A Man in Africa

by Lara Blunte

  "Cambodia?" I was thinking it was far enough and in Asia, which I loved.

  "Yes, the government is taking land away from people there. Write me a beautiful story, take some gorgeous photos!"

  "I will go to the airport now, can you wire me expense money and have the ticket waiting for me by the time I get there?"

  "Do you have your passport?"

  I pointed at my bag. "Never without it!"

  He stood up and looked around for his phone. "OK, it will all be there for you. I will let you know what hotel we get you. I hear the Intercon in Phnom Pehn is a good place."

  "That will do fine!"

  I got up and he walked over and hugged me. "I am really sorry, if there is a person who doesn't deserve this, it's you. Clive is an idiot and he can't appreciate what he had ─ or maybe he can't stop...But you will be all right, even if you don't think so now. Just be in touch, though, or I will worry..."

  "I will."

  I put on my large sunglasses ─ they were by Miu Miu, with round white frames that seemed like a pretty ridiculous thing to wear at a tragedy. I walked out of Pete’s room, down the back stairs of the hotel and through a few trees toward the street, my bag and camera bag hanging from my shoulder.

  A few villa employees were cleaning the mess we had made the night before. They smiled and waved.

  "Auguri! Auguri!"

  Congratulations...Yeah!

  I grunted, waved back and stepped out into the street, looking for a taxi.

  As I walked away from the villa, hoping that Clive would not suspect anything and come after me, I felt something even stronger than the horror that I still had to process.

  I felt the pull of freedom.

  A Secret in a Temple

  However, this is what I knew, as I lay face up on a bed in Siem Reap, looking at the fan turning in the ceiling like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now.

  I knew that my love life was over.

  I knew that when so much betrayal takes place without you ever suspecting, when someone seems to love you and you have shared adventures, laughter, sex, life and beneath the surface all that was going on, I knew that it was a trauma too big to overcome.

  If I had found out that Clive was a foreign agent who had been told to get a normal life and had chosen me to fake it with, while he was off assassinating presidents and archdukes, I could not have been more surprised.

  If I had found out that he was, in fact, a serial killer who had buried several women in our yard and kept their eyeballs in the fridge, I could not have been more stunned. I would have been the woman giving the interview with a pale, frozen face: "But it can't have been him! There has to be some mistake!"

  It was as if we had been in the Matrix, where our day-to-day life loving each other was the illusion created by evil machines and reality was a completely different thing and horrible.

  Some women can never forgive one betrayal: their husbands cheat with complete unknowns when they travel, but the marriage still falls apart.

  I lay face up and started to laugh at the thought. Imagine! I would never have known such a thing, not even if it happened in every one of his trips. There would have been no record of it; I would not have had to read the volumes and volumes which I had scrolled through on his phone.

  What do you do when six years are wiped out, every moment a lie, the person you loved a complete fabrication, a completely different person you might ever have thought, a person you would never have wanted ─ a person who would be someone else’s cheating boyfriend and who, when unmasked, would have provoked disdain: That poor Clive who can't keep his dick in his pants...

  How do you mourn for the loss of the person you loved, who never existed, for the years you have wasted and for so much that happened that never did happen as it seemed?

  I knew Clive to like a glass of wine with his meals, Italian cheese, The Sopranos and dislike fried food, spirits and eggplants. I didn't think those things were invented, but that was what I knew about him.

  I was in mourning for a person I had loved who had suddenly died and I didn't know what to do with the stranger I had married, who kept sending me emails and trying to Skype me until I blocked him. Who was that psycho?

  Looking at the fan, covered in sweat, I thought I should get up and turn on the air conditioning. I had walked in after arriving in Siem Reap and just thrown myself on the bed with a bottle of vodka from the minibar in my hand, my shoes still on my feet. I did manage to throw my shoes off, but I couldn't get up. I just lay in my own sweat like Martin Sheen as Willard, and looked at the fan.

