Appropriate Place

by Lise Bissonnette

  He had also brought up the question of spoiled meat from diseased herds, of schistosomiasis in the ponds and lakes, and above all of the dangers during the final days of the monsoon, when you think you’re settled into the dry season and then the downpour comes out of nowhere, transforming the rocky paths into swamps, blurring all markers. To reach the high plateaus then, crossing the gorges became a nightmare, he himself had had to retrace his steps last year at an even later date, it was madness to venture there, even if the terrible drought in the north seemed to alleviate the rain in the centre of the country.

  It wasn’t normal for her to have listened to him so abstractedly, the two of them compatriots happy to meet here surrounded by American murmurs, saved briefly from the boredom of ambassadorial salons, which were particularly beige in Ethiopia because any traditional object found locally, which were generally prized by foreign decorators, was prohibited in deference to the moods of the regime. She didn’t care about risks, she said. At the suggestion of the Italian restaurant owner in Addis, she had hired for a high price an experienced Ethiopian driver, whose huge Jeep could generally get out of any unsuspected dangers. “And if I disappear, don’t go looking for me. There’s no one to claim my remains.” She was smiling, playing the confident loner, but he was convinced of her incompetence. He had met a good many intrepid souls with no apparent family ties only to discover, when they were repatriated maimed or dead, that they had fled marital problems and flocks of descendants who would fight over the insurance for years. This girl, who could have been his type if he hadn’t been the contented lover of his own wife, definitely had the intelligence necessary for lying, so their conversation was in fact inconsequential.

  And now here he has close at hand, in writing that reminds him of his mother — whose letters he’d read and loved across all the distances from which she had written him over a period of more than twenty years — the journal found in the bag of a dead woman who may be, who is without a doubt, the woman in red from the American salon. According to the Ethiopian soldiers’ report, the accident had occurred two days earlier, during the terrible descent from Dejem, the one that plunges towards the shoddy bridge over the blue Nile. She’d been on her way home then, a day at most from the capital. But it was only yesterday that the sky had finally cleared.

  He suppresses a temptation to go to Dejem, has a memory of green tea, its taste masked by the smell of turpentine that permeated the inn and its overly high walls, erected against unlikely inquisitors. Last year he’d spent a night in that village, a stopping place, which was perched as a belvedere above the canyon, with its long houses, pride of the rich, built to last, yet more humid than the huts made of cow dung that were scattered over the far-away plateaus. It had been a true African night, solitary, filled with obsessive fears and ghosts that refuse to disperse before dawn, that enter blindly the mauve of regret, pummelling what have to be called sins, irreparable debris of a life spent drinking, eating, smoking, caressing, talking — while waiting to accomplish great things. Some of those magnificent things of which one could see the yellowing underside, in the distance near Sudan, the last ray of light in a dusk that would not retreat.

  What would be the point? He knows what she saw when she was dying and that it bears no resemblance to Dejem’s diffident luxuriance. The accident must have happened in the afternoon, drivers usually stop before nightfall. But when it rains, even in broad daylight the descent is a night. And it brings to bear on travellers the most powerful of seductions — the appeal of melancholy. Spread out like huge recumbent images, the plains at the summit lose their few areolas in the fine shades of grey of the sky, the breath of clouds brushes against the skins of animals and earth, the sharpness of the cliffs becomes a sooty fleece that it would be good to sink into. Vertigo, the body’s rudimentary caution, vanishes. What’s a little silt on the road? The foam of this sea of sky, of which one must touch the bottom. In that way the sun, when it becomes visible again during the descent from Dejem, regularly finds shattered men to burn who in reality are drowned.

  Today, the tribute is a woman, a more uncommon event in these escarpments transformed into a cemetery of all the carcasses, carts, Jeeps, buses, and tractor-trailers, whose young drivers are sometimes spared, they fling themselves onto the road as soon as they lose control of the wheel and let their load go hurtling down, plunging kilometres further along and catching fire. Their iron sun crackles in silence, from the belvedere, villagers will look down on it. They stopped counting some time ago.

