This was my last year in Tégéso, and soon a war would ruin the place and separate me from it forever, but that time was my favourite. I spoke the language, I practised 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 could. The reason I had come to the village—to find drinking water—felt like an old and confusing dream. I had gone here and there with Mamadou and taught people about Aids, promoted vaccinations and prenatal care, 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 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 mongoose like 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."
"Adama, I am old now. Things have changed badly in the world. These days, I like to come to the forest and simply look at it. The people come to me with their 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, marvel 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. 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 honour me. In the corner, his wife undid her top wrap in the lamplight, smoothed shea butter over her chest and breasts with her hands.
"You really eat this food, Adama?" Sogbo said and smiled under his thin moustache.
"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, 'cheeseburger.' Don't you need to eat those things not to die?"
"Two and a half years now," I said and tapped my chest. "Still alive."
"And you sleep in a hut? On a mat?"
"Sometimes I sleep in my fields. When I'm hunting agouti, I don't sleep at all."
"Hey!" he said, shaking his head. "You hunt the agouti?"
His wife snorted from the corner. Though she was deep in the shadows, the lamplight shone on her moistened skin. She rubbed her arms with the butter, said, "Don't pester him with questions, Sogbo. It's you who are the stranger here. They call him Uao-fa because he kills so many francolins. Don't ask him what he eats, where he sleeps. He plays in the forest with the witchdoctor." She looked into my eyes in a hard way as she said this. Why had I never noticed her before? "Look at how he speaks our language. Look at how he eats our food. How can he be white? He takes off his skin and hangs it up at night. He's black underneath. He's a sorcerer."
"Hey?" Sogbo said, looked at his wife, at me, seemed confused.
I said, "The zipper's on my back."
He looked at me a moment as though not sure what to think. Then he bounced his son on his knee, smiled. "You even joke like we do."
I ate, sucked the thick sauce from my fingers as I did. I looked at the wife and she at me. Her presence was all over me. Her skin was black and supple with the shea butter. Her breasts were pendulous with milk. We'd both worked hard in the fields that day and were tired in a way that her husband wasn't. I said to her, "Sogbo's wife, you've pounded the foutou as smooth as cream."
"I thank you, friend of my husband's. I thought of you as I pounded it."
"The sauce is as rich as honey."
"It was with thoughts of you that I mixed it."
"Sogbo's wife, I have eaten it all."
"I will rise now and prepare more, friend of my husband's."
"Tomorrow I will eat it, my friend's wife."
"As you say, Adama whiteman. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I shall think of you again."
Sogbo looked at his wife, at me, trying to decipher this exchange, which I was too. The wife looked down at her hands, rubbed the shea butter into her shins. Sogbo said to me, "You are satisfied, Adama?"
"For now."
"You are welcome," he said and smiled.
I spent the next days close to him because I wanted to be close to his wife. Just the bowed presence of her as she served us food brought the blood up under my skin. Sogbo had left the village years before, visited now only irregularly. I could see that the conditions depressed him, that the labour of the fields wasn't something he wanted to do. But I honoured him with my presence, and in that way helped make his short visit a pleasant one. The men who came from the city went into deep debt to return to the village, to distribute gifts in it. The villagers had no concept of the poverty of city life and so nothing brought back to them was ever enough. All that they could see was Sogbo's Manchester United jersey, his knock-off Reeboks, fine modern things to them. I understood that these were probably the only clothes he owned.
"Goodbye, my friend," Sogbo said to me as I saw him off on to the logging truck that would carry him away. He had tears in his eyes. "We are great friends now, and when you come to the city, you will come to my home and allow me to honour you."
As the logging truck coughed to life and raised thick veils of dust behind it, I waved goodbye at it, understanding that I would never see Sogbo again.
Time passed as it does in the village. In the evenings, after a long day setting up an Aids lecture in a neighbouring campment or uprooting yams in the fields with the men of my age group, I'd wash from a bucket behind my hut in the last light, pull on my boubous like a nightgown and walk to dinner at Mamadou's.
Since Sogbo had left, I'd found myself taking a roundabout route. There at the east end of the village, I made a pretence of saluting the blacksmith, of asking after the well-being of his banished son. He'd recently repaired the lever of my shotgun for me and as I'd sit and smoke a cigarette with him under his mango tree, I'd look across his courtyard to the next: Sogbo's. There, Mariam turned cassava toh in the pot with the long paddle, while Sogbo's decrepit mother sat nearby on a mat, watching. Sogbo's mother was an ancient woman; she often sat with her head bowed and eyes closed as though in pain, or asleep. I understood then that Mariam took care of her and the son both. Mariam's arms were long and strong, the skin on them without flaw. She never looked up.
