Somebody's Heart Is Burning

by Tanya Shaffer

  I shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Please. Let us agree. I will tell you a story of my friend, who met a genie, then you must tell me what you are.”

  I nodded and took a long swig of beer. I extended my hand. “Deal.”

  Gravely, he shook my hand. He looked at me for a long moment, then began:

  “He saw her here, at this bar, sitting alone at a table. She was a beautiful round African woman. She was dressed in expensive European cloth. He himself is so skinny, with one leg shorter than the other, and not rich. Normally he would never speak to a woman like that, but her eyes stopped on him, and she smiled and nodded her head. He went to her and offered to purchase a drink, but she said no. She asked if she could go home with him instead.

  “They walked to his house, but every time he reached for her hand, she said ‘laisse moi’ and pushed him away, just the way you pushed me away before. Every several steps she asked him, ‘Where is your house?’ He asked her why she was in such a hurry to get there, but she only said, ‘I need a place.’

  “When they finally arrived she almost ran to the door. Inside, he tried again to pull her next to him, and she went ‘ft!’ ” Here Jimmy made the sucking sound, violently, his hands in the air and his eyes wild.

  “Then she started undressing,” he continued. “She took off one skirt, then another and another and another, then blouses, one, two, three, until there was a pile of a hundred, two hundred skirts and blouses lying on the floor. The room was filling up and my friend could not breathe. He ran for the door, but the woman begged him not to leave. ‘Stay!’ she cried. ‘Stay with me!’

  “But my friend was too frightened. Even though she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, he opened the door and ran down the street to the house of his cousin. He remained in his cousin’s house for two weeks. Finally he went back to his place. Everything was normal. No clothing on the floor, nothing. But from that moment on he was impotent.

  “That is why if a woman says ‘don’t touch me,’ I don’t touch her. I don’t know what she is.”

  I gazed at Jimmy, entranced by his fine cheekbones, expressive eyes, and wide, elastic mouth. I gulped at my second beer.

  “Now,” he said, “You must tell me what you are.”

  “Oh . . . I don’t know,” I teased. “I don’t know if I can trust you with that information.”

  “Ma soeur!” he said eagerly, taking my hand. “Surely you can trust me. Have you ever in your life met a nicer person than me?”

  I nodded.

  “Where? In America? Ghana?”

  “Lots of places.”

  “Lots of places? No. There is no nicer person than me. How can you say someone is nicer than me? When you told me not to touch you didn’t I say, ‘yes, Madame’?”

  “Yes, but only because you were afraid of me. A really nice person doesn’t ask a woman to sleep with him when they’ve only known each other for five minutes. Especially not when she’s alone in a dark place.”

  “You must talk more quietly; you’re talking very loudly.” He eyed a portly man at the next table, who was staring at us with unmasked curiosity. “I was just making several options available to you,” he whispered. “You never know what a person wants to do. I said, do you want to go to the concert tomorrow, to the museum, shall I go with you to the market? You said no. I said you are very interesting, can I take you to bed? You said no to that, too. I said all right. I was only giving you choices.”

  My head was spinning from the beer, and I started to laugh. The day’s heat and exhaustion lifted off me, and I felt giddy and weightless. So what if I couldn’t find my hotel that night? I’d surely find it in the morning, when it was light. Perhaps I am a genie, I thought, full of hidden powers, and the thought made me feel sexy, reckless. Something moved inside, not unlike the sensation before an impulse purchase, a rash, against-my-better-judgment stirring, a heart-knock of desire. I was lonely, too— why not indulge once in a while? Whose outdated ethic governed me? What was I defending, and why? Here was Jimmy, a physically stunning man, and vital, creative, alive. I could almost feel the heat of his hands against my body, the long smooth journey of my fingers down his back. Oh God, it had been so long . . .

  I leaned forward and kissed his lips.

  “You want to know what I am?” I asked softly. I was about to follow it up with something flirtatiously ironic, when Jimmy quickly scooted back his bench and stood up.

