by Tony D'Souza
Starlight seeped in the window. There wasn’t any sound but the faraway whir of the air conditioner. “I’m sorry,” I said from the truest place in my heart. I wished that her presence next to me didn’t have to be about money.
“Such a small girl. My girl. My best and only thing.”
“I’m sorry for you, Sabina.”
“Oh man, why is this the life? Why is it? Why is one rich and the other poor? Why is one black and the other white?” Sabina said, her face on my chest. For a long time, neither of us slept, the starlight making the top sheet covering our bodies seem as though plated with silver.
The maid fried us all eggs and toast in the morning, cut a cantaloupe. We sat at the table like normal people, two couples. Martin looked refreshed and healthy. He said, “We’ll all take a trip to Man sometime. See the vine bridges. We’ll all stay together at the beach in Sassandra. Eat lobster and escargot.” The girls smiled and nodded, brushed their braids back from their eyes. Martin told his guard to let me in any time. Sabina kissed me good-bye at the door, told me to be safe in the bush; she wanted to swim again, to stay here now with her new sister, Fabienne. I took a transport up-country, longed for Sabina in my heart, wished life could be the way Martin had said it forever.
In the village, I told Mamadou about what had been going on in the city, about Sabina, and he was relieved. As we ate rice with our hands from the calabash his mother had set out for us under the mango tree and stars, Mamadou laughed and said, “You were worried I’d think badly of it? Hey! It makes me happy. Adama, it’s not normal to not have a woman, to be without a woman so long as you have. If you waited any longer, certainly you would fall sick. See how sick you fell for the Peul girl? Now it is fine again. As the ancestors say, ‘Know the lion by his roar, the monkey by his cry.’ What is the call of a man but for a woman?”
The news of my sexual normalcy won me the young men’s trust enough that they were now willing to discuss AIDS with me, to listen to me talk about it in a way they hadn’t before. And because I was having sex in Africa, I found myself talking about it realistically.
“A condom ruins the feeling, Adama,” another one of them said as I sat in a group of them, smoking cigarettes in the late night outside the chief’s hut.
“It’s true. It makes it lose its flavor. But use a condom when you are in the city. Use a condom until you find your wife. Then you can be sure and enjoy forever.”
“On the radio, they tell us to not have sex, Adama. But if a man does not have sex with women, then how can the world know that he is a real man?”
“Of course we won’t stop having sex. That is nonsense. But we can be prudent about it when we do.”
“If we get the test, and the test is positive, then we will lose all hope and our bodies will grow weak and die.”
“We are men, are we not? We have the test because we want to protect the women we love. Of course it’s scary. But we must be men and face this thing as we face anything else that frightens us.”
Mamadou came to my hut in the night. He sat on the stool by my doorway and lit a cigarette. He said, “My go is pregnant.”
“Allah den balo. God bless your children,” I said to him.
“And your go?”
“She’s a maquis go.”
“There is no shame in that, Adama. Many men marry maquis gos in the city.”
“I’m not thinking about marriage,” I said, and smoked.
“But do you love this one this time, Adama? The way that you whitemen must love your women? Or is this again as it was with Djamilla?”
“I don’t love her, Mamadou.”
“Not at all, Adama?”
“I worry about her when I am away.”
“To worry about a woman is good. After all, the yam dreams of the sun as it sleeps. Perhaps this will become the love that takes time. The leopard is not born with all of his spots. Chickens are not eaten the day that they hatch. There will be time for all things, Adama. Time to live, time to work. Still, the ancestors say, ‘The rice, even growing, knows that one day it must be cut.’”
With Sabina at Martin’s house, Martin often away, I pretended in the pool that this was my real life, that this luxury was mine to give her. Sabina rose from the bed one night, stood at the window, and looked out at the moon. She said, “Tonight I feel sick. Tonight my heart is in my village in Liberia. But I have shamed myself and can’t go back. So here I am. I want to tell you, man, that with you, it is okay. I want to do this with you as long as you like. I know that one day you will go back to your country. Still, it is okay for me.”
“I like you, Sabina. I want to take you places if you’ll go.”
