A Dancer's Guide to Africa

by Terez Mertes Rose

  “You fish volunteers have it tougher in that way. I can’t think of any posts where fisheries volunteers are coupled up. Same thing with the community health volunteers. Jenny in Oyem with Carmen is pretty unusual. Although there used to be a pair of volunteers right here in Mitzic.”

  “So I heard,” Kaia said. “A married couple. One did fisheries, one did health. I suppose that makes it easier to pair them up.”

  “They left last summer before I could meet them, but Carmen mentioned they had a nice little house.”

  “I’ve seen it. It’s adorable. It’s still under contract to the Peace Corps. There’s talk that they’ll put another couple here next year. Jenny and I are already jealous.”

  “You know, you and Jenny,” I mused. “This would be a midway point for the two of you and your territories.”

  “That would be fun, to move here, to share the house with her.” Kaia sounded wistful. “But that’s dreaming.”

  “I switched posts,” I reminded her. “Go ahead and dream.”

  The Regab truck driver headed out of the restaurant and glanced around for me. I waved and he gestured to his truck. Kaia and I rose and made our way over there.

  “Thanks again, for everything,” Kaia said.

  “No problem. And thank you for two fantastic breakfasts.” I gave her a fierce hug. “Hang in there. The first year is tough.”

  “You’re off to Libreville next weekend?”

  “Yep. Education conference, followed by the COS conference.”

  “Have fun,” she said.

  I thought of William. I thought of the luxury hotel the Peace Corps would put us up in for the three nights of the COS conference. I could feel a grin spreading over my face.

  “I have a hunch I will.”

  Chapter 30

  “Why do I get the feeling I’ve been kidnapped?” Joshua asked. He and I had just claimed a table in a Libreville bar, a French expatriate hangout, which meant it had real walls, real tables instead of wooden picnic benches or wobbling plastic tables. Customers, all well-dressed Europeans, occupied a few of the tables, sipping Pernod or chilled white wine. Jazz music, not African, whispered from speakers. Beer—Heineken only—was five times the price of Regab, which was the best way to guarantee no Peace Corps volunteers would show up. “What is this all about?” he demanded.

  It was indeed a kidnapping of sorts. We’d just finished our education conference, with two days to relax and kill before the start of the second conference. I’d bribed him to come out with me for a beer without letting on where we were going. I didn’t want to scare him away. When the taxi we’d taken deposited us in this unfamiliar French neighborhood, he’d grown puzzled.

  “I wanted a place where we could talk without looking over our shoulders,” I told him.

  “Why?” He looked suspicious.

  “Because I wanted to talk. And volunteers are nosy.”

  “All right, talk away.”

  I scrutinized him as he shifted in his cushioned chair, trying to get comfortable. He was still slim and pale, but he’d grown his brown hair long, keeping it back in a ponytail. He was wearing loose, colorful West African clothing. It suited him. “So,” I said, “been to any bwiti ceremonies lately?”

  He grew still. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s supposed to mean, have you been to any bwiti ceremonies lately?”

  He paused, then seemed to drop his guard. “What did you hear?”

  “That you got initiated.”

  “Who’d you hear it from?”

  “Christophe. The grapevine.”

  “Not Peace Corps admins?” he asked.

  “I’m inclined to think if they knew, you’d know it.”

  “Good point.”

  “So?” I prodded. “Anything you’d care to elaborate on?”

  “Like what?”

  “Maybe the way you took a near-fatal dose of iboga and hovered on the cusp of where life meets death, and what it was like?”

  “I can’t talk about my initiation, if that was your intention in bringing me here.”

  “It wasn’t, but out of curiosity, why can’t you talk about it?”

  “You take a sacred vow when you get initiated. I can only discuss the experience, and my journey, with other bwitists.”

  It was more than a little freaky to hear him talk in this way, see the wariness in his brown eyes as if I were the enemy.

