A Dancer's Guide to Africa

by Terez Mertes Rose

  “I’ve never tried to hide from you that I’m seeing someone else. But I’m not bound by a contract. Diana and I are both free to make choices.”

  “But you’re living together.”

  He laughed, but it was a sound devoid of mirth. “Oh, so it’s the living together that was the deciding factor here. If we’d just been dating, you’re saying you would have happily joined me in Mouila? Isn’t that a bit hypocritical?”

  Frantically I searched for a retort. “There is a difference. You’re an established couple. I’m the odd one out. You have no idea what it feels like to be the person on the outside, looking in. It’s the worst feeling in the world.”

  Christophe sighed. “You know, if you stopped dramatizing, Fiona, you’d see that you’re creating your own problem here.”

  His words, so like something my siblings would have said, made my blood race. I clawed at the door and scrabbled out of the car. He got out at the same time. We both slammed our doors and faced each other. “Thanks for the ride,” I spat. “And I think it’s safe to say I have no interest in living in Mouila.”

  “What if I told you it was arranged?”

  “Then un-arrange it.”

  He scowled. “It was to help you, Fiona.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “I could have minimized your problems.”

  “Thank you. But I won’t be needing your help.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” He came around the back of the car and strode toward me. Uneasy, I took a step back and promptly bumped into the side-view mirror poking out.

  “Is that a warning?” My voice squeaked.

  He stopped just before me. “No. It’s simply that I know this country and how it works. And I know you, and how you work.”

  I had no answer to that. In the silence that followed, he took a step closer, hands falling to my hips. Another step. Our pelvises met.

  Desire sank through my rage, muzzling it. He was so close I could feel his breath warm against my cheek. From his neck, I caught a whiff of the cologne that haunted my nighttime fantasies of him. Here was the real thing—mine for the taking if I could play by his rules.

  I couldn’t.

  “I’ll take my chances,” I said. “No Mouila.”

  “All right. Fine.”

  Like that, he became all business. He pulled me away from the car and reached over to brush a speck of dust off my skirt. “I’ll walk you to the door,” he said.

  We walked down the path in silence. At the hotel entrance, he stopped and turned toward me. His face was cool and impersonal, that of a tutor sending off a pupil of whom he’d grown bored.

  “Good luck. I’ll be thinking of you,” he said.

  When Robert appeared, arms folded, Christophe turned and left.

  That evening, I was in one of those moods my family knew well, one that told them to keep clear, or else. Carmen took one look at my face and swallowed her comment. Robert, however, wasn’t so smart. Over dinner, he bragged to Joshua and Daniel about the river rat he’d tried for lunch the previous day. “Fiona wouldn’t go near it. I keep telling her these things are an acquired taste.” He chuckled and shook his head as if to admonish me.

  I’d just about had it with meddling, overconfident men. I searched my forearm and found a ripe twin bump. “Acquired tastes, Robert?” My voice, after an hour of stony silence, seemed to startle him from his reverie. “Yeah, well, acquire this.” With a practiced pinch of my skin, out popped two maggots. I rose, extended them over Robert’s chicken and rice and dropped them with a flourish. “Care for some grated manioc with that?” I cooed.

  When Robert saw the maggots wiggling around in his food, he let out a yelp. He scrambled up, but caught his legs on his bench. Both bench and Robert went crashing back. Carmen and Daniel laughed so hard tears began to run out of their eyes as Joshua helped Robert up.

  “Oh Fiona, you bad girl,” Carmen gasped. “Who’d have thought the prissy ballet dancer we met in training would turn out to be such an animal?”

  It was one of the best compliments I’d ever received.

  Part Two

  The First-Year Volunteer

  Chapter 6

  “On your mark, get set….go!”

  My cry set off a scene of pandemonium. Two students raced to the front of the classroom and scribbled an English word on the blackboard. Their teammates began to shriek and encourage them as they hurried back to home base, sandals slapping against the concrete floor. After a handover of chalk, the next student was off. The girls played to win, hiking up their navy uniform skirts in order to run better. Their braids, poking up all over their heads, waved like antennae as they scurried. I watched the words accrue on the blackboard and congratulated myself. Another successful Fiona-style lesson.

