Whiteman

by Tony D'Souza

  While the potatoes baked, we went out on the porch. I sat cross-legged on the tiles while Bamba kneeled and trimmed my hair with medical scissors from the kit inside. Something about him put me at ease. Perhaps it was the idea of all the things he’d seen in his life, that someone could undergo such hardships and continue on as he had. He drew my hair out in lengths, snipped it as cleanly as though he’d always been a barber.

  “When Cathy leaves, whoever replaces her will have some village friend they’ll want to hire.”

  “Ah, patron, this is true. When Cathy leaves, I will do business again. Already I am thinking of it. Always I attempt to make business.” He paused the hair cutting to pack a short bone pipe from a beaded pouch with what I thought was tobacco, but as soon as he lit it, could smell that it wasn’t. He inhaled a few times, released long plumes of smoke over my shoulders, traded the pipe for the scissors. Then his fingers again stroked my hair. “WHien I first came, I said to the patronne, to Cathy, ‘All this grass here is good. Let me raise something, some animal.’ That is what we Peul do. Cathy said to me that this was fine. So first I bought sheep. Three sheep. All my savings. Two ewes and one ram. They were small. Cathy said we must give them names. Very strange for sheep, but Cathy is the patronne. I name the ewes Aminata and Kadi. Very difficult to decide. So for the ram, I could not think of a name. I said to Cathy that I could not decide, and she said to me that the rams name was Billy. So the ram was Billy.

  “These three, they ate the grass, grew very well. I did not have to cut the grass any longer. So that was also good. But this Billy, his horns grew and curled, and then he became angry. Never had I seen a sheep such as this. Cathy had one cat. She called him Turtle. Then she had a duiker that her friend brought from her old village, when she was living before as you do now. The mother duiker they had found caught in a leg trap in the field. That one they ate. But the child duiker they brought here. The child was very good, very shy. I tempted him every day with mango leaves, and then he would sit in my lap as the cat would sit in Cathy’s. So much like a gazelle. Imagine, patron, a duiker in one’s lap!

  “But this Billy. First he beat the ewes with his horns. All day it was running and beating, the house full of screams. Cathy did not like it. I tethered him to the wall. But Billy did not like to be tethered. He broke the rope. Then there was a screaming in the night, patron, such a screaming you could not imagine. Like a bat. Or a pig. We came running with flashlights. It was the cat. He was lying just here. His neck was broken. Still Billy was beating him. After I tied the crazy sheep, Cathy said to me, ‘What must we do about this cat?’ I said to her, ‘We must kill the cat, patronne.’ She was very much sad. How to kill it so that she would not be sad? I took an iron pole from the shed, but Cathy said no. She had been petting this cat very much, always in her lap. She said she must be the one who must kill it. She filled a bucket with water. She put the cat in a plastic bag, put it in the water. She held it down with her hands, crying very much. The cat was fighting so that I wanted to cover my ears. Then the cat was dead. But Cathy poked the bag with a stick, tore it, and the cat came out. It was not dead. It was wet like a rat, screaming, the neck broken like this. Horrible, patron. Then I killed it with the iron pole.”

  What could I do but listen, lethargic from the smoke, from Bamba’s fingers in my hair.

  “Soon this Billy broke that rope also. He killed the ewes, the child duiker. We woke in the morning and the bodies were on the grass. Billy was eating beside them. Imagine, patron. All my money.

  “Cathy said to me, ‘I don’t care, Bamba. Billy must go.’ But I said to her, ‘Billy is very bad, but he is also like my cat.’ Cathy said to me one last chance. I tied this Billy to the water pipe. The water pipe was very strong. In the morning, water was everywhere here, like a fountain. The pipe was broken. Billy was eating grass. This pipe cost much money to repair. Cathy said that Billy must go. But I could not kill him. So I sold him in the market and lost much money Then I cried as Cathy had.”

  “That’s a terrible story.”

