Whiteman

by Tony D'Souza

  “Why did he let you out of it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You don’t remember what you said?”

  “Justine did most of the talking.”

  “How can you not remember?”

  “Come on, Jack.”

  Women brought mangoes for us to eat before we went to bed, grinning at us as if they knew what was about to happen. Cathy was ostensibly supposed to complete a progress report on what I’d been doing, but with the country the way it had been the past two years, she hadn’t even brought the forms. We brushed our teeth in the starry night, turned in. In the dark of the night in my hut with the cricket’s soft susurrus all around, I said to her on her mat a few arms’ lengths from mine, “Are you sleeping, Cathy?”

  “I’m not sleeping yet. The crickets. I don’t get to hear them anymore since I’ve been in the city. It’s too wonderful to sleep.”

  “Do you think about going home?”

  “All the time. My parents have wanted me to come back for years. I imagine my friends would like to see me, too, if they even remember who I am. I’ve stretched it out as long as I’ve been able. But I feel it waiting for me now. Sometimes it feels like something that’s about to swallow me up.”

  “What are you going to do there?”

  “Now? I have no idea. Drink too much, probably. I’ll probably look for Africans wherever I can find them. I’ve liked who I am here. I don’t know who I’ll be back there anymore.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I can’t even remember who I was.”

  “You can call me and we’ll remind each other who we were when we were here.”

  “That sounds horrible.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m going to be lonely back there.”

  “I’m going to be scared.”

  We were quiet then, thinking, breathing. The thought of America hung before me like a cliff. I said, “What do you think about sleeping here next to me tonight?”

  “No strings?” she said.

  “None.”

  “It might be nice.”

  After a moment, she came over.

  Cathy stayed in Tégéso two nights, and we had a good time. I showed her my old fields, everyone’s fields, all the trails through the forest, and she remarked on all the work I must have done to clear such a farm. She squeezed my biceps as we stood with the fallen and dried stalks around us, said, “But it still hasn’t made a difference.” Everywhere we went, women set down their short-handled hoes to embrace her, to sing her welcome as my wife.

  “Not my wife. My friend,” I reminded them. It didn’t matter.

  I carried my shotgun with us, and though she wasn’t interested in killing anything, she shot stones off a termite mound at forty paces. I showed her the green clearing in the forest where the girls were excised, the swamp and the yellow lotuses in it. We drank tea with the chief, with Mamadou, while his girlfriend Korotoum, her new baby tied to her back, smiled and plaited Cathy’s hair. And in the night in my hut with the crickets singing around us, we made love.

  “You know I’ve slept with girls down in Abidjan,” I told her.

  “I’ve had boyfriends here, too, Jack. So what? We’ll use a condom. I’m used to that.”

  “Are you as worried about it as I am?”

  “Every few minutes, every single day.”

  When Cathy left—the logging truck idling on the dusty roadside and the forest all around—we said good-bye with an embrace as though nothing had happened, as though we were simply the friends we’d been before. The chief’s wives gave her a bolt of dyed red cotton as a gift, wailed as though grief stricken about her leaving, and she hung out the window and waved back to thank them for it. The village, my life in it, seemed diminished somehow: Still, I knew things would quickly resume their normal routine. Some of the women followed me as I walked back to my hut. Ama Bintou called, “See how he walks now? His head hangs like the donkey who has lost his mate. Oh, see that Adama’s heart is as soft now as a rotten mango! Raise up your voices, oh, to sing a lament for Adama’s lost wife.”

  Mamadou came to my hut in the evening, smoked with me under the stars. He said, “You looked healthy for a short while, Adama.”

  “Don’t I always look healthy?”

  “You always look normal. But for three days, you have looked like the forest after a rain.”

  “And what do I look like now?”

  “Now? Like the rain has gone. Like leaves that brown and curl as the harmattan dries them. But don’t worry, Adama. My eyes will adjust, and then this new look of yours will be normal again. Do you miss her?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Will you see her again?”

  “Maybe.”

