The Uttermost Parts of the Earth Page 16

  Madame Van glanced at him, perplexed. “A man gives a woman a cloth,” she said. “Or a bodice. Or a head scarf.” He realized that what he had given her, this head, could not be worn before other women, to demonstrate his regard.

  “I’m not any man. I give you art.”

  “Am I to take it with me to Kisangani?”

  “No, it’s too heavy. You keep it here.”

  “In your room?”

  “If you like.” He started to tell her that it would make him think of her while she was gone, but he did not say that. Neither did he say that a woman kissed a man when he gave her a present.

  “You keep it for me,” she said. He realized the present had been a mistake. Livie would have been pleased; Madame Van was not. Odejimi would have her to impress during the entirety of their trip. Perhaps when she returned, she would no longer want to sleep with him. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the gold chain and gave it to her. She was delighted. She draped it around her neck where their friends would see it and assumed the head was a joke. She kissed his hands. He pulled her to him and kissed her mouth.

  THE NEXT morning Kwame was to drive Odejimi and Madame Van to the airport. He fetched the center’s truck. Odejimi left the hotel, carrying a duffel. “We all set?” he asked.

  “Where’s Van?” Kwame inquired.

  “It turns out she doesn’t like planes.”

  “She’s not going with you?” Kwame’s heart jumped with delight.

  “She’s gone to her village, Bololo or something.”

  “What a bummer for you,” Kwame said.

  “No matter,” replied the doctor. “There are women to amuse a man in Kisangani.”

  When Kwame returned to the hotel after a swim, he saw Moulaert placing a footlocker into the back of his Land Cruiser. “What have you got in there?” Kwame asked. “You moving to the bush?”

  Moulaert grinned and opened the lid of the footlocker. Inside it were tens of bundles of zaire notes. “Bride price money,” he said. “You think she’s worth it?”

  “What if they want hard currency?”

  “I give them the vehicle. And rent it back in zaires!” He laughed heartily. The transfer of notes would signify for Moulaert the fulfillment of his quest. It would establish for him more or less exclusive rights to his beloved—at least until he returned to his wife and two sons in Flanders and sent her back to a life of pestle and mortar.

  “Ay, copain,” he called. “What a gift, eh? My best Noël ever!”

  ON CHRISTMAS Day Kwame felt depressed. When he woke, he lay staring at the ceiling, missing Madame Van. They sometimes made love in the morning, neither of them fully awake, and he missed her. Missing her would persist all day. He drank some whiskey. He ate some breakfast of champions. He went down to the terrace, had rolls and coffee, and stared at the river. Back upstairs he tried to call Livie, mainly to be able to say he had. He could not get through. He wrote her a letter. He said he missed her—which on this day at least he did.

  He made a pact with himself that he would not go to the center. He thought about his students and what he was trying to impart to them. He thought, “I ought to read something.” All his life reading had given him pleasure. Now, although he had a library, he had not read a book in weeks.

  He took a skiff with an outboard out onto the river. He maneuvered it behind islands to block off his view of Mbandaka and beached it on a sandbar. He stared at the tracks made in the sand by crocodiles, visitors to the place at night. He stripped and swam in the river, careful of the current. Drying off in the sun, watching clouds, he thought: “What’s happening to me?” He drank whiskey nowadays, not excessively, but nonstop. He chewed dope for breakfast and smoked joints every day. He liked the woman he was fucking, liked her very much, but was sharing her with another man, treating her like a whore. And what was he doing in this shit-hole town? Running a library for illiterates, offering books in languages people couldn’t read. He was achingly lonely and achingly bored. And the sun was burning him alive.

  Back at the hotel he watched the river from his balcony. Perhaps Odejimi was right; he needed to be with another woman. He went to the pool, half hoping to give himself a Christmas present of the Gauguinesque girl. But she was not there. He swam lap after lap to wear out his body.

  When he returned to the hotel, he found La Petite lounging in the entry. “Come with me,” he said. She followed him upstairs and along the passageway to his room. It was Kwame’s intention to drop his pants to his ankles and have her worship at the altar of his masculinity.

