“You were the one who told me the Gabonese were sensuous people.”
“Yes, but I was referring to the adults, not the kids.”
“I saw another one here.” Lance leafed through my students’ letters and singled one out. “‘How many tongues do you have near your family? In my land we have many tongues, but I only utilize two of these.’” He looked over at me. “They’re trying to say ‘languages,’ right?”
I nodded. “I imagine they checked the French-English dictionary in the back of their textbook and used the first listed translation for the word langue. But hey, that’s cool—it means they looked inside their book on their own.”
“Here’s an even better one.” He snatched up another letter. “‘How many women do your father have? And boy childs? My father he holds three women and twenty childs in which that is to say seven are boy childs and four are no more of this live.’”
“Yikes. That’ll certainly give the American students something to think about.”
I’d struck gold with the pen pal project. Sophie and her entire class had responded enthusiastically, and, with genuine diligence, had set about writing their pen pal letters. Like that, they’d gone from my most difficult class to my best.
“Uh oh. Here’s a student who’s seeking a pen pal of means,” Lance said. “‘Please, my dear friend of the pen that I love with many hearts, send me Nike shoes in the size of eight or two pairs if it does not derange you.’” He chuckled as he set it down. “I have a neighbor who speaks English to me, and he always ends his requests with ‘if it does not derange you.’ Do you suppose I should tell him the English translation of déranger is ‘bother’ and not ‘derange’?”
“Nah. We get the point, don’t we? And besides, sometimes I do feel a little deranged here.”
“No kidding.” Lance clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “I hope these projects you’re doing are worth all the extra effort you’re putting in. You set up a library during Christmas break?”
“I did.”
“Was it quiet, here at the mission?”
“Yup.”
“How was New Year’s Eve with the sisters?”
“More fun than you’d think. They’d baked all sorts of Belgian goodies and we drank brandy and sang songs. More than one of the sisters got tipsy. It was cute.”
“Libreville was wild,” he said. “I had a hangover that lasted two days.”
“You do know how to party, Lance.”
“It’s important to be good, really good, at something. And I’m thinking I might not be the world’s best English teacher after all.”
I chuckled. “Yeah. Been there myself.”
After Lance left for the night, I washed dishes, neatened the living room, and headed to my bedroom. There, I waited expectantly. Sure enough, shortly thereafter, drumming started in the distance. Which I now knew, courtesy of William, came from Célèste’s neighborhood and their drumming group.
I’d learned to differentiate the drums. There were the deep, resonant ones, which sounded like boulders plunging into water, and smaller ones that had more of a high, percussive slapping sound, like popcorn popping. Whenever I heard the drumming, something in me would grow still, alert, like a dancer awaiting her cue. The Saturday evening after Christmas, so quiet in Bitam with the students and other teachers gone, I’d felt the urge to explore their sound up close. But halfway down the footpath to Célèste’s neighborhood, my flashlight a lone beam piercing the darkness, I’d heard loud, agonized shrieks, as if a woman were being tortured. In a panic, I’d turned and sprinted back to the safety of my house.
Tonight curiosity took hold once again, especially after learning the shrieks I’d heard had come from a hyrax, a small, furry grey mammal whose nearest relative in the animal kingdom was the elephant, which made little sense, but that was Africa for you.
The pearly glow of a full moon that lit the path made a flashlight unnecessary tonight. I walked, compelled by the sound of the drums, and yet, the closer I got, the more uneasy I became. A dreamy, vertiginous feeling invaded my mind and slowed my footsteps. It came to me that this trudge through the forest was just like my malaria dream. Next, I’d come upon a group dancing and drumming around a fire, and a bent, gold-colored woman with feathered tufts, who would lead me away and push me into an abyss.
I stopped, swallowed and told myself to get a grip. I simply had to find out what lay at the origin of those drum sounds. I crept ever closer until I could see the action, yet still remain hidden. Yes, to the drummers, four or five of them, and yes to the fire, the dancers in a large semicircle, swaying and jiggling their hips. But that was it. No bent, gold-colored woman who planned to cause me harm, nothing ominous in the least.
I chuckled out loud. Why had I’d been so anxious? This was great to watch; dance practically at my doorstep. If I wasn’t able to dance this way, at least I could observe. I watched for twenty minutes, letting the music and movement fill me. Finally I crept home, feeling uplifted and a little sheepish.
It seemed William didn’t come by as often as he used to, but maybe I’d just grown hypersensitive to his presence, his absence. I’d been so nervous about how we would act around each other after Christmas, but he’d shown up the day after New Year’s with a chicken and a box of American condiments his mom had sent, and we let all of that distract us. He acted just as warm and friendly as always, but nothing more. I vowed to follow his lead and not bring up Christmas Eve and the kiss.
Tonight we were laughing about a family drama relayed to him in a letter. His sister Katie, a vegan activist, had put a slash through another sister’s leather coat, which had all the females in the family up in arms against her.
“Katie’s the one who told you if anything happened to you here, she’d come out and kill you a second time?” I asked, as I brought a bowl of peanuts to the coffee table.
