Adé: A Love Story (5 page)

“You know,” he said, “your great-grandfather was a composer before he lost his sight and opened the newspaper stand on Fifty-seventh Street.”

I nodded. He had told me this a thousand times.

“Yes,” he said. “He lost his sight in the small-pox epidemic. You must always be careful, my oldest daughter,” and this last he said with gravitas, “You never know how this life will unfold.”

He was right about everything, of course, but I was already gone. His house, his stories, his tragedies, could not hold me. I did not see them as my own. He was locked in his past. I was hungry for my future. It looked painfully bright.

AFTER THE SWEET
spaghetti, on those last days of Ramadan, Adé came after the sun went down and took me for long walks through the old town, a place full of movement during the day, and absolutely, eerily still at night. On our fourth or fifth walk, we held hands, our fingers separating only when I had to lift the hem of my sarong to keep it from trailing into one of the many reeking puddles of liquid—water, donkey urine, who knew what else—at every curb, or when Adé pointed at a place significant to him, a landmark on his road of his life. The doors he carved for a powerful man in town, the tea shop his cousin owned, the site of the old hospital long torn down.

A few weeks after Ramadan, we walked to the seafront and sat on the low wall of stones at the edge, staring out at the moon. We were quiet, holding hands in the dark, until he spoke. “I don’t know how to say this,” he said. “It is something that makes me uncomfortable, something not easy but I know I must tell you, or I will always be holding it in my mind, and that is not fair, to keep secrets between each other. Even though we do not know each other very long, we know each other in the right way, and that is something you cannot measure in normal time.

“It is that I have feelings for you. Or? I can’t say exactly, it is that I am always thinking of you. When I am working I am thinking about coming to see you, or walking in the night with you, like this.” He paused and looked out at the water. “Do you think I should not say these things? Maybe I should keep them only to myself, but you are something different, or isn’t it? Look at you, you are more Swahili than a Swahili girl, you are respectful, not like the others who come. My stepfather tells me to be careful, but to him I say the world is big, the life is long, who am I to say no to you just because you are not born on Lamu?”

I was quiet. I had already fallen in love with his words. For whatever reason—his halting dance with my language, his tender heart—when I listened to him, I heard the tremulous vulnerability of poetry. He had split me open weeks ago.

Before I could speak he continued, “I know you will say that it will hurt too much when you leave, that we should stay only friends, but there is a saying,” he said. “
Kipendacho moyo ni dawa.
I am not sure how to say in English, but it is like, how do you say, What the heart desires is medicine to itself. Does that make sense?”

“What the heart desires is medicine to itself,” I repeated back to him.

“Yes,” I said, wondering how I would ever, in a million years, leave this man.

“Yes, yes. That makes sense.”

A few weeks later, Adé told me I needed a new name. “You need an Arabic name,” he said, looking at me carefully across an old backgammon board we discovered in a corner of the guesthouse. We were sitting at a table on the rooftop in the heat, a few dozen
feet outside the door to my little room. The call to prayer was a low whine straining through the sticky, hot damp of impending rain. I looked at him, slid a worn brown circle across the elongated triangles on the board, and laughed into his eyes.

“Really?”

We had taken to meeting on the rooftop during the day because something happened when we walked the narrow stone streets in the light. People stared at us, studied our movements, and murmured about our togetherness. Shopkeepers, fishermen, men mixing cement. Women who slid by so quickly I didn’t know they took us in until they had already turned away. The community was small, yes. But also, I had come to find out, Adé was well known in his place, on his small island. Respected. Walking with a woman in public, an
mzungu,
a foreigner, meant something about him, about me. People, his people, were waiting to see what.

“I think Farida suits you,” he said, pausing with the import of the moment before picking up the dice. “It means the woman who is exceptional, a jewel. There is no other like her. She stands alone.”

I smiled.

“But this name, will your father mind? It is a real Muslim name.”

We had been speaking of religion. The night before I explained I was not brought up in any formal religion, but my mother was born Christian and my father, Jewish. He had turned his head quickly to face me when I told him this.

