Tropic of Night

by Unknown

  I left the Chenka that spring as the ice on the Yei dissolved with many a groan, along with (as it turned out) the Soviet Union. By that time, I had put much of the unpleasantness behind me, and had erected the usual structure of self-justification. Marcel something of a fraud, sad to say, not the sort of man I had thought him at all, curiously cold in that French intellectual way, but helpful, of course, encouraging and helpful, and it had been quite a lark, our affair, something to dine out on for years to come. I recall saying just this in a light tone, with many an amusing anecdote, to Louis Nearing, a fellow anthropologist I dated for a couple of months in Chicago. I was in Chicago on a teaching contract, the year after Columbia gave me my doctorate. Anthro 101 and two veg. The bloom had gone off anthropology to an extent, but one must do something. Lou was a big, solid, open guy, a football player from Notre Dame, a Catholic, a year younger than me, sweet-natured and transparent as his collection of beer bottles; yes, just about as far as one could get from Marcel Vierchau. He was incredibly impressed, as were the other faculty, that I had been with Marcel for all those years, and knew all the great stars of the field, and had seen the remarkable Chenka in Siberia. In response I had developed this pathetic ironic set piece, especially to the what’s-he-really-like opening. I had been well trained in this sort of dissembling at home. Getting along by not seeing or mentioning things was the prime value chez Doe.

  Lou was not significant enough to be a rebound from Marcel, and I think he knew it. I suppose I went out with him to demonstrate that I was still a regular person, that I could still have a regular life. If I had been more skillful at the lessons Mom tried to teach me, I would have married him and I’d now be living in a four-bedroom in Bloomingdale or Wheaton, teaching at the U., with a couple of kids, a retriever, and a Volvo. But I met my husband instead.

  Poor Lou! I hadn’t thought about Lou Nearing in years. He’s gained a little weight, but that is certainly, undeniably, him walking toward me down a corridor at Jackson, me having just picked up a cart full of records at the ER. He’s deep in conversation with a small brown middle-aged man dressed entirely in white, an obvious santero. I recall now what Lou was interested in. Medical anthropology. In another age he might have been a missionary priest, but he became a medical anthropologist.

  He glances up and looks into my face as I glide by. I look back at him for an eyeblink, willing the recognition from my eyes, keeping my progress steady, not breaking into a mad run, as I wish to do. The problem is that I have forgotten my slump. Aside from the face, there is nothing so recognizable as the walking posture. I see his eyes change. The small brown man looks at me, too. His glance is bland, merely social for an instant, and then his eyes change.

  Now I am past them, slumping for all I am worth. “Jane?” Lou actually introduced me to my husband! But the next moment I am through the swinging door and then I start to run.

  ELEVEN

  9/16 Lagos

  Things are not right. I say, it’s Africa, give him time to adjust. Everyone says it. We all work hard, getting the various operations together. We lost all the ciggies, rum, much tape wrecked by being exposed to the weather, we’ve prob. enough, but barely. Fucking country, big, fertile, full of intelligent & creative people, large educated class, sea of oil, run into ground by criminals in power.

  No, real problem’s not fucking country but fucking husband. If he was present , all this supplies horseshit would be a joke, something to tell stories about back in NY. It’s unbelievably embarrassing. He’s acting like the kind of man he used to parody, the big, stupid, domineering black stud. I keep waiting for him to grin and tell me it’s all an elaborate, ill-considered joke. I want to blame Ola Soronmu. It’s what they call Afro-pessimism. Big on revival of African traditional politics, means male head of family gets to make all decisions, beat up on women, fuck whomever he wants, and party a lot. And traditional religion, too, white man imposed his religions, Islam and Christianity, on the black man, these represent evil as black. They say, worship like us and you will be white as us, but this is a lie. A new black god needed to rescue Africa from the whites, from neocolonialism, from corruption, from self-contempt. Will require bloodletting, all the rotten fruit must be cut off. He uses this phrase with glee, moving his arm like a man with a machete. Chop-chop. The bloodthirsty intellectual, curse of the century …

  Night. He’s not home yet, prob. out at one of the dives Ola takes him to, where can be found the real Africa. The others look at me with expressions varying from sympathy to satisfaction. Mrs. Bassey sympathetic, invited me to church (!) w/ her tomorrow. I’m going.