He chuckled. “Yes, that’s Katie. She’s very principled, but, if you ask me, this is taking things a little far. Would your sister have done anything like that?”
“I’d say no. Alison is all cool and composed, although right now, she might be acting less so. My mom wrote that she was all wrapped up in her wedding planning and stressing about it.”
“When’s she getting married?”
“The last Saturday in March,” I said.
“Oh no, you’re going to miss it.”
“Yeah. It’s okay though. It’s better this way.”
The moment the words came out, I regretted them. William looked at me oddly.
“Why?”
I shrugged.
“What does that shrug mean?”
I shrugged again, searching for a way to divert the conversation back to hothead Katie.
William persisted. “Is it her fiancé? Do you not like him, or something?”
This was where I was supposed to reply, as I did when Carmen asked, that Alison’s fiancé was just great. But a reckless dizziness came over me and I blurted it out.
“No, I like him fine. I especially liked him when I was dating him. Enough to lose my virginity to him.”
A terrible silence followed my announcement, giving me ample time to consider the idiocy of my decision to be honest.
“Oh, Fi,” William said finally.
William’s voice carried a particular quality that I found so appealing, a way of demonstrating compassion and concern without overt pity. Which explained why the rest of the story tumbled out so easily.
“You see, Alison is very beautiful. A regional celebrity. And once Lane met my sister, that kind of killed it for Lane and me. Except that I was slow to catch on.”
“How did you find out?” he asked.
“I caught them together. At a shopping mall, of all places.” I rubbed my temples, as if that might take some of the ache out of the retelling. “I saw him first, and it stopped me in my tracks. There was such a look of infatuation in his eyes. The way I’d seen in his eyes only once toward me. The day he
met me.”
“And he was looking at your sister.”
“He was.”
“How did she react?”
“She was stunned to see me. They both were. But she recovered fast.”
The memory sucked me back in. The way Alison’s look of alarm had faded, replaced by that composed expression I’d come to despise in her pageant queen years. She didn’t address me directly. Instead, she turned back to Lane.
“We can tell her,” she said. “It’s time she knew.”
Nothing more needed to be said. I could read it in their body language. Not only were they involved, they were in love.
“How could you?” I said to Lane, as, to my everlasting shame, I began to cry. “We’re dating. I can’t believe you’d do this to me.” My voice had grown shrill; I realized people around us were pausing to take note, listen in.
“Stop it, Fiona,” Alison hissed. “You’re only turning this into a more embarrassing situation. Wake up. He’s been trying to break up with you for months. Have you no sense of shame?”
That Alison should turn this moment into a scolding, a dressing down.
That was it: the moment for which I’d never forgive her.
What I remembered beyond that was not conversation but images. The ice cream cone in Alison’s hand. The way Lane kept furtively licking from his cone—with pleasure, at that—as Alison and I exchanged harsh words, me with tears squeezing out, knowing I looked uglier when I cried. Alison’s composure. Her ice cream, at least, was in the same state as I, melting, creating a mess, dribbling down its cone onto Alison’s hand. I focused on that little imperfection; it somehow helped me make my way through the rest of the terrible scene and what followed. Because, in stepping back and whirling around, away from Alison and Lane, I promptly bumped into a mom and her young child, knocking him over, as if to prove that, ballet dancer or not, I was the most graceless human being on earth right then.
There in the safety of my house, I began to cry again, helplessly, as if it had been twenty-three days and not twenty-three months since I’d caught them.
William moved his seat closer to mine, reached out and rubbed my shoulder. I sat there crying until I grew numb, depleted. William rose, pulled the jug of water from my little fridge, and poured us both a glass. I sipped it and dabbed at my eyes with the corner of my tee shirt.
“Okay, “he said. “When you’re ready, I’m going to challenge you a little.”
“Great,” I sniffed. “Thanks. Bring it on.”
“It seems your sister’s betrayal was twofold, and that’s one of the reasons you’re having a hard time with it all. True or false?”
“True,” I admitted.
“All right. Catching them together aside—because I’m right with you, that was a shitty, hurtful situation—there is the other part. Your sister chastising you for staying in a relationship you should have seen was over. True or false?”
“True.”
“Say you’d been dating someone else and you’d let it go too far,” he said. “And your sister saw this. Would she have been out of line to say something?”
“Truth? I think I would have still told her to fuck off.”
“Yes, but it would be annoyance at a sister thing, right?”
I glared at William.
“All right,” William said. “Try this. Replace your sister with Carmen, her observing and speaking up.”
This was easier. “Okay, I get it, Carmen wouldn’t have been shy about speaking her mind. And, yeah, you can bet she would have railed on me if I’d kept things going with Christophe.”
Here William hesitated. You could almost hear the unspoken query hovering in the air.
So, it really is over with you two?
“Anyway,” I said hastily, “I hear what you’re saying. And you’re right. One comment was coming from the big sister. The other was coming from the soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend’s new love. It was just horribly unfortunate for me that the two were one in the same.”
“Agreed.”
I drew a shaky breath and exhaled slowly.
“So, how are things with her now? Do you write each other?”
