Whiteman

by Tony D'Souza

  The stars were wide in the sky about the bustling street, and Charles lifted his sweating beer bottle, shrugged as though he didn’t care. “You want to sit down with me? Really? Be my guests. It’s still a free country after all, isn’t it?”

  This was Chuck: Two years in, he’d made it out from his village, Berebi, on the coast, where the worst massacres of this killing season had happened. He’d been there for it; he’d seen the bodies, had known some of them. And even before that, we’d heard of him: His best friend, another PWI worker, had died the year before in a motorcycle accident outside Odienné. Still, he stayed. Maybe he stayed to see his service through for them both. He spoke his dialect with a liquid fluency; he seemed aloof. Whenever the Americans in-country gathered for a holiday—Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July—as with Ryan and me, he didn’t go. He was tall and lanky, good-looking in a tired way; I understood that behind his glasses, he knew more about life than I did. Beside him as we sat down, the girl, black and thin, looked away.

  “Surprised to see you out,” Chuck said after a minute, and put on an uncomfortable smile. “Africa suiting you well?”

  The girl didn’t understand English. She glanced at him, at what he was saying, like looking at strange and dangerous wasps: the English words.

  We drank, didn’t talk much. What was there to say really? I began to look at the girl, to inspect her, to take in her presence and attempt to decipher it. Chuck said something to her softly in her language, which he knew, and she blushed deeply, hugged her beer bottle close to her heart. In her eyeteeth were fillets of gold. She was dramatically beautiful, her hair close cropped, her long limbs perfect, her tribal scars feathered around her eyes making her seem even more beautiful than she was. I said to him, “How long have you known her?”

  “Twenty minutes,” he said, and shrugged.

  Far below the music, Chuck whispered more things in the girl’s ear that made her draw her knees up so she set her sandals on the table. What was he saying to her, I wanted to know. She sipped her beer awkwardly, as though the bottle was too big for her, as though it wasn’t a thing she did. The alcohol animated Ryan, and Chuck answered his questions about where he thought the violence was going, about the bleak future of Ivory Coast. But really, it was as though we were at two tables now: one where three young American men discussed Ivorian politics, and another where a man and a woman were finding intimacy. Chuck rested his hand on the girl’s thigh as though she belonged to him, and the girl smiled. If she was lying about that smile, I could not tell. He rose, tossed bills onto the table, took the girl about her waist. “Well,” he said, “welcome to Africa. I’ve got no advice for you. It’s not a place for everybody.”

  The barmaid brought more beers. I said to Ryan, “I could do it.”

  Ryan looked away at the night, exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke, said as though to himself, “Not me.”

  Then they were there, born from the black night itself, two tall girls in tight pants, glass bangles rattling, perfume as thick as flowers, sitting down across from us as though they’d been invited. Had they? The near one leaned across the table, her face a delicate palette, said, “You Frenchmen? Soldiers?”

  “Americans,” I told her, “relief workers.”

  “Oh, so you’re poor, don’t got any money,” she said, moved to get up.

  I reached across the table and grasped her wrist. I said simply, “We’re not that poor.”

  “I’m not going to do it,” Ryan said in English.

  “We’ll just talk to them.”

  “Talk to them about what?”

  “I don’t care what. Keep me company.”

  The girl was black as oil. Her nose was a petite thing on her face, neat and pretty. Her braids hung over her shoulders like cords. Her tight white outfit made her look as if she was about to participate in some sort of sport. She said, “English? That what you speaking? You Englishmen?”

  “Americans, I said.”

  “Not the same thing?”

  “No.”

  “Do Americans like to fuck?”

  “Sometimes they do.” I nodded.

  She snapped gum. I couldn’t tell if she was bored. She whispered to her friend in a language I’d never heard. The friend nodded, snapped gum, and looked bored, too.

  I bought them drinks, tried to make conversation about the war. They wouldn’t. “What’s your name?” I said to the girl across from me.

  “Sabina.”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “I thank you, man.”

