by Lara Blunte
Just get ready and go, I told myself
I did and the driver I had hired, Edward, was waiting for me downstairs. The highway from Kampala to Mbarara had been quite good, but now we were embarking on a long drive over bad roads to Kagale, which lay at the mouth of the Impenetrable Forest.
Edward had a cough and asked me if he would stop to buy medicine. I needed some things from the pharmacy myself, so we went together. In Uganda pharmacies sold valium over the counter and, terrified of sleepless nights obsessing over Clive’s lies, I bought a box; I hoped I would not have to take any.
In the car Edward opened his bottle of cough syrup and took a long swig as I watched in alarm.
“There’s a little spoon that comes with it,” I said. “Or a cap to measure?”
“Oh, if I take more I’ll get better quicker,” he replied.
No, but he got a lot sleepier. The roads became worse and worse, until they were mere wide paths. The SUV bumped over rocks as Edward nodded on top of the steering wheel and I poked his shoulder. His head would come up and he would see a huge rock just in time to swerve madly to the left of the right, while raising a great quantity of red dust.
“We can go more slowly,” I said as I hung on for dear life or slid back and forth on the seat. “I’m in no hurry!”
I’m in no hurry to die, I thought. But Edward, desperate to arrive and be able to really sleep, only stepped on the gas.
Thankfully, we finally found Kagale. I was to meet Dr. Burton in the offices of the Uganda Wildlife Authority, which here turned out to be a small wooden shack with a makeshift sign.
As I practically fell out of the car, not much minding that my hair was red and stiff with dust, I saw a white man dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, standing around talking to the khaki-clad officers of the Authority. He was tall, dark-haired and handsome. He was probably a nature enthusiast there for gorilla trekking.
He glanced in my direction and, as he stared for a few moments, the shallow girl in me ran a hand through my hair and longed for some lip gloss, though my knee-jerk reaction was to hate the handsome idiot. I hated all handsome lying idiots now, trying to spread their seed over the earth. Mankind was seven billion strong and we didn't need their promiscuity anymore!
In fact, death to all males, except for Pete and some other friends of mine.
I went into the shack/office instead and introduced myself to a man in uniform inside. He smiled brightly, as people in Uganda almost always did, and shook my hand.
"I'm Godfrey! We exchanged emails." he said.
Indeed, Godfrey had given me directions, as Dr. Burton had only replied briefly that he would meet with me. I returned his smile and he asked me about my ride over from Mbarara as he led me to a small office that had a meeting table for, at most, six people. The blinds at the window were old, going up one corner and down the other and the fake wood paneling on the walls was peeling. An old air conditioning unit sounded like a helicopter.
"Would you like water, tea, coffee?" Godfrey asked me.
I said I would be glad to have a cup of tea, though as he left I thought out loud, "Whiskey would be a lot better after that trip..."
"That can be arranged," a voice behind me said.
I turned around. It was Hotman.
"Good afternoon," he said, smiling at me. "How was your trip?"
"Good afternoon. Oh, the trip was fine. I'm here to see Dr. Burton!"
"Yes, I know."
I nodded and smiled at Hotman. He nodded and smiled at me. I sighed and took out my iPad, showing him the saved photograph, thinking he was going to need visual aid. "Dr. Burton?"
His smile grew wider and his dimples deeper, as if he were privy to a joke. "I'm afraid I don't know anyone who looks like that."
Hot was very hot, but I was very tired. “Do you work here?"
"Sometimes I do."
"And you don't know Dr. Burton?"
"I am Dr. Burton."
"Dr. Christopher Burton?" My voice came out shrill.
"I won't say the one and only, as apparently there are others," he replied, motioning toward my iPad.
I stared at him again, then at the photograph, then at him. I was so sure that I was going to get chubby, kind-faced Dr. Burton — and ask him to elaborate on his views on infidelity — that I was a bit speechless at the fact that the man whose book I had been devouring, and whose opinion I had come to get, had a great head of dark hair, penetrating hazel eyes and top of the line cheekbones. He was now fully smiling.
"You're Roberta Bovi, right? You sent me an email, you wanted to interview me?"
"Yes, yes. I know that," I said almost peevishly, as if the mistake had been his fault. How dare you look like that and be Dr. Burton, the savior of gorillas and children? "I was only thrown for a moment, because I thought this was you."
The other Dr. Christopher Burton, as I found out later when I had WiFi again and actually read the caption under the photo, was a dentist in Florida. That must be why he was smiling so much, though by then he seemed to be laughing at me. Burton in Florida had probably paid to come out first when anyone Googled the name he shared with Dr. Hotman.
I rummaged in my bag for the tape recorder, a pad and a pen as he turned off the air conditioning/helicopter. I was thinking he might be very handsome and apparently intelligent (or maybe someone ghost-wrote his book), but he was certainly a lying pig, as all hot men. His views on infidelity were probably developed with the noble aim of being able to sleep around as much as possible and then blame it on nature.
Though, to be fair, Bwindi Impenetrable Forest — or Kagale, for that matter — with small communities, did not seem like a very good hunting ground for plentiful and varied sex, unless he were into gorillas.
