The Darling (46 page)

“ ‘Nother place to live?” she asked, incredulous.

“I’ll need your room for my office. I’m sure Woodrow can find you a place to live in town.”

Woodrow quietly said, “Really, Hannah.”

“And, boys, from now on you won’t have Jeannine or me following you around, picking up your clothes and cleaning up your messes and treating you like little princes anymore. You are little princes, of course, but you’re going to learn how to be good men, too, and the first step is learning not to expect women to do all your housework for you. That includes cooking and washing dishes and making your own beds and, as soon as you’re able, doing your own laundry.”

Woodrow said, “Men don’t do laundry, Hannah.”

“In my house, Woodrow, everyone washes his own clothes. Even you.”

“Missus,” Jeannine said. She did not turn around. “Can’t I stay inside the garden house? I can put a cot in wit’ the yardman’s t’ings.”

“No, you can’t. I’m sorry, but I’m no longer going to tolerate what went on before,” I said and looked straight at Woodrow, who turned away and stared out the window at the passing scenery.

“Mammi,” Dillon said, “is this the way American boys do? Do they have to wash their own clothes and cook and stuff?” In the six months I’d been away, Dillon had added half a foot in height and fifteen pounds of muscle. The twins, too, had outgrown their little boys’ bodies.

“Not always. But when they don’t, who do you think does it for them?”

“Their mammies.”

“Right. But lots of American mammies have jobs they go to every day. So, who does it then?”

“The boys do, I guess.”

“Right.”

“Well, I think it’s okay then. We can be like American boys. So, are you going to have a job, too? Like American mammies?”

“Yes, I am.”

Willie said, “Me and Paulie think it’s okay, too. We want to be like American boys.”

Woodrow said, “You’re going to have a
job?”

Ignoring him, I said to my sons, “You’re going to have to be even better than American boys. They grow up to be American men. But you’re going to grow up to be Liberian men, the kind of men this country will be proud of. And I’m going to help you.”

“Thanks, Mammi,” Dillon said, and the twins said it, too. “Thanks, Mammi.”

Still gazing out the window, Woodrow in a morose, resigned tone said, “Tell me about this job. And why you want Jeannine’s room for an office. There’s no need for the wife of a minister in the government to work outside, you know. It will make me look bad, Hannah.”

“Everyone in this country who can should go to work. And I can, so I will, yes.”

“Will you work for an American company? Or at the embassy?” he asked hopefully.

“I’ve got plans. I’m going to do something that’s never been done in this country before.”

“And what is that?”

“I’m going to build a sanctuary for chimpanzees. For the chimpanzees that have been abandoned by the lab, if any of them is still alive. And I’m going to buy up and save as many chimps as I can find, those pets on chains and in cages that are sold in the markets and in back alleys. And the chimps that people try to smuggle out of the country to be sold as pets or used in experiments in Europe and America. I’m going to restore them to health and sanity, if I can, and eventually I’ll return them to the jungle, where they belong.”

Woodrow looked at me, as if checking to be sure I was the same woman who had left his home barely six months ago. “That’s … insane,” he declared,

“Can we help with the chimpanzees, Mammi?” Dillon asked.

“Yes,” I said. “And so can you, Woodrow.”

“How? No one cares about dumb animals. Not even the lab. That whole monkey program is dead. Been dead for years.”

“I want you to tell President Doe that I have an offer to make that he’ll not be able to refuse.”

“Why?”

“Because I do.”

“Indeed,” he said.

And then I saw that we had arrived at Duport Road, home, with the two huge, drooling mastiffs behind the gate. They were staring cold eyed at a white man in a rumpled white suit and Panama hat who stood in the street a safe distance from the gate. Sam Clement. When the dogs saw the car, they backed off and wagged their thick tails and smiled as Satterthwaite got out and unlocked and swung open the gate. He patted the dogs on their bony heads and told Sam to come on into the yard, then returned to the car and drove it up the driveway. Sam waved at us as we passed him, and by the time we arrived at the door, he was standing at the top of the steps to greet us.

