Being dancing partners was part of their function at the Bamboo. And yet they were neither customers nor workers. They hinted that they were runaways. They hung around. There was always food for them, and always beer. I never saw money change hands.
On Fridays I was impatient. I had a few beers and went home early, with an African girl. They were interested in my house, but not particularly impressed. I liked the place. I lived alone. I had three bedrooms and a fireplace and all of Campbell’s old Spectators. I liked sitting on the veranda and looking at Mlanje Plateau — the great slab of rock rising out of the dark-green tea estates. I had a flower garden, and Campbell’s herbaceous borders, and my own pigeon loft. Some days, Captain put a cloth over his head and slaughtered a pair of pigeons, cutting their throats according to muslim custom, and made them into pigeon curry.
Captain also did the shopping, leaving me free on Saturdays. That was the day I stayed late at the Bamboo. I did not leave until well after midnight. I never left alone. Often I reached home as dawn was breaking. I would be pushing my bike uphill. That was lovely. The sky would lift and lighten, and night seemed to dissolve and grow rosier as I reached the top of the road and left the forest. The birds would be screeching and the cocks crowing. There was always mist in the air and the grass was soaked.
I walked to the center of my sloping lawn as the sun appeared at the edge of the far-off plateau. The African girl was behind me, parking the bike under the pigeon loft, and the jingling woke and fluttered the birds.
And then on the lawn I unzipped and pissed into the sunrise, a whole night’s beer, rocking back on my heels and feeling wonderful the morning chill, the pink dawn, the dampness, and the tootling birds.
The African girl walked in front of me and laughed at what I was doing. She left footprints in the dewy grass — dark feet showing in silver. She stood there — the bursting sunrise behind her thin skirt dazzling between her legs.
3
That was how it was for five months; and then Likoni left and I took his place, and for the next two months it was even better. As headmaster, I made the rules. And that was the situation — frenetic, happy, I lost count of the nights and girls — when Willy Msemba was brought into my office and given bricks to make.
It had all been a secret activity. It was what Africans themselves did on weekends. The Peace Corps office didn’t know anything, but so what? To me it seemed almost virtuous — making love to African girls. What was the point in being in Africa if I didn’t do that? Promiscuous was not the word for it. My activity was different, it was explosive. During the week it was nothing, and then it was a frenzy — three girls a weekend. It overstimulated me, and those days I could not sleep; but by Monday I was calm again.
I was young, I felt it was temporary, I had just had my twenty-third birthday. That day I copied Milton’s poem about turning twenty-three into my notebook. It contained a line that gave me a pang: Time, the subtle thief of youth … I was changing fast. I mistook maturing for aging and was desperate to use all the time I had. I could not have done more. It made me extremely tired.
Once I went to sleep while teaching a class. It was night school. I taught it Tuesday and Thursday evenings. It surprised me: I had never heard of anyone going to sleep while talking. I had been telling my English class the story of Animal Farm. They were too dim to read it themselves.
“The pigs began to quarrel,” I said.
The Tilly lamp fizzed on my desk.
“They accused each other of trying to waw … aw …”
And then I went to sleep. My hand still supported my head and the warm buzz of the lamp kept me under.
When I woke up, no one spoke; no one giggled. They were mostly older people, very polite, and they liked me. Falling asleep while teaching made me seem eccentric and harmless. And of course half of them slept through the lesson, too. I became popular. Tell us about cowboys, they said. Tell us about guns. Do you have a horse? Have you flown in a plane? Did you ever meet Elvis? Are you rich? Are you a Christian? What language do Negroes talk? Can Superman really fly? Not one of them believed the world was round, but all believed in witches. They felt they had been swindled by the British. I had arrived in the country at the perfect time: they were ready to be Americans. I could only encourage them.
The African girls at the Beautiful Bamboo had the same attitude as my students. They were not merely susceptible to Americans, they were infatuated. Having overcome their fear of whites, they realized that we found them desirable, and they liked themselves better. Some of them had stopped wearing torn dresses, and now wore printed T-shirts and blue jeans. One shaven-headed barefoot girl wore a floppy sweatshirt printed with the head of Beethoven.
Some were very young — fourteen or fifteen; and none was older than twenty. They were sturdy, hard-fleshed and slim — in Nyasaland no African was fat. At least I had not seen one. Their hands were so calloused they could hold hot pots without noticing; they walked miles barefoot; and they could pop bottle caps off with their teeth.
They had one thing in common: they were unmarriageable. They had disgraced themselves in various ways, and had been kicked out of their villages. A few were rebels and had run away, but most had had children or abortions or been involved in intrigues. A few had committed petty crimes. At least one was a witch — or so the others said. None could expect to marry an African man. They had no status, they had no dowry.
It took months for me to discover these things, but when I did I understood why they were amazed that we chased them and took them home and made love to them. We desired them! They had been rejected by their families and their villages, and we romanced them.
I was single-minded, but it was not much trouble. I had everything I wanted: unlimited and guiltless sex. And because this was Africa and they were black it was not only a pleasure, it was also an act of political commitment. I pondered the fact that I was in Nyasaland, in Central Africa; and then I smiled, knowing there was nowhere else I wished to be. Sometimes I thought: I’ll never leave.
All that sex could have driven me mad, but I think it made me judicious. It concentrated my mind during the week and it kept me from pawing the students. I felt it was my duty to discourage such practices, though Deputy Mambo and Mr. Nyirongo did it all the time — fucking the little girl students in the grim, scolding way that they had learned from the missionaries.
I was occasionally tempted. After night school one evening a big goon named Eddyson — a part-time janitor — knocked at the window of my house. Usually he found me wild pigeons for my loft, but tonight he brought me a slender girl. She was smiling nervously and wringing her hands.
“Thanks, brother,” I said.
The three of us stood on the shadowy veranda.
“Take her, Mr. Anderea.”
Her name was Emmy. She had big dark eyes and a thin pretty face, and she reminded me of a warm reptile. She would wrap herself around me and laugh with her tongue out. I knew such girls, younger than she — I took her to be fifteen. It was not her age. She was a student. I couldn’t.
I sent them away. I didn’t want Eddyson pimping for me and I knew there had to be a clear line between my two lives.
They crashed away, trampled the herbaceous border and cut through the hibiscus hedge, Eddyson explaining that I was probably too tired and Emmy meekly agreeing. Later he told me he had her himself on the way home, tipped her onto her back, just like that, under a tree. “And I got mud on my knees!”