The Soccer War

THE PLAN OF THE NEVER-WRITTEN BOOK THAT COULD BE, ETC

31

God’s victim, I have been lying in Lagos for two months now like Lazarus, struggling against illness. It is some sort of tropical infection, blood poisoning or a reaction to an unknown venom, and it is bad enough to make me swell up and leave my body covered with sores, suppurations and carbuncles. I have no strength left to fight the pain, so I ask Warsaw for permission to return. I have often been sick in Africa, since the tropics beget everything in excess, in exaggeration, and the law of intensified propagation and variety applies to bacteria and infections. There is no way out: if you want to enter the most sombre, treacherous and untrodden recesses of this land, you have to be prepared to pay the reckoning with your health, if not your life. Yet every hazardous passion is like this: a Moloch that wants to devour you. In this situation, some opt for a paradoxical state of existence — so that, on arriving in Africa, they disappear into luxurious hotels, never venture outside the pampered neighbourhoods of the whites, and, in short, despite finding themselves geographically in Africa, they continue to live in Europe — except that it’s a substitute Europe, reduced and second-rate. Indeed, such a lifestyle does not agree with the authentic traveller and lies beyond the means of the reporter, who must experience everything at his own cost.

32

More devastating than malaria or amoebas, fevers or contagion is the disease of loneliness, the disease of the tropical depression. Defending yourself against it takes iron resistance and a strong will. Yet even then it is not easy. (Here begin a description of the depression.) Describe the extremities of fatigue after empty days that pass purposelessly. Afterwards the sleepless nights, the morning listlessness, the slow immersion in sticky, clotting mucus, in an unpleasant and repulsive fluid. Now you look at yourself with loathing. Now you are repulsively white. The flavourless, unappetizing whiteness. Chalky, waxy, freckled, mottled, blood-blistered white skin — in this climate, in this sun! Horrible! In addition, everything is sweaty: head, back, belly, buttocks, all as if it had been left under a tap that had been carelessly turned-off so that there is a continuous — emphasize that, continuous—dripping of a warm, colourless, insistently sharp-smelling fluid. Sweat.

‘Oh, I see that you perspire a great deal.’

‘Yes, ma’am, and yet it’s healthy. Perspiration in the tropics is, if you will, health. Whoever perspires can bear the climate. It won’t wear him out.’

‘And you know, I simply can’t perspire. A little bit, of course, but it’s really nothing. I can’t imagine why.’

‘To perspire you need to drink a lot. Drink and drink, whatever is available. Juices, soft drinks and a little alcohol do you some good, too. It’s better to perspire than to urinate. The kidneys work less.’ Oh, God, those endless conversations about sweat, until the ears burn.

‘But it’s a natural thing. Perspiring isn’t shameful.’

‘And you know, there’s something psychological to it, too. If you point out to someone that he is perspiring, he immediately begins perspiring even more.’

‘You’re right, ma’am. At this moment, I’ve just started dripping with perspiration.’

Thank you, sir and madam, for the conversation — and you think: poor white people overwhelmed by the tropics, thrashing about in the tropics like fish on the beach, packed together, flaccid, crumpled, wrung out and, precisely, sweaty (she less, he more). Describe the characteristic sweat complex, which is in fact a weakness complex.

