The Story

by Victoria Hislop

  Madame shook her head. ‘I see it, in the air around you. Please, come into the shop.’ She lifted a hanging curtain printed with giant golden flowers.

  Blurrily, Celia followed. Madame Miri indicated that she should seat herself beside the big cutting-table heaped with fashion magazines and bolts of multicoloured cloth, and brought her a cup of scalding French coffee.

  ‘You don’t sleep well last night,’ Madame Miri stated rather than inquired.

  ‘Not very well, no,’ Celia admitted.

  ‘You have the nightmare, perhaps?’

  ‘Well, yes, sometimes,’ said Celia, thinking that the appearances of Dwayne Mudd were a kind of nightmare.

  ‘I shall give you something.’ Madame Miri rose and swept through another curtain at the dim back of the room, where she seemed to be opening drawers and unscrewing bottles, murmuring to herself in a sing-song.

  I’m not going to swallow any strange medicine, Celia promised herself.

  ‘Voilà.’ Returning, Madame laid before Celia a small bag of reddish homespun tied with a strip of leather.

  ‘Take this, chérie. You don’t open it, but tonight you put it under your pillow, yes?’

  ‘All right,’ Celia promised, relieved. She knew or could guess what was in the bag: a selection of the magical and medicinal herbs and bits of bone sold at stalls in the village markets and even here in the capital. It was what people called a gris-gris – a protective charm.

  ‘It’s good,’ Madame urged, smiling, holding out the little bag. ‘Good against fear.’

  Of course Madame Miri believes in spirits, she thought; almost everyone does here. The principal religion of Goto, after all, was animism: the worship of ancestors and of certain trees, rivers, and mountains. Ghosts and demons inhabited the landscape and the fields and groves often displayed, instead of a scarecrow, a bundle of leaves and powders and bones given power by spells and hung from a branch or wedged into the fork of a tree. According to local belief, it protected the crops not only against birds and animals but against thieves and evil spirits.

  ‘Thank you,’ Celia said.

  When she could Celia kept her promises. She therefore put the gris-gris under her pillow that night and, because of it or not, slept more easily the rest of the week. Somewhat revived in spirits, she decided to risk going out with the second of her current admirers, the Marine Master Sergeant in charge of the guard at the Embassy. Jackson was an amusing young Southerner of considerable native wit who looked well in his uniform and magnificent in swim trunks. On the down side, he was four years younger than Celia, badly educated, and had terrible political convictions.

  This did not surprise Celia: in her opinion, many people had peculiar views. But however much she might disagree, she made no attempt to protest or correct them. She’d always disliked argument, which in her experience never convinced anyone – only facts did that, and even then not very often. Whenever she seriously disagreed with someone she repeated a phrase her father had taught her when she was fourteen: ‘You may be right.’ (‘It took me fifty-five years to learn to say that,’ he had told her. ‘Maybe it’ll save you a little trouble.’)

  At the last moment before Jackson arrived in his red Corvette, Celia, with a superstitious impulse of which she was rather ashamed, placed Madame Miri’s gris-gris in the bottom of her handbag. But when her date handed – or, more accurately, handled – her into the car, she thought for a moment that she saw Dwayne’s image, wavering but distinct, on the whitewashed wall of the compound. It was transformed almost at once into the blowing shadows of a banyan tree, and Celia scolded herself for succumbing to nerves.

  Unlike Gary, Jackson did not wait to make his move till after supper. As soon as they pulled up in front of the open-air restaurant, from which noisy, thumping local music was soaking, he turned towards Celia. ‘Hey, you really look super tonight,’ he said, grabbing her expertly.

  Dwayne Mudd reappeared at once, sitting on the hood of the Corvette: strangely grey and semi-transparent against the sun-flooded tropical shrubbery, as if the light that shone on him was still the humid grey light of London. You better watch your step with this one, he announced.

  Oh, shut up, Celia said silently. I’ve come all this way; I’m going to enjoy myself if I feel like it.

  – He goes with whores, Dwayne continued relentlessly, pressing his grey face up against the windshield. – You should find out when he was last tested for AIDS. And check if he has a cut on his lip.

