The Fugitivities

by Jesse McCarthy

  With his new friends and warmer living arrangement, things were falling into place. At the university, Nathaniel’s heart always jumped when he spotted Laura entering the amphitheater. She would come over to him and meet his cheek with a warmly perfumed bise. They often paused to chat before class in one of the grand stairwells, a flirtatious islet in the hubbub of students streaming in and out of the lecture halls.

  He continued to struggle with his coursework. His French was still pretty bad, as she had pointed out, although he found he could understand a good deal more than he could speak. But the professors certainly didn’t make it easy. They had a way of talking about an idea or an event without ever really saying what they thought about it, or what had happened.

  The history of Iceland, one professor seemed to argue, was crucial to understanding the origins of the French Revolution. Nathaniel had never thought about Iceland in his life, nor the people that lived there, and it occurred to him that had he not taken this particular course he most likely would have gone to his grave without ever even once having considered them. The professor said that one of the great human tragedies of the modern era took place on this tiny North Atlantic island. A period known as the Mist Hardships, which followed the eruption of the volcano Laki on June 8, 1783. This massive eruption, the professor explained, produced the closest thing to nuclear winter that anyone had ever experienced until Hiroshima. In Iceland, anyone living at that time would have believed it was the end of the world. Clouds of poisonous sulfur and ash blotted out the sun. Rivers of fire and falling molten rock set fire to the villages. The clouds of death spread to Europe. In London the fog of noxious gases made navigation of the Thames impossible. Laki’s pall of doom generated extreme weather that spread chaotic and toxic conditions around the globe. In the winter of 1784, as far away as North America, the Mississippi froze at New Orleans, with icebergs spotted by bewildered slave and sugar traders in the Gulf of Mexico. The extreme weather lasted until 1788, when disastrous hailstorms put the final nail in the coffin of Europe’s peasant underclass, causing widespread famine, notably in France, where passions stoked by the Jacobin intelligentsia set the house of Europe on fire, igniting a revolution that forever changed the course of history. Geography. Meteorology. The seasons of the Earth are as much an actor in History as any other force, the professor claimed. Even the origins of the French Revolution could be traced and explained, at least in part, by a spell of bad weather. A change of climate issuing from a dismal and humiliated island in the North Atlantic that no one cared about. History, the professor concluded, is a deep ditch of diabolical misfortune, out of which Man has always struggled to climb by filling the cavity with the bodies of other men somehow unlike him and using them as a ladder, only to discover that the bodies and the ditch are one and the same thing, and that nothing is more like oneself than one’s enemy.

  * * *

  Nathaniel had recounted his story with Laura to his roommates. They listened and they offered their advice. “The women here are not trustworthy,” Ghislain said. “You have to be very careful. Don’t get involved in something you can’t control, or you’ll have problems and the police will come and deport you if they can, and if they can’t, they will harass you so much you’ll want to leave anyway.” Apollinaire said that he had never been with a white woman, that he wasn’t interested in white women, that every time he had ever interacted with a white woman it had only further confirmed his feelings. Ghislain passed around a joint. Claude said women were not something you could know about one way or the other. You had to accept that and flow with it day by day and not judge them because, in the end, you can only judge yourself.

  One evening, Laura invited Nate to dinner at her new apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up in an old building on the rue des Cinq-Diamants. You could see most of the place from the entryway. It was more of an attic with a kitchenette and a shower. She had a little oval window with a view of rooftops and potted chimneys and a patch of sky. It reminded Nathaniel of a painting that he had seen at the Musée d’Orsay.

  Laura made grape leaves stuffed with ground lamb and rice in a mint yogurt sauce. They drank a bottle of burgundy with the meal, and a second one kept them talking late into the night. After clearing the dishes, she went over to the window where he stood and put her hand on his back. As he turned, she raised herself on her toes, leaned forward, and kissed him. It was a good kiss. Nathaniel found himself surprised at how safe he felt. He had wondered if he would actually be capable of feeling at peace in her arms. But he did. He had also feared a certain intimidation on her part. But she was without hesitation, as if the pleasures she would give and receive would have always been self-evident. If anything, he was the one who was slightly intimidated by her feistiness. How she strapped herself around his torso, pressing her dark nipples to his chest, nipped him with puckish kisses, came with unassuageable ferocity.