  9/17 Lagos

  The service at St. Mark’s Anglican, ultra—high church. In procession everyone?priest, deacons, and altar boys (no girls here)?wearing a white gown & pointy bishop’s miters. The text John 9, healing the man born blind, sermon was about miracles, priest was a skeletal man with the look of a saint in a Coptic mural. Apparently up north 163 churches had been burnt out last year by Muslim mobs. The congregations decided to hold services anyway in ruins, in rainy season. But on Sunday the sun shone. It then rained continuously for the next six days, & the sun came out again on Sunday, a pattern repeated for the next fourteen Sundays, by which time the congregations had rebuilt roofing. Muslims left them alone now. True story? Maybe. It’s Africa.

  The saints all blackfaced here and crude, statue of St. Mark looked like a lawn jockey, w/ actual stuffed lion, decrepit, some Brit’s idea of joke?

  The marvelous sculptural tradition of the Yoruba has not made jump to Christian iconography, sad.

  Afterwards, tea w/ Mrs. B. in her private apartment at Lary’s, & we let down our hair a little, cozy, her room a near-replica of one at Bournemouth & I wished I was a Brit, and could suck the last minim of cozy out of it, am starting to suffer from weird.

  Cozy = antidote for weird? Dress for dinner in jungle, O those Brits!

  Tried to detect the signs of deracination, or phoniness or subtle obsequiousness that Forster and Waugh have told us is fate of the native who apes the whites, but I couldn’t find any. Mrs. B. = fine Christian lady, pure cultural choice. Real intimacy possible? I am nervous with older women, easier with older men. No surprise there!! Elements of shame, me being actually comforted by this peculiar woman, in her absurd, hideous apartment, here in heart of Africa. I almost wrote heart of darkness, too.

  Lyttel and Washington mock her behind her back, see her as phony, a reminder of colonialism. Excused by youth, by their American negritude? W. can’t stand her, mimics her cruelly to the others. His perfect ear.

  She doesn’t care for him either. Over tea and cream buns (how can she do cream buns in Lagos? But very good cream buns!) she broaches this. No secret in the house that we are not getting along. What embarrassment, but I spill, not the whole story, but all about his recent behavior & the business with the stolen gear. I said he was unbalanced in Africa, said I loved him, said it was my fault.

  She gave me a pitying look, said a man like that my girl is no good, here is not in the bush you know, you don’t have no bride price paid for you, you are a Christian girl and you have your own money. She made a gesture, a grasping. Show him the door! Is what I would do in your place, is what I did do in your place, and I didn’t have none of your wealth either, no.

  Heard the whole story of Mr. B., his laziness, his drinking, his cronies, his stealing from the hotel. When he started ripping off the guests, he got the boot. The fate of the strong black woman not Made in America. Strong woman, what’s black to do with it? Pop sociology?

  We embraced, me hard put not to blubber like a girl.

  Later we had Sunday dinner. We always have some guests. Tonight’s a guy named Bryan Banners and his wife, Melanie, he’s an art historian, she’s an anthropologist. Midwesterners both, both large and pink and blond. Banners had bought a little statue in the market. He had it with him and showed it around. It was an Ogun ax, a thin spindle of three figures, in ebony, with a triangular ax blade of iron att
ached to the head of the topmost. Greer looked it over and said it was a nice piece & Banners asked if it was authentic. Greer said that depended on what he meant by authentic, said it was an Ekite carving from the Kwara region, but what Banners probably meant was, “was it old or recent?” Greer said it wasn’t appropriate question to ask about African art. Age = European fetish. I could see that Banners hadn’t ever thought that Europeans had fetishes & he said that he only meant did it come from a tribe with an intact tradition, or was it tourist trade? Greer said that wasn’t the right question either, because you could ask also if Robert Motherwell was in an intact tradition or making stuff for the trade when he sold a painting to his New York gallery.

