Sogbo's Wife

I remember a fight in the village. This was on a harvest night when the moon was full like a great silver coin, and the tall mask--the one on stilts--had appeared in the witch doctor's compound, fortune-telling for rice and change, then dancing to the young men's drums, turning and leaping on those stilts like a giant crane. I had been in the village for more than two and a half years, and even though I was the only white most of the community had seen, I was no longer a novelty. I was a hunter, and I could wind my way through the Worodougou's maze of customs with relative ease. I knew, for example, that when a man put on the mask to dance for the wellness of the people, he was no longer a man. He became the mask and the voice of the ancestors.

Later, after the second harvest was stored in the granaries and the hot and dry harmattan wind had begun to blow, the leopard and crocodile masks would moan in the night, crawling on their bellies in the light of the bonfire like beasts scenting the air for flesh. But this night the moon was round, the land was moist, the first rice and cassava had been gathered, and the tall mask had made everyone happy. There would be a short lull in the field work now, and the sense of ease and festivity was general.

Perhaps for this reason, Gaussou, my neighbor Bébé's arrogant older brother, thought to pay a visit to his third wife, the new one he'd taken as part of a debt settlement between his father and hers. Gaussou hadn't yet expressed much interest in the new girl. She was skinny as a chicken, her nose was thin, her eyes were narrow, and her teeth were set tightly in her mouth so her face resembled a beak. But the air of the times was light.

Long after everyone else had gone to bed, Gaussou roused himself, went and pushed on the door of her hut and was surprised to find it locked. He put his ear to the planks to hear if she was sleeping. He heard moans instead. His wife was giving pleasure to herself! With a carrot or slender sweet potato--women in need were rumored to do this. But what a waste of life energy, what an insult to the ancestors! If only he had known, he would have come to her hut more regularly. Yes, the girl was ugly. But what did beauty matter in the face of duty?

Gaussou listened more intently, grew aroused at the sounds his new wife was making. He imagined her writhing on her mat, the carrot between her legs and her plastic bridal beads white as cowries around her hips. In this way Gaussou finally understood the great beauty of his third wife's long thighs, supple belly. He parted his evening wrap, took his erection in his hand. Yes, this was a great sin too, but listening to the girl moan, he could not help it. Suddenly he was on the verge of eruption. He shouldered in the door, stripped off his wrap and said, "Remove the carrot, wife! I am going to possess you."

In the darkness of her hut, he fell on her to mount her, thrust his penis vigorously between her legs. A male voice yelped: Gaussou was prodding the buttocks of the boy who was fucking his wife. All three tumbled apart, found their feet, ran out of the hut. For their part, the lovers, anxious in their hearts already, assumed they were under attack by a genie. Gaussou, for his part, understood instantly that his name had been ruined beyond repair: Not only had he been cuckolded, but his mogo had touched another man's anus. Naked, he began to beat the boy, and after taking a few blows, the boy began to fight back. He was the blacksmith's fourth son, and his arms were muscled from endless hours turning the bellows crank. The wife, Shwalimar, began to scream at the top of her lungs because, at times like these, everyone must do something.

We all ran out into the silver moonlight at the commotion. We were humbled, quieted, by the fury with which the men fought. How strange, how awesome to see the primal rage of two furious men who weren't wearing any clothes. Gaussou's brothers jumped in, hitting the boy repeatedly in the face until it leaked like a cracked melon. Then the blacksmith's sons arrived, and the fight was a general rumble of elbows and grunts, of locked forearms and teeth. In the moonlight, it was like looking at a living field of marble hop-lites in battle. The night was punctuated with the root consonants of human language: chokes and shouts. The women of the two families scratched one another's faces, pulled hair; soon men punched women, women leaped on and bit men. Even the dogs snarled and cursed.

The chief's sons came running with braided cattle whips, cracking them in the night, applying lashes liberally. It was pandemonium, people running in circles at three in the morning, the whips cracking like the end of the world. Then the chief himself arrived with his staff, his withered limbs. With a voice much louder than that body had a right to produce, he shouted, "A bana! A man-yee! Dougoutigi a nah! A bana! An Allah a nua laka?" It's finished! Evil people, your chief is before you. Would you open God's eyes onto us?

