenly dry and thirsty so poured one of the small ceramic cups and drank it off. As soon as it hit my stomach I realized that I was also terribly hungry. The sun was about to sink, which meant I had been on that bus all day, it must have been eight or nine hours since I had eaten.
The old woman who was bent in half from a life time of planting and replanting rice shoots worked over a low counter making tea. She ignored me completely so I approached her.
I squatted in front of her so she could see me and greeted her ‘mingala bai’ in one of the only Yurman phrases I knew. She still didn’t look up at me. So I continued. “is there a guest house or hotel here?” I thought this being the only business I could see she might put me up. “No”, she waved me off, “no, go away”, she waved at me.
This was incredible; though people had been occasionally indifferent to me I hadn’t met anyone who could be described as rude. I stood shocked and more than a little pissed off. I looked at the men sitting at the tables. One looked up and caught my eye. He pointed indifferently to his left and spoke in awkward English “there, go there.” “Where?” “There, go… Titsou.” “Titsou?” I asked surprised. “There” the man repeated “Titsou”.
I couldn’t believe it. The Titsou were still here. I grabbed my bag and walked quickly out into the gravel lot again. The bus had left and now it was dark in earnest. There were two smaller streets leading off the high street and I thought to take the one to left, but then I heard the rumble from far off. It was a din like you would hear in the back ground speaking to some on a phone in a crowded restaurant. There was a halo of light in the distance. I walked on, the high street went up an incline, after a few minutes walking in the dark I came to the apex and looked down at a bustling, brightly lit area of town that hummed with music and loud laughter and shouting. The smell of cooking food rode on cool drafts. It seemed to be a festival, which could explain the emptiness of town.
I walked quickly towards the noise and light anticipating a time of ribaldry. Who knew what kind of jungle insanity would be going on here tonight? I hadn’t had a wild night since arriving in the country and thought this would be right on the mark.
Then I was just outside the glow of the throng. Watching the people silhouetted in the streets. Being rocked by what sounded like Nigerian pop music. There were open salas all around crowded by groups of people eating and laughing and talking in French. These were the Titsou. Amazing, here were these people that wandered out of the jungle some forty years ago knowing nothing of the contemporary world partying with all of the intensity of a New Orleans Mardi Gras street festival. I stood outside the light of the party just taking it in.
One of the people from the nearest sala bounded off the platform and moved in an unusual gait across the open space to a car parked in the middle of the street. I hadn’t noticed it before, even though now I realized it was the source of the music, as the figure passed in front of the headlights I saw him outlined clearly. I thought it must be a trick of the light because it seemed to be a hugely fat and squat person but the silhouette moved in an incredibly quick and graceful way.
The shape was less that of a man then of an ape. The shoulders were massive. The back wide and bent. As I watched the man, it was now definitely a man. I suddenly realized the car was a Mercedes Benz. I stepped back from the edge of light into the complete dark for a minute to think about this. The man had started his looping stride back to the sala but then froze and lifted his face to the sky, it seemed he was tasting the air, he turned to look straight at me. I couldn’t decide whether to move further into the dark and try to make it back to the bus station or step forward and let him see me. Suddenly he was moving across the space between us at an unreal speed.
It was the base fear we all harbor at a subconscious level, a fear genetically imbedded in our sullied primitive instincts. The fear prey has of the predator. The fear that someday something incredibly strong is going to come out of nowhere with terrible speed and break your spine with a single blow; is going to crush your wind pipe with huge incisors. The fear was going through me. Before I could react he had closed the distance and hit me with the force of a bull rhino that knocked me unconscious.
I have no idea how much time passed. When I came to I didn’t remember where I was, or what had happened. I was submerged in complete blackness, lying on a loose mucky dirt floor. The room or cell was cool, almost cold and the smell of ageing meat was thick in the air. When I scraped myself from the floor the sounds I made echoed around me. I sensed the ceiling was tight to my head and the walls close in. I made a few cautious shuffle steps, my foot caught something hard and cold I stepped away quickly and slipped crashing into a pile of wet bundles. They were the bundles of thawing meat that had been unloaded from the bus.
I flailed around in the pile trying to catch a hand hold to pull myself up. Behind me a door was flung open and the room was filled with the yellow light of the night festival. I turned but was blinded after the complete darkness. Before my eyes could adjust I was clasped in a vice like grip and dragged out into the night. The air was fresh and it awoke my dulled sense of pain. My body ached from whatever blow had brought me to the room. Pain turned to delayed panic.