“We do,” I admitted. “Which is a pleasant surprise. I’d call it a cautious truce.”
“The wedding—is it going to be the traditional kind, in the church, big family event?”
“It is.”
“It’s going to be hard for you, being here, so far away.”
“I think you’re right.”
“We’ll just have to create a little celebration right here, that night. We’ll hunt down some good food and raise our beer bottles high together. Sound good?”
I managed a wobbly smile. “Sounds good.”
“And in the meantime, I say we head down to the market, check out the night life, eat, drink and be slothful.”
I smiled broader. “Sounds great.”
We kept up the lively banter as we hopped into his truck, drove into town, grabbed dinner and spent the rest of the evening at the adjacent outdoor bar, getting tipsy and laughing a lot. I gave William a nudge with my shoulder as we were sitting side by side, watching the activity. “You know, I really like you, Guillaume,” I shouted over the noise. “You’re the greatest.”
“So are you, Fi,” he said, and we exchanged beery grins.
It was approaching midnight when we returned to the mission. William parked and we walked toward my house. When the path split, one direction to his guest room and the other to my house, I declined William’s offer to walk me to my door. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I assured him, but just then I took a misstep and stumbled into a pothole. William caught my arm before I tipped over further.
“Honest, I’m not accident prone,” I said and we both laughed.
“Sure you’re fine?” William asked, still holding onto my arm. I nodded. He gave my arm a friendly squeeze, but instead of just letting go, his hand slid down my forearm. Our hands caught and held for the briefest moment before separating. The surprise contact gave me a jittery, adolescent thrill. I covered up my reaction with a wave and a breezy “good night” and marched ahead, not stopping to look back. Once in my house, I mulled over the incident. He’d just held my hand. Or had I been the one to catch his hand and latch onto it? And yet, it took two to hold hands.
I sensed it was an issue we would once again address on his next visit.
I couldn’t wait.
Chapter 24
Africa, however, had plans for me beyond the exploration of an infatuation. A week after William’s visit, Soeur Beatrice called me into her office to inform me that Christophe’s mother had been killed. She’d been hit by a speeding car in Libreville while crossing a street. She’d died at the scene. The news made headlines in the family’s native Oyem and through the Woleu Ntem province. The whole country, in fact.
I thanked Soeur Beatrice for the information, pushed through the rest of the day’s teaching, went back to my house and cried. I couldn’t stop thinking of the tragedy of it all, the smiling family in the photographs, the loss that Christophe, so close to his mother, must have been feeling. I scribbled out a letter, tore it up, wrote another, crumpled it, and ultimately settled on a simple note that read, “I’m thinking of you and your family. All my love, Fiona,” that I slipped into the mission’s outgoing mail.
Death seemed to be in the air. A week later, Lisette and I heard the frantic honk of a car horn on the main road, instantly followed by tires screeching and a terrible bang. Lisette’s eyes widened. “Oh, that was bad,” she said. We raced out of her house and headed toward the road. A hundred meters from the mission entrance, we saw that a beer truck had crumpled a taxi-brousse, most likely from the beer truck’s overtaking of another car on a blind curve. The panicked passengers had spilled out and now circled the wreckage, screaming. Two of the sisters were hurrying towards the scene. In their white outfits and headdresses, they looked like angels flying to the rescue.
I’d viewed bad accidents before, but
from the safety of a car window. Even then, I’d always managed to arrive at a time when everything was under control. I followed Lisette, but I wasn’t prepared for the chaos, the crying people, shirts and faces splattered with blood. The women’s keening shrieks sounded eerily like singing. Everything seemed unreal, as if I were simply observing a film clip on the evening news. The full force of it hit me—I bent and threw up. Lisette, who had run ahead, turned and saw me crouching on the ground. Her perplexed face softened. She walked back and held out her hand to me.
I shrank back. “I don’t know what to do,” I whimpered.
“Help them.”
The taxi-brousse had been knocked off the road by the impact of the beer truck. The driver of the taxi still sat slumped and motionless behind the shattered windshield. Of the dozen passengers, over half were injured, staggering and weeping. Soeur Beatrice was trying to calm a well-dressed young woman who was lying on the ground, screaming in French that this couldn’t be happening, that her family was waiting for her.
I followed Lisette over to an older woman who’d been thrown from the back of the taxi-brousse. She didn’t look as badly injured as the others, but as Lisette and I drew closer, I saw blood trickling from the side of her mouth. Her eyes fluttered open at our approach. Her breath seemed to rise and fall in tortured gasps. Per Lisette’s command, I ran to the refectoire for blankets. When I returned with them, Lisette began tucking one around the woman. I dropped to the woman’s side and impulsively took her hand, which felt cold and papery. She looked up at me in confusion. Her gaze swung to Lisette and she asked something in Fang. She sounded agitated.
“Non,” Lisette assured her. “Elle n’est pas fantôme.” She turned to me. “She’s afraid of you. She thinks she’s dying and that you are a part of the spirit world, come to take her.”
“Not this again! Tell her I’m not. Tell her I’m human, just like her.”
A Dancer's Guide to Africa Page 23