  When she approached him, smiling salaciously, he noticed that her teeth were filed sharp. He also saw the sculpted head he had given Madame Van. It was watching them. He pushed the girl away. A voice behind him distinctly spoke. “My friend, what’s the matter with you?” it asked. “You are missing Madame Van. Thinking all she is to you is a fuck. Give her some respect. And notice, too, this sida bug’s teeth.”

  Kwame looked behind him. He saw the charm Madame Van had given him, lying in an ashtray. It spoke again. It said, “Tombolo will know you were with La Petite.” Kwame did not believe in talking charms. Odejimi had advised him to burn it. The voice warned him, “These people talk. Van will know who you’ve been with half an hour after she gets back.” Kwame gave La Petite zaires and some bananas, said, “Bon Noël,” and pushed her from the room.

  HALF AN hour later a knock sounded at his door. He trudged to it grumpily and opened it. Madame Van stood at the threshold. Kwame was astonished. She smiled at him. “Madame, it’s you!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been missing you all day and here you are!”

  When she stepped into the room, he kissed her. She pushed him away, teasing.

  “I thought you went to Bolobe.”

  “I was thinking,” Madame said. “You are alone at Christmas. Maybe tomorrow you would like to drive me to Bolobe. You could show films for my people.”

  The invitation flattered Kwame. So she had never intended to go to Kisangani. He understood that he was now starting at quarterback on Team Van.

  As they lay in bed that night, their Christmas being together, Madame Van was sad. “Those poor refugees in the jungles,” she said. “It’s Christmas and I cannot stop thinking about them.” Kwame kissed her forehead. “Terrible things happen in the jungle. The ghosts of the dead live there.”

  Kwame did not want to tell her that there were no ghosts, only psychological projections. If he did, she would not believe him. And anyway how did he know? “Do they?” he asked.

  “Some ghosts are as tall as trees,” Madame said. “Others are as tiny as ants. Some of them have nothing but skulls. No bodies. When they go into the world they take on body parts from other creatures. So as not to frighten the living. They put them on like clothes.”

  Kwame smiled at this thought. He moved his head away from her so that she would not feel him smiling.

  “Some ghosts live in the ground,” she continued. “They come into the world through tiny holes. If you are not careful, they will lure you down a hole.”

  They were quiet for a time.

  “Those refugees in the jungles,” she persisted. “They have nothing to eat and no place to live. The ghosts are watching them. When they are weak and tired, the ghosts carry them off. They take their spirits into their holes in the ground.”

  Again they said nothing for a time. Kwame thought: How curious that I once wondered about becoming African. I could never think like that.

  Finally Madame said, “You do not believe me, do you? About ghosts.”

  Kwame put his arms about her and kissed her forehead again. “The ghosts in America are different,” he said.

  “You will go back there, won’t you?”

  “Eventually.”

  When he kissed her cheek, he realized she was crying.

  “What is it?”

  “I would like to have your child,” she said.

  Kwame said nothing. She must have sensed that because of the charm he had been
considering this. Was that the cost of starting at quarterback?

  “Some of you is African. Leave part of you here.”

  “I am doing nothing to prevent you having a child. You know that.”

  “You are withholding permission.”

  “Am I?” he asked. “I thought the seed was permission enough?” After a moment he said, “Maybe it’s the babies. They look down at this country falling apart and they do not want to come.”

  They were quiet again. He did not want to tell her that she was the person withholding permission. That without her knowing it, her body had erected a psychic barrier to conception. Why? He suspected she resented her lovers, not so much because they would leave her. But because they did not respect her; they considered her only a toy that gave them sex. Kwame himself had been guilty of that. But was no longer. Conception might happen when they truly trusted one another. Surely Odejimi would scoff at this notion as poetry, not biology. Let Odejimi scoff.

  “If a child consented to come,” he asked her, “could you raise it alone?”

