Whiteman

by Tony D'Souza

  What I finally wondered was this: Had her heart been broken? Did she feel the loss of Wen as much as Wu did?

  Wu came to my village one Friday afternoon when the witch doctor was off hunting and everyone else was occupied at the mosque with prayers. I was sitting outside my hut eating the seasons last guavas, and some small children led him to me, running before where he followed on his mobylette. The children were naked, potbellied, crusts dried under their noses; they stood quietly a short distance away from us as though stunned by malnutrition and fatigue. Wu parked his bike, looked at me in my field rags, peered inside the gloom of my hut, grunted. “It’s a wonder,” he said, “that you are not dead, too.”

  Wu looked neat. He was clean shaven, his hair had been cut. The wrecked and humiliated man I’d seen groveling in the bars the past months had somehow been returned to the doctor I had once known. “I need a favor, Jack. I’ve never asked you for anything. Now I need your help. They have the girl in the Mankono jail. My money’s gone. I need to borrow 100,000 CFA, a document fee. But I also need a witness. Someone must sign that I am Didi’s legal guardian. No one in Séguéla will do this for me. If you won’t do it, then they will release her and I will never have my grandson.”

  Of course I did not want to have to make this decision. With everyone away, there was no one to lend me support, to make an excuse as to why I couldn’t go. There was simply a thin, middle-aged man from China who had once been my friend, and some naked children staring at us numbly, not even blinking.

  For a long moment, I didn’t say anything. Wu looked away, and the children stared at me like a council of judges. The sky was blue, the day yellow. I set down the guava, went into my hut, took off my field clothes, and pulled on my green boubous. I slipped my identity papers in my pocket. When I went out, Wu kick-started his mobylette, and I got on behind him. “Tell the chief I’ve gone to Mankono. I will be back tomorrow, inshallah.”

  The children nodded grimly. The oldest girl said in her delicate voice, “Allah ee kissee, Adama.” ‘God bless your route.’

  Wu waited outside the bank with his mobylette running, and when I came out, I gave him the money. Then he rode us through the dusty streets to the courthouse, and the soldier at the gate told us the judge was in the bar. At the bar, the judge in his purple suit was drinking whiskey at a table of soldiers. The music was loud and they were all laughing. They laughed anew at me in my boubous when we approached: a whiteman dressed as a Muslim. In a minute, the judge wiped his mouth dry with a cloth napkin, grew serious, and said, “Bon. Do you have the money, Wu?”

  Wu handed him the stack. The judge flipped through it quickly, tossed two soiled bills of it on the table, then folded the wad into his inner breast pocket. He put on his mirrored sunglasses, said something to the soldiers in Baoulé, and then we went out to where the driver waited in his black Mercedes.

  The ride out to Mankono from Séguéla was long and silent. Even with the air on, it was hot in the car, and the judge in front in his suit smelled of his sweet cologne: lilac. The road was red and dusty, the savanna wide and dry around it, a flat yellow plain. There were no other vehicles on the road at all, and in the few villages we passed, people stood up from their labors to peer at the car’s tinted windows.

  “You’ll witness for him?” the judge said to me as we sat in the car at the Marahoué ferry crossing, the old bargeman poling us across the dirty river on the oil-drum raft.

  “I will,” I told him.

  “Never in my life could I have imagined this: both a whiteman and a Chinaman in my car at the same time. It was very good that you brought your son to Africa, Wu. So many unexpected things this decision has brought all of us.”

  In Mankono, a soldier opened the gates of the jail and we drove through in a cloud of dust. Chickens scratched in the dry yard, and the office was bare and hot, a metal desk beneath a metal fan. The judge dictated to the gendarme at the typewriter, who worked carefully and deliberately in his uniform. On the wall above him was a picture of the current general-president looking just as pleased in his suit and sash as he did on the nation’s postage stamps. Beyond the door was the hallway of cells. Now and again, a yell sounded behind it.

