Somebody's Heart Is Burning

by Tanya Shaffer

  “What about your children?” I asked.

  “They will stay with my mother,” she said. “It’s only two, three years. I’ll make a lot of money, then I’ll come back. I’ll open a restaurant, my own, like the one yesterday. Cook African food; white people will come.”

  “And your husband?”

  “He doesn’t mind.” She flipped her hand. “He’s not mean. You will find me a job?”

  “I don’t think—”

  “I know it’s not sure.”

  “It’s really not—”

  “You will try?”

  I shrugged helplessly. “I’ll try.”

  That night, Yolan cooked a delicious dinner of savory chicken soup. When they weren’t busy serving us, Yolan and Nyanga ate their meals out in the yard while we sat inside at the table. Rod pulled her chair as close to mine as possible, so that our knees touched while we ate. Lidia sat at a small table by herself, her face covered with food.

  “Please can I go play, Mama? Please can I, please please please?” Constantin held out his empty bowl for inspection.

  “And where is your schoolwork?” She turned to me. “Last week he missed half on his geography test.”

  “I did it, Mama. All finished, tout c’est fini! Fini, fini, fini!”

  “All right, all right, go, my ears cannot bear to hear you,” she swatted at him as he left.

  “He is bad,” she said. “He never wants to do his work.” She smiled indulgently at Lidia. “That one never gives me any problems.”

  “He’s not bad,” I said.

  “No?”

  “No. He’s just a normal boy.”

  “Is he?” She seemed pleased.

  “Uh huh,” I nodded vigorously. “Just a boy.”

  Rod had finished her meal, and was tugging at my skirt. Her mouth was moving, and I brought my ear close. She was repeating the word boy, “garçon, garçon, garçon . . .” I lifted her onto my lap.

  “How did she get the name Rod?” I asked.

  “A white man,” said Rod, in perfect French. Un homme blanc.

  I looked at her in surprise. Brigitte started to giggle.

  “What white man?” I asked the little girl.

  “Mama’s boyfriend,” she said, and went back to eating her soup.

  “An American, named Rod,” said Brigitte. “Peace Corps. He wanted to marry me, but my mother said no. I was only seventeen, and I was scared. If it were now, I would go with him. I would go like that.” She made a whisking motion with her hand.

  “So you gave her his name? Your husband doesn’t mind?”

  She shrugged again, a bored expression crossing her face. “I told you . . .”

  My voice joined hers, “He’s not mean.”

  When I accepted Brigitte’s invitation, I’d planned to stay two or three days. A week had gone by, and I was expecting my visa from the Malian embassy any day. As the time of my departure approached, Brigitte’s conversations with me developed an urgency, as though there weren’t time for her to say everything she wanted to say before I left. I too had begun confiding in her, talking about Michael and my dilemmas of the heart. Her response to my predicament was not unlike Santana’s.

  “You say you love him?” she inquired.

  “Yes I do. Very much.”

  “Then what is the problem?”

  I told myself to answer honestly, no matter how stupid it sounded. “It’s like we’re brother and sister,” I began. “I thought my lover, my soul mate . . . I thought it would feel different.”

  “How should it feel?” she asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know . . . Exciting. Passionate,” I paused for an instant. “Like travel. When I travel, I feel so alive. Every moment is charged. I guess I thought love would be more like that. You know, constant discovery. I know it’s too much to expect, I know that, but—”

  “You are like a man,” said Brigitte. “Always wanting something fresh.”

  “It’s not that,” I said, a little too loudly. “It’s just . . . I mean . . . Why should I force myself to stay in one place, with one person, if it doesn’t make me happy? Just because some societal standard says I’m a bad person, a bad woman, if I don’t? I never want to hurt anyone, believe me! But sometimes people get hurt, not by design, but just by the truth of how things are. I mean, I blame myself, of course I do, I blame myself all the time. But what can I do? All you can do is try to deal in truth, right, moment to moment? Try to do the best you can with the information that’s available to you?” I stopped, shocked by my outburst, amazed to find myself crying. God, girl, I thought, you’re more lost than you even knew.