  Vocabulary: to run, to write, to teach, to learn. Grammar point: present progressive. The student is running. The boys are laughing. Miss Fiona is cracking up. I loved teaching them that phrase. The students had loved it too. When one student called out, “Miss Fiona, this English class is cracking me up,” we’d all laughed.

  “What’s going on here?” A harsh voice broke our game. A tiny man with a bushy moustache, the surveillant—the school disciplinarian—stood at the door, his angry voice compensating for his size. The students stopped in their tracks. The excitement and happiness drained from their faces. Silent now, they slunk back to their seats with their eyes cast down.

  “It’s all right,” I assured him in French. “The students were practicing new vocabulary.” When he directed his frown upon me, I straightened to my full height, inches above him, and launched into my speech about the value of incorporating activity into the learning experience. “You see, Monsieur Auguste, these students can speak English. Michel,” I called out to one of my better students, “tell the surveillant what you learned from today’s lesson.”

  “The students are running to the blackboard in the classroom,” Michel, a lanky teenaged boy, announced in careful English. “They are learning to speak English. The game is cracking them up.” This last part produced a flurry of giggles that made the surveillant glare at them. But he couldn’t deny Michel’s proficiency, nor the fact that every student in the classroom had understood what Michel had just said. This, after only two weeks. Judging from the defensive look on the surveillant’s face, he clearly hadn’t been able to translate what “cracking up” meant. Probably because he’d had an English teacher who’d taught by the more traditional rote method: lecturing to silent, note-taking students who, at the end of class, would parrot back the phrases.

  The surveillant gave me a curt but respectful nod. “I’ll leave you to your teaching.” His gaze swept back over the class. I am watching you, his narrowed eyes told them. The students kept their expressions carefully blank. After the surveillant had left the room, I exchanged grins with my co-conspirators.

  “All right,” I called out, “please write these words from the blackboard in your notebooks.”

  As the students settled to work, I thought back to the scene I’d encountered on the first day of school. I’d walked into the classroom, under the scrutiny of fifty Gabonese teenagers, and wished them a good morning in English. From some of the students, the academic equivalent of ninth graders, a hesitant “good morning” in reply. From others, a bored mumble. I’d halted midway to the desk. In spite of my hammering heart, I’d managed to keep my voice light as I informed them in French that I needed everyone to wish me good morning. I’d walked right back out. When I popped back in a moment later and sang out “good morning” again, they laughed and replied correctly. By the time I left the classroom an hour later, the students were sitting up straighter, alert with interest. By the second week, everyone was participating.

  Teaching English was a lot like a dance performance, I decided, with the audience’s rapt attention on me, and the way my actions could produce a palpable energy in the room. I watched my students’ eyes come alive. I could almost hear them thinking, This can’t be
learning because it’s fun. It galvanized me. Ideas for class events and projects filled my head: a trip to the market, where we’d bargain in English with my money; maybe an after-school ballet class for the girls. A pen pal program with American students. The possibilities were endless.

  The lycée, the French equivalent of junior and senior high where I taught, was a collection of whitewashed buildings in a clearing dug out of the rainforest, forming an L-shape around a courtyard. As I was leaving at the end of the “race for English” day, I overheard one of my students boast to his friend, “Miss Fiona is the most interesting teacher here.”

  “It’s not fair,” his friend grumbled back. “You have the American while I’m stuck with Monsieur Assame.”

  I hid my smile as I sailed past the students with a queenly nod. They liked my style. They were learning. It was just as I’d visualized.

  The euphoria of successfully teaching energized me during my walk home and through town. Makokou, provincial capital of the Ogooué Ivindo, was a pretty place, I decided. Tucked into the northeastern section of the country, it had forested hills that tapered off at the banks of the Ivindo River, which snaked and sparkled in the afternoon sun. The air smelled fresh and sweet, like potting soil laced with honeysuckle. I strolled along Makokou’s main drag, a haphazard collection of buildings and coconut palms lining the town’s lone paved road. While I had no American colleagues at the lycée, Malaria Rich and Keisha both lived in Makokou, on the other side of town, and taught math and English, respectively, at the Catholic mission near them. Their close-but-not-too-close presence helped me feel less alone here.

