Adé: A Love Story (6 page)

Perhaps the seed of our separation had been planted weeks earlier, I thought then, in Sharm el-Sheikh, in Mustafa’s glimmer of recognition.
“Ah, you look like my sister, you know?”
Miriam, the Israeli, and I, the Egyptian. We did not know how to talk about it, but we felt it, and now there was this, this bush between us that could, at any moment, go up in flames. In her room, I felt the shrub beginning to burn, I could feel the heat, and I took pity on her. I didn’t say what we were both thinking: I belonged here, and she did not. And so I released her, the only way I knew how. I took her hand, kissed her cheek, and told her what she needed, but did not want, to hear.

“You go.”

She nodded as her shoulders slumped in defeat, and fell back onto her bed. She knew she could not fight me. She knew I didn’t
need more. She knew I could fall in love on this island and stay. As for me, well, Miriam was no longer enough. She was seaworthy, but Adé was the sea itself. She had Coconut Grove. She could always go back home. I was never sure if the homes I left would be there when I returned. The Indian Ocean was stable; the moon rose up out of the water like a planet. Adé knew how to navigate it by the stars.

I hugged her, and when I looked back from the doorway, she was sitting on the small bed, clutching her blue notebook. She looked bewildered. Betrayed. I felt guilt but lacked doubt. This new world—with its Afro-Arab-Portuguese inhabitants with whom I shared bone structure and skin color, and whose brown eyes appraised me as if they knew me better than I knew myself—had claimed me in a way I had not known. The island was becoming my home. My mother’s prophecy was becoming manifest.

NOT LONG AFTER
the first night we made love Adé brought me to meet his mother. She lived in a small clay house with a fire pit for cooking in front, and a hole in the ground in the back for everything else. Her mother, Adé’s
nyanya,
spent most of the day lying on a cot in the short, narrow hallway that served as both living and dining room.

The day he took me, holding my hand, telling me it would be okay, Nuru Badi was sitting outside her house in the spot I would come to know as hers, because I would soon greet her there on the many days and nights I came to visit. At first, I did not understand her pride of place, but then I grew to admire her strategy. From her chosen perch she could watch her children—the smaller ones from her current husband—and also keep an eye on the fire burning beneath the huge aluminum pot filled with coconut rice and vegetables for the evening meal. Her long view included the paths that brought her sons and husband back to her at the end of each day, and the position of her chair, slightly turned toward the road, allowed her to keep track of all the other comings and goings of her realm.

Nervously, I greeted her in the way Adé had taught me, kneeling before her and saying the appropriate words,
Shikamoo Mama.
To say she appraised me the way all Swahili women did would be to understate her response. Nuru stared at me, straight into my pupils, and held my gaze as she spoke to Adé. I knew enough Swahili by then to understand most of her words.

“Who is this girl, Adé, and why are you bringing her here? What is the meaning of this?”

This is Farida, he said gently. I told you about her, do you remember? We met during Ramadan.

“She is
Amerikani?
”

Yes.

“What part does she come from?”

From New York. It is a big city, much bigger even than Nairobi.

“How old is she?”

She is still young, Mama, you can see for yourself.

“Where did you meet her?”

At the guesthouse. She is new here, with no family, only one friend, another girl.

“Doesn’t she have parents who are worried about her traveling so far from home?”

Things are different in America. Her parents want her to know the world is bigger than just one place. And she has already been to university. She is not a child.

And then the final question:

“When is she leaving?”

Which is when Adé surprised me by saying what some small part of me had been thinking but not dared say aloud.

She is not leaving.

And then Nuru Badi cracked a smile, mostly with her eyes, and waved me in to meet her mother.

I began to spend whole days at Nuru’s house, cooking with her, making her laugh at my feeble attempts to wash clothes. I could not wash everything with just three small cups of water. She could, and I watched her at least a dozen times as I tried to figure out the science of apportioning the small amount of liquid just so, but I found it impossible to duplicate her formula and was reduced to caricature. The water spilled. I forgot to keep some separate to do the rinsing. I put the clothes down on the dirty ground when they grew tangled and heavy.

