A Dancer In the Dust (20 page)

“Someone I knew in Lubanda also never trusted foreigners,” I told him. The old pain struck again. “And she was right.”

If I’d expected this heartfelt admission to penetrate Idi’s firmly established view of me, I was quite mistaken.

“You paid me to tell you,” he said matter-of-factly, our transaction now complete, and our need to be connected over, “so I did.”

And with that, he hung up.

Not that I’d expected him to do anything else. He had more immediate concerns, and so did I. Chiefly the question of whom this latest visitor to the tattoo parlor actually was.

I thought of a Lubandan proverb:
The elephant makes bigger tracks than the viper.
It was typically Lubandan in its back-to-the-puckerbrush sense of the basic. The viper was betrayal, and the proverb simply meant that by its very nature betrayal is a secretive thing, a slithering thing, which, at its most successful, leaves a false trail by which the betrayed remains forever unaware of either the treachery or the traitor.

I was still considering the twisting nature of deceit when Gail’s voice sounded from the outer office.

“Going out for a smoke,” she called.

“Okay,” I said. “Do I have anyone this afternoon?”

“The Patroness.” Gail answered as she peeped her head into my office.

Indeed, she was just that. Lauren Mayes had inherited a fortune and had spent most of her life dispersing large amounts of it. She funded hospital wings and theaters and museums. Her name was always listed among the five-star benefactors. Over the last few years she’d taken an interest in the undeveloped world, particularly West Africa, so that she’d come to remind me of Dickens’ Mrs. Jellyby in
Bleak House,
a comically classic do-gooder forever engrossed in the affairs of Borrioboola-Gha. I knew that this association was unfair, however. Mrs. Mayes was a heartfelt giver, an honest, decent person, though one who probably had no idea where her money actually went, or to whom, or that the sums that flowed from her many charitable trusts might as often provide warlords with AK-47s as they did clean water to a distant village. For the fact remained that an impenetrable veil had fallen over the whole altruistic enterprise even before Martine wrote her
Open Letter,
and little since her wilderness cry had changed.

Perhaps it was my complete acceptance of the fact that nothing had changed over the twenty years since I’d left Lubanda that caused me to stop dead and once again consider what had happenered there and the part I’d played in it.

“Take the rest of the day off,” I told Gail. “But first, cancel all my appointments.”

“Again?” Gail’s expression grew more deeply troubled. “Are you sure?”

I nodded. “Beginning with the one this afternoon with Mrs. Mayes,” I said. “I need time alone, here in the office, to catch up.”

She didn’t believe this, and I knew it. The look in her eyes told me she suspected that I must be having an affair with a married woman or committing some other such indiscretion.

“You can take tomorrow off, too,” I told her. “As a matter of fact, I’ll call you when I’ve gotten caught up.”

This surprised Gail even more, but by the clock, it was time for a cigarette, so it didn’t surprise me when she responded with a hasty “Whatever you say” and left it at that.

During the next couple of minutes I listened as Gail canceled my appointments, then, no doubt desperate for a cigarette at that point, quickly gathered up her things and rushed out of the office with a quick “Bye.”

I didn’t know when or if the gentleman to whom Idi had given my business card would show up, but I calculated that the risk of this confrontation’s being violent was very low, and so I simply waited in my office for the rest of the day. I didn’t work at confirming, denying, or ameliorating any of my clients’ risks, however. Instead, I found myself sitting with my hands on my desk, my computer screen idly displaying a series of floating abstract images, my mind not so much thinking as receiving images and sensations, almost all of which came from my time in Lubanda. I remembered the taste of the bread Martine baked, unleavened, the grainy taste of teff, as well as the honeyed flavor of her homebrew. And then there were the many dinners I’d enjoyed at the outdoor table or on her ragged screened porch. Like other Lubandans, she’d flavored cassava paste with various spices brought to her by the Lutusi, for which she exchanged her own homemade products, mostly from her harvest, but occasionally something she’d made—a woven basket, a wooden bowl, an old-style African broom.

