An Angle on the World

by Bill Barich

  The teaching left me exhausted. I felt like a poser in front of my students, who were older and more qualified than me. Some men had begun as teachers when they were just twelve years old. As the cleverest boys in tiny hamlets, they’d been sent to a city for their primary education, then returned home to open a school. Now they were doing a two-year course to improve their credentials and their pay rate. They were still hungry for education. They excelled at debate, leaping to their feet to praise a canny verbal thrust by crying, “Point!” Proud of their penmanship, they composed their essays in an elegant nineteenth-century hand. Rather than stick a pencil behind an ear, they planted it in their hair.

  The classes gave me headaches until I realized I could do no good in Nigeria. My best hope was to do no harm, and once I recognized that, the teaching became easier. I saw myself as a sort of anti–Peace Corps volunteer, who belonged to a different organization, less arrogant and officious. The organization had some other members, too, guys who also subscribed to the “no harm” scheme. We kept in touch by mail and visited one another whenever we could, crisscrossing the country in 404s, although hardly anyone traveled to Nnewi. There was nothing to do except drink beer at Edwin’s, or next to the pumps at the Total gas station, where the owner handed out free ball caps to white folks.

  On the rare occasions when I had a visitor, I’d invite Paul to join us. He enjoyed the company, but he seldom stayed for more than a drink or two. He could be slippery like that, interested in Americans but not overly so. In the same way, he struck a careful balance between the rigors of his job and the delights of his sneaky affair. He also bounced between a modern view of the world and a belief in the supernatural that was deeply rooted in Igbo culture. For the Igbo, a god called chukwu, neither male nor female, was the supreme being, but that belief hadn’t prevented most people from adopting Christianity, as well, when the missionaries arrived.

  Christianity aside, I knew many Igbos who spurned the church in a time of doubt or travail and looked elsewhere for salvation. That was true of Paul when his fever began. He didn’t take it seriously at first, because fevers were so common. When the dry harmattan winds blew down from the Sahara and almost buried us in fine dust, nearly everyone contracted a cold or the flu. My students hated the chill and dressed as if for winter in sweaters and jackets. Their throats were sore, they coughed and shivered, and they swallowed penicillin by the fistful. The dust was inescapable. It filtered past your lips and into your mouth. It flew into your nostrils, unless you covered your face with a handkerchief or a scarf.

  When the fever persisted, Paul took his dose of quinine, but it had no impact, so he threw away the tablets. Though I urged him to go to the village clinic, he refused. I couldn’t understand his stubbornness. He was suffering, and the suffering looked worse because of his superb physical condition. I never expected to see him stretched out bare chested on the couch, moaning and groaning, with a wet washcloth on his forehead. I absolutely never expected to find him staring at the ceiling for hours. He was morose and spoke not a word to me. When I tried to draw him out, he just brushed me aside.

  “That woman,” he muttered at last. “She has done it to me. I am finished.”

  The end of the affair, I assumed. He must be grieving. It was a normal kind of suffering, one I’d gone through myself. His lover must’ve dumped him, yet when I offered my sympathy, he got angry with me. This was no garden-variety fever, he insisted. He was the victim of juju. The woman must have spiked his food, or rubbed a potion on his lips as he slept. His strength was ebbing fast, and he needed to be cured. His attitude baffled me. He was an intelligent man and a college graduate, so I accused him of behaving like a child. We were both young and invested in certainties. Paul would no more dignify my version of reality than I’d bend to his.

  “You don’t know,” he said wearily.

  “Yes, I do. I do know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  There was an Igbo word for the person Paul wished to consult, but I’ve forgotten it and, besides, I referred to the person in question as a “witch doctor” for the sake of argument. The arguing had a salutary effect on the patient, who rose from the couch to pace and waggle a finger in my face. An oracle was involved, he warned me, and that was no small thing. Insults hurled by accident could reemerge from the turmoil of existence to bite me on the ass, just like the snakes I feared. If I wanted to witness the cure, I could come along. I’d see the evidence, the hard proof that my youthful certainty demanded. He’d even wager on the positive outcome.

  “One pound sterling.”

