The Piano Tuner

by Peter Meinke

  “We should have champagne! You were magnificent.”

  Although he found himself agreeing with her, Mr. Carlin looked at his watch and saw that it was 2:00 A.M. But he knew he had an excuse for his wife: he was winning, he couldn’t quit, the casino stayed open until four o’clock. “All right,” he said, “a bottle of champagne.”

  They sat at a small table in a dark corner of the casino. Mr. Carlin felt as if he were in a movie. He struck the matches for her cigarettes with one hand, a trick he had learned in the Army. The noise, the smoke, the lights in the room hummed and whirled. He felt light-headed but in control. They talked about Africa and he told her about the huge water-tree, how he loved to look at it, sit under it, listen to it and smell its fragrance. The more champagne he drank, the more he loved Africa.

  Ayo was saying that she was hungry. He was, too. But no food was served in the casino at this late, or early, hour. “Come to my place,” she said. “I can make us some sandwiches. I live very near to here.”

  The fog lifted from Mr. Carlin’s mind for a moment. No, he had better not. And wasn’t she with Adedeyo? O no, not at all, she had just met him here by accident.

  “Well, I’ll see you home,” Mr. Carlin said. “But then I’ll have to go.” He didn’t want to say it was late, he had to be in by a certain hour.

  Outside the hotel he hailed a taxi, Ayo gave the address, and the old cab rattled through the twisting streets of the darkened city. He imagined he could smell the delicate scent of the water-tree even here, among the corrugated tin roofs and large stucco houses with broken windows and sagging porches. Here and there Mr. Carlin saw people sleeping on the sidewalk; occasionally a few furtive figures scurried along. In ten minutes the taxi stopped. “Wait here,” Mr. Carlin told the cab driver as he got out with Ayo.

  She lived in a square two-story house, a little run-down but with a solid tile roof and a number of large leafy trees clustered around it. These trees sheltered it from the neighbors and gave it a feeling of privacy, almost isolation. “I live on the second floor.” Ayo took his hand and guided him to an outside flight of steps on the side of the house. The steps led to a small screened-in porch; he followed her through this into an interior room. The door was open and it was very dark.

  In the darkness Ayo turned a half-step, into his arms. He swayed as he kissed her, almost falling down. The entire length of her body pressed against his, and when she at last stepped back he knew what was going to happen. He felt in a way that he deserved this, that perhaps everyone deserved this once in a while, a sort of noblesse oblige for the common man. He knew he wasn’t thinking clearly, and when he felt her naked he stopped thinking entirely.

  * * *

  Mr. Carlin awoke to the cab’s honking. He lurched up in bed, his heart pounding—it was almost 5:00 A.M., he must have fallen asleep an hour ago! Ayo wasn’t in the bed; where was the other room? Mr. Carlin dressed hurriedly, fumbling without light, a sharp pain darting around his head. He looked for Ayo but was afraid to call out, and rushed from the room, through the porch, and stumbled down the steps to the waiting taxi.

  “The University,” he said to the driver, collapsing in the back seat. His head was going to blow off. They drove in silence for a while. Then the driver turned around and said, “This cost you very much. I wait long time.”

  “Yes, all right,” said Mr. Carlin. “How much will it be?” He felt for his wallet and then yanked it out of his pocket. He couldn’t believe it, he looked at it again and again. He turned absolutely sober. The wallet was empty. “Driver, turn around!” he almost screamed at the man. “Go back to the house we came from!” A little later he added, in a more normal voice, “I forgot something.”

  “This cost you very much,” said the driver. Mr. Carlin held his head and began rocking back and forth, back and forth, like a man having a fit. When they reached the house he jumped out and ran up the steps and into the porch. The inside door was locked. He pounded on the door and after a while he heard slow footsteps approaching. The door opened part way. It was Adedeyo, still dressed in his tuxedo.

  “Let me in,” said Mr. Carlin. “I want to see Ayo.”

  “She’s not here,” said Adedeyo, not unkindly. “Go on home, it’s late.”

