Adé: A Love Story (4 page)

Gradually the opening and closing of doors and the shifting of furniture outside my door grew into laughter and talking and the sound of food and drink being served. It was Ramadan; the sun had gone down, and the music had begun to play. That night the fast was broken with a melodic Lingala, and I immediately put my book down and let my head fall back into my pillow. I had not heard Lingala music before, and the newness of the sound affected me. I was used to the haunting whines of the griots from Mali and Senegal, the polyrhythmic chants of pygmies from Central Africa. But Lingala was different. It was music born of African rumba, a child of Afro-Cuban fusion that took hold in the
Belgian Congo in the forties, and made its way east to Kenya and Tanzania in the seventies and eighties, absorbing influences from Congolese folk music and Caribbean and Latin beats. On the Kenyan coast it leapt again, and with three or four guitars, one bass, drums, brass, and vocals, evolved a new offspring, benga, or the Swahili sound. Lingala was dance music, hypnotic and polyphonic, full of movement. It brought to mind the sound of bottles tinkling at a bar, and women and men sweating and dancing hip to hip under colored lights. The sound was so infectious, so sexy, it drew me out of my room and into the movement of it, into the ecstasy of its freedom.

I opened the door, and saw a man in the center of this exuberant stream of sound. He was inside the benga. Standing with his back to me, among a dozen or so other strikingly beautiful bodies, I saw his slender hips first, the clean white
kikoi
wrapped neatly around his waist, the tails of the turquoise button-down Oxford shirt modestly covering his behind. Adé’s was the first body I saw, and then my eyes were captivated by others: a handsome African American man I later learned was from Boston, a thin, olive-skinned beauty from Brazil, a serious exchange student from Tunis, five or six diffident looking young men from the island. Everyone was talking, drinking, laughing, and sharing survival stories from months on the road.

Miriam had already found her station among the celebrants, stretched out on a beat-up sofa, holding court, no doubt sizing up which man she might bed. By now I was used to her insatiable appetite, the way men fell at her feet, mesmerized. She felt me looking at her, turned and caught my eye, and motioned for me to come and sit. I walked to her slowly, and from my new perch turned to look for him, the man at the center of the sound, the
first man I noticed, but he had already gone. And then I felt silly, who was I to him? I had only opened my door and found him standing there. I had no right to summon him. But he was at the center of it all. He was all I saw. I wanted him to come back and stand with me. I wanted to see his face. Instead, I lay my head on Miriam’s shoulder as she ran her fingers through my hair and pressed my cheek further into her sturdy frame.

Adé returned only after the bottles had been emptied and the benga tapes had been played again and again. Miriam had disappeared, but I knew she would return soon, it was only the first night, after all. I was stretched out on a wooden chaise, with a towel wrapped around my legs to protect me from the cool of night, when I saw him at the top of the staircase. He had changed into a different
kikoi
and T-shirt. His hair was carefully combed, and his hands and feet glowed clean. He carried a Styrofoam plate in one hand and in the other, an orange Fanta. I said hello and we looked at each other, and then he said how are you and I said okay and he asked if he could sit near to me to break the fast. I said I would not mind at all; in fact, it would be nice to have some company because everyone else had gone to bed.

I sat up and told him my name, offered my hand. His hands were full, so he bowed his head respectfully and told me his. Adé. “What does that mean…” I asked. “Ah,” he said. “It is not important, I have some time to live up to this name. But it is to mean royal, the one who wears, how do you call it? The crown. It is not a traditional Swahili name,” he said. “My mother gave it to me because she thought I should be like a lion.” “King,” I said, laughing. “Yes.” He smiled sheepishly. “But it is a long way off, no? I have much to learn.”

I made room for his solid six-foot frame on the chaise, taking
in his broad shoulders and strong arms as he gracefully brought the plate and bottle of soda to rest. We did not touch—he was careful not to come too close—but the power of his physical presence moved me. He, it, radiated an honesty that was unfamiliar, a blend of humility and self-awareness, confidence and modesty all at once, and when he turned to face me, I gasped a little at his unselfconscious beauty. I saw his dark eyes and full mouth, his sharp cheekbones and clear, brown skin, and then, of course, the totality of him—all the parts put together.