  When he woke up, Nathaniel felt a cold breeze running along his arm. Laura was asleep, curled under the blanket like a teardrop. He got up. It had rained, and there was a puddle forming along the wall and the baseboard. He closed the window and glanced around the apartment. He ran some water and did the dishes. Then he brought the wine bottles down and slotted them one by one, with shattering cries, into a giant municipal-recycling container. He spotted a bakery. Laura looked confused when she opened the door to let him back in. “I brought you some breakfast,” he said. He took the warm pastries out of their paper pouch and set them on the table. They spread spoonfuls of confiture along the innards and talked.

  They decided to go for a walk in the Parc Montsouris. Nathaniel was convinced that the people they passed were staring at them. He thought for a long time about how to put this to Laura and wondered whether she was seeing the same thing. But by the time he had put together the words to ask her, they had crossed all the way through the park and arrived at the station where he would have to take the train back out to the suburbs. The way she held him as they kissed made putting it off indefinitely desirable.

  * * *

  —

  “No life is really meaningful without good food. Without eating well. Without fish and rice and mango and okra, the world would be a mistake,” Ghislain said. “There is no greater food to be found anywhere than in Cameroon, a land, thank god, blessed with the best fish and the freshest fruits in all of Africa. I must teach you how to cook real dishes from Yaoundé, which, if you prepare them only once for your lover, she will never leave you. Like Roger Milla, you will score every time!”

  “What Ghislain is saying is wise, leke mo bax,” said Apollinaire, “but not entirely true. The greatest food in the world, it is well known, comes from Senegal, which makes the finest sauces and the most raffiné cuisine in all of Africa. And the real way to a woman’s heart is to make yassa with fresh catch from the Casamance caught by the excellent fishermen of Ziguinchor. Or a chicken mafé with a spicy peanut sauce that they also love in Mali. Or a delicious lamb dibi if she is more of a city girl and you want to show off the savors of the capital. Basically, love in a marriage should resemble a long meal, pleasantly sauced and served with care. That is, grosso modo, all there is to the good life.”

  “Taking a woman out to dinner can be expensive,” said Claude. “If you cook for her you will save money, but she will also love you more because good in the kitchen means good appetite, which means good sex and good health, and if you can have all those things in your life at once then you must be doing something right with your life, because God bestows his favors and blessings on the just.”

  Nathaniel and Laura spent many nights together. And many days too, days when they were supposed to be in lecture but remained marooned in her blankets pleasuring each other in the quiet part of the afternoon when folks were still at work, and the traffic was light, and they could hear the leaves outside whisking greenly. He would hold the curves of her belly. Smell her olive-black hair, pressing into the pillow beside him like his picture
in the history book of an old Roman aqueduct.

  One day, on a square near the Métro Jourdain, he came upon a large poster on the side of a building of a starving African child. The eyes were sunk deep in their cavities, and the skin around the mouth was so taut to the jawbone that the expression was fixed in a tawdry, heinous smile. The slogans asked passersby to give, to fight, to support, to end hunger. He froze for a moment before the black-and-white advertisement.

  Why was it always like this? A nameless starving African. And people going to work averting their eyes, the message assimilated, quietly disposed of. How much had really changed? The agency behind the poster had probably hired a marketing team to produce their campaign. They had offices in London, Geneva, Paris, and New York, and employed wealthy and upper-middle-class whites who could afford to live in the great cities and chose to take up more attractive volunteer work. The life behind the starving face had no substance or will. A fly crawling over the mind of Europe.

