A Man in Africa

by Lara Blunte

  Chris had gotten me to the guest room and he sat me on the bed. He took off my sandals and left them by the bed and took a shirt of his out of the wardrobe and placed it on my pillow.

  "The room is fine," I said, "it's not spinning!"

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yesh."

  "All right, then I'll leave you to it. Tomorrow you can tell me why you became an alcoholic.”

  That seemed incredibly funny as well. As he left and closed the door I managed to take my clothes off and put his shirt on. It smelled nice and clean. I climbed under the blanket and fell on the pillow, laughing and that's pretty much how I stayed till the morning.

  A While Longer

  The next day greeted me with a knife through my eye and a punch in my stomach.

  "Oh, Dio..." I muttered, still in bed. Where was I?

  Everything came flooding back — and I mean everything. All the things I had asked Chris, all the embarrassing things I had said.

  I found the Miu Miu sunglasses by rummaging blindly in my bag, put them on and stood swaying, this time in pain, dressed in Chris' shirt. Opening the door a crack, I heard that he was in the kitchen and that BBC News was on. I slinked to the bathroom and closed the door. There was a new toothbrush still in the box lying on the sink (why does he have a new toothbrush, a lot of one-night stands?) — but when I took it out I saw that it was shaped like a dinosaur bone and meant for a child.

  No, Roberta, he is not a pedophile!

  I looked at my face and almost shrieked. The little mascara I had put on last night had run onto my cheeks and my hair looked like a rat's nest. I didn't even know what I could do to fix all that, so I just washed my face and brushed my teeth through the pain. There was a towel for me as well and when I turned towards the door there was a note on top of the cupboard that said Take me and a pill lying on it.

  Well, doctor's orders! I grabbed the bottle of water he had left for me and swallowed the pill, then finished the water greedily, feeling as though my insides were cracking with thirst.

  As I was about to walk out, I backed toward the mirror again and tried to run his comb through my hair, but only managed to get it tangled. I now could not get the comb out. I walked to the kitchen with my sunglasses on: the house seemed made of windows and it was flooded with painful light.

  Chris looked round when I appeared and started to laugh. Ha, ha and ha. So funny.

  "Good morning!" I said with dignity as I tried to tuck the comb behind my ear.

  "What have you done?" he asked.

  "I don't know, I think you'll have to cut my hair off."

  He walked over to inspect the damage and patiently took tendrils away from the comb until I was free. “You are a little accident-prone, you know that?"

  "A little bit..."

  Finally he managed to untangle the comb and he even ran it over the tangled part of my hair. Then he put it down and motioned me to a high stool, where he had placed a dish, a bowl, cutlery and a cup.

  "Coffee, tea?"

  "Fair trade coffee?" I asked sharply.

  God, why did everything I said make him laugh? He really was an African.

  "Real coffee," he said.

  "Please!" I said, extending my cup with the eagerness of Oliver Twist.

  He poured some for me. "Eggs? Toast?"

  "Ugh."

  "Eat some fruit. You have to put some vitamins and minerals back in your body."

  He gave me papaya, all cut up. I liked this treatment. A little song started running through my head, Emergency please, calling Dr. Chris! Calling, calling, calling Dr. Chris.

  I didn't realize that I was singing out loud until I saw that his shoulders, as he made the eggs, were shaking with laughter.

  "What?" I asked.

  He turned round with his dish of eggs and leaned against the counter to eat them. "I love the glasses, by the way."

  I was frowning behind them, then I said, "I am sorry for —"

  He shook his head decisively. “No, I don't need you to be sorry about anything. You nearly spent the whole evening yesterday being sorry."

  I waited a bit, playing with my papaya, then said, "Well, it's good manners."

  He laughed again.

  "What?" I exclaimed peevishly.

  "You!" he shot back. "That's what. You're funny."

  I didn't know whether I wanted to be funny, but he just laughed more. "You are like a crazy little doll with those glasses!"

  I was 5'7'' to his probable 6'2''.

  "I'm not so little! May I have a shower?"

  "Yes, there is a towel for you in the bathroom. I'll run you into town."

  Fifteen minutes later we were in the car and driving toward my hotel. I was pensive and he seemed more serious as well, as if getting ready for his day and the sadness in it. I had a thought mushrooming in my head, but it was fighting against a slight headache and some haze.

  He stopped at the hotel, kissed my cheek as I got out of the car and drove off.

  I was lying in bed in my room a little later when my sister called me on Skype.

  "Ma che cavolo fai a Uganda?" she asked. What the hell are you doing in Uganda?

  My excuse to avoid Skype calls till now had been faulty internet, though it was good enough to talk if one didn't turn on the camera. Ornella therefore couldn't see my face, but she knew me better than anyone and could tell all sorts of things by the way my voice sounded.

  I had not told her that I had run away during the wedding, because I didn't want her to hate Clive. She had known him for years, had come to stay with us in London and we had gone to her in Italy and then in Sydney, where she lived now. How could I explain that the marriage had ended before it began without throwing Clive under a tank? What he had done did not mean that he did not care for my sister; I knew that he did.