I collected myself and asked where he’d been. He told me he had gone to the mosque to pray. For four hours? I exclaimed, smiling, warm but skeptical, having long ago been trained to distrust religion. No, no, he said laughing, that would be too much. Only for a little while, he said, but before that he had to clean and shut down his dhow, bathe, and visit with his mother. Every evening during Ramadan he visited her, he said, to talk over the day’s events outside her small house.

I asked if this was customary, if all the young men on the island went home to their mothers in the evenings during Ramadan. He said that some did, but not all, and then I was quiet and thought of all the stereotypes I had of Muslim men. I had not imagined them spending hours with their mothers. He told me that when he sat with his mother, he also gave her the money he earned each day, and they discussed how she would use it to manage the house and feed and clothe his brothers and sisters. I had never known a man to bring home all of his earnings, to hand the fruits of his labor, a fistful of cash, to his mother, his wife, his sister. To a woman.

Out of habit—I was trained at university, after all, to pose questions such as these—I asked if his mother was allowed to
work, if she ever had her own money. And then I worried suddenly that I had crossed an invisible boundary.

But no. After a beat, Adé looked at me and said, “But my money is her money. My mother,” he said, “she works very hard. I wish I could give her even more.” I felt both ashamed and put at ease. His calm openness in the face of my implicit criticism seemed the better way to move in the world. I exhaled and looked past him at the moon rising, huge and luminous behind us, from the other side of the island. I motioned to it and he twisted around to see. We stayed like that for what seemed a long time, watching its ascent in silence.

Eventually he turned back to me and asked if I was hungry. I was not, but again, just as with the women in the boat, something stopped me from responding as I might have, loudly and without respect for the sanctity of the moment. I said yes quietly, almost in a whisper, and watched him carefully take the thin sheet of tin off of the plate. As I parted my lips and waited for the forkful of noodles he offered, I glanced at his muscular calves, and his large and handsome feet resting in sandals made from the faded black rubber of old tires. And then the spaghetti reached my tongue. It was sweet! It was cooked with sugar! It was one of his mother’s favorite recipes, he said. It was special for Ramadan and meant to remind us of the sweetness of life, of God.

I nodded, pondering this new being before me, feeding me the taste of his mother’s hands, her offering to God, and I had the urge to touch him, to feel that he was real. And then the sweet spaghetti was finished, and he said he had to work early the next morning at the woodshop. He was a fisherman first, but also a carver, he said, and chiseled rosettes into the massive wooden doors announcing the thresholds of the larger houses in town.
We had seen some of them, I said, on our way to the guesthouse. He nodded. I wanted to kiss him, waited. He folded the square of tinfoil covering the plate and put it into his shirt pocket. I stood closer to him, and we walked together to the steps. He was taller than me by several inches, and I felt some indescribable protection there, in his imagined embrace.

After he left, I lay on my thin mattress, thinking about the unusual potency of our attraction. I knew nothing about him and yet I wanted to see him again. I had too much power, I thought. I might consume him out of my own curiosity simply because I could. I could stay or go. He could not. He had too much power, I thought. He could reject me. He could break me in two.

Not long after, I heard a quiet knock on the door and for a moment thought he might have returned. But it was Miriam who entered without waiting for my response. She spread out next to me, humming a tune from the Lingala, as I gushed excitedly about the moon and the sweet spaghetti, about young men giving money to their mothers. She talked about the invisibility of women in the old town, and the claustrophobia she felt walking down the narrow stone streets. She said that for the first time in her life, she missed seeing cars, a way out.

I tried to stay awake, but was tired and did not like what she was saying. I could not imagine we were on the same island. I started to say something, to defend this small place and its people, but I could not bring myself to do it. I had only just met this one boy. The story of the world was too big to reverse in one night. My mind and then my body grew heavy. I pressed myself against her, and drifted off to sleep.

