American Spy

by Lauren Wilkinson

  I smiled. Other than when Djeneba was meeting my cordiality with instructions, she’d barely spoken to me in the time that I’d been there. But I knew she wasn’t shy. Women stopped in all day to chat with her in Mooré; I’d heard her loud, distinctive laugh many times, just never when she was speaking in French with me. Her attitude didn’t seem like rudeness, obsequiousness, or timidity—it seemed to reflect a sincere and complete lack of interest in me. I respected that.

  I took a large bottle of water from the fridge and drank lustily from it as I strode through the living room. Whoever had furnished it had good taste—or rather, they had taste that appealed to my American sensibilities. It was a large, pleasant space with the same vaulted white ceilings that were in the bedroom; a worn Senufo bed functioned as a coffee table and as such was spread with glossy magazines. Above the sofa was a large abstract painting of a brightly colored fish on a bicycle that made me think of Gloria Steinem.

  I strode out onto the covered patio, to the plastic table and three lawn chairs there. A calico cat was curled up in one of the chairs. She glanced up at me, blinking slowly. I don’t think she belonged to anyone and seemed to consider the house hers, so she was as entitled a cat as any other.

  I looked out at the garden, which by its very existence communicated American extravagance. It was a dry, dusty city; I’d yet to have been anyplace else in Ouaga that was quite so green. Privet bushes guarded the patio, and a group of small shrubs huddled in one corner of the shaggy lawn. There was a carissa tree, and a bougainvillea with yellow flowers in bloom on it, one so tall that its pom-pom top could be seen above the vine-covered adobe wall that enclosed the yard.

  Jean, the guard, was sitting in a lawn chair on the other side of the garden, beside the black metal gate. His presence was a convention of the city—every place that was populated by the wealthy or foreign had a guard stationed by its gate. He waved and asked if I needed the bike.

  “Not yet,” I called back. He was balding and had a wiry build, and I guessed he was only in his forties, despite the deep lines the sun had baked into his face. Whenever we made small talk, I could tell that his patter had been specially generated for me as an American.

  Djeneba appeared on the porch with a heavy tray, which she set down on the table before going back into the house. Breakfast was a baguette, a homemade croissant, half a papaya on a blue ceramic plate. A French press was filled with dark, rich-looking coffee.

  I ate quickly. Went back into the house to get a second bottle of water, then descended the patio steps and crossed toward the green motorcycle waiting in the shade of the bougainvillea. It was a Yamaha XS1 according to the brand plate, one with a rusted flank, but it had quickly revealed itself as a powerful, reliable machine. I loved it. When Jean noticed me approaching the bike, he jogged over to it and quickly wiped it down with a dry rag. Then he put it in neutral, pushed it through the gate and out into the street.

  I looked around as I kick-started the engine. My temporary neighborhood, Zone du Bois, was a suburb in the south of Ouagadougou, and everything about it suggested relative wealth. The lots were large, the roads were paved, and while most of the houses there were hidden behind walls, the ones I could glimpse were much bigger than they were in other neighborhoods.

  Between the houses, neem trees and plump bushes waved almost imperceptibly in what passed for a breeze. People persisted in telling me that the neighborhood was one of the coolest, temperature-wise, in the city, because of the nearby reservoir and park, but I’d only been in the direct sun for a few minutes and I already felt brutalized by the heat.

  It was embarrassing how poorly equipped for it I was. On my first day there, I’d tried to go for a walk, but had only managed to get a few blocks before feeling like I might pass out.

  It wasn’t that I was surprised it was hot in equatorial Africa—your mother wasn’t a complete fool—it was the nature of the heat. It was heat you could feel crawling around in your organs, trying to squeeze them to a stop.