  In the general store, I bought a baguette and a can of lentils, exchanging greetings with the owner. A bright, can-do smile stayed on my face as I headed home, until the moment I caught sight of my house.

  I’d envisioned many things, back in Libreville, when dreaming of my future home. A sturdy yellow house with a modest verandah; a cottage with a walkway and flower tubs in front. Perhaps a bungalow on a hill with a sweeping view of the river and surrounding forested hills. I was, after all, a teacher, a respected profession here in Gabon. I’d seen the pictures of other volunteers’ houses. One was cream-colored with giant blue shutters that swung open to expose screened windows, like Switzerland meets Out of Africa. But within a neighborhood of tidy, whitewashed houses, my house, a squat, poorly painted wooden structure, stood out like a wart.

  I walked down the weed-strewn path that had resisted my efforts at clearing and went inside. A permanent musty odor emanated from the bedroom, which featured a sagging bed crowned with mosquito netting. In the living room, a single light bulb dangled from the water-stained ceiling. A set of rodent feet scampered above me, somewhere between the ceiling and the corrugated tin roof. I sighed and headed into the galley-sized kitchen. Time for lunch.

  After la sieste, the lunchtime break where everything in the country shut down for three hours, I headed to the post office. The strike had been resolved the previous Wednesday. On Thursday, the building had remained dark inside. Friday, there’d been workers but apparently no mail to distribute. Today, Monday, there was mail, and lots: six bulging bags. “It is from Libreville,” one of the clerks confirmed. My heart leapt. I probably had over a dozen letters there, forwarded by the Peace Corps office to my new address.

  “How soon will it be distributed?” I asked.

  The worker shrugged. “Toward the end of the week.”

  “The end of the week?!”

  “Maybe longer.”

  Deflated, I shuffled over to the row of metal post office boxes. Empty, for several more days. I wanted to cry. I pulled out my key and fit it into the lock of my box, as if doing so would produce a letter. And to my stunned surprise, inside I found a thin blue international aerogramme. From my sister. Sent to my new Makokou address and dated only ten days earlier.

  “How is this possible?” I asked a worker who strolled by. He took the aerogramme and studied it.

  “Ah. This letter is not from Libreville.”

  “But surely it went through Libreville?”

  The man shrugged, the catch-all response to most of my queries in Makokou. He explained that, most likely, because it was international, it had circumvented the bottleneck of the accumulated mail. Regardless, there it was: my first letter from home in six weeks.

  I tore into the letter as I walked home, scanning the contents. Hi, Fiona! Alison had written. Mom got your letter with the news of your new posting yesterday. She read it to me, and I thought I’d try the address right out. Hope you’re doing well there. We’re fine. Last night, as you might have guessed by looking at the calendar, was The Show. Of course a group of my girlfriends and I came over to watch it with Mom, like we’ve always done.

  The Miss America Pageant. I’d forgotten the pageant this year. I laughed out loud, a mad cackle laced with increasing hysteria that I curbed only when I realized the locals were staring more than usual.

  As predicted, there’d been no escaping the attention my presence drew. I was one of a handful of white faces in a town of six thousand Africans. Conversations always halted when I passed, as male and female alike sized me up. Only the older women, barefoot and bent from a load of wood on their backs, trudged past without curiosity. Small children, spying me, would hesitate, turn and run the other direction. One time, a naked toddler, unable to keep up with the others, had looked over his shoulder at me as I drew closer. He stumbled and panicked, squalling in terror until his sister raced back, swooped him up and carried him to safety.

  The Show, indeed. What had Alison been thinking, that I’d still be caught up in that? But this was new territory we found ourselves in, communicating pleasantly through letters. I sensed we were both tentative, awkward, striving to find common ground.

  The letter went on to detail the cold spell Omaha had been caught in, news of our brother Russell’s big promotion at work. But it was the third paragraph that most caught my interest.