Of course there was a history to it, not between the boy and Gaussou per se but between this man and that, this old woman and her neighbor or the parents who had sold your true love to someone else for two chickens and a wicker hat. There were always lingering debts, festering for generations. It was life in the village.

In the end, the boy was driven into the forest then and there, naked as he was, banished to whatever village would take him for two years on pain of death. The girl was carried into the forest by her husband's women, her vagina stuffed with chili peppers. And Gaussou received kola nuts and a red hen from the blacksmith in compensation for his shame, though this would never be enough. When we'd see him walking to his hut in the evening, alone as all men are, Mamadou, my best friend and village guardian, would swallow a mouthful of rice and whisper, "Remove the carrot, wife."

This was my last year in Tégéso, a village of 700 people in the bush of northern Ivory Coast, and soon a war would ruin that place and separate me from it forever, but then, that time was my favorite. I spoke the language, and I lived in the village as a member of it. I'd grown my own fields, proven myself to the Worodougou in every way I thought I could. The reason I had come to the village--to find clean drinking water as a relief worker with Potable Water International--felt like an old and confusing dream. I had gone here and there with Mamadou and taught people about AIDS, promoted vaccinations and prenatal care, but really I was simply there, my heart beating, my lungs taking in air, growing older as the sun rose and fell. I thought about the hookers I'd visited in Abidjan, and I wondered if I had AIDS. The stars looked so wonderful to me at night. One day, maybe soon, I would take my place among them.

One afternoon the witch doctor and I went hunting for mongoose, which we liked to eat. We crawled into a dense thicket in the forest where the leaf litter was a damp and warm humus, full of worms and grubs: what mongoose like to eat. We sat with our backs to an old termite mound, held our shotguns, waited. The hours turned toward evening, and nothing came. The sun set, and still we sat. Then in the dark of night, I heard the flick of his lighter, smelled the cigarette smoke. I lit one too.

"Adama, you've learned patience."

"Thank you, Father."

"Before, I could feel your heart beating like a drum. Now you are like the air.

"Adama, I am old now. Things have changed badly in the world. These days I like to come to the forest and simply look at it. The people come to me with their ailments, fears, and I gather those things from them and bring them here. I give them to the forest, and then I go home to the village. I like to look at the small children eating dirt. Sometimes I take a pinch of dirt and eat it too. You should go home, Adama, be with your people. You should sit in your village and look at your children. Gather your children's fears, take them to your forest, sit, marvel at the beauty."

"I will soon, Father," I told him. We crawled out of the thicket and followed the path home.

The first time I noticed Mariam was in her hut. Her husband was visiting the village from Abidjan, and like all visitors, what he wanted to do before anything else was meet the white man. His name was Sogbo, and he was nice enough. He worked in a plastics factory in the city's Adjamé quarter, punching out durable cups and bowls from a press. I didn't ask him about his life in the city, because I knew what it was like and didn't want to make him lie: He lived in a squalid shantytown like all village men there did. Here now, he'd brought soap and a new pagne for his wife, held his small son on his knee as (continued on page 143)Sogbo's Wife(continued from page 80) he watched me eat the plantain foutou and peanut sauce that he'd had his wife prepare to honor me. In the corner, his wife undid her top wrap in the lamplight, smoothed shea butter from a jar over her chest and breasts with her hands.

"You won't get sick and die if you eat black men's food?" Sogbo said. "The white men in Abidjan, they eat 'falafel.' They eat this thing, 'cheeseburger.' Don't you need to eat those things not to die?"

"Two and a half years now," I said, whisking a glob of that great treat through the peanut sauce, popping it in my mouth. "Still alive."

"And you sleep in a hut? On a mat?"

"Sometimes I sleep in my fields. When I'm hunting agouti, I don't sleep at all."

"Hey!" he said, shaking his head. "You hunt the agouti?"