"What is the magazine you write for? Qultura?" he asked.
"Well, as the name implies it's a magazine that looks at different cultural issues all over the world. We also have sections on lifestyle, trends..."
"So you write about a crazy law against gays and an increase in AIDS, and then say that the Ritz has a great spa?" He was smiling wryly at me.
"Well, there might be something similar to all that in the magazine at the same time," I replied, hoping that my dry tone would repress his irony. "Such things do sometimes exist side by side in reality as well..."
"Only too often," he scoffed.
Oh, was he going to be all intense about poverty? I hated poverty as much as the next person and I did have a heart, but I liked spas as well. So that was the great fault of Dr. Burton, he was literal-minded! All about the great and noble struggles and hot-stone massages be damned!
Godfrey walked in with the tea, said something in one of their languages and walked out. Dr. Burton served me tea and then milk. He pushed the sugar towards me.
I turned on the tape recorder and placed it next to him. He sat back, waiting for my question, and his eyes seemed far too intelligent by now. Why do you have such intelligent eyes, Dr. Burton? The better to fool you with! Why are you so handsome, Dr. Burton? The better to lure you!
I gave my head a little shake to clear it and, turning on the voice recorder and placing it next to him, I began: "Dr. Burton, you have been very vocal in your disapproval of the anti-homosexuality act being proposed in Uganda. You have also mentioned that the spread of fundamentalist religious dogma among the population has harmed the progress that had been made here in the fight against AIDS. Could you elaborate?”
He nodded once and said, "Well, in spite of having been here a short time, I think you can already see that these issues in Uganda and in a lot of Africa are quite complex. I wouldn't want to oversimplify the question for your readers..."
No, because they are reading this in the spa, right?
"But I would say that extreme forms of religion are holding back the campaign to decrease the number of AIDS cases. Many missions here do good, they give schooling to children and feed the poor. However, some of the more fundamentalist missionaries, whether they are fro
m here or abroad, are preaching the worst of religion, a brand of hysteria and fear that doesn't help anyone. A part of the population, especially in rural areas with no access to education, is also suddenly becoming all fire-and-brimstone in their beliefs and that in turn is leading to intolerance and aggression.”
"How specifically do these new and more extreme teachings represent a step back in the fight against AIDS?"
"The fight against AIDS in Africa has many obstacles; one is a general dislike of condoms on the part of men..."
"Of course..." I muttered.
"I beg your pardon?"
I wriggled my hand. “Oh, go ahead, please..."
"The submission of women doesn't help things," he added forcefully. "In Uganda we had advanced quite a bit in educating the population about how AIDS is transmitted and making condoms widely available. This was a long and hard struggle. Now this is being turned back by an insistence on chastity, which is taking away all emphasis from condoms. Then John and Mary walk out of the meeting, where they have been told that they simply have to control themselves, but they don’t control themselves. In the meantime condoms raise red flags about their clandestine behavior, so they don’t use them either. This also happens among homosexuals, who are being actively persecuted — beaten and even killed. In some places, to even try to buy a condom has become synonymous with being gay and it means risking your life.”
"That's horrible," I said, frowning.
“It is. The active persecution of homosexuality here often forces gay men to marry women, to hide their real sexuality. It isn’t long, in some cases, before they are unfaithful to their wives with other men but without condoms. The short of it," he said and I could see the anger in his eyes, “is that we were on the path to controlling the spread of AIDS and now more people are getting horribly sick, they are dying and their children are dying. That didn't have to happen."
I looked down at my notes, feeling slightly ashamed of my antipathy for him when, in spite of being a handsome lying pig, he was dedicating his life to saving people in the sticks of Uganda.
"As an observer, do you believe that Africans ..." I started.
"I am sorry to interrupt, but I am not an observer, I am African."
"What do you mean?"
"You ask me that question as if I were a foreigner. But I am African."
"Yes, I know, but you're..."
My uncontrollable Italian hand stretched out to gesture over him.
He was smiling again. "What?"
"You know...Not originally African."
"I am third-generation Ugandan, but if you mean that I am white, you can say it."
“Well,” I said, consulting my notes, “you were born in London…”
“Only because my family had to leave during Idi Amin’s regime,” he explained. “My parents were born here and their parents. They came back as soon as was possible. I was only seven years old.”
The truth is that politically-correct labels confuse me sometimes and I had thought that to call him a “white African” might sound like a throwback to colonial times… In any case, Dr. Burton sounded English, between his early childhood in London and his studies there.
"That’s what I mean, you're white," I said.
"Yes I’m white. We are very few in Uganda. We were a few thousand before Idi Amin and are even fewer now, but it’s still my country. I still see the problem as a problem in my continent. I can't see it as an outsider. There are many educated people here, of whatever race, fighting disease, and many civilized people who don't want to see homosexuality punished with death."
"Is that the view of most Ugandans, though?" It was my turn to interrupt him, "I have been told by gay activists that there is intolerance against them from pretty much all quarters."