  Nathaniel felt a swelling rage. There was such a vast canvas of injustice, bigger than he had ever previously imagined, worse the more he learned. All the knowledge he had acquired since he had moved abroad was coiling together, glowing hot as his own sense of futility increased. It was like the time when he stood in that awesome hallway in the Louvre, nearly deafened by the massive paintings on all sides, furious at the hollering mobs of tourists knocking into him with flagrant fouls. He was surrounded on all sides by pinkish angels and Madonnas and bearded saints with their marks of holiness, their place in history. But nowhere, in the entire palace, could he find a celebration of the goodness, the power, the intelligence, the glory of anyone who looked like him. Not one instance in all the sacred imagery of the Occident of a black man crowned with power and holiness.

  And yet he felt especially peculiar, perhaps more alien than ever, when he passed the groups of young black teenagers huddled together in the gray wastelands in the city center at Les Halles. Boys who looked so familiar to him, and yet who regarded him with a wary curiosity. And he couldn’t deny that this was, at least in part, because they (like whoever had built the hideous shopping-mall complex where they copped their cheap Euroburgers and chased skirt) seemed astonishingly indifferent to the flying buttresses of Saint-Eustache. A building whose old stone arches and spires filled him with awe.

  At the top of the rue du Transvaal, there was an esplanade from which one could see the whole city spread out below. It was lovelier than the Bronx. It had art and aspiration. But did it have soul? Did it have a place for his arts? Would the mind of Europe ever be able to incorporate him? Just then, as if to banish any further thoughts, an overwhelming need to urinate came over him and he marched furtively down into the sketchy park below. There, he found a suitable tree and released a torrent which, in an alternate universe, he would have made gargantuan enough to drown every embassy, every sleek arms-dealing bureau, every petroleum office tower, every pompous government office building in the city of light.

  The questions nagged at him. Could he love the woman and not her city? Could she ever love him across the vast gulf of experience that separated two people like them? What was it in her that he couldn’t reach? What filled her with the sadness that he had detected from the very start, but that she wouldn’t reveal or hadn’t yet? He had seen the traces of that sadness. They could show themselves in anything or nothing at all. In the way she said, “Toss me a cigarette, I think there’s one in my raincoat.” Or those odd moments, he noticed, when she stared absently at her own hands. Sometimes when they fucked, he would catch a glimpse of her mouth biting at the air, uttering words that he couldn’t understand, that he supposed were Armenian, or maybe not even words at all but a lost or alternative alphabet accessed only in those fleeting moments when sex makes language strange again, keeping a part of the world secret, sacred, free from the will of men.

  * * *

  —

  One night as they left a café in the Latin Quarter, Laura pulled on Nathaniel’s arm, and said she wanted to talk. They moved off the boulevards and took the narrower, older streets. They came to the fountain square at Saint-Sulpice. One of the bell towers of the church was covered in scaffolding, the clasped fingers of planks and girders covering its massive, ghostly presence in a loose skin that rippled and ballooned gently in the wind.

  Laura said she was thinking a lot about her brother, Mehdi. Nathaniel felt as if a jab had caught him in the ribs. “I didn’t know you had a brother,” he interrupted, stopping in his tracks for emphasis. She had never mentioned him before.

  Laura stared at the pavement as she fished through her bag. “I’m sorry, I thought you would be overwhelmed because Mehdi adds a layer of complication to my life. He’s really only my half brother, and he’s Muslim. He stayed in Lebanon with an uncle. I haven’t seen him since we left Beirut. We were very close before my parents took us away. I get letters from him sometimes, very beautiful letters in Arabic. He’s a great writer. So good.” She paused to light a cigarette. “My parents won’t talk to him. My father never got over his decision to stay in Beirut or his disdain of science. Mehdi embraced religion and totally rejected Paris and the studies that my father wanted him to pursue. He said he didn’t need the French to understand his place in the world or the universe that Allah set in motion. Sometimes I think he was right to want to stay. When I read his letters, I think about how long it’s been since I’ve seen an olive tree. Just sunlight and an olive tree in a garden. The smell of cypress and lavender and the wooded closeness of earthly things.”