“Okay, man, let’s go. Where do we go?”
Surprised, I said, “Really?”
I took her to the Abidjan zoo. Through American eyes, the zoo was a miserable place of stinking, fetid cells housing sick and bored animals. But the animals were actually marvelous. Arm in arm, we laughed at the baboons and their wide butts. We stood quietly before the sleeping lions. We reached up handfuls of banana leaves to the elephants’ sucking mouths. People looked at us. Sabina did not seem to care.
At the mall, Sococé, Sabina came out from the dressing room of the couture shop in silk blouses, in skirts and matching heels. The Lebanese attendant seemed put out, refused to offer suggestions, busied herself with folding clothes as though what we were doing was distasteful. Sabina didn’t seem to care about that, either. She was beautiful; the clothes lay on her body as though made for her, the pleats of the skirts fanned out about her knees as she twirled to show them off. Sabina walked out on my arm in the sharpest outfit in Abidjan: a cream blouse and skirt that brought out all the luster of her color.
We went to Legends on the lagoon and danced salsa together; Sabina’s legs were as long as swords, her waist tiny in my hands. Every man in the city looked at her, all the respectable women. We went to Sassandra on the bus, ate steamed crab at the old hotel. Sex was different now; she’d become more to me than she’d been, and I didn’t want to wear a condom any longer, didn’t. Yes, I gave her money, but it was more than that. I signed us into the hotel as Monsieur and Madame Jacques Diaz. I wired home to my mother, told her to send me $500 from my savings account. I put Sabina up in a small apartment in working-class Anyamé, bought her a parrot, an African gray, which she named Levi, who knows why. She didn’t call me “my boyfriend” or snap gum at me anymore. She’d brighten when I’d appear at the door, say, “Hey, man. Why so long time away?”
In my village, I thought a lot about AIDS. In the night outside my hut and smoking a cigarette to the stars, I wondered if I had it, ultimately didn’t care. What was life but to let someone know you intimately, to be glad for what little joy you could scrape from the dark world? As I’d stub out my cigarette and duck under the thatching of my hut for bed, I’d say aloud to myself, “Allahumdu lilah.” Thanks be to God.’
I avoided the few other Americans in Abidjan, had a different life. Still, when I’d check in at the office, others were always there: working on grant proposals, having a respite from their villages as I was. Now and again one of the men would corner me, say, “I know you sleep with those girls, Jack. How do you do it? Where do you take them? How much do you pay?”
I’d shrug, say, “Pay them what you can. They’ll take care of the rest. That’s their job.”
Often, these men’s faces would grow hard then. They’d say, “I’m trusting you. Understand me? Don’t tell a living soul about this conversation.”
History surrounded us in Africa, forward and back, white men, black women. But in the night with Sabina, neither of us seemed to have color.
The end of the story is this: I bought a school uniform, khaki, for Sabina’s son, Max, who she’d brought from Monrovia to live with her. He was a small boy, timid; thin as a bird in his new clothes, his knees as round as apples. He’d never been so near a white person before, and was afraid of me, hiding behind his mother’s legs until she slapped
and scolded him to stop that.
At Sococé, I took him to the jungle gym, urged him with Sabina to attempt the long slide. The children there were both white and black, healthy and loud, attended by nannies who snoozed on the bench in uniforms as their charges played. Max took a long time to climb the steps. Steps were new things for him, hard to manage, as were the bright colors of the gym. He was terrified as he looked down at us from the height; the pleasure that it was supposed to be, lost on him. For a long time, he sat and looked at his mother as if pleading to be rescued. Then she barked at him, and he came down. I was waiting at the bottom. I caught him, swung him up onto my shoulders, and for the first time since I’d been there, he laughed. Sabina smiled and took my arm. I didn’t know where it was heading, didn’t care. “Give me 200,000 CFA, Jacques. I want to buy a sewing machine and make business, clothing. I’m too bored when you are away. It will make work for me when I wait.”
