Exhausted amazement

So we left the factory compound. There had already been one week that we were in Nigeria, and this was the first time that we dared stepping outside.

We had settled it a long time before, once expeditions of this kind have to be prepared well in advance and very carefully: ask to a Nigerian colleague to exchange in the black market our dollars into the (as Paulo calls it) "Mickey Mouse currency" of this country; ask for a driver, since the streets of Lagos are just for masters; and ask for police escort. Our imagination also went far away when they mentioned "police escort", but on the morning of the adventure we were just entitled to an unarmed policeman: "Robbers? No, I'm just going with you to protect you from the police; don't worry because I have my contacts; they won't hassle you, I know them all".

We crossed the factory gate leaving behind the well painted and clean buildings, surrounded by hectares of properly cut and strong grass, spread over a landscape composed here and there by trees coloured with red flowers; leaving behind the pool surrounded by aligned bushes, the clean tennis court, the low guesthouses and the rooms illuminated by large windows that open over all the garden.

We crossed the factory gate to face the dusty road, split in half by rubbish, interposed by skinny and dirty people that between the two lanes scratch the abandoned packages, eats the rest of the leftovers, gives breast to their children and watches the infernal traffic go by. They have by now lost all hope to raise their begging hands. By the sides unstable wooden and metal stalls try to sell some raw meat spread on top of stones and covered with old empty cement bags, or packed products decoloured by the sun, deformed throughout time and infested by humidity. The driver speeds up, never stopping, not even by the numerous police patrols that hassle the locals: our escort is doing its job.

More or less intense, the landscape outside the car window doesn't seem to change throughout the long hour that we take to get to the town centre. Agustin, our driver, makes sometimes comments about the places we go through: it seems that he's proud for driving the white "sirs", masters of that skin colour that we cannot see on the streets. We haven't seen any white people in any of the areas we crossed. And yet we know that they exist in Lagos, but they hide behind the dark windows of their high luxury cars or behind the security of their houses covered in barbed wire. Agustin probably thought that like them we don't like to mingle with other colours and he suggested that we stopped at the new shopping centre in town, probably one of the few places where the faces are brighter, in an aseptic environment made by products that are more expensive here than they are in Europe.

We crossed several areas in town, but without ever leaving the car, so the security rules obliged. Outside the car semi-famine people would come close; Agustin told us not to take pictures. We still managed to stop at the city beach, where kids dived in contaminated waves, leper beggars collected old bills and someone shitted far away on the sand. Our arrival was followed by that of a group whose entirely white tunics obfuscated their dark skins. They were from a radical Christian religion that scratched with sea water the brain, source of all washable sins.

Back to the car we took a look at a stall that seemed to be selling some sort of food. From far, it seemed to be some too fried, too dried, too dirty kind of fish, but a closer look identified grilled meet.

From then onwards our amazement was already too tired to notice anything. It's maybe because of that exhausted amazement that the Europeans that live here have already forgotten about this reality. The last thing I felt before falling asleep in the comfort of the bumps on the road was the smoke from rubbish burning.