by Tony D'Souza
The chief said something. Mamadou said, “The chief asks if you slept well.”
“I slept well, tell him.”
The chief said something and the whole crowd laughed. Mamadou said, “The chief asks if you like girls.”
I looked at the chief and laughed, and he smiled at me. I said, “Tell him I like girls.”
The chief said something and everyone was somber. Mamadou said, “The chief says, ‘Your ways are as confusing to us as ours must be to you. Don’t ask for food again, Adama, if you are not hungry.’”
I sent a kilo of sugar to the girl’s mother later in apology, and almost two years to the day after that, the girl, Fatoumata, much taller now and a woman, came and rapped on my door with a smile and her eyes lined with ceremonial kohl. She said in her husky woman’s voice, “Where’s my gift, whiteman? Haven’t you heard that I’m getting married?”
Living in the village was much like living on a farm, though I’d never done that either. All about us in that maze of huts with the mango and acacia trees standing up between like light poles were animals: goats and sheep and dogs and chickens, some cows, even a few donkeys. Everywhere if you looked, sex was happening, anytime, anyplace. Just sitting on a stool in front of my hut of a brief morning, I could watch a rooster strut about, chase and mount and rape a half dozen chickens, shake out his legs after each act, dizzy and disoriented from it, and in a few minutes, he’d be chasing and raping another one. Stuck-together dogs were always great fun to watch; to watch the children toss rocks at them, the dogs trying to run away on eight legs, other dogs trying to mount what was already mounted, their penises erect like skinned sausages, humping the ribs of the couple in question. Male goats worked together to pin a bleating female against a tree, taking turns mounting her roughly against her wishes. Even the ducks made love, the drake on top of the hen’s back and pressing her to the ground with her neck in his bill, his tail wagging in quick jerks like waddling as he did what he had to do. It was easy enough to ignore, but if you were in that sort of mood, it was all that you seemed able to see.
Mazatou came one morning as I sat on my stool and asked me for some of the peanuts I was eating. There were people around; boys shooting marbles, an old man sleeping in a hammock, an old woman chewing tobacco under her mango tree and looking off at nothing, and I couldn’t have grabbed her if I wanted to. She held out her rough hand and I spilled nuts into it. She looked around, opened her wrap so her bare hips and thighs were only an arm’s length away, then closed the wrap up as nonchalantly as though she herself hadn’t noticed what she’d done.
“Keep that up, Mazatou, and you’re going to get in trouble,” I promised her. “Don’t the ancestors say, ‘The fly who plays near the spider’s web risks feeding the spider’?”
“What are you taking about, Adama? Adama, what are they doing?”
I looked where she was looking, and a yellow dog was mounting a black one, his tongue hanging out happily and he looked around and seemed to smile, his haunches thrusting into her. Then Mazatou pointed in another direction, and it was a rooster, pinning a squawking hen to the ground with his body, shaking his hips an instant, hopping off her again in a dizzy way as he tried to find his footing. Then she pointed straight ahead out to two donkeys in the distant field, the male with a long black pole erect between his hind legs. He reared up, and the whole of that pole’s grand length slid into the female. “What are they doing, Adama?” Mazatou asked me, and winked. “Do you know what that is?” I could only grit my teeth. And then, like a joke on both of us, the old man roused himself from the hammock, coughed and spit, waved to the old woman chewing tobacco who was one of his wives, and she followed him into his hut and shut the door.
The idylls of the dry season ended with the first sprinkling showers of April. Like all the men of the village, I went out into the forest to clear the tract of land the chief had given me for my farm. Because I was a whiteman and considered much weaker at field work than they were, I was given two hectares that had lain fallow only one year. Therefore, the brush I had to clear from it was only twice my height.