  “Patron, that is not all. I took the money from Billy and purchased rabbits. You see how the grass is, good for sheep, but also good for rabbits. I purchased five rabbits. I did not know if they were male rabbits or female rabbits. In one month, there were twenty rabbits. In two months, there were thirty. Then there were rabbits in Cathy’s shoes, in the kitchen cabinets, under the beds. They made so much mess, all day I was sweeping. Cathy said to me, ‘Bamba, you must butcher some of these rabbits.’ I fed them every day from my hands. But the patronne is the patronne. I took one by the ears, killed it with a hammer. Then I was crying. Allah, it was too difficult for me. I paid a Gouro boy to butcher the rabbits. Each time, I waited inside my room. I lost more money, paying this boy to do this silly thing that I could not. Cathy was very much upset. She said to me, ‘Bamba, why did you decide to raise rabbits if you can’t kill them?’ I said to her, ‘I am sorry. I did not know that I could not.’ Cathy saw that I was losing much money, so she gave the boy 20,000 CFA of her own to come now and again and butcher the rabbits. Then we went to the market, and while we were away, he butchered them all. Cathy was very mad. But the boy said to her, ‘Why have you paid me so much money if not to butcher all the rabbits?’ She said to him, ‘Now and again. Now and again.’ Then he said, ‘Ah.’

  “What to do with so many rabbits, so much meat? We had to give them away to the neighbors. The neighbors were pleased, but we were not. Then the boy came again. He had gone into the latrine at his parents’ compound. The cement had broken and he had fallen in. One hour he spent there. Then his brother let down a rope. He came out, but the money remained down. He used all his father’s soap to take away the smell. He said to Cathy that she must give him money for soap. What could she do?

  “Very strange things at this house, patron. Not good or bad, but very strange. Now my money is gone. Life is not to be understood.”

  I had moved to lie in a hammock in the telling of Bamba’s stories, and he had swept together the clippings of my hair with his hands, burned them with a match so that no one could take them to work magic against me, as was the way. It was a calm evening, and as I’d listened, I’d grown drowsy, felt I could lie there forever. “Set the table, Bamba, won’t you,” I said, the darkness settling down. “If Cathy gets here soon, it would be a shame if we weren’t ready.”

  “As you wish, patron. Cathy will be very pleased. Too often she is here with only me. Too much with the violence we are always inside. It is not good to be so much away from one’s own people. It is the sort of thing known to make one strange.”

  The table looked romantic on the porch where Bamba had set it, the candles burning straight. As I lay in the hammock waiting for Cathy, he came and sat on a mat beside me. He was a tall man, lean and well boned, his blue robe handsome around him. I imagined him astride a camel, sitting like this under Mali’s desert moon.

  “And what about you, Bamba? Will you one day go home and buy a wife?”

  “Buy a wife, patron! Oh, no. After so much time near white people, that is a thing I can no longer do.” He touched a match to his pipe, drew on it, exhaled a slow plume. “To see the world is very good. But to see the world is also to change.”

  “And a family, Bamba?”

  “A family, patron?”

  There was a clamoring at the door and we both hurried out to it. It was Cathy, her arms heavy with packages. “Take the packages, Bamba,” I told him. He carried them into the house in his sandals.

  “Jack? Jack, what are you doing here?”

  If I thought that we’d embrace at this meeting, we didn’t. Perhaps it was the long trip up from Abidjan on the bus. But perhaps it was something else. Cathy looked very good in a blouse and jeans; she’d had her hair braided since I’d last seen her, her face was colored with sun.

  “Did something happen in Abidjan?” I asked from across the table as we waited for Bamba to come from the kitchen with the food.

  “Nothi
ng happened in Abidjan, Jack.”

  “Then you must be tired.”

  “I’m not tired.”

  “It’s good to see you, Cathy,” I said, trying still.

  “Jack, what are you doing? Why have you come here and done all this?”

  I looked at my fingers holding the stem of my wineglass as Bamba came with the last steaming trays, and then, to do something, I lifted up the bottle that had spent the afternoon breathing. I reached across to pour for Cathy, but she covered her glass with her hand. The candlelight sparkled in her eyes, and she was beautiful.

  “You don’t want wine?”

  “Bamba’s a Muslim. He doesn’t drink.”

  I held the bottle in my hand, wanted to say, ‘What does Bamba matter?’ Then I looked at him where he stood waiting to attend to us in his robe. For the first time, I understood how handsome he was.