  “I will never be alone. In a village a child has many parents.”

  The darkness lay all about them. Finally Kwame said, “The Bon Dieu gives a woman a child. Let’s leave this in His hands.”

  He wondered: Could he truly withhold permission? No! In his society a man gave permission with his seed.

  Madame Van wanted a child in order to gain admittance into that category of adulthood that in Africa a woman could achieve only by producing offspring. For his part the deeper their emotional bond grew, the more concerned he became that they used no contraception. Trust was blooming between them. If they grew to love each other, he feared that she would conceive. He would leave her with a child he would not participate in raising. An affair, Kwame thought, should not produce a child. In that sense she was right; he truly was withholding permission.

  If the emotional bond between them continued to deepen, Kwame wondered, would whatever was blocking conception dissolve? And would he have a responsibility in that? Should he break with her now? No! That was impossible! He liked her too much. So perhaps, he mused, it really was best to leave the matter to the Bon Dieu.

  Kwame thought of Livie. She disapproved of male irresponsibility. She also opposed using condoms, but for reasons of aesthetics. Sex was better without latex; that was her strongly held opinion. In any case, she was on the pill. Aesthetics in sex were important to her. Often in their postcoital mellowness she would analyze the performance that had just occurred. She would contemplate ways to improve it, to heighten their sensations. Kwame hated these debriefings. He fell asleep—or pretended to.

  There had come a time in South Africa when Livie grew moody and depressed. When Kwame asked her what was wrong, she could not pinpoint the malaise. “I’ve been here more than a year,” she complained. “I need to go home for a while.” Kwame was not the kind of man who kept track of his lover’s menstrual cycle. But he wondered if she were late. Livie did not approve of abortion—although, of course, she approved of a woman’s right to have one. In fact, she had one night tearfully, regretfully admitted to Kwame that she had had an abortion her second year at BU.

  Then one day she called him at the office to say that she was at the airport. She was about to board a plane for New York; she would be back in a couple of weeks. When she returned, she was happy again and overjoyed to see him. “Oh, how I’ve missed you!” she told him repeatedly. “I don’t want us to be separated ever again.”

  More than once Kwame felt himself on the brink of saying, “You went home for an abortion, didn’t you?” But he never spoke the words. What was the point? He knew what she had done. Asking for a confirmation she did not want to acknowledge would only damage the relationship. They handled the matter in a very WASP way; nothing was ever said. Kwame sometimes thought, I am not a WASP. But this woman is turning me into one.

  He wondered the same thing now. Was Madame Van’s charm working its magic on him? How else could he explain the fact that he sometimes wanted her to have their child—even when he knew that he would not be around to parent that child?

  He had also been wondering something else. If abandoning her was what he must do when he left Zaire, why didn’t he marry her? Take her with him? Impossible! he would tell himself. Even so, the idea was often in his thoughts. But these were not his ideas, he reminded himself. They were placed in his head by Van’s charm.

  “I would like to have a child,” Madame said again, caressing him. “I know you will go away. All men go away.”

  When they made love that night, Kwame wanted Madame to feel fulfilled. As they climaxed, he thought, “I give my permission.” Would the Bon Dieu hear him? They would see what the Bon Dieu did.

  TWELVE

  Kwame and Madame Van set out in the film truck at midmorning. Kwame carried two jerricans of gasoline, another of drinking water, a projector, gasoline generator, portable screen, cans of film, and a couple of changes of clothes. Packing for the trip, he recalled the morning he and Odejimi and Van had enjoyed their threesome together, drinking, fucking, and chewing the breakfast of champions. A reprobate moment, the lowest he had sunk to on the downward path to gain Odejimi’s friendship. He had enjoyed it, but now felt corrupted by it. And so in packing he did not take whiskey or hemp. He wanted to test Odejimi’s contention that these were crucial to his survival. He did, however, take a case of Primus beer for Madame Van’s father.

