I look up at the guide, showing him the jar, ‘Do you know who put this here?’
‘Madam, please, I do not know. How can I know? Local people coming here do not report to me. They are free, this is their place. You must not touch these things.’
‘But if a white man came here you would know. Everyone would know.’
‘These are not your things. They are not for you to touch or meddle. You must be respectful.’
I replace the jar, stand and wipe the sand from my knees. I try to sound sensible. ‘Is it a curse?’ I want to see the truth in his eyes, I want to have some instinct. But he is hidden, he is vanishing back down a path into the bush.
‘I know that cloth. I recognize it. I want to know who put it here.’
‘The cave, madam, it has had an effect.’
‘I have money. I can pay you. More than he did.’
He moves nervously, definitively toward the entrance, ‘Your friend is waiting for you, madam.’
Back at the car, Gloria seems preoccupied and barely greets me. She turns the ignition. With a little cough — rather like the old guide’s — the engine starts.
‘Why did you bring me here?’
‘What?’ She’s looking straight ahead.
‘Here. Why are we here, Gloria?’
She grips the steering wheel and takes a deep breath, so her whole body expands and subsides. ‘Have you got a thousand bucks?’
Tanga, May 29
It was simple for me to go to the bank and withdraw it from my credit card with its virtually limitless limit. I hand the money to Gloria in an envelope. She takes it, weighing it for a moment in her hand, and then stuffs it somewhere down the front of her dress. ‘Thank you, doll, really.’
‘Thank Tom.’
We are sitting now in the Peace and Plenty, a café near the market where they serve mango smoothies and crisp samosas. Swallows roost in the high eaves of the ceiling.
‘What’s it like?’
‘What?’
‘Having money. You just buy whatever you want, go wherever you want.’
‘I never thought about it.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘Tom paid for everything. Or it was an expense. Housing, taxis. A lot was on expense.’
She moves her jaw back and forth. ‘No shit.’
‘We weren’t extravagant.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Her tone is suddenly savage. ‘You go to the bank and get a thousand bucks and do not even fucking blink. Imagine, imagine that you could only get, maybe on a good day, forty. You’d stand there while the machine made its noises, like it’s trying to decide whether to give you the cash or tell you, “Hey, loser, there are insufficient funds to cover this transaction.”’
She places her hands flat on the table, creating a triangle with her body. She’s suddenly like an animal which can make itself bigger to ward off attackers. ‘Doll,’ she hisses. ‘Money changes everything. With money James would still be alive. And that’s everything. My son was everything.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Now, isn’t that the most useless fucking word. Oops. James would be alive if I’d had money. Sorry. And you’re sorry?’ She shuts her eyes for a moment and when she opens them there are tears. These she wipes away furiously, angry that Mary, soft Mary, is leaking out. ‘My boy, my sweet boy’s head exploded with a bullet. And there is not a single morning I wake up and my first thought isn’t about him, and I’m not hoping that when I open my eyes I’ll be in the past, where he is. Money gives you choices, doll. It gives you good schools and nice neighborhoods, and if those fail, it gives you lawyers. You don’t even see that. You’ve lost nothing in your life but a dumbass husband and you think boohoo-boo-fucking-hoo, so sorry for yourself.’
She pauses here to sniff and exhale. ‘Sorry is the ashes of your child in your hands blowing into the wind.’
All that comes from my mouth is one syllable: ‘O.’ But this is attached to a string of invisible Os that sound in my head like the women outside the Bomba Hospital ululating O-O-O-O. I am terrified of the gaping tomb that is Gloria. How deep, how wide, how bottomless the pit and what lives down there, what forms in the dark, in the mud of the soul. The sound, listen close, I can almost hear, between the sobbing and the weeping there is the mumbling, the muttering of spells.
‘I have to go,’ I say. And I almost run, knocking over a chair on the way out.
*
The lights sparkle on the dark sea like fallen stars. The fishermen are far out on the continent’s edge in wooden boats with patched cloth sails. They light kerosene lamps to attract the fish on which they depend. But to the observer, the lights are decorative, ornate.
Waves break on the reef. I can hear the rushing of surf. I imagine the foam, pale and blue in the moonlight, the moon-dappled sea, the nets sinking quietly below. Do the fishermen ever fear the sea and its dark, unfurling possibility?
I pour another glass of wine, cheap South African stuff. Tom would be mortified. Tom will never know. There’s a power cut, so I’m sitting in the dark. I want it to be quiet, but the expats in the big house down the street have a generator, and so we must suffer juggernaut noise for their uninterrupted light and TV.
On the table in front of me is the box. I run my hands over the fraying cardboard. I think about the person this once was: a young man, perhaps, a son, a brother, loved in the rambling, careless way of a too large family; protected as much as possible from the shame of his white skin, his ugliness, his need to stay out of the sun.
When he was a boy some children from school tied him to a fence so he would get sunburned. The pain was excruciating: his clothes felt like sandpaper. His skin peeled off in sheets, and they laughed and called him a lizard.
Years later, he got a job, washing dishes in a fish restaurant in Mwanza. He had friends, and maybe even a girl who didn’t mind how he looked. She was dark-skinned, ebony, and wore a bright yellow shirt that seemed like a fabulous conspiracy — the darkness of her skin, the brightness of her shirt. He knew men hunted his kind. So he was vigilant. One of his brothers always came to the restaurant to walk him home after dark. He slept with the door locked. But they were waiting, one night: first they clubbed his brother, and then they took him, put him in the back of a car. Tied him up. He paid attention on the drive, he took in everything — the dark night and the intermittent lights, the smell of the car, of the men, of the night itself, damp from recent rains; the wide and forever darkness expanding across Africa; the sound of the car rattling on the road, the brakes squealing when it finally stopped. He did not protest or beg, he knew there was no point. He knelt down and looked straight ahead. He felt calm with certainty, but also he was tremendously sad. He saw through the dark, across the miles they’d driven to where his girl lay sleeping in her yellow shirt. He went to her, lay with her, put his arms around her warm body and she whispered his name.
And then the men cut his throat.
There must have been screaming. He would have screamed. A man dying to feed the hate of another. How does such a transaction come to pass? What kind of wrong extracts such a price? Who is the accountant?
I notice the neighbors’ generator has stopped pounding. But the lights haven’t come back on, so perhaps it ran out of diesel. I need to be outside, and push open the door. The air is humid and so heavy with salt it almost coats my skin. The tide has ebbed. The night is soft, lapping. I stand on the little headland above the mangroves and listen to the sucking of the sea, the popping of seaweed, and far beyond, just audible, the ocean against the reef. Everything is moist and sucking and briny, constantly rejuvenated by the return of the sea. I think about the incessant regularity of the tides, how they come and go, unlike the rain inland that fails or floods, or the northern seasons that falter or linger. The sea washes the shore every day, with whispering possessiveness, forever and ever.