In the tropics the white feels weakened, or downright weak, whence comes the heightened tendency to outbursts of aggression. People who are polite, modest or even humble in Europe fall easily into rage here, get into fights, destroy other people, start feuds, fall prey to megalomania, grow touchy about their prestige and significance and go around completely devoid of self-criticism, bragging about the position and the influence they have at home. From the summits of fancied authority they swear vengeance upon their enemies (and the enemy is no imperialist politician, but the ordinary co-worker at the next desk) and if someone told them that they ought to have their head examined (which I often felt like doing) they would be mortally offended. People make spectacles of themselves without even thinking about it. But then again, if it were otherwise there would be no literature. Writers would have nothing to observe. All of it — the weakness and the aggression, the loathing and the mania — is a product of the tropical depression that is also symptomized by wild swings of emotion. Here are two friends sitting at the bar for several hours, drinking beer. Through the windows they can see the waves of the Atlantic, palms, girls on the beach. None of it means anything to them. They are sunk in depression; they have wall eyes, pained spirits, atrophied bodies. They are silent and will remain completely listless all evening. Suddenly one of them picks up his mug and slams the other one across the head. Screams, blood and the thump of a body hitting the floor. What was it? Exactly nothing. Or rather, the following occurred: the depression torments you and you try to free yourself of it. But the requisite strength is not born in a moment. It takes time to accumulate it in sufficient quantity to overcome the depression. You drink beer and wait for that blessed moment. And there is a further pathological deviation evoked by the action of the tropics. Namely, in the period leading up to the blessed moment in which you will be able to overcome the depression calmly and with dignity, a surplus of strength arises in you — no one knows from where — a surplus that blows up and assaults the brain in a wave of blood, and in order to vent that surplus you have to crack your innocent friend across the skull. This is the depressive explosion — a phenomenon known to all habitués of the tropics. If you are the witness of such a scene, you need not step in — there is no further reason to do so: that one blow frees a person of the surplus and he is now a normal, conscious individual, free of the depression. Describe other behaviour from periods of depression. Physiological changes in chronic states: the slumber of cortical cells, the numbness in the fingertips, the loss of sensitivity to colours and the general dulling of vision, the transient loss of hearing. There would be a lot to say.

33

At the beginning of the 1960s Africa was a fascinating world. I wrote volumes about it (I haven’t mentioned that the press agencies insist on a correspondent’s writing and writing, without pause, without stopping for breath — I don’t want to say without thinking, even though such a prospect is also possible from time to time — that they demand constant telexes, dispatches, some by post or with returning travellers, an unending stream of information, commentary, reporting, opinions and evaluations, because only when the folios full of his collected correspondence are breaking at the seams and spilling out of the cabinets back at the home office can he count on their saying approvingly: That one’s all right. He’s really good). I too wrote volumes of information and commentary, of which not a trace remains. But our job is like a baker’s work — his rolls are tasty as long as they’re fresh; after two days they’re stale; after a week they’re covered with mould and fit only to be thrown out.

34

Some time after sending the ‘Burning Roadblocks’ piece to Warsaw, I received a telegram from my boss Michal Hofman, then the managing editor of the Polish Press Agency. ‘I kindly request,’ I read in the telegram, ‘that once and for all you put an end to these exploits that could end in tragedy.’ The once and for all referred to previous predicaments that I really might not have been able to get out of. My boss treated me with patience and understanding. He tolerated my adventures and my pathological lack of discipline. At my most irresponsible I would suddenly break contact with Warsaw without having told them my plans and would disappear without a trace: throw myself into the jungle, float down the Niger in a dugout, wander through the Sahara with nomads. The main office, not knowing what had happened or how to look for me, would, as a last resort, send telegrams to various embassies. Once, when I showed up in Bamako, our embassy there showed me a telegramme: ‘Should Kapuściński happen to show up in your territory, please inform PAP through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.’

35

In Lagos, when I was ill, I read through Tristes Tropiques. Claude Lévi-Strauss has been staying in the Brazilian jungles, carrying out ethnographic research among the Indian tribes. He is running into difficulties and resistance from the Indians; he is discouraged and exhausted.

