Candyland in Lilongwe

Purple. Candy Hearts. I missed the Rainbow Trail. Boy, you can say that again.

It’s almost eight o’clock in the morning and I’m playing Candyland with a Dutchman at a hotel bar in Lilongwe. You’ve never heard of Lilongwe, I know. It’s the capitol of Malawi. Maybe you’ve never heard of Malawi; that’s okay too- it’s lost in that thin murky section of Africa. We’re drinking bad gin and killing time. What do the Dutchman, the bad gin and Candyland have in common? A flood, a political insurrection and a lot of bad luck. 
 

We are sitting at the table at the end of the bar farthest from the lobby. It’s the least shitty table in a room full of shitty tables and we had put packets of sugar under two of the legs to sure it up. The smoky air is musty and sticky. A general sense of lethargy has washed through the hotel, leaving indolence and apathy pooled everywhere. We’ve been stuck here for a ten days, give or take. A handful of foreigners caught in the tide, clinging to this hotel like slurry at the edge of a lake.  
 

Purple. Peppermint Stick Forest. 127 miles. Why aren’t they called candy canes? What year was this game made? It’s a long road ahead.
 

Richard is tall, lanky and bald. Right now he’s wiping back the sweat from his head and lighting another cigarette. He’s my Dutchman. He has a wide easy smile that translates better than his Chichewa. Of course everyone at the hotel speaks enough English to get by. Richard is a photographer. He’s a wildlife cameraman. He had just gotten back from the game preserve at Lake Malawi when the rebels came into the city.  He’s told me the story a number of times. The Rover busted a hose and overheated. He and the driver had to take turns pissing into the radiator and waiting for the engine to cool down. With each telling there seems to be more pissing.
 

Like most people I’ve met from Holland, Richard’s mastery of English was complete. He swears beautifully and without remorse. A few days ago he complained that he had started to dream in English. I don’t know where he picked it up but he had mastered the art of the backhanded compliment. “Of all the foul liquors we’ve shared, this one is certainly the best.” This was his verdict of the gin.  He also had an odd habit of stacking his metaphors to overemphasize a point, “He’s a whale of an elephant of a man”, or “that merchant is a scorpion of a snake.” 
 

I tell him I think his speech is colorful.

“It’s not weird. It’s Dutch,” he says.
This is his mantra to explain away any of the strange things he might do. I’ve been to Holland though; I’ve smashed up a croquette in a hard roll and called it a sandwich. And to be fair some of it is Dutch but everything else, which is a considerable amount, that’s all Richard.

We came downstairs at dawn and we took up our positions at the table. The sun was just filtering into the lobby then, the desk clerk and the porter were smoking and going through the morning paper, it was maybe seven o’clock. It was already hot. Richard ordered a soft-boiled egg and toast. I’m still waiting for my appetite, we usually meet around 8:30.

We are drinking gin because we had finished off the last of the rye last night. It’s Malawi gin. This means it’s locally made and has a lot in common with engine solvent. It’s distilled from sugar cane. This should, technically speaking, make it a rum but it doesn’t taste like either. It’s a sweeter version of lighter fluid.

Machille, from behind the bar, promises us that a new case of rum will be delivered today, if the rebels don’t hold it up, but not until the afternoon. Machille smiles. His face is round and swollen like a peach. When offers up a toothy grin, which he has at every occasion. When he smiles his cheeks bunch up. He pulls a cigarette from a pack at the bar and lights it absently. 

Double Blue. Gumdrop Mountains and the Cherry Pitfall. 92 Miles. For the love of God, not again! I had to get the last double blue. Now I'm stuck here. You can’t trust a Dutchman to shuffle a deck of toy cards. 

Lilongwe  has two cities: the New City and the Old City. The New City has better hotels and more importantly the embassies; it’s where tourists would stay, not that tourists visit. The New City is better but we’re in the Old City. The Old City has its casual charm and spice shops. We don’t care much about the casual charms; we’re in the old city because it’s safer. The rebels are only in the New City, they don’t care much about what happens here. So there are foreigners scattered across the fleabag hotels here. One way or another things will settle down and the airport will reopen.

If I'm callous about the coup, I apologize. Does anyone really care? Okay, well their President cares about the coup, don’t misunderstand me. It’s just that I don’t much care. I probably should, with the rebels and their promises to rid the country of corruption. But no one believes it, least of all them. The country will just shed one bad government so that it can start over, like a snake pulling off its old skin on a tree branch. It’s the natural order. The checks and balances here don’t come from representative democracy as much as the constancy of blood spilled. It's hard to get the Americans to care about any black war, least of all one in Malawi. 

