Mthuka started the car and we were off leaving the village, all people who were jealous or disapproved, many children, the goats, the nursing mothers, the chickens, the dogs and my father-in-law.
“Que tal, tu?” I asked Debba.
“En la puta gloria.”
This was the second phrase that she liked best in Spanish. It is a strange phrase and no two people would translate it alike.
“Did the chui hurt you?”
“No. There was nothing.”
“Was he big?”
“Not very.”
“Did he roar?”
“Many times.”
“Did he not hurt anyone?”
“No one. Not even you.”
She was pressing the carved leather pistol holster hard against her thigh and then she placed her left hand where she wanted it to be.
“Mimi bili chui,” she said. Neither of us were Swahili scholars but I remembered the two leopards of England and someone must have known about leopards a long time ago.
“Bwana,” Ngui said and his voice had the same harshness that came from love or anger or tenderness.
“Wakamba, tu,” I said. He laughed and broke the rough bad thing.
“We have three bottles of Tuskah that Msembi stole for us.”
“Thank you. When we make the big rise we’ll turn off and eat the kippah snack.”
“Good cold meat,” Ngui said.
“Mzuri,” I said.
There is no homosexuality among Wakamba people. In the old days homosexuals after the trial of King-ole, which Mwindi had explained to me meant when you gathered together formally to kill a man, were condemned, tied in the river or any water hole for a few days to make them more tender and then killed and eaten. This would be a sad fate for many playwrights, I thought. But, on the other hand and if you have another hand you are lucky in Africa, it was considered very bad luck to eat any part of a homosexual even though he had been tenderized in the Athi in a clean and nearly clear pool and according to some of my older friends a homosexual tasted worse than a water buck and could bring out sores on any part of the body but especially in the groin or in the armpits. Intercourse with animals was also punishable by death although it was not regarded as so fouling a practice as homosexuality and Mkola, who was Ngui’s father, since I had proved mathematically that I could not be, had told me that a man who had rogered his sheep or his goats was as tasty as a wildebeest. Keiti and Mwindi would not eat wildebeest but that was a part of anthropology that I had not yet penetrated. And as I was thinking of these facts and confidences and caring greatly for Debba who was a straight Kamba girl replete with modesty and true basic insolence, Mthuka stopped the car under a tree where we could see the great gap and break in the country and the small tin-roofed shine of Laitokitok against the blue of the forest on the Mountain which rose white sloped and square topped to give us our religion and our long and lasting hope while behind was all our country spread out as though we were in the aircraft but without the movement, the stress and the expense.
“Jambo, tu,” I said to Debba and she said, “La puta gloria.”
We let her and the Widow, who had been very happy between Ngui and Pop’s gun bearer in the red-and-yellow shirts and with the black arms and the delicate legs, open the tins of kipper snacks and the two tins of false salmon from Holland. They could not open them properly and one key was broken but Mthuka used a pliers to bend the tin back exposing the false smoked salmon that was Holland’s glory in Africa and we all ate, exchanging knives, and drinking from the same bottles. Debba wiped the neck of the bottle and its lips the first time she drank using her head cloth but I told her that one man’s chancre was every man’s chancre and after that we drank without ceremony. The beer was warmer than it was cool but at eight thousand feet and with the country we looked back over and the places we could see now as though we were eagles, it was lovely beer and we finished it with the cold meat. We kept the bottles to trade in and piled the tins together, removing the keys, and left them under a heather bush close to the trunk of the tree.
There were no Game Scouts along so there were no people who had sold their Wakamba heritage to denounce their brothers and no worship of Miss Mary and the hangman or the puppies of the police so that we were free in a way and we looked back at the country where no white woman had ever been, including Miss Mary, unless it counted when we had taken her, unwillingly but with the excitement of children, onto the deck where she had never belonged nor known how its penalties equalized its small glories.
So we looked back at our country and at the Chulu hills which were as blue and strange as ever and we were all happy that Miss Mary had never been there and then we went back into the car and I said to Debba, stupidly, “You will be an intelligent wife,” and she, intelligently, took hold of my place and of the well-loved holster and said, “I am as good a wife now as I will ever be.”
I kissed her on the crinkly head and we went on up the beautiful road that swung strangely and curved up the Mountain. The tin-roofed town was still glistening in the sun and as we came closer we could see the eucalyptus trees and the formal road that, heavily shaded and with Britannic might, ran up to the small fort and jail and the rest houses where the people who participate in the administration of British justice and paperwork come to take their rest when they are too poor to return to their home country. We were not going up to disturb their rest even though it meant missing the sight of the rock gardens and the tumbling stream that, much later, became the river.
It had been a long hunt for Miss Mary’s lion and all except fanatics, converts and true believers in Miss Mary had been tired of it for a long time. Charo, who was none of these, had said to me, “Shoot the lion when she shoots and get it over with.” I had shaken my head because I was not a believer but a follower and had made the pilgrimage to Campostella and it had been worth it. But Charo shook his head in disgust. He was a Moslem and there were no Moslems with us today. We needed no one to cut the throats of anything and we were all looking for our new religion which had its first station of whatever cross there was to be outside of Benji’s General Store. This station was a gas pump and it was inside the store that Debba and the Widow would select the cloth to make their dresses for the Birthday of the Baby Jesus.
It was not proper for me to go in with her although I loved the different cloths and the smells of the place and the Masai that we knew, the wanawaki, eager and unbuying with their cuckolded husbands up the street drinking Golden Jeep sherry from South Africa with a spear in one hand and the bottle of Golden Jeep in the other. They were cuckolded standing on one leg or on two and I knew where they would be and walked down the right side of the narrow tree-shaded street that was still wider than our wingtips as everyone who lived on it or walked it knew and I walked hurt footed and, I hoped, not insolent nor pistol proud down to the Masai drinking place where I said, “Sopa,” and shook a few cold hands and went out without drinking. Eight paces to the right, I turned into Mr. Singh’s. Mr. Singh and I embraced and Mrs. Singh and I shook hands and then I kissed her hand, which always pleased her since she was a Turkana and I had learned to kiss hands quite well and it was like a voyage to Paris which she had never heard of but would have ornamented on the clearest day Paris ever had. Then I sent for the Mission-trained Interpreter.