And that is how it happened, that after taking photos and exchanging addresses and hugs and promises to write, Miguel and I left our newfound family and walked briskly through the narrow streets with this new Abdelati as our guide, until we arrived at the home of our old friend Abdelati just as the last orange streak of the sunset was fading into the indigo night. There, I threw myself into the arms of that dear and lovely young man, exclaiming, “I thought we’d never find you!”
After greetings had been offered all around, and the two Abdelatis had shared stories and laughter, we waved goodbye to our new friend Abdelati and entered a low, narrow hallway, lit by kerosene lamps.
“This is my mother,” said Abdelati.
And suddenly I found myself caught up in a crush of fabric and spice, gripped in the tight embrace of a completely veiled woman, who held me and cried over me and wouldn’t let me go, just as if I were her own daughter, and not a stranger she’d never before laid eyes on in her life.
2
Dirty Laundry
Sometimes I think I’ll never go back to the U.S. The words are seductive, and once in a while I play them in my head, a tantalizing refrain: never go back, never go back. Of course it’s all drama, because what do you fill that “never” with? You still have to spend the rest of your life somewhere.
I couldn’t escape Michael. My time in Morocco, consuming as it was, had not erased the memory of our parting. He’d held me so tightly at the airport that I could feel his heart knocking against the wall of his slender chest. He wouldn’t let go until they’d called final boarding three times. When I finally managed to pull away, he ducked his head in embarrassment, his eyes leaking tears.
I blamed myself for leaving, but I blamed him, too. In recent months, he’d started talking marriage, and talk of marriage made me extremely uncomfortable. He knew this, but he wouldn’t stop.
After countless hours of negotiations, accusations, recriminations, and apologies, we’d agreed to leave things open while I was away. We’d stay in touch, of course, but we were free to see other people, and there were no guarantees on either side about what would happen when I returned. The length of my trip was indefinite; I didn’t want to feel constrained by the idea that he was waiting for me.
I hadn’t counted on the wiliness of memory. I’d go almost an entire day without thinking of him, and then I’d turn a corner and there he’d be, his sudden, cheeky grin reflected in the face of a policeman or trinket hawker, his loose-limbed walk adorning a museum guard. His letters arrived at the Moroccan work camp every few days. Each one was quintessentially Michael: quirky, humorous, tender, filled with misspellings and the whimsical poetry of daily life. Although reading them made me homesick and confused, I felt anxious and impatient on days when they didn’t arrive. I tried to keep a tone of neutrality in the ones I sent back—to let him know that I missed him without raising false expectations. It was a difficult line to walk.
I arrived in West Africa tired and cranky. I hadn’t slept well the night before, and Abdelati’s six-year-old sister had burst into my room at five-thirty in the morning with a pot of tea. The flight itself had been an exercise in nausea control.
A con artist accosted me in front of the airport in Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast. He’d emerged from a small army of men who hovered outside the sliding glass doors of the baggage claim, jockeying for the attention of travelers. He was a slim African man in his early twenties, dressed in what a cynical volunteer once called “third world chic”—dark blue jeans with bright orange stitching up the sides and a carefully pressed St. Louis Cardinals T-shirt. I made the mistake of meeting his eyes. After that, there was no shaking him.
“Bonjour, Madame. My name is Jean-Pierre. Let me take you to your hotel. They know me; I will help you to get a better price,” he said to me in French.
“I’ve got no money for you, okay, pas d’argent.”
“I don’t want your money. I help you choose the hotel. If I bring you there myself, they give me commission.”
“I already know which hotel I’m going to.”
A boozy expat on the plane had looked through my guidebook and steered me away from the hotel I’d circled in Treicheville, the “African” quarter.
“Too dangerous,” he’d said. “Stay in the Central Section, or at least here, this one’s right next to the Central Section.” He poked a stubby finger at the page. “Anywhere else, they’ll sniff you out and rob you in a New York minute.” He laughed.
Although I pegged him as a racist, I decided to go with his suggestion for my first few nights. Later I would stay in the African parts of town. I hadn’t come to Africa to avoid Africans.