  “Jack,” Cathy said, “there was no way to send word to you, even if I’d thought I’d had to. I didn’t plan it. Neither of us did. It just happened. Things happen like this.”

  “I will serve,” Bamba said.

  “Sit down, Bamba,” I said, taking the spoon from him. As I filled their plates, I said softly, “You both know that I’m sorry.”

  For a long while, we were quiet, as though wondering what to do now. But the food was good, and as we ate, I let the embarrassment pass from me. Finally, I laughed aloud, shook my head, and looked up from my plate to see them blushing. What was left but to be happy, to share food, to sit together in friendship, to be glad that life was just the way it was, and that here now for a change, people were getting it right.

  WU DIDI

  Wu’s story was simple: He’d come to West Africa from Shanghai in search of a better life. Chinese herbalists had established themselves in the major cities over the past decade; Wu’s cousin was one of these, and he brought Wu over. Nearly every major and minor city of Ivory Coast had a Chinese herbalist but Séguéla. So Wu, with the help of his cousin, set up his practice there.

  For the first few months, he didn’t do anything but hire a local teacher to tutor him in the rudiments of West African French, and spend piles of his cousin’s CFA entertaining the city’s functionaries in the bars. Then he hung his shingle in the marketplace, and the patients began to come. Mostly they were soldiers and teachers who had contracted venereal diseases from the local prostitutes. They knew their names would get out if they went to the town’s hospital, so instead they went to Wu and he cured them with acupuncture and erythromycin. Even the two Ivorian doctors came in now and again with embarrassing rashes. On weekends, Wu would ride his mobylette into the villages and treat the chiefs and their sons for these same maladies, at prorated village prices. His practice thrived, and, soon enough, he was able to send to China for his wife and son.

  Wu became my friend out of the necessity of our foreignness, and in bits and pieces over the years, he revealed to me the totality of his misfortunes. I’d seen the wife around before I’d ever gotten to know Wu, was always surprised by the sight of that petite Chinese woman in a tight pink wrap mincing about the crowded Séguéla market on clogs that kept her elevated above the fish heads and mud, a pink parasol opened above her head like a flower to protect her from the sun. In her wraps, she was as decorous as a rose in brambles. Wherever she went, she was followed by a long train of market children singing, “Chinese woman! Chinese woman!” and by mangy and homeless dogs who were attracted, perhaps, by her strange scent. I was glad to see her because not only did her presence in that obscure market give me a pleasant shock but, also, she was even more alien there than I was. Whenever we’d cross paths, the children who’d been following me shouting, “Whiteman! Whiteman!” would abandon me to join her entourage. I understood that her life in Africa must have been hell.

  “Peiching hated it here,” Wu told me the night he revealed that part of the story. We were in his house drinking warm beer, playing poker for the shrimp tails that remained from our dinner. At that time, Wu was utterly alone, his house big and empty around him. “Everywhere she went, the children followed. In the market, the women always wanted to touch her skin. I hired a tutor to teach her French, but she never picked it up. Not one word. Her heart was in China. Whien Wen died, she was ruined. A few months later, she went home.”

  Wu showed me pictures of his wedding. Outside, it was a rainy night, and, for a change, Séguéla was quiet. When they were married, they had both been poor students, and the best honeymoon Wu could afford to give her was a trip to Beijing, where they stayed with his relatives. The picture showed them in a garden outside the Imperial Palace, and if that garden had been full of the colors of the flowers of that long-ago time, they had faded, like the rest of the picture, to sepia. Wu looked thin and young, a cigarette in his fingers, and his wife looked shy. They were both wearing jeans, and if I hadn’t known they were in China, they could just as easily have been a couple back home. Neither of them was smiling, but something in their rigid postures suggested an important event.

  Everyone in China warned Wu not to bring his son to Africa; Africa was full of danger and disease; there were too many risks for a family’s only child. But Wen and his father were close, always had been, and the boy decided to postpone university to follow his dad. Wu showed me pictures of his son, too, another time. Wen had been a tall boy, pale skinned and serious looking, his face neat and narrow like his mother’s, handsome; someone the world would belong to one day. He was standing in front of a jade Chinese lion in a snowy square somewhere in Xian. He wore a heavy wool coat, military issue, and the snowflakes rested on his shoulders like petals. As he showed me the picture under the naked bulb of his room, Wu said in a quiet voice, “I took him here for his graduation. To sightsee. To celebrate. One child in China. One son. Can you imagine? In a world of rain, one single drop to belong to you.”