  “Please,” he said, “The bartender, he knows all the hotels. He will help you. Please be kind. Don’t watch me. Don’t follow me. Please.”

  And Jimmy was down the street and around the corner before I could tell him that of all my roadside suitors he was the lucky winner—that I was no genie at all, just a tipsy human female ready to step off her pedestal and seek a little comfort far from home.

  13

  She Kept Dancing

  Sitting on buses and tro-tros, I find myself repeatedly telling strangers the story of my life. Sometimes, hearing myself talk, I feel as if I’m doing it more for my own benefit than for the hapless individual sitting beside me, listening with such polite attention. Some need seems to drive my narration, as if through the telling I’m constructing a self-image that I can anchor myself to and believe in. I want the events to be linear and the lessons cumulative, building on each other like Legos: this led me here, and I learned this, and then I was here, and I was lost, and I found this.

  Life, of course, was never so orderly. It was more like my long hair used to be after a ride in the open back of a truck: an ungovernable tangle. Growth wasn’t like that either. Growth happened when I wasn’t looking. It happened later, after I’d given up hope. And love wasn’t like that: so transparent and unequivocal, a balance sheet of pros and cons. Life was life and love was love. All the explanations came later.

  I hadn’t noticed Brigitte until we pulled up to the curb in downtown Ouagadougou and she leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder. “If you don’t have a place to stay during your visit,” she said with breathless timidity, “you are welcome in my house.”

  I was used to sudden changes in plans and to West Africans’ amazing, nearly overwhelming hospitality. I hadn’t planned to stop off in Burkina Faso’s sprawling capital, but I suddenly realized I needed to apply here for my Malian visa. It would be just my luck to arrive at the border and get turned away. Besides, after spending a largely sleepless night at the side of the road while our tro-tro driver went in search of a tire, I was in no mood to coninue traveling. My cream-colored T-shirt and olive skirt had turned road-dust gray, and my shorn hair—the only part of my body retaining any natural oils—was plastered to my scalp. Something new and odd was happening with my body, which for days had produced the sensation of sweating, though no actual moisture appeared. I felt like a kettle that rattles and shakes, but never quite manages to sing.

  I stood guard over Brigitte’s cloth-tied bundles while she used the phone box outside the upscale Hôtel de l’Indépendance to call her husband. Oceans of motos swerved around me. The air was thick with dust and exhaust, whipped about by the harmattan’s harsh gusts. The sunlight seemed to rob the landscape of depth, leaving it two-dimensional, like a painted set. Even with sunglasses on, the glare knit a hard ache behind my eyes.

  Driving north from Ghana, the terrain had grown gradually drier. The color of the dirt had shifted, little by little, from red and brown to tan to almost white. The streets, buildings, and grass of Ouaga (as I soon came to call it) appeared washed out, as though they had been dipped in a bucket of bleach.

  Brigitte was in her mid-twenties. She had a plump figure and a perky, impish face with round, shiny cheeks and eyebrows that leaped and danced when she spoke. She had managed to stay astoundingly clean on the journey from Bobo, where she’d gone to visit her cousin. Her bright orange and green print dress still looked freshly pressed. A matching cloth wrapped her head.

  “I’m bringing a friend home,” I he
ard her say. She paused for emphasis, then added, “a white friend,” her voice simmering with excitement.

  An expensive taxi ride took us from wide, heavily trafficked downtown boulevards lined with stately buildings to a gravel-paved neighborhood on the outskirts of town, where solid cinderblock houses with clean-swept dirt yards alternated with vacant lots filled with rubble. Goats nosed around in the debris, munching on garbage. Not the pygmy goats of Ghana, but lanky Burkina Faso goats, with drooping ears and tails, and doleful, basset hound eyes.

  Brigitte lived in one of the cinderblock rectangles with her husband—a midlevel customs official—their three children, and two servant girls. In the open-air bathroom, a mud wall separated the neatly swept section where a board covered a hole in the ground from the area where you carried your bucket of water to bathe. With a television, boom box, and telephone inside the house, it was a solid middle-class home.