  Brigitte stared at me for a long moment, as though discovering something extraordinary.

  “You can do any particular thing you want,” she said slowly.

  “Pretty much,” I admitted. “Maybe that’s the problem.” I looked away in embarrassment.

  “Does moving around make you happy?” she asked.

  “Well, yeah, I guess,” I paused, laughed awkwardly, swiped at my eyes with the back of my hand. “I don’t know. Happi- er.”

  Brigitte looked at me for a moment, then smiled and shook her head. “Just like a man,” she said, squeezing my hand. “Except for this.” She lifted her finger to my cheek and captured a fugitive tear.

  Rod became more affectionate than ever, clinging to my hand, sitting on my lap, hanging onto my legs. I sat with her sometimes from afternoon till evening, stroking her hair and singing. Her presence brought up my latent mothering instincts. I loved children, always had, the touch and feel and smell of them. They opened my heart in a way that nothing else could. There was a part of me that wanted children of my own, yearned for them with a longing so fierce it stopped my breath. Michael, too, had wanted children passionately. He had even tried to persuade me, on occasion, to play a little Russian roulette between the sheets.

  “I can’t do it, Michael,” I’d said.

  “Why not? You’re great with kids. Look at my nieces and nephews. They adore you.”

  “I adore them, too.”

  “Well then?”

  “Because. I’m not ready. You know that. I want to do things. I’m not . . . stable enough yet. If I got pregnant now, I wouldn’t forgive myself. Or the child.”

  Michael shuddered. “Don’t say that,” he said.

  Now, with Rod on my lap, I was hard-pressed to remember what “things” I had to do that were so important. I wanted to squeeze her little body close to me, to bury my nose in her oiled and braided hair. Maybe I’d made a mistake. Maybe having children was exactly what I needed, the catalyst that would toss me headfirst into the clear cold pool of my own happiness. The ultimate wake-up call. Maybe. Maybe not. Unfortunately, I couldn’t take a trial run.

  One evening, I sat next to Brigitte on her bed while she worked the sleeping Lidia’s hair into tight little braids. Rod had already been put down for the night.

  “Lidia never lets me do this when she’s awake,” Brigitte explained.

  I watched her fingers fly, dipping into oil, then sectioning, braiding, sectioning again.

  “I don’t love my husband,” she said to me. “I used to love him, but now I don’t. He goes with other women.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I’ve seen the woman. My friend has pointed her out to me.” She made a disgusted face. “It makes me sick. And he doesn’t give me money.”

  I looked around. “How do you buy things?”

  “Oh, he pays for food, you know. School things. But anything for me, my clothes, my hair, I have to get it for myself. But he won’t let me get a job! He wants me to have more children.” She pulled another face.

  I watched her fingers layer the braids into overlapping arches.

  “As soon as I find someone else,” she continued, “I’m going to divorce him. I just have to find someone first. I don’t want to go around, going on dates. A woman isn’t safe that way. But I must hurry, before another baby comes. Can you find
an American husband for me?”

  “I can’t even find one for myself,” I joked.

  “I want an old man,” she said. “Young men are too complicated. I want one who’ll appreciate me. I’ll give you a picture of me to give him and he can send his picture, and if we like each other, then he’ll send me the plane ticket and I’ll come.”

  I pointed out that the visa might still be a problem.

  “He’ll get it for me,” she said. “If he’s hot, he’ll do it.” She took her hands from Lidia’s hair and ran her palms up and down the sides of her body, over her breasts, arms, thighs. She closed her eyes. “An old man, who’ll treat me well.”

  I said nothing. After a moment, she opened her eyes and went back to her hair sculpture. Lidia started for a moment, opened her eyes, and whimpered. Then, seeing her mother, she closed them again and drifted back to sleep.

  “What about Lidia and Rod?” I asked. “What will they do if you go to the U.S. and marry some old fart?”

  She shrugged impatiently. “Their father will take them. I will send money. It will be better for them.”

  I looked down at the sleeping baby. “If I . . . If I had children like yours,” I said, “I could never leave them.”