  What I knew was that the enormity of the betrayal, of the lies, was such that I would never trust anyone again.

  These things happened, they had happened to many wives and girlfriends ─ and husbands and boyfriends ─ of liars, psychopaths, foreign spies, sluts and man whores. They did happen. They were even quite common.

  They could happen again.

  Perhaps I had hit the motherload with Clive. Perhaps not everyone was so elaborate and relentless. Or perhaps, as my friend had said, they all were unless you watched them like a hawk.

  I didn't want that job. Yet I didn't want it to ever happen again, I didn't want any more years to be lived in the Matrix.

  How would I know? They didn't come with a certificate!

  When I managed to get up, shower and change, I realized the summer dress I had bought at the airport in Bangkok was already too big on me: I had lost quite a bit of weight in a few days. My hair is medium brown and I never fooled with the color, as I would become a slave to hairdressers anywhere in the world who might decide to do their own thing. If I were in the sun enough, it would become light brown with blond streaks, but now it looked limp and lifeless and darkened my face. My green eyes, which were usually the object of praise, were dull and underlined by purple circles. I ended up sticking my tongue out at myself: looking bad was not the worst thing that could happen to a person, not by a long mile.

  When I went out again, it was a beautiful afternoon. The hotel had arranged a guide for me, a handsome young man called Sopheak and a tuktuk driver. After a brief conversation about which temples to visit, we went off.

  On the way there, Sopheak told me about the land-grabbing going on in Siem Reap as well. I had already researched the story in Phnom Penh and now I took notes as he told me how people there also lived in a place which was supposed to be theirs, bought and paid for, and were now being told to leave. That came on top of everything else that Cambodians had suffered during the Khmer Rouge regime.

  In the 1970s the Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, had wanted to send the people of Cambodia back to a basic agrarian economy and had hated intellectuals. Millions were tortured and murdered, sometimes only for looking intelligent or wearing glasses. Whole families had been wiped out or, often, all the men in a family.

  Now, as the country went toward a market economy, the land seemed to be worth something and people were being moved again, sent away from their own homes.

  By the time we got to the ruins I had a good amount of inside information from Sopheak, which I would double check through more interviews. In the meantime we went to see Angkor Wat, the great temple and religious complex which is so key to Cambodian identity that it's on the kingdom's flag. It was magnificent, its reflection upside down in the pond that surrounded it. Sopheak showed me carvings on the stone walls, so fine and intricate they demanded that you look carefully at the whole story of princes, devils, monkeys and the ocean of churning milk.

  I walked around taking photos with Sopheak behind me, pointing at something worth photographing; I was more interested in the people around the temples, the children playing, the fruit vendors wearing black gloves, a guard with a pink umbrella, our driver sleeping in a hammock inside his tuktuk.

  I told Sopheak I had seen a film where a man goes to Angkor Wat and whispers a secret into the walls ─ was it a tradition? He seemed puzzled and then took me to a passage that connected two corridors. He said that
there was an echo there and maybe that was where people whispered secrets. He thumped his own chest for me to hear it, but one would hardly whisper a secret to an echo.

  I didn't tell him that in the film the man's secret was that he loved a woman, and mine was that I hated a man.

  I wanted to visit a smaller temple now and the tuktuk went through the woods to Banteay Srei, the small pink temple that was built in honor of the Hindu god Shiva. I walked around it, only half listening to Sopheak; there was the music of cymbals coming from beyond the walls, the smell of incense being burnt for the Buddha, the rustling of the breeze through the trees. It was very beautiful there.

  Then I didn’t want to see more temples; I would return the next day. Sopheak told me that he would stay in Angkor, to see if he could take other tourists around. I rode back in the tuktuk as the trees on the way let go of their white flowers and they floated around me. I found myself smiling for the first time since my wedding night.

  I was alone, but I suddenly knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that even so my life could be beautiful.