His wife snorted from the corner. Though she was deep in the shadows, the lamplight shone on her moistened skin. She rubbed her arms with the butter, said, "Don't pester him with questions, Sogbo. It's you who are the stranger here. They call him Uao-fa because he kills so many francolins. Don't ask him what he eats, where he sleeps. He plays in the forest with the witch doctor." She looked into my eyes in a hard way as she said this. Why had I never noticed her before? "Look at how he speaks our language. Look at how he eats our food. How can he be white? He takes off his skin and hangs it up at night. He's black underneath. He's a sorcerer."

"Hey?" Sogbo said and seemed confused.

I said, "The zipper's on my back."

He looked at me a moment, then bounced his son on his knee, smiled. "You even joke like we do."

I ate, sucked the thick sauce from my fingers as I did. I looked at the wife, and she at me. Her presence was all over me. Her skin was black and supple with the shea butter. Her breasts were pendulous with milk. We'd both worked hard in the fields that day and were tired in a way that her husband wasn't. I said to her, "Sogbo's wife, you've pounded the foutou as smooth as cream."

"I thank you, friend of my husband's. I thought of you as I pounded it."

"The sauce is as rich as honey."

"It was with thoughts of you that I mixed it."

"Sogbo's wife, I have eaten it all."

"I will rise now and prepare more, friend of my husband's."

"Tomorrow I will eat it, my friend's wife."

"As you say, Adama white man. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I shall think of you again."

Sogbo looked at his wife, at me, like he was trying to decipher this exchange, which I was too. The wife looked down at her hands, rubbed the shea butter into her shins. Sogbo said to me "You are sat isfied, Adama?"

"For now."

"You are welcome," he said and smiled.

•

I spent the next days close to him because I wanted to be close to his wife. Just the bowed presence of her as she served us food brought the blood up under my skin. Sogbo had left the village years before, visited now only irregularly. I could see that the conditions depressed him, that the labor of the fields wasn't something he wanted to do. But I honored him with my presence and in that way helped make his short visit a pleasant one. The men who came from the city went into deep debt to return to the village, to distribute gifts in it. The villagers had no concept of the poverty of city life, so nothing brought back to their was ever enough. All they could see was Sogbo's Manchester United jersey, his knockoff Reeboks, fine modern things to them. I understood that these were probably the only clothes he owned.

"Good-bye, my friend," Sogbo saiD to me as I saw him off onto the logging truck that would carry him away. He had tears in his eyes. "We are great friendS now, and when you come to the city, you will come to my home and allow me to honor you."

As the truck coughed to life and raised thick veils of dust behind it, I waved good-bye at it, understanding simple that I would never see Sogbo again.

•

Time passed as it does in the village. In the evenings, after a long day setting up an AIDS lecture in a neighboring campement or uprooting yams in the fields with the men of my age-group, I'd wash from a bucket behind my hut in the last light, pull on my boubous like a nightgown and walk to dinner at Mamadou's.

Since Sogbo had left, I'd found myself taking a roundabout route. There on the east end of the village, I made a pretense of saluting the blacksmith, of asking after the well-being of his banished son. He'd recently repaired the lever of my shotgun for me, and as I'd sit and smoke a cigarette with him under his mango tree, I'd look across his courtyard to the next: Sogbo's There Mariam turned cassava toh in the pot with the long paddle while Sogbo's decrepit mother sat nearby on a mat watching. Sogbo's mother was an ancient woman; she often sat with her head bowed and eyes closed as though in pain or asleep. I understood then that Mariam took care of her and the son both. Mariam's arm: were long and strong, the skin on then without flaw. She never looked up.

At dinner Mamadou would note the direction I'd arrived from. "What's there Adama, this new direction you've beer arriving from?" he said to me one night as his mother set calabashes of toh and okra sauce on the ground between us.

"The blacksmith's," I said and washed my hands in the water bowl.

"Even the constant dog is led away by a new scent."

"What's that you say, Mamadou? I'm not in the mood for proverbs."

As he lowered his eyes to eat, he said, "Women don't really satisfy themselves with carrots, Adama."

"I know that."

"And men don't use empty calabashes. Nobody needs to visit the cross-eyed blacksmith more than once a month. You know your way around. I won't say any more. Many things have happened since you've come. Now we'll see what you've learned from them."

