“I am a guest, so I have to behave myself.”
“You are my guest, so you have to do what I say.”
I had always thought she was submissive. What was this? I said, “What do you want, sister?”
“Jig-jig.”
“Sorry. Not with your brothers near us.”
They didn’t sleep in beds. They had mats, which seemed to me much worse. The mats were beside the bed and under it. We would be screwing on top of them.
“We can do it somewhere else,” she said.
I thought of the snakes I had seen that afternoon.
“Here,” she said. “My man.”
We were standing beside a dead tree in the darkness, whispering.
“There are snakes on the ground here.”
“We will screw standing up,” she said. “Come near. Near.”
The word was pafoopee—an easy word to say lewdly.
I said no, but she insisted, and she got me started with her rough hand. She leaned against the tree and held the hem of her dress. Then she balanced herself on an upraised root and we went at it like a couple of monkeys. When we were done I remembered that her father was dying in a hut on the other side of the village. She wanted me again. Pafoopee, she said.
All night I heard the two children snoring beneath my bed. I was wakeful, fearing that Gloria would come in. But she stayed away.
She gave me a basin of water and a chunk of soap the next morning. No matter how thoroughly I washed I still felt filthy afterwards. Africans always looked clean. It was their secret. How did they manage to keep clean in mud huts? I was very grubby, and having washed only my hands and face, the rest of my body itched. I didn’t shave, and I was too unsure of the water to brush my teeth with it.
But Gloria looked even worse than me. Her dress was dirty, and what was this dancing dress doing here? The buttons down the back were undone, and I could see the row of knucklebones on her spine. By the second day, which was Sunday, she looked very slovenly, and the other women and girls seemed embarrassed by her. She was cranky, her feet were dirty, her dress was torn.
She was oblivious of this. She said the other women got on her nerves. In the town of Zimba she was known as one of the stylish girls from the Beautiful Bamboo; but in this little village she looked whorish and silly.
The women were quiet and rather shy. They were solicitous towards me, urging me to stay in the shade and eat. They brought me African beer. It was sour, almost rancid, but I was flattered to be treated in a traditional way.
Gloria said something which I was sure was, “He doesn’t drink that crap.”
She told me to give one of her brothers some money to buy a bottle of Castle Lager in Balaka. I didn’t want it, but rather than make a scene I gave in.
“These people are stupid.”
I thought what a horrible person she was and regretted that I had come. But I was ashamed of myself too, for the more I thought about her the more convinced I was that she was like me. Had I made her that way? It was not that she was Americanized. She wasn’t that, by far. It was that she was a scold and a slob and very stupid.
“The old man wants to see you again.”
He lay in the darkness.
“I have been thinking about you,” he said.
That mattered to me and moved me. He was a wise man. Perhaps what I had sought in his daughter he would offer me. I imagined folk stories and proverbs, and memories of the settlers. He was over seventy, which meant he had been born in the nineteenth century. I looked upon his sunken face, this man from another age. He had been thinking about me.
“Yes, you are lost,” he said. It seemed to me that he was chuckling. “You are damned.”
I thought: That’s what everyone says.
The mail train left Balaka at midnight. We boarded it, and I stretched out on the wooden slatted seat, inhaling coal smoke from the chimney. The insects shrieked at the open windows, from the black woods. Gloria was also sleeping. At one point she woke me up crying, “Help!” She said it was not a nightmare but a song. I woke at dawn, as we drew into Blantyre. My back ached; but I was glad, the sun was up, the air was cool.
But when we walked to the bus depot I knew that something had changed between us. I had seen her village. She had been ashamed of it, ashamed of her father and the “primitive” people. She was distant with me now, as if I might make fun of her. I had seen her secret. She thought I knew too much.
She said, “Bye-bye.”
She never showed any affection in public, but then Africans in Nyasaland seldom did.
She was going back to her life and I to mine.
Rockwell was waiting in my office. He wanted the key to the tool shed.
I saw that his whole face was swollen. It was the same pinky bareness that his chin had been, but it was an entire mask of it.
He gave me one of his hacking laughs that meant Watch out! and told me that he had plucked some whiskers out of his chin and that had given him an idea. He wondered if he could do more. Over the weekend he had had nothing to do (“Because you took the key to the tool shed with you, Parent, thanks a million”) and had plucked all the hairs out of his upper lip, the mustache area. He had used a pair of tweezers. He said it hurt at first.
“Then I thought what the heck. I started again yesterday and did my whole face. Hey, what if it doesn’t grow back?”
8
The African girls never talked about politics. There had been no mention of it in Gloria’s village. The British had gone, a black government was coming — everyone knew that. But for now no one was in charge. It was not anarchy, it was peace. People walked in the road there were so few cars, and poor people put on their best clothes and went to get drunk, men in ties, women in dresses. Strangers talked to each other: “Hello, father,”
“Hello, sister.” Everything was very simple. All the African girls seemed like one girl, uncomplicated and enthusiastic and pretty. I was probably no more than a white person to them, but a sympathetic one, and an American. I spoke the language, I knew how to make them laugh.
One said, “I love you because you dance with us.”
We were dancing to “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.”
Then the political talk was talk of independence. It was a kind of nervousness that trembled through the country — or at least through Zimba, and the Beautiful Bamboo Bar, and Chamba Hill Secondary School. It was like the expectation of a parade, the way people get to their feet and fidget just before they hear the band. The day was only two weeks off.
After morning assembly one day I had a visit from Deputy Mambo. He was wearing a red shirt, flapping shorts, and knee socks. He carried a stick. He also wore new shoes. Africans wearing new shoes always made me wary. They looked as though they wanted to kick something.
“I must speak to you,” he said, and then added slyly, “Headmaster.”
“Come in, brother. Who are you supposed to be?”
“I am a Youth Leaguer,” he said. “I am organizing our students for the independence celebration.”
He did not seem to recognize me. It was as though he was peering dimly out of his uniform, sort of hiding behind it.
“What does that badge say?”
It was a stiff embroidered disk pinned under his Doctor Banda button.
“Chamba Youth League.”
Chamba had a Youth League?
“No one told me anything about it.”
“I am telling you. We are arranging the independence. There will be flags, fireworks, demonstrations, and what-not.”
“What are the students supposed to do?”