  I didn't want to start a coven against him, to talk and talk of what a disgusting shit he was, or what he deserved. I didn't want, in that peculiar way that families have to make things worse at times, for my sister to ask me, "Were you freaking blind — how could he do all this stuff?"

  She was my sister and she would say what everyone was thinking.

  "We went on a small honeymoon, then he had to work and I had to work and everything went back to normal."

  "Turn on the camera!"

  "I've told you it doesn't work!"

  "How long have you been there?"

  "Ma che palle! Stop being such a pain, tell me something fun."

  There was a silence, then she said, "Why, your marriage isn't fun already? Welcome to the freaking club!"

  My sister and my friends would all talk against marriage and against having children, though in the end they seemed stuck with their husbands and devoted to their offspring. She had never thought that my problems were serious, because no one who was childless could have serious problems.

  "You just wait till you do..." she would say.

  "You wait. You'll be waiting a long time."

  And now, all of a sudden, I wanted to hang out with a bunch of children at once, but I was certainly not going to tell her that.

  I didn't tell Clive either, though he was sending me several emails a day, asking me to allow him back as a contact in Skype, or give him my number, or to please just let him know I was all right.

  I'm all right, I wrote him. But there isn't anything to talk about for the moment.

  Another email pinged in, Please, please talk to me! Please don't do this.

  I ignored it. The thought that had been growing in my mind was now almost fully formed and I asked Edward to drive me up to the hospital. The children were in class and didn't see me and the cooks waved at me, smiling.

  A while later I saw Chris coming from the fence that divided the hospital from the nursery. I ran out toward him. “Chris!" I said.

  "Hey! You're here?"

  "Yes, I didn't want to disturb you –"

  "You don't."

  "I wanted to ask you — could I stay a while?"

&n
bsp; "Stay?"

  "In Uganda. I mean, I know I can stay in Uganda, but I want to stay here and...I want to help. Is there anything for me to do?"

  He was frowning at me in the sun. "We can't afford another salary..."

  "No, no. No money. Just as a volunteer. I think I am allowed two and a half months more here. Put me to work! I can teach, or take care of the kids, I can help in the hospital..."

  "Are you sure?" he asked me, still frowning.

  And I said yes — because this is what I had understood: that there might be other stories out there, but I wanted to live this one. I had understood that the world could wait and that I didn't always have to be running somewhere new. I had understood that this place had something to teach me.

  Learning

  Another thing I found out was that I liked to teach.

  I ended up teaching the kids all sorts of mad things, because Chris, Gideon and Miriam thought that they should learn about the world: about classical music, opera, geography, history, films, literature. They wanted the children to be entertained and happy and they let me do what I wanted, as long as I didn't show them horror films.

  Instead I told them about Italy: how it had been full of different tribes, the Venetians, the Romans, the Tuscans, but then it had united, just like Uganda and how we also had a language like Luganda that united us, though in each place they spoke something different. They thought the story was very similar to theirs, and I even made a big quantity of ice cream that turned out good, and they were very happy.

  We listened to the rhythms that had gone out of Africa to many places in the world: jazz in America, reggae in Jamaica, calypso in Trinidad, samba in Brazil. We danced together to all this music.

  My camera came out and I took lots of photographs of them. They never tired of posing, and I never tired of snapping them. They would huddle around me to look at the result afterwards, as I flipped through the camera, and would laugh their heads off.

  It was a seamless existence: people were always there, in the hospital or in the nursery, sometimes after their shift was over. The cooks had a TV which they would bring outside, and the caretakers plus several children would gather around to watch. The women sat with the orphan girls at their feet and braided their hair as they made comments about whatever program was on.

  I knew that on Sundays Chris and Gideon would sneak into the kitchen to watch parts of a football game and the cooks would spoil them with samosas and dishes of matooke, starchy bananas served mashed. A few boys would manage to get in and afterwards, if things were calm, the doctors would go to the grass at the back and play football with the kids.

  The children sometimes would be angry, fight, or sulk, but I had never seen creatures readier to love and be loved. I had never seen kids ask forgiveness of one another, or of adults, with such sincerity and I had never seen apologies accepted so quickly. A child would go to a friend, rarely prodded by an adult, to say that he or she was sorry and soon they were running off, holding hands.

  In the hospital, too, the adults suffering or dying were happy to see us, glad when I sat next to them and talked, thankful when they knew we were caring for their children. You might think that we were kind to them, but they were also kind to us, not complaining, not supposing we were doing anything wrong when they were in pain, or couldn't be saved. They were never impatient, they were never angry.

  I knew I had something to learn and I was learning. I was learning that I had taken too much for granted, all the time. I had not been grateful enough for the love that people had given me, I had not appreciated how healthy I was, how wealthy.

  I was learning that sometimes those who had nothing were made so much happier than me by anything they got, anything at all.

  Adroa was still the coke bandit and the heart thief and though I liked all the kids — even Paul, who sulked, even Marcia, who screamed —I couldn't help feeling happiest whenever I saw him. He always had some benign scheme brewing and was in love with the baby girl called Mugisa. She was eighteen months old and both her parents, tragically, were sick at the hospital. She was under our care as the doctors tried everything to save the mother; the father was probably in his last weeks or days.