  Greer said the reason why the Africans don’t fetishize antiquity is that nothing organic lasts in Africa. Old masks and statues are routinely buried and new ones are made by clans of carvers. It’s the spirit, the ashe, in the thing that counts, and this particular thing is full of ashe , so it doesn’t matter if it was made a hundred years ago or last Wednesday. There is a lot of junk, of course, you have to discriminate, as the locals do. Like in New York.

  Then we got into Geertz’s theories about art as a cultural system, and semiotics, and the deeper zones of modern anthro, which is home base to me, and I jumped in and we talked and talked, technical stuff, the four-color flat painting of the Abelam people of New Guinea, comparisons with Yoruba art, the unity of form and content, comparison to the Euro. Renaissance output; Moroccan poetry, its function as an indicator of social status and prestige, the relation of this to what West African griots do, praise singing in general, the Iliad, the modern epic poets of the Balkans, which way the influence traveled through these cultures, that, or an independent creation satisfying an instinctive human need, the possibility of a reliable semiotics of art.

  Glanced over from time to time at W. to see how he was enjoying this, he was the artist here, he should be eating this up, plus I thought the discussion was better than most jabber in salons of New York, but he had a sour, bored expression on his face, and five empty lager bottles in front of him. Fact = W. can’t drink. I thought, I should be like Melanie, I should go over and make nice and then I thought I was having a good time, brain was coming alive, like when I was with M., and I turned away.

  The next time I looked it was because he was laughing with Soronmu, loud, and everyone stopped their conversation & waited for the other people to explain the joke. The joke was white folks trying to understand Africa, W. explained to Soronmu what an Oreo was. I looked at Greer, saw that his jovial host persona was wearing thin. He made some genial comment, inviting them to join the discussion, and W. said no, boss, us niggers’ll be happier down the street, all this high-tone shit be over our heads. And the two of them staggered out, cackling.

  He’s still gone and it’s after two. I don’t know what to do now. I know he loves me. I can’t be wrong about that.

  TWELVE

  Can we talk?” Paz asked. “I could come back later or meet you someplace, if you’re busy now.”

  “Now is fine,” said Dr. Salazar, “but not here.” Something in her tone and look reminded Paz of the characteristic wariness of the fugitive, what you saw in a snitch. Dr. Salazar, he thought, was on the lam.

  “We could go for coffee,” he said. “There’re plenty of places on Le Jeune …”

  “The faculty club, I think. The coffee isn’t so good, but we won’t be disturbed.”

  Seated at a quiet table overlooking the campus lake, they passed some minutes in small talk, in Spanish, Paz consciously upgrading his diction and idiom to match hers, which was that of the prerevolutionary Havana gratin . After a pause, Paz asked, “What you said before … who did you think was going to disturb us?”

  “Oh, you know … unpleasant people. The last time I ate in a public restaurant, a man came up and spat into my food. I’d prefer to avoid such scenes.” Paz gave her a questioning look.

  “You don’t keep abreast of politics in the Cuban community? No, why should you? The politics of the Cuban community has little to do with people who look like you. I should explain, though, that I’m considered inadequate in my hatred of Fidel and his regime. I signed a petition, for example, asking that the embargo be lifted to allow the importation of medicines and baby formula. Also, I was so remiss as to tape an interview that was shown on Cuban television. It wasn’t about politics, but only about my field of study; still, it was construed as being a comfort to the enemy. I was also friendly with Fidel beyond the time when it was considered appropriate, that is, when he began to seize the property of the rich.”

  “You knew Fidel?”

