quinta-feira, 21 de junho de 2012

Blue Black David and the not quite so white sun browned Woman from the south


In the blue of the bathroom light she examines her face in the mirror. Reaching for a glass of water from the clay jug by the sink, she walks to the window and peeks through the wooden louvers, her eyes trying to adjust to the still darkness outside.  No, there is no one there.  A new moon, it must be.

Rambling thoughts skimming, her vision uncomfortably blurry, the birds not yet started. Each day a new bird, some winged creature she had never seen before - toukans, yellow weavers, togrons, egrets.  Rivulets of the ravages of another bad night and too much gin.  "This place is getting to me.  Why am I so lonely?"
But she sees something outside.
Strange.  It is not real. A dark, tall figure in a long green cape, something ready, some danger at the middle of his body, something scary in the pointed hood, on top of his head. 

David, the night guard!  Perched on the stonewall, gingerly, he balances himself, left arm extended straight forward, right elbow bent back, bow fully and dangerously poised, arrow pointed and ready. 
“Is he going to shoot?”   She looks across the yard, the thumping in her heart, the fear.

Like an avenging blue black angel and most certainly very drunk he staggers across in full magic take, dance steps one – two and mock shooting his arrow at imaginary targets.   There is nothing there!  

First to right, one!  Shoot the top of the tall corn stalks not yet ready for harvest. 
Then to the left, two! Shoot the black beans slightly lower. 
Straight up! Three - shoot through the dark azure, not yet morning skies – a hint of constellation madness in his bucktoothed grin.


She giggles, looks over at the bed where her husband sleeps, and collects herself,  “ I must do something about his behavior, why, he is here with us as a guard.  Imagine, should someone break into the compound." 

The African continent, that country, that city, the destruction of war, troubled people, orphaned children, rain and mud, the hostility.  She tries to blend in with long green cotton skirts, long sleeved blousy white shirts, her uniform of conformity chosen for her trips downtown.  She tries her best to look like a nun, a missionary and not as a fun loving sensual woman.

But dammed if she is going to give up walking all over the place and shopping by herself, looking for cloth and trinkets in the market and trying to talk to people. Trying to understand. 

And yet, and yet, just yesterday, she felt the evil, the hatred in the eyes of those Muslim men.  She could touch the air so filled with their hateful stares.  She had wandered into a new neighborhood, a few blocks from the market.  One street wrong turn, she thought, searching for the nice Asian Portuguese man who sold the little bags of roasted ground nuts, that little man who looked as lost as she felt in that city.

The words, of course, she had not understood, but the hot stickiness, just like blood.  This is a culture thirsty for more blood. Twenty recent years of war, centuries of not so recent ones had not quenched the thirst of these men and their conquered women. Not much, not even their orphaned children stops their thirst.

She thought she was done dealing with the blood of conquest, back in Washington. Back when she made the discovery, at the age of forty, that she was valued at exactly half the salary of men. Back when she freaked out and left the city, what she thought of as the Mother Material America of the North, back when she decided to try to get away from those people. Back when she quit and joined Forrest in one of his overseas engineering projects. Back when she gave up. 

And now this, having to deal with the night guard.

She had come to live in this small city following her husband in one of his East Africa management projects.  She had tried to come employed, but somehow it never worked out. It was as if these deals came in a package. Haranguing litany of bad prayers in her head:
 "You come as appendage. You will occupy yourself with the tasks that matter.  Manage the house, make your husband happy. Give many tea parties and make wonderful friends. Do charity, do some good for these people, they really need you." 

Stifled by the voices that seemed to say
"We do not let you work for equal pay or for choice, don't try or we'll do our best to stop you."
"Your children will go to good private schools, excellent teachers from abroad.
You don't have any children, what a pity!"
A strange stare and a smile
"There is plenty though, you will be happy.  The garden club, annual flower contests, the crafts group, we meet on Wednesdays. Quite artistic!"

There was no end to the litanies.
 "The charity bazaar at the church. You're a Methodist aren't you? We all do volunteer work. These people need us! You will feel right at home, I am sure, dear. Tomorrow night there is a party at Ginny's house.  It is a theme party, I believe they are doing country Western this time."
"Oh, and of course, we will pay for a full time local employee, a night guard. These are local people, so be careful, you know, they are different, they are like children but you will get used to them."

