High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [75]
I walked across a bridge and found the concrete shell of a building that turned out to be a hotel. It looked as if it had been bombed, but that was only a trick of tired eyesight; the building just never got finished. The solemn night clerk showed me to a room with a cot and a sink. He considerately pointed out to me that the door had no lock, and no knob.
At first light, the commerce outside my window rose to fever pitch. The first travelers of the morning were half a dozen small girls driving a herd of pigs; the second, two young men zooming across the bridge on a motorcycle, carrying upright between them a five-foot-square pane of naked glass.
Women crossed the bridge at a more stately pace and moved toward the market balancing gigantic burdens on their heads: bolts of cloth; a mountain of bread; a basket of live chickens with their wings draped over the side, casual as an elbow over the back of a chair. Nearly everyone in Benin dresses in magnificently printed wax cloth, West Africa’s trademark garb. Women wrap great rectangles of it around their bodies and heads; men wear it tailored into pajamalike suits or embroidered caftans. The central market is a roar of color, scent, and sound. Next to a pile of dried fish, a tailor works at his open-air table. A woman selling tapioca also does coiffure: a client at her feet can get her hair wrapped with black thread into dozens of pointed, upright sprigs. The market’s outskirts grade into industrial zones: cooking fires and small foundries. Beyond this, pigs devoutly work the riverbank garbage dumps.
This is not a country notably equipped for tourism. Every sizable town has at least an inn or two that can provide a bed, a mosquito net, and a decent meal. But mainly Benin is equipped for the business of living as the Beninois do. It’s a place to come and witness: to learn, for example, how people use resources when they have no choice but to be resourceful. How armies of little boys at the edge of the market can constitute a city recycling center. You’ll have plenty of time to think about everything you’ve thrown away in your life, as you wind through a labyrinth of palm-frond shelters where hundreds of families are at work, hammering empty oil drums and tomato tins into funnels, buckets, knives, and votive-candle lanterns to light the streets by night.
Not a cubic inch of space in any moving vehicle is wasted. When you flag down a taxi—invariably a subcompact Peugeot—it already has passengers; three in the backseat will make room for a fourth. For thirty cents, you’ll get where you need to go.
To travel to a different village you have to take a bush taxi. Go to the particular street corner where trips are organized for your destination. Make an agreement with a driver there, settle on a price. Are you traveling with luggage or animals? These things figure into the cost. Come back in a few hours, the driver will tell you, or tonight—he needs to line up more passengers. You ask, Which? A few hours, or tonight? He says, Both. Maybe you’ll make the trip with three other travelers, or five. The driver is in control of this event, and since he is charging by the head, most likely there will be seven. Someone may ride on the roof. Don’t worry, it won’t be you; you have seniority.
Be prepared to wait. Time is the only thing everyone here has, and they have plenty.
When I told friends I was flying to Benin, alone, with no itinerary, their replies fell into two categories: “Why on earth?” and “Where is that?”
Why on earth is a very good question, though where travel is concerned I’m inclined to let the burden of proof rest in the camp of “Why not?” Among African nations, Benin doesn’t have the faunal glamour of Kenya, the cultural cachet of Senegal, nor the political notoriety of Zaire or Somalia. But Africa pulls on me, the whole or any part; having rubbed against it in childhood