The Other Language (42 page)

He insisted on lifting the hood and started screwing and unscrewing tops and bolts, rubbing the tip of the spark plugs with the corner of his shirt as men tend to do when presented with a broken-down car and a woman in the driver’s seat.

I’ve checked those as well, she said, but he pretended not to hear.

She stood next to him looking at the tangle of wires under the hood and answered his third degree.

She had come to write a report on an NGO just north of Barsaloi.

Yes, she had been driving by herself all the way.

No, she didn’t need a driver because she knew the road.

Because she had grown up there.

On a farm not far from here.

No, she hadn’t been back in a few years. She used to come visit, but she hadn’t now for a while.

She was heading to the airstrip outside the town to get on a six-seater back to the capital.

She was supposed to fly back to Europe the following day.

“Okay,” he said, “hop in my car, I’ll give you a ride to the airstrip. Forget the car. We’ll send a mechanic tomorrow.”

“Leave it. It’s a rented car, I’ll call them and they’ll take care of it.”

“Then get your stuff and I’ll drop you off.”

She sat next to him in the big Land Cruiser, filled with tools, carton boxes, muddy boots and towels covered in red dirt. They drove off and for a while neither one of them spoke.

She remembered him, of course. She didn’t feel like telling him, because it had been so long ago, at a time when she still lived in the country, and she didn’t want him to think she still remembered their brief encounter after all these years. He had changed, but he looked more interesting now that he wasn’t so boyish, with thin lines around his eyes. He lit a cigarette without asking her whether it might bother her.

“I remember you,” he said, breaking the long silence.

“Really? From where?”

“We met in the bathroom at Jonathan Cole’s house. You had on a pair of bright red sandals you had just bought in Italy.”

She opened her mouth, feigning bewilderment.

“Come on. How can you remember
that
?”

“We had quite a long chat in there, and I tend to notice women’s feet,” he said.

She had been putting on her lipstick when he’d wandered in with a drink in his hand. They had flirted—mildly, in the oblique way people flirt late at night at parties—and shared his vodka tonic while sitting on the edge of the bathtub. Then Consuelo Gambrino, the alluring Argentinean eye doctor, had walked in.

“What are you two doing here?” she had asked them mischievously, shattering the moment. Consuelo had pulled up a stool and had started speaking nonsense to him in her thickly accented English, ignoring her. Sonia had left the room, meaning to catch up with him later, but somehow she’d lost sight of him, or maybe he had left without saying goodbye.

“Yes,” she said, “I remember you now. You described in detail a scene from a book you were reading.”

“Did I? That sounds rather boring.”

“It was … it was the one with the lion and—was it the heart, the skin?—in the title. The part where the nun falls off the bridge. I actually bought the book afterward.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, you made me