  “Fine,” I said. “I didn’t come here to grill you about your experience. In truth, I was hoping you could help me translate my own experience.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  I gnawed on my lip before plunging in. “I’m in a weird place, Joshua.”

  “Weird, like what?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not something I can easily explain.”

  “Try me.”

  I’d caught his interest. “All right. You knew I used to dance, back in the States?”

  He nodded.

  “So, I’ve been dancing a lot lately, at ceremonies. African stuff. I’ve picked up on the movements by watching the others. About a month back, a woman, a trained priestess, gave this incredible performance. I could tell she’d danced herself into a trance, and it made me just burn with curiosity. Two weeks ago, I was feeling really agitated and I just poured it into my dance. And then, well, it was like I danced myself somewhere else.”

  “Wow.”

  I raised my eyes to see him regarding me with new respect.

  A server approached with our Heinekens and two chilled glasses. I waited until he’d poured our beers, lit the candle between us and departed before I spoke again.

  “Something in me was frantic to go somewhere else. Or something was calling me to do it. The drums, maybe? They affected me so much, it was as if the sound went inside me and altered my blood chemistry.”

  Joshua said nothing.

  “So I danced beyond my dizziness, my consciousness. I think I fell to the ground. I think they helped me up and over to a bench. But I might have been talking through it all.”

  I traced a design on the condensation forming on my beer glass. “They told me I was speaking Fang. Conversing in Fang.”

  “Wow.” Joshua leaned forward. “I didn’t know you spoke fluent Fang.”

  “I don’t. I know a smattering of phrases and that’s it. But Célèste told me it sounded like I was just one of them.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “I know.” I regarded my swirly design gloomily. “I’m pretty freaked out over it all.”

  The memory of it sent a visceral tug of fear through me. It was still too close. I’d gotten a reprieve with my trip to Kaia’s village, but the issue wasn’t going to go away on its own. Célèste wouldn’t let it.

  “Do you suppose they felt as though spirits were communicating through you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “Whoa.” He sat back. “Impressive.”

  Memories came rushing back—the screaming blur, the sense that I was hovering at the border of some realm, trying to break through to what lay just beyond. And I had. Something more had happened, something that now eluded my conscious mind.

  “What if I really did go somewhere else? In my mind?”

  “Would that be such an awful thing?” he asked me. “Truth be told, it’s very Western to process all phenomenon through our rational minds alone, quantify everything with scientific reports and documents and FDA approval and such. You know, our ancestors, and pretty much all the ancient, indigenous tribes, did this kind of thing. Partaking in nature, ritual, ingesting local herbs, shrubs, to allow them to enter a different realm, a different consciousness. You can bet the Gabonese aren’t fazed by dancing oneself into a trance. Probably what freaked them out was seeing you do it so effortlessly. You’re so…white.”

  A bark of laughter burst out of me, in spite of the seriousness of our conversation. “Do you know, people have been commenting on my pale eyes since my arrival here
,” I said. “They say I have ‘spirit eyes.’ And the day Célèste met me, my first day in Bitam, this white bird, an egret, flew into the sisters’ dining area and walked right up to me. You should have seen her expression. It was as if she’d seen a ghost.” I laughed at the memory, but Joshua didn’t laugh with me.

  “Oh, boy. She’s got you pegged for big stuff, doesn’t she? How did you leave things with her and the group?”

  “She wants me to do it again.”

  “I can imagine she does.”

  “But for the next time, she wants me to prepare. Fast for the day, meditate in the ceremonial hut, and before the ceremony, ingest something that promotes ‘my journey.’ Those were her words. Like iboga but not, she said.”

  The silence that greeted this made the whole idea seem all the more preposterous.

  “Let me ask you this,” Joshua said. “If you tried to pursue that feeling again, what would be the motivating factor?”

  I mulled over his words. “Okay, I have to admit it. There’s this hunger, a dancer’s need to see how far I can go with a physical experience. I’m obsessed with the notion.”

  “Do you want to connect with spirits that might be trying to communicate through you?”

