A Man in Africa

by Lara Blunte

  I don't know what came over me, but I said, "No!" and I was sure of what I was saying.

  Chris looked at me. I was not crying; I hadn't cried at all.

  "Roberta..." he said.

  "No!" I repeated. "He's not Eva, Chris! He's much stronger! He loves life!"

  We went outside the ICU.

  "Roberta, he is too small. He may not last tonight."

  "He will last!" I told him

  "I don't want you to suffer, I don't want you to see what it's like..."

  "I will be here."

  He saw that I meant it and he let me go in.

  I didn't leave the hospital that day, or the next. Adroa didn't die that night, though his breath was shallow and his fever high; sores had appeared on his face and torso. Chris was doing everything he could and I pushed a bed next to Adroa's to stay there with them.

  I had to wear gloves and a mask, because any infection could only make things worse, but I lay next to Adroa and held his hand.

  Though his fever was high, I told him of all the things we would yet do together, how I needed to take him on safari and to Italy to eat ice cream. I thought that his finger twitched. Chris said it might be a reflex, because he didn't want me to hope and have my hopes dashed, but I knew that he was right there, I knew it.

  I didn't feel tired; I kept hold of Adroa's hand and talked. I wasn’t tired because as I held his little dimpled fingers, I knew I would never forget how sweet they looked. I knew that anyone who lost a child would forever think of how small he or she had been, how adorable and helpless. I couldn’t let it happen because I knew I would never forget him.

  On the second night his fever was high again and everyone thought he would go before the morning. I didn't think so, I just started singing Happy Together to him. And his little fingers in mine began to move, then to beat the rhythm as I sang. He was there!

  The more I sang, the more the little fingers moved. Chris came in, saw it and his face changed. He held Adroa's other hand and also started to sing.

  We didn’t sleep. Adroa lived that night and the next day. Chris changed the moist bandages over the sores on his eyes, but they were still closed. Adroa's hands moved, looking for one of ours and we both took his fingers. He moved them, asking us sing and we did. Neither Chris nor I left the hospital: we ate, washed and changed there. We kept on going, always by his side.

  It took five days for the fever to abate and two more days until he was breathing better. In another week the sores on his eyes and body closed and turned into scabs and the scabs fell. As we cleaned his eyes with care, he finally opened one and then, a day later, the other.

  There had been many frightening days and I must have fallen asleep at last. I woke up to hear Chris singing and another voice accompanying him. When I opened my eyes, I saw that Adroa was sitting up, that he was smiling in spite of all the pain he had gone through and that he was singing, though his voice was raspy.

  He stretched his fingers to me and I took them, but I wasn't supposed to tire him. Chris looked at me and smiled, nodded and the despair was gone from his face.

  I got up as they came in to change the bottles attached to Adroa's needles and I walked a little dazedly out of the room toward the courtyard, where the afternoon sun almost blinded me. I stood swaying as if I were drunk and I knew that I was going to start crying. Chris was walking toward me now and for the first time I saw that there were tears in his eyes. He took my face in his hands and said, "Thank you."

  He embraced me and repeated, “Thank you.”

  Both of us were crying, our cheeks together. It wasn't an embrace of passion, but of two people knowing they were in a leaky, an imperfect boat, hoping that they would make it. It was the acknowledgement that we would turn ourselves inside out to silence the angry, greedy, selfish animal; that we would try to find the best in us, that all we could do was try — and sometimes that was enough.

  The End of Something

  Adroa's illness and recovery took us to almost the end of my time in Uganda.

  I could renew my visa but there was my life, my livelihood, my job. Pete had been texting me: he wanted me back — and I did have to work. I had never relied on Clive's money, I had always paid my way and, besides, I loved what I did.

  So here I was, having to earn money because my savings were not very big, wanting out of a marriage which I should never have entered and not knowing what to do about the man I now loved.

  Chris said nothing, he just watched me in a different way. It was a quiet way, as if he were thinking too.

  I had gone back to the nursery, to say goodbye little by little to the children, when something that was brewing happened. It happened because I had run away and not given things "closure," as pop psychology calls it.

  One afternoon I was told by a caretaker that there was a man waiting to see me outside. He didn't use the word mzungu as he might have done to another Ugandan, he said "a man".

  By the time I was in the parking lot, I knew who it would be and there he was: Clive. He must have traced me through the friends making donations. One of them would have given me away, thinking it was for the best.

  There were many things in his face, sadness, anger, shame, misery. And, at that moment, I didn't see the man I had been in love with — I would never see him again — but I did see a person I loved.

  Maybe it was the proximity of the hospital, of the bed where a woman had lain to comfort her dying husband and forgive him; or it was Karen’s suffering over a mistake she had not been able to help — but I stood there thinking that I had gone through things which were much harder than betrayal, much more important than my pride. What Clive had done didn't compare to seeing Adroa lying in a bed at death's door. It didn't compare to seeing Eva die, or to the agony of so many people abandoned to a devastating disease.