  “Everyone knew Fidel,” she said dismissively. “Cuba is a small country and he never desired to hide his candle under a barrel. Also, we were at the university together.” He saw her eyes unfocus for an instant, something he had seen his mother do often, when the lost world of the Cuban past presented itself in some particularly vivid way. “But you didn’t search me out to speak of ancient history. You wish to consult me on … what?”

  “Lydia Herrera suggested I talk to you. I went to see her because this showed up at a murder scene.” He took out the opele nut and put it on the table. She looked at it but did not pick it up. He went on, “Besides this, the murder was … it looked like it might be some kind of ritual killing, and the victim’s body was loaded with a bunch of exotic drugs. Narcotic and psychotropic drugs.”

  “And you think it might have something to do with Santería?”

  “Do you?”

  “With organized Santería as it exists in the United States and Cuba? No, absolutely not. There’s no tradition of drug use in Santería, aside from a few ritual swallows of rum, nor, of course, is there human sacrifice.”

  “There’s animal sacrifice, though,” said Paz, and got a sharp look.

  “Yes, and Catholics eat their God during communion, but no one supposes that they’ll depart from the symbolic to the literal and consume actual flesh and blood. You of all people should know this.”

  “Why, because I’m a black Cuban? I’m sorry, but that’s as wrong as assuming you’re a rabid Alpha 66 supporter because you’re a white Cuban.”

  A bristling moment, Paz cursing himself for getting miffed at a potential information source again, but to his surprise, Dr. Salazar smiled. “There you have it in a nutshell, why Fidel is still in power and we are all over here. We are a waspish, disagreeable little people, are we not? I beg your pardon for my unwarranted assumption, which smacked, too, of racism.”

  “No offense taken,”said Paz. “But the fact is, my ignorance of Santería is practically total. My mother was particularly against it. She thought it was low.”

  His mother. A memory flashed into his mind. He had come home from school with a slip of paper. It explained that in the fifth grade he was going to start in a remedial class. He explained to her that this was where they put the dumb kids. The mother was surprised. But you can make change, you can add up in your head, you read everything, and from an early age. Why are they doing this, in the school? It was embarrassing to say the real reason; perhaps his mother had not yet observed this element of American culture. He shrugged. He didn’t answer. His mother was smarter than he thought, however. There was a Herald reporter who came to the restaurant. He was in love with her food, also a little with the cook. At his table one evening she stopped and told him the story. A smart boy, why do they want to put him with the estupidos ? The reporter knew why. He knew that the school system had determined that although it could not get away with actual racial segregation, it could do the next best thing by insuring that little black and little white children would never have to sit in the same classrooms, for it was an element of the American creed that the reason They do not do well in life is that They are not very smart. A story was duly run about tracking and its discontents. Jimmy was placed in the gifted and talented track and became officially part of the Talented Tenth along with Oprah and Colin, so the Americans could
go back to thinking that all was well in that area of national life.

  Dr. Salazar was staring at him peculiarly. Had he missed something? He said, “Sorry, I got distracted by the past for a second there. You were saying?”

  Through a faint smile she said, “I was saying that I should have acknowledged that any deeply held faith can produce monstrosities. Some years ago in Matamoros, a group of men who called themselves santeros committed more than a dozen murders, supposedly as part of a ritual. But that had as much to do with the true religion as the Jonestown atrocity or that terrible man in Waco had to do with Christianity. So, it’s entirely possible that you’re dealing with someone, a madman, who’s warped Santería to his own sick ends. Can you tell me something about the ritualism associated with this murder?”

  Paz did, leaving out, as usual, some important details. Dr. Salazar’s face became very grave, nearly stricken. She picked up the opele nut in its plastic envelope.

  “This is African,” she said.

  “So I understand. Does that make a difference?”

  “Yes. It’s quite possible that you are dealing not with a Cuban or an Afro-Cuban, but with an African, a practitioner of the original religion from which the various New World religions were derived.”