Above all, he asks himself questions: Why has he come here? With what hopes or what objectives? Is this a normal occupation like any other profession, the only difference being that the office or laboratory is separated from the practitioner’s home by a distance of several thousand kilometres? Or does it result from a more radical choice, which implies that the anthropologist is calling into question the system in which he was born and brought up? It was now nearly five years since I had left France and interrupted my university career. Meanwhile, the more prudent of my former colleagues were beginning to climb the academic ladder: those with political leanings, such as I had once had, were already members of parliament and would soon be ministers. And here was I, trekking across desert wastes in pursuit of a few pathetic human remnants. By whom or by what had I been impelled to disrupt the normal course of my existence? Was it a trick on my part, a clever diversion, which would allow me to resume my career with additional advantages for which I would be given credit? Or did my decision express a deep-seated incompatibility with my social setting so that, whatever happened, I would inevitably live in a state of ever greater estrangement from it? Through a remarkable paradox, my life of adventure, instead of opening up a new world to me, had the effect rather of bringing me back to the old one, and the world I had been looking for disintegrated in my grasp. Just as, once they were in my power, the men and the landscapes I had set out to conquer lost the significance I had hoped they would have for me, so for these disappointing yet present images, other images were substituted which had been held in reserve by my past and had seemed of no particular importance when they still belonged to the reality surrounding me. Travelling through regions upon which few eyes had gazed, sharing the existence of communities whose poverty was the price — paid in the first instance by them — for my being able to go back thousands of years in time, I was no longer fully aware of either world. What came to me were fleeting visions of the French countryside I had cut myself off from, or snatches of music and poetry which were the most conventional expressions of a culture which I must convince myself I had renounced, if I were not to belie the direction I had given to my life. On the plateau of the western Mato Grosso, I had been haunted for weeks, not by the things that lay all around me and that I would never see again, but by a hackneyed melody, weakened still further by the deficiencies of my memory — the melody of Chopin’s Etude no. 3, opus 10, which, by a bitterly ironical twist of which I was well aware, now seemed to epitomize all I had left behind.

36

Consent for my return home arrived and I went from Lagos straight to a hospital bed on Plocka Street. In the small, suffocatingly, overcrowded ward lay perhaps fifteen people, two of whom died before my eyes. The rest snored, moaned, argued or went on and on about the war. The window looked out on a lifeless courtyard bordered by the wall of the morgue, a grey muslin sky in which the sun never appeared and a bare tree that looked like a broom handle that a janitor had stuck in snow before wandering off for a vodka. Even so, I liked it there.

37

I returned to the editorial offices (it was the beginning of 1967) but had no idea of what to do. I felt smashed inside, shattered; I wasn’t suited for anything; I wasn’t in touch; I wasn’t there. I did not regard my stay in Africa as merely a job. I had gone there after years of having to function as a cog in a complex mechanism of instructions and commands, theses and guidelines, and Africa had been, for me, liberation, where — between 37°21′ and 34°52′ latitude and 17°32′ and 51°23′ longitude, between Rass Ben Sekka in the north and Needle Point in the south, between Capo Almadi in the west and Raas Xaafun in the east — I had left part of myself behind. Africa was a film that kept playing, an unbroken loop, non-stop, in show after show, but nobody around me cared about what was happening in my cinema. People were talking about who had taken whose place in Koszalin, or arguing about some television programme in which Cwiklińska had been first-rate, although others said she hadn’t been, or giving each other merry advice about how you can travel to Bulgaria for a holiday inexpensively and actually make money as well. I didn’t know the man who had gone to Koszalin, I hadn’t seen that programme on television and I had never been in Bulgaria. The worst thing was the acquaintances I would run into on the street who would begin by saying, ‘What are you doing here?’ Or, ‘Haven’t you left yet?’ I understood: they did not regard me as one of their own. Life was going on and they were swimming in its current. Talking about something, arranging something, cooking something up, but I didn’t know what, they weren’t telling me, they weren’t expecting me to go along with them; they weren’t trying to win me over. I was an outsider.