  “Let me in or I’ll kick the damn door down!” The force of Mr. Carlin’s anger overcame all fear.

  Adedeyo opened the door and Mr. Carlin rushed in, looked by the bed, in the bathroom, the kitchen. No money. No Ayo.

  “I want my money, goddamn it!” He confronted Adedeyo.

  “Get out of here,” Adedeyo said. “You’ve had your little fun, as you Americans say, now get out before you get hurt.” He reached over and took Mr. Carlin’s arm. With a cry of fury Mr. Carlin smashed his fist into Adedeyo’s sharp cheekbone, sending him reeling backwards through the room. In a rage he charged after him, stopping just in front of the Nigerian as the faint light from outside glinted on the knife in Adedeyo’s hands. And then Mr. Carlin dropped like a dead man as something crashed on his head from behind.

  * * *

  When he came to he was outside in a strange district. The sun was coming up a blazing red. Decrepit houses lay scattered around the landscape like abandoned machines on a battlefield. He was burning, he had descended into hell. And the dead tree gives no shelter, came to him, the cricket no relief. What time was it? His watch was gone, his wallet and his travelers’ checks: all gone.

  He had read somewhere that everything breaks down but the amino acids. Now he had a vision of the world disintegrating, everything crumbling into these irreducible molecules, whirling round and round the earth like the indestructible bones of witches. He lay down under a large tree. He knew he had a broken rib so he turned gingerly over on his back. The whole world continued to spin. After a while he could feel the sweet drops falling on his face.

  The Bracelet

  At first she had felt like a white fleck of foam in a black sea. She would bob along the crowded streets of the cloth market in Ibadan, looking at the bolts of bright fabrics piled higher than her head in front of the open shops lining the narrow dirt thoroughfares. She had been afraid to buy any of the beautiful material with the mysterious names—adire, adinkra, kente, kyemfre—because she didn’t know how to haggle over prices and didn’t want to pay too much. So she would just flow along with the crowd, small and wide-eyed, the lanes sometimes so jammed that her feet would be lifted from the ground and she’d be carried like a piece of driftwood with the tide.

  But that had been ten years ago. She had come to Nigeria as an archaeologist working on her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. She had done some reading on the Old Kingdoms of the Yoruba and wanted to study them at firsthand, particularly the Kingdom of Oyo, one of the traditional centers of Nigerian culture. Ibadan was the natural place to go, an important market city with a new university, and it was less than twenty miles from Oyo, where they were reputed to still have slaves and eunuchs guarding the Oba’s palace.

  When she arrived Sally Warren was twenty-six years old. She was shy and quiet; at the same time, nothing much frightened her. She had a no-nonsense face with clear brown eyes that she didn’t waste time gazing at. Her plan had been to spend a year or two researching the Kingdom of Oyo and then return to Minnesota and write her thesis. And then, she supposed, she’d get married. Her fiancé, Jim, was opposed to the trip entirely; he had wanted to get married right away. There was nothing wrong with Jim: he was fine, he was ambitious, he played a decent game of tennis. He was the type of young faculty member who was sure to advance, get tenure, and become chairman of his department. He had it all planned. Eventually they would have two baby archaeologists, a boy and a girl.

  Sally was a reflective woman, but not a complaining one, even to herself, so the first time she realized that Jim bored her was when she was flying to Africa. They were flying over the vast expanse of the Sahara Desert; for an hour she looked at the unchanging, almost colorless sand. Why, that’s just like Jim, she thought,
and crossed him off.

  Perhaps that was why Africa had given her such an enormous sense of freedom. She had no sooner taken a room at the University when her past years washed away like so many ridges of sand at high tide. Her room, on the second floor of the dormitory, was tiny: a bed, a desk, a wardrobe. An open passageway ran in front of it; she could bring a chair out there and look into the white flowers of a large frangipani tree growing in the courtyard next to the building. In the evening its jasmine-like fragrance flooded her room and she could think of nothing but the fragrance itself. That was what Africa was like to her: it demanded attention to the texture of her life.