“Really? Your father is
Judeo?
” He laughed, showing his dazzling white teeth. “This we cannot tell my mother yet.”

I had raised my eyebrows, anticipating one of the long, sometimes
contentious discussions we had been having about religion and culture, the winding talks that alternately clarified and vexed, but then, finally, brought us back to each other with a newfound understanding: his view of America was partial and tinged with propaganda; my feminist view of Islam was phobic and left no room for gray.

“No, no,” he said. “It is no problem, but she will be shocked to know I like a Jewish girl. She wants me to marry a traditional Swahili girl I have known all my life, but now I do not think that is the life I want for myself.”

“What is the life you want for yourself?”

“Ahh, I don’t know, I am young, I don’t know my destiny yet,” he had said, as if his life was something to be revealed to him at a certain age, in a particular moment.

“I don’t think my father will mind,” I said now, wondering about my own destiny. “I will just have to explain it to him.” And then I laughed out loud at the thought of sitting with my father in his office on Madison Avenue. I would translate my new Arabic name while perched on one of the sofas we had picked out together at Bloomingdale’s, when I insisted he needed furniture in the office where he spent most of his life but none of his money.

A sketch of him arguing in the Supreme Court would be on the wall to my left. If it was after five o’clock in the afternoon, the blinds covering the windows on one side of the corner office would be lowered to keep the setting sun from hurting our eyes, but the other bank of windows would remain open to the fading light. I would look out between the hulking gray buildings of concrete and steel, beyond the thousand tiny boxes of light, each filled with a legal assistant or advertising executive sitting behind a desk, to catch a glimpse of the liquid path of the East River.

I would tell my father my Arabic name was Farida, and he would laugh and laugh from behind his L-shaped mahogany desk, leaning back in his armchair, eyes twinkling.

“You are amazing,” he would say. “You travel to the other side of the world and come home not with little tchotchkes from the tourist shop, but with a new name and a Muslim mother-in-law!”

Then we would laugh together, because he was right, it was ludicrous. We would not speak of the underlying currents. My nomadism was legendary, a label slapped onto a deeper childhood fracture best left unspoken: the collapse of our home, our family, the brutal ripping apart of my foundation. My classmates were applying for prestigious grants and law schools. They were like trains, each on their own track forged in steel. I envied their certainty. But I was first-generation Ivy League, only the second generation in my family to go to college. My genes were new to this place of privilege. I felt lost on campus, but the dislocation was deeper than that. It rumbled through generations.

“But wait,” I said to Adé, snapping back to the present, my tongue heavy in my mouth. I knew the importance of naming in his culture. “Are you trying to tell me something? Am I to be always alone? Are you saying you don’t want me—that I must go and live by myself? That I am not your future?”

“What is the meaning of this? This, Farida?”

Adé looked at me quizzically, and then reached across the small table to take my face in his hands. He said that was not at all what he meant. But he had never met a woman so independent and so beautiful, so full of ideas and open at the same time. And then he leaned in and kissed me with lips so full and so warm, I
felt a rush of heat flood my body and then only desire. I pulled him from his chair, kissing him all the way through the door of my room, and then I was pulling him to the floor, down onto my thin mattress, over me, on top of me, heavy, new, hard, wanting.

I led him through the steps of lovemaking, either because he did not know them or his nervousness had gotten the better of him. I coaxed him, massaged his neck and whispered my new name into his ear as he entered me. His climax was almost immediate. I didn’t mind. Drops of rain began to fall, and I held him in my arms like a child, even though his body was big, bigger than any man I had ever loved.

After, he told me I was his first lover.

“I have never done that before,” he said, looking up at me, his face as open as the sky. “You are my first love.”

And then, “You will be my only love.”

I looked at him, at his sparkling, smiling eyes, and felt the foreign becoming familiar. I was beginning to feel at home in another land. He gave his mother all of his money every night. He fed me sweet spaghetti. He gave me a name. He answered all my questions about Islam and everything else with unwavering patience. He rubbed my feet at night. He covered the vein that ran down the underside of my arm with soft, tender kisses. I was to be his only love.

