I told myself I had to learn to ignore them. Otherwise there could be no ballet in my life here. I deepened my focus through développés and grand battement. I overheard an adult male voice call out for the kids to scat, go away, which most of them appeared to obey. My neighbor, I surmised. I didn’t hear his footsteps crunch away on the gravel path and I sensed that he, too, had paused to watch, through the broken shutter.
After a distracted adagio in the center of my living room, I called it quits. I slipped on shorts and flung open my front door, expecting to see my neighbor nearby. But to my surprise it was someone else, a young man who seemed vaguely familiar. One of my colleagues at the school? No, surely too young. I’d seen him at the general store—was he one of their employees? He had a bullish jut to his chin and wide shoulders that strained against his faded tee shirt. He was taller than the average Gabonese. He looked surprised to have been caught there in my yard, but he only smiled at me, in a way that seemed both polite and sinister.
“Good afternoon,” he said in French. “It is good to see you again.” Which confirmed that he knew me and thought I remembered him.
“Good afternoon,” I replied in French, my brain whirring, trying to place him.
He approached, and I wondered in dismay if he expected me to invite him in, the way people did here. Provincial Africa had a very sociable, connected culture, and adults and colleagues paid each other visits. Since no households had phones, no one could call to say “is this a good time to stop by?” and instead, simply showed up. I’d always hated inane, cocktail chitchat, and these days all conversations had to be conducted in French.
As the non-invitation issue hung in the air between us, I saw him take in my attire. I’d put on shorts but hadn’t bothered to cover the pale, thin-strap leotard, which had become old and stretched. Back home, dancing and/or rehearsing for hours daily, I’d been lean. I’d gained weight here, and it all showed up in my breasts, a deeply unwelcome sight to any ballet dancer. My visitor, it seemed, couldn’t take his eyes off my chest.
“You’ll excuse me if I’m not free to invite you in,” I said. “I’ve just finished my exercise and I need to change my clothing.”
“I can wait while you change,” he said.
As if. Knowing he was outside my door as I shucked my leotard and peeled back sweaty tights, exposing my nude body with just a wall separating us? After the way he’d just eyed my chest? Distaste curled in my gut.
“No, thank you.”
He nodded as if he’d been expecting the rebuff. “Before I go, I wish to offer my services.”
“Which are?” I asked suspiciously.
“Monsieur Shawn,” he said, referring to the volunteer I’d replaced. “I helped him in his house. This house. I cut his grass. I came over after school. I can help you.” His eyes traveled up and down my body. “I can make sure you do not feel…alone.”
This was precisely the kind of thing Christophe had warned the men would propose.
“No, thank you,” I replied coldly. “I do not need your help. I can take care of myself.”
“But—”
“I said, no thank you.”
He scowled at me, and for a moment I regretted my harsh tone. It was too early to make enemies in this town.
“Thank you, though,” I added, and smiled. “I appreciate that you stopped by.”
This softened his scowl. In fact, I saw the glimmer of something else in his eyes when he smiled at me, which told me I’d overplayed my friendliness.
This was going to take some learning.
“Goodbye,” I said, in a tone I hoped was firm yet cordial. I began to shut the door.
“Goodbye,” he called out. “I’ll see you at the school.”
Once I’d shut the door and locked it, I puzzled over his words. No, not a fellow teacher, I was certain. But someone who knew me at the school.
A prickle of horror came over me, as recognition filled my mind.
His name was Calixte. He was a student. He was my student. One who’d seen my sweaty, overexposed body. One I’d almost invited in. One I’d spoken to, respectfully, even smiled at, as though we were equals.
I didn’t need Christophe to tell me that I’d just made a big, big mistake.
Chapter 7
The fever came around sunset one day in November. At first I thought my muscles were aching from the previous night’s dance workout, a punishing two-hour session to make up for the half-dozen aborted daytime efforts of the last month.
The aches intensified and my face grew warmer, but even that was no great sign. As the short rainy season edged in, the air had become hotter and more humid, which I wouldn’t have thought possible back when I arrived in Gabon five months earlier. But when the chills set in, waves of them, like a giant rotating fan hitting me every few minutes, I knew I was in trouble. It took tremendous effort to rise from the couch and stagger to the bedroom. I lay slumped on the bed and listened to my teeth chatter, which I’d always assumed was just a cliché. It wasn’t. It reminded me of rosary beads clacking together, like when I’d jiggled them in my pocket as a kid, bored and restless during Mass.
Malaria.
I knew the drill: five tablets of Mefloquine—five times the normal malaria prophylaxis dosage—with a glass of water. Expect several hours of fever, chills and strange dreams. And the dreams didn’t disappoint. In one, I was flying on the back of some giant bird over a lemon-yellow river that sparkled and undulated beneath me. Ancient okoumé and ficus trees, tangled with overgrown liana, lined the banks. The trees reached out to snag me, but I eluded their grasp, rising above the emerald canopy. It terrified me to be so high, only I didn’t know how to get down.