  It was love at first sight for me and little Rod. She stood shyly at the gate with her three middle fingers in her mouth, twisting her upper body back and forth as the taxi pulled up. As I swung my bulky pack out of the roof rack, she was already at my side, and I swerved off-balance to avoid hitting her. When I flopped onto the couch in the tiny living room, she came and sat silently on my lap.

  Rod was five years old and had silky skin the color of fresh coffee grounds, kept creamy by her mother’s daily application of shea butter. Her small face was a perfect oval with grave, wide-set eyes so dark you couldn’t separate iris from pupil, and pouty, beautifully shaped lips which often hung slack in the unselfconscious gape of childhood. She seldom spoke, but always stayed within a few steps of me, often slipping a hand into mine as I sat writing or talking in the yard.

  “This one’s too quiet,” Brigitte said, holding Rod at arm’s length and brushing dust off her pink skirt with a brusque hand. “Here comes the smart one.” Her face lit up with a smile as a chubby two-year-old careened through the doorway with a stocky teenager following a step behind.

  “Lidia already speaks French, don’t you?” Brigitte said to the little one. “Tu parles français?”

  “Oui!” the baby shouted, and Brigitte laughed with delight. She barked a command at the teenager, who rushed out into the yard. “I’ve told her to get water for your bath,” Brigitte told me. Brigitte and I spoke French with each other, while she usually spoke to the children and servants in her native Mossi. She turned back to the crowing Lidia.

  “This one,” she said, smiling, “this is my girl.”

  Her son Constantin came home a few hours later, dragging a book bag behind him, his school uniform covered with mud.

  “Tintin!” Brigitte called sharply. “Did you greet our guest?”

  He slid to a halt in front of me, a nine-year-old bundle of kinetic energy: hands, knees, and feet all trembling to go.

  “Pleased to meet you,” he murmured, sneaking a glance from lowered eyes.

  “My pleasure,” I said.

  He flashed me a smile, dropped his bag in front of the couch, and took off running, out the door and through the gate.

  “Change your clothes,” Brigitte shouted as he tore around the corner. “Did you see him? That one is bad,” she said, sighing and shaking her head. “Bad.”

  Rod and Constantin shared a bedroom with two teenage servant girls, Nyanga and Yolan, while Lidia slept in a crib in her parents’ bedroom. I shared the large bed with Brigitte. I never met her husband, who arrived home that night after we went to bed, slept on the couch, and left early the next morning on a business trip. When I asked Brigitte about him, she simply shrugged her shoulders.

  “He’s not mean,” she said.

  I was struck by the difference in appearance between Brigitte’s children and the two servants. I knew that it was common in West Africa for middle-class people to have live-in servants, but this was the first time I’d witnessed it firsthand. While the two little girls had neatly braided hair, clean dresses in appropriate sizes, and sandals on their feet, Nyanga and Yolan walked around in faded sacklike prints, barefoot, their hair in fuzzy plaits that looked as though they hadn’t been touched in weeks.

  Yolan, the older girl, was seventeen years old, tall and robust, her affable face drawn in broad, clean lines. The other girl, Nyanga, was sixteen, according to Brigitte, but looked twelve. She stood about four foot ten, with slim hips and the barest hint of breasts. Her face was an impassive mask, eyes and lips locked in an expression of perpetual blankness. She looked as though she’d been through a war, and who knows? Maybe she had.

  I never heard Brigitte speak a gentle word to these girls. If she spoke to them at all, it was to bark out commands, often adding the words “lazy” or “stupid” at the end. Yolan took this in stride, her sense of herself secure and unflappable, but the shouts seemed to hit Nyanga’s small body like blows. At every insult she flinched, and her face grew more determinedly blank.

  When I asked Brigitte if Nyanga and Yolan had ever been to school, she said no. They were simple village girls, she told me; their families could not afford it. When I asked her what these village girls were doing in the city, she shrugged.