Who was I to say we were not each other’s destiny?

I told Miriam the next morning. She shook her head and began pacing the worn, colorful rug on the floor of her small room. She became animated and emphatic the way she’d been in the steam room months before, spinning.

“Don’t get attached. It is dangerous to get attached.”

In a great rush of words, she said she was ready to leave the island. She found the tourists annoying, the Muslim men disrespectful. She said the place wasn’t real. It wasn’t really Africa. She was bored.

“We have to get out of this place,” she said, digging through her life-size backpack propped against the wall. “It is just a fantasy land for rich Italians. This girl I met, Sarah, says all the men just want to find a woman from the West to pay for them to travel to Europe or America. It’s not real. None of this is real! How do you not see that, you of all people?”

She pulled out her notebook, the threadbare blue rectangle she carried with her everywhere. Receipts and little scraps of paper with names and phone numbers scrawled across them in her left-handed script bloomed from its edges.

“I met a guy with a glass factory near Lake Turkana in the north,” she said, unsnapping the hair band holding the notebook together. “It’s supposed to be amazing. There’s an overnight train through the blue hills, and then a twenty-four-hour bus ride north. From there we can go west to Uganda. There is a ferry across Lake Victoria.”

She was still pacing.

The idea of a twenty-four-hour bus ride followed by a ferry to anywhere made me want to run screaming from the room. I did not want to move again, I did not want another place to slip through my fingers. I did not want to get back on the never-ending train of my life. For once I longed to arrive, not depart.

After a few more moments of listening to her plans, I finally stopped her. “Is the man you met from Turkana more real than the men here?” She stopped, midstride. “What is the difference
between here and there, really?” I said. “Why run from this place? There is time. It is safe.”

Her eyes—hazel, green, blue, they changed with the sun—stared into me, screaming astonishment and heartbreak. We were supposed to travel the continent, to pass through places, not become part of them. I was breaking the covenant, betraying the map.

“Well, to start,” she said, her voice now tinged with sarcasm, “there are no tourists, and only a hundred or so people in the whole village. He invited us to stay at his mother’s house.”

I waited for her to continue.

“Oh, and it’s not a beach town full of boy prostitutes looking for sugar mommies.”

The blow. She was talking about Adé, and she was talking about her idea of the “real Africa.” My stomach jumped in rebellion, but I found I didn’t have the words or energy to explain. I wanted to tell her that she was chasing a myth from the pages of
National Geographic,
that she had read too much Paul Bowles, that she believed in some kind of impossible contrivance of purity. I wanted to tell her I had never subscribed to the idea of a “real Africa” to begin with. I wanted to tell her I was sorry that I wanted to stay, that I had found a place and it was becoming a part of my history.

Perhaps I should have said all of that, but at the moment I did not have what it would take to build that bridge; the burden of crossing the divide was, even for her, for us, too much to bear. How to tell the entirety of my life in a way she could understand?

A glimpse of the future passed wordlessly between us.

“I don’t want to go to Lake Turkana,” I said gently. “I want to stay here and read the African novels I’ve been lugging everywhere.
The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
is as long as
Anna Karenina.
I want to read it in one place, sink into it. I want to write. I want to learn how to cook coconut rice. Here.”

And then I said what we both already knew. “I want to stay with Adé.”

She looked up at me, reaching for common ground, but I saw jealousy in her eyes. She was usually the one to meet a boy. Wherever we went, men wanted her. Her breasts were large, her mouth willing. Even I had wanted her, but that part was over between us. We had moved on from our infatuation to the meat of things: men.

As I listened to her plead, and talk about the smell of sewage in the street and donkey shit on the sidewalk, I saw the balance of power shifting. I had always followed her, but here, now, it was becoming clear: I would not be seduced by her pursuit. I had become the beacon of my own desire.