WHEN I FIRST
cared for the dreamers, back when the lab was still functioning, I saw them as creatures less evolved than we, as weaker, as deprived of essential and powerful abilities to reason and communicate. Later, when I knew them better, and they knew me, I saw, not that the dreamers in amazing ways closely resembled humans, but that we in equally amazing ways closely resembled them. As a result, I revised those early assumptions and came to believe that I could empathize with the dreamers.

But then, during the months that I was away from my little colony of apes, I began to see the built-in limitations of empathy. Perhaps because of my relationship with Carol and the rivalry with Zack, and because I am a woman, I came for the first time to believe that even the best-intentioned man, one who truly does empathize with women, is nonetheless incapable of knowing how the relations between men and women
feel
to a woman. Mainly, he is incapable of knowing how he is perceived by her. And therefore she, despite her likeness to him, remains opaque to him, unknowable.

This doesn’t mean that conflict between them is inevitable or inescapable. But there are useful parallels in the relations between men and women, between whites and blacks, between people without disabilities and disabled people, and between human primates and non-human primates. We who have more power in the world, like men with good intentions, try to empathize with those who have less. We try to experience racism as if I who am white were black, to see the world as if I who am sighted were blind, and to reason and communicate as if I who am human were non-human.

And thus I dealt with my chimpanzees as if I were one myself. And what was wrong with this? What was ethically and even practically wrong with having empathy towards the other? For a long time, I answered,
Nothing
. Nothing at all. It’s good politics. I see a blind man about to cross a street and think,
He can’t see the whizzing traffic, he needs me to see it for him, to take his arm and escort him over to where he clearly wishes to go
. Operating on the assumption that, if I were blind, I’d need me to help me, I grab the man’s arm and pull him panic-stricken into the traffic, terrifying and endangering him. Because I am sighted, I have relied and insisted on using a guidance system that utilizes sight as its main source of data. But the blind man has his own system for crossing the street. The blind man hears what I merely see, isolates bits of information that are lost on me, and coordinates and remembers data that I’ve not even registered.

I’m talking here about the difference between
empathy
and
sympathy
, between feeling
for
the other and feeling
with
the other. The distinction came to matter to me. It still does. When you abandon and betray those with whom you empathize, you’re not abandoning or betraying anyone or anything that’s as real as yourself. Taken to its extreme, perhaps even pathological, form, empathy is narcissism.

WOODROW DECLARED
that he could not do without the car, promising that I would have a car of my own in a few days. I couldn’t wait, however, and the morning after my arrival home, as soon as Satterthwaite had driven the boys to school, I pedaled my bicycle out to the old lab, knowing fairly well what I’d find there. In my backpack I carried as many fruits and vegetables as I could stuff into it, along with my lunch and the video camera that I had shipped back from the States. Woodrow had assured me that in my absence the dreamers had been fed and their cages kept clean by Elizabeth and Benji, but I knew how casually and carelessly they would have done their work. I feared the worst.

The lab was a wreck. The office had been looted of nearly everything that remained—every stick of furniture, the filing cabinets and most of their contents, the remnants of medical equipment, all of it either gone or smashed to pieces. Plumbing fixtures and electric lights had been ripped out. The doors to the three cabins swung open, and the window frames had been pulled out and were probably way across town by now, installed in a permanently unfinished cinder-block hut. In those days half of Monrovia had been vandalized to build the other half, and work on the other half had unaccountably ceased. A strange sort of stasis had settled over the city.

I smelled the dreamers before I saw them. From halfway across the yard, the stench enveloped me—rotted fruit and urine. The old, rusted Quonset hut was silent as I approached. The padlock was gone, and the door hung half-open on one hinge, as if someone had tried to rip it off and had given up. Thus the stench, I thought, but I would have smelled it even if the door had been shut and locked. It was overpowering, putrid, like nothing I had smelled before, and though in subsequent years I became almost familiar with that odor, I knew at once that it was the smell of dead bodies, if not human bodies then enough like human to smell the same, to repel and frighten me in the same primal way and fill my throat and mouth with the soured contents of my stomach.