  A photographer came from the town on a bicycle and took Wu’s picture against the bare wall. Wu didn’t smile. The judge stamped and signed the documents, then he called Wu to sign, and then me. The documents seemed ornate enough, colorful with the blue ink of the round stamp, and I didn’t bother reading what they said. The photographer, a Dioula in threadbare slacks, asked permission of the judge to leave, but the judge told him to take another picture. He had me stand on one side of him, and Wu on the other. “A white, a yellow, and a black,” the judge said, and then the picture was taken.

  “Now may I go, patron’?” the photographer asked, inching toward the door. Wu gave him some coins from his pocket, said, “One of me and my friend.” He held my hand as the photographer took our picture. Again, we didn’t smile.

  The gendarme barked for the soldier to come in from outside, gave him the thick ring of keys. The soldier went into the hallway of cells through the door, and I heard a tumbler turn, a metal door creak open. Then the soldier pushed a small Worodougou girl in by the shoulder. Her feet were bare, her wraps were dirty, and she didn’t look at any of us. Something in her downcast eyes said that she’d had enough. In her arms she held a small boy, who blinked at the daylight streaming in from the window. His skin was the color of tea, his eyes were Chinese, and his hair was straight and black. He was a handsome boy, delicate and frightened, wearing khaki shorts and a collared shirt as though dressed for an occasion.

  “No problems now, muso,” the judge pointed his thick finger and said to her, “and you’ll be free to go. Understand?” She nodded. The gendarme lifted the child from her by the arm, and the boy clung to her wrap, began to cry. He set the child on the desk, pushed the girl out into the yard with the stock of his rifle. Through the window, I could see him push her all the way out through the gates and onto the street.

  Wu called to his grandson in a tender voice, offered out his arms like coaxing a reluctant pet. I thought for an instant that Didi would cry, but he didn’t. Perhaps he’d had enough as well. The gendarme passed Didi to Wu, and Wu held the child close to him, petted his hair, kissed the top of his head. He spoke softly to the boy in Chinese, and Didi set his arms around his grandfather’s neck as though tired.

  From the window of the car as we left, I saw the girl standing alone on the roadside, watching us go. She looked like any of the poor women there, but prettier, a small thing in the crowd. I assumed she would cry out, chase us. But she held her shawl closed at the neck, and then a line of women in colorful wraps came with basins of water on their heads, and the girl was lost among them, and in the swirling dust the car had left behind.

  For a while, Didi complained and kicked, and then he was asleep. Wu closed his eyes and held him, oblivious now to the bumps in the road, to the film reel of Africa outside the window, which for him was becoming memory.

  In a few weeks, the photographer came out all the way from Mankono to my village on a bicycle to present me with the picture of Wu and me at the Mankono jail. I asked if he had news of the girl, but he shook his head. Then he tucked the money I offered him into the pocket of his shirt, mounted his bicycle, and left. In the picture, Wu and I both looked more severe than we did in life, taller. That we’d been holding hands didn’t make it into the frame.

  There was a certified envelope for me from Abidjan at the Séguéla post office the next time I went in, and I waited until I was back in my hut to open it. Along with the money, Wu included a brief note, which someone had typed in French for him. The Chinese embassy had arranged a visa for Didi, they would soon be leaving for Shanghai. “Things are good now,” he wrote. “What small thing I could have salvaged from this nightmare, I have.” He thanked me for what I’d done for him, wished me the best. If I was ever to visit Queens, New York, I must visit his sis
ter. If ever in Shanghai, I must see him.

  Time passed, the war drew close. Everyone was thinking now, about what would happen to the country, about what would happen to the village and how they would survive it. I was thinking, too. Somewhere, in the bush beyond Mankono, a young girl gazed at these same stars and wondered after her son. Somewhere in a tenement in Shanghai, a boy grew taller each day, learned better in a new language how to articulate to his grandfather his needs now for rice, for candy, for juice, for toys, and soon enough, for his father, as well as his mother.