It never changed.  From country to country, from tribe to tribe.  It was going on five years by now. She had tried, she really had tried, in vain.  Every time the voices repeated those words until the mere sight of tea, cake and cookies and certain frequencies in white female voices made her physically sick.

So that was how David, the night guard had come to live with them.

Not in the house.  No, he stayed in the quarters, outback, near the outside gates. She had never been inside there herself.  And he was not their first choice. The other man had taken the job at the embassy.  David came to them with references from Paul, the other engineer in the project.  He had saved Paul's life. He had crawled out of the house when the armed bandits had tied everyone inside. David had sneaked out and fetched the military police.
 
He came from the South of the country, his people extending across the lake to Kenya.  Tall and angular, skin very black, he was not a big man. Not many of his people were big. He would be handsome, except for his teeth.  They protruded giving his face a notion of a perpetual smirk. It took her time to understand his English.  Not only was English not her first language, but she had learned it in the United States.  What he spoke was British English mixed with African syntax and flavors. 

They developed an uneasy relationship. With Forrest, her husband gone on road site inspection trips for a great deal of time, she remained the (uncertain) white queen of compound, her domain of temporary home, this land. David then the keeper of the night mostly, the black night guard, he kept her safe, or so she imagined. 

The electric power in the city was out most nights, sometimes most days.  Shortages or sabotage, one never quite knew why. The generator inside their compound kicked in automatically, if David remembered to keep it fueled.  By then she knew his blood shot eyes did not come from malaria alone. 
 
In those days and mostly at night, it was not uncommon to hear the short staccato of machine gun fires towards the East.  Had the rebels arrived from the North or had some disgruntled man lost his mind and shot his wife? Had thieves been caught in action? Usually the later, and life continued as if nothing had happened at all.  
 
She tried not to listen to the haranguing voices inside her head telling her David would take advantage of her kindness. Voices whispering at her not to trust, centuries of ingrained racism.
 
They both tried to make the best out of it.  She bought him a brand new pair of trousers. 
 
"Why", said the voices, "why a new pair. These were my husband's, they should do fine, they're hardly worn. Why does he need a mattress? He's used to sleeping outside, a straw mat will do fine."
 
One night, she had the first in a long series of shock treatments about his life.  She was alone. It was dark. The generator did not kick in. She had to find him. 

She opened the back door, and cautiously made her way to the back, where he lived.  By the yellow light of the lantern she made out his figure crouched near the dying embers, inside a small little tin cooker, low on the bare dirt floor.  She called him and he, startled, stood up.  At that moment the power came back on. 
 
He stirred a thin porridge and that was to be his evening meal.  Then there was bare cement floor in the two little rooms reserved for the servants.  The voices whispered:
 
"Employees, we treat them like employees, but really they're almost like family."
  
From that moment on, the voices dimmed, every time. And she spoke with him.  She asked him where he lived and drove him to his village.  She helped him load an oil drum from Forrest's construction site into her truck.
 
She asked him "Why do you need an oil drum?"  "To make a door out of it, a strong door made out of iron." He wanted a door on his hut to keep the thieves away, when his wife and his children were out tending to the fields and he, of course was not there to protect them..
 
She discovered he was not a vegetarian by choice. One more sociological mistake brought about by her expensive North American education.
 
They bought a pig and David killed it. She left the house, could not stand the sight of blood.  He worked two days steady processing the meat. Every ear, every piece of lard, everything neatly packaged and ready for the big freezer. By the end of the day he looked exhausted, so she took her big William Sonoma knife and pitched in.
 
Up to her elbows in blood and pig guts, they were doing the entrails, extracting the stomach lining for tripe.  They worked with the pig brains, getting them ready for cooking. She had to insert her hand inside between the membrane and the soft tissue of the brain meat. 

Something clicked inside her own brain, some old forgotten memory. Her mother teaching her to do exactly that, to stick her hand inside the brain to make a meal. 
 
She remembered an old foam pillow she had, when she was very little.  Hard foam, all mountainous and bubbly.  As a child, alone, she had spent hours exploring the nubbly textures of that old pillow.  Once or twice, she had also explored the textures of pig brains, deliciously cooked with tomatoes, parsley, garlic and onions, the smell of cumin. 
 
While they worked, she remembered other stories about her homeland, the far away dream land of the other side. The memories surprised her. She began to share the ways of her almost forgotten people. 
 