Suddenly I was in a plane instead, that crash-landed with a violent, noisy whump in a clearing. I scrabbled through the wreckage and stumbled down a path that led to a group of villagers who were dancing and singing with rattling gourds and pounding drums. The people drew me into the circle with cries of greeting. They all had blue eyes that matched the blue bonfire crackling and spitting in the center of the circle. They wanted me to dance for them. When I told them I didn’t know how to dance like them, they laughed and nudged me toward a bent, withered woman. She was neither black nor white, but a rusty gold, like the color of the earth. Bright red feathered tufts sprouted from her shoulders. I tried to run away from her but she was faster. Taking me by the hand, she led me to a great, gaping chasm in the earth. She motioned that I needed to fly over the abyss to get to the other side. My gut contracted in fear. I tried to tell her I couldn’t fly, and that I would die if I tried, but the words stayed lodged in my throat. When I leaned over to contemplate the black depths, she chuckled and pushed me.
I awakened with a jolt in the darkness of my room, my heart slamming against my chest. It felt like the night had been going on forever. I looked at the time. It was nine o’clock. I’d been asleep for less than an hour.
Thus began a long hallucinogenic night where I’d wake with the bedsheets drenched, my body alternately wracked with fever and shaking with chills. Lying half-awake in the darkness, trembling from the nightmares, I contemplated my isolation. I was on my own here in Africa, more alone than I’d ever been. I’d always thought I couldn’t get enough of solitude. Now the truth hit me like a blast from a fire hose: I didn’t want to be alone. It terrified me. I wanted to go home. I wanted my mom, her baked chicken and cheesy mashed potatoes, her hugs, her cool hand on my burning forehead. I wanted to turn back the clock and be a kid again, trusting that everything would work out all right. But I couldn’t.
The intensity of my fever compounded my sense of isolation. I’d never been this hot before. Could you die of a fever? Could you die of loneliness? Maybe tonight I’d find out the answers.
I woke much later in a fog of disorientation. Light filtered through the cracks in my shuttered windows. A sunbeam illuminated the dust swirling in the air and stretched down to the floor where it created a puddle of sunshine. I stared at the pu
ddle blankly. Morning. The demons that had whispered in my ear all night were gone. And absurdly, so was the fever. I felt as wasted as I had the weekend I’d danced back-to-back Nutcracker performances, but I was able to stand and get dressed. Afterward I walked on unsteady legs over to my neighbors’ house.
My neighbors had remained a bit of a mystery to me. There were several children, a man and two older females. One of them, a plump woman with a baby tied to her back, had come over a few days after my arrival. I’d been working in my yard, hacking at weeds. Without much introduction, she’d handed me a set of keys her husband had been safekeeping, one for my post-office box, the other for a bicycle shed. Her husband, a silent, shiny-faced Gabonese man who always seemed to be wearing the same light-blue, short-sleeved, polyester suit, worked in the lycée’s administrative office. He was neither attractive nor ugly, young nor old, friendly nor unfriendly. After our first encounter, I’d felt a stab of disappointment. I’d been hoping for some personal connection, a fatherly type with a jolly smile who would dispense advice for me on how to cope here. It wasn’t to be.
The rest of the household disappointed me as well. Everyone greeted me politely, but attempts at anything beyond routine exchanges always fell flat. Neither of the women became my confidant, my tour guide, my best friend, like they always seemed to do in the movies and Peace Corps recruitment videos. Instead, a glass wall seemed to eternally separate us.
Today it was the younger of the two women, diminutive and solemn with short hair poking up in yarn-laced tufts, who answered my knock. “I have malaria,” I told her. Her only reaction was a grunt of assent. Not exactly the soft-eyed sympathy I’d been seeking. Instead it was the same resigned expression she wore much of the time, whether sobbing children were clinging to her legs or the man of the house was shouting at her. “Can your father inform the lycée administration that I won’t be teaching today?”
Her impassive face broke into a smile. “My husband?”
I’d forgotten about the polygamy business. “He’s the one who works at the lycée?”
She nodded.
“Yes, him.”
Business finished, I thanked her, staggered back to my house, hit the bed and slept.
Malaria Rich was more sympathetic, when I went to his house for dinner several days later. Since my arrival, he’d been friendly but cautious, as if having a new, potentially clingy American around might taint his African experience. With the malaria, however, I seemed to have passed some sort of initiation. In his kitchen, we compared experiences. “Did you do the Aralen treatment or the Mefloquine?” he asked.
“Mefloquine. How about you?”
“I tried Aralen first. Hate the way Mefloquine messes with you. The problem is that the chloroquine-resistant mosquitoes like the Aralen treatment better too. The malaria kept coming back, every third day, for two weeks. Finally I gave in and hit the hard stuff.”
“Did you get weird dreams?” I asked.
“Yeah, and I was dizzy for weeks afterwards.”
“I had a second bout two nights later, but that seemed to be it for the fevers.”
“If you got over it within a week, it probably wasn’t the plasmodium falciparum type,” Rich said. “Probably plasmodium ovale or vivax. The good news is you didn’t die, which can happen with plasmodium falciparum. Within a day of the symptoms appearing.” Rich’s eyes burned into mine. “The bad news is that if you had the vivax, it will probably come back. I’ve had it three times already.”