  SOGBO’S WIFE

  I remember a fight in the village. This was on a harvest night when the moon was full like a great silver coin, and the tall mask—the stilt-walker—had appeared in the witch doctor’s compound, fortune-telling for rice and change, then dancing to the young men’s drums, turning and leaping on those stilts like a great crane. Later, after the second harvest was stored in the granaries and the hot and dry harmattan wind had begun to blow, the leopard and crocodile masks would moan in the night, crawling on their bellies in the light of the great bonfire like beasts scenting the air for flesh, but this night, the moon was round, the land was moist, the first rice and cassava had been gathered, and the tall mask had made everyone happy. There would be a short lull in the field work now, and the sense of ease and festivity was general.

  Perhaps for this reason, Gaussou, Bébé’s arrogant older brother, thought to pay a visit to his third wife, the new one he’d taken as part of a debt settlement between his father and hers. Gaussou hadn’t yet expressed much interest in the new girl. She was skinny like a chicken, her nose was thin, her eyes were narrow, and her teeth were set tightly in her mouth so her face resembled a beak. Gaussou often complained about this to anyone who would listen. But the air of the times was light, and perhaps he thought, Why not? She’s terribly ugly, but she’s my wife after all. Why not perform my duty and allow her the honors of a married woman?

  Long after everyone else had gone to bed, Gaussou roused himself, went and pushed on the door of her hut, was surprised to find it latched. He put his ear to the planks to hear if she was sleeping. He heard moans instead. His wife was giving pleasure to herself! With a carrot or slender sweet potato, women in need were rumored to do this. But what a waste of life energy, what an insult to the ancestors! If only he had known, he would have come to her hut more regularly. Yes, the girl was ugly. But what did that matter in the face of duty?

  Gaussou listened more intently, grew aroused at the sounds his new wife was making. He imagined her writhing on her mat, the carrot between her legs. Her plastic bridal beads were white as cowries around her hips, and it was only in this way that Gaussou finally understood the great beauty of his third wife’s long thighs, supple belly. He parted his evening wrap, took his erection in his hand. Yes, this was a great sin, too, but listening to the girl moan, he could not help it. Suddenly, he was on the verge of eruption. He shouldered in the door, stripped off his wrap and said, “Remove the carrot, wife! I am going to possess you.”

  In the darkness of her hut, he fell on her to mount her, thrust his penis vigorously between her legs. A male voice yelped: Gaussou was prodding the buttocks of the boy who was fucking his wife. All three tumbled apart, found their feet, ran out of the hut. For their part, the lovers, anxious in their hearts already, assumed they were under attack by a genie. Gaussou, for his part, understood instantly that his name had been ruined beyond repair: Not only had he been cuckolded, but his mogo had touched another man’s anus. Naked, he began to beat the boy, and after taking a few blows, the boy began to fight back. He was the blacksmith’s fourth son, and his arms were muscled from endless hours turning the bellows’ crank. The wife, Shwalimar, began to scream at the top of her lungs, because, at times like these, everyone must do something.

  We all ran out into the silver moonlight at the commotion. Newly roused from my dreams, I had the impression that the village was covered in snow. People were in all states of disarray and dress: Women were bare breasted, men wore only sleeping shorts. Even I was nearly nude; my chest bare, my long legs bare. No one stopped to take in the sight of me.

  I have rarely seen anything so vicious. We were humbled, quieted, by the fury with which the men fought. How strange, how awesome to see the primal rage of two furious men who weren’t wearing any clothes. Gaussou’s brothers jumped in, hitting the boy repeatedly in the face until it leaked like a cracked melon, a swollen mass of liver. Then the blacksmith’s sons arrived, and the fight was a general rumble of elbows and grunts, of locked forearms and teeth. In the moonlight, it was like looking at a living field of marble statues, hoplites, in battle. The night was punctuated with the root consonants of human language: chokes and shouts. The women of the two families scratched each other’s faces, pulled hair; soon men punched women, women leaped on and bit men. Even the dogs snarled and cursed.