  For how difficult Africa had been for his mother, Wen took to it as though he’d been waiting his whole life for the release that it was. He was just eighteen when he came, and for whatever reason, the Africans took him in as though they’d been waiting for him as well. He played basketball with the soldiers’ sons every evening at the stadium court, he borrowed his father’s mobylette and disappeared into the bush for days with friends at the slightest rumor of a mask dance. He ate fried plantain chips from the street vendors, put away his leather shoes and wore foam flip-flops that he bought in the market. He went swimming in the distant Marahoué River, worked in the fields with people he barely knew for fun. In three months, he was speaking Worodougou as if he’d been born to it.

  Every warning of his father about intestinal parasites, bilharzia, melanoma; about AIDS and the local girls, he laughed away. Six months after he’d stepped off the bus in Séguéla on a dusty Sunday with his mother nervous beside him, Wen had a local girlfriend, and two months after that, he told his father that the girl was pregnant. It had been the first hard rain of the season, and for the only time in his life, Wu struck his son. Who knows why? Perhaps it was the stress of worrying about the boy, perhaps the mounting difficulties of his own psychic isolation in a foreign land, perhaps his frustration with the corrupt Ivorian government, which always had a new document he had to buy, a new tax to pay. Perhaps it was all of these. Whatever the reason, Wu slapped his son again and again like beating him on that porch that opened onto the market, and even though it was raining, people watched this exchange between the Chinese men from every doorway, called to their friends, and laughed.

  Wu said, “What sort of life will a half-black have in China?”

  Wen shouted back at his father from the rain, “I live here now! I’m never going back to China!”

  Wu ran out to grab Wen’s arm, and Wen shook free, ran off into the night. For three months, there wasn’t any word, and halfway through the fourth, a messenger came from the girl’s village beyond Mankono, where the couple had fled. The messenger was a poor man in village rags. He never looked up into Wu’s eyes as he broke the news he’d car
ried with him: Wen was dead.

  As I looked at the photos of the tall and serious boy with snowflakes on his shoulders who was dead, I said to Wu, “What happened to him there?”

  “It’s Africa. Who knows what happened? Here, we sleep under nets. There, he was living in a hut. He wasn’t on any medication. It could have been malaria. It could have been cholera, typhoid, plague, or fever. They could have poisoned him. He was dead, that was all we knew. It took me three days to tell my wife. Still, I know that she knew. She wouldn’t talk to me, as though she was waiting. When I told her, she beat me. She blamed me for everything. A few weeks more and she went home. She said that she had made a mistake in choosing me for a husband. I can never go home now, do you understand? One child in China. The only possession of any value. They told me not to bring him here. Even if I went back, they would not forgive me.”

  My friendship with Wu developed cautiously. The weekends that I went in to Séguéla, I’d invariably meet Wu at the Club des Amis bar, beside the remnants of the Catholic church that had been burned in the uprising when I’d first arrived. For over a year, I knew Wu only as someone I drank with: the strange Chinese doctor who’d somehow ended up in this backwater, who chain-smoked cigarettes as though they were the secret to life, who wouldn’t ever let me pay for drinks, as though trying to buy my camaraderie with them. None of the other relief workers of the region befriended him because his French was incredibly difficult to understand, and also, when they would come in to Séguéla from their villages, they were looking to get drunk in peace. I wanted this as well, but Wu sought me out. When I got used to his style of speaking French, I began to look forward to seeing him. He was educated and knew the world. We’d have long and drunken debates about Tiananmen, Kent State, the spy plane, 9/11, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and the future relations of our countries. It was much better in the end than drinking alone. Often we’d go back to his three-room place on the edge of the market, drink some last beers that we’d brought with us, and begin to watch an old Jackie Chan movie on his portable DVD player. I’d wake in the morning on a wicker mat, under a sheet he’d covered me with, and for over a year, I had no idea that his wife had recently gone for good, or that his son had died. I also didn’t understand that it was in his son’s room that he’d put me to bed.