  The first to arrive at the scene of the minor carnage of a Jeep with driver and passenger will have been the children of course, as agile on the mountain peaks as their goats. Two boys and a girl, shivering at dawn in the frayed blankets that enveloped them from knees to head, their fingers as fine as their features, inherited from Araby, the eyes without fear because they’re unacquainted with mirrors. If they touched the dead women in red, or in blue denim because probably she hadn’t travelled in her dress, it will have been the way they approach any foreigner, gripping her hand as a sign of friendship for these lost souls whose concern or even sorrow they can guess at, they’re confronted with so much space and horizon. They won’t have stolen anything, they take only what they are given. Even the youngest ones, in robes the colour of their sheep, have that reserve. Afterwards they’ll have crouched down, unmoving, guardians of the blue, empty sky, till an implacable sun rises at noon and their older brothers arrive, whose work is to convey stones from the mountains, who are able to transport corpses too. Still hesitant, the blue sky will then have cast a green glow over the mass of fallen rocks, as if moss were dancing where the children pass. The Jeep will have impaled itself halfway there, still a long way from the bed of the Nile, replete and brown, on the season’s rich alluvium. If she bled to death and sensed for a moment the iridescence of dawn, at least Abyssinia will have spared her its lot of dirt. She hadn’t got to the bridge, which is under surveillance by soldiers in boots and berets, sentinels in decrepit shacks, wary-eyed and rifles at the ready. They would have stopped her in the stifling heat that makes them so malevolent deep down in the canyon, and they would have been odious for hours. Instead of that she had rested for a moment in the light, when her pain had departed before life itself.

  The Canadian ambassador to Ethiopia, who is also responsible for Sudan and Somalia, has a most poetic way of toning down the probable terror of one of his nationals, who’s been stolen from her family and friends by a terrible accident on the way out of Gojam province on a day of impenetrable fog. But he won’t share his ranting with the woman’s relatives and he wonders why he’s so impressed by the incident, he has known worse: two teenagers whose throats were cut in the middle of the old Roman road outside Algiers, an archaeologist held and tortured by thieves in an abandoned grotto in Petra, a colleague shot to death in a Cairo souk. That the most recent Abyssinian rains should take a life is normal, they’ve always done so at the end of the season, just as the ice in Quebec’s rivers claims its victims every spring.

  He can’t help feeling though that this woman wanted the descent from Dejem to be a journey with no return.

  He pulls himself together, accuses himself of suffering from the “colonial blues” of which Michel Leiris, the literary ethnologist, wrote in L’Afrique fantôme, an account of the minor woes encountered by a 1933 mission from France during the famous crossing from Dakar to Djibouti. The ambassador is one of the very few to have read and savoured every page. The distinguished Leiris, who spent as much time bickering with camel drivers and wondering about his sexual abstinence as he did noting facts about
African life, wrote outlines of novels he never completed. The finest is the one about the gentleman, also an ethnologist, who wants to cure himself of his impotence by sleeping with a native woman, and finally sends her away after lacerating her; then comes an epidemic that he manages to use for his own suicide, after putting all his papers in order and writing, in the form of allusions, some farewells and confessions to a distant lover. The ambassador has often dreamed of taking up this thread of Leiris’s, of writing the story, bitter and nonchalant and African, of an individual so gifted for the incomplete.

  Another great achievement left in the lurch. All he has written, from one difficult posting to the next, are confidential and succinct reports to ministers that were summarized by other colleagues before being filed away forever. The grey notebooks in which the woman named Marie scribbled a few pages, he’s very familiar with, a good many diplomats fill similar ones instead of drinking during countless idle evenings, hoping one day to publish their memoirs, at their own expense if need be. Some do it and then turn to alcohol, retirement is sad if it’s lived alongside boxes of unsold books.

  Marie’s squared-paper notebook, made in France by Chatelles for schoolchildren, has heavy extra-white paper and a photo of a virile Greek mask seen in profile. It’s unlikely that she bought it for the picture, which has nothing to do with her. But it’s well made, spiral-bound, in a size convenient for travel. Does the ambassador have the right to read it? The question is superfluous, he’s alone with Oscar and why bother mastering discretion, first requirement of his profession, if it’s not so as to become judiciously involved in other people’s business? He pours himself a Scotch, it won’t hurt just this once, and settles himself in the study, dark with bookcases, which is most often used as a TV room. He’ll go back to the chancery a little later than usual, they can get along without him for a while.

  First he leafs through the notebook, curious about the writing, rather untidy for a teacher, slanting sometimes left, sometimes right, with no apparent hesitation but concerned about legibility. Of a page where all the lines are used, you could say that it’s reminiscent of a badly weeded lawn. But then if you look carefully it’s not a diary, there are no dates, no place names, the pages follow one after the other, front and back, like the manuscript of a novel written in prison, saving paper. Yet she has filled only a quarter of the notebook, indicating that she was interrupted. Maybe, contrary to his assumption, she was not intending to die.

  The first paragraph gives some indication. At the top of the page, capital letters written in blue ink by an awkward hand, read BURTUKAN, followed in parentheses by the word “orange,” scribbled hastily.

  Someday I’d like to revisit Burtukan, the name means orange in Amharic. Yesterday saw me at the Gennete Maryam church, the paradise of Mary, just outside the holy city of Lalibela. A surrounding wall carved out of the rock like the church held a dozen children who’d come running as soon as we arrived, one was a little girl in braids, only slightly less timid than the others. At first all I could see was her sloppily woven empire-waisted grey dress, draped as gracefully as taffeta, which grazed her ankles. She wore colourless leatherette ballerina slippers, a reject from some international charity but perfect on her feet. She said: “My name is Burtukan [I hear Brutkan, brute, I’m stunned to hear English]. I have a nice name. I am ten years old. What is your name?”