  It made sense in a lot of ways. We both enjoyed ourselves in Africa, enjoyed the Africans. We were both energetic and fearless there. Who hadn’t heard legends about relief workers meeting in the bush, about romances in the sweltering nights, about couples going home together to start their American lives? While some did bring African spouses home, that often seemed impossible. They couldn’t read, they couldn’t write. They couldn’t speak French, let alone English. What in the world would they do in America? Many of the young women in my village had never seen a lightbulb.

  A few weeks went by and I borrowed the mobylette I’d given to Mamadou to help with his rural AIDS education project. I cleaned the carbon off the spark plug with a knife, greased the chain with palm oil, asked permission of the chief to visit my white wife, and then I rode down to Daloa to see Cathy.

  The ride down was great: It didn’t rain, the bike didn’t give me trouble for a change, and the goats and sheep lying on the roadway wherever there was a village got up and made way like the parting of waters. The two times I took off my helmet to buy gazole, the boys selling the fuel from old pastis bottles asked me, “Hey, whiteman! Where are you going on a hot day like this?”

  “To see my go,” I said, and winked. A go was any girl you were involved with romantically.

  “White or black?”

  “White this time.”

  “That is good,” they said, and nodded, pulled crumpled bills from their dirty pockets to make change. “Crickets with crickets, ants with ants.”

  At thirty miles per hour, it took five hours to ride to Daloa. For the most part, the pavement had held up through the rainy season, and the forest around was tall and green. There was nothing better than humming through it at leisure.

  In many respects, Daloa was like my hometown, Chicago. Certainly, there were no skyscrapers, no broad parkways, no low slate of the sky in winter, but even in its meager buildings, there was that same bustle of work. Daloa was the gateway to western Ivory Coast, the country’s great intersection, and all manner of commodities passed through it on smoke-belching trucks to Abidjan: thousands of tons of cocoa, yes, but also cashews, peanuts, cotton, timber, beef. Cathy’s house—the PWI regional office—was in the leafy residential section near the sugarcane fields. While the streets still weren’t paved, there was real money in this neighborhood, and the homes reflected it. Cathy’s was on a corner across from the gates to the university. Like every house of wealth, large or small, it had a serious security wall around it, and when I rang the buzzer, her houseboy, Bamba, turned the bolt to let me in. Inside was a wide and wraparound lawn, tall mango trees for shade, a vast porch with hammocks, open-air windows like eyes on a well-constructed French villa. I’d spent the night there a few times on my way to and from Abidjan but hadn’t taken part in any of the parties it was famous for. When Cathy decided to throw one, she’d send word around on transport trucks, and the half dozen or so relief workers would come in from the area villages to get drunk, stoned, to listen to new music friends had mailed over on cassettes; to shit on a real toilet, take showers—though cold—and laze away the weekend speaking English in those hammocks.

  Bamba helped me park my bike in the garage, took my helmet when I handed it to him.

  �
�Where’s Cathy at?” I asked, looking through the windows of the great house.

  “Cathy? The patronne? Cathy has gone to Abidjan. But she is due tonight. I am preparing to cook tcheb for her. Now that you have come, I will cook for three.”

  “You know how to make tcheb, Bamba?”

  “I lived for many years in Dakar, patron. I make it well. I do not overcook the vegetables or season the rice too strongly.”

  “Leave the cooking to me today,” I told him. “I’ve got an idea to surprise her. I’ll make us a big meal. We’ll have a salad and rice, and I’ll grill some meat. Why not?”

  “Patront”

  “Don’t worry, Bamba. I can cook, too.”

  I had heard about Bamba from Ryan, though this was the first time I’d met him. “You’ll like him,” Ryan had written in a letter some time back. “He’s weird. I spent two nights there and all he did was tell me crazy stories.”