It was one of the Titsou dragging me by the legs. I kicked out and tried to turn on to my back. We were moving fast over the ground and as I began to struggle the Titsou, without missing a step in his long loping gait delivered a kick to my kidneys which made me retch. The pain was tremendous and if I wasn’t being dragged I would have fallen and curled into a fetal position.
From the ground I could look up and see the faces of other Titsou looking on in curiosity or amusement. It was a horrific vision. Though their faces were not in-human, more like pre-human, their bodies were animalistic in every way except for being hairless. They were all but naked, wearing random pieces of clothing for decoration rather than to protect any sense of modesty. A pink spaghetti strap top pulled taught over a massive torso here. A pair of baggy hip hop style shorts hanging off there. A little girl in a white dress holding a dolly. All of them bent over with huge muscular shoulders and thick necks atop bodies hung in layers of fat. Bodies layered in steps of brown rolls glistening in the bare yellow light.
Though I was in pain and stricken with a kind of terror I had never known before I couldn’t make a sound as I looked up at the bodies lining the sides of my path. I was spun fully in the air and slammed against the base of a platform. Before I recovered any feeling hands reached down out of the blinding light and stripped my clothes off in shreds. I was pinned to the ground as it happened by a foot that gripped with brutal strength and felt cast in lead.
Naked and unable to breathe I was picked up again and hurled onto the sala. I rolled to a stop and opened my eyes. This sala was more brightly lit then the rest. It seemed to gleam with gold and the shimmer of silk. My vision was blurred with tears as I lay on my side struggling to breathe. My back still ached where I was kicked and my lungs felt crushed. I was staring at something that through my blurred eye sight and ruptured perceptions I couldn’t understand.
The chattering of the crowd stopped. I rolled to my stomach and tried to push myself up but there was a flash, a blur that connected with the side of my head like a gunshot which lifted me up and over and onto my back. I didn’t understand what it could have been. It felt like a baseball bat, but had come from nowhere, and then the thing I had been dumbly staring at re-arranged itself so that I could take it in at a different angle and realize that it was an immensely obese Titsou woman in full repose.
She had slapped me. that was clear, but impossible. She was more than twice her height in girth. She couldn’t have moved like that. Her arm was nearly the size of my waist. She lay against a hill of silk bolsters on an upholstered silk matt. There was no distinguishing the parts of her torso. Her breasts disappeared amongst cylindrical layers of fat. Between these flashes of gold chains and amulets glinting in the light that hung from her neck but soon disappeared into the crevices and ravines of her formless body. Her arms and legs were only recognizable from the elbows, and knees, above the joints it all blended into the rest of her.
Around her and between us were platters of food. Every conceivable type and condition of anything edible. Prawns were piled in a pink tower of crustaceous antennae. Heavy piles of organ meat; fried and boiled articulated and ringed on lacquer platters. Skewers of chicken, pork, beef, fish and dog were stacked in different levels for consumption. A silver serving tray the size of a small bath tub filled with white fluffy rice took up an entire corner of the platform.
It was too much to see and comprehend at one time. Suddenly I regained my vocal abilities and began to scream with what I imagine is the most primal, basic instinct we have left as humans. That scream of pure terror. The child’s nightmare scream. The scream let out just as the knife rips into the solar plexus. Total reaction, no cognition, all reflex. As soon as the sound escaped my mouth I was smacked with the same terrible speed and accuracy as before and knocked back across the platform to where I had started out.
The blow cut my scream short. This time the woman looked at me. The face, not much larger than the face of a normal human, or Titsou any way, atop this great leviathan of a body.
She spoke, not to me but past me, in French. This language I had always related with refinement and culture coming from what could only be described as a mutant. Unfortunately, or maybe not, I can’t speak French. So the smooth sounding dialogue between her, and I supposed the one who had dragged me here, sounded no more threatening than a Marcel Marceau gag. There was no shouting and no inflections of threat. I dared not move again as this went on. My head rang with pain. I hurt so badly I forgot the humility that should have accompanied being naked atop the platform.
When their dialogue finished the women looked at me directly. I had shifted my gaze just to the right of her head so as not to have to think about her physiognomy. ‘what are you doing here, in H’you?’ The voice was Miss Maples’, it was the voice of a well educated elderly women who lived in a cottage somewhere in story book England, not of this. I knew they spoke English, I had read it in the pamphlet. But it shouldn’t sound like this. It should be harsh and guttural at best, just barely comprehensible. I had lost the ability to speak, shaking my head in an indeterminate direction, meaning, I suppose the bus station.
She pursed her lips then speaking in French again I was dragged off and thrown to the ground. This time I thrashed around a bit as I was on my back but the first kick, delivered by one of the children, connected with my shoulder and I heard a terrible crunch. I supposed my cartilage had all just been ripped out of place.
