The Coup by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page B

but-was "And that the deep wells drilled by foreign governments disrupted nomadic grazing patterns so that deserts have been created with the wells at their center? Are you aware, furthermore, that climatic conditions in this region have been the same for five years, that the 'humanitarian catastrophe" you speak of is to us the human condition?" "O.k., O.k.-better late than never. We're here now, and what's the hang-up? I can't get anybody to talk to me." At my back, the impatient murmur of the Tuareg intensified, and with it intensified, to fade quickly away, that misplaced barbershop sweetness. "I will talk to you," I said, raising my voice so that our audience might understand, at least, that I was on the attack. "I am Ellellou. I speak for the people of Kush. The people of Kush reject capitalist intervention in all its guises. They have no place in their stomachs for the table scraps of a society both godless and oppressive. Offer your own blacks freedom before you pile boxes of carcinogenic trash on the holy soil of Kush!" "Listen," he pleaded, "Zanj is taking tons of grain a day, and they have Chinese advisers over there. This thing cuts right through the political shit, and anyway don't yell at me, I marched for civil rights all through college." "And have now been predictably co-opted," I said. "I am not as ignorant of your nation's methods as you may suppose. As to Zanj, I am told that you have favored its suffering citizens with tons of number two sorghum, a coarse grain grown for cattle fodder, which gives its human consumers violent diarrhea." He shed some insolence at this information, and assumed a more confiding tone. "There've been some ball-ups, yeah, but don't forget these primitives are used to a high-protein diet of meat and milk. They eat better'n we do. We send what we have." "I see," said I, gazing upward at the terrace of crates, fitfully illumined by some torches that had been lit in the throng of witnesses at my back. Korn Kurls had been stamped across one whole tier, and Total in letters of great momentum repeated itself over and over on the wall of cardboard that reached into darkness, toward the blazing desert stars. "Listen," the American was trying to sell me, "these breakfast cereals, with a little milk, sugar if you have it, are dynamite, don't knock "em. You're chewing cactus roots, and we know it." In another tone, boyish and respectful, he asked, "You really Ellellou? I love some of the things you wrote in exile. They were assigned in a Poli Sci course I took at Yale." So he knew of my exile. My privacy was invaded. Confusion was upon me. I took off my sunglasses. The brightness of the lights shed by the torches was surprising. Should I be getting royalties? At the back of my skull the horde was chanting, "Ellellou, Ellellou..." As if to escape a lynch mob, I stepped forward, across the invisible Sahel-Kush border, toward the dark mountain of aid. Seeing this political barrier breached, my American confided, "They really want this stuff," in a voice that implied the battle was over; I would sign some papers, his starchy bounty could be abandoned, he would be received into his wife's freckled bed in Tangier, and his superiors would commend him all the way back to Washington. Alas, there was no safety for him in my heart, or in this night. His pallor, now that night was altogether upon us, appeared eerie, formless, or rather having the form of a parasite shaped to conform to the sunless innards of a nobler, more independent creature. The nomads and their rabble of slaves with a giant rustling crossed the border after me, pressing us with their flapping torches into a semi-circle of space against the cliff of cardboard-cardboard, giant letters of the Roman alphabet, and polypropylene, for our benefactors shipped their inferior sorghum in transparent sacks, whose transparency revealed wood chips and dead mice and whose slippery surfaces reflected the torches, torches that highlighted also with