  Bamba wasn’t young the way most houseboys were; in fact, he was a few years older than I was. He was a Peul, as his tall and lean stature suggested, as his blue robe defined. A Peul was a strange choice for a houseboy; as was Bukari, Djamilla’s father, they were proud, devoutly Muslim men who’d come down from the deserts of Mali to make livings as they could in the forest, scorned by the Ivorian tribes, lonesome in their singularity. They had mystical roots and spoke fluent Arabic. But Cathy took her own path in many things, as she did in this. Maybe she thought it was funny to have a nomad as a houseboy.

  Inside, I showered under the cold water, laid on the bed in the back room to enjoy the chill of the electric fan on my wet body. Then I wrapped a pagne around my waist and went into the kitchen, where Bamba was cutting carrots on the board for tcheb despite what I’d told him I wanted to do.

  I said at his back, “I’ve heard about you from Ryan. Do you remember Ryan?”

  “The blond one who enjoys to raise chickens? Oh yes. He is good. Not all are good. But he is very good. I have heard many things about you as well. You are the dark one who does not come down. Sometimes to Abidjan, but otherwise always in your village.”

  “Is that good, Bamba? To always be in the village?”

  “That is good, patron. That is your job. You are living in the forest, shooting many francolin. You are with the Dioula, is it not?”

  “The Worodougou.”

  “Is that a people?”

  “It is.”

  “And why have you come this time, patron!”

  “To see Cathy.”

  “Cathy?”

  “Yes, Cathy. She came and visited me. Now I’ve come to salute her. Isn’t that the way?”

  “It is, patron. It is as you say. One visit must be honored with another. So that is very good.”

  “I want to make a meal for her. Will you help me? My clothes are dirty, too. Can I pay you to wash them? I’d like to have clean clothes before she gets here, a haircut, if there’s time.”

  “You don’t have to pay me to wash them, patron. I will do it just now. It is my job, and it is nothing.”

  “Is Cathy a good patronne to you?” I asked, thinking of her now as I had been on the ride.

  “Cathy is an excellent patronne. Very honest. Very respectful of African ways.”

  “She’s a good girl.” I nodded and folded my arms.

  “She is coming soon. Then you will be very pleased to see her,” he said, and winked over his shoulder.

  “What do you know about it?” I blushed and said.

  “Oh, patron,” he said, and smiled. “I am only talking. Words are good to fill the air. How can I have any ideas about business that is not mine to know?”

  Bamba lent me a T-shirt and jeans, filled a bucket to scrub my own, and I walked the few miles into the city. Daloa had a real downtown—three blocks of it, anyway—Lebanese chwarma shops with their curbside rôtisseries intermingled among the electronics and mobylette dealerships. I bought a kilo of marinated halal beef in one, salad vegetables from another, made a few purchases in the sparsely stocked grocery; spreading money around, always a good idea when you stood out the way I did. There were even a few white people around on the bustling streets—three of them, in fact—two fat Lebanese men smoking cigars outside their hardware store and a woman hurrying by in her chador, a bag of onions hanging from her wrist. There were taxis there, too, green and rattling affairs held together by wire, and I took one back to the house with my purchases. The dirt and stones of the road showed through where the floorboards had rusted away, and twice it died and I had to get out and push so the driver could pop it into gear.

  I planned on a meal of buttered rice, grilled steak, baked potatoes. A green salad with fresh tomatoes. Garlic bread. A bottle of French pinot noir from the Lebanese supermarket. Things I never got to eat or drink. I’d bought candles from a vendor in the marché, handkerchiefs we could use as napkins. And why not? It had been years since I’d sat at a table for a candlelit dinner with anyone, had any reason to.

  Bamba watched me in his robe as I took over cutting vegetables in the kitchen, as I boiled water for rice and tore the lettuce. The afternoon sun streamed through the window, and I began to sweat like a real chef. Bamba said, “I have never seen cooking such as this, patron.”

  I stooped and lit the oven, waved out the match. “Think of it as learning, Bamba. You’ll be able to cook this food for Cathy after I’m gone.”

  “This cooking is like exercise, like how the university students do on the field when they prepare for sport.”