We had an Italian friend, Remo, who left a few days ago. Remo was every bit as entertaining as Richard. He learned English in South African, so his accent was, well, unique. He picked up the Afrikaner trait of ending sentences with affirmations. For Remo saying “honestly” or “I promise you” is like using a period. Requisite. Remo suggested making for Harare or maybe Johannesburg.
“Listen to me, aye, we should head off to Jo-berg. I promise you.” he said and crushed out his cigarette. If he gets across Mozambique and into Zimbabwe, he’ll be able to get a flight home pretty easily. He’ll probably get home before me but why bother? Sure, I’m stuck for a bit but I’m reasonably safe. If they get stopped on the road it could be ugly. 

I miss his sexist jokes and his contempt for other Italians. If you gave him an Italian surname he would tell you what was wrong with the clan:
“Bertoli”

“They live in the hills. Strong backs, good as laborers but crooked in business. They once tried to sell me mule. It was a very bad mule. Honestly.”

“Disanti”

“Thieves. Every one. They work with the gypsies outside Napoli. Do not trust these people, I promise you.”
It was a fun game. If we are to believe Remo, very few of his countrymen were honorable. 

Yellow. Crooked old peanut brittle house. 59 miles. I'm finally making some progress. But damned that Dutchman, he just pulled the only double-red out of his ass. He's in Lollypop Woods and he's going to beat me home. Again. 

I had been in the villages southeast of the city when the floods came. This just was before the rebellion. What little the villagers had was taken by the flood. You could see only the tops of their huts and the upper braches of the cashew trees when the waters crested.  Any animal that could was clinging to those braches. A wet onerous leopard sat a few branches from a family of monkeys. On that day, there were no predators or prey - only survivors.

Once the obvious dangers had passed, once the waters receded, the animals simply go on with their lives. Animals have nothing and so they lose nothing. They just go on as if nothing happened. It’s the villagers that have the real problems. The ones that survived the flood had dysentery and then malaria to look forward to. Later still, they would have to have to rebuild, replant and otherwise start their lives again.

If the flood itself made any ripple in the international press, the concerns have since faded. Whatever aid was shipped is now in the hands of the guerillas and profiteers. No one in the West cares what happens after they allot the funds. It is the cheque alone, once issued, which scrubs away any guilt they might conceive. But hell, it's not like anyone in the Congo cares about it either. The next time you think that things are bad, that you have problems and your life is a mess, take heart: this is where God shits on the world.

With any luck the insurrection will work itself out by week’s end and I’d get out. It was getting to where my trips out were longer but there were fewer merchants that would extend me credit for tea or dinner. The hotel was stuck with me, one more orphan in the city. I was already into them for a more than a week's rent and probably a month's bar bills. I gave them my laptop and the rest of my gear. Partly to get it out of my room, partly as a show of good faith. 

Green. Lollypop Woods. I’m ahead this time and I might actually win one.

There was girl at the bar last night. She was young and American. Her hair smelled like a memory. What every teenage boy wants a girls’ hair to smell like – an aroma of flowers and mystery.

She came down fresh from the shower; her hair hadn’t yet dried. When she sat down, the sight and smell of her hair took me back to high school. Standing under the bleachers with Angela Stephenson: it was early in the fall and a sudden rain had us taking hasty cover under the grandstands. I remember a wet thicket of brown locks that curled up at her shoulders. The smell of her shampoo was awakened by the rainwater. It stirred up something inside me, a curious mélange of romance and lust. Between the memory and the rye, long after her hair was dry, she was Jessica and I was 17 and most importantly we were not in Africa.

Her eyes are wide and green. Her eyebrows large but still tailored. Her hair swayed as she spoke and my eyes drifted to her hips: wide for her frame but solid and trim. They swayed in time with  her hair. I know I wanted to touch her. To grab her hips and press her against me. Hard. I wanted to part her lips and kiss her. 

In the time I can recall her being at the bar, I had worked beyond the kiss, beyond the lovemaking and I was well into an established life. A life with a porch and a dog and large sedan that required regular maintenance. A life that was laden with complex insecurities that could be easily mistaken for the lingering remains of desire. A life where we complicated one another by taking too many things for granted. We would look back to that night in the bar in Lilongwe and wonder how to get back this magic. I was very drunk. I had taken the fantasy too far.

 She was young. She was an aid worker no doubt. She had a tattoo of an eagle on her left wrist. It was something like an Egyptian eagle or maybe it was an old German eagle. She was in the bar for a couple of hours and she sat with Richard and me. It’s not like there was much choice. The bar was empty otherwise and you didn’t come down to the bar to sit and drink by yourself. You might do that in a midtown tavern or some dive in Cleveland - if you’re trying to drink some problem away. Not in Lilongwe though, not in Timbuktu or Jakarta. You might try it in Johannesburg but you’ll feel a little guilty if you did.

It’s simpler here. If you want to get away from people, you have every possible opportunity. You can just stay in your room if you’re feeling antisocial. We all get that way from time to time. But within a couple of days you work through whatever baggage you’ve brought. If you’re the introspective type you’ll take a personal inventory. How and why you are in Lilongwe should rank high on that list. 