38

At the editorial offices they could tell that I was hanging around the corridors without purpose or goal. In principle it is accepted that when a correspondent returns from a bureau in the field he has no assignment or work for a certain time and becomes a fifth wheel to our long-suffering, dedicated team. But my alienated behaviour and prolonged idleness had exceeded all the limits of tolerance, and Hofman decided to do something with me. Thus there was an attempt — one of a series in my life — to establish me behind a desk. My boss led me to a room containing a desk and a typist and said, ‘You’re going to work here.’ I looked it over: the typist — yes, she was nice; the desk — abominable. It was one of those small desks, a mousetrap, which sit by the thousands in our cluttered and overcrowded offices. Behind such a desk, a man resembles an invalid in an orthopaedic brace. He cannot stand up normally to shake hands, but must first disengage himself delicately from his chair and cautiously rise, attending more to the desk than the visitor, as it takes only a nudge for this rickety, spindly-legged contraption to collapse with a roar on to the parquet. The seriousness of a whole office disintegrates into sniggering when instead of an official enthroned behind a monumental sculptured desk it sees a crouching, cramped wretch imprisoned in a miniature cut-rate snare. I cannot suffer a desk! I have never had a desk, and I have never joined in at meetings where people shout into each other’s faces and jump down each other’s throats with a desk between them. In general I am no enthusiast of furniture and regard as the ideal house the Japanese one in which there is nothing besides the walls, the ceiling, the floor and the ichiban. Furniture divides man from man; people cower behind furniture as though behind barricades; they disappear into furniture like birds into holes. If someone shows me a time-honoured antique and announces ceremoniously that it comes from this or that century and epitomizes such and such a style, I am unmoved. Nevertheless, I understand the utilitarian value of furniture, the need for it, its awkward if practical vocation in the interest of human comfort. This tolerance of mine extends to all furniture except the desk. Upon the desk, I have declared a silent war. It is, after all, a specific piece of furniture with particular properties. While many whole categories of furniture may be man’s serviceable instruments, his slaves, in the case of the desk a contrary relationship obtains: man is its instrument, its slave. Many thinkers worry over the progressive bureaucratization of the world and the social threat of its terror. Yet they forget that these very bureaucrats are themselves terrorized, and that they are terrorized by their desks. Once plunked down behind one, a man will never learn to tear himself free. The loss of his desk will strike him as a natural disaster, a catastrophe, a fall into the abyss. Notice how many people commit suicide at their desks, how many are carried straight from their desks to psychiatric hospitals, how many suffer their heart attacks behind desks. Whoever sits down behind a desk begins to think differently; his vision of the world and his hierarchy of values change. From then on he will divide humanity into those who have desks and those who do not, and into significant owners of desks and insignificant ones. He will now see his life as a frenzied progress from a small desk to a larger one, from a low desk to a higher one, from a narrow desk to a wider desk. Once ensconced behind a desk he masters a distinct language and knows things — even if yesterday, deskless, he knew nothing. I have lost many friends for reasons of desks. Once they were truly close friends. I cannot say what demon it is that slumbers in a man and makes him talk differently once he’s set behind a desk. Our symmetrical, brotherly relations fall apart; there arises a troublesome and asymmetrical division into higher and lower, a pecking order that makes us both feel uncomfortable, and there is no way to reverse the process. I can tell that the desk already has him in its clutches, in a full nelson. After a few experiments I give up and quit calling. Both of us, I think, accept the outcome with relief. From then on I have known that whenever one of my friends starts achieving ever more showy desks, he is lost to me. I avoid him to spare myself the lurch that marks every transition from symmetry to asymmetry in human relationships. Sometimes a man will get up from behind his desk to walk down and talk with you at the other end of his office, in a couple of armchairs or at a round table. Such a person knows what desks are and knows that a chat between people divided by one is like a discussion between a sergeant perched in the turret of a tank and a raw frightened recruit standing at attention and looking right into the barrel of the big gun.

39

So even if the desk my editor had placed me behind had an inlaid mother-of-pearl top, I had to get out. The desk after all, has one more dangerous property: it can serve as an instrument of self-justification. I sense this in moments of crisis, when I can’t get anything down on paper. Then a thought pushes into my mind: Hide behind the desk. I’m not writing because I’ve got something important to think about. What’s writing? Writing doesn’t mean anything. We are absolved; the desk makes up for everything; it compensates. When my editor became convinced that all his efforts had been in vain and that there was no way to get me doing office work, he decided to do something with me. It would be best if I went somewhere. One day he summoned me to say there were some roubles in the office account and I should go write something. I got on a plane and flew beyond the Caucasus and then in the direction of Bukhara and points east. But that is a different world, not the world of this book.