The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks Read Free Page B

on. Perhaps it was only false pride that made the Katongans seem querulous and loud and self-admiring—a defensiveness fueled by generations of colonial and post-colonial dependency, deracination, poverty. Nonetheless, I found it irritating. They blew their own horns, as it were, continuously, especially to strangers, and loudly sang the praises of the most trivial expression of their national character and culture—their affection for the roasted flesh of chimpanzees, for instance—as if it were something to be universally admired and imitated.
    Katongans generally, and Gbandehans especially, socialized outdoors and at night, when it was finally cool enough to eat a large, lingering meal of rice and beans, hot peppers, and bits of what they called bush meat, and drink cheap liquor distilled from palm wine, talk politics and religion, and later dance and make love. Every evening, the Gbandehans, rich and poor and young and old alike, shed their work clothes, washed their red-ocher skins, and dressed up—the men, sockless in American running shoes, wearing dark, sharply creased slacks and starched, white guayabera shirts; the women in high heels and provocative, colorful rayon dresses, their oiled black hair elaborately plaited and pinned into thick, uplifted wings and blades—and headed for the cafés, bars, and restaurants that crowded the alleys and side streets off Binga Park.
    I was halfway through my first Rhino, waiting for the local people to start appearing, when I glanced up and noticed in the distance a strangely contorted figure pass along the square, his shape silhouetted sharply against the yellow glare of fading sunlight off the park. Dressed in a few scraps of dark cloth, barefoot, filthy, and hunched over like an ape, he lurched more than walked, and then suddenly he glanced in my direction, straightened, and, stiff-legged, lumbering like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, turned off the square and entered the cul-de-sac, where, at the far end, at what had become my usual table, I sat staring.
    The street was narrow, a cobbled walkway barely wide enough for a single car to enter. The attached, three- and four-story, unpainted, wood-frame buildings that lined the street dated from early in the colonial era. On opposite sides of the street, tilted balustrades and balconies loosely attached to shuttered French windows nearly met each other overhead. The buildings once housed the waiting rooms and offices of the home country’s clerks and administrators. Now these dusty, unlit, high-ceilinged rooms were used mainly for the permanent storage of empty file cabinets, rotting rolltop desks, glass-fronted bookcases, and countless cartons of moldering, mouse-eaten colonial records. The only commercial action on the street nowadays took place at ground level, where the numerous small repair shops, grocers, barbers, and other native businesses had drawn down their slatted metal shutters for the day. My café was the only business open for business, and at the moment I was its sole customer. The barman and a waitress were lounging inside, flirting with each other and smoking American cigarettes in the shadows.
    When I first sat down, I had felt sociable, a citizen of the town, practically. But now, with this strange creature bearing down on me, I suddenly felt alone and cut off and, for the first time since entering the country, vulnerable. Even at a distance, I could see that he was just another madman, a dust-covered, ill-coordinated, mumbling man of indeterminate age. Such a figure was not an unusual sight in the cities and towns of Katonga, where there were no insane asylums, no mental health services of any kind, for that matter, and where a large segment of the adult population still suffered from the horrors of the 1960s revolution and the civil war a decade later. The thousands of young men and women who had been maddened by the savagery of the wars and had survived into middle and old age were generally homeless