  I shook his hand. “Agreed. One pound sterling.”

  * * *

  The next afternoon, I hopped onto the back of Paul’s scooter. We were headed for the remote bush, a territory I’d never explored. I imagined the vegetation would be dense and tangled, but I saw clearings and compounds everywhere, all connected by rutted dirt roads. There were farms where yams, corn, and cassava grew. We passed ancient, tattered men, who pushed heavy wooden carts laden with calabashes. They only moved a few paces before they stopped to rest. Their struggle was eternal, a ceaseless labor beyond the finite borders of time. Old women sat outside mudbrick huts with thatched roofs, naked to the waist, their breasts flat and sagging, as if an army of infants had sucked them dry.

  Through the vivid splendor of the bush we rode until we reached the doctor’s compound. Its size hinted at his prominence, even as the mudbrick walls, inlaid with shards of broken glass to scare off thieves, implied that there were valuables inside worth stealing. I brushed the dust from my clothes and tried to act nonchalant and inconspicuous, but again I drew a crowd. That irritated Paul. He was sick and sweaty, so he gruffly accosted a little girl and fired several rapid questions at her in Igbo, eager to hasten the consultation.

  The girl escorted us to a hut by a grand house. A bolt of cloth hung over the doorway, and when the girl clapped her hands, the doctor ambled out. His mood was genial and cordial, due to the bottle of Spanish brandy that he gripped by its neck. He was a fleshy man in a flowing robe, big-jowled and stout of belly, and he wore an embroidered cap and had a leathery face dominated by a bloodshot eye, indelibly crimson. It glowed like a beacon. He seemed determined to hug me, so I let him. He smelled of tobacco and aftershave. It was as if I’d been gathered in by an entire continent.

  The doctor spoke no English, but he talked to me nonstop. “America,” he said merrily, and patted me on the head. I did my best to reply, concerned that he’d lose patience if I didn’t and put a curse on me. After another titanic hug, he ushered us into the hut, a cluttered space adorned with the skulls and bones of small animals—monkeys, maybe, and porcupines. The air was hot and thick and fetid. I’d anticipated a spookier scene because of all the mumbo jumbo in Hollywood movies about Africa, but our host, apart from being fairly drunk, was a total professional. I thought he might require the brandy to attain an exalted state of mind. I could scarcely be critical, since I turned into a seer myself if I drank too many Stars.

  He sat at a battered desk and gestured for Paul to sit opposite him, near a table where a blood-stained sheet covered a mound of something. When Paul produced a wad of money, he became even jollier. “Toast!” he shouted, pouring us each a large measure. We clinked glasses, and the doctor picked up an elephant-hair fan, the kind chiefs carried as a symbol of office. When he waved it, the air turned marginally cooler. He touched Paul’s forehead next, and his eyes rolled back in his head. This happened so fast, and with such theatrical flare, I was convinced he’d had a seizure. I almost leapt to his assistance, but I decided to wait.

  That was the right thing to do. He soon recovered. His eyes opened, and the bloodshot one glowed more brilliantly than ever.

  The doctor seemed to be in a trance and stumbled to the table and put his hands beneath the sheet. The hut filled with an eerie sound of metal against metal, a muted screech. He might have been rubbing tin cans together, or scraps of tin. This was the oracle, Paul whisp
ered. I listened to the screech until it stopped abruptly, and the oracle uttered some sentences in Igbo. I had no idea what was said, but the voice was so high-pitched and ethereal it might have belonged to a will-o’-the-wisp. I could barely hear it.

  Paul sat transfixed, while I watched the doctor. His lips moved ever so slightly. I felt certain that he was a ventriloquist—another certainty. There was no other rational explanation, but I failed to understand I’d left the rational world behind. Perhaps the oracle had contacted an ancestor of Paul’s, or perhaps an appeal had been made to a minor deity in charge of feverish lovers, but I couldn’t tell. The doctor appeared to be drained, at any rate, and needed a belt of brandy before he could inhabit his mortal form again. From a row of apothecary jars, he mixed a remedy of herbs and powdered roots for Paul. He was very happy now and polished off the bottle.

