A Man in Africa

by Lara Blunte

  He took the groceries out of the bags. "I did manage to find pasta, though you'll be horrified."

  I went over and looked. It was spaghetti made in Spain. "Hmm," I said. An Italian is never as judgmental as when it comes to food and fashion.

  He laughed. "I'm not sure this was a good idea. You'll hate everything!"

  "Aspetta! Fammi vedere!" I couldn't help switching to Italian as I took over, pushing him aside gently. He surrendered the bags, put the white wine in the freezer and took out a beer, which he handed to me.

  I took a swig after he opened it and considered the things in front of me: tomatoes that looked red and ripe, eggplants (which made me think of Clive), garlic, some sort of cheese. I looked into the cupboards and the fridge as well, taking everything I liked.

  Then I found a long dishcloth, tied it around my waist and got busy.

  Chris went to have a shower and after a moment I yelped out loud when I suddenly thought of his body with water running over it.

  Maniac! I told myself. You're worse than them! Well, the difference was that I could control myself.

  But when he came out wearing a white shirt and smelling like soap, his thick straight hair still wet but combed, it didn't make things any better. Handsome men only become more so when they wear a white shirt. I handed him a cold beer and he started cutting fruit and putting it into a bowl to make a salad for dessert.

  We talked about nothing and everything as I cooked and we drank our beers. I told him I had lost my parents in a car accident and about my sister. He told me about his mother and brother, Ben, who lived in Mount Elgon and about his father, who had died seven years ago of cancer.

  Then he helped me take the food to the table, which he had already set quite nicely. I had made Spaghetti alla Norma with the eggplants, plus a dish of roasted bell peppers with olive oil and parsley, another with beetroots and cheese. I also had half a chicken with some potatoes in the oven which would be finished off with sprigs of rosemary.

  Chris started to eat, making appreciative noises. "It does taste like Italy!"

  I had drunk a beer when cooking and was now in my second, almost third glass of wine. He was still drinking his first beer.

  "Don't you like wine?"

  "Yes, but I try not to go beyond one drink. If there is an emergency at the hospital I should be clear-headed. So I make this one last a long time."

  "One of you doctors stays the night at the hospital but calls the others if …"

  "Yes ─ pretty much. Sometimes two of us stay."

  I twirled my glass of wine. "I wanted to say again that I am sorry. That was no way to behave. I am not normally like that."

  "Give yourself a break. It isn't easy to see that for the first time."

  "Does it get easier, the hundredth time?"

  He leaned back in his chair. "What if we don't talk about it tonight? You can ask me questions tomorrow, if you want?"

  "I'm sorry, you're right, it's your time off!"

  He smiled and got up, taking the plates. I started to stand up as well but he motioned me down. "I’ll do this."

  Chris cleared the table and brought the fruit salad, which tasted fresh and seemed like just what we needed. He asked me if I wanted more wine and I nodded. As I have said, I do commit excesses sometimes and I liked the slight buzz I had begun to feel.

  I thought I would be safe with Dr. Chris. But perhaps he wasn't going to be safe with me, as I was also getting bolder. A small voice was saying, You will regret this tomorrow.

  Shut up, voice!

  "So, you live up here all alone? Don't you have a girlfriend?"

  He gave me another smile, a pretty amused one this time. "No, I don't have a girlfriend."

  I closed one eye and considered him. "That’s a bit strange, if you don't mind my saying."

  "I don't mind."

  "What about a boyfriend? Oh, was that rude?" I covered my mouth. I was drunker than I thought.

  He laughed outright. "Is that for your article? No, I don't have a boyfriend either."

  "Which one would you have, if you could: girlfriend or boyfriend?" Tipsy Roberta persisted, in spite of me.

  "I'm not gay," he stated.

  "In any case, that was very nosy of me. Also, in any case, it's about to become really illegal here."

  I wondered momentarily if Clive had been right to take the bottle of wine away from me. Clive, that swine!