  Anger crossed Brigitte’s face, and I was immediately ashamed. Who was I to lecture her? Single and childless, I was a veritable poster child for the transient lifestyle.

  “They’ll be okay,” she said.

  We sat in silence, Brigitte’s hands resting on Lidia’s braided head.

  “In your city, will you show me around?” she asked later that night, as we lay side by side on her white-sheeted bed under the gauzy canopy of the mosquito net.

  “Of course,” I said, eager to reestablish our intimacy. “We’ll go dancing together, go shopping, to the movies.”

  “Oh yes,” she said, “yes, that’s it. I’ll be in the movies. You’re an actress, aren’t you?”

  I nodded, “But not in movies. On the stage.”

  “I’ll do movies,” she said. “That’s the way to make money.”

  I laughed, and she turned her head sharply toward me.

  “It’s not that easy,” I said.

  “Oh, but I can do it!” she said, and in the dark, I could feel the motion of her hands stroking the sides of her body, her head thrown back. “I can do the movies like that, the love scenes . . . I know how to do it.” She stopped abruptly. “Of course, if I had a husband, he wouldn’t let me. On my own, I could make some money.”

  “Your husband probably wouldn’t stop you. In the U.S., it’s normal for women to work. Most women work.”

  “Oh yes?” she said. “Good.”

  When I got back from the Malian embassy the next afternoon, passport and visa in hand, I found Brigitte in the smoke-filled kitchen, waving a large stick at Nyanga. The wispy girl cowered in the corner, wailing with fear.

  “She’s bête!” Brigitte shrieked, when she saw me, using the French word that means both “stupid” and “beast.”

  “What? What happened?”

  “Bête! I had some mayonnaise—did you see the mayonnaise? I bought it—it was supposed to last until Easter—and yesterday she served it all to the people who were here. All of it. Il faut économiser. I don’t earn the money here, it’s my husband who earns the money. What’s he going to say? He will blame me, he will blame me, and then . . . Stupid beast!” She held the stick above her head, her face livid. The girl sobbed loudly, pressing herself into the wall as though she hoped to push through it and disappear. My eyes teared in the heavy smoke.

  Behind Brigitte, Constantin appeared in the doorway, sucking on his fingers, a guilty smile on his face. Afraid his presence would further escalate things, I gestured sharply with my head, and he scampered off. I approached Brigitte slowly, holding out my hand for the stick.

  “Everyone makes mistakes,” I said.

  “The same stupid mistakes, again and again. I will beat her now. Never a word, this girl, never a sound, but she is trouble, she is bad!”

  “She’s not bad. We all make mistakes,” I said again, evenly.

  “I made the mistake, staying here with these stupid girls. I could be in America, with Rod, Peace Corps. There is a machine that washes, a machine that makes the food!”

  “That’s not her fault, Brigitte. She’s just a child. Look at her, she’s terrified. Please. I’ll buy you more mayonnaise. A whole new jar.”

  Brigitte looked at me as though I were a stranger, an alien being she was seeing for the first time. I tried to smile, but my lips wouldn’t do the trick. In the corner, the girl moaned. Out in the courtyard, I heard Constantin’s cackling laughter.

  How desperate we humans are, I thought. How our hearts burn, feeding on their own desire as if it were tinder.

  Slowly, as though awakening from a dream, Brigitte lowered the stick.

  At eleven o’clock that night, Brigitte and I sat on the couch in the living room, drinking beer. It was my goodbye party. Brigitte got up, went to the tape recorder, and put in a tape—a funky, bluesy groove. She pulled me up, and we started to dance. After about twenty minutes, I collapsed back onto the couch, my head swimming. Brigitte kept dancing, her eyes closed. I stared at her, mesmerized by the extreme grace of her bulky frame. Her hips seemed to move independently of her upper body, which hovered above them, regal and still. Her behind taunted the beat, tantalized it, waiting till the last possible instant, till I thought she wouldn’t make it, couldn’t, then it snapped into place, twitching and popping like corn in hot oil.