  I said nothing to Paul on the ride home. I was stumped about what to say, in fact. I believed the doctor was a sham, albeit a marvelously contrived one and well worth the price of admission, particularly if you factored in the free drinks, but I saw no reason to spoil it for my friend. He was overjoyed with the meeting. He already looked healthier and more robust, and promised never to see the woman again. He had the survivor’s tic of making resolutions, every day a new beginning and so on. Our adventure should have ended there, except for the wager. Paul wanted to collect his money, adamant that he’d won.

  He sang the doctor’s praises and made the mistake of asking my opinion. I made the mistake of answering. The doctor was a terrific performer, I said, but he was a phony. He relied on trickery. When Paul bridled, I got a dictionary and showed him the definition of a ventriloquist—“an entertainer whose voice seems to come from a dummy or an animal.” This was a setback for him. He was familiar with the concept, he admitted, but that didn’t mean the oracle was a fraud. The universe was complex, even unfathomable, so oracles and ventriloquists could exist side by side. Only the doctor knew the truth, and he was sworn to secrecy.

  I paid one pound sterling. Paul accepted it sheepishly, like someone who scores a tainted victory. We must go to Edwin’s soon, he told me, because his fever would pass, and we must celebrate its passing. I agreed, of course, and felt guilty about dragging out the dictionary, but the certainty of youth isn’t easily dislodged. I wondered later, too, if I’d been wrong to dismiss the doctor. Perhaps he had a touch of real magic, even a gift for healing. Of all the lessons I learned in Nigeria, the most lasting was how little I knew for certain.

  Narrative, 2009

  Houseboys

  Even before I arrived in Nigeria, I took a solemn vow not to hire a houseboy. True, you could employ one cheaply, but that would be exploitative and a dreary echo of colonial times. As a young, vaguely idealistic American, I hoped to set a better example than the Brits and show a democratic regard for an individual’s self-respect. I might have made good on the vow, too, except that I underestimated the number of houseboys around. Any white man without a servant was presumed to be in need of help or desperately eccentric, and since my eccentricities were still under wraps, the applicants kept flocking to my door at St. Andrew’s College.

  They came from all over the Eastern Region, sometimes traveling forty miles by mammy wagon on the breath of a rumor. Usually they were grown men rather than boys, and often twice my age. The most serious candidates, who had some actual credentials, presented letters of recommendation from their last employer, fondly recalled now that he’d left West Africa and retired to Bournemouth or Surrey. They recited a list of the “European” dishes they’d been taught to prepare, a Yorkshire pudding or a beef Stroganoff the brigadier’s wife had been fond of, but I turned them away, one after another, until I realized houseboys would rain down on me forever unless I reneged on my vow.

  Dominic was the lucky lottery winner. He showed up just as my patience was running out. His credentials weren’t vastly superior to the others I’d rejected, but he didn’t feel that way at all. He took pains to introduce himself as a cook steward, not a houseboy, and related the important duties he had performed until recently for an officer at the British Council in Enugu whose house, he noted, was much grander than my humble Peace Corps digs. “Very, very big, sir,” he bragged. Dom’s English was quite good, although crippled by the honorifics his former master had drilled into him. He had also finished primary school, another feather in his cap, and could both read and write. As an actor, he was supremely gifted. Tears flooded his eyes when he told me about the misery he’d endure if I failed to choose him. This was both touching and sneaky. I gave him credit for being inventive and awarded him the job.

  Dom made a trip to his home village to collect his things, and returned on a bicycle with an old leather suitcase strapped to it. He would be quartered in the converted toolshed I’d once occupied. That was no hardship, he let it be known. He had a roof, a bed, a chair, and a table. With his starting salary of about twenty dollars a month, the going rate and all I could afford, he’d have enough cash left for a radio and the batteries to run it, a luxury every Igbo craved. As for food, he never spent much, subsisting on a diet of garri, or cassava root, and stews with a bit of meat or stockfish tossed in. He was as lean as those Kenyans who enter marathons, and looked as if he could sprint for miles without getting winded. Only the wealthy packed on weight in Nigeria.