  "So why..." I was unstoppable, it seemed.

  "I don't have time to have a girlfriend," Chris said. "I'd need to go out, meet someone and have time to woo."

  "W─w─woooo?" the word became wooohooohoo as I laughed.

  He must have been kidding: his dimples were very deep now and his eyes twinkling like nobody's business.

  “Yes, you have to woo a good woman,” he said.

  My eyes got a bit lost at this, they just stared at nothing. "How do you know? How do you know if a person is good or not?"

  "I suppose you get to know them a bit."

  “Would you ever marry anyone?”

  His opinion seemed very important to me at that moment.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and didn’t elaborate.

  “Do you have a good outlook on that institution?” I insisted.

  He shrugged. “Has its good things, has its bad ones…”

  “You don’t seem to commit to any opinion, do you?” I asked.

  “Why would I?” he replied. “Don’t you know that opinions can change?”

  “So, if you met a good girl, if you thought that you knew that she was a good girl, marriage might seem like a great institution to you?”

  “Not an institution,” he said. “It might just seem right to do it. Or not.”

  It made me suddenly bitter that dreamboat might have a good girl one day. For heaven’s sake, what man in the world looked like that and sat saying he wanted to woo a woman? And it also annoyed me that he answered questions with questions or evasions.

  "You seem extremely angry right now," he said and he was still smiling.

  I caught a glimpse of myself on the glass door behind him and realized I did look a bit like Medusa on a bad day.

  "I was just thinking...no one ever knows anyone else, do they? I mean, you might know what someone likes and dislikes and if he or she snores after forty years, but you won't really know what's in people's minds, will you? You won't know what's in their heart..."

  I couldn't believe I had used the word heart as a seat for the emotions, when I knew it was just a fairly ugly organ that pumped blood and oxygen.

  He was still looking at me, now quietly, as the wine and the conversation kept increasing my belligerence. I went on with my questions: "What about what's in your mind? Was bringing me here a plough?"

  "Plough?"

  "Ploy!"

  "No, Roberta, bringing you here was not a plough. Nothing is going to happen."

  "Nothing? Then it's because you think I'm not attractive. I don't know what man would take a woman to his house, wine her, dine her and then...nothing!"

  He was getting more and more amused, if possible. "You are attractive, you dined me, you are wining yourself."

  I looked at the bottle. It was past the halfway mark. "I'm not drunk!" I protested.

  "I didn't say you were,” he said, looking like he thought I was, at least a little.

  I stabbed my finger wildly in the air. “You just seem too perfect. What's your terrible secret? Let's have it!"

  "You want to know my secret?" He was suddenly serious, his eyes boring into mine.

  "I...I...Yes! You know what, I do! As long as it's not serial murder, that wouldn’t be good...What's your unconfessable thing?"

  "I'm not sure that's a word, but all right." He stood up. "I'll show you!"

  He extended his hand to me and his face was in the shadow now, his eyes gleaming. Porca troia, what had I done? I lifted my hand and put it in his and he helped me stand up. Now I was terrified by his seriousness as he led me towards
the sofa. He sat me down and picked up two remotes.

  Oh, Lord, is he going to show me some porn, like that Saudi Prince tried to do once? Or a snuff film? Sadism, like the other Chris in a novel I didn't read? He was still quite serious as he pointed one remote at the TV and the other at a DVD-looking thing.

  Was it a homemade sex tape? Help!

  The TV screen was blue, then suddenly big letters appeared: Karaoke.

  My mouth hung open, the glass of wine in my right hand. Chris had taken hold of a microphone.

  "You've only yourself to blame," he said.

  He moved the cursor among the songs on the screen with the remote until he clicked on one and the familiar strains of Let's Get It On began.

  The mad doctor started to sing and this was his secret: he was incredibly good! He sounded just like Marvin Gaye through all the woahs and oohs.

  When he finished, my mouth was still open but I started to laugh.

  "That was amazing!"