  They walked slowly up the rue Férou. Laura continued. “I thought God was real when I was little. One summer, my parents took us on a trip to the Sinai. We stayed with Bedouin in a camp by the Red Sea. In the distance on the water there was a city we were forbidden to go to. At night, one of the old Bedouin men took us away from the campfires and up into the dunes. His blue shesh was wrapped under his chin and his hands were very bony and strong. We rested on one of the highest dunes overlooking the camp, with Mehdi on one side of the old man and myself on the other. ‘Look up,’ he said. We looked into the deep and all that was there were the stars. The old man said, ‘Look close,’ and he lifted a hand into the darkness above. ‘Do you see it?’ And Mehdi said yes, he did. And I asked, ‘What are we looking for?’ And the old Bedouin laughed and tousled my hair roughly and then took my hand and made an arc with it through the middle of the sky. And then I did see it. A trail, a phantom plume like fog on a windshield. ‘What is it?’ I asked. The Bedouin said that it was the fingerprint of God. And then he said something that I didn’t understand, but that Mehdi nodded to in agreement. He told us that men’s fates were written in the stars. And then he coughed loudly and spit in the sand. He told us not to live dangerously. That danger was always a sign your life was out of balance. He told us to love life and to love Allah, who gave us the chance to know Him. Then he put his bony hand on my thigh and held it very hard, which scared me. He said it was necessary to live very close to Allah. ‘In the cities, a life in accordance with the will of Allah is impossible,’ he said. ‘Only the desert nomad knows his ways and does not stray from the righteous path.’ It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life,” Laura said. “But I think about it often. And when I do, I think of Mehdi.”

  Back in the apartment on the rue des Cinq-Diamants, Laura undressed in the bathroom. When she came out, Nathaniel was lying naked on his stomach. She slipped down next to him and kissed him gently between the shoulder blades. Their bodies wanted as immoderately as ever. But something was there that was also different. The distress of brittle sex that is not as it once was.

  9

  The central stairwells of the Cité Lamartine formed a vertical chorus. All through the day, the crying of children, the muffled shouts, the scurrying whoops and shrieks of schoolchildren, the racket of scooters coming in through broken windows, the laughter and ritual greetings saturated the life on the landings and even i
n the spaces between them. Sisters, mothers, neighbors from every corner of the former colonial world raised up a babel from their impromptu salons, chatting, gossiping, arguing as they braided, twisted, brushed, picked, locked, roped, pressed, and prodded.

  Behind this polyphonic hubbub, Nathaniel recognized a recorded music that amplified as he rose toward the upper floors. It was coming from the apartment next door, and he knew from his time at Faisal’s that it was the extraordinary voice of Umm Kulthum. She sounded to Nathaniel like a blues singer. When he asked his African friends about her they told him, only half-jokingly, that her voice was the only thing the Arabs agreed upon. An experience of transcendent beauty that some, in moments of weakness (and near blasphemy), said even rivaled the surahs of the Qur’an. If the windows were open, and he knew that on a day like this they probably were, her call to her lover, her habibi, would carry out over the balcony, a faint wail reaching the ears of the kids playing soccer in the concrete lot.

  Ghislain was cooking, and throughout the apartment there was a heavy aroma of okra stewing in peanut sauce. Nathaniel dropped two grocery bags in the kitchen and exchanged greetings with the chef. When the food was ready the four men sat down and ate by hand from a large bowl set in the center of the table equidistant from each of them. At first, they all ate in silence. Then they discussed their plans for the evening. Each of the roommates desired to know how Nathaniel’s affairs were progressing with Laura, and if he had yet considered marriage. Ghislain produced cups and boiling mint tea, which he poured from very high without losing a drop. For a time, they drank in silence as they listened to the faint voice of Kulthum through the wall. “Nathaniel,” Claude asked suddenly, changing the subject, “do you think one day there will be a black president of America?” Nathaniel felt as if he should have anticipated the question, even though he had no prepared thought on the matter. He looked around at the other men. They met his gaze gravely in a way that suggested they expected him to take some time to answer.