WHEN I TOLD
my mother I wanted to travel to Africa for a year, maybe more, she did not flinch. She thought it an excellent idea. She had traveled to Africa, too, when she was a few years older than me, and written her first book of many, a collection of poems, inspired by the experience. On the appointed day of departure, we stood in her study, in front of her typewriter, and she wrote me a check for three thousand dollars. She smiled as she handed it to me, happy, I think, to have the means to give me the gift of another continent. Then we hugged, which gave the exchange a ceremonial air. A seal of approval, a nod of expectation of what was to come: discovery, expansion, and, of course, art.

Africa was part of our mythology. We talked about African novelists like the South African writer Bessie Head, who went insane. We met the Ghanaian literary star Ama Ata Aidoo when we traveled to London. Shona marble sculptures from Zimbabwe graced our home, along with gorgeous books about the Ndebele people who paint their houses in brightly colored, abstract designs. My mother bought enormous photographs of pygmies from Zaire, and hung them, with their great round bellies and expressive eyes, in the living room. When the opportunity arose,
she made sure I met Nelson Mandela, and a photograph of the three of us, smiling, was perpetually on display.

In our house and in our relationship, Africa was not foreign, threatening, or exotic. It was inspirational, full of powerful people with tremendous intellects who made remarkable contributions. Africa was a rich and looming place and my mother made me feel, through her words and actions, that it belonged to me. It held secrets, she said to me in her own, quiet way. Things I would never hear if I did not go myself.

My father was altogether different. He nodded gravely when I told him where I was going, and arranged for me to have my own American Express card added to his account. He didn’t appear concerned about the trip itself, but that it included Miriam seemed to chafe. In the months before we left, Miriam sold me her car, and he didn’t find it roadworthy. His younger brother had been killed in a car accident while driving home from veterinary school a decade earlier. For my father, it was a defining moment.

We were living in Washington at the time of the crash; my father was working as an attorney in the administration. He woke me up in the middle of the night and carried me to our sturdy Volvo for the long drive to New York. We sat shiva at my grandmother’s house in Brighton Beach, and I watched in horror as the headstrong woman who never finished high school, worked several jobs as a bookkeeper, and bought me wildly decadent things like gold-plated jacks, wailed and beat her chest. Some days she could barely stand, or bring herself to look at the people filing through her tiny living room to pay respect.

At night she clutched my father’s lapels, demanding, “Why, why, why?”

He held her and looked into her eyes as his own filled with tears. “I don’t know, Mama, I don’t know.”

My father, the rock of each family he coalesced—with my mother, with his mother, with the mother of my half-brother and sister—told me he worried every time I drove “that car of Miriam’s.” I drove too fast, he said, and he was right. I hated the monotony of the road, especially the stretch of highway from New Haven to his house in the suburbs of New York City, and I was young and arrogant enough to think poorly of all the other drivers. I deemed them slow and too focused on the road. I was more interested in the destination. The accelerator in Miriam’s car was also smooth, too smooth. What took other drivers two and a half hours, I accomplished in two, sometimes less.

One night before Miriam and I left the continent, I slid the car up to the front of the house and saw my father though the living-room window, waiting quietly, reading Reinhold Niebuhr. He looked up from his book, stood and walked outside, ambling down the cement path from porch to curb. He hugged me, kissed my forehead, and then commenced his ritual inspection of the car.

“Dad,” I said impatiently, “the car is fine. It’s fantastic. Stop worrying.”

He checked the tires, crouched to see if any fluids were dripping from the machine’s underbelly. “I don’t like you driving this car, sweetheart. It’s not safe. I don’t see how Miriam’s parents let her drive it. And now you’re going to another country with her?” He shook his head in resignation, then put his arms around my shoulders, steering me back to the house, toward safety.

My sister ran to greet me as we came through the door, giddily wrapping her four-year-old arms around my legs, and shouting my name.

We sat for two hours in the wingback chairs, and I listened to my father talk about my brother’s success in little league, and the musical talent he must have inherited from my great-grandfather.