  My house was very basic. I had no toilet or indoor plumbing and no kitchen. Instead I cooked on a two-burner propane stove outside, right at the edge of the oil palm bush. Dom was depressed by the sight of it. His face collapsed, but there were no tears at least. Probably he’d become a little spoiled in Enugu, the capital city, but he was cheerful by nature and soon recovered. A bad job was better than no job at all, so he adapted and began to serve me three meals a day. Only dinner required much effort because I ate lightly at breakfast and lunch on account of the heat. My energy flagged on a full stomach, so I stuck to fruit and sandwiches until the early evening.

  Dom had a large and varied culinary repertoire. His signature dish was an elaborate chicken curry with lots of garnishes, little side plates of peanuts, orange segments, raisins, and diced bananas and tomatoes. The first time he prepared it, he wondered if I liked chilies, and when I told him I did, he looked at me strangely. “Would you take it as we do, sir?” he asked. “As many as an Igbo man?” He meant this in all innocence, but I interpreted it as a challenge. The words “Igbo man” were loaded and implied an ideal, one that was felt but never wholly stated. If I lived up to the ideal, or even came close, I could expect a high compliment, but when I fell short I demonstrated what some people already assumed, that I was a lesser being marooned on a continent where I didn’t belong.

  “Same as you, Dominic,” I replied. This was a long time ago, before I could tell a habanero from a jalapeño, so I had no idea of the punishment that lay in store. Hours later, my tongue still burned, along with the scorched roof of my mouth, and I would pay a further price when I visited my latrine the next morning. Dom tried, but failed, not to laugh as I chugged down cold beer and flapped a hand in front of my mouth in a doomed attempt to create a healing breeze. An Igbo man required seven or eight chilies in his curry, it seemed, seeds and all, so I had failed another test.

  Although Dom was proud of his heritage, he took offense when I asked him to cook some pounded yam and bitterleaf soup, a stew with tart greens I’d enjoyed at the market. He believed I shouldn’t eat the local chop because it was beneath me. I liked yams, though. They had a thick bark and looked as inedible as firewood, but once they were peeled and boiled, they could be as tasty as new potatoes. If you added a little water and pounded them with a pestle, they became as pliable as pizza dough, and you rolled some dough between your fingers and dipped it into the soup.

  I thought this was a fine way to eat, but Dom felt my behavior was inappropriate. He warned me not to go “bush,” or native, as if too much bitterleaf might cause me to strip off my clothes and dash naked through the jungle. Yet the truth was tha
t he hated to pound yams. It was laborious and old-fashioned, an insult to the skills of a modern cook steward—women’s work, really.

  Dom also watched over my social life, as finicky as a maiden aunt when it came to my choice of friends. He approved of Michael Ofokonsi, our postmaster, who was respected for his stock of traditional wisdom, often expressed in proverbs. “It is little by little a bird builds its nest,” Ofokonsi might say in praise of hard work or, to promote cooperation, “One finger cannot remove lice from the head.” His attitude toward me was paternal. He could see how overwhelmed I was at times, so he offered advice and guidance and invited me to his compound for barbecued goat and palm wine.

  Almost every day I stopped to chat with him at the post office, a mud-brick building with pigeonholes for letters and a ceiling fan that created a quiet rustle of paper. Ofokonsi was a good influence, Dom told me, but he worried that Fred, the village photographer, a gap-toothed hustler who ran with a fast crowd, might lead me astray.

  But Fred was OK in my book. He operated from a fancy market stall that was always jammed with customers. Nnewi people loved to be photographed and valued the results. Whenever I visited someone, I could count on being shown an album of pictures or a special family portrait. Snapshots didn’t exist in the village in 1966, so a fixed image, particularly of the dead, had enormous import. Fred used an old-fashioned box camera on a tripod, big and cumbersome, and arranged his subjects before a blank or painted backdrop, then rushed to his station and ducked beneath a black cloth to expose the negative. His subjects were not supposed to move, so they looked stiff and somehow timeless, like figures in a daguerreotype. Often they adopted a noble pose with a finger beneath their chins to suggest a studious nature, or tilted their heads slightly to gaze at the horizon, where a glorious future loomed.