  “God, no! That sounds preposterous. I’m Catholic-born and bred. And very, very white, inside and out. I just don’t believe in that kind of thing. In fact, it feels kind of goofy to be discussing the possibility.”

  Anger started to build in his eyes.

  “Can you honestly say that two years here hasn’t changed you?” he asked. “Opened your mind to unforeseen, inexplicable things? Experiences that have blown you away, that leave your thinking forever changed? And if you’re going to tell me you’re unchanged, and try to crack a little joke about this instead, well, I don’t know what we’re doing here, and I’m done.”

  He half-rose in his seat, as if he couldn’t get away from me fast enough.

  “Joshua, stop!” I laid a hand on his. My heart had begun pounding faster, as if his agitation had been contagious. “Okay, fine. You’re right. Something in me has changed. A lot. In fact, thinking of it now, weird shit has been happening to me all along.” The woman who’d appeared and disappeared the day I got lost in the brush. The spirit eyes business. The lame woman in Henry’s village on New Year’s Eve with her prophecy.

  You dance. That is how they will know you. And they will join you.

  Had she actually said that?

  She had.

  I told Joshua about the woman and her words. My voice shook. Thinking about it made my head pound horribly. There’d been something more, too. Protection, maybe? Which made no sense. Surely I’d misheard. Maybe projection. That sounded appropriately psychological and spectral.

  Joshua looked happy again, nodding in satisfaction, as if he’d just won a high-stakes bet.

  I drew a deep, shaky breath. “Oh, man. It’s not done with me yet, is it?”

  “I don’t think it is.”

  “Oh, jeez. Oh, shit.” But even as I spoke, I could feel excitement building in me.

  Joshua noticed that, too.

  “I need to issue a very important caveat, though.” His expression grew solemn. “You should be aware of this. In the middle of my initiation, where they were forcing more and more iboga down me, with my body rejecting it, I asked myself if it was all worth dying for. Because that was where I was sure it was heading. I literally thought I was going to die. I told them I wanted to stop, and they only chuckled and kept force-feeding me the iboga.”

  “Joshua, that was so risky! It could have killed you.”

  He ignored the reprimand. His eyes burned into mine. “They knew what they were doing. And so will your people. But there’s a good chance that, combined with the hallucinogens, you will think you’re dying. That’s where the most powerful spirit communication takes place, at the cusp of living and dying. That might be their goal for you. So if you decide to do it, make sure it feels like a quest you’d risk your life for.”

  My insides contracted. I could hardly breathe.

  “I scared you,” he said.

  “You did.”

  “Good. You needed to hear it. Because this is no game, what they do. Nor is it a circus trick. It’s as real, as serious, as life itself.”

  Silently we watched the candle flame flicker and bob merrily between us.

  “Do you have any regrets?” I asked.

  “None.”

  “It’s changed you.”

  He nodded. “For life. For the better.”

  “What’s it going to be like to leave in a few months’ time?”

  “I’m not ready to leave. In fact, I put in a request earlier today. I want to extend to a third year.”

  That brought us right back to reality, to Libreville. “Are you serious?” I exclaimed.

  “I am.”

  “Joshua. What’s your family back home going to say?”

  “They’re not my priority. My family here, the people at my post, the bwiti community—they’re the ones I’m thinking of.”

  I studied him. “Should we be concerned about you?” I asked.

  “Define ‘we’.”

  “Peace Corps. Chuck and Rachel.”

  “No.”

  “Okay, Carmen and me.”

  He hesitated. “Nah.” He smiled at me in a way that made me see the old Joshua. “But thanks for caring.”

  “Thanks for coming here with me. It’s been… illuminating.”

  He laughed. “Doesn’t that describe it all?”

  On the taxi ride back to the case de passage, the spooky, mystical energy between us began to dissipate. Being in Libreville itself was like waking up from a fretful dream. Everything here, from the blaring traffic to the bustling crowds and myriad shops, seemed lively, cosmopolitan and cheerfully abrasive. My spirits grew bright. When I thought of the fact that I would see William in two days’ time, they grew even brighter.