  I saw April Manning the other day. She was in town visiting family and stopped by the house to say hi. Wow, she looks glamorous, quite the star ballerina. She said she’s a soloist now, with the American Ballet Theatre, but you probably already knew that. She asked about you and I gave her your address in Africa. She promised to write.

  April Manning, my first ballet buddy. My steps slowed as I walked the last blocks in a reflective reverie.

  I had Alison to thank for my friendship with April. And, in truth, the Miss America Pageant, for igniting Alison’s interest in ballet. The year she was eight and I was seven, we’d stayed up, like always, to watch the annual broadcast. The next morning, Alison announced that she’d decided on her talent for her own future run at Miss America. A classmate of hers named April took ballet classes. “Dance will so be easy,” Alison told the family at the breakfast table. “I mean, what does it take to spin around, flap your arms and smile for the audience?” Even easier, the dance studio was walking distance from our house, which Mom liked. She agreed to pay for ballet lessons, provided Alison could convince me to do it too. Initially, I balked. I was a bookworm, a dreamer, far less ambitious than my older brother and sister. Alison alternately cajoled, threatened and sweet-talked me. When she tossed her new strawberry delite lip gloss into the bargain, I agreed.

  The following Monday afternoon, we walked to the studio, stowed our street clothes in the dressing room, and took a place at the barre with the other congregating girls. Alison immediately made friends with the prettiest ones and decided aloud that she liked ballet class. But fifteen minutes into class, I could tell by Alison’s expression that she didn’t like it. The teacher’s strictness, the complex and foreign movements set to classical music—none of this suited her. Meanwhile I was instantly engrossed, not frustrated by what I couldn’t do so much as intensely curious. I watched the best girl in the class, which turned out to be Alison’s classmate, April. She had thin arms and long legs like mine that easily turned out from the hip, so our toes, in first po
sition, pointed in opposite directions. I strove to mimic April’s smooth, fluid movements, the way she held her head high, letting her legs do all the work, while her arms remained calm, beautifully curved. I tried pointing my toes like she did, arching my foot into a banana shape, and once again, it came naturally. The teacher, observing, gave a murmur of pleasure.

  The class practiced a turn called a pirouette, where the teacher kept her focus riveted on April. “You’re not quite straight enough, dear,” she said. “Act like there’s a string running through you and holding you up. Like a marionette. And the instant you take off from your preparation, shoot that supporting leg right up to passé.”

  April paused to consider this, demi-pliéd in preparation, and spun, executing a perfect double turn. Dazzled, I burst into applause. April swiveled around to regard me. No one else had clapped. The other girls, in truth, looked much like Alison did: irritated about being overlooked and outclassed.

  “That was really good,” I murmured to April, abashed.

  “Thank you,” she said shyly. Our eyes met and I knew I’d found a friend.

  For that, I thought as I walked up my path and unlocked my front door, I owed Alison an eternal debt of gratitude.

  For that, alone.

  Inside, the urge to practice ballet overpowered me. I changed into my dance clothes and put on my leather ballet slippers. I pulled out the cassette player and adjusted the living room shutters for privacy.

  I found immediate comfort in the familiar music, familiar barre routine. My feet cramped in tendus as I pointed my toes; it happened when I didn’t practice regularly enough. My extensions, too, were lower than they used to be. But still the love, the swept-away feeling.

  Until my audience arrived.

  This had occurred the last time, too. It was as though, each time, I’d set up a loudspeaker on my rooftop, blasting out classical music, as much of an oddity here as I was. In no time, the house had drawn a crowd of spectators. I heard them now, neighborhood children, their murmurs, their jostling to get the best view. I paused the cassette player and firmly shut all my shutters, which acted as both windows and blinds. I turned on the overhead light, which felt wrong in the afternoon, but gave me privacy. But the children didn’t leave. As I continued my barre, I could sense their presence, their sharp exhales of breath, their whispers, the occasional thump of a hand or a forehead against the shutters, two of which, I realized, had a chunk missing that the kids could peer through.