  "And the proof that I'm not just a mzungu!” he said triumphantly.

  "Do it again," I begged like a child, "Sing another one!"

  "OK, but afterwards you have to try." He pointed at the screen. "Which one do you want?"

  "Do you know them all?"

  "You may have noticed that there isn't a great deal to do around here in the evening?" he said dryly.

  I was reading the titles. "Oh, please, do Witchcraft."

  And he was off, sounding like bloody Frank Sinatra. I was hugging the cushion underneath my chin by the time he finished. “Are you joking, you can imitate a bunch of singers?"

  "It's my secret superpower." He gave me a second microphone. "Your turn!"

  "No, I can't sing!"

  "Come on!"

  I chose Bad Romance, which might have been the story of the last six years of my life. I had passed the halfway mark on the bottle and thought I sounded soulful and fierce.

  When I finished he said, "You really can't sing!"

  We laughed quite a bit and he sang Your Song and The Very Thought of You so well that my mouth just hung open. I destroyed Killing Me Softly as he winced and then sang Unforgettable in a duet with him, except that every time I sang, he laughed.

  It was hard to have enough of singing, which I must admit was quite addictive, or of hearing him sing: he was like a private concert of all my favorite music.

  Oh, you sneaky Dr. Chris, man of mystery and fun.

  And then we started to get hoarse, so we went outside and see the few lights down in the city from the terrace. He brought me a Maasai blanket and wrapped it around my shoulders. It was chilly, which kept the mosquitoes away. The smell of embers floated to us.

  "That makes me remember good times," he said.

  "Why?"

  "The best times in Africa, growing up, are around a fire. You get a bit sleepy, but you don't want to sleep — and people tell stories, tease each other, laugh…”

  His beer had ended and he had nothing to drink. I kept valiantly trying to finish the bottle of wine, which made me less inhibited than ever. Besides, Chris had a thing common in men of science, he didn't mind questions, though he didn’t necessarily answer them to my satisfaction.

  "So, you know, I read your book. Becoming Human..." I said.

  "Did you?"

  "Do you think we ever will? Become human?"

  "I don't know, I think it ought to be the trend ─ we ought to evolve away from instincts that we no longer need, like aggression. We ought to lose some of our reproductive drive as well, with the planet so overpopulated."

  "Do you think we are apes trying to be angels, then?"

  He glanced at me. "That's a fairly good way to put it."

  "Why do we even want to be angels, why don't we wallow in our apeness…?”

  "Actually, now that you know some of my secrets, why don't you tell me about you? What has made you so angry at men?" he asked.

  I almost spat my wine. "I beg your pardon?"

  "Well, you asked me if I am gay, can't I ask you that?"

  "What makes you think I hate men?"

  "I didn't say you hated them, I said you were angry. It's written all over your face all the time. You have a very expressive face."

  My hand flew up to my cheek to feel what was going on there. "What do I...?"

  "You frowned at me for half an hour straight the day we met and you did this," he gesticulated up and down manically at my body. “…when you were trying to say I was white. You called the silverback 'pig' under your breath all the way out of the forest. What happened to you?"

  "What do you think?" I asked, sobering up a little." It's the least interesting story in the world and one of the most common."

  "Cheating boyfriend?"

  "Husband," I corrected him.

  "You're married?” He seemed very surprised. "For how long?"

  "Six weeks?"

  "You have been married six weeks and your husband cheated?"

  I took a deep breath and explained, "I found out on the day of our wedding that he had been lying and cheating for six years."

  He grimaced. "Oh. That's bad. I'm sorry, it must hurt."

  "Yes, it does hurt because I loved someone and I don't know where he is —and the person who is there, I don't love. I don't understand why there was so much lying, why he couldn't just admit that this is something stronger than him and go off to be free."

  "Maybe he's ashamed? Any addiction is shameful, it's an inability to control oneself."

  "All right." I leaned forward. "I want your philosophical-evolutionary-clinical take on this: is it an addiction, or is his behavior within the norm? Are men truly like him?"