  She looked at me like she was trying to decide if mine was a face she could manage. Something electric ran all through my body. I said to Ryan, “I’m bringing her back to the room.”

  “She’s got AIDS, Jack.”

  “I know that.”

  “Wear two condoms—”

  “I only want to hold her.”

  Sabina shifted her chair beside mine. She set her hand on my knee in the casual way an old girlfriend would. I looked at her hand, noticed the fingernails bitten down to the quick. Instantly, she tucked her fingers down under her palm. The African functionaries drinking at the other tables in their fine pagne shirts glanced at us, looked away as though they’d seen nothing. I said to Sabina, “Do you do this much?”

  “Do what much?”

  “This.”

  “This? What is this? No, man, I don’t ever do this. Never. Only you. I see you, you are handsome to me, I come and I sit. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  The barmaid came and warned about the curfew, and we took a taxi back to the hotel. Ryan sat in front beside the driver, and I sat in back between the girls. The other girl set her hand on my knee, and Sabina barked something sharply at her in their language. The other girl took back her hand and looked out the window.

  “Your brother don’t like my sister? She not beautiful for him?”

  “She’s beautiful.”

  “My sister, she come with me even if she not beautiful for your brother. I watch for her.”

  “She can come. She’s already here.”

  “Your brother don’t love?”

  “No, not tonight.”

  Sabina rested her head on my shoulder, snapped gum slowly as if she’d fallen into a dream. The streetlights played over us in the dark as the cab carried us through the silent quarter.

  At the hotel, the uniformed guard let us in as though nothing was out of the ordinary. I understood then that nothing was. In the hallway, I heard a party raging in another room; the others achieving their release. Our own room was empty. I put on MTV cracked beers for everyone from the fridge. Sabina came from her armchair to sit beside me on the couch, glanced at MTV an instant as if absorbing the images of the black women dancing there, turned to me, kissed me. Ryan and the other girl sat in armchairs across the coffee table from each other, their legs crossed, uncomfortable, as though at a formal function.

  Sabina smelled like soap, like sweat, tasted like the sugar of her gum. Her lips were soft. Her tongue roamed in my mouth. Somewhere far away, Ryan was talking awkwardly to the other girl about the chicken farm cooperative he’d started in his village while waiting for funding to build a deep-bore pump. I heard the other girl say, “You really living in a village, man? In a dirty backward village where they living like worse than animals?”

  “Yeah,” I heard him say.

  “In a house?”

  ” hut.”

  “Got to be so difficult, man!”

  “It is.”

  I was touching Sabina’s breasts now; she was moaning in my ear. I lifted my body over her, felt her body softening beneath me under her clothes. Behind me, I heard Ryan say to the other girl, “Well, shit. What are you doing sitting over there?”

  In a minute, Sabina touched the side of my face, whispered in my ear, “Look, man. Look at your no-love brother.” I looked, and Ryan had the other girl on his lap, was kissing her with his eyes closed. Sabina and I laughed together. I carried her into the bedroom, t
urned out the light. “How much you give me, baby?”

  “How much you want?”

  “Ten thousand.”

  “Five.”

  “Give it now.”

  “Use condom, man,” she whispered in my ear. Though AIDS was everywhere, inside Sabina it didn’t seem such a frightening thing; I ignored it, found it worth the risk. Life was about living, about doing this. I thought about taking the condom off. She let me hold her body tight to mine all through the night. Then I slept soundly, and in the morning, she was gone.

  We had a picture taken together once, a Polaroid at the amusement park in Zone 4.

  Sabina had been in a mood. She hadn’t liked going out in public with me, but I had this desire to do other things with her besides fucking. The amusement park was a rusted Ferris wheel on a desperate asphalt slab, and a few frayed bumper cars that boys pushed in their bare feet for coins when the power was cut, as it regularly was. The Ferris wheel had frightened Sabina, the long looks the Lebanese families threw our way in the night hurt her pride. She wouldn’t hold my hand no matter how many times I tried, wouldn’t attempt to have fun of any sort at all. After an hour of it building in me, I grabbed her arm and said in a low voice, “What am I paying you for, Sabina? To act like a bitch?”