•

I put Mariam out of my mind. Except one night, overcome by the image of her smoothing shea butter into the skin of her chest by lamplight, I lifted the corner of my mat and scratched her name, Mariam Dosso, into the dirt of my floor. Then I took an ebony leaf from the bundle the witch doctor had long ago given me to protect my hut and laid it over the letters of her name. What good would it do? Could the ancestors read? Could she?

The next evening, I shot two francolins in the rice of the chief's fields, tied them by their spurs to my belt. The nightjars were calling the coming of evening, and as a last thing, I hunted the swamp in the forest near the edge of the village. There was a large lizard that lived there. The people called it varan-o. I don't know the Western name. But it was like a small crocodile without teeth, and if you happened upon it and startled it, it would whip your legs with its tail before diving under the water.

Here now, I crouched in the rushes at the swamp's edge, breathed, let the scene come to me. The evening light between the trees was blue all over the black water. There were gray stumps in the water like broken concrete pilings, and on one, its eyes closed, lay the varan. I aimed, exhaled, watched the air sacs under the creature's throat fill and deflate as it breathed. The meat and skin were prized. If I brought it back to the village, the children would holler and sing my hunting prowess to everyone.

Perhaps I had been there too long. I looked at the sleeping animal a long time, wondered why in the world I should want to kill it. I lowered my gun, simply looked at it. How did this great lizard and I come to share this world?

Nearby someone was chopping wood. I circled through the forest and crept in close to the sound. I could stalk people even more easily than I could animals. It was a woman with a child tied to her back, collecting some last wood before returning to the village for the night. I crept closer and saw it was Mariam. She thwacked the long ax into a dried stump, worked the blade free again with her foot. Her son was asleep on her back, and each time she raised the ax high above her head and swung it down into the wood, she exhaled like coughing. She seemed as oblivious to everything as her sleeping son was. From behind the tree where I watched, she was Africa, struggling with her work beyond the eyes of the noisy world.

I stepped into the clearing. Mariam turned and looked at me.

"I felt you behind me, Adama. How long have you been watching?"

"Why didn't you turn if you felt me there?"

"Who turns and looks at danger?"

"Am I a danger to you, Mariam?"

She looked at me. She didn't seem frightened. She said, "I don't know what you are."

"I've wanted to see you."

"I've seen you, at the blacksmith's. Every night you come and look at me."

"Should I not?"

She didn't say anything. I slung my gun over my shoulder. I went to her and touched her bare arms. She looked up at me. She said, "Not here, Adama. Not in the forest."

"When I breathe, I think of you. When I sleep, I think of you."

"When the moon is new, come to me. The old woman sleeps early. It will be dark all over the village. Come to me then. Even after you go back to your people, I must stay here. When the moon is new, Adama. Then come."

I pressed her arms with my rough hands, was surprised at how soft her skin really was. She gathered the shards she'd cut from the stump, arranged them into a neat stack on her head. She said, "I know that you are a man, Adama. I know that the skin you wear is your own. Every night I am glad to see you looking at me. Every night I've wondered how we would meet." She squeezed my hand, left on the trail to the village, and I lit a cigarette and waited in the swamp for the full cover of the falling darkness.

•

In a few more nights the moon was new, and after dinner I went to my hut, made all my typical signs of retiring--brushed my teeth and spit, pissed a last time in the grass--then closed the door and lay on my mat, waiting. I could hear the witch doctor's sons laughing around their hearth fire. A long time went by as I willed everyone to go to bed, and finally there were last coughs, and then there was quiet. I went out through the dark village in my bare feet, the dust of the paths soft like powder between my toes. Some dogs barked at me, and I hurried on. Even the stars were covered by clouds. Under her mango tree I whispered, "Mariam, Mariam," to the night.

I heard someone trying to hide her footsteps. Then her hands were on my arms. "To your hut," she whispered. "The old woman is sleeping."

I led her by the hand through the dark. Inside I closed the door, lit my hurricane lamp. Mariam's son was asleep on her back, and she untied him now, spread the wrap on the floor, laid him on it. Then we stood and looked at each other in the lamplight. I offered her my hands, and she took them, stepped close to my body. She unhitched her wraps, let them fall; the lamplight shone warmly all over her clean body. I pulled off my shirt, undid my belt and let my pants fall. I stepped out of them. I pulled down my shorts, stepped out of them, too. Her marriage beads were like pearls around her waist. Milk hung in drops on her nipples. What was there to say? We didn't say anything. For the first time I held her to me, nothing between us but flesh.