“Eh we!”
Nuru would scold me, the words snapping from her small mouth. “Don’t you know Aliyah had to go all the way to Ngomani for this water? Do I have to send her again? It is a long way for a little girl, you know.”

Nuru was stern, but she told me stories about Adé when he was a boy, how he slid out of her body in just a few minutes, eyes wide open. She told me the meaning of her name: “beautiful light,” which made sense. Her face was round and golden brown, her black eyes sharp and bright. She poked cruel fun at me too. Each time her sisters came over and tossed aside their voluminous yards of black cloth to reveal their pretty floral dresses and voluptuous figures hidden underneath, Nuru told them a different story about my profound incompetence.

Her best son, her most faithful, her smartest, her hardest working son, had brought her a useless daughter-in-law, she said. I couldn’t cook or wash clothes. I couldn’t even make a proper fire. They all laughed, clapping their hands and shaking
their heads, tearing up at the absurdity that was me. I wrapped my
kanga,
the patterned sarong I bought in the market, tighter around my waist and pulled my scarf over my head to claim what dignity I could muster until Adé came to save me.

“Stop making fun of her,” he said. “She is not from here. She does not know the ways of this place. You should be ashamed, Asha. Was it so long ago that you were afraid to even take the boat alone to the mainland? And that is just a short distance, not even one half hour! Farida has traveled across the world on an airplane for more than twenty hours—do you hear me? Be patient with her, she will learn.”

The sisters looked down, but not Nuru. She held her eyes up, taunting us. “Here, here then, my grown son,” she said, rising from her stool and walking into the tiny, narrow bedroom, “take these shirts your future wife has washed!” And she showed him the clothes I had wrestled with for hours, with the streaks of dirt still visible around the seams, and the soap barely rinsed from the cotton.

I wanted to cry, but Adé took the shirts and motioned for us to go. He flipped the shirts wordlessly over his shoulder as we walked the crooked stone streets back to the guesthouse. After a few minutes of silence, he reassured me softly, “My mother is not really angry. It is her way of testing us. She is trying to make sure you are strong, that you will not leave me at the first sign of trouble.”

As the days passed, I grew used to spending my days waiting for him. I would shower, letting the lukewarm water from the communal stall on the rooftop rinse me clean in the morning. Then I read a hundred pages or so of one of the African novels I found at
the kiosk or bought off of a traveler passing through. I wrote in my journal. I sketched in the book of unlined pages Adé brought to me one evening. “Why not draw?” he said. “You are always taking
pichas,
isn’t it? Maybe some should come from inside. Not everything can be found from looking out.”

On some days I took grocery orders from Nuru and walked to the market for fruits and chapatis, or a packet of pencils for Adé’s youngest sister; other days I made my way to the sea, all the way to the end of the beach, where the women sat cloaked in black. I’d sit with them, not speaking, looking out at the ocean, and trying to get a glimpse of Adé in his dhow, wondering how he was managing under the hot sun.

One evening Adé said he had a surprise for me. He had something to show me. He said he had been working on it in secret for weeks, but wouldn’t tell me what it was. He clasped my hand and led me from my rooftop down to the cobblestone streets, and then took me higher and higher above the old town, stopping every now and then for air. When I looked up at him, pleading and impatient, he told me to keep going.

“Patience, Farida! We are almost there, you will see.” But the suspense was excruciating. I imagined we might be going to visit his older sister, Amina, and her husband. Adé told me they were having a hard time; the husband was cruel to her, and though I asked several times, Adé refused to take me to their house.

“He is very rich, and he is not our relative,” Adé had said. “It is not the right thing to do, to go to him. Amina must come to me first, or I cannot help her.”

I had met Amina once, at their mother’s house. She was standing behind a high-backed wooden chair, holding it as if to shield her from any perceived threat. She was stunning, the epitome
of all that was revered in her culture: creamy, light brown skin; dancing, dark brown eyes; a thin, perfect nose; straight, white teeth.

She was slim, with modest but seductive curves not fully revealed even in the dresses she wore underneath her floor length covering, her
buibui.
She was present, but quiet, almost invisible.