I gave Sabina the money, $300. I went up-country, came back again. It was raining all over Abidjan. I took a cab to Sabina’s place. The apartment was empty. The floor was littered with bottles and cigarette butts. Even the parrot was gone. I asked after Sabina everywhere I knew. Nobody knew where she was.
I went up-country for four months, came back again, looked for Sabina. Everywhere, I saw her, girls like her: dancing too close with other whitemen, showing off their long legs from the shadows of the corners. A girl in an electric blue miniskirt came up to me from the shadows on Rue des Jardins and said, “Sabina, she gone back. Some months now. Visiting her daughter.” I paid the girl cash to tell me this information. At the Hacienda, the bartender looked at me with hooded eyes until I brought out my money. He folded the bills into the pocket of his shirt, rubbed his face: numbed by things like this. He said, “Her daughter start school, man. She gone back to Monrovia.”
I wandered through the city a few days, in the clubs and bars. Finally, I told the organization’s doctor that I might have AIDS. She gave me the test in the sterile examining room, drew the bjood from my arm. The doctor was middle-aged and gende, from Ghana, a mother. Later, she held the results in her soft hands on her desk while I sat in the chair. Like pleading, like trying to manage emotions larger than she understood, she said, “What I don’t understand is how you boys can sleep with women you don’t know. Don’t you want to find a special woman to love! Don’t you want to hold her in your hands and protect her like an egg?”
She set the paper down on her desk. She said with a blank face, “You don’t have AIDS, Jack.”
There were years of service before me, a war. I wouldn’t find Sabina that time. In time, I wouldn’t care. Outside my hut the night I came back, I smoked cigarettes, gazed at the stars, wondered where Sabina was, who she had really been. Finally, I went to bed. In the morning, the village’s mortars sounded with the women pounding rice for the hungry mouths of the new day.
SUSTAINABILITY
Midway into my second year, even as I was seeing Sabina, I rode my mobylette, a battered 49cc blue Peugeot, the sixty miles north from Tégéso to Ryan’s village. I’d sent him a note to tell him I was coming. I’d visited him there once before, more than a year ago, when neither of us could yet ask for water properly in our village’s languages. That time, we’d simply sat and stared at the people who’d gathered in his courtyard to stare back at us.
The mobylette was against the organization’s rules, but as with a lot of things, I didn’t care. We really had very little contact with the Potable Water International office in Abidjan once we’d been sent to our assignments in the bush. The secondhand machine had cost me $150 in Séguéla and changed my life. No longer did I have to wait hours in the dust on the hope that some transport or other would chug into my village and pick me up. With my mobylette, I could simply fire it up and go.
I loved the way the wind whipped my face, the way the forest and its shadows ran along as in a silent film as I rode my little banged-up horse. But to tell the truth, the bike was more trouble than it was worth. For every thirty miles of freedom it afforded me, it would break down for days. On the way up to Ryan’s, I had to spend two nights on a borrowed mat on the roadside in Djirabana, while the local mechanic, a boy in oily rags, bent and scraped the copper of my bike’s burnt electrical wires with his teeth. There were diamond mines nearby, and all during the time I spent there, shifty-eyed Peul in their blue robes tried to sell me stones that looked like rock salt, not believing that a whiteman could have no money.
When I finally arrived in Fadjiadougou, dusty and tired, Ryan stood up off his porch where he was drinking tea in a robe and said, “Hey, Jack. What took you so long?”
While I had spent my time hunting francolins and listening to fables about gazelles and bush pigs told to me by Mamadou, Ryan had started projects. He’d made a solar food dehydrator out of long scraps of tin sheeting; he’d instigated a vegetable-garden collective in the fenced area beside his mosque with the village women. And above and beyond all that, he’d begun breeding chickens for eggs. The coop was a fine constructed building of thatch and chicken wire across from his hut, and when we approached to feed the twenty chickens rice, they hurried forward in a group like pets. They clucked and cooed, and Ryan made kissing noises at them. None of these things had anything to do with clean drinking water, the focus of our mission, but it didn’t matter. He was making the best of things. His village was so proud of him that every evening old men came to his hut from the fields to present him with fresh peanuts, papayas, and mangoes, and the women sang his name as they passed. He had so many peanuts, they filled great sacks inside his hut.
