“They all went back to England,” Rosie said. The other girl said wistfully, “They just left us.” She sounded like an abandoned child.
I said, “But I’m not leaving.”
“That’s good,” Rosie said.
I said, “Come and visit me someday.”
“Yes,” she said, and put her hand over her face and giggled behind it.
I took a breath and said, “What about now, sister?”
She made a sound, her tongue against her teeth, that was stronger than yes.
We left, walking side by side. I pushed my bike because I could not carry her on my crossbar uphill. She said that no one minded her leaving: the Bamboo was not very busy.
“No money for European beer — just for African beer.” She meant the porridgey stuff the market women sold in old oil cans.
In the pitch-black forest I took her hand. It was hard and heavy, tough fingers and a palm the texture of an old boot. But I hung on to it.
At home I sat her down and poured her a glass of gin. She sipped it, making faces. She was barefoot, and I could see that her feet were rough and cracked like her hands. Her green dress was both fancy and ragged, and the strip of lace at her collar was torn.
I made a fire in the fireplace, burning eucalyptus logs, and we sat in front of it on the sofa Mr. Campbell had left. But Rosie was restless. She sniffed around the room.
“Books,” she said.
She looked at the pictures — of Scotland, from calendars. Of cats, of dogs. I asked if she liked them. She said no. She kept prowling.
“Table.” She smoothed it with her hand. “Flowers. Looking glass. Curtains. Carpet. Knife and fork. Tomato sauce. Mustard.”
Next to the cluster of sticky bottles on the table — they too were Campbell’s — we had dinner, served by Captain. Captain was my cook: he also had been left by Campbell. He was too nervous to disguise his leering, and he spoke to Rosie in a language I did not know, perhaps Yao or Tonga. I caught the word “American.”
She ate hungrily and with a lot of noise, wetting her fingers on the food and then wiping her lips with the back of her hand. I learned then that the frantic manners of the poor are their way of not wasting a crumb. Eating made her perspire, too, and sitting across from her at the table I was aroused and wanted to make love to her.
After the kitchen was silent — Captain gone — I took her leathery hand and, saying nothing, led her into the bedroom. She stepped out of her dress and folded it neatly on a chair. Then she sat on the bed and tipped onto her back and lifted her legs. I knelt before her and started, and a moment later she shrieked, “Mwamuna wanga!” (“My man!”). As soon as I had finished she wanted me again. We made love three times in the same sort of sandwichlike way. It had been over a month of abstinence for me. She fell asleep and snored all night. In the morning I took her back to town — downhill, on the crossbar of my bike.
“Do you want money?”
She just laughed.
“I want a beer,” she said.
It was nine o’clock in the morning, but the Beautiful Bamboo was open. I bought a Castle Lager for Rosie from the sleepy-eyed bartender and a glass of sugary tea for myself. We sat in the empty bar, saying nothing, listening to the bell at the Catholic mission being rung. It sounded stern, like a school bell.
That was Sunday. I spent the rest of the day writing letters, and Rosie appeared in some of these letters. Letters were all I had. I lived for them — writing them, receiving them. Nyasaland was a country with no writing. And I was always touched by the wornout way the envelopes looked — so battered and resolute, having reached me from so far.
I kept writing until the sun set behind Chamba Hill. I was happy. I often found memory sexier than actual experience, and anticipating a woman was always an erotic pleasure. All day I had been preparing myself for my return to the Beautiful Bamboo. I went after dinner, my bicycle lamp shaking in the dark on the bad road.
“Rosie is not here,” another girl said, and she stayed to talk. Her name was Grace.
Between us we drank eleven bottles of beer and when my eyes refused to focus I knew I had had enough. I stood up clumsily and headed for the door. On the veranda I paused and felt a hand close over my fingers. I thought it was Rosie, because it was cracked and large and had weight but no grip, like a kind of dog’s paw. It was Grace.
“I come with you.”
I couldn’t speak. I was moving forward. I tripped on the edge of the open sewer and staggered.
“Sorry!” she cried.
I turned back and tried to set my eyes on her. She was a blur. And yet I did not feel drunk. I was small and sober inside a big drunken body.
“I love you, mister,” she said.
She insisted on pushing my bike. I was grateful to her for that. I walked behind her, catching my toes on the ruts, and feeling unsteady in the darkness. At Chamba we did not talk. We went to bed like an old married couple and were immediately asleep. But in a dark morning hour I woke up and felt her damp skin against mine, and I snuggled against her. She helped me and then almost killed my desire as she chafed me with her rough hands. She muttered and sighed in pleasure, a kind of laughter, and then she went snufflingly to sleep.
Her smell kept me awake for a while. She had the same odor as my students — soap, dirt, skin, sweat. It was a human smell — a rank sort of dead-and-alive odor. It was dusty and undefinable, like mushrooms.
She was gone in the morning. She had vanished, leaving a dent and a smell on the sheet that was about the size of her body.
Captain said, “She told me ‘sorry’—she is seeing her sister today,” and he put a plate of eggs in front of me.
He was a small, bucktoothed man who had been a cook in the King’s African Rifles. He could make scones, he could make mint sauce and gravy, he baked bread. He spoke little English but he knew words like “roast” and “joint” and “pudding.” He spoke army Swahili, though we stuck to Chinyanja. He was a Yao from Fort Johnson, and a muslim. Now that he had seen me with African girls he seemed to regard me in a different light. He became friendlier, slightly more talkative and familiar, but at the same time protective.
“Next time I can take the girl back to town on your bicycle — if you say yes.”
He used the slang word for bicycle: njinga, which was the sound of a bicycle bell.
“Yes,” I said. “Next time.”
He knew something that I had only just realized, that there would be many more times. I was happy, but that Monday morning, walking down the road I had built, towards the school, I itched. Before morning assembly I found dark flecks clinging to my pubic hair. I pinched one out and took it to the science block to examine it under a microscope. I saw that a crab louse is aptly named.
There were other customers in Mulji’s Cash Chemist in Maravi that afternoon, so I whispered lice.
“Crab lice or body lice?” Mulji said out loud, and everyone heard: Grab lice or bhodee lice?
The powder he sold me killed them all. I combed out the dead nits, spent a busy week at the school, and on Friday I was back at the Beautiful Bamboo.
That had been my first week in the country, and that was how it was every subsequent week. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights I picked up African girls at the Bamboo and took them back to Chamba. I returned them to town in the morning, or else Captain did, carrying them on the crossbar of my bike. There were about twenty different girls at the Bamboo. They were not jealous. They never asked for money. I think they simply wanted the experience of sleeping with an American. And I wanted them.
We danced in a jumping, shaking way, to the Beatles and Elvis and Major Lance and Little Millie and “The Wah-Watusi.” A song I hated was “How Do You Do It” sung by Jerry and the Pacemakers, but they played it all the time. I developed a taste for the woozy penny-whistle music they said was South African.