I was dragged through the crowd which seemed to be breaking up already. The music began to blare from a half dozen different sources and the lights burned in my eyes. I was dragged then pushed up against a wooden post. A thick leather cord was pulled tight against my throat. I strained against the cord as the huge hand of the Tistou who was holding my skull in a solid painful grip fumbled at the sides of my head.
There was a quick thump on the right side, then the same on the left side. I felt a strange numbness in both my ears for a second and then a burn as if they had been torn off. I leaned forward in an effort to relieve the pain but choked against the strap. If I leaned back the burn flared to an unbearable singeing, I sat there twisting against the pole, choking and burning in my ears. The Titsou’s face leaned down to meet me eye to eye, he smiled sweetly and whispered bon noi as he cracked my skull against the thick wooden pole and I went out.
I woke into a state of pure pain hours later. The sky was streaked with a murky gray, dawn was emerging. The lights still glowed around me but it was all murky and confusing. My vision was blurring and if I wasn’t sitting down I would have fallen down. I wanted to shake my head to try and clear it but was instantly reminded by pain that something was pinning my head against the pole I rested against.
My senses were seeping back. Someone was speaking English, American English. Clear and understandable. There was a response in the high British tinged with French. I couldn’t follow what they were saying but knew they were behind me. I sat there pinned and choked trying to hear, to comprehend what was an incomprehensible situation.
I was being held by monsters. Monsters; alive and walking and listening to African dance music blasting from the stereos of Mercedes Benz’s. I had been attacked, beaten, stripped, humiliated and what? Tied to a post, for what? The realization that they might eat me was real.
Then clear enough I heard him. ‘He’s awake now’. Then squatting in front of me, a Caucasian face. A plain white face looking me over questioningly. Dressed like any one going to the mall to price shower curtains. No bones around his neck, no Khaki, no pith helmet.
‘emm, can you hear me?’ He shouted at my face. I tried to speak but could only groan. Then he was out of sight, but I could still hear him.
‘Go ahead then and take the nails out, bring him over, shit, what the hell is he doing here?’
The Titsou grabbed the top of my head again and the burning pain in my ears tore open, flaming up so that I screamed. I could hear the nails rip through the tissue and scabs. Blood filled the canals on both sides of my head. The strap was released from around my neck I sagged, and gasped for breath; the Titsou caught me with his foot grasping my chest with his prehensile toes. I sighed with the relief of being able to breathe free again.
The Titsou scooped me up onto his shoulder. I retched once and then threw up a streak of yellow bile over his naked fat back. He giggled ‘merde’ as he started to trot. The lights and disorientation of being carried like a sack made my head swoon and I passed out again.
I came to again in the full light of day lying on a bed in a small room. Sun streamed in through the windows, heating the room. It must have been late morning. My body ached, my head was pounding, my ears felt like novelty items. They throbbed audibly.
Worse was the dry, clenching thirst that made it difficult to take in air. It had been more than twenty four hours since I had anything to eat or drink. The room was spartan with only the bed, one odd looking chair and a few books piled on a make shift shelf. There was no liquid in the place. I sat up slowly feeling every bruise and abrasion on my abused body. The silk sheet draped over me stuck to the side of my head with dried blood. I pulled it away ripping away hair and scab. I felt the gash and the blood that had starting oozing out of it again.
I sat looking out the window wondering about the silence. My hearing was obscured by the tidal sound of pulse rushing in my swollen ears. There was nothing else. Outside the streets beyond the little yard of the house were empty. There were no people, or Titsou, or cars or motorbikes. A lone feral dog appeared and scampered for a moment in the bright sun before disappearing into a slit of shade.
‘The American’ I thought, this is the house of the American, and as if on cue a door I hadn’t seen, being in the wall behind me, opened and in trod the American, looking now more as I had expected this morning. He was naked except a single native cloth wrapped around his torso. He was deeply tanned, thin and wiry.
He glared at me without saying anything for what seemed a very long time, then turned and left the room. My stomach quivered. Fear and hunger mixed together in a wave that made me nauseous again. I retched audibly. The American leapt through the door again and yelled ‘don’t you dare puke in my fucking bed you idiot.’ I clasped my hand over my mouth and nodded until he stepped back out of view then I concentrated deeply on settling my guts. Breathing in through the mouth out through the nose, after a minute the saliva that had filled my mouth drained away. I wondered for a second if I should try and bolt through the window and back to the tea house were the bus left from. They were laughing when I arrived, had pointed me in this direction. Had sent me here on purpose, they knew exactly what was going to happen so there was no hope there. Besides that I could barley move. How was I going to run, leap. I had no clothes.
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