At dinner, Mamadou would note the direction I'd arrived from. He'd often have his baby daughter on his lap, but when I'd arrive, he'd send her away and brush off a stool for me. "What's there, Adama, this new direction you've been arriving from?" he said to me one night as his mother set calabashes of toh and okra sauce on the ground between us.
"The blacksmith's," I said and washed my hands in the water bowl.
"Even the constant dog is led away by a new scent."
"What's that you say, Mamadou? I'm not in the mood for proverbs."
He lowered his eyes to eat. Just as he was about to put the first ball of toh in his mouth, he said, "Nobody needs to visit the cross-eyed blacksmith more than once a month. You know your way around, Adama. I won't say any more. Many things have happened since you've come. Now we'll see what you've learned from them."
I put mariam out of my mind. Except one night, overcome by the image of her smoothing shea butter into the skin of her chest by lamplight, I lifted the corner of my mat and scratched her name, Mariam Dosso, into the dirt of my floor. Then I took an ebony leaf from the bundle the witchdoctor had long ago given me to protect my hut, and laid it over the letters of her name. What good would it do? Could the ancestors read? Could she?
My dreams were troubled that night. I dreamed of Sabina, dancing salsa with me at Legends in Abidjan before she'd disappeared, of Mazatou opening her wraps when no one was looking to tease me before she'd been sent away. I woke up in a sweat, pressed my belly to feel my liver in the dark. But my liver was not swollen, it wasn't malaria for a change. I lay in the dark a long time, the thoughts I always had at times like these whirling through my mind. Who did I think I was? What in the world was I doing here?
The next evening, I shot two francolins in the rice of the chief's fields, tied them by their spurs to my belt. The whippoorwills were calling the coming of evening and, as a last thing, I hunted the swamp in the forest near the edge of the village. There was a large lizard that lived there. I'd long been eager to shoot him. The people called it "varan-o." It was like a small crocodile without teeth and, if you happened upon it and startled it, it would whip your legs with its tail before diving under the water.
Here now, I crouched in the rushes at the swamp's edge, breathed, let the scene come to me. The evening light between the trees was blue all over the black water. There were grey stumps in the water like broken concrete pilings and on one, its eyes closed, lay the varan. I aimed, exhaled, watched the air sacs under the creature's throat fill and deflate as it breathed. The meat and skin were prized. If I brought it back to the village, the children would holler and sing my hunting prowess to everyone.
Perhaps I had been there too long. I looked at the sleeping animal a long time, wondered why in the world should I want to kill it. I lowered my gun, simply looked at it. Why did this great lizard live in the same world that I did?
Nearby, someone was chopping wood. I circled through the forest and crept in close to the sound. I could stalk people even more easily than I could animals. It was a woman with a child tied to her back, collecting some last wood before returning to the village for the night. I crept closer and saw that it was Mariam. She thwacked the long axe into a dried stump, worked the blade free again with her foot. Her son was asleep on her back and each time she raised the axe high above her head and swung it down into the wood, she exhaled like coughing. She seemed as oblivious to everything as her sleeping son. From behind the tree where I watched, she was Africa embodied, struggling with her work beyond the eyes of the noisy world. I stepped into the clearing. Mariam turned and looked at me.
"I felt you behind me, Adama. How long have you been watching?"
"Why didn't you turn if you felt me there?"
"Who turns and looks at danger?"
"Am I a danger to you, Mariam?"
She looked at me. She didn't seem frightened. She said, "I don't know what you are."
"I've wanted to see you."
"I've seen you, at the blacksmith's. Every night you come and look at me."
"Should I not?"
She didn't say anything. I slung my gun over my shoulder. I went to her and touched her bare arms. She looked up at me. She said, "Not here, Adama. Not in the forest."
"When I breathe, I think of you. When I sleep, I think of you."
"When the moon is new, come to me. The old woman sleeps early. It will be dark all over the village. Come to me then. Even after you go back to your people, I must stay here. When the moon is new, Adama. Then come."
I pressed her arms with my rough hands, was surprised at how soft her skin really was. She gathered the shards she'd cut from the stump, arranged them into a neat stack on her head. She said, "I know that you are a man, Adama. I know that the skin you wear is your own. Every night, I am glad to see you looking at me. Every night I've wondered how we would meet." She squeezed my hand, left on the trail to the village, and I lit a cigarette and waited in the swamp for the full cover of the falling darkness.
Mamadou said that night, "The old gazelle knows his way past sleeping lions."