I got into a taxi. Jean-Pierre was next to my open window, still talking.
“Please,” he said. “This is how I live. I show tourists to the hotel, I get commission.”
“I’m not a tourist. I’m on my way to do some volunteer work in Ghana.”
“You pay nothing! The hotel, they pay.”
I sighed, and taking that as a yes, he got in. The taxi took off without setting the meter or agreeing on a price.
“Wait,” I said, “attend,” and Jean-Pierre, sitting beside me, repeated the phrase in a local language. How could an airport taxi driver not speak French?
“Tell him he has to set the meter,” I told Jean-Pierre. I’d read this in my guidebook: “In Abidjan, make sure they set the meter.”
He spoke to the driver, who just kept driving. Then he turned to me.
“There is no need,” he said. “He knows the price.”
“There is a need,” my voice grew shrill, “because if he doesn’t set it, I’m getting out.”
“Small, small.” He laughed, making a calming gesture with his hand. He spoke to the driver some more. The driver barked with laughter, then slapped the meter. It came on, its electronic digits bright and reassuring. I settled back in my seat.
I was too tired to take in the rows of dilapidated wood and cardboard shacks and the women wrapped in bright, dissonant cloth with bundles on their heads. Too weary to crane my neck at the colorful markets with their expanse of tables piled high with everything from vegetables to virility potions to auto parts. I’d traveled enough in the “developing world” that these things seemed strangely familiar. Even the thick tropical vegetation reminded me of someplace else. Jesus, I thought, what’s happened to me? It’s my first day in sub-Saharan Africa and already I’m bored.
I did notice the peeing, though. It seemed every man in the city had sought out the most conspicuous corner he could find on which to urinate. Again and again I saw them, poised like statues in that telltale wide-legged stance, facing the wall. I leaned back in my seat.
There’s a river around central Abidjan, like a moat. As we approached the bridge to enter the downtown area, the driver suddenly swerved into a gravel parking lot.
“Ici,” said the driver.
A hand-painted wooden sign reading “Hôtel” was propped against the door of an enormous stone rectangle of a building. The windows on the ground floor were boarded up.
“Are you sure this place is open?” I asked Jean-Pierre.
“Bien sûr!” He jumped out and opened my door.
I paid the driver and he peeled off, covering me in dust.
Jean-Pierre grabbed my backpack and headed through the door.
“Improvements,” he said, gesturing at the boarded-up windows.
The stairway was narrow and dark after the bright gray outdoors. We climbed two flights and entered a deserted lobby with dirty green carpeting, a sagging sofa, and a counter that looked like a bar. At least there were windows—that stairwell made me feel claustrophobic.
A man popped up behind the counter as though he’d been crouched there, waiting. He did not seem to know Jean-Pierre. I told him I’d like a room and asked the price. Before he could answer, Jean-Pierre jumped in, speaking to him in the local language. The man answered him curtly. He turned his attention to me.
“Please, the cost is 4,000 CFA,” he said. The price, roughly thirteen dollars, was slightly more than the guidebook said. Expensive for this part of the world, but I was prepared to splurge on my first night. He reached under the bar and got a key and a form to fill out. I was ready to drop from exhaustion.
“Can I put my things in my room?” I asked. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Please,” the man at the desk said. Jean-Pierre accompanied me down a short, unlit hallway.
“See,” he said proudly. “I got you a good price.”
I said nothing. I dumped my things, locked the room, and headed back to the desk. I had two things on my mind: shower and laundry. I hadn’t done laundry since the volunteer project ended, and all my clothes were stuffed in my backpack in fetid lumps.
I paid the man at the desk, who introduced himself as Adjin. I thanked Jean-Pierre, and turned toward my room.
“Pardon,” said Jean-Pierre, “you have forgotten my commission.”
“Jean-Pierre,” I said, “you told me the hotel pays the commission.”
“No! You pay the special, low price. Then you pay me commission. I got you a good price.”
I turned to Adjin.
“Did you give me a special price?” I asked.