  A Long Trip

  "Are you coming home?" Pete asked me over Skype.

  "What home?" I replied.

  I hadn't meant to sound full of self-pity, it just seemed like a fact.

  "Haven't you been talking to Clive? Don't tell me he wouldn't leave the house to you, as you figure the whole thing out?"

  "I haven't spoken to him. I just get lots of mails ─ but I wrote him that we won't be talking for a while and that we should look into an annulment or a divorce. It seems really dumb that we were married for a few hours and that it could stick."

  "Probably not, but I can ask my divorce lawyer." Pete had been through the process twice.

  "Can you? Because Clive is just going to say that it's difficult, or that I have to go back there...and to answer your question, no, I just want to keep on going. I loved Cambodia. What else have you got?"

  "Uganda."

  "Uganda?"

  "I hear it's beautiful! I think Churchill called it The Pearl of Africa," he said.

  "Churchill only ever said what sounded good! He should have been in advertising!"

  "Doesn't tempt you? You’ll get great photos!"

  "What's the story?"

  "Capital punishment being proposed for homosexuals there, and AIDS on the rise."

  “Oh, I remember reading that…” I said.

  I thought for a second, then realized I had always wanted to go to the east of Africa.

  "All right. Get me the ticket, get me the hotel."

  I went out to say goodbye to Phnom Penh, a city that was not very pretty, but that I had thoroughly loved. At the Russian Market I walked through narrow covered alleyways where small shops sold a lot of pretty things.

  I bought some silk scarves, sapphire earrings, a pretty clutch and a Buddha. There were Buddhas of all sorts, but I ended up getting a small silver one. His face was serene, his eyes closed and his right palm raised to the chest and facing outward. A small text explained that it was the Buddha for Overcoming Fear: This statue signifies courage and offers protection from fear, delusion and anger.

  The feeling I had in Angkor, that I could be alone forever and enjoy it, was faltering. I needed to not be afraid and to let go of my anger.

  At the Intercontinental, I found the plane ticket in my inbox. Phnom Pehn to Bangkok—Bangkok to Doha—Doha to Entebbe. Sounded really dreamy.

  I got tipsy at the airport and had a massage, then the long trip began. In Doha I received the good news that Pete had upgraded me to business class. He texted me: "By this time you are cursing me so hard I think I had better not push it..."

  I texted him the emoji of a heart.

  The next day I landed in Entebbe and thought the arrival quite civilized, unlike the traffic between Entebbe and Kampala.

  "It might take two hours," the driver told me. It was normally a forty-minute ride but that time of the morning was rush hour.

  I lowered my sunglasses over tired eyes and watched people. There were many of them along the road and shops of all kinds. There were makeshift signs for mechanics, barbers, restaurants. Women were often dressed in colorful cloths and some wore turbans. There were children playing near the cars without adult supervision and I suspected they hardly ever got hurt; they took care of themselves and of the smaller kids.

  I could see how photographable it all was, but I was far too tired to pick up my camera at that moment.

  When the driver announced that we were in Kampala, I sat up to look at a city that had quite a bit of red dirt, many roundabouts, and still looked like the 1970s: presumably a lot of building had taken place then, under the dictatorship of the megalomaniacal and childishly brutal Idi Amin Dada.

  In fact, the driver was praising Idi Amin, wishing he were not dead and he could fix Uganda. A lot of taxi drivers all over the world have a hankering to resurrect dictators.

  I craned my neck to look at stalks that seemed like pterodactyls, huge birds with long beaks making their nests everywhere in the city.

  In the afternoon, having unpacked, swum a few laps in the pool, eaten and rested, I sat in my room at the grand-sounding Kabira Country Club and poured myself some chilled white wine.

  I had begun reading about the turnaround in the country's fight against AIDS on the plane. Uganda had once been the model for containing the disease in Africa, with effective campaigns centering around abstinence, monogamy and condoms. The president had spearheaded the drive to promote fidelity in a culture where men often kept two or more sexual relationships going at the same time. A man might infect several women, and they in turn would infect their babies in the womb.

