A Man in Africa

by Lara Blunte

  Then he lay face down on a sun bed next to mine and fell asleep, and I lay on my stomach, my legs swinging behind me, to stare at him like a fool.

  I must have fallen asleep as well, because when I opened my eyes he was looking at me very intensely and he didn't blink or look away when he saw that I was awake; he just kept on staring, so I shut my eyes. I felt the light shift behind my closed lids after a moment, heard a splash and when I peeked he was in the pool again.

  Aiuto, I mumbled to myself, which means help in Italian. Help me not fall for this man. I would not be falling into a shallow hole; this wouldn’t be a teen crush that might have me doodling his name for a few months after I left Uganda. Dr. Burton was deep: I would fall from a great height and get hurt.

  In the evening, we went out in the jeep again. Yoweri guided Chris to the places where we might find a leopard and pointed a spotlight at trees. The two of them talked in Luganda.

  The jeep flew over the dirt roads again. The moon was in the navy-blue sky, an African moon like an orange. Everything was perfect, even though the dirt was turning my eyelashes white and making me cough quite a bit. I pulled a scarf over my nose.

  We found the leopard in a tree, his tail hanging down. As Yoweri shone the spotlight on it, the leopard looked back at us, its eyes turned to clear glass. Its tail flickered like a whip.

  "It's a beautiful thing," I said.

  "It sure is," Chris said, almost sadly.

  Back at the lodge, after showering and changing, we walked towards an acacia, a big, old, venerable tree with a flat canopy of leaves and branches. I got to it first, to look up at the birds that were twittering madly before retiring. When I glanced back, Chris was moving my way with an easy, lanky walk, almost like a cowboy.

  I started to get nervous, so I talked. "We are in the middle of the park," I said. "How do they keep the animals out?"

  "They don't."

  "WHAT? They don't do anything, electric fences, something?"

  "No."

  "So they could just appear?"

  He nodded. I started looking around, expecting to be eaten at any moment.

  "But there is something much worse that you should be worrying about," he said.

  "What?"

  He pointed up and I looked and saw nothing but the sky — and the bright, beautiful moon, which was now silver. The full moon.

  I looked at him. He was smiling, though his eyes looked a bit dangerous.

  "The full moon!" I gasped.

  "This is when I turn into a pig."

  He was still moving towards me and I had the tree against my back, the old, venerable tree. I ought to run, I thought. God knew what happened when he turned into the werepig.

  I started stammering, "W-w—what do—do—do you do when...what does the pig do?"

  He kept approaching me and I stood frozen with my back to the tree.

  "Whatever pigs do."

  I didn't understand why he was approaching me, why, when he had said he would not make any moves and we would be friends.

  "And what and what do they –"

  "You know very well."

  "But—but—but you said we were friends..."

  "Pigs lie."

  He was very near now; I ought to duck under his arm and run. I suppose a part of me truly expected him to turn into some other crazy form and kill me, but he was doing something worse, he was coming nearer and nearer to me, and then he was bending his head, and then he was kissing me.

  He tasted a bit like the salty dirt of Africa, and his kiss was heaven — and I didn't want to push him away, and I didn't want him to stop.

  Paradise

  No, Feminist, I did not use Dr. Burton's body and then told him to get his clothes and get out.

  I think what I did could not have been more opposite to that. I melted, I clung to him and I let him have his way with me. I succumbed and succumbed again. Then again.

  Needless to say, the safari the next day took place in the huge bed in my room and it went on all day. I wondered at one point if that mesh really made us invisible during the day, otherwise we were providing nature and the staff of Kibibi Lodge with a spectacle of our own.

  And I won’t describe the mechanics of the act, but I will say that Chris had the one thing that women most desire in a man, at least in bed: he was gentle and savage at the same time, and he knew exactly when to be which.

  Oh, Dr. Burton, Lord Bumbleworth would have tightened his jaw and scowled if he had known how much better you were at this than him. You were like the primeval forest enveloping me, like the savannah taking over and if didn't clap, it was only because I had no strength.

  Would I have been tempted by another man, so soon after the obliteration of a long relationship? I suppose Chris had to appear in my life and simply carry me away, as if he were the Nile dragging me through eleven countries.

  "How long have you been thinking of doing this?" I asked him in the afternoon, when we were catching our breath.

  "About the second after we met."

  "What, you true pig!" I punched the bed.

  "I'll bet if I told you I started thinking of it five weeks later, you would be even more outraged."

  "So when I met you, you were..."

  "Thinking you had amazing eyes and lips like two pillows and that you bit your pen in a very sexy way — that your breasts..."

  "My breasts? How did you...?"

  "When you bent to get something in your bag..."

  "When I bent you were looking at my breasts?"

  "Duh!"

  "You horrid dog!"

  "No, dogs don't appreciate their females' mammary glands. It's a strange obsession of Homo sapiens..."

  "And then?"

  "I liked your intellect…” he said wryly.

  “You lying werepig! Were you thinking these things all the times we were together?"