He turned to his stove, jiggling the pan that held frying onions. He was making his dinner specialty: corned beef and tomato sauce à la Rich, served over rice. It was salty, processed and oddly comforting, like something Mom might have made for us on nights Dad wasn’t around. Rich had been happy to provide me with the recipe the first night we met for dinner. “Fry up some onion and garlic in oil, toss in the corned beef, the tomato paste, some water. And voila, thirty minutes later, you’re set. Now if you add more tomato sauce and water, throw in a little dried oregano, you have a killer spaghetti sauce. And if you take out the tomato paste and mix everything else with eggs, you get a great corned beef scramble. Add cheese, crust, it’s a quiche.”
He had a total of seven corned beef recipes (“one for each day of the week!”), most of them liberally dosed with piment, a fiery local chili. He pried the corned beef out of the newest can and dumped the gooey rose-colored mass into the frying pan. “You know,” he mused, “they said it would be hard to eat well here, but I don’t know what they were talking about.”
A knock at the door saved me from replying. Keisha had arrived. As Rich finished his food preparations, Keisha and I wandered into the living room.
“How’s school?” she asked.
“Pretty good. The kids can get a little wild, but the lessons seem to really be sinking in.”
“Don’t let them get too wild,” she warned.
Keisha didn’t like me. We’d established that early on, back in Lambaréné, the first time I’d mouthed off to Christophe during a training session. To her credit, she was making an effort here, which was crucial because I needed her. She was a fellow volunteer; she had a year’s worth of English teaching under her belt. Our American-ness, as well, bound us. She knew where Omaha was and that Hollywood wasn’t bigger than New York. She knew who the Brady Bunch were; she’d eaten Oreo cookies and Snickers bars. In more ways than one, we spoke the same language.
I told Keisha about my idea, American pen pals for my students.
“What about the cost of mailing?” she asked. “And are you going to do that for every class? How would you choose without causing the others to mutiny?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, flustered. “I haven’t worked out the details. It’s just that I thought it would be fun.”
“Fun,” she echoed distastefully.
“Well, work too. They’d have to produce a letter on their own. In English.”
“Have you made contact with someone in the U.S. willing to participate with you?”
“Of course. My former high school French teacher.” I made a mental note to mail her a request the very next day.
“That’s a good start,” she admitted.
Rich joined us in the living room. “What do you think of our students so far this year?” he asked Keisha.
“Not bad. My third hour has some troublemaking redoublants, though. They’re starting to act up.”
Rich nodded. “I know which class you’re talking about.”
Redoublants were students forced to repeat or “redouble” the previous grade. Here in Gabon, repeating grades was not uncommon. Academic standards, based on the French learning system, were high, while parental guidance and support were low. The redoublants tended to be older and more confident than the others. Like Calixte. Sometimes this worked in a less-accomplished student’s favor. But other times, the redoublant became potential trouble. Like Calixte.
He and I hadn’t spoken of our encounter on my porch. It almost seemed like a dream, except for the knowing look he gave me, from time to time, when our eyes met. Which was infrequent. He was a poor student and rarely knew the answer and thus avoided my gaze in the classroom. But that didn’t deter him from watching me outside the classroom. I’d feel his gaze on me as I passed him during break or after class, both of us aware that I’d mistaken him for a man, smiled at him, and all but invited him in.
I opted to not share this with Keisha.
As I was preparing to leave Rich’s house that evening, Keisha held up a finger. “I almost forgot to give you something,” she told me. She reached into her backpack and withdrew a cream-colored envelope. “This is yours. They put it in my post office box by mistake.”
I looked down at the envelope. It was not the pale blue of the international aerogramme or Mom’s white American stationery, but an elegant envelope with a Libreville postmark. I glanced at the sender. Essono Christophe. A wave of dizziness passed over me. I covered it up with a polite smile as I
thanked Keisha.
I could feel the presence of the letter in my backpack as I bicycled home, as if the letter were giving off its own heat. Back in the house, I savored the anticipation, neatening up and getting ready for bed. I slipped under the bed’s mosquito netting with the envelope. I held it, afraid to open it. Finally I slit it open and pulled out a matching cream card with the gold letters EC embossed on top.
Ma belle Fiona, he’d written. I am with my parents in Libreville this week. Last night, my mother played a recording of Saint-Saens’ “Rondo Capriccioso.” The music, so intriguing and full of passion—it is you. You’ve been in my thoughts ever since.
Further below his scrawled signature, he’d added a P.S. I’ll be in Libreville again over the Christmas holidays.
I read the note again, more slowly. He’d called me his belle Fiona. Beautiful Fiona. I caressed the words with my thumb, as if that might somehow help them sink in. He thought I was beautiful. He’d been thinking about me. I read the note a third and fourth time. His mention of being in Libreville over the Christmas holidays was surely no casual aside. Robert, Carmen, Daniel and I were meeting in Oyem, in the north, for Christmas break. We’d have plenty of time to travel to Libreville afterwards. There’d surely be a Peace Corps party, a chance to issue in the New Year properly, maybe even with a stolen kiss.
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