  The engine roared awake, and I started toward Haven for Women. Although the NGO was in walking distance of the house, I thought it best to take the motorcycle. I sped across the red-dust-covered Avenue de la Croix Rouge, which featured one of the rare street signs in the neighborhood, a nefariously subtle blue plaque. I’d later learn from my first trip to Paris that the style was a French import. There was a mechanic’s garage on the corner, and a young man was already out front in a sleeveless US Army shirt pressing a homemade barbell—a pole that he’d made two disks for out of concrete. He waved at me as I passed. I was conspicuously foreign in Ouaga, but people didn’t guess I was American until they heard my accent. Until they heard me speak, they assumed my father was French.

  I rode through Zogona, the neighborhood adjacent to my own. On the day I’d gone for my one and only walk, I’d gotten as far as Zogona before having to turn back. A second example of the obviousness of my foreignness: As I’d passed a group of children playing in the street, they’d all stopped at the sight of me. Then one little girl—a tiny, self-appointed dignitary—had detached herself from the group, come over, stiffly shook my hand, and said bonjour before returning to the game.

  The sky was bright and full of clouds. I rode along a commercial stretch in Zogona, where there were several kiosks set up in the street. I passed a woman who was leaning into the open window of one, wearing a wrapper, a T-shirt, and a scarf on her head. At the level of her waist was a shelf crowded with bottles of what I thought might be cooking oil. I couldn’t tell you what the shop sold though; portions of the oil if I had to guess. I note this to point out precisely how lost I was when it came to commercial interactions in Ouagadougou. My ability to buy things, or in some cases, to even recognize a building as a place of commerce, was a surprisingly accurate indicator of the overwhelming Americanness that made it difficult for me to navigate this new place.

  As I rode I thought of Thomas. I was looking forward to seeing him again, in the flesh, for reasons that were personal as much as professional. It was hard not to think of him in Ouaga: His face was a common sight in the newspaper, silk-screened on T-shirts, and on billboards. My favorite was the enormous one facing the airport to welcome visitors: Bienvenue au Burkina Faso, tombeau de l’impérialisme! Welcome to Burkina Faso, the tomb of imperialism! It featured a photograph of Thomas, and in a cutout in the center of the billboard was a Coke logo.

  I turned onto a red dirt street busy with pedestrians, bicyclists, people on mopeds. Up ahead was an intersection with a tower of four or five tires in the center, presumably to indicate that it was a two-way street, and on that corner stood a man in front of a corrugated tin kiosk, listening to a radio and flipping meat with tongs on a sizzling grill. I turned right there, as I’d been instructed to do when I called HDF the day before, and found myself on yet another residential street.

  The map I’d looked at before I’d left hadn’t indicated that the street I was on would narrow like it did as it came to its end. I had to cross over a weathered piece of plywood laid over the sewer to get out into the wide intersection—I watched the woman on the moped ahead of me do it, but I pulled up short at the last second, afraid that the weight of my XS1 would land me in the sewer. A man and his young son were laying the foundation for a house nearby. I felt them both watching with amusement as I made a graceless ten-point turn.

  I passed the man at the grill again and turned up the next street, incorrectly assuming that it ran parallel to the one I’d been told to take to HDF. It ran diagonal. Frustrated, I took the first road it intersected with, and was on it for a while before realizing it wasn’t going to take me anywhere close to where I needed to be.

  My panic was starting to rise. It had rained the night before, and there wasn’t any drainage on the dirt roads, so some puddles were quite deep. I rode down an incline, going slowly to avoid them, then came around a bend. A camel was there, tied up and sitting in th
e shade of a tree. They are bizarre-looking creatures if you aren’t used to them, and I found the thing so surprising that I took my eyes off the road for just enough time to speed right into a deep puddle.

  I cursed as I backed out of it and pulled over near the camel. My dress clothes were splattered with mud. I noticed a couple of teenagers sitting on a low wall on the other side of the street; they’d stopped chatting and were watching me. I reached into the small saddlebag attached to my motorcycle, took out the bottle of water and a map. As I was trying to make sense of it, I was startled by a voice talking into a megaphone and looked up for the source. A truck flew past and through the puddle, sending mud up into the air and more onto me. I wanted to scream. Despite my cynicism, I must’ve had an idealized vision of West Africa in my head—in it travel wasn’t nearly so frustrating.