  "No, afterwards they graduated into much worse things."

  I hit his chest with a thump.

  "You cannot say that to me!"

  "Then don't ask! And that little fist hurts, by the way…”

  I sort of liked him saying that to me — so, shoot me, if you can find me!

  "And then?" I asked.

  "And then, that night at my house I really, really wanted to do everything we have been doing since last night…” He looked at me and brushed a lock of hair away from my face. "But you were sad."

  "You were always laughing at me!"

  "You were funny too, but you were sad."

  "Am I not sad now?"

  "Yes, I think you're still sad and scared ─ but the full moon came and I am not responsible for my actions while it's around."

  “Only when it’s around?”

  “The rest of the time, you’ll have to make a move…”

  “So I can’t pay for my drinks, but I can make the first move? What kind of code is that?”

  He gave me a knowing smile and pulled me toward him. “Dr. Burton’s code.”

  And off we went again.

  We did get out of the room for dinner and I found that my legs were wobbly and that it felt good to walk to the restaurant with a man who had his arm around my shoulder, who smelled of soap and who would wrestle a lion or a hippo if it tried to attack me.

  (Go away, Feminist!)

  That night was beautiful and still full of lovemaking, just as nature had intended when it made us attracted to each other. The next morning we were back on safari, only now I could sit next to Chris and look at his profile, if I wanted, I could get a kiss as we sat watching the animals, I could kiss him in the pool and he could put sunscreen on my body.

  I said that I hadn't been in a spa in a long time, that I needed a pedicure and we sat in our porch for him to paint my toenails; and because he had trained as a surgeon he did a pretty good job as I looked at the amazing view (which was him at my feet, not the Nile or any of that other stuff).

  But then there was that snake in paradise, Doubt, which came to me as he walked away f
rom the tent, talking on the phone.

  Why is he walking away? I wondered. I remembered how many times Clive must have done it, how he must have answered a phone call from Ursula or someone else I knew and many creatures I didn't know and walked away from me to speak in a low voice, even as I watched him, to ask a woman on the other side if she was thinking of him, to set up an appointment, to say he was catching a plane to see her.

  Why was Chris walking away, why did he want me not to hear what he was saying?

  Who was he calling?

  When he came back he left his mobile next to me as he showered and I thought that I should look at it. Look at it now, not six years from now, I told myself. I started to feel a bellyache and to sweat — and the phone seemed like an evil object that had the power to shatter my life.

  You are crazy, Roberta! Believe, or you won't see paradise.

  But I couldn't believe. Here was what seemed like the perfect man, but I remembered his book, the book that talked so eloquently about the illusion of fidelity.

  Genes and Chemicals

  Clive wrote:

  Roberta, it can't go on like this! We're married! I love you, even if you don't believe it now. I know what I did was terrible, I was sick ─ I don't know what happened, I don't know why I did it. I love you ─ please, help me! Please don't shut me out like this! I can't work, I can't sleep, I can't eat...

  You are the most important thing in my life, let me spend the rest of my days making it up to you. Please, my love, don't shut me out like this. I feel like I am going to die!

  I wondered why he needed to sound so passionate, when he liked so many women that we ought all to be interchangeable. I wrote:

  The thing is, Clive, that you didn't fuck up once. It was a massacre, well planned and executed. How many times a day did you have to decide how to juggle all those women, all those schedules, all those emails and calls? That is what lawyers mean when they talk of premeditation.

  You must have had a world map, in a hidden room behind a wardrobe, where you put pins of different colors in every country — otherwise, how you kept them straight is beyond me.

  You didn't lose your head, Clive, you kept it. You kept it often and for very long.

  And what I don't know now is if you are what men are, when they have the freedom to be anything, when the women in their lives don't want to look through their phones all the time, when they don’t nag them and threaten them every day.

  I am not that woman. That's why you think you love me, Clive. Because I was your alibi, your passport, you had the tranquility of a stable relationship, the illusion of a human life with a woman you knew, with whom you had things in common, with whom you laughed — and you had all the adventure, romance and sex you wanted with everyone else.

  But now, Clive, this doesn't matter to me anymore. It can't be put right.

  It only matters because you have made me afraid…

  I deleted the whole thing without sending. There wasn't anything I wanted to say to Clive. Either he was really sick and had a compulsion, in which case he needed to be treated by a doctor, or he was a gigantic opportunist and there was no point in talking to him at all.

  I thought that it was something in the middle. He had a disease and it made him opportunistic. I could not remember anything good about our life together without pain and anger, but now I knew that it was the pain of incomprehension, the anger of hurt pride, the distress that one might feel at realizing how impossible any of our angel wishes are. It was not the pain of a woman in love.

  Because I was in love with Christopher Burton, so in love.

  I had come out of the Matrix, where I had loved a man for a while, not with the first flush of passion but profoundly and steadily, only to discover that it had all been an illusion. I had then met another man and, yes, I was in love with him after just two months. We only had one month left, so that everything that was wonderful — his eyes, his touch, his smile, his body, his laughter, his kindness, his kiss — everything became terrible.