  Involuntarily, Celia ran the tip of her tongue over Jackson’s wide mouth. Mistaking her intention, he gasped and pulled her closer, murmuring, ‘Oh, baby.’

  That night, oppressed by both anxiety and frustrated desire, Celia slept worse than ever – as was immediately apparent to Madame Miri when she appeared next morning.

  ‘But it is not yet well, ma petite,’ she announced, after lowering herself into a chair and accepting coffee.

  ‘No,’ Celia admitted. ‘I guess your charm doesn’t work on Europeans.’ She laughed nervously.

  Madame ignored this. ‘There is something heavy on your mind, is it not so?’ she asked.

  ‘No – well, yes.’ Giving in, Celia told Madame Miri, gradually, everything. She’ll know I’m insane now, she thought as the grotesque words fell from her mouth like the toads and snakes of the old fairy tale. She’ll tell me to see a doctor.

  ‘My poor child,’ Madame said instead, when Celia fell nervously silent. ‘I see how it is. This individual, he is jealous. Since he cannot have you, he wants to keep all other men away. That I have seen before, eh oui.’ She sighed. ‘And so for nothing you made this long journey.’ For the first time, she used the intimate second person singular. ‘Though perhaps not for nothing,’ she added almost to herself.

  ‘I thought, if I was so far from London—’

  ‘Chérie, two, three thousand miles, they are like this’ (she snapped her fingers) ‘to a spirit. They don’t figure space like we do.’

  ‘A spirit?’ Celia echoed.

  ‘Exactement.’ Madame Miri smiled, and Celia remembered a verse from a tribal chant that had been recited to her by the Deputy Chief of Mission.

  Those who are dead have not gone.

  They are in the shadow that brightens,

  They are in the shadow that fades,

  They are in the shadow that trembles.

  ‘And how was he called in life, this personnage?’ Madame asked.

  ‘Dwayne Mudd,’ Celia said.

  Madame frowned. ‘Mudd. C’est la boue, n’est-ce pas?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Celia admitted.

  ‘A bad name. Ill-omened.’

  ‘Evidently,’ Celia said. She tried an uneasy laugh, but Madame ignored the pathetic result.

  ‘It takes a spirit to catch a spirit,’ she said in a low voice, leaning across the table towards Celia as if Dwayne Mudd might be listening. ‘You know perhaps some very powerful woman gone over to the other side, your mother, your grandmother peut-être?’

  Celia shook her head. ‘No, I’m sorry. They’re both still alive. And my other grandmother, my father’s mother – I don’t know. I never liked her much and I don’t think she liked me either.’ She looked up at Madame Miri, who was still waiting patiently, and then down into the dark reflections of her coffee cup.

  ‘There is someone,’ she said after a pause. ‘I never knew her, but I’m named after her. She was my father’s stepmother.’

  ‘Une belle-mère, mais sympathique.’

  ‘Oh yes, so my father claims. He never uses the word “wonderful” about anyone or anything, but he said once that she was a wonderful woman – I’m supposed to be like her, even though we weren’t related.’

  ‘That’s well. Perhaps you have her soul.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Celia said, recalling that according to local belief ancestral spirits returned after death to inhabit their newborn descendants.

  ‘En tout cas, she’s without doubt watching over you, or you would not have
thought of her now.’ Madame Miri smiled.

  ‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Celia said. ‘I mean, if she is, I guess she hasn’t been watching very often, or I wouldn’t be in this fix now.’

  ‘Pas certain, chérie. This belle-mère, she was perhaps a very polite lady?’

  ‘What?’ Celia asked, feeling disorientated. Lack of sleep, she thought. ‘Oh, yes. My father said she had perfect manners.’

  ‘That explains it. She’s watching over you, oui, but when you and some type are becoming close,’ (Madame made a somewhat obscene gesture) ‘elle est bien élevée, she averts her eyes. And, tu me l’as raconté, that’s the only time this evil spirit appears.’

  ‘Yes,’ Celia agreed. Am I really having this conversation? she thought.

  ‘Very well, I tell you, this is what you do. Next time you see him, you call for la belle-mère. Not necessary to shout her name out loud, just whisper in your mind, “Venez, venez à moi, aidez-moi.”’