I smiled at her tentatively, as if approaching a rare bird. She smiled back, and I immediately felt transported to another house, another room, another land where the light of the equator streamed through the windows like the northern light in a Vermeer. I understood immediately why Amina had been snapped up by a man so much older, a man of means. She would be day to his impending night.

Finally, Adé and I came upon a small, newer house. It was clean, bright white, but still in the old style: smooth stone, elegant arches, and a large tub of water with a cup for a shower. I didn’t get the meaning until we climbed to the top floor and stood on the terrace overlooking the island—the old town to the left and the white sand of Shela Beach spreading to the tip of the blue-green Indian Ocean to the right. I clutched Adé’s hand tighter. He had found a terrace for us, far from the hustle and bustle below, a vantage point for us alone. I saw myself in a chair, legs outstretched, my journal in my lap.

“There is more,” he said. “I am not sure you will like it, but it is a beginning. It is for now until we can make something better. Come.”

He led me to a low doorway a few steps back from the terrace. Another structure was perched atop the building. He pulled a key from his pocket—I had never seen him use a key—and opened
the tiny door. It was a room, a room for us. A bed stood in the center of the small space; he walked me over to it and placed my hand on the headboard, the dark wood carved with a single, exquisite rose.

“I made this bed for us,” he said. “For us to sleep, for you to read and write. Maybe, who knows, we will make a child in this bed.” I looked around. The room was almost in miniature, with only two small windows, the bed, and a small table. A few hooks for clothes. A hot plate. The mere idea of a breeze.

Then he gave me the same big smile as he did after the first time we made love. “Let us get married, Farida. This is only the first step. I will build a house for you. And we will have children, and you will learn everything. I promise.”

What could I say? In the logic of our unfolding, it made perfect sense. The days had turned into weeks, the weeks into months. It could not go on open-ended this way, not in this culture. If we married I could stay forever. I would have a permanent home, as unchanging as the thousand-year-old stone streets. I would be free to leave, but always expected to return. I would learn how to wash clothes and cook delicious food over a fire. I would learn all the things I did not know about the island. I would never have to survive another cold winter, in a cold city. I would write a book. I would have children. I would be happy. I would give up everything and gain even more. I saw it all.

Yes,
I said, a young girl full of idealism. Of course it was possible. Wasn’t it? Why couldn’t Adé be my future?
Ndyo. Kabisa.
We will be married. And I tilted my face up to his as I had done, by now, so many times, waiting for his lips to push against mine. And we fell onto the creaking but sturdy bed, the both of us
laughing about its potential to hold our weight, and made his gift our own.

Later, as Adé walked me back to the guesthouse, he took my hand in such a way that I could tell something powerful had shifted. His hand felt bigger, more possessive, certain.

“We will go and call your parents tomorrow,” he said. “It is Saturday, so I don’t have to work on the dhow. We will not tell them yet, my parents should hear first, but yours should know you are safe. I will wait in line with you at the post office.”

I nodded, thinking about how much my mother would approve of Adé, his careful inquiries and overriding gentleness. I would tell her that I was thinking about staying longer, for weeks, months, perhaps a year. I would tell her that I felt at home in Africa. That I was receiving the message I was meant to hear.

The next morning Adé and I walked together down to the post office situated at the water’s edge, and while waiting in line for the phone, we watched the ferry dropping off and picking up passengers and supplies. The dock was teeming with men heaving sacks filled with everything the island could not create: rice, wheat, sugar, textiles, and tea. We were there early because it was still relatively cool; the sun had not yet become hot enough to drive us indoors until the late afternoon, when it would be bearable again to walk the narrow, car-free, streets.

An hour plodded by and then it was our turn. Adé negotiated the rate with the man behind the counter, arranging as always for everything to be less expensive for us. If the sunburned tourists loaded with backpacks and guidebooks had to pay three dollars a minute to call home and were only allowed five minutes,
we paid fifty cents and talked however long we liked. Which is what we did, ignoring the stares of others who had been waiting in the heat, on the hard bench. It could not be helped; I had to tell my mother everything: Adé, his mother, my rooftop, and the brightly colored
kangas
I now wore draped over my head or around my hips.