the taste and he loved the idea of fish, and there was always enough. He knew where to find fish, how to catch them, their varied types and names. He drank the river. That was enough. He didn’t make palm wine or buy it. He was self-sufficient and contained within his small world.
He provided fish to his mother and her two younger children, as I see him, a loyal son though an alienated neighbor. His mother still lived at the fringe of the old village. His surplus catch he dried on racks, or in wet season smoked over a fire, at his solitary riverbank camp. Occasionally he made considerable journeys, paddling miles upstream or drifting downstream, to sell a boatload of fish in one of the market villages. In this way, he had tasted the empowerment of dealing for cash. Brass rods were the prevailing currency, or cowrie shells, and sometimes he may even have seen deutschmarks. He bought some steel hooks and one spool of manufactured line, which had come all the way from Marseille. The line was disappointing. The hooks were excellent. Once he had floated downstream as far as the confluence with the Sangha, a much larger river, powerful, twice as wide as the Ngoko, and had ridden its current for a day—a heady and fearful experience. On the right bank he had seen a town, which he knew to be Ouesso, vast and notorious; he gave it a wide berth, holding himself at midriver until he was past. At day’s end he stopped and slept on the bank; the next day he reversed, having tested himself enough. It took him four days of anxious effort to paddle back up, hugging the bank (except again at Ouesso), climbing through eddies, but the Voyager made it, relieved when he regained his own world, the little Ngoko River, and swollen with new confidence by the time he beached at his camp. This might have occurred, let’s say, in the long dry season of 1916.
On another occasion, he paddled upstream as far as Ngbala, a river town some miles above Moloundou. It was during his return from that journey, as I posit, that he stopped at Moloundou and there, in his boat, where it was tied for the night in a shaded cove just below town, had sex with a woman.
She wasn’t his first but she was different from village girls. She was a river trader herself, a Buy ’em–Sell ’em, several years older than he was and considerably more experienced. She traveled up and down the Ngoko and the Sangha, making a living with her wits and her wares and sometimes her body. The Voyager didn’t know her name. Never heard it. She was outgoing and flirtatious, almost pretty. He didn’t think much about pretty. She wore a print dress of bright calico, manufactured, not local raffia. She must have liked him, or at least liked his performance, because she returned to his boat in the shadows the next night and they coupled again, three times. She seemed healthy; she laughed merrily and she was strong. He considered himself lucky that night—lucky to have met her, to have impressed her, to have gotten at no cost what other men paid for. But he wasn’t lucky. He had a small open wound on his penis, barely more than a scratch, where he’d been caught by a thorny vine while stepping ashore from a river bath. No one can know, not even in this imagined scenario, whether the lack of circumcision was crucial to his susceptibility, or the little thorn wound, or neither. He gave the woman some smoked fish. She gave him the virus.
It was no act of malice or irresponsibility on her part. Despite swollen and aching armpits, she had no idea she was carrying it herself.
100
River travel through tropical jungle is uncommonly soothing and hypnotic. You watch the walls of greenery slide by and, unless the channel is narrow enough for tsetse flies to notice your passing and come out from the shores, you suffer almost none of the discomforts. Because the riverbanks represent forest edges, admitting the full blast of sunlight, as closed canopy does not, the vegetation is especially tangled and rife: trees draped with vines, understory impenetrable, thick as an old velvet curtain at the Shubert Theater. It presents an illusion that the forest itself, its interior, might be as dense as a sponge. But to a river traveler that density is immaterial because you