  For some time she pursued her studies at the University, with occasional field trips to Oyo, always made with great difficulty because of the irregularity of the bus system. To stay overnight in one of the cheap hotels was uncomfortable; she would be the only woman there, a white woman walking through a maze of small rooms where men sat silently drinking palm wine or chewing on kola nuts. At least they were always silent as she walked by, and even when she lay alone in her bed she felt them staring at her, their gazes a positive weight on her skin.

  So her studies became diffused. As she got to know people at the University, some of whom had cars, she began visiting whatever places they were driving to. If they were going to Oyo, good; if they were going somewhere else, like Abeo-kuta or Oshogbo, good: off she went. She was learning a great deal about the Yoruba in general but not making much progress on the research for her thesis.

  She made one marvelous find, by accident. She had been taken by one of the professors in the Institute of African Studies to visit an old shrine for Shango, the God of Thunder, which had been destroyed in a war but was still regarded as a holy place. It was outside of Meko and the jungle had almost reclaimed it. On the way back from the shrine she had gone off the overgrown trail to look at a small crimson flower she saw glowing in the shadows. As she knelt down by the flower her eye was caught by what seemed to be a tin can buried in the ground. When she pulled it up and brushed off the dirt and leaf mold, she found it was a brass bracelet about six inches wide, with intricately wrought figures and a series of small bells attached to either end.

  Her companion was greatly excited. At first he thought it was ancient, but as they cleaned it he decided the bracelet must be between fifty and seventy-five years old, one of the ornate decorations worn by the priestesses of Shango or some related deity. He wanted Sally to bring it to the Institute for appraisal. “This is a fine discovery, Miss Warren, you’re very lucky.”

  “I’ll polish it up,” she said, “and bring it over later.”

  But when she took it back to her room and worked on it for several hours, using a bottle cleaner, brass polish, and finally her toothbrush, she found she didn’t want to give it up, or even let it out of her hands. The bracelet was a perfect fit, feeling heavy and snug on her arm. There was a long mirror on the inside of her wardrobe door; she stood in front of it with the bracelet on, and then slowly took off her clothes and looked at herself for a long time. Maybe I’m going off my rocker, she thought, and smiled. But she began doing this every night, sleeping naked under the mosquito netting, wearing only the bracelet.

  The months slid by. She made two good friends, both of them dancers, with whom she would take her meals in the University dining hall. Andrew Cage was a thirty-year-old Englishman who had studied medicine at Oxford and switched to dance late in his student career. He had danced with several of the major companies in England and America and had come to Ibadan two years before to study African dance. Like Sally, he found much that fascinated him, but his specific studies went slowly. Unlike Sally, however, whose money was running out, Andrew seemed to have a decent independent income, and he often paid for all three of them when they went out together.

  The other dancer was Manu Uchendu. Manu was the son of a chief of one of the larger villages in northern Nigeria. Despite his small stature, he was a commanding presence: slow and oracular in talk, dignified and erect in carriage, he looked the part of a chief. His eyes were deep-set and yet prominent; he was almost pop-eyed. High blood pressure, said Andrew. But he inspired confidence; when Manu spoke in his measured, musical tones, people edged forward to listen.

  When Andrew spoke, people tended to laugh. He was cynical and worldly, and often drunk. Sally thought he might be homosexual. Once she asked him why he had never married. “It’s the old story,” he told her. “I loved her. She loved her.” And that was all she could get out of him on the subject. But he was careful not to be alone with her at night.

  One evening Sally brought him to her room to see the bracelet; he was edgy and uncomfortable. “Yes,” he said, when she put it on. “You’re a natural priestess. I wish you’d put a curse on old Millers.” Millers was the stuffy director of Andrew’s dance project. “May his tongue swell and his genitals wither.” Andrew wouldn’t sit down in those close quarters. He went out on the passageway and stared at the frangipani tree trembling in the moonlight.

  One Sunday Manu told them that the fetish priest of a small village near Oshogbo was going to perform, that this was “the real thing” and they should try to see it. “We’ll have to bring him some sort of gift, like a bottle of schnapps, that’s customary.”

