In Another City by Mark Jacobs

I was in Madrid, trying to find out how much was the right amount to drink. I was having no luck. This was in a bar in Tetuán. It was noisy, a Friday night in early October, still warm outside but the season’s change poised like a dancer. People were blowing off a week’s steam. A bald truck driver from Murcia with a cowboy belt buckle was turning belligerent, the reason why not obvious at least to me. He checked me out once, saw I was a foreigner, wanted to make something of it. I looked away.

Madrid, Spain, Europe. Not Africa, the Congo, Kinshasa.

The miracle of geography.

It was not that much of a surprise when Pollito walked into the bar that evening. Pollito was a nurse. Our paths crossed in Kinshasa. For a while, we worked at the same clinic. In his memory, too, hung the smell that tires make when they burn. I remembered he was from Tetuán, which is a barrio where tourists looking for monumental Spain do not go.

He ordered a drink at the bar, looked around, saw me standing at the other end. Made his way over through the throng. We shook hands.

“Billy. You, here.”

“Hello, Pollito.”

His English was bad, but not as bad as my Spanish.

Pollito was a beefy man with muscular arms good for lifting patients out of bed and restraining people agitated by their pain. His face was broad and open in a way that made you think he must be naïve; he was some sort of overgrown child. It was a misleading impression.

He did not ask me what I was doing in Spain. Anyway, I didn’t know, except that it was an Atlantic away from America. I was not ready to go home. In Kinshasa, the people we hung with—expats like us who had NGO jobs and apartments paid for by our employers—didn’t ask questions of each other. It was not a code or a taboo, just a thing we didn’t do. We liked declarative sentences, usually short.

“At the hospital where I’m working,” Pollito told me, “there’s a wing for people with dementia.”

I nodded. I took a drink.

“The other day, a man got out of his bed and hit me. In the face, here.” He pointed to his cheek. “I wanted to hit him back. He’s a mean son of a bitch. But that’s not something you do in my job.”

“Probably better that way.”

We finished our drinks. Independently, we decided we would have another together. I was feeling relieved, as though a danger had passed, but the opposite was true. The truck driver was cursing at somebody in a theatrical voice, but it did not seem to be a person who was present in the bar.

Pollito was drinking beer. He drained half his glass in one pull and told me, “Mariana left me.”

Mariana was his wife. I used to wonder what she thought of his going to work in Africa. She came to visit him in Kinshasa once, but they holed up in a hotel room, and she did not get introduced around to the people Pollito knew. Some of them were offended. Not me. I had no space, inside or out, for superfluous outrage.

I was drinking red wine. I drank in a way I hoped expressed my sympathy for the defection of Mariana. We had fallen into our Kinshasa habit of talking without questions.

“I got a text from Giselle the other day,” I told him.

“Mariana was born in Extremadura. That’s where she went.”

“Giselle got the prosthetic arm. It’s on. It works. It’s not perfect, but it helps.”

“Mariana always hated Extremadura; she couldn’t wait to get away from the place. You know what people here say, despues de Madrid, el cielo.”

“Giselle said you sent the money for the arm.”

“Mariana won’t talk to me. That’s not right, Billy, it’s not right.”

He was seething.

I told him, “Giselle said she still feels pain in the arm that’s gone.”

Giselle was the Congolese director of the clinic. The day the clinic was attacked, she went out front into the street and tried to fight the attackers off, not with a weapon but with her righteous anger. Somebody with a machete hacked at her arm. I was there but useless except for herding some of the kids out of the multiple lines of fire. Pollito was also there. In the midst of the attack, crazed and angry and fearful people everywhere, he took over. Giselle was on the ground on her back, in shock. Her arm was hanging by strings. Blood was spurting. Pollito saved her life, but she lost the arm.

The truck driver was making his way over to us.

“Americano,” he accused me. “Eres americano.”

My Spanish wasn’t good enough to catch the nuances of the things he was accusing me of. Pollito grabbed him by his right arm. He shook him, saying nothing. When Pollito shook you, you paid attention. The truck driver moved away. Already, he was yesterday’s weather.

“I’m going to Extremadura,” Pollito told me. “Tonight. I’m going now.”

I didn’t mind being the target of his belligerence. He was daring me to say that was a dumb idea, so I did. He ignored me.