In a few more nights, the moon was new, and after dinner, I went to my hut, made all my typical signs of retiring—brushed my teeth and spit, pissed a last time in the grass—then closed the door and lay on my mat, waiting. I could hear the witch doctor's sons laughing around their hearth fire. A long time went by as I willed everyone to go to bed. Finally there were last coughs and then there was quiet. I went out through the dark village in my bare feet, the dust of the paths soft like powder between my toes. Some dogs barked at me and I hurried on. Even the stars were covered by clouds. Under her mango tree, I whispered, "Mariam, Mariam," to the night.
I heard someone trying to hide her footsteps. Then her hands were on my arms. "To your hut," she whispered. "The old woman is sleeping."
I led her by the hand through the dark. Inside, I closed the door, lit my hurricane lamp. Mariam's son was asleep on her back and she untied him now, spread the wrap on the floor, laid him on it. Then we stood and looked at each other in the lamplight. We weren't teenagers. We weren't in the throes of some adolescent lust. Still, we were afire. I offered her my hands, and she took them, stepped close to my body. She unhitched her wraps, let them fall; the lamplight shone warmly all over her clean body. I pulled off my shirt, undid my belt and let my pants fall. I stepped out of them. I pulled down my shorts, stepped out of them, too. Her marriage beads were like pearls around her waist. Milk hung in drops on her nipples. What was there to say? We didn't say anything. For the first time, I held her to me, nothing between us but flesh.
"Hurry, Adama. There isn't time."
She looked at me, put her fingers in the hair of my chest, touched my stomach, wrapped her hand around me. Everything was a marvel: my body, hers, the colours of our skin, our desire. She lay on my mat and I lay on her. I kissed her, held her face, drank her milk. I had a condom, began to put it on. She took it off me with her hand.
"You should be afraid of me, Mariam. I've been to the city."
"How can I fear? My husband lives there."
It didn't last long. In a few minutes, she dressed, tied her son on her back, and I led her to her hut.
We made love everywhere. It was difficult, it was dangerous. But every breath that I took, I thought now of Mariam.
I asked the witchdoctor for the leaf wash that would make me invisible to genies in the forest, shared the leaves with Mariam, and we made love in the rushes of the swamp, in the forest's dark glades, her son asleep on a bolt of cloth beside us. We contrived stories to travel in to Séguéla: she to sell onions from her garden, me to mail letters home, and when her onions were sold, she'd come to the small house I shared with the aid workers of the region. Melissa or Shanna would entertain the boy in the front room while Mariam and I made love on a real bed for a change, showered together afterward. The girls had their own affairs. They were happy to help me in mine.
After a few months of this, Mariam received word that her mother had broken her leg back in their home village, Djamina. She told me as I passed by her hut, "Meet me tomorrow in Gbena." Gbena was the village where the bonesetter lived. I told Mamadou I'd be hunting gazelles in the forest beyond Soba-Banadjé, and he took it at that. I wound my way to it through the forest, found Mariam in Gbena with her mother. The mother's shin was swollen with the break, and she had to stay at the bonesetter's for a week. Villages kept secrets like this from each other, and after presenting the chief of Gbena with a bundle of kola nuts and a pair of francolins I'd shot on the way, Mariam and I were able to live there a week, discreetly, as man and wife.
Her mother was kind to me and this was the finest week of my life in Africa. I'd hunt francolins in the Gbena chief's rice fields during the day and, in the evening, return to the hut he'd given us and a meal of toh that Mariam had prepared.
I'd hold Mariam's sleeping body in the night, imagine I was holding the whole of that hot continent.
When i returned from Gbena, I ate dinner with Ma-madou. "No gazelles?" he asked. "No luck," I said and brushed off my pants.
He wouldn't look at me. I washed my fingers in the water bowl, and we ate his mother's toh. I pretended for a while that his silence didn't bother me. Finally I said, "What is it?"
"Don't you know what it is?"
"That's why I'm asking."
"Sogbo's my kinsman. We were circumcised together."
"What if I say I don't know what you're talking about?"
"Adama, you are my brother. You were like an infant when you came, and you have grown before me until you have become more important to me than my children. Don't you respect my name? Don't you respect our ways? Her mother-in-law has made accusations to the chief. Were you going to their hut after the village slept during the last new moon? Don't you know that old people don't sleep well? Old people are the bridge to the ancestors, are almost ancestors themselves. She says they've been speaking to her in her dreams. She's made claims against you."
"What did the chief say?"
"He sent her away. If it was anyone else, Adama," he said and shook his head. "But it is you. Our whiteman. The old woman's gone to Wye. The only reason anyone goes to Wye is to see the witchdoctor there. He is blind and has a white beard. Everyone fears his magic. You should be careful now. If shame comes upon me because of you, I don't care. But the old are old because they have learned to protect their lives. She needs Mariam to care for her. Be careful, Adama. You think you know a lot here, but you don't. Get medicine from Chauffeur. Do whatever he says. She's set genies on you. Everyone is expecting you to die."