  ‘All right,’ Celia promised.

  For a few minutes after Madame Miri had left, she felt better. Perhaps she wasn’t mad after all, only haunted. In Goto the existence of supernatural beings did not seem so impossible. Out in the country, almost every village was guarded by one or more fetish figures, which resembled large grey stone fire hydrants hung with coloured rags and garlands of flowers. They had broad faces, staring eyes and huge sexual organs, and gave off, even to a sceptic like Celia, an ominous and powerful aura.

  Even here in the capital, the totemic animal of the dominant local tribe, the pigeon, was honoured by a monumental sculpture of a huge white bird, described in tourist brochures as the ‘Pigeon of Peace’. Closer at hand, in a shadowy corner of Madame Miri’s courtyard, squatted two household gods, smaller versions of the village fetish figures. They wore bright, constantly renewed garlands of red and orange flowers, and each day Madame’s cook fed them: their open stone mouths were always smeared with dried blood and rice and fruit pulp.

  But Celia’s euphoria lasted only briefly. She realised that if she began to take all this seriously she would be mentally worse off than before: not only having delusions, but starting to believe in ghosts, and thinking that she could exorcise them by invoking the name of an ancestor whom she had never met and who wasn’t even an ancestor. Going native, in fact, she thought. She had already heard stories about people, anthropologists mostly, who began by taking the local belief system too seriously and ended up partly or wholly off their rockers.

  Some of these tales, and most of the information about Gotolese superstition, had come from a man in whom Celia was becoming seriously interested: the Deputy Chief of Mission himself, a career diplomat and former anthropologist named Charles Fenn. He was a tall, thin, very intelligent, slightly odd-looking man of about forty, with a long face, skewed eyebrows, a beaky nose, and a satirical, melancholy manner. She had liked him from the start, without ever thinking of him as a possible beau. But then, everyone at the Embassy liked Charles, from the Ambassador (a fat, elderly Texan magnate whose contributions to the Republican party had earned him this honorary post) down to the twelve-year-old Gotolese undergardener.

  According to Embassy gossip, melancholy was not Charles’ normal mood, but the result of events beyond his control. He was recently separated and in the process of being divorced: his ex-wife, everyone said, had been a cute and even lovable airhead, but terminally indiscreet and totally unable to adjust to West Africa. Since she left, Charles had been under the weather emotionally, while remaining unvaryingly hard-working and sympathetic to his staff. ‘He really listens to you,’ people often said.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Celia always replied, feeling mildly uneasy, because this was what people often said about her.

  Her unease escalated to panic at her next one-to-one meeting with Charles, after her skilled attentiveness had drawn him into describing his years as an anthropologist.

  ‘It’s a very cluttered field,’ he was telling her. ‘In more ways than one. You know what they say about the Navaho, that the typical family consists of a grandparent, the parents, 3.2 children, and an anthropologist. It was almost like that where I was. I realised I wasn’t only going to be unnecessary and ineffectual, I was going to be superfluous.’

  ‘Tell me more,’ Celia murmured encouragingly as he paused and gazed out the window into the glossy green crown of an Embassy avocado tree.

  Charles turned and looked at her. ‘You always say that, don’t you?’ he remarked with what struck Celia as a dangerous casualness. ‘“Tell me more.”’

  ‘No – well, not always,’ she stammered.

  Charles smiled. ‘Or else you say, “That’s really interesting.” Persuading the other person to go on talking, so you’ll get to know them, and they won’t know you. I recognise the technique, you see, because I do it, too.’

  ‘I don’t…’ Celia began, and swallowed the rest of the fib.

  ‘But now I think it’s your turn. You tell me more.’ He did not take his eyes off her. They were a strange colour, she saw, between dark gold and green.

  ‘More about what?’

  ‘I don’t care. Your childhood, your opinions, your ambitions, your dreams, whatever you like. As long as it’s the truth, of course.’ Charles smiled.

  ‘I – uh.’ Celia hesitated; her heart seemed to flop in her chest like a fish.

  ‘I know. Tell me about your time in the Peace Corps, what you liked most about that.’ He glanced at the wall clock. ‘You have ten minutes, all right?’