  All these things were the things I would lose, the things I would never allow myself to have. I thought that I must return to the feeling I had in Siem Reap, going through the floating flowers: the feeling that I was enough for myself, that I was happy alone.

  Every time this African man kissed me, I needed to remind myself of that. Every time his eyes lingered on me when I left a room and were still on me when I returned, I needed to remember that this was an illusion.

  "What do you call the chemical that is making us have so much sex?" I asked him.

  "I call it bloody wonderful," he said.

  To grossly oversimplify things, it’s called dopamine. Dopamine is a neuro-transmitter with complex functions and it contributes to waking up the reward centers of the brain to all sorts of pleasures, including sex. Poor dopamine is not the only chemical that causes us to have terrible addictions, but it plays a part in them.

  And then there is oxytocin, when the sex abates a little, when you can bear to watch TV or read a book next to that body that before inspired crazed lust. Oxytocin and other chemicals will bind the lucky couples by making them feel a profound sense of wellbeing in each other's company. Less sex, more of something like love.

  Studies show that the more copies a man has of the variation of a certain gene (RS3), the more he is prone to straying; it happens to women too. A person with this gene, or allele, will find it impossible not to give in to temptation, as their brain searches desperately for the chemicals it craves.

  I believed in science and it made sense. Clive was a victim to the alteration of a gene and he had craved novelty. Poor Clive would never be healed, unless some mad scientist managed to suppress that variation in him.

  And Chris, did he have it? Who was Chris speaking to on the phone, all the time?

  I didn't want to sleep as we did, so close, almost mouth to mouth. This was the illusion, these were the chemicals in my brain. I didn't want to feel what he made me feel, it was not real.

  It was a lie.

  Moving In

  But sometimes, when I was not thinking so hard, it felt so right to love Chris, like in a Marvin Gaye song. When our four days in the wilderness ended and we went back home, he drove me to my house and said, "I'll help you."

  "Do what?"

  "Get your stuff."

  "What for?"

  "To go to my house. You don't need to stay here now."

  My eyes were as wide as a milky eagle owl’s, native to the place.

  "But..."

  "Why would you stay here, it will only be another pit stop," he said reasonably.

  He didn't really let me think too much, he just walked in with me and started helping me put my clothes in my small suitcase, the bathroom things in a plastic bag and taking the drawings off the wall. We looked around to see if I had forgotten anything and I said goodbye to my little house in Uganda.

  I suppose that was the equivalent of the caveman dragging the cavewoman by the hair, except that Chris did it with more finesse. At his house, he removed everything from the wardrobe in his room and left it to me.

  But then he was off again in the garden, talking on the phone.

  No don't come here, I could imagine him saying to a beautiful Ugandan girl. I have guests. I will come to you when I can get rid of them.

  He walked in with the phone as I read in his bed and sat next to me.

  "I need to go to Kampala," he told me.

  My heart dropped at 100 mph, like some ride in an amusement park.

  "A good friend of mine, from a really big family here, is holding a fundraiser for the hospital, so I have to go see if I can get money out of people," he explained.

  What's her name? I felt like asking. What an idiot, Roberta, you have done it again, you have become the bloody oxytocin! Go back to your house!

  "Will you come with me?" he asked.

  "What?"

  "Is it too much traveling?"

  "No! No..."

  "Then you'
ll come?"

  I only nodded.

  "I'm glad, it would be hard to leave you," he said and kissed me. His phone now looked quite innocent. “One more thing…”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you let me use your photos?”

  “How?”

  “I’d like to project them during the fund raiser. Just let them appear on a wall. They’ll speak volumes about the people here, believe me.”

  I felt shy and pleased at the same time, and said, “Of course…”

  The next day we went to the nursery and who was at the gate, waiting with hands on waist?

  "What have you seen?" cried Adroa, tiny uneven teeth on show, as he walked towards us. "What have you seen?"

  I had to let Chris pick him up first and he came to me after a moment. I told him about all the animals that were going to be in the story now, the zebra that ran and left her stripes behind, the lion whose mane was combed by the beaks of birds, the hippo with a periscope.

  "When can I go?" he asked me.

  "When you're older. They don't let small boys like you go on safari."

  He frowned a little at this, but then he crossed his legs and put his hands on his knees, like a talk show host and told me his news: Musiga had finally said something, but he hadn't understood it, she was also crawling a lot and he liked to draw with felt pens now.

  All the children wanted to tell us what they had been doing and I had bought whatever I could find at the gift shop in the lodge. I got busy distributing caps, shirts, toys, stuffed animals and candy.

  That night Chris and I were very tired and we would leave early for Kampala the following day, but even so we made love, because it was hard not to. Those brain reward pathways…

  The next morning I packed my wedding dress and peep toe shoes, because I might not find anything else to wear to the fundraiser in Kampala, or I might not have time to look. We drove to an airfield where a small plane was waiting for us.