"Hurry, Adama. There isn't time."

She looked at me, put her fingers in the hair of my chest, touched my stomach, wrapped her hand around me. Everything was a marvel: my body, hers, the colors of our skin, our desire. She lay on my mat, and I lay on her. I kissed her, held her face, drank her milk. I had a condom, began to put it on. She took it off me with her hand.

"You should be afraid of me, Mariam. I've been to the city."

"How can I fear? My husband lives there."

It didn't last long.

In a few minutes, she dressed, tied her son on her back, and I led her to her hut.

•

We made love everywhere. It was difficult, it was dangerous. But with my every breath, I thought now of Mariam.

I asked the witch doctor for the leaf wash that would make me invisible to genies in the forest, shared the leaves with Mariam, and we made love in the rushes of the swamp, in the forest's dark glades, her son asleep on a bolt of cloth beside us. We contrived stories to travel into Séguéla: she to sell onions from her garden, me to mail letters home, and when her onions were sold, she'd come to the small house I shared with the aid workers of the region. Melissa or Shanna would entertain the boy in the front room while Mariam and I made love on a real bed for a change, showered together afterward. The girls had their own affairs. They were happy to help me in mine.

After a few months of this, Mariam received word that her mother had broken her leg back in their home village, Djamina. She told me as I passed by her hut, "Meet me tomorrow in Gbena." Gbena was the village where the bone-setter lived. I told Mamadou I'd be hunting gazelles in the forest beyond Soba-Banadjé, and he took it at that. I wound my way to it through the forest, found Mariam in Gbena with her mother. The mother's shin was swollen with the break, and she had to stay at the bonesetter's for a week. Villages kept secrets like this from each other, and after presenting the chief of Gbena with a bundle of kola nuts and a pair of francolins I'd shot on the way, Mariam and I were able to live there a week, discreetly, as man and wife.

Her mother was kind to me, and this was the finest week of my life in Africa. I'd hunt francolins in the Gbena chief's rice fields during the day and in the evening return to the hut he'd given us and a meal of toh that Mariam had prepared. Then we'd watch the evening settle down on the land from our stools until all of the land was dark, and we'd retire to our night together. Even the first sound of the women's pestles pounding rice in the morning found Mariam's body entwined with mine.

•

When I returned from Gbena, I ate dinner with Mamadou. "No gazelles?" he asked.

"No luck," I said and brushed off my pants.

He wouldn't look at me. I washed my fingers in the water bowl, and we ate his mother's toh. I pretended for a while that his silence didn't bother me. Finally I said, "What is it?"

"Don't you know what it is?"

"That's why I'm asking."

"Sogbo's my kinsman. We were circumcised together."

"What if I say I don't know what you're talking about?"

"Adama, you are my brother. You were like an infant when you came, and you have grown before me until you have become more important to me than my children. Don't you respect my name? Our ways? Her mother-in-law has made accusations to the chief. Don't you know that old people don't sleep well? Old people are the bridge to the ancestors, are almost ancestors themselves. She says they've been speaking to her in her dreams. She's made claims against you."

"What did the chief say?"

"He sent her away. If it was anyone else, Adama," he said and shook his head. "But it is you. Our white man. The old woman's gone to Wye. The only reason anyone goes to Wye is to see the witch doctor there. He is blind and has a white beard. Everyone fears his magic. You should be careful now. If shame comes upon me because of you, I don't care. But the old are old because they have learned to protect their lives. She needs Mariam to care for her. Be careful, Adama. You think you know a lot here, but you don't. Get medicine from Chauffeur. Do whatever he says. She's set genies on you. Everyone is expecting you to die."

•

I met Mariam in the hut of my old fields. The work had been too difficult alone, and after the first year, I'd let mine fall fallow to help Mamadou enlarge his instead. All around us my old farm was a tangle of weeds and short trees. Even the old paths through it were lost in the surging reclamation of the forest. Mariam set her son down on the cloth to sleep. She lay beside me. She wasn't well.