  Pain is also a relative thing, though we don't want to accept it. When we suffer we feel like the protagonists of some play put on by evil gods: we have been betrayed, or lost our money, or aged, or lost a love. No one has ever suffered like us, nothing has ever been as unjust. We never want to think of the much more terrible plays going on elsewhere and it probably isn't easy to do so.

  If I had not escaped from my wedding, if I had not come to Uganda, I would probably still hate Clive but now, instead, I felt a communion with him. We were animals that had been given the capacity to think, to long for something better, higher, brighter and sometimes that capacity hurt us immeasurably, torn as we were between ape and angel.

  I looked at Clive and saw a fellow creature, not a man who needed to have loved me more. I saw his confusion, his wanting to be better than he was and not managing. I saw him failing, over and over again.

  Clive stood in the parking lot, destroyed by his failure to be human.

  So I walked up, put my arms around him and he was surprised, so surprised that he began to cry and he couldn't stop.

  I knew that Chris could perhaps see us, but that he would not be jealous or intervene. He had never said a word against Clive, he had always supposed that he must be suffering to lose me. It was true that Chris would normally see the pain of others before he perceived a threat to himself.

  I therefore knew that Chris would understand that I needed to speak to Clive alone, that he wasn't going to have a jealous fit or be angry at me. So Clive and I went to his hotel, sat in a verandah with an absurdly beautiful view to the lake and talked.

  "Please just come back, please give me a chance," Clive asked me. His face was red and hot, like a feverish child's.

  I shook my head. "Clive, you know that won't happen. You know it."

  He cried a lot more. He was a child; we all are, at times.

  "I fucked up, I fucked up," he kept saying.

  But I knew it now, I knew that he wanted to be better than he was and he didn't manage. I knew that even when he had been plotting and planning, using me and others, he had wanted to be better.

  He wanted to be better, everyone does, because every
one knows or finds out what happens when we are bad. Everyone knows or finds out that there is some sort of reckoning, sooner or later. And no, we don't have to wait till the Final Judgment.

  I knew, looking at Clive, that no one loves their addictions. They are like terrible taskmasters riding people, sending them to the devil several times a day. I knew there must be the feeling in those who can't stop doing something bad that they know, before and after, how bad it is and yet they do it again.

  It must be a terrible hell.

  "I don't know what I was doing," he kept saying, "I don't know why I couldn't stop."

  There are people who manage, I thought. But I don't think the need they are suppressing ever leaves them; I think they struggle with it every day. Cults of all kinds and recovery groups are full of people wrestling with themselves, proclaiming that they managed to go another day without failing, hoping they won't fail tomorrow, glad that it's almost time to sleep but scared of the morning, scared of their own dreams.

  It was a blessing not to be cursed in that way, to have nothing worse than a fondness for champagne, and that's why I felt sorry for Clive. I was more fortunate than he was. Who was I to judge him, any more than I could judge a man who is starving and steals food?

  Who was I to judge?

  I knew that there was a reckoning to be had and it came from other people. We all point at the failures, at the liars, at the cheats and we expose them to the world as an example. There are checks and balances, people are forced to behave well by other people, or else. Or, at least, they are forced to pretend.

  If the possibility of having the scarlet letter on our breasts exposed to the world did not exist, would not all of us behave badly? If we felt compassion and unconditional love for the sinners, would not everything go haywire, would not everyone behave as Clive had done to me, taking advantage of our love to go on being selfish?

  Probably. I was probably meant to make him feel very bad, to almost destroy him and see if he emerged cleansed; I couldn't do it. There had been so much suffering, I just couldn't do it. I wanted to say that he should be what he was and accept it, but I knew that he wasn't just Cheating Clive, he was also a man who needed love. That was where his confusion and misery started.

  He begged me and begged me to go back and I said no. He asked me what I would do and I said I didn't know.

  "Are you staying here? In Uganda? Have you gone crazy, Robbie, what will you do here?"

  "I haven't decided yet."

  He was looking at me closely now with puffy red eyes. "Is it that bloke in there? The doctor?"

  I couldn't lie to him. "In part."

  It took him a moment to control his breathing and ask, "Are you in love with him?"

  "Yes."

  "So soon after..."

  He stopped himself. He knew that if he finished the sentence it would be his vanity talking, he knew he had done the same thing a million times: loved someone five minutes after leaving me at home.

  Clive said instead, "I know that it looks like I never loved you, but I did and do. But you don't love me?"

  "Yes, I do love you, but I am not in love with you. I believe you love me, it's just not a couple thing anymore."

  "I fucked up..." he repeated. "I just fucked everything up. I really don't know how I'll go on knowing I did this and lost you."

  The conversation went round and round. He tried to attack the idea that I might have found someone out in the sticks, the unlikelihood of it succeeding, but in the end I saw that he had begun to understand that it was truly no use. I was already gone.

  We stood in the room, two fellow creatures embracing and he just repeated, "I fucked up. I'm so sorry."

  Finally, I freed myself and he said, as I opened the door, "I really love you, Robbie. As far as I am able. You really deserve love."