Adjin frowned, and Jean-Pierre burst into a string of words. Adjin ignored him.
“You paid the regular price,” he told me.
“You see,” I said to Jean-Pierre, “I don’t owe you anything.”
“But I have helped you to get here!”
I handed him 300 CFA. “Goodbye,” I said.
“Uh!” He made a high-pitched sound of disbelief.
“Jean-Pierre, I’m tired. You said you didn’t want anything from me. That is enough.”
I refused to feel guilty about the pained, vexed look in his eyes. Michael would’ve given him more money, even if he knew he was being ripped off. He was like that, generous as rain, giving of himself until there was nothing left. It was healthy to move the money through, he said, otherwise you got constipated. Consequently, I sometimes had to loan him the rent.
I went to my room, shut the door, and locked it. It was a basic room: a single bed with a mosquito net hanging above it, suspended from the ceiling by a rope and a wooden ring. A ceiling fan, a wooden chair, a tiny barred window facing a cement wall. But the bathroom held an overhead shower with running water, albeit cold. That was more than I’d had in a month. I showered, lay down on my bed, and slept.
When I emerged in the late afternoon, I asked Adjin if he knew of a place where I could do my laundry. I’d spent much of the last month on my knees in the dirt, and my light-colored cotton clothes were covered with ground-in grit. I’d scrubbed and scraped at them, but it had done nothing to lighten the dingy gray. I figured that in Abidjan, which the guidebook called the “gleaming high-rise capital” of Ivory Coast, I’d treat myself to a spin with a washing machine.
Adjin told me there was a woman connected with the hotel who would do the laundry for me.
“How much will it cost?” I asked him.
“Let me see the items.”
I plopped the bag on the counter.
“It’s not so much,” I said. “A skirt, a shirt, a pair of pants. . . .” I pulled the pieces out one by one. “And a bunch of little stuff.” I waved my hand toward the underwear and socks at the bottom.
Adjin looked the items over, then said, “It will cost you 500 CFA. You can collect them this evening.”
I headed downtown to change money. As I walked across the bridge, I looked down and saw a man standing on the stony riverbank, peeing into the river. I decided to leave for Ghana and my next volunteer project as soon as possible.
I walked among Abidjan’s rectangular high-rises, none of which gleamed. The air was humid as the Moroccan bathhouse, the temperature pushing a hundred degrees. Raw sewage ran down the side of the street, its odor mingling with exhaust and the faint scent of rotting vegetables. Next to the gutters, women sat stirring large metal pots of pale mush over charcoal burners or roasting skewers of gristly meat. They grabbed at my arm as I went by, scolding me in French, “Venez, venez.” Come.
I didn’t want to come. I didn’t want to touch their food, let alone eat it. I wanted to go home. But that was a place—and a person—to which I might never go back.
Getting service in the bank required assertiveness. Crowds of Africans and foreigners roiled around the windows with no semblance of a line. After spending half an hour in their midst with no visible progress, I began to push. As I braced my body against the human mass, a voice next to my ear croaked in melodic English, “Now you get the idea.”
I looked up at a towering Italian with curly silver hair, a Jimmy Durante nose, and a vocal cadence that made every statement a punch line. His name was Luigi, and he was vacationing in West Africa with two friends, all of them members of the Italian left, formerly the Communist party. He offered me a ride to Accra, the capital of Ghana.
“Don’t take the bus,” he said. “The buses are horrible. Filthy and crowded. Always breaking down.”
“Not very proletarian of you,” I said.
He looked startled for a moment, then bellowed with hilarity.
“When I make holiday, I become bourgeois!”
I’d thought to take public transportation and meet locals, but there’d be plenty of time for that in Ghana. I agreed to meet Luigi and his friends at their hotel the next morning.
That night the laundry wasn’t back.
“She will bring it tomorrow morning,” said Adjin.
“What time?” I asked, “because I’m meeting some friends at ten.”
“Fine, fine.”
The next morning, Adjin said, “She will bring it soon. Sit and wait. Small, small.” He laughed, making the same calming gesture with his hand that Jean-Pierre had made in the taxi. “Give me your address, and when you are back in your country, we will write to each other.”