  The road followed the Congo River. It proved to be in good repair as far as Wendji about twenty miles west of the town. Beyond it they headed south into an area of swamp, some of it open water, very shallow, with the road a ridge above it, some of it moving through scrub jungle. Kwame drove carefully. Madame Van watched him. Neither spoke.

  In the silence between them Kwame felt comfortable. He realized that this was almost the first time he had been with Madame when their being alone was not about sex. He glanced over at her and recognized her not as an object of competition with Odejimi, but as a person in her own right. Who was she anyway?

  Finally Kwame said, “Shouldn’t I know your name? What do people call you in your village?”

  The question seemed so unusual that she did not immediately respond. Finally she said, “Kalima.”

  “May I call you Kalima?” Kwame asked. She looked at him carefully. “It’s not improper, is it, for an American to call you Kalima?”

  “You may call me Kalima,” she said gravely. She glanced at him ironically and added, “Monsieur.”

  “Monsieur! Stop calling me Monsieur.” He grinned at her. “Can you say Kwame?”

  “Oui, Monsieur,” Kalima replied, teasing him.

  He laughed. “Quoi-mee. Say that?” Kalima shook her head. “It’s an African name, Ghanaian. Kwa-mee. Can you try that?”

  “Kwa? As in pourquoi?’

  “Oui. And mee as in moi.” She laughed. Kwame explained the origin of his name, good teacher that he was. His companion listened with the intensity of his best students. “Will you call me that please—” he hesitated, then for the first time, addressing her, spoke her name. “Kalima?”

  “I will call you Kwame,” she agreed. “Monsieur.” She laughed.

  Although they teased each other, Kwame had a strange feeling that something significant was happening. He and Kalima were exchanging not merely names, but—what? He would not allow the word ‘vows’ to form in his mind. Kalima seemed virginal to him, not a woman men had used. Men like Odejimi and Vandenbroucke and possibly Mason— And he himself, he acknowledged. Now that Madame Van was Kalima, she acquired a purity. Kwame smiled at her. He stopped the truck and kissed her with such tenderness that she gazed at him with a kind of radiance.

  Moving south over swamp, the traveling was very slow. They could see remnants of the road that had existed in colonial times, but it had not been maintained. Kwame drove where he thought the road must be. When they crossed through swamps, he left the truck and walked the road before driving over it. Kalima w
alked with him and sometimes they would see women bathing or soaking manioc tubers.

  The farther they advanced from Mbandaka, the harder the road was to follow. Now and then they lost it all together. Several times Kwame stood on top of the truck to scout where they should go. They arrived in Bikoro as the sun was setting. They discovered that the road to Kalima’s village of Bolobe had reverted to being merely a trail; vehicles could no longer pass over it. They found a guesthouse to lodge in and Kalima sent a young man to inform her people that they would arrive the next day. Kwame would show films to the entire village if her people could provide porters to carry his equipment.

  After dinner Kwame and Kalima went to their room. With a single candle alight on the bedside table, they crawled onto their bed, got cozy inside the mosquito net, and leaned against the wall at the head of the bed, pillows wedged behind them. Kwame took Kalima’s hand in his, a gesture to which she was not accustomed, and told her that inside the mosquito netting it was as if they were in a little house all their own. He told her about little houses he had made as a child out of cushions on his parents’ couch. He told her about growing up in Amherst, Massachusetts, about snow and cold, about first beginning school, and autumn leaves. He asked her to tell him about Bolobe. She started hesitatingly—how could her childhood in a village interest a man from great America?—but every time she faltered he asked questions to keep her talking. Eventually the candle burned out. “You are very beautiful,” he said. “Do you know that?”

  She laughed. “It is easy to tell a woman she is beautiful in the dark.”

  “Ka-li-ma,” Kwame said, tasting every syllable. “My Kalima.” Instead of lighting another candle, Kwame moved toward her and held her, his cheek against hers. “Your eyes sparkle when you laugh. Did you know that? You have an extraordinary mouth.”

  “How are my ears?” They both laughed.

  “If I had never come to Zaire, I would never have held you.”