I recalled that Ufala had been unable to adapt to the long-handled broom, preferring the whisk broom, with its short handle, a style little changed from its ancient prototype, the Old English
besma,
meaning “bundle of twigs.” She’d had to stoop low during the whole process of sweeping, a backbreaking labor, it had seemed to me, though each time I’d pointed out the sleek new broom I’d brought from Rupala, she’d shaken her head and refused it. Once, when I’d mentioned this to Martine, she’d smiled and said, “The hardest thing in life, Ray, is to understand those you cannot understand.”

At one point that afternoon, I reached for the atlas I kept in a bookshelf filled with other reference books, thumbed my way to Lubanda, and stared at the map for a long time, my gaze tracing the route that led from Rupala to Tumasi and which still bore the simple name “Tumasi Road.” A few black dots designated the larger villages that had huddled along the road, places I knew well and which I could see quite vividly in my mind, a collection of round mud huts with vaguely conical roofs, a shape that reminded me of the tepees of the Plains Indians, though fashioned from wood rather than skins. But then, there’d been no need to protect Lubandan villagers from the biting cold that had lashed the American plains. In Lubanda, the need had been for cool and ventilation, a roof of sticks perfectly designed to allow heat to rise and air to circulate. This, too, had been one of Martine’s many illustrations of the ways in which Lubandans managed their lives, dealt with their environment, and generally, in a thousand ways invisible to foreigners, held to their own ways.

She’d made her position most emphatically clear to Theodore Calley, the head of Helping Hand, yet another of the American charities bringing aid to Lubanda at that time. He’d arrived with Farmer Gessee and his entourage, and together they’d strolled through the market, no doubt in order for Gessee to point out its backward reliance upon local products. It was clear from the sour look on Gessee’s face the moment he glimpsed Martine among the market throng that he took no pleasure in finding her in Tumasi that day.

But Gessee was Gessee, an actor first and foremost, and so, rather than change the day’s itinerary or hustle Calley back into his Land Cruiser, he launched himself into the crowd, shaking hands and patting backs, the consummate politician.

I saw all this from my little concrete stoop, Seso standing beside me, the two of us watching Gessee move from stall to stall, talking confidently of the richness of the savanna, the large amount of coffee it could produce if only there were enough fertilizer, irrigation, and the like, all of which cost a regrettably large amount of money.

He’d at last come to a halt near the center of the market, and there he’d hoisted himself onto a platform. The people had crowded in around him, Seso and I now among them. At one point, Gessee noticed my white face among all those black ones and gave me a quick, friendly nod. Then he introduced Calley as “a great friend of Lubanda.” Calley waved broadly, as if he were riding in a motorcade, and mouthed “Hi” and “Hello” and “Wonderful to be here.” He was young and he looked energetic, and I had little doubt that his intentions were good, a fact that made his subsequent exchange with Martine all the more awkward, but also curiously poignant, at least in memory, with Calley looking strangely perplexed by what Martine said, but not angry, and with no hint of the flaming disapproval I’d glimpsed in Gessee’s darkly sparking eyes.

That it happened at all surprised me because just as Gessee was about to speak, I saw Martine still standing near one of the market stalls. She was holding a small bowl, turning it over in her hand and paying no attention at all to the show that was going on a few yards away. Her indifference seemed completely natural, rather than a display. She had heard Gessee’s pitch before, and expected to hear nothing new in this latest one. The bowl was more important to her, and after she turned it over in her hand, she checked her basket quite thoroughly, as if looking for something she might offer in exchange for it. By then Gessee had mounted the platform and was addressing the crowd, first introducing Calley, then giving his standard speech about the future of central Lubanda, how much it could contribute to Village Harmony.

Martine appeared not at all to be listening to any of this. She had obviously found nothing in her basket and was—at the moment when the word was spoken—well on her way out of the market, where she would have swung to the left and made her way toward home, all of which I fully expected her to do.

But the word stopped her in her tracks, Gessee by that time gloriously elaborating on the word that had halted Martine’s return to her farm, frozen her in place like an invisible hand, then drawn her around to face the market, the crowd, Farmer Gessee.

The word was “love.”