I met mariam in the hut in my old fields. The work had been too difficult alone, and after the first year, I'd let mine fall fallow to help Mamadou enlarge his instead. All around us, my old farm was a tangle of weeds and short trees. Even the old paths through it were lost in the surging reclamation of the forest. Mariam set her son down on the cloth to sleep. She lay beside me. She wasn't well.
"What's the matter, Mariam?"
"I haven't eaten in three days. I'm afraid of the old woman. I think she's going to try to poison me."
"She's an old witch."
"She's not a witch, Adama. She's Sogbo's mother. If I were in her place, I don't know if I would do any differently. Adama, I have to leave the village. If I go to my mother's, they will find me. I have to go to Abidjan. I've wanted to anyway. I learned how to weave as a child. I can go to Abidjan and weave market baskets. Everyone will buy them. All women need a basket to go to market with."
"And I'll be alone here?"
She petted my face. She said, "You will go back to your people. Give me money, Adama. Let me run away. I will write to you, and then you can join me. I'll find a house in Abidjan and when you come to me, it will be like when you came to me the first time when the moon was new."
For a few days, we kept a low profile. I went into Séguéla and withdrew 150,000 CFA from the bank. People in Abidjan were lucky to make 15,000 CFA a month, people in the village 15,000 the whole year. It was nearly all the money I had. I gave the bundle of money to Mariam in my field hut, and she tied it into her wrap. We made love a last time.
In the morning, Mariam was gone. On discovering this, the old woman let up a lament that brought even the old chief to her hut. No one, not even Mamadou, spoke to me for days.
For many weeks, the old woman and I battled with magic. I was constantly sick with malaria, and killed first one cobra, and then another, that had somehow got into my hut. After that, I visited the witchdoctor of Kavena because I knew that Chauffeur wouldn't help me with what I wanted to do, and I sacrificed the black and white speckled chicken the one-eyed Kavena witchdoctor told me to at the black granite boulder outside that village.
"It needs to be strong magic," I told him when I came back from the cleansing sacrifice. "I need to protect myself from her. I'm guilty of what she claims."
"It will be as strong as what you feel in your heart, whiteman," the old man said. He tossed bones, antelope joints, on his mat, read them, then assembled a packet of herbs and fur drawn from the many bundles of them he had tied in the rafters of his hut like an alchemist's workshop. He wanted 5,000 CFA—about $8—three kola nuts and six eggs to get the old woman's genies off my back, gave me the burlap concoction to bury behind my hut.
For some days, the old woman and I exchanged hard stares when we'd pass each other in the village, as hard as what we felt against each other. The whole village seemed to await the outcome of this battle and everyone, even Mamadou, kept their distance from us lest the genies circling about our huts would think they were caught up in it too. Soon enough, the old woman cut her foot while chopping wood for her hearth fire. She was carried to her home village, Kenegbé, on the back of a young nephew and there, despite the Kenegbé healer's best efforts, the wound grew gangrenous, and she died.
After he returned from her funeral, Mamadou said to me, "So it's over, Adama. Good. But know that the bush pig who uproots a baobab tree eats well for one day. After that, he starves."
I'd be leaving soon because of a war, though I didn't know that yet. In many respects, the death of the old woman was my end in Tégéso anyway. It wasn't about the way people treated me. It was how I felt about myself.
Nothing I'd done there was what I had been sent there to do. Now I'd killed an old woman. What was the meaning of this? How had any of this love or witchcraft made my life or theirs any better?
A letter came on a logging truck addressed to me, Diomandé Adama, Whiteman, Tégéso village. On the seal, it read, "Devine," "Guess."
Inside, there was an address in Abidjan. The words on the paper said simply, "I wait for you as on the new moon."
I took a transport to Séguéla the next day, was in Abidjan within three. The address was in a squalid and dangerous neighbourhood of Adjamé, and as I made my way through the fetid alleyways of tin-roofed shacks in the darkening evening, youths and menacing toughs followed in my wake. At her shack, I rapped on the door. Sogbo opened it. His smile was broad and open under his thin moustache. He said, "Adama! I told you that you would visit my house. Come in, Mariam will prepare a special meal, a feast. I hear my mother has died. I'm very sorry for that. But first I thank you for the help you gave Mariam so that she and my son could join me here."
In the corner, in the lamplight, she was spreading shea butter on her chest; unconquerable, unknowable, as beautiful and resolute as always. She did not look up at me.