  I tossed rings over bottles again and again, wasting money, until I got it right and won her a yellow teddy bear whose foot was already leaking stuffing. I’d regretted what I’d said instantly, needed this interlude to let it go. As I gave her the bear, I caught her hand, made her look me in the eyes, said, “Sabina. Hey, Sabina? Look at me. I’m sorry. I won’t disrespect you again.”

  “I don’t need your fucking money, whiteman.”

  “I know that.”

  “Don’t bring me to these fucking places.”

  “I won’t again.”

  A black photographer came, said, “Photo for the handsome man and his wife?”

  I pulled Sabina to me, and the camera flashed. I looked at the Polaroid in the cab on the way to the cheap hotel. She hadn’t been smiling, and I was surprised to see just how black, how small against me she really looked. Why had she felt so much taller beside me than she was? She was a small African woman in the most obscene of Western dress. I brought the picture to my village with the intention of showing off my city girl to my friends there, but didn’t. From time to time over the coming years, I’d pull it out of my papers on a strange urge, consider it in my hut in the night by my hurricane lamp’s dim glow. It seemed to record an ancient time, people we had never been. How small Sabina looked, defiant and unhappy. Why had I made her do those things? Why had I believed that what I was doing was all right? The picture was lost with everything else when I fled the village at the outbreak of the real war. I wonder what they made of it, those people I knew who parceled out my things among themselves and found it.

  That time during the security hold in Abidjan, word spread quickly, of course. Alan and Fred came back to the room in the night, turned on the lights, saw what was going on, and went out again. In the morning, they told everybody.

  At that day’s briefing at the embassy, the men acted as if they didn’t know, couldn’t care if they did, and the women wouldn’t look at me. The stigma of what I’d done spread all over my shoulders as I held the Xeroxed security update in my hands. What was there to do but crawl into my heart and not care? Did these other people not need it? Were they not human the way I was? My only worry was that Ryan was embarrassed like this, too. I’d pressured him to do it in the end, hadn’t I?

  At the buffet lunch, a male voice said at my neck, “Gone completely native now, have you, Jack?” and later, as I ate a burger and chips in my folding chair with my plate on my knees, a girl I barely knew glided past and said, “Are they better than we are?”

  I saw Ryan, drew him aside. I said, “I’m sorry I made you do that.”

  He shook off my arm and said, “You didn’t make me do anything.”

  Chuck sat in the corner by himself. For the first time, I noticed how isolated he was.

  The gray-haired CIA man took the podium in his polo shirt. He looked through his notes as if preparing for a lecture. “A-liss-san-ney Wat-tar-aye,” he said, mangling the name nearly beyond recognition. “Anybody got the scoop on this individual?”

  Alassane Ouattara and the RDR would rule the country when the war was over, I knew. In the afternoon, they released us back to our villages.

  Every time I’d come to Abidjan, I’d find Sabina. I began to make excuses to come down: to research pump prices, to attend cholera information meetings. Always, there were weeks and months in the grueling Iron Age with nothing but the stars at night and the village’s suffocating customs for company. Always at the end of them was a girl with long limbs who smelled like soap and sweat. My dreams away from her were haunted by her shape. She’d taken her place in the pantheon of women who were important to me. When I’d find her, we’d ride in a cab to Blockhaus, to the Ebrie Lagoon, watch the fruit bats cross its dark waters on their way to feed in the fields of the commercial plantations in their great evening migration, dance then to makassi music in the rough waterfront bars. The dirty hotel with the television in the cage was our rendezvous the first few times. Then, like any whiteman in Africa, I made friends with another of my kind.

  Martin was Belgian, handsome, alive, electrically intelligent. He wanted to know Africa the way I did, asked pointed questions about life in the village at the expat California Bar-B-Que bar while the CIA men sat in their shirts under the fan and glowered. He said, “You really live with them? As simply as they do?”

  “I try to,” I told him.