Not an intimacy, but a guarded sharing of things she was not even quite aware she knew.  He taught her about local native plants, some new ways of cooking, of cutting meat, of making salt out of banana peels, of achieving perfection in the consistency of porridge. 
 
At one time, he told her about the elephant plant, humongous green veined leaves of this plant she had chosen for her new flower bed.

" Mom, the roots of this we use to cure new born baby sickness"
"What, you have a newborn baby?" "Yes", he replied, "the clinic would not give us a tying of tubes. They send us home to think it over. The woman there said it is not legal."

She found out the church did not condone the use of condoms, it was not illegal, it was simply immoral, the Church people said to him and to his wife. She was appalled when she discovered their choice of birth control was for him to live and work in the city, and for his wife to live in the village.  They saw each other, oh maybe, once a month, when he went home with his money on a weekend leave.
"But David, you know there are other ways. You get yourself fixed up", she ventured.

"Oh no, mom, I can't. My father in law would not let me back in. And my friends would talk, my wife, no I could not do this to her.  You know mom, here things are different from where you come from!"

"Yeah, but not so different.  And I don’t come from where the other white folk come from." she mused as she walked slowly back to the main house.

She began to feel a strange sense of peace starting to intrude.

That weekend, she went away with her husband on one of his business trips to the capital.  They left early, sun barely up, as driving was still risky business. David was there, bleary eyed for sure, but there, opening and closing the gates, shooing the dogs back in. 

She felt contentment, a small tug of pride to her heart. "This is a special moment. I have captured a moment at last, I may be on the verge of some happiness."

So, in trust, they went away again, one more time, this time out West on holiday. She wanted to see snow in the tropics at least once, up on top of the Mountains of the Moon.

In seven days they returned, home to their Eastern mountain landscape.  Delays, postponements, they returned a day late. 
No lights inside. The gate shut.  They honked the horn, an eerie sound in this full moon sky.  The moon, the garden outside the gate - red canna lilies alive, eerie structures, moon halogen light bulbs attached.  Soon lily lights faded.

What was going on? Why was David not answering, and dutifully opening the gates to the ompound?
They got inside, but it took some doing, some jumping over prickly hedges. By the time they got inside the house, they found the dogs happy and overjoyed, not stressed at all.

In her living room - there was something wrong, something out of place.  Her tasteful and careful arrangements of flowers, her prized bric a brac upside down, strange chicken feathers sticking out of her vases.  The red water pottery smelled foul.  Cigarette smell?  A party? The dogs though, looked all right.

"Tomorrow I must deal with him!" Her husband "He has no respect! We could let him go, you know, and be done with it!"

She thought "Yes we could let him go and by letting him go, let go of this thin line of memory, this connection to a lifeline of mine. Yes, we could let him go, but I will not do it. I will not give up and let him go."

In time and ever so slowly, over time, they began to wonder about this mystery, their friendship, this gateman and this wandering woman. They looked for a language in the every day. Ever so slowly.  Her equal pay for his equal people talk, the kindness he was not used to, from her kind. His sense of humor, his deep connection to his land, her forgetfulness about hers.  Her discoveries of all she missed about hers and her kin – the simple places of his.

One night, alone again, the lights out, she went outside for the first time, just to feel the scented air.  The blue mist, the quarter moon lazy in the huge African sky.  David was doing his night guard duty rounds.  The air was crisp, a hint of cold.
 
She had her long fuzzy winter coat.  He had his long green cape, the bow and arrow.  "Good evening Mom."
She smiled, went back inside the house, fetched her bottle of gin, two crystal glasses and poured them both a drink.  They sat, side by side, on the stone ledge, said nothing.  Just gazed at the moon, and smelled the air.  She asked if she could touch the bow and arrow. 

Hours later, they were dancing, quite drunk, dressed in long dark capes, he teaching her how to survive by killing with bow and arrow, she teaching him the two step, on top of this stone wall, built by the old Brits, inside this European African compound, howling to the moon and to the gods and to the goddesses.

A bridge crossed. Something about clarified, and purified, just like butter, just like slowly melting ghee, they flowed, native lands dissolved in a dance.
 
This blue black guard named David and this not quite so white sun browned woman named Ana from the south.

a short story by Erica Weick

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