Helping Mamadou with his father’s farm from my very first days there, I’d learned to swing a machete efficiently, and more than that, how to build a field hut. It was an easy thing, once you knew what to do. You buried two main supports, each a forked pole as tall as you were, a half dozen paces apart, then laid a pole in their forks. On each side, you did the same again, with short poles, low to the ground. Then you built a lattice of stripped palm branches for the framework of the roof, and cut and bundled grass for thatching. It took two days to build. But it could last the whole rainy season, giving one shelter from the afternoon monsoons. Children could do it; I did it. Then I sharpened my machete under its shelter with my file, went out into the bush surrounding it, and began clearing my farm.
At this time, all the hundred men of the village were occupied clearing their own farms as I was. My days were spent like this: I ate rice and oil at Mamadou’s mother’s hut in the morning, then walked the three kilometers on the trail through the forest to my farm. I’d cut and cut that brush, leaving it behind me in piles. Blisters on my hand opened and bled. I wrapped my hand with cloth strips and went on. All the men there did. This was what growing your own food meant. At night, I’d trudge back to the village, my whole body aching, my bones in pain, and I’d smoke a cigarette in the village center near the chief’s hearth with other tired young men and listen to the smallest children drumming on old coffee cans, the virgin girls singing. It was a time of fatigue and not really talking to your friends. My arms would be so worn and tired from the work that I could not bend them completely down as I lay on my mat.
The only thing different about the work I did on my farm was that I did it alone. The other men had their women and children to help them, and besides, nobody liked being in the forest by himself. The forest was rife with haunts and genies. Among the most important parts of having a woman was that she prepared lunch in the field. This was always the simplest of dishes, often nothing more than rice sprinkled with salt. Not having a woman, I didn’t even have that. I ate green mangoes that were just starting on the wild trees, and green papayas that grew in my field from the last farm that had been there. It gave me diarrhea, but I wanted to build a great farm and be a man. Mazatou tried to continue our flirting morning ritual, but I was too tired for it for now.
After weeks of slashing and cutting, the weeds fell and dried behind me like kindling, and with four acres cleared for the first planting, I lit a match and watched that bracken roar up in flame. When the ash settled, the area was open and clear. I had my farm.
The way to sow corn and beans there was to take a short-handled hoe and walk in lines. Each half pace you stepped, you chopped the earth open with the hoe, tossed in some seeds, patted the wound closed again, and stepped another half pace. Like this I planted my first four acres by hand, cleared ever more.
The heavy rains fell just as the ancestors promised. And then one morning I went out to my farm, and it was green with shoots, each one in its appropriate place. Now was the time for weeding, because the weeds rose up between the plants as quickly as they did.
How many weeks passed when I didn’t even notice the setting of the sun, the rising of the moon, the cycle repeated again in the morning, the passing of days? All was work. And I did it until my arm felt made of cement, did it almost as well as any man there. When my beans were ankle high, my corn as high as my knee, my fields long and clean of weeds between the rows, I set down my hoe, went and lay under my field hut on its soft and dry earth, closed my eyes, and thanked the ancestors. I fell asleep. What did I dream? Plants growing to fruit, the earth fertile and alive.
Someone shook me awake. I blinked my eyes open to Mazatou.
“Adama! You’ve worked very hard out here. I wondered what you were doing in the forest all by yourself, why you don’t play with me anymore like you used to. The village is empty. It’s very boring there.”
“What are you doing here, Mazatou?”
“I know you have no woman,” she said, kneeling before me where I lay, setting down a calabash of rice. “I thought you must be hungry, so I came to give you food.”
I was hungry, always was then. I reached for the calabash, and she pulled it away, smiled. I reached for it again, and she let me have it. I ate greedily, ate every last grain of that rice, the fish bones mixed in it. Then I lay back and began to feel alive again, food in me, the major work done and my fields green and growing. In a minute, I opened my eyes and looked at her face above me, the thatch of the hut I’d built beyond. She said, “Whiteman?”
“Yes, Mazatou?”
“You look like Sergio. You’re Sergio, aren’t you, from the television?” The Mexican soap opera was called Marimar; Marimar was Sergio’s girlfriend. Sergio and Marimar had all the same problems of any couple in a Western soap opera. One night they were kissing, the next night fighting, the next night they’d have split up completely and taken new lovers. Mazatou approached me in that hut on her hands and knees. She said, “Kiss me the way Sergio kisses Marimar.”