  Over the rhythmic thump of the music, I heard Rod’s voice coming from the bedroom, soft and plaintive. “Mama. Mama. Mama. Mama.”

  I longed to go to her, but what good would it do? Tomorrow I’d be gone, and besides, she wasn’t mine. I don’t know whether Brigitte heard her or not. She just kept dancing.

  14

  Sand Angel

  In Ghana, funerals are parties, with drumming and dancing all night long. The older the deceased, the bigger the bash. T-shirts commemorate the prominent ones, with inscriptions like “In ever-loving memory of Mercy Aidoo, alias Nanna,” silk-screened on the front and “Rest in Peace” on the back. As one guy told me, “When a young man dies, it is a sad thing. But when an old man dies, it is just natural, so we figure we might as well entertain ourselves.” Others put it more delicately: “We rejoice that the person has lived so very long and well.”

  Maybe this blunt attitude toward death is part of why the average West African seems so much happier than the average American. Perhaps the constant awareness that death could drop in makes people more fully inhabit their lives. My Ghanaian friends strenuously protest the comparison. “We are desperate here!” they say. Nevertheless, I dare anyone to walk down the streets of Accra and then San Francisco, observing the faces, and tell me the Ghanaians aren’t happier. You might say that smiling is just a habit, a cultural mannerism, but I think it goes beyond that. These are not empty smiles. The approach to daily life is humorous and exuberant, even in difficulty, like popping a whole chili pepper into your mouth and relishing the burn.

  For better or worse, Katie’s absence had freed me to travel to whatever out-of-the-way place struck my fancy. One such place was the legendary city of Timbuktu. Its illustrious history as a trade center and seat of higher learning was enough to capture anyone’s imagination, but even more intriguing to me was the boat trip up the Niger River. According to my guidebook, people along the river were living much as they had for thousands of years. The more sedentary groups inhabited fishing villages, while the nomadic tribes set up temporary camps, pulling up stakes and moving with the migration patterns of the fish. Even before her illness, Katie had been reluctant to make the journey. If anything happened, she’d said, we’d be too far from anywhere to get decent medical care. Now that she was gone, there was no obstacle to me hopping on a boat.

  Before I left Ghana, I discussed the matter with a bikini-clad English expatriate I encountered by the
pool at the Accra Novotel. The Novotel was the most expensive hotel in the city, practically the only place in Ghana where you could pay European-scale prices for everything from soap to sandwiches. On hot days, I occasionally splurged on the three-dollar fee to spend an afternoon by the blue waters of its heavily chlorinated pool.

  “You don’t want to go there!” the expatriate said in horror, reclining in a white plastic lawn chair while she rubbed cocoa butter onto her sleek, tan legs. “Timbuktu’s a ghost town! There’s nothing to see. It’s not the great trading mecca it once was. No camel caravans laden with gold. Just a few beleaguered beasts with feathers on their heads, and an army of guides waiting to mob you every time you step outside your hotel. Besides, how good is your French? Mali is Francophone, you know.”

  Her equally sleek and sun-bronzed French boyfriend opened his eyes and chimed in. “Sand,” he said flatly. “A lot of sand. Sand in the hair, sand in the eyes, sand in the bread you eat, crunch crunch.” He wrinkled his nose and mimed picking grains of sand from his mouth.

  “And the boat rides!” the woman continued, waving her hand in front of her nose in horror. “You know how sometimes a trip is really grueling, but when you finally arrive, you say, ‘Well, it was hell, but I’m glad I did it?’ ” She paused for emphasis. “This is not one of those trips. It’s just hell.”

  The Niger is the third largest river in Africa, after the Nile and the Congo. If you include its delta—the surrounding wetlands created by the river’s sediment—it’s the largest in the world. Starting in Guinea, the river enters Mali just below the capital city of Bamako. It heads northeast across Mali until it reaches the edge of the Sahara at Timbuktu, then turns due east. Shortly thereafter it shifts toward the southeast in a great arc, passes through Niger and Nigeria, and empties into the Atlantic Ocean. In its entirety, the river basin overlaps nine countries.