“What in the world are you going to do with all those peanuts?” I asked him.
“Don’t know,” he said, and sipped tea like a pasha. “Perhaps I’ll sell them in Séguéla, buy pencils for the kids.”
“Then they’re really going to love you.”
“Yeah,” he said, and sighed as though he was tired of it, “I guess they probably will.”
Back in my village, I ate dinner, cassava toh and okra sauce, with Mamadou. We talked about my trip, about what had gone on in the village while I was away. The blacksmith’s daughter was having an affair with the potter’s second son. Ama Fanta believed a genie was trying to crawl into her hut at night through the thatch. Bukari’s cattle had eaten rice in Bébé’s field and there had been an angry dispute about that. When we were done exchanging news, I said, “Guess what, Mamadou? We’re going to start a project.”
“A project, Adama? What sort of project?”
“We’re going to teach the people about AIDS.”
“Ah, you are going to talk to the young men again, as you do. That is good.”
“Not me this time, Mamadou. We are going to talk about AIDS.”
“Who we?” he said, and knit his brow.
“You and I, naturally.”
“Adama!”
Of course the major problem of Ivory Coast was AIDS. Because of my relationship with Sabina, I sometimes felt sure I had it, lived with it, whether I really did or not. As I’d gaze at the Southern Cross in the night from outside my hut, I’d ask myself, ‘What are you going to tell your mother?’
“AIDS is our project, Mamadou. You and I are going to become the big AIDS chiefs of Tégéso.”
“AIDS chiefs! Adama! What about my name?”
“This project will only enhance your name.”
“AIDS? Are you crazy? It is fine for you to talk about such things. The people will let you talk about anything you want. But me? I won’t do it. There is no possibility at all that I am going to stand before the people and talk about something like AIDS.”
“Get some sleep, little brother,” I said, getting up to leave. “We start tomorrow.”
Not only was Mamadou my friend, but as the companion the village had assigned to me to help me learn their customs, he was also in some ways my slave. He was two years younger than me, beholden to me because of the rigors of the village age-hierarchy. But more than anyth
ing else, the chief had given him to me like a possession. I had the right to tell him what to do.
My standing among the Worodougou at this time was twofold. First and most important, I had learned the language, and second, I’d given away all my Western possessions soon after I’d arrived. The agency hadn’t offered us any advice on this during training. What was most important to them was that we stayed. To this end, they wanted us to be as comfortable as possible in our villages. The last few days of training had included shopping trips to Abidjan so we could buy the things we’d need during our service in the field. For some, this meant haggling with Lebanese merchants in the clamoring Adjamé market for kerosene refrigerators, for butane stoves. Many went to their villages with portable stereo systems, frame beds, a cushioned chair or two. I’d never liked shopping, didn’t do it there. Still, when I arrived in Tégéso with my small pack, no one could see past my transistor radio and tape deck, my fancy hiking sandals and array of Western clothes.
“Hey, Adama, you are rich!” a passing old man had said to me through Mamadou one of my first nights there. I’d been listening to Bob Marley on my tape player as I’d brushed my teeth before bed.
“Rich?” I’d said, thinking of the mat I’d sleep on, my few changes of clothes, my hut itself, black spiders casting webs all over the thatching inside no matter how often I swept them out. “How in the world can you say that I am rich?”
As the days passed and the scales of the West fell from my eyes, I saw myself as they did: my tall and healthy body, my unscarred skin, my thick and clean jeans, my wondrous electronics.
I turned off my tape player one evening soon after, carried it to the chief’s hut, set it at his feet. My clothes, I parceled out to his sons. My shampoo and deodorant I gave to his wives. In this way, I let the West blow from me leaf by leaf. As though in exchange for what I’d given up, Mamadou’s mother presented me with a wicker hat she’d woven herself to keep the sun from my face; Mamadou gave me an old machete so I could work alongside him in the fields; I accepted tattered field clothes from the witch doctor. Just as soon as I had been naked among them, I was dressed again.