“She’s staying with her sister. The sister’s name is Covadonga. It’s an old-fashioned family; that’s where the name comes from. The family lives in a little town in Badajoz.” He stopped, thought for a moment. Then he told me again, “Mariana always hated Extremadura.”

“If you’re going to Extremadura tonight, you’d better quit drinking.”

He gave me a look as if thinking about something a long way off. It was a quirk I had, too. In Kinshasa, I lived for a time with a Belgian woman. Charlotte had a bad conscience over what her home country had done to the Congo before she was born. She was doing what she could to atone. Nothing, she liked to say, I can do so little it amounts to nothing. Which, of course, was true but, at the same time, irrelevant. She told me I had contempt for the here and now; that was why I put the faraway look on. It wasn’t true. A certain amount of pain was involved, yes, but not contempt.

Pollito set his mostly full beer glass on the bar.

I set down my glass of wine.

The bartender was a woman with very short dark hair and a flush to her cheeks. She was good at reading people’s gestures and knew we were done.

“I’m not drunk,” Pollito told me.

“Me neither.”

“I was going to be drunk.”

“Me too.”

“But I’m not.”

“That’s good,” I said. “It’s good that we’re not drunk.”

“We must take turns driving. Can you drive a car with embrague and gears?”

I told him the word. “Clutch. Yes, I can drive a car with a clutch.”

This was how I built my French vocabulary in the Congo, a word at a time, in context. I had no talent for learning languages. At a certain point in Kinshasa, I quit caring how untalented I was. The hell with brilliance, I said. I’m getting by. This was before Giselle’s clinic was burned. Feu, that was the French word for fire. Some words stick with me. I get the sense they will be with me forever.

Out on the street, the air had a feel like raw silk rubbing against your skin. Night had fallen. Even in Tetuán, Madrid is a city that holds its head high. It has style. At this point, I could not think about being anywhere that wasn’t Spain.

We walked off the buzz we had acquired in the bar, going to Pollito’s apartment. He did not invite me in.

“It’s a wreck,” he told me. “Wait here. I’ll get the car key.”

I had nothing with me. No change of clothes, nothing you wanted if you were going on a trip, even a short trip. It didn’t matter.

I did have a phone but did not look up the distance from Madrid to Badajoz or the route. It did not seem essential for me to know.

When Pollito came down with the key, we walked three blocks to where his car was parked on a short street of big apartment buildings. It was an old Seat the color of an orange gone bad. It was a small, two-door sedan. Behind the wheel, Pollito looked like a bear on a tricycle.

We left the city without conversation. It felt as though we had made up our minds about something consequential. Pollito didn’t need a GPS; he knew the way to Mariana’s town. He put the radio on but turned it off when he remembered my Spanish wasn’t up to following the news.

“It’s fucked,” he told me.

“What’s fucked?”

“The news.”

Outside the capital, my head began to ache, and I was thirsty. That was the wine, reminding me of the bar and the truculent driver and the pleasure I’d felt, seeing Pollito walk in.

“Mariana was angry,” he told me once.

It was the perfect place for a question. I didn’t ask it. When he was ready, he went on.

“About the arm,” he said.

“Giselle’s prosthetic arm.”

“Mariana said it wasn’t my responsibility to pay for it. I became frustrated when she said that, Billy. I said ugly things. More than a few of them. Which in turn caused Mariana to say ugly things back to me.”

“In Kinshasa,” I told him, “when Charlotte told me she was tired of living with me, I said some ugly things.”

“There you have it.”

“She didn’t say ugly things back at me, though; she just walked out. She had a place to go. She had a plan. Charlotte was famous for her plans. Another Belgian, a guy from Antwerp. She was from Antwerp, too. He was the plan.”

The two of them had history. It was the history of colonialism in Africa.

Pollito said, “I wondered what happened to Charlotte.”

We drove for a while in silence. In the old Seat, the tires on the pavement were loud, the engine was loud, the headlights were arbitrary in what they picked out on the road ahead of us.

When Pollito spoke again, it was about Giselle. She had the height, the rangy build, the lighter skin tones of a Tutsi, but she never once identified herself as a member of that tribe or any tribe. Je suis Congolaise, she insisted if you asked her. Ethnic identity, ethnic hate had done all the damage to the Congo that they needed to do.