  I smiled at him and went away, knowing that it was over and that Clive had accepted it.

  The Exorcist

  Pete had called to say that I needed to decide if I was going back to work or not. He was keeping some juicy stories for me because he trusted me to do justice to them.

  "You have to decide, gal," he told me. "You don't have time to shilly-shally anymore, time's a'ticking. Is it your career or Hot Doctor?"

  Pete was always ironic and light, but I knew that he cared about me; we had known each other for a while. And, besides, he was right. I looked in my bank account and there was barely enough money for an emergency. I needed to work.

  Chris and I had never talked about what would happen to us, if there was even an “us” beyond the short time we had spent together. It seemed that we were both in love, but I had no idea if, for him, this were a temporary thing — a welcome relief from his hospital life, a carefree moment.

  I knew what the problem was for me. It was not only that I had to earn a living, it was that I would have a hard time believing in love anymore. Love was just chemicals and it didn't matter how blinded I was by them, they couldn’t truly fool me. There was no such thing as love, it was just an illusion meant to make men and women work enthusiastically at baby making and bind a couple to each other and their child, giving it the best chance to survive.

  Neither I nor Chris wanted to have biological children. Working with orphans had made him see that there were so many kids in the world that it was absurd not to love them, instead of making new ones. I felt the same: could I ever love a child of mine more than I loved Adroa, little Musiga and the other children who were already there? I didn't think so and I had no desire to try.

  So our baby-making activities were all for our own sake. I wonder if that made us more human?

  Two days before my visa expired, he needed a haircut and had no time to get one, so I asked him to sit on a stool in the living room and found scissors and a comb. As I touched his hair, I felt how painful it would be when I couldn't do it anymore; I loved his hair. I straddled one of his legs and then the other, snipping away.

  Eventually he reached out and put his hand under my dress, caressing the small of my back.

  "Are you leaving, then?"

  Snip, snip, snip. "Don't move your head..."

  "We will have to talk about it eventually, or did you plan to go without saying anything?"

  I had become a weeper and was trying not to cry. He pulled me to him and kissed my neck.

  "I have to go," I said. "I need to work."

  "And you're not considering working and coming back?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean that you might have your base here, go off to work and come back. It will make life in Uganda more bearable for you."

  "I don't know how many times I could go in and out of Uganda a year..."

  He was looking into my eyes now. "You know what I am asking you."

  I looked at the scissors, at the floor, anywhere but at him.

  "I'm asking you to get out of a marriage and into another one, like an out-of-control pop star..."

  “Are you…Are you…” I couldn’t even speak, but I managed to finish, “…mad?”

  “Why?” he asked me. “Because you hate marriage?”

  “Yes and also because you…” I made a movement with the scissors in my hand and he took them away from me, throwing them on the table.

  “I, what?”

  “Do you want to be married, when…you saw what can happen?”

  He stood up and held me. “I like you,” he said. “I don’t want you to go away and not come back. That’s all I know.”

  “So you’d marry me to give me a visa and then…”

  He shrugged. “And then we make a go of it.”

  I laid my cheek on his shoulder, to avoid looking at him because I was crying. I was crying because my answer was no, I couldn’t try to make a go of it; I couldn’t do it.

  He picked me up, I put my legs around him and he paced with me in his arms. I think he must have comforted more than one gorilla like that and did I not have 98% of genes in common with them?

  "How can you
ask me to marry you, when you have known me for three months?"

  "Before I met you, I was seriously considering sending for a Russian mail bride," he said.

  Now I did look at him with horrified eyes.

  "I’m joking!" I put my head down again and he went on. "Look, I know it might not be the best bargain you ever got. I work too much, I deal with disease and death. Uganda is not an easy place all the time and that's why it would be a good thing for you to strike a deal with Peter and travel for him sometimes. If you like me, that is."

  "I like you," I said in a small voice.

  "I am going back to Mount Elgon, to start a clinic there," he went on.

  "That sounds like heaven.”

  He kissed me again, rocking me. "The problem is, then?" he asked.

  My head had already done the bullet points a long time ago.

  Pros of Dr. Chris:

  — Brilliant

  — Gorgeous

  — An artist in bed

  — Strong

  — Immensely kind

  — Funny

  — Saves lives (see below)

  — Writes

  — Sings

  — Flies planes (see below)

  — Beats up religious nuts

  — Heir to a coffee estate in Africa

  — Will buy my champagne every time

  Cons of Dr. Chris:

  — Saves lives and suffers

  — Flies planes that might crash

  — Doesn't like to be driven, ever

  — Has come after epic cheating and my incapacity to suspend disbelief

  I was frowning and biting my lip as he looked at me.

  "You're scared."

  I swallowed a few times. "Yes, I am."

  I was ashamed to say it, after all we had been through — after things which were so much worse and more frightening than that someone should stray or not.

  He walked to the sofa, put me down on it and sat leaning over me.

  “Do you think I’m not? It’s not only men who cheat, you know.”

  “I know… At this time it’s hard to believe I could ever have an affair, I don’t think there would be a man like you anywhere…”