  However, we had to watch Adroa at every turn, otherwise there he would be, half-carrying, half-dragging Mugisa somewhere. He would sing to her, take her under the tree to give her some fruit, or talk to her as if she understood what he was saying.

  "Why do you like her so much?" I asked him.

  "I don't know," he replied, and shrugged.

  Outside the hospital there were other things I had to learn as well.

  Freedom and anonymity had defined my life until that point. From the moment I began to work and left home, I had always done exactly as I liked. My relationship with my mother had been full of conflict, as we had seen eye-to-eye on almost nothing, but it had improved when I moved away. My father had always been distant and that didn’t change, but we were able to talk as adults about books and films we enjoyed and that, too, had been good.

  My sister and I were close, but then she moved away and we had to keep contact over email and Skype. I had become used to do as I liked, go where I pleased, even before I met Clive — and when we started to live together, he never tried to stop me from traveling for work. Now I knew why: he had also wanted the freedom to invite women to our flat, probably, to go out to meet them, put the phone on silent mode to then say he had forgotten it somewhere else in the house and hadn’t heard it ring.

  Anonymity had also been quite precious to me. In my profession it was better not to be seen, not to be noticed until you had to step up and ask questions. If I were not anonymous, just another mzungu walking around any town of the world, I would not learn what really happened in those places.

  I had, therefore, become used to observing and not being observed, but the moment I rented a small house in Lake Bunyonyi, I became a resident, almost a part of the community, and it was impossible for me to divorce myself from people. I had to learn to be in a group, to have people know all that I did, to talk to everyone along the way to the hospital or the market, because everyone talked to me. Sometimes they stopped and chatted, and there was no rushing off. I had to ask about whole families and hear how everyone was doing, when in London one hardly ever took the time to hear “Fine!” after asking “How are you?”

  Sometimes I had to hear ignorant opinions: a person would say that Idi Amin had been right to throw out the Indians, because they wanted to take over the country; another would say the devil had done this or that, another would whisper that so-and-so, who was from another ethnic group, was dirty or bad.

  Chris helped me find the house, but he warned me about the lack of privacy in town. I realized it was not by accident that he had ended up on top of a hill. A man who cared for people all day needed his time alone.

  However, I knew that even through this, even through the annoyances, I was learning something.

  I had dismissed Edward and the car, telling him not to drink cough syrup on the way back, and I took my meager possessions to the house. On the day I moved in, I grabbed Chris by the arm, begging him to look for spiders, cockroaches, snakes and rats.

  “You do know you’re in Africa, don’t you?” he had asked me.

  “I only have a problem with those things,” I told him.

  “The ants here can kill you too, though…”

  “Stop it!”

  He looked everywhere with me behind him and in the bathroom suddenly turned to throw something that looked like a snake at me. I shrieked and climbed on him.

  It was a piece of hose sticking out of the faucet in the shower. He laughed, though he covered his ear where I had screamed and I held on to his neck from the back, with my legs around him.

  "I swear, I swear there wasn't anything!”

  I wouldn't get on the floor again and he carried me to the living room to place me on a chair.

  "Are you going to be all right?"

  "Of course
!" I said with hauteur, waving a hand. "I've traveled all over the world alone!"

  “I can see that!”

  He left, still laughing. He always laughed at me.

  I went on to unpack: I had such few clothes that they didn't even fill the tiny closet in my room. There was my wedding dress, still dirty from the party and from my running away, the peep toe shoes that I had no occasion to wear and the few things I had managed to buy in Cambodia and at airports. I had next to nothing and yet I didn't feel, for the moment, that I needed more.

  Like Chris, I soon had drawings on my wall, many of them signed AD.

  I looked around and remembered my apartment with Clive, where we had design pieces by Eames, van der Rohe and Aalto. We had precious things from our trips, silk carpets from Iran, antiques from France and Portugal, photographs and paintings by very good artists. I had walked around that huge apartment fluffing pillows, arranging objects, setting tables with china, crystal and expensive bouquets for our friends.

  And now I was setting a table, an old table so uneven that I had to find some cardboard to fold and put under one of the legs: I covered it with a colorful African cloth I had bought at the market, put plastic dishes, old cutlery and glasses on it. I had picked some flowers on the way and arranged them in a bigger glass. Then I used some tiles I had found for the saucepans with the food.

  I had invited Chris and Gideon for dinner: Miriam had stayed on duty at the hospital. I cooked pasta, chilled a few beers and made a tiramisù, or at least an approximation of it. I told myself not to go beyond two glasses of wine and not to ask them embarrassing questions. I told myself to particularly not ask any embarrassing questions of Chris, who smelled good as he kissed me on one cheek, looking relaxed in jeans and a light-blue shirt.

  It was Gideon who started talking about Musiga during dinner; like Adroa, he loved the little girl. Her father, Kasozi, was dying.

  “Musiga’s parents are an example of what I told you,” Chris said. “The mother contracted the disease from her husband, because he was promiscuous. Then she gave birth to a little girl who is HIV positive…”