  “And you genuinely like the Africans?”

  “I do.”

  “Are you making a difference?”

  “No.”

  “And still you believe in what you’re doing?”

  “Yes.”

  Martin paid the tab. I protested, but he patted my hand in the European way, said, “Let’s not pretend.” He worked for the World Bank, signed off on loans worth more money than either of us would ever know, got paid well to do it. His Mercedes was long and black, the interior upholstered with cream-colored leather that still smelled of the factory. He slid Ishmael Isaac into the CD player, and as the streetlights splashed down over the dashboard, I wondered if he was gay. But, too, I understood that we were in Africa, that he was lonely for a friend. The streetlights winked down on his hands in the night as we cruised Rue des Jardins. The girls stepped up to the curb, offered their rumps, their long legs, to the car’s tinted windows for appraisal. Martin’s hair was curly, neatly cut. His body seemed healthier than mine, though it may simply have been that he was able to stay cleaner, that his clothing was crisp and new. He said, “What do you think of these girls? It’s sad, isn’t it? War in Liberia, war in Sierra Leone. Poverty everywhere else. And now all these images from the West, all these products to desire.”

  I said, “It’s very sad.”

  “Imagine? They offer their bodies to strangers for what it costs us to buy a drink at home?”

  “I know.”

  “Some men do sick things to them.”

  “Some men are sick.”

  “It’s a lonely life for us here, isn’t it?”

  “Martin, I sleep with these girls. If that’s what you are trying to ask me, the answer is yes. It’s something that I do. I won’t deny it.”

  He wheeled the car around, accelerated. He said, “So much better than watching a stupid DVD. I have a special one, Jack. I would like to find her.”

  “I have a special one, too.”

  “Great. Let’s get them. We’ll have a party.”

  His girl’s name was Fabienne. She sat up front in her long braids as if the car were her own. At the corner where I most often met Sabina, she stepped out of the shadows. She slid in back beside me, seemed glad to see me for a change. She ran her fingers along the supple leather, snapped her gum. “Good to see you, boyfriend,” she said, kissed my
cheek. She took my hand in hers, pressed it. “So long time I don’t see you. I get worried.”

  Martin lived in a big furnished house with a pool in the expat district: a mansion. There were lights in the pool, and the four of us swam together in our underwear, drank Martin’s wine, French burgundy he’d had imported. The maid, an old woman of the coastal Appolo tribe, brought out a platter of alloco, fried plantain chips; Martin gave her money from the pocket of his crumpled pants, told her to go home. We swam naked then, played a game where we each took turns holding our breath at the bottom of the pool. It was quiet down there, silent, like not being in the world at all. Sabina stayed down so long, I wanted to dive and bring her up.

  “Goodnight, Jack. Goodnight, lovely Sabina,” Martin said when it was time, showed us to our room. It was a four-poster bed with clean and cool sheets. The air conditioning was almost too cold to bear. As I turned down the covers, Sabina said to me, “Does this mean more money, boyfriend?”

  “I wish it did, Sabina,” I told her. She stuck her gum on the nightstand, stretched tall like a cat, rolled her neck, got into bed. Did she do that to become a different person, I wondered, the person who would let me enter her? Her hands were on me instantly; I caught them, stopped them, wanted to talk. About what, she asked, yawned. I didn’t know. Something. Anything. I wanted to communicate.

  So talk, she said.

  I talked to her about America a long time. I explained what a garage door opener was, how everyone had a car. I talked about the lakefront, the jazz festival in Grant Park. Perhaps I was hinting at something, trying to impress her. If she caught on, she didn’t say anything.

  When the sex was over, Sabina said to me as I held her, “Hey, man. I’m used to you now. It’s okay. You’re pretty. So I let myself see it. You are different, good. I think about you. When you come, I like to see you.”

  I asked why her daughter had died, and she said, “Don’t know. I loved her so much. Bought her every nice thing. It was like she did not want to live. She was fat, and then when she had two years, she got skinny. Every nice thing, I bought her it. She thinned and thinned, and then she died.”