“They’re talking about giving her another clinic,” Pollito told me. “Right now, she’s still at home. She is resting. Recuperating, that is what one says, correct? She is getting used to the arm, that is to say, the things the arm can do and the things it cannot do.”

“She’s still weak.”

“Extremely weak.” Because he was a nurse and spoke with authority, it sounded like a clinical diagnosis. “With the arm, her spirits are better. It might be a new clinic they are building; it might also be that she takes a clinic for a director who has become discouraged.”

“Guy,” I said. “That was the name of the Belgian Charlotte went to live with. I never liked him.”

“Of course not, Billy. Of course not.”

The vehemence with which he spoke made me feel a little better. I hadn’t realized how much Charlotte’s desertion back in Kinshasa was still bothering me.

I might have dozed. I woke when Pollito pulled over to the side of the road. He had left the highway. We were on a secondary road somewhere out in the country. My mind was slow and dull. So this is Spain, I thought. After all this time, this is Spain. It felt like climbing onto a life raft.

I took over the driving. I had gone maybe half an hour when the tire went. It was the passenger-side front tire, and it made a bang as it exploded. The car complained. It shuddered. It tried to go sideways. All that time, it wanted to fishtail. I took my foot off the gas, downshifted, gripped the steering wheel hard, and let the Seat slow to a stop. I parked on the berm.

“Cabrón,” said Pollito.

We got out of the car to inspect the damage. The tire was shredded, and I was worried about the rim. It might be bent. I shined the flash from my phone on it but wasn’t sure.

“Do you have a spare?” I asked Pollito.

“What?”

“An extra tire.”

He went to the trunk, popped the latch, and pulled out a spare tire. It was flat.

“Me cago en la leche.”

He was relieved to have someplace to put his anger that wasn’t Mariana.

“We can call a garage,” I said. “Maybe they’ll send somebody out.”

He shook his head. “This time of night, out here, nobody will come.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Sooner or later, somebody will come by.”

It was late. The road Pollito had chosen was not heavily traveled. We listened but heard no vehicle approaching from either direction. What we did hear was the sound of water. It was a creek, traveling at a diagonal away from the road. There was enough moonlight to see that it was shallow and running fast over a bed of flat stones. The light silvered the froth on the surface of the swirling water. Overhead on both sides of the road were trees with no names. Despite the mild weather, they had lost a good half of the leaves on their branches, which gave them a transitory look. You couldn’t count on them for protection.

“I was thinking about going back,” Pollito told me.

“You wanted to go back to Kinshasa.”

“In order to see Giselle. I mean, see Giselle now that she has the arm. I told Mariana. That’s when she became angry and left.”

The day they attacked the clinic, they also barricaded the street with tires and set them on fire. The idea was to prevent the police or the military from showing up to stop them. The odds of anybody showing up to help were low, they were ridiculously low, so there must have been more to it than that. Burning the tires, watching clouds of oily black smoke rise and hang in the windless air must have produced a pleasure all its own. If you wanted to explain why they did what they did, you fell back on something Giselle said one time, that the marriage of political hatred and ethnic antagonism was a retentissant success in her country.

Pollito found a bottle of brandy in the glove box.

“It’s cheap,” he warned me. “It’s not good brandy.”

We each took a drink. He was right; it was not good brandy. He screwed the cap back on, set the bottle on the hood of the car.

There was still no sound of a vehicle. The rush of creek water filled the night’s ears.

I felt full. I was stuffed to bursting. Certain inflexible feelings, certain specific Congo memories, were pushing at me from the inside, trying to get out. I was as stiff as a toy soldier.

Pollito walked over to the tire that had blown up. He kicked it. I was pretty sure he was feeling the same kind of full that I was.

There was nothing to make me think anything was going to change for either of us, not anytime soon.

We had our anger. We had our hero. She had courage and an artificial arm. We had Kinshasa the way you have a city you have walked around, eaten in, slept in, made friends and enemies in. We had the hole the city cut inside us.

Pollito kicked the tire again. He cursed again.

“Mariana won’t come back,” he told me. There was calm in his voice, but there was no doubt. “Put money on it, Billy, Mariana is not coming back.”

It might take a while, but in time, a car would come by. When it did, we would flag it down.