My body awakened. I said, “You know that they aren’t real people, Mazatou, that it’s a story made up for fun?”
“Kiss me like he kisses her,” she said with her eyes closed.
I held her face in my hand, and I kissed her. Our tongues met and danced briefly against each other. The red stick came to life in my pants as she’d made it do so often before. I grabbed her shoulders and pulled her close down onto me, wrestled her a minute trying to kiss her more, and she shook me off and ran away. Like this, she’d managed to tease me yet again. “Take your calabash with you,” I shouted from my knees, watching her run off through the corn, throwing it in a long arc after her.
At Mamadou’s in the evening, I told him what had happened. We smoked cigarettes after the rice his mother had prepared for us and were tired. “Are you sure it was her?” Mamadou asked me, leaning against the mango trunk, seeming too tired to care.
“What do you mean?”
“If she didn’t go to the fields with you, how can you know for certain that it was her? Genies like to take the shape of people we think we know, and they like to take the shape of women. It causes men problems. The next thing you know, you think you are sleeping with your neighbor’s wife. If she didn’t go to the fields with you, she could be a genie. You have to be careful. Genies like to torment and embarrass us. That is what they do.”
“That was a real girl I kissed out there. That was the real Mazatou.”
“What I am saying, Adama,” Mamadou said, and released a slow plume of smoke, “is that it could be Mazatou, or it could be a genie. Unless we watched his birth, how can we know that a man does not have a twin?”
“Can a man sleep with a genie?”
“Genies like to trick men into sleeping with them. It gives them pleasure. Then, sooner or later, you reveal your heart to them and they eat your soul.”
“If she comes back again, genie or not, I’m not going to let her get away.”
“‘Genie or not’? Adama, I see now that you’re too lost for advice. But maybe it won’t cause problems for you. Who knows what kind of power genies have over whites.”
She did come again, the very next day. She came at noon, with food. She bowed and presented it to me. “Eat, whiteman. Eat until you are full.” I looked at her carefully. Every pore of her seemed to be the same Mazatou who tormented me in the village, so why wouldn’t it also be her here now, doing the same? I ate until the rice was gone, then lay on my back and smoked a cigarette. Mazatou kneeled close by, as she had done the day before. She said, “You work too hard. All by yourself.” All around us were my growing corn and beans.
“Work with me,” I told her.
“Whiteman, Adama, I can’t work with you. What would my grandmother say?” She shuffled forward on her knees. Her face close to mine, she said, “You’re Sergio.”
“You’re Marimar.”
“Kiss me, Sergio.”
I stubbed the cigarette out in the dirt, exhaled the last of the smoke to the side, then reached and touched her face, and she leaned down with her eyes closed to kiss me. There was still a little rice in my mouth, but she didn’t mind. We kissed longer than the day before, and I reached and touched her breast through her blouse. She let me long enough that I felt her hard nipple beneath the thin material. Then I moved to snatch her around the waist, and before I could, she was off again through the rows of corn, her sandals slapping up against the soles of her feet.
Every day went like this until I became as frustrated and flustered as I had been when I’d woken up to her those many mornings pounding rice and shaking her hips at me. She came to my field hut and brought me food, called me Sergio, and we’d kiss like on Marimar. Even my scalp itched from it. Evenings I’d tell Mamadou, and he’d shake his head and look away, warn me about genies. “Maybe it’s a genie that likes a fight, Adama. Next time, don’t let it go, and make love to it, and it should leave you alone.”
“And if it isn’t a genie? If it really is Mazatou?”
“Make love to her, anyway. The rabbit that plays with the leopard is waiting to be eaten.”
When I’d see Mazatou in the village and other people were around, she’d act as though we hadn’t ever exchanged words; as soon as we were alone, she’d show me her hips and thighs, come close and whisper, “Kiss me like Sergio.”