  "I wouldn't be able to judge, I haven't met him. And I am a man, in case that was not wholly clear…"

  "Then tell me, do men think like pigs?" I asked forcefully.

  "Men think like men!" he exclaimed. "Pigs don't think. That's my clinical take."

  "You know I am using pigs as a metaphor for...animal. Apes, rather than angels."

  "Oh, we are no angels."

  "So, metaphorically, pigs!" I concluded triumphantly.

  "Look, if you want to say that men want sex a lot of the time, you are right. Do women never think of it?"

  I shrugged, ignoring the fact that I had thought of his naked body not long ago. I had also been wondering if he was a good kisser, though I had not realized that I was thinking it until I caught myself watching his lips.

  "We may, but a lot of women would not cheat, for the sake of something else. For the leaky boat that is marriage,” I said. “The leaky boat where two people climb, thinking they will make it…somewhere…”

  "So women don't cheat?" he asked after a moment and he seemed more serious.

  "Aha! Did one cheat on you?"

  "I don’t know. It’s possible." Chris was frowning a little now. "Like you said, who can know another person, we are all such bundles of needs and impulses and miseries.”

  “Yes, we are…”

  He looked at me. “Maybe another explanation for what happened in your marriage is that he did care for you, but he couldn't help what he was doing."

  "Under my nose?" I asked bitterly. "With women that I knew, that I worked with? He could at least have looked out for me, have had respect…It was like a massacre, every traffic light was run through, ‘don’t cheat, not with someone I know, not in front of my friends, not in our house, don’t keep in touch with them’…”

  I leaned forward and put my cheek against the table.

  "I think it's time for bed," he said.

  I raised my head and widened my eyes, or at least I think I did. "Aha!"

  "Not with me, on your own,” he clarified.

  "You'll take me back to the hotel?" I slurred. How had I come to slur like that?

  "I think you should sleep here, I have a guest room. You are quite sloshed."

  He was standing and I tried to do the same, failing twice. “I can perfectly well..."

  Chris took my hand a
nd helped me to my feet, then he guided me inside the house. I moved like an old woman, bumping into everything, but I still managed to turn around rather swiftly to face him. “So, can you state that you aren't a pig?"

  "A metaphorical one?"

  "Yesh."

  I swayed before him as he held on to me.

  "I can't say that, no."

  "Aha!" My finger pointed at him.

  "There is a time when I turn into a pig."

  "A time? Like a spessshific time?"

  "Yes. When the moon is full. That's when it happens."

  I gasped. "So you're like... the werepig?"

  He was laughing. "That's me. The werepig."

  I started to lean backwards to look at the moon. Was it full? I would have noticed it, if it were full! He held on to me as I almost fell and brought me back to an upright position.

  "Is that the only time when it happens?"

  "Yes. But it's once a month, so there is enough pig in a year."

  "I'll bet!"

  I swayed forward and my cheek ended up against his shoulder. He was patting my back as if I were one of his gorillas, while I got into the sentimental phase of drunkenness.

  "I just wanted to say...I wanted to say that you're a good man, even if you turn into a pig sometimes. You're a really good friend."

  "I'm your friend, am I?"

  "Shhhure. I mean, here I am and I don't feel you would take avvvvantach of me."

  "I'm not a rapist, if that's what you mean."

  I looked up and he was still dimpling. I felt like raising my hand to put my finger inside one of his dimples, but realized in the meantime that what he had said sounded immensely funny. I threw my head back to laugh, except that my whole body went with it. He managed to grab me and set me straight again.

  "All right, off to bed. I think the room might start spinning a bit for you."

  "My husband...the pig...he used to take the bollllel of wine away from me! I really hated that."

  "Maybe he had a point," Chris muttered, walking me to the guest room.

  "Madonna, mi sento un po' male..."

  "Watch the wall!"

  "Excuse me," I said to the door. "Quel brutto stronzo!"