"What's the matter, Mariam?"

"I haven't eaten in three days. I'm afraid of the old woman. I think she's going to try to poison me."

"She's an old witch."

"She's not a witch, Adama. She's Sogbo's mother. If I were in her place, I don't know if I would do any differently. Adama, I have to leave the village. If I go to my mother's, they will find me. I have to go to Abidjan. I've wanted to anyway. I learned how to weave as a child. I can go to Abidjan and weave market baskets. Everyone will buy them. All women need a basket to go to market with."

"And I'll be alone here?"

She petted my face. She said, "You will go back to your people. Give me money, Adama. Let me run away. I will write you, and then you can join me. I'll find a house in Abidjan, and when you come to me, it will be like when you came to me the first time, when the moon was new."

For a few days we kept a low profile. I went into Séguéla and withdrew 150,000 CFA francs from the bank. People in Abidjan were lucky to make 15,000 CFA a month; people in the village, 15,000 the whole year. It was nearly all the money I had. I gave the bundle of money to Mariam in my field hut, and she tied it into her wrap. We made love a last time.

In the morning Mariam was gone. On discovering this, the old woman let up a lament that brought even the old chief to her hut. No one, not even Mamadou, spoke to me for days.

•

For many weeks the old woman and I battled with magic. I was constantly sick with malaria and killed first one cobra, and then another, that had somehow gotten into my hut. After that I visited the one-eyed witch doctor of Kavena, because I knew Chauffeur wouldn't help me with what I wanted to do, and was told to sacrifice a black-and-white-speckled chicken at the black granite boulder outside that village to cleanse myself.

"It needs to be strong magic," I told him when I came back from the sacrifice. "I need to protect myself from her. I'm guilty of what she claims."

"It will be as strong as what you feel in your heart, white man," the old man said. He tossed bones, antelope joints, on his mat, read them, then assembled a packet of herbs and fur drawn from the many bundles of them he had tied in the rafters of his hut, which looked like an alchemist's workshop. He wanted 5,000 CFA and six eggs to get the old woman's genies off my back and gave me the concoction in burlap to bury behind my hut.

For some days the old woman and I exchanged hard stares when we'd pass each other in the village, as hard as what we felt against each other. The whole village seemed to await the outcome of this battle, and everyone, even Mamadou, kept their distance from us lest the genies circling about our huts think they were caught up in it too. Soon enough, the old woman cut her foot while chopping wood for her hearth fire. She was carried to her home village, Kenegbé, on the back of a young nephew, and there, despite the Kenegbé healer's best efforts, the wound grew gangrenous and she died.

After he returned from her funeral, Mamadou said to me, "So it's over, Adama. Good. But know that the bush pig who uproots a baobab tree eats well for one day. After that, he starves."

•

I'd be leaving soon because of war, though I didn't know that yet. In many respects, the death of the old woman was my end in Tégéso anyway. It wasn't about the way people treated me. It was how I felt about myself.

Nothing I'd done there was what I had been sent there to do. Now I'd killed an old woman.

•

A letter came on a logging truck addressed to me: Diomandé Adama, Whiteman, Tégéso village. On the seal, it read, Devine. Guess.

Inside there was an address in Abidjan. The words on the paper said simply, "I wait for you as on the new moon."

I took a transport to Séguéla the next day, was in Abidjan within three. The address was in a squalid and dangerous neighborhood of Adjamé, and as I made my way through the fetid alleyways of tin-roofed shacks in the darkening evening, youths and menacing toughs followed in my wake. At her shack I rapped on the door. Sogbo opened it. His smile was broad and open under his thin mustache. He said, "Adama! I told you that you would visit my house. Come in. Mariam will prepare a special meal, a feast! I hear my mother has died. I'm very sorry for that. But first I thank you for the help you gave Mariam so that she and my son could join me here."

In the corner, in the lamplight, she was spreading shea butter on her chest--unconquerable, unknowable, as beautiful and resolute as always. She did not look up at me.

The chief's sons came running with braided cattle whips. It was pandemonium, people running in circles, the whips cracking like the end of the world.