  A man was standing in the truck bed, littering leaflets behind the vehicle. A second was shouting into a megaphone in French: “Support fair elections or suffer under Blaise Compaoré, the schizophrenic despot! Blaise Compaoré, the shadow manipulator!”

  The man repeated the slogans in two other languages: Mooré, I assumed, and maybe Jula, before the truck was out of earshot. I quickly picked up one of the leaflets, which was stamped with Democratic Defenders. At the top was a drawing of Compaoré with his lips pushed into a grotesque kiss. I skimmed the page:

  Chronic schizophrenia is characterized by:

  Neurotic sex drive.

  Phantasms in the subject’s consciousness that cause him to seek to live his dream life detached from external realities. Which explains why Blaise believes himself able to sleep with all the beautiful women of Burkina and in the Ivory Coast when he visits his father-in-law, the president, Papa Houphouët. Without fair elections, the shadow leader will force us toward the brink of destruction.

  Believing the flyers to be an indication of the serious dissent facing the CNR, I folded the leaflet into my pocket to look at later, then turned back to the map Ross had given me. It wasn’t remotely accurate, and I gave up on it after a minute or two. Worried and annoyed and already tired from the heat, I crossed the street to the teenagers and asked for directions. All three greeted the request with silence and blank stares. I wondered for a moment if it was because they couldn’t understand me, but then one of the boys hopped down off the wall. He said something to his friends that made them laugh. I thought he was making fun of me, which was irritating. Any fondness I had for the city was quickly waning.

  Still, the boy threw a leg over his moped and gestured for me to follow him. He started in the opposite direction of the one I’d been planning on from the map, then turned sharply into some foliage. There was a narrow road hidden there. As I rode behind him, I thought of the afternoon in New York I’d spent with Thomas, the way he’d been surprised when we were in the park and those kids on bikes had whizzed around us. He’d sounded embarrassed when he’d said he’d been unable to pick out the bikes from the ambient city noise, and now with a teenager practically leading me through Ouaga by the hand, I thought I understood why. It is humbling to have your social fluency, your sense of yourself as a competent, independent person, upended by a foreign city.

  The boy led me through a network of streets to the mouth of the one I was looking for, nodded, and went on his way. I glanced down it. Walls visually dominated the architecture, some of them mud brick, others concrete. Because there were no kiosks here, the effect was of severe uniformity. I rode down the street and pulled up beside a gray 4x4, parked in front of Haven for Women. To distinguish it from the other homes, someone had painted its black metal gate with a woman on a rearing horse grasping a spear.

  I shut the engine off, and although I was late, sat for a moment with my eyes closed, trying to mentally prepare myself for the meeting. It was quiet; all I could hear was the buzz of the slack power lines above my head. I was worried about the mud, what a bad first impression I was about to make, but took a breath, got off the ticking bike, and passed through the gate.

  I was standing in a red dirt courtyard with what looked like an open-air dining area in one corner and a few buildings laid out in a half circle in front of me. The ones to my immediate left were an outhouse and—I assumed because it was the largest building—the dormitory. Two older women were sitting together on the ground of its shaded porch, and a third was resting, curled up on her side, with her eyes closed. The dining area was on the far right; all it amounted to were a few benches haphazardly sitting beneath a blue tarp and a fire pit, where a woman was squatting to cook. I went toward the center building, thinking it might be the office, and stuck my head through the doorway. “Bonjour.”

  A woman sitting at a plastic table looked up from her work and greeted me. She was in her early twenties, had dark, smooth skin and long box braids up in a high bun. She was wearing a white collared shirt and a white midi skirt—the color suited her complexion well, and the outfit was miraculously crisp considering the heat and red dust in the air.