My every thought was of Mazatou, of sating myself in her body, and in doing so, becoming a real man of that place. What else was there to think about in the quiet of night in my hut before sleep? Everyone and everything was satisfying themselves around me just as they wanted. Mazatou had brought me to the point that I would do anything to find satisfaction as well.
“Kiss me like Sergio, Adama whiteman,” she said, and bumped my shoulder with her hip as she passed me sharpening my machete that final evening before my hut. I rasped that blade to a razor’s edge and decided that next time I would kiss her for good.
That last morning—the last morning I ever woke up to her—Mazatou didn’t flirt with me. She pounded her rice with the monotony of a robot, and I could see that something was wrong. “What the matter, Mazatou?” I called to her from my stool.
“My grandmother is sending me back to my village today, Adama. My fiancé hasn’t come from Abidjan for me. So now I must go and all our playing will end.”
“I’m sorry that he didn’t come,” I told her, and took up my machete and calabash of water to head out to my farm.
“Adama, it’s all right. We stop crying for rice when we’ve filled ourselves with yams. Playing with you has been fun.”
“Maybe for you,” I told her.
“I’ll carry food to you today. Bring your red stick. Maybe today is the day I’ll finally see it,” she said, and winked.
I tried to work out there, but with Mazatou on my mind, I couldn’t. I went and lay under the cool shade of my field hut. I hadn’t had contact with a woman since coming to the village, just this girl who had frustrated me endlessly for months. The corn was waist-high now, my fields were very healthy. It rained a bit in the late morning, and then the sun came out and burned the rain to steam. Mazatou came through that clearing mist in her colorful wraps and set a calabash of rice beside me. I ate a few mouthfuls and pushed it aside. She crawled to me on her knees. “Kiss me like on Marimar,” she said. We kissed awhile, and then she broke away. “You can show me that red stick now.”
“Are you sure you want to see it?”
“Yes, Adama, of course.”
“And you’re not going to run away?”
“Why would I run away?”
“You have every time before!”
“Well, this time I won’t.”
I didn’t trust her, but what choice did I have? I unbuttoned my pants, slid them down, and there was the red stick. She looked at it as if it were a strange creature; it was as red as I had promised. She wrapped h
er hand around it like a pestle and began to pound it up and down. I drew deep breaths, enjoying: her hand thrummed like a piston; at first I wanted her to slow down; then I didn’t; then I stopped breathing altogether. Suddenly, I was at the cusp of release. I grabbed her, pulled her to the ground, rolled and pressed the weight of my body on hers, stripped her wrap free from her thighs, and my stick touched her where it was supposed to go in. Could it have been inside her an instant? With the strength of a girl who pounded rice day after day, she pushed me off, scampered out from under the hut on her hands and knees; I was close on her heels, a goat, a dog, a rooster, a man, everything about me fire, hunger, lust, desire. I grasped for her wraps which flew about her like ribbons, and for a moment, had them in my fingertips. We ran deep into the corn, she just inches away from my outstretched hands, my pants falling around my ankles. Then, as had to be, my pants tripped me. A girl ran through the corn as I shouted her name from the dirt. The force of my pleading raised the lahou birds from the great trees, laughing already as they turned circles through the air, remembering forever this new story I had given them.
L’ÉTUDIANT
A boy in a school uniform came and sat in the dust outside my hut one evening. Six months had gone by, and I felt settled in the village. I was in my field clothes, a rough T-shirt and jeans, which had dried around me like cardboard. The day had been long and I’d worked hard putting up corn to dry on racks I’d built. Despite my fatigue, the boy didn’t bother me. I’d gotten used to people staring at me, understood why they did. I didn’t mind someone like this who simply watched, was otherwise respectful.
The boy’s name was Abou, one of the witch doctor’s many sons, the one he had sent to school. Most families chose to educate at least one son—sometimes even a daughter—to help them make certain they weren’t getting cheated when time came to sell the cotton harvest, and the government men would arrive in the village with their badges and thick ledgers to buy it. No one expected these children to go on to be doctors or lawyers. It was enough if they could add and subtract, and follow the buyers’ quick French.