  The chief’s sons came running with braided cattle whips, cracking them in the night, applying lashes liberally, and the melee began to be subdued. But then even the chief’s sons fell into a lust for it. Soon they were running about, whipping people who hadn’t been involved. It was pandemonium, people running in circles at three in the morning, the whips cracking like the end of the world. Then the chief himself arrived with his staff, his withered limbs. With a voice much louder than that body had a right to produce, he shouted, “A banal A man-yee! Dougoutigi a nah! A banal An Allah a nua laka?” ‘It’s finished! Evil people, your chief is before you. Would you open God’s eyes onto us?’

  Of course there was a history to it, not between the boy and Gaussou per se, but between this man and that, this old woman and her neighbor, between old lovers, or the parents who had sold your true love to someone else for two chickens and a wicker hat. There were always lingering debts, festering for generations. It was life in the village.

  In the end, the boy was driven into the forest then and there, naked as he was, banished to whatever village would take him for two years on pain of death. The girl was carried into the forest by her husband’s women, her vagina stuffed with chili peppers. And Gaussou received kola nuts and a red hen from the blacksmith in compensation for his shame, though this would never be enough. When we’d see him walking to his hut in the evening, alone as all men are, Mamadou would swallow a mouthful of rice and whisper, “Remove the carrot, wife.”

  This was my last year in Tégéso, and soon a war would ruin that place and separate me from it forever, but then, that time was my favorite. I spoke the language, I practiced the customs as well as I ever would, and I lived in the village as a member of it. I was a man and a hunter. I’d grown my own fields, proven myself to the Worodougou in every way I thought I could. The reason I had come to the village—to find clean drinking water—felt like an old and confusing dream. I had gone here and there with Mamadou and taught people about AIDS, but really, I was simply there, my heart beating, my lungs taking in air, growing older as the sun rose and fell. I wondered if I had AIDS. The stars looked so wonderful to me at night. One day, maybe soon, I would take my place among them.

  One afternoon, the witch doctor and I went hunting for mongoose, which we both liked to eat. We crawled into a dense thicket in the forest where the leaf litter was a damp and warm humus, full of worms and grubs: what mongooses liked to eat. We sat with our backs to an old termite mound, held our shotguns, waited. The hours turned toward evening, and nothing came. The sun set, and still we stayed where we were. Then in the dark of night, I heard the flick of his lighter, smelled the cigarette smoke. I lit one, too.

  “Adama?”

  “Yes, Father?”

  “You’ve learned patience.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  “Before, I could feel your heart beating like a drum. Now you are like the air.

  “Adama, I am old now. Things have changed badly in the world. The world has become more than we can understand. These days, I like to come to the forest and simply look at it. The people come to me with th
eir ailments, fears, and I gather those things from them and bring them here. I give them to the forest, and then I go home to the village. I like to look at the small children eating dirt. Sometimes I take a pinch of dirt and eat it, too. You should go home, Adama. Be with your people; you should sit in your village and look at your children. Eat dirt. Gather your children’s fears, take them to your forest, sit, remark at the beauty.”

  “I will soon, Father,” I told him, and we crawled out of the thicket, followed the path home.

  The first time I noticed Mariam was in her hut. Her husband was visiting the village from Abidjan, and like all visitors, what he wanted to do before anything else was meet the whiteman. His name was Sogbo, and he was nice enough. He worked in a plastics factory in the city’s Adjamé quarter, punching out durable cups and bowls from a press. I didn’t ask him about his life in the city because I knew what it was like and didn’t want to make him lie: He lived in a squalid shantytown like all village men there did. Here now, he’d brought soap and a new pagne for his wife, held his small son on his knee as he watched me eat the plantain foutou and peanut sauce that he’d had his wife prepare to honor me. In the corner, his wife undid her top wrap in the lamplight, smoothed shea butter over her chest and breasts with her hands from a jar.

  “You really eat this food, Adama?” Sogbo said, and smiled under his thin mustache.

  “See,” I said, whisking a glob of that great treat through the peanut sauce, popping it in my mouth, “I’m eating it.”

  “But won’t you get sick and die if you eat black men’s food? The whitemen in Abidjan, they eat this thing, ‘chwarma.’ They eat this thing, ‘cheeseburger.’ Don’t you need to eat those things not to die?”