So as I was saying, if you ended up drinking by yourself it was just until someone else would come sit next to you and talk. You were there for company. Conversation and human companionship. Anyone to talk to. Even before the girl, I had Richard and Remo so I was lucky. 

Of all the strange foreigners you could get stuck with in a very foreign city, Richard’s not the worst option. He’s a lion of a puppy or something like that. His linguistic curiosities aside, his quirks are quite bearable and you’ll easily suffer through them for the company. Especially if he’ll suffer yours. He’s not opposed to playing Candyland after breakfast to pass the time. Even when there are only a dozen cards and no matter how well we shuffle them, we both know without much thought exactly how many greens are left in the short stack. It seems that through the faint waxiness of the cards you can feel the hard primary colors seeping through.

The Dutch seem to be easy with guilt-free pleasure. I’m not sure how much pleasure there is in Candyland, but whatever there is does not bother him. Richard and I ran out of things to talk about a few days ago. We might fall back on his last trip to the preserve or how the flood is working out - but it’s tiring. So instead we hope for something to happen; something to shake the staleness out of the room, like the old women beating their rugs in the street.

“She thought you was funny”, Machille says, “dat American bird”.
Young Angela.

“It wasn’t me Machille, it was the familiarity."
Richard is behind me pantomiming to Machille the international sign which signifies that I am not funny at all. Though I'm not entirely sure what that sign looks like.  
"It was just that I was someone who spoke English”, and as I say those words Richard bounces a sugar packet of my head, “…without an accent” I quickly qualify.
"He means that he was the only Yank in the place." Richard assures Machille.

It's true though. I'm just someone who’s seen too many Budweiser commercials, even if you hate those commercials, even if you hate Budweiser. You try and use that person and those moments as best you can – I told you what she meant to me. For her, I was a small life preserver in the ocean of things foreign. I don’t remember when she left but I’m sure it saddened me profoundly. 

You snatch up whatever you can that’s in English, newspapers, magazines, anything. I found a month old copy of Elle in the lobby a couple of days after I arrived and I was glad for it. There were a few tattered copies of the Guardian or the Times floating around but you could only read those so many times. It was hard to care about some Torrie prat crossing sides of the floor for a vote that failed a month ago.

Yellow. Ice Cream Floats. There isn’t even a mile marker here. You’re that close. I remember how much that frustrated me as a child. You get so near Home Sweet Home but you’re trapped on a path that leads you away from it.

I wake up back in my room. It’s about four in the afternoon and I know I won’t sleep anymore. It is too hot to sleep. I had been dreaming about a cat I once had. The soft orange of his fur. He had been butting his head against mine and the constancy of his purring remains with me as I rub my eyes. He lived to be 18, which is old for a cat, but in the dream he was much younger. Why I should be dreaming of that long dead cat eludes me. I go back down to the bar. Richard is laying on a bench against a wall where he’s passed out but I don't want to wake him. There was no one else there but I didn’t want to sit in my room anymore. I put my head down on the table and waited. You drift back home on a thin fiber of a waking dream. You try and figure out what time it is at home and you work through what your friends are doing. 

There comes a point in everyone's life, or at least there should come a point, where you realize the importance of a good bed. At that point, you'll become serious about your bedding; you understand the power that your mattress has. You read up on goose down – you find out what a good fill count is. You learn the difference between a duvet and a comforter. So much depends on your bed. Not here. Not in Africa. Not like this. Here, you have to shit within two feet of it. It's a place to sleep but nothing more. It will not rejuvenate you. So you think back to your bed. You conjure memories of your real bed like an old-world phantom. Hoping that the thought of it, or its ghostly presence might make the slab you are laying on seem more comfortable.

The backdoor of the bar opens and afternoon sun floods into the room only to be broken by the silhouette of Machille. He has the promised case of rum. He’s swaggering. The door closes behind him and stems the thunderous draught of sunlight. That dog of a jackal of a president has fled. He got on a plane for Zambia. Someone else said it was Sierra Leon but it doesn’t matter - he’s gone. The rebel leader will take his place and things will get back to whatever passes for normal. All the news is welcome. I wake Richard up and Machille leaves a bottle of Bacardi dark on the table for us, he smiles at me before he disappears behind the bar. 

Orange. The molasses swamp. 10 miles. Almost there. 
 
Richard has won again, it’s now eighteen games to twelve. Soon, it won’t matter. Maybe not tomorrow but in another morning or two we can take a car to the airport and we will head our separate ways. We’ll make some foolish promises about meeting up the next time I'm in Rotterdam and we’ll trade email addresses. But when the doors of the plane close it will be the end of this relationship, with all of its liquor, smoke and Candyland. I don’t think either one of us will be sad about that.