Ana and the marketplace

In between, all this time, there was the city of Mbale.

And the market place.

The marketplace where Ana searched and found the best Calvin Klein shirts on earth for twenty cents. The best Liz Claiborne, best name this side of the valley. The best dried fish wholesale, best groundnut paste and sesame, best cloth. Dainty white hands touched the greenish silver of antelope home-made from Zambia, a tingling sensation, smooth fingers lingering over merikkani cloth of Zanzibar, maybe the yellow lions of Kenya touched on a coffee cup. Blue eyes delighted in the raised texture of gold trim surrounding cloth of indigo. Protection cloth, she was told, for the young girls who did not know "what to do with themselves". She was told, the best plastic colanders ever made from China. Sculptured airplanes out of tin, oil can into airplane lamp, the best she had seen engineered and thought out so far. Exquisite sense of gadgetry, the tiny, the large, wear ever forever in there for the flow of their lives.
Best of all, Ana loved the people who would pick among the beans of many colors to find for her black bean, uniform kilo of just one color. A people who would come to her and go away from her – a flotsam and a jetsam. The market was the place where she would wander inside, not once, but twice and for days and days without measure and the numbers important to qualify the outsider and her heart.

Because she wandered inside, many daily rituals emerged - the market and the people inside the market were never hers. Yet Ana knew she belonged inside that market. She recognized the people in that market and they recognized her. There was an intimacy inside that place of smells, a touch of shoulder, a touch from afar, a scoop of groundnut flour offered for one shilling, a word for a smile, a fair trade.

The market beckoned her. A meandering of stalls that created shade everywhere, except where in the center, and in the center there was meat. Once and twice a week, depending on the rains. Sometimes she ventured too far in her search for the meat man when he came in from the southern fields with the cows. Go look for lung set raw and red on top of tables in the open air, next to the water pots. Water merchants and meat merchants, from the lowlands and from the mountain. Day for slaughter same as day for red water pots.

To the side, spaces made for the sacs of goods to come in, on the backs of men, the tomatoes. Carried in large baskets ten kilometers down from the mountains, powered by the legs, these short wiry men.

There was talk everywhere.

The Mbale market was a market that measured, to her metric estimations from childhood, where a city block, a “quarteirão” measured ten thousand square meters, then this market of Mbale measured about the size of a small town - it was so big! It was the market of rarely the foreigner. "Wasungu!" the children yelled, running alongside her little truck when she ventured into the country by herself. It took her time to understand all the meanings of that word. The educated one, the foreigner, the one who is not one of us. The man that comes in with the knowing and leaves us all behind.

But not here.

This was the place of her joy of living - the small and huge discovery of tiny pleasures. A lost woman, not a "wasungu". Just this woman in her fake white skin coat of a colonizer, a civilizer. So lost in her search inside this place, so much like her, when she wanted the best ground white maize, sold out of huge one hundred kilo cotton bags. Measured and dispensed with swift movements by the turbaned ladies of the market. Almost always making her feel she should be buying enormous quantities of the stuff, given her color and her status, and not just a meager two.

Soon the inadequacy of her feelings forgotten in the next exchange. The next exchange, a nagging, a slight tug from the boy hired to carry the stuff. "There, look there, that’s what you are looking for. Mom, she’s here today!" And indeed, she was here today and she had what Ana wanted, for today.

There was a new boy every time. Just like the people inside the market, they came in one day, they went away the next. Timid, belligerent, small, tall, always thin, all looked to be about ten, round, gaunt faces surrounded by mops of black curly hair. Perpetual slight frames not quite able to contain the defiance in their usual brown eyes, in their crooked smiles. When the market boys smiled, unavoidably, Ana smiled with them.

They took her to the hidden places, through the alleyways, along the outside walls. The specials, they told her, in kind smoothing cajoling tones. The noisy dark smoldering corners where the metal workers hammered the old to make the new, stoves, ladles, pots and pans. The acrid smell of fish drying racks, brown smoked blackened cod, shacks where truckloads of used clothing disappeared, quickly sorted and parceled by feel and by color. Some local weave set aside, plenty of multi-colored unsorted pencils imported from Pakistan.

It was her marketplace, her life cow and guts, her almost breathing lungs from a pig, her live connection to some fact that almost happened then to the safety line of western thought that almost kept her there. That same line that spit her out of there and made her leave for home. She felt like nothing at all, felt the right to differ. Unsolved puzzles, legacy from a country torn by war. She tried to find and to phrase, not another alternative, but to be human and brave woman enough. She tried to find something in her
language that would be more sustaining. The safety of her western thought brought her back to very little.

Years later she came back to the in between place, she came back inadequate and tentative to that marketplace. There was no marketplace. The market had burned to the ground.

Ana stood there, quiet, eyes shiny, soul dull. Gone were the merikkani cloth, the silver of Zambia, the lions of Kenya. Haunted this place that wished to burn out of existence.

She remained there for a long while, tears not quenching the thirst inside.