  The COS conference: three nights in a luxury ocean-front hotel; private beach and swimming pool; air-conditioning and soft beds; hot running water, bathtubs and French soaps.

  And William.

  “I have just one thing to say to you,” said Chuck on Sunday night, at the opening session of our conference. An image flashed onto the projection screen in front of us: our original group of twenty-six trainees at the airport in Paris almost two years ago, minutes before boarding the flight to Africa. The eleven of us who remained howled with laughter. We all looked clean, neat and ridiculously wholesome, except for Carmen, with her spikey hair and black-rimmed eyes.

  “Look,” I cried. “It’s Robert! I haven’t thought about him in ages!”

  “Look at you, Fiona!” Carmen gasped, laughing, and I was shocked at how aloof I looked, standing slightly apart from the group. My hair was slicked back into a tight bun; I’d forgotten how much I used to do that, an emotional shield of defense in a non-ballet world.

  “And you, too, William!” Carmen couldn’t stop laughing. “Omigod, you look so grim.”

  She was right. William had posed on the opposite end of the group, starched white shirt buttoned high, looking pained, like a high school principal forced to pose with the unruly students he’d just disciplined.

  I looked over at him now, sitting between Henry and Buzz. Had I really not thought of him as seriously attractive before? He was wearing a white button-down shirt, the same one in the photo, in fact, minus the starch. His face was tanned, his thick golden hair tamed back, his physique more buff and toned from physical labor, and he’d never looked better. I watched as he laughed at a comment Henry murmured into his ear. His face lit up with animation, eyes bright, smile broad.

  He glanced my way and caught me staring. A hot blush rose to my cheeks and I ducked my head to inspect the patterned carpet.

  It had been like this since I’d first spied him three hours earlier. I’d taken ridiculous care with how I looked, blowing half a month’s living allowance on a silky ivory trouser and top e
nsemble, very Paris-meets-Africa. I’d put on makeup for the first time in months: petal-soft French foundation, coral lipstick, liner for my pale eyes and brows. I’d dried and styled my hair with a blow drier. William’s stunned expression when he encountered me had made me think I’d overdone it. But he’d smiled and hugged me in the same way he always had. Since then, we’d remained apart, like kids at a middle school dance, hovering by our same-sex friends’ side as we eyed each other from across the room. It was both absurd and adorable.

  The night’s session was brief, mostly an overview of what Chuck and two other administrators and a few returned Peace Corps volunteers would share with us about COS procedures and facts. It was hard to concentrate, with so much new stimulus swirling around us. Chuck’s words, however, sank in.

  “You’re here to learn how to leave. You’re here to recognize what’s important in your life in Gabon, at your posts, and make the most of your remaining time. Because you don’t want to put off doing something important that, once you get home, you’ll regret not having done. Don’t go thinking you have all the time in the world. You don’t.”

  I thought of William, across the room. Right then, I wanted to be next to him with a desperation that cut my breath short. I wanted to feel his arms slide around me and hold me close. In such a short space of time, he’d become so important to me. He was warm, intelligent, funny, passionate, principled. He was everything I wanted. And unless I stopped dancing around the issue, avoiding any chance of rejection from him, I was going to lose him. Not just during this conference or here in Gabon, but for life. He’d move on and I’d return to Omaha, alone. The thought appalled me.

  How ironic: play it too safe, and you lose. Big.

  Time to leap into the abyss of the unknown.

  After the evening’s session had ended, all eleven of us trooped down to the hotel’s elegant lobby. The far corner held a bar and lounge area, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows that overlooked the lit swimming pool and behind it, the darkened Atlantic Ocean. But the European luxury, with its potted palms, framed artwork, Persian rugs atop polished floors, seemed all wrong for our cheerfully boisterous group. Outside the hotel, two blocks away, we found an outdoor bar with plastic tables and chairs, loud music and cheap Regab, and commandeered half the place.