  “Marie.”

  “You have a nice name, Maryam, Mary. Do you have a pen? I am in fifth grade.”

  She spoke with the same accent as the pupils in the first class assigned to me in Montreal when, though I hadn’t really mastered it myself, I was teaching English to bored teenage girls who nonetheless pronounced it better than their own language. Over her shoulder she had a threadbare cloth bag, buttoned shut. She opened it, showed off her exercise books written in Amharic, there were crosses here and there. There was even one drawn on the back of her hand. Salomon, the driver, says that she’ll be given away in marriage in two or three years, in spite of school, it’s the practice outside the towns, and all Ethiopia is outside the towns. “They’re so young that their first pregnancy often kills them,” he noted in a voice that now sounded urban. I asked her to write her name on the first page of my notebook. Salomon said that it means “orange,” an ultrarare fruit for these children, it’s possible they’ve never tasted or even seen one. I told her in turn, “You have a nice name,” and gave her my pen. I was the perfect tourist, stirred by the first of what would be, as soon as the next day, a whole series of graceful children who would materialize whenever we stopped to look at churches, trees and rocks, knowing how to declare their names in English, to request mine and to ask for pencils. At Addis, a famine worker told me that in Mekelle, the most skeletal of the children ask first for pencils from foreigners who are there to distrib-ute milk.

  But the image of Burtukan disturbs me for other reasons. As if with her notebooks, her stench of school, the iron cross around her neck, her sycophantic English, her gentle submissiveness, she were the replica of what I once was, Marie the ready-made, already false. She is the contradiction of what I’ve come here to look for.

  The reflection stops there and the text begins again after two blank pages, as if the writer had wanted to set aside some space she could come back to during her journey, when she would have a better grasp of the nature of little Abyssinian girls. The ambassador thinks though that she has understood everything from the outset.

  Eight

  ABOVE ALL, leave Rimbaud out of it.

  He has nothing to do with what I’m looking for here — that mama’s boy who left home to come down with his fevers in Africa so he’d seem more interesting when it was time to meet his maker as so many others did in that era of infections and poor hygiene. He got it — his parent’s pity, his sister’s grief, and the everlasting veneration of those in our lands who saw themselves as damned and dangerous poets, not all of whom were lucky enough to have buggered Verlaine at the dawn of their versifying careers. Let him keep them all for his cult, those vaccinated tourists on pilgrimage to Harar with their filter-ground coffee, their tamed hyenas, their recreated Rimbo House. I too have had my Disney and Eiffel Tower periods. But at least I had the excuse of having studied literature with the nuns and of having encountered Rimbaud and Verlaine, both text and sex foreshortened, only in the Calvet textbook.

  I am searching for the earthly paradise. Paradise on earth. The land of paradise. Once I’m there I myself will drive myself out. For I’m not seeking it so I can settle in, chew khat and let myself be penetrated, through the toes, by the faith of their churches you must enter in bare feet. For a moment or less, I want to see the earthly paradise without humanity inside. That’s all.

  It’s an idea that came to me small and then grew, the way ideas do when there is still so much room in the brain. I myself had a lot when I wakened at the age of eleven, knowing very well how to read and write the trifles it was considered essential to fill my head with, in a green clapboard house with a huge willow behind it that didn’t weep but that could have had reasons to do so in the area around the lane separating those who were poor and clean from the ones who were soiled. In the cellar that had a dirt floor at the time and smelled of cat pee, just next to the furnace a rock showed through, so big and solid that it had to be left in place when the basement was finished because it would have been impossible to dynamite it without endangering our big family home. I think that was where my idea came from, from the light bulb that long hung above the rock, the eye was in the grave and was looking at Cain, I suppose, but I certainly d
idn’t make the connection at the time.

  One thing is certain, nothing would suggest to me, not even in the most subliminal manner, any historical episodes prior to the one involving Cain. My parents seemed to have well and truly chosen to move as far as possible from the pleasant valley of the St. Lawrence and the indescribable charms of the lovely city of Quebec where they had met and chastely converged — I don’t say “loved,” how could I know that when at the time I was acquainted with them they were no longer making babies and their bedroom in the morning smelled more of mustiness than of coitus interruptus. For that matter, I couldn’t have told one from the other, I didn’t even know that my brothers peed from the end of a rod. Perhaps they loved one another in their way, she glad to have found someone to help her avoid the desires she dared not have, he amazed to be in the company of that pretty brunette, very temperate but industrious, at his still fairly lean side.