  “The big one’s parents have died, and her family cannot keep her. Her uncle knew my husband in the army; he asked him to help. The other girl came with her. She is very ‘shhhhh.’ ” She made a zipping motion with her lips. “No one learns a word from her.” She shrugged. “They are lucky to have employment. Many such girls end up selling themselves to whichever man walks down the street.”

  I wanted to speak to Brigitte about her treatment of them, but I didn’t know how, and I was wary of making things worse. I contented myself with indirect tactics, openly praising Nyanga and Yolan for their cooking, their washing, the care they took of the children. When I did this, Yolan giggled in embarrassment and Nyanga flashed a shy smile that completely transformed her appearance. Smiling, she revealed a classic African beauty, with her strong, narrow chin, high forehead, wide nose, and full lips.

  Sometimes Brigitte regarded me strangely, as though suspicious of my intent.

  “Don’t you think it’s a good idea to praise people when they do something well?” I asked cautiously.

  “Oh yes,” she said absently. “When someone does well you must tell him so.”

  Once Nyanga spilled water on the floor as she carried a bucket outside for my bath. After reprimanding her severely, Brigitte shook her head. “These girls,” she said, “they are lazy because I do not beat them.”

  “They don’t look lazy to me,” I said. “They seem to work very hard.”

  She shook her head. “At another house they would be beaten, but I am too soft with them, so they take advantage of me.”

  It was hard to imagine the cowering Nyanga taking advantage of a mosquito, but I held my peace.

  On my first full day in Ouagadougou, Brigitte and I wandered together through le Grand Marché, an enormous market housed in a blocky cement building. “It used to be outside, the African way,” Brigitte said with disdain.

  Brigitte wouldn’t let me pay for anything, insisting on playing the perfect hostess. She bargained fiercely to bring down the price of a woven bracelet I tried on from the equivalent of sixty-five cents to about forty. When she began buying vegetables for lunch, I stopped her.

  “Why don’t we go to a restaurant?” I said. “My treat.”

  “Restaurant?” She looked hesitant.

  “Come on,” I said. “We passed one yesterday when we got off the bus.”

  Still skeptical, she followed me to La Grotte, a restaurant in the international section of town, close to the chichi Hôtel de l’Indépendance. The restaurant was nestled behind another building, its white plastic tables shaded by umbrellas. Large white blossoms perfumed the air, and rotating fans provided a light breeze. Palm and banana trees surrounded the enclosure; the light that danced sideways onto our table was mottled and green. A brilliantly colored parrot perched nearby on a wooden post, keeping mum. The clientele was m
ostly white.

  From the moment we entered, Brigitte grew quiet, looking around her with widened eyes. She sat with her hands in her lap, not picking up the menu the waiter placed in front of her.

  “Don’t you want to order?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “I’m not hungry,” she said, her eyes flicking back and forth.

  “Are you sure?” She nodded. “Well, at least have a drink, okay?” She nodded again. “You can share my food,” I added.

  I ordered a chicken dish with tô, the staple of the region, a firm porridge made from pounded millet. When the waiter asked Brigitte for her order, she mouthed, “Coca Cola.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She cleared her throat, “Coca Cola.”

  “Why do you order this dish?” she asked me, after the waiter had gone.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This isn’t your food.”

  “I’m in Africa. I want to eat African food.”

  She shook her head with incredulity. “This food is too plain. I wouldn’t serve you this food.”

  She continued to shake her head as I paid the bill, which came to roughly five dollars.

  “A bit of a splurge,” I said. She was silent all the way home.

  But sitting in the packed dirt yard the next morning, Brigitte was full of plans. It was a cool, fresh morning, the sky a guileless baby blue that bore no hint of the heat to come. We’d carried out the white plastic table and chairs and were eating our breakfast in the shade of a plane tree.

  “You will find me a job in your country,” she said. “I can do anything. I can cook, I can clean. All kinds of African dishes. I worked for a German family; they were very content with my work.” She paused, then continued. “You will find me a family. They can send the plane ticket, then when I work, they don’t pay me until it’s paid for. They can get a visa for me.”