I untied my head scarf and covered my nose and mouth and swung the door back, reached blindly into the darkness and found the switch. Miraculously, the fixtures and fluorescent tubes were still in place and working, protected against theft no doubt by the awful smell of death. The pale, flickering light drove the thick darkness from the building. I could almost hear the darkness flee. But the stink remained. There was no movement in the cages. Brown and black lumps of hair were all that remained of my dreamers. I staggered along the row of cages and one by one said their names, as if taking a macabre roll, and as I passed, first one of the lumps of hair, then another, came slowly to life, rolled its head into view, showed me its flattened, expressionless gaze. They were shrunk to half the size they had been when I’d last made this walk from cage to cage and called their names and they’d leapt to the front of the cages to greet me with glad hoots and hollers. Now they barely stirred at my passing. They lay in their feces and urine and the rotted remains of their last feeding, which from the looks of it had taken place weeks ago. Some of them did not move at all. Others turned their faces to me, but did not open their eyes.

Of the twelve dreamers I’d left behind six months ago, only eight survived. Four cages had a dead body locked inside: Ginko’s, Mano’s, Wassail’s, and Edna’s. I flipped the switch of the video camera and slowly, back and forth in front of the cages, from one foul end of the Quonset hut to the other, I shot close-ups of the dreamers’ flaccid faces, their emaciated, scab-covered bodies, their sores and self-inflicted abrasions and wounds, and I took lingering footage of the dead. Then I stepped to the center of the hut and panned the length of it, filming a slow, sweeping medium shot of the rack of cages. Doc lifted his huge head, and when he looked at me, I switched to zoom and closed on his blank gaze and held it for a full minute.

I brought water to those that still lived and distributed the food I had carried in my backpack, and afterwards hurried to the nearest market and brought back a large sack of fufu leaves and cabbages. I stayed with the dreamers for hours, coaxing them to eat and drink. It was mid-afternoon before I had managed to remove the bodies of Ginko, Mano, Wassail, and Edna from their cages and drag them outside to the yard, and by dusk I had buried them together, side by side, in a small plot of bare ground at the rear of the Quonset hut. The last thing I did was make a circle of rocks around the grave. Then I returned home to my family of humans.

A DAY LATER
I had my own car, and after dropping the boys off at school, drove myself straight to the Executive Mansion and once again marched up the long, wide staircase as if on a mission from the American ambassador himself and presented myself at the office of the president. Samuel Doe welcomed me with a warm smile and a familial hug. I shrugged out of it and stood away from him.

“It is a wonderful t’ing that you have returned to us,” he began and sat slowly behind his vast desk.

“Yes, well, I have something for you.” I pulled the video cassette from my purse and set it on his desk before him.

He pursed his lips in surprise and curiosity, then gave me a lecherous grin. “Aha! An American movie! You know my taste in movies?”

“This is a Liberian movie, Mister President,” I said. “Let’s watch it together, you and I.” I looked around the room for the television set and VCR that I knew would be close at hand, for, indeed, I did know of his taste in movies. His addiction to pornography was a nationwide joke. In the corner was a cart with a TV and VCR ready to go. I walked over and snapped them on and inserted the cassette, then came and stood next to the president.

Together, in silence, we watched the film. A ghastly study of pain and cruelty, it ran for about fifteen minutes. Neither of us spoke for the entire time. Yes, it was only a video of some apes in their cages, dead and dying of hunger and thirst and neglect, but flattened out on the screen like that in unedited documentary mode with no soundtrack, it was as shocking and indicting as footage of the hold of a slave ship.

The film ended, and I rewound and retrieved it. The president said, “These them chimps from out at the old American blood-testing place?”

“Yes.”

“Why you showin’ them to me?” he asked, genuinely puzzled. “I was expectin’ some other kind of movie,” he said. “You know the kind.”

“I have a proposal to make to you, Mister President,” I said. I began to lay out my plan in very simple, straightforward language. I told him that, with his help and protection, I would establish a permanent sanctuary for the chimpanzees someplace not far from Monrovia. I would need a building and a secure open space for them and enough funding to care for and feed them and to pay a small staff. I would need money to purchase, whenever possible, chimps that were being sold illegally for pets. I explained that I intended to develop a national program designed to protect this internationally protected species. It would provide him and his administration with good public relations worldwide, especially among the Americans, and people would come from all over the world to visit the sanctuary. The Americans would make films of the project to show on American television, and Liberia would finally become known as something other than a place to register foreign oil tankers.