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With respect for and acknowledgment to Alberto Moravia
Enrique Segura lost all sense of earth, gazing out over the airplane's wing: on the land below there were no clear demarcations between river, swamp, and hill. This disorientation, along with his cramped muscles and the low fever he was running from the shots, seemed proof that the trip to Africa was a bad idea. At Orly fifteen hours ago his wife had thrust a travel book into his valise, and as the plane lifted off he'd begun reading the chapter on Cameroon: the hinge of Africa, the author called it. Rut in the chaos of Douala airport he'd lost the book somehow, fighting his way through customs to catch this charter flight to Yaounde.
Babies wailed. The plane was RiH of embassy wives with bouffant hair, changing diapers and discussing the American president's assassination in Dallas. Segura's brother-in-law, Charles, had planned the trip for the two of them, in his peremptory way, but now Charles was hospitalized with gallstones and Segura launched alone-in order that the arrangements not be wasted, his wife had said. Six days in Cameroon, and then on to Chad and Ghana, and he knew nothing of Africa. . . .
Two seats away, a girl smiled at him. She was lovely, with thin, arrogant lips: someone's daughter. He smiled back, nodded. He slept with a stranger occasionally not because he still expected to find the passion that other men seemed to experience with wives or lovers, but as an act of rebellion at not finding it.
Forty-six, and you're too old even for ironic sex, he decided. Too old for girls, too hold for travel. . . .
At Yaoundé he wore the heat like a bearskin as he veered across the airport to the taxis, where a porter dropped his suitcase, spewing clothes into the road. The sky was white and low, the sun like melted cheese, not at all what he'd expected of Africa. Blacks moved in lateral throngs along the sidewalk, touching each other. "It's unsafe to drive from Yaounde to Douala without armed guards," a bearded German announced to no one in particular, and nobody paid him any attention. Segura had grown up in a cardboard shanty...