  It seemed that there had been pressure from Catholics and Protestants alike at home, and from fundamentalist missionaries, to put the emphasis of the anti-AIDS campaign on abstinence and take it away from condoms.

  Moreover, a crusade against gays had been taking shape for years in the country, and it had resulted in a bill proposing capital punishment for them.

  As I read more on the subject, passionate quotes from a Dr. Christopher Burton began to appear. He was a MD fighting against AIDS in the southwest of the country, where he also championed the endangered mountain gorillas. He denounced the intolerance and violence against gays and spoke decisively against the bill.

  A man who sounded reasonable. I looked him up: a Ugandan of English descent, he was 34 years old and had studied in the UK, trained as a doctor and surgeon and then pursued studies in evolutionary biology and zoology.

  He had written a book on evolution called Becoming Human. Using the "Look Inside" feature on Amazon, I read a bit of it and as it seemed not only well written but interesting, I bought it.

  Dr. Burton might be a good man to talk to for my story, but he was near Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, which was all the way west. I would request a meeting with him and work my way to the forest by stopping along the way to talk to members of the government, gay activists and anyone else who might be germane to the article.

  When I was done tracing my itinerary I glanced at my iPad, where the images of Dr. Burton appeared on top of the search results. A chubby but kind face with baby blue eyes beamed at me. I closed the page, opened the Kindle app and started to read what he had written.

  The index told me that chapter seven was called "The Illusion of Fidelity".

  Dr. Burton, I Presume?

  Dr. Burton said in his book that the present "romantic" idea of a passionate and exclusive love between two people who went on to form a nuclear family was very recent in terms of evolution and not what our brains were wired for, hundreds of thousands of years ago.

  Mankind would have never survived, considering how long human gestation took and the even longer period during which children stayed helpless, if the males of the species had not been promiscuous.

  If human males had felt attracted exclusively to a single female and waited for her to survive pregnancy and the perilous act of giving birth, to o
nly then make another baby we might have been extinct a long time ago. It was a large brain, able to plan, a capacity to work in groups and a sexual desire which was greater, more constant and more varied in humans than in most other animals that helped the growth in our numbers and our ultimate success as the reigning species on the planet.

  Therefore, Dr. Burton added, the notion of a nuclear family based on the fidelity of both spouses and their continuing sexual desire for each other was a figment of Homo sapiens' imagination.

  This romantic fable, however, had been born out of a desire for transcendence, for being more than just an animal: for true, eternal love.

  It was a desire, even a longing — but that didn't mean that it was real. When it happened, it was the fruit of effort, forbearance and sacrifice, not a gift nature. It was, in fact, a struggle against our nature.

  Clive then had been the alpha male, trying to put his seed into as many receptacles as he could find, his impulses still answering to an atavistic imperative.

  There was much that was fascinating in his book and Dr. Burton wrote well. Some parts were almost poetic, as if there were a heart beating in the same body as the clinical mind that took everything apart and leaving little that we considered sacred standing. One could feel, behind the science, that there was some sort of spirit wishing that things could be different, that we could shed the animal in us and finally become fully human.

  I had spoken with some LGBT activists in Kampala, the few who were less afraid of being arrested for admitting to be gay than of what their country was about to become. Now I needed the opposite point of view: a high ranking member of government told me that gays needed to be extirpated like a disease from the face of the planet; he didn’t mind being taped or quoted.

  That same day I went toward the west and slept in the Lake View Hotel in Mbarara; I woke up the next day with a cold feeling of dread in my stomach. Everything that Clive had done hit me each morning and I would lie in bed going over what I had read on his phone. I could remember whole paragraphs, though I had read them so quickly. The only thing I didn’t manage to do was to dwell on any of the happiness we had had, which until very recently was all I ever remembered when thinking of him.