“It is love my dear friend, Mr. Calley, is offering the people of Lubanda,” Gessee told the villagers of Tumasi. “And we are to be the grateful receivers of his love.”

“Not good,” Seso whispered darkly as he watched Martine head back toward the crowd, her head cocked slightly to the right, as if questioning whether she’d actually heard Gessee correctly.

She moved unhurriedly forward, and once, perhaps twice, she slowed or stopped, as if briefly undecided as to whether she should do what she was planning to.

At a certain point, she caught Gessee’s eye, but he continued speaking, giving her approach no notice, though I could see he was well aware that she was moving toward him, glancing at her quickly and almost surreptitiously, as one might regard an unlikely yet potential assassin.

He’d finished his remarks by the time she reached the outer perimeter of the crowd and raised her hand to ask a question, as if she were a student in his class. Gessee looked away and started to step down from the stool. He clearly had no intention of acknowledging her. But Calley was an American, and thus very familiar with the custom of public officials taking questions from the crowd, and so, with a broad smile, he said, “Yes, you have a question or a comment, ma’am?”

“A comment,” Martine said. “A comment about Farmer Gessee’s mention of love, your love, the world’s love for Lubanda. I have a comment on that, yes.”

With Calley in full happy-warrior mode, Gessee had no choice but to say, “Of course, my child.” The big smile beamed. “So, what is your comment?”

“My comment is that charity is not the same as love,” Martine said.

Gessee had nothing to say to this, but Calley did.

“And what is that difference?” he asked.

“The difference is that charity asks people to give,” Martine answered. “Love might ask them not to.”

Something in Gessee’s eyes hardened, but he didn’t speak.

Calley, young, naïve, with no more than a few days in Lubanda, was not unexpectedly perplexed. And yet, rather than offer some off-the-cuff response to this, he said, “I’m not sure I understand.”

“Then I shall put it this way,” Martine said in that measured way of hers. “There is sometimes more love in not giving than in giving.”

“How so?” Calley asked quietly.

“Because if you have more than you need and you give to me from this extra that you have and which I do not have, then you must be surperior to me, yes?” She looked at Calley with all the force of her character, that great, commanding stillness in her eyes. “And if I take from you and take from you, and more and more I take from you, then in the end I will become like a person long in bed. My muscles will wither, and I will not be able to get up, and so I will remain an invalid forever, one who cannot walk, cannot clean or feed himself, yes?”

At that point, Gessee, smiling sweetly because he had no choice, stepped toward her. “Mr. Calley is trying, Miss Aubert, to help Lubanda.”

Martine’s voice held its firmness. “I am sure he is,” she said, “which makes it all the harder for Lubandans to refuse his gifts.”

Gessee continued to offer his fatherly smile, but I saw something register in Calley’s eyes, a sudden awareness that he was perhaps not as ready for his post as he’d thought himself.

Martine glanced at Calley, but only for an instant, before returning her gaze to Gessee, where she held it briefly before she turned and headed back toward the road.

She was still faintly visible, a lone figure, moving slowly away from me, by the time Gessee and Calley had climbed back into Gessee’s car. I noticed that while Gessee was expansively waving to the crowd, Calley was gazing up the road, to where Martine’s withdrawing figure could be seen, though only blurrily, behind a wavy veil of heat.

Here this story might have ended had I not noticed and later recalled that a third man had been seated in the back of Gessee’s car as it pulled out of Tumasi that afternoon, a small, bespectacled man, well dressed in a tailored suit, and whom I’d never once thought of until, nearly twenty years after leaving Lubanda, and three days after Idi’s call, he walked into my office, nodded silently, then said, “I know what Seso Alaya had.”

Think of Beria, Stalin’s infamous enforcer, with his round face and little rodent eyes. Add black skin and small, distinctively shaped ears that curl in upon themselves like tiny, limbless embryos. Give him hands a bit too large for his body and a shiny nose that looks polished. Include a dollop of courtliness, but with a rough edge, as if he’d been sent to some bush finishing school, and you’d have the man who introduced himself to me that afternoon.

“Nullu Beyani,” he said.

He put out his hand and I took it.

I offered him a seat, and he settled into one of the two chairs that faced my desk.