  Her appearance made me freshly embarrassed of my own. I’d spent a lot of time choosing my outfit that morning, wanting to be appropriate and inoffensive. According to the guidebook I’d read, women weren’t supposed to show much of their legs. Because of that, and because I knew I’d be taking the motorcycle, I’d opted for gray wide-legged pants. I’d paired them with a white silk collared shirt and an oversized belt. I was also wearing my favorite sunglasses, which were large and literally rose-colored. Despite the care I’d taken, I looked as messy as she did neat.

  As I got closer she noticed the state of my clothing. “Oh my god! What happened?”

  “The bridge was out,” I said. “I went another way and got lost.”

  “It was out? But I went over it this morning.”

  “Someone had put something temporary there. Some plywood.”

  She was confused. “Yeah, the bridge.”

  She spoke French in a way that’s tricky for me to re-create on paper, peppered with English, elongating her words that reminded me of the cadence of a Valley girl, but didn’t imply (for me anyway) the usual American materialism and vapidity. Plus, what she said was filtered through a culture as divorced from Southern California as it was possible to be. The result was beguiling. And slightly jarring.

  It was clear from the way she spoke that she consumed a lot of American movies and music. I would later hear the word disquette used to describe a particular type of Burkinabè girl—one who was as thin as a floppy disk, because that was what appealed to the French men they hoped to marry. One who wore chic, Western clothes, spoke fluent French and maybe even a little English. She could easily have been dismissed as a disquette. But it was a lazy characterization of any woman, and I would come to realize that was especially so in the case of Nicole Ouédraogo.

  She was beautiful; the only aspect of her appearance that might’ve been called an imperfection was the broken front tooth that revealed itself when she smiled.

  She handed me some tissues and laughed gently as she quickly helped me with the mud stains; her amusement was good-natured and made me feel better. She said, “It’s a cute outfit though.”

  I looked around the single-room office, which was sweltering despite the industrial fan working in the corner. On the table there were a few bottles of water and some stacks of paper. On the far wall was an open door that led to a backyard.

  Nicole followed my gaze. She said, “His office is out back. You want some water before you meet him?”

  “Please.” I thanked her as she handed me a bottle. “I can’t get used to this heat.”

  “He totally used to say the same thing.”

  “What’s he like?” I asked as she led me out into a small backyard where there was a second outhouse and a small hut. I’d been a little worried about seeing Daniel Slater again. A lot of time had passed, and I was guessing he’d become a cynical Thomas Fowler type. />
  “Oh my god, so nice. You’ll love him.”

  She knocked on the hut’s door, and a voice from inside called for us to come in. She turned and said she’d see me later.

  I opened the door. The office was dim and cool, air-conditioning running at full blast. There were cartons of cigarettes stacked on the desk as well as several bottles of Scotch. In the far corner was a handbill press. International news poured from the radio. Daniel Slater was sitting behind the plastic desk with a phone receiver up to his ear; he was wearing jeans, a dress shirt, and wraparound sunglasses on his head. He had a new belly pushing against his shirt and a heavier jowl than I remembered. His hair was flecked with gray and thin at the temples.

  When he finally put the phone down he smiled at me and said in English, “I’d forgotten how much you look like your sister.”

  17

  HE INTRODUCED HIMSELF WITH AN ALIAS then turned off the radio and said, “She was always late. You can’t be though, not while we’re working together.”

  “I won’t,” I said, feeling taken off guard. I mumbled an apology for the delay and my appearance; he dismissed my concerns with a gesture.

  “Late. All the time. It was the one thing about Helene that drove me nuts.”

  His eyes were as piercing as I’d remembered. I was glad that he spoke in English. I liked to speak in French because it had an element of nostalgia to it—I was reminded of whispering through the wall to my sister. But I felt foreign to myself in Ouaga, which was so different from New York. I was glad for any opportunity I could get to cling to the familiar.

  “Sit. Let me walk you through your next few days here.” He looked at his watch. “We only have a few minutes; one of my agents will be here soon. Did you meet Nicole?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was a secretary at the embassy, until I offered her this job. Stole her away. Efficient little thing. She handles everything related to HDF, all the charity stuff. She’s great. Without her, we wouldn’t be able to focus on our real work.”