"Homosexuality has been there, but not talked about," Dr. Burton said. "A lot of Ugandans in rural Africa will tell you they don’t know what it is, they have never seen it…That’s because it has traditionally stayed hidden, as it was in Europe or America in the 1950s, or before."
I wriggled in my chair, trying to find a reason to go after him. "So you think that gay people should hide?"
"I don't personally think so, no. It's a naturally-occurring phenomenon, it has been observed in several other species. Science is well on the way to explaining how it happens. Still, it will take a while for homosexuals to be fully accepted here, because we are behind Europe or the United States. Tolerance towards others, especially when it goes against a primordial code such as reproduction, is normally only adopted after widespread economic wellbeing and greater education."
I would, at this point, have asked him about his book, if he had been kind and chubby Dr. Burton. But I didn't want to talk about the fact that we are nothing but animals and that fidelity is an illusion to this fiercely intelligent and very attractive man.
"Thank you, Dr. Burton!"
"Is that it?"
"Yes!" I said, turning off the recorder and putting it away to hide my confusion. I motioned toward the camera. “May I take a picture?”
“Of me?” he asked. “I’d rather not, if you don’t mind. I know articles have little room for photos, I’m sure you’ll get better ones!”
I nodded, though he didn’t exactly understand how things worked. A photo of a man like him would make most people stop at the article. Yet he seemed genuinely modest, and I didn’t insist.
"You have come a long way to ask me only a few questions,” he said. “You should at least stay tomorrow and see the mountain gorillas."
"The gorillas — in the forest?"
"That's where they live, normally."
His anger was gone and he dimpled again as he smiled.
I was thinking I didn't much like forests. Or trekking. But I didn't want him to think I was a spa-only kind of woman, though why should I have cared what he thought?
“I’m absolutely delighted to have come to Kagale…” I began.
He laughed outright, then said, "This is the only region where mountain gorillas exist anymore and there are less than a thousand left. They’re something worth photographing. Are you in a hurry to get back to Kampala?"
"No. I would love to see the gorillas."
This sentence came out in spite of my express desire to say the opposite. What was I doing? Though how absurd to be so near the gorillas, the few left in the world, and not see them!
"Do you know where you are staying tonight?" he was asking me.
"Not yet. I tend to make it up as I go."
"You might want to try Silverback Lodge, in Buhoma, right in the forest. It will be something of a drive now, but you won’t be far from the starting point tomorrow morning. I will have you picked up."
I nodded and thanked him. As we walked out I asked, “You seem to be something of a polymath ─ you treat people, study gorillas, write about evolution. What is really your vocation, if there is one stronger than the others?”
Again he seemed a bit embarrassed that the focus had turned to him, but tried to answer me, "I suppose I started out with people and then..."
"And then?" I looked at him.
Burton considered me for a second. "And then I realized we are all just apes who shed some hair and learned how to talk. So I went to study apes. Their behavior explains a lot…” he scoffed.
I narrowed my eyes at him. "And yet you have gone back to people again. You're treating them at the AIDS hospital."
"Uganda needs doctors," he said curtly.
We arrived at my car and he seemed to be avoiding more questions by speaking in Luganda to the driver; Luganda is the most widely spoken Bantu language in Uganda, especially in the south and around Kampala, where the driver was from. I understood the words Silverback Lodge.
Burton turned to smile at me again, shook my hand and then he walked briskly towards the shack/office without a backward glance. He didn’t seem very interested in me at all; and I was definitely not interested in him, or in any man.
The Impenetrable
Forest
I arrived at Silverback Lodge in the evening, after thinking the whole way that Edward, who had probably been chugging more cough syrup to heal even faster, might end up running over one of the endangered gorillas: it was raining as much as in Noah's Flood and the windshield was covered with mud.
At the lodge there was a power outage. I ran from the car to the reception and arrived there drenched. There was a group to welcome me, a tall man and three women, all of them holding flashlights underneath their chins, which made me scream as I walked in. I felt as if I had arrived at Dracula's Castle.
But they were not vampires, in fact they were very nice. The manager welcomed me, said I must be tired and had one of the girls escort me to my room. To our left, as we walked toward the room, there was a great darkness: I had no idea what the view would be like in the morning.
My room was small and had a comfortable bed covered in white linen and a mosquito net. The girl asked me if I wanted something to eat and I declined, as I had eaten on the way. I requested some hot milk with a little cocoa and sugar, which she brought to me. The bed had been warmed with a water bottle and after showering and changing into cotton PJ bottoms and a T-shirt, I got in between the sheets and started to read about gorilla trekking.
The information that stood out to me was that sometimes people walked for six hours and never met the gorillas. I read this at the same time that I listened to the rain pitilessly drumming the roof.
I thought in desperation that I didn't have Burton's mobile, but I did have Godfrey's. Maybe I could cancel? I held my mobile and thought about it, and I must have fallen asleep because I opened my eyes to the song of many birds and there was light coming in through the window.
Good heavens, it was morning and I hadn't cancelled the trek!
I leapt from the bed and looked outside and I was stunned. I could hardly believe what I was seeing, so I moved to the door and opened it.