I looked at him in surprise. We hadn’t exchanged ten words, and now he wanted to write to me?
“I’ll give it to you when I get the laundry,” I told him. I decided to meet the Italians and come back later.
“Where do you go now?” Adjin asked.
“I told you I was meeting friends at ten.” I looked at my watch. “It’s ten.”
Adjin really laughed at that one.
“You people,” he said at last, wiping his eyes, “you live by the clock.”
An hour later, I pulled up to the hotel in the back of a rented Peugeot. Luigi and his friends got a tremendous kick out of the boarded-up windows and the hand-painted “Hôtel” sign. I felt oddly slighted by their derision.
“They’re doing some repairs,” I explained huffily as I climbed out.
At the top of the stairs, Adjin greeted me with a beaming smile.
“The laundry is here,” he announced triumphantly.
“Do I get a discount for lateness? Just kidding.”
He handed me the bill. The total was 1,700 CFA.
“Hey,” I said. “This isn’t what we agreed on! You said 500.”
Adjin shrugged. “I didn’t see everything. All the slips.”
Every pair of underwear was itemized by the word “slip.”
“Well, I showed you what was here. This is more than three times what you said it would be.”
He shrugged again.
“This is what the woman charges.”
This wasn’t right. I had to resist this stuff. Not give in to guilt. Otherwise I’d be taken for a ride every step of the way. I’d seen it happen often enough.
“I’m going to pay what we agreed on,” I said. “Five hundred CFA.”
“But the price, it is not up to me,” said Adjin. “It is the woman who does the laundry. If you don’t give it to me, I must pay her from my own pocket.”
“You should have thought of that when you quoted me a price. I can’t afford this.” I slapped the bill. “If I’d known it would be this muc
h I would have washed it myself.”
“Oh!” he said, with some surprise.
“I’m not rich, you know. I’m not a tourist. I’m a volunteer.”
“Why don’t you stay and speak to her yourself. She will come soon.”
“I can’t stay,” I said, exasperated. “My friends are waiting for me in the car.” I paid him the 500 CFA and turned to go. The laundry, folded and wrapped in brown paper, was heavy in my hands.
“It’s a little damp,” he said. Then he called after me, “You forget.”
I turned around. He had a big smile on his face.
“You have forgotten to leave me your address.”
I didn’t understand this guy at all. Sighing, I went to the bar and wrote out my address.
“Are you sure you will not speak to her?” he asked as I left.
I set the laundry beside me on the back seat as we drove away from the hotel. I refused to feel guilty. 1,700 CFA was over five dollars—not a lot at home, but a small fortune here. I didn’t want to be a dumb tourist, conned and conned again. If I was going to draw this trip out as long as I hoped to, every dollar counted.
“What is the matter, comrade?” Luigi asked jovially. “The cat has captured your tongue?”
As we pulled out of town we passed a broad hillside, completely covered in laundry. Shirts, pants, dresses, and bedsheets were spread across the high grasses as far as the eye could see. In the river below, women knelt on flat rocks, wringing and scrubbing, their bodies swaying back and forth. Suds drifted lazily downstream in the brown water.
Ivory Coast is one of the wealthier countries in West Africa, and the roads are very well kept. Our Peugeot wound its way over smooth black tarmac amid a spectacular tropical tangle: festooning vines, palms with wide, flat leaves, gangly saplings with frizzy heads. Men and women tromped along the sides of the road, carrying bundles of sticks and baskets of bananas on their heads. In the midafternoon we stopped at a restaurant, ducking beneath the thatched overhang just as the rain hit. For a moment I thought of Michael, how he loved that time of day, the way the greens and yellows popped out in the dying light. I drank orange Fanta from a rusty-necked bottle and munched popcorn as the boys played checkers. And for a moment, I touched something . . . happiness? Why here? Why now? Why did I run halfway across the globe if this was all it took—just to sit, in the company of others, with rain, laughter, mild air, fragrant earth?
Somebody's Heart Is Burning Page 2