  “I’ve got a bottle of Gilbey’s gin,” said Andrew. “I can teach him how to make a martini.”

  “Gin will be all right; just let me handle it.”

  They drove in Andrew’s car. The village consisted of several clusters of mudbrick huts with rusted corrugated tin roofs sprawled around an open market. One cluster enclosed a small courtyard where a crowd of villagers, mostly women, were already assembled. Manu spoke to one of the elders, who placed the gin by a large handcarved chair with wooden snakes forming the legs and arms. The three visitors sat down at the edge of the circle of people.

  Four drummers had been playing softly in the background; now their beat became faster and more insistent. The crowd stirred as the priest entered the compound. He was a little old man completely covered with a gray clay-like substance, snakes wrapped around his neck, wrists, ankles. There was something wrong with his face—eyes and mouth twitching—and his limbs trembled in the heat as if he were freezing. “Parkinson’s disease,” murmured Andrew. The priest sat in the chair, one gray leg shaking violently, and received gifts from the village women: yams, cloth, pineapples, a large white chicken. He brandished a pair of brushes made of cowtails; beside him a young man held a basin of white powder. As each woman presented her gift, she would touch the ground in front of the priest and he would chant to her, dipping the cowtails in the powder and brushing her shoulders.

  “He is curing sickness,” Manu whispered. “And barrenness, and bad luck. He can only do it when he’s possessed.”

  “I don’t feel well myself,” said Andrew. “I could use some of that gin.”

  Sally was spellbound. She was trying to commit every detail to memory. She wondered if she would be frightened if this were at night.

  The drums became more and more excited. With dignity the priest stood up and began to dance, stamping and shuffling in a circular motion. He took a banana and rubbed it over his face and body, then did the same thing with several eggs. Now his young helper handed him the fluttering chicken. The drummers leaped up and began playing in a frenzy; the priest whirled around, swinging the chicken over his head. He stretched the chicken to its full length and sank his teeth into its neck, tearing at it until he put the chicken’s head into his mouth and bit it off. Blood streamed down his neck and torso. Still dancing wildly he again swung the chicken around, ripping off its wings and legs, blood spattering the spectators.

  As the tempo of the drummers slowed, he turned and stopped in front of Sally. Without hesitation she stood up, then touched the ground with both hands as she had seen the women do. He brushed her shoulders with the white powder, chanted for a minute, and it was over.

  Back in the car they were silent for a long time. After a
while Sally asked, “What did he say to me?”

  “He wished you good health and asked the gods to watch over you here in Nigeria,” said Manu.

  “It turned my stomach,” said Andrew. “I’ve read about geeks in American carnivals, old winos who bite the heads off chickens for a few drinks. I don’t know how you stood up when he came to you.”

  But Sally was elated. She felt that she had done the right thing, that something significant had happened.

  Not long after, Manu became Sally’s lover. He seemed to expect it, he didn’t press her. They were in her room, talking about her plans, about the experience with the fetish priest; she was wearing the bracelet. When he held out his hands, she went to him, her body pushing at him of its own volition while her mind thought Why not!

  It didn’t seem to make any difference in her life. They were careful; she wasn’t swept away by passion. Sally had learned long ago to dismiss all generalizations: they were fine, you needed them to hold a decent conversation, but they never applied to a particular case, to her case (even this generalization, she realized, was suspect: perhaps some did apply to her case). Jim had been a great generalizer; he had theories about everything. But she had never understood theories. As soon as she uttered or wrote one, the exceptions would crowd into her mind like a mob of unruly children clamoring for attention. This trait wasn’t helping her write her thesis.

  So one day at a time the year disappeared. The University of Minnesota renewed her scholarship for a year, but even so she was hard-pressed for money. Jim’s letters, frequent at first, slowed down to a trickle, though he threatened to fly to Ibadan to find out what was wrong with her. But Sally was sure he would never do such an extravagant thing, even for love. After about a year and a half at the University she began looking for a job. She worked for a while as a cataloger in the University museum: this wasn’t bad work, but consumed a lot of time. Work on her thesis had virtually stopped.