  ‘All right,’ Celia said. She swallowed. ‘I think it was the way the villages looked at night,’ she was surprised to hear herself say. ‘Especially when there was a moon…’ Why did I agree? she asked herself. Why didn’t I just laugh it off and say – Not today or – I don’t feel like it? I could still say that. But instead she heard her voice going on, beginning to speak of things she’d not told anyone, not because they were private or shocking, but because nobody had ever really listened, they were all just waiting their turn to talk.

  It’s the way he looks at me, she thought, glancing at Charles. He knows I’m here. Is that how I make people feel?

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ Charles said as she paused, glancing at the clock and then back at Celia. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well. It’s because, you see, the desert isn’t quiet at night. There are all the sounds in the trees and scrub outside the village, rustlings and squeaks and sighs, and you’re there, you’re part of it… you feel…’ She looked at Charles Fenn. He was still listening; he heard her, every word. This could be important, she thought. It is important.

  She thought it again after she left Charles’ office, and that evening back home. She told herself that Charles was a most unusual man. That without his flighty wife he would probably go far; with Celia, even farther – if she were ever her normal self again. Otherwise she would simply screw up his career, not to mention her own, she thought wretchedly. Then she reminded herself that there was no reason to worry about this, because nothing Charles had yet done or said suggested he wanted to go anywhere with her. But for some reason that made Celia feel even more miserable.

  Things were still in this condition when Charles asked Celia to accompany him and another staff member to a reception at the French Embassy. The Commercial Attaché was in the front seat with the driver; Charles and Celia in the back, and as they drove through streets illuminated by the mauve and vermilion afterglow of a tropical sunset Charles described the rank, history and personal peculiarities of the people she was about to meet.

  ‘There’s a lot of rather odd characters in the local diplomatic corps, I’m afraid,’ he concluded. ‘But I hope you’re going to like it here all the same.’ The car lurched suddenly round a corner, flinging Celia, in her gossamer-light pale mauve muslin dress, abruptly against him.

  ‘Thanks, I think I will,’ she replied distractedly, trying to catch her breath, not moving away.

  ‘I’m very glad to hear that.’ Charles also did no
t move; under the cover of the attaché case on his lap, he put his hand on hers.

  – You’re making another mistake, said the flat dead voice of Dwayne Mudd. At first Celia could not see him; then she realised he was sitting, grey and squeezed up, between Charles and the door.

  – You think he’s so fucking great. He’s got –

  I don’t want to hear it, Celia thought desperately, feeling the steady, disturbing, desirable pressure of Charles’ shoulder, arm and hand against hers.

  – Athlete’s foot, and –

  Remembering Madame Miri, she cried out silently in her mind to the other Celia Zimmern. Venez à moi, aidez-moi! How stupid it sounded: like calling on herself.

  Miraculously, the horrible flat voice ceased. My God, it worked, Celia thought. But the shadow of Dwayne Mudd did not vanish: it remained in the car, silently moving its greyish lips, until they reached the French Embassy.

  ‘So, how does it go?’ Madame Miri asked next morning, waylaying Celia as she went out for an early run. Narrowing her eyes in the brilliant sun, she added, ‘Perhaps not completely well, yes?’

  ‘He’s still there,’ Celia admitted. ‘I can’t hear him any more, but he’s there, trying to speak, opening and shutting his mouth. Half the way to the French Embassy yesterday evening in the car, and all the way back – well, whenever I – you know. I can’t bear it any more!’ she cried suddenly. ‘I think I’m going mad.’

  ‘Ah non, chérie. Come, come chez moi. We shall consider this further.’

  In a dazed condition, weakened by another night without sleep, Celia followed Madame to her shop and then, for the first time, through the curtain into the back room. It was low, dimly lit, hung with thick woven and embroidered fabrics and dominated by a kind of altar covered with an embroidered red cloth and crowded with flowers and images, including what looked like a lion with wings.

  ‘Sit down, please.’ Madame Miri indicated a low multicoloured leather pouf.

  ‘There is something,’ she said, opening her eyes after some moments of silent concentration. ‘I think this spirit of mud has got some hold on you.’