  “This cooking is American. Like it or not, that’s what I am, and this is how we cook.”

  “Then how can you say I will learn it, patron? I am a Peul.”

  “You can learn by watching.”

  “Then I will watch.”

  He watched me quietly a few minutes, and all the time I could feel him behind me, his arms folded, thinking. I knew that what he thought wasn’t good. Finally, I said, “Bamba, aren’t you glad you get to take the night off?”

  “I don’t want to take the night off, patron. This is my job. It is better if you let me cook. I can still manage to make a tcheb, despite what has happened to the vegetables. Please, patron. Perhaps take a nap? You are sweating very much. Perhaps you will make yourself sick if you go on.”

  “What will make me sick is if a tall Peul stands behind me all day picking at my back like a vulture.”

  “Like a vulture, patron? Oh, no. That is very bad. A very bad animal. Better that you think of me like an owl.”

  I shook my head, gave up. I scrubbed the potatoes in the sink. “Bamba, what were you doing before Cathy took you in?”

  “Patron, is it that you refuse to let me cook?”

  “Yes, Bamba. I refuse.”

  He sighed, closed his eyes, rubbed the bridge of his slender nose, seemed to resign himself. He leaned back against the wall, his long robe covering his feet. “I tended cattle in the bush, patron.”

  “And how is settled life treating you?”

  “Oh no, patron. That was many years before. Before when I was young. The next thing before was that I left my village and walked to Bamako. For some time I sewed boubous for my uncle, and then the next thing before I walked to Dakar and drove a taxi for my cousin. One day a whiteman engaged my taxi. His own vehicle was with the mechanic because his driver had taken it out in the night to impress his go, had gotten drunk and hit a donkey. Every place that whiteman told me to, I took him. Every question he asked me, I answered. He talked about his wife very much, about his daughters. He was a very fine man. At the end of the day, he brought me to his home. It was a very fine house. He was the assistant of the Belgium ambassador. I was his houseboy for two years. Then his wife and daughters wanted too much to go back to Belgium, and they left. He gave me a gold watch. Then I walked to Monrovia. My uncle was there. We made yogurt and were successful. Then there was the war. The soldiers took the watch from me. I walked to Freetown with my uncle. That was very good. We opened a spaghetti kiosk there. It was successful.
Then war came again, and the kiosk was burned. I have a cousin here, so I came here. Some days I walked, other days I took transport. I had to go through Guinea and pay many bribes. My cousin had an omelet kiosk here, very successful. It was burned last year in the uprising. My cousin went back to Bamako. He left me one machete. I knocked on all the doors in the quarter to be a gardener. Cathy took me here. This is what I have done before.”

  “You walked all those places?” I said as I chopped the lettuce.

  “Walking is what we Peul do.”

  “Such incredible distances?”

  “I spent much money on shoes.”

  I nodded, smiled. “I once knew a Peul in my village.”

  “It is good to know Peul, patron.”

  “I learned some Peul words, too. Sun, moon. Simple words. Pretty sounds.”

  “It is beautiful language.”

  “All the words I learned are gone now. Gone like the girl.”

  “It was a Peul girl that you knew, patron?”

  “Very beautiful.”

  “And where did she go?”

  “Home to her mother. I promised to marry her. But I got scared.”

  “Patron, that is bad.”

  “I know it is.”

  “Patron, I think that you are very much liked by women. Perhaps it is that you are liked very much by Cathy.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “You don’t know, patron?”

  “I’d like to think I know. But Cathy is Cathy. She’ll decide what she wants in the end.”

  “Is this the way with white women?”

  “It is.”

  “And that is why you are cooking these things, though I am the houseboy?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Ah, then. Now I see and it is clear. Patron, this is very good. Very much it will surprise her and she will be happy.”

  “Are my clothes washed, Bamba?”

  “They dry on the line.”

  “I’ll give you some money.”

  “I won’t accept it,” he said, and held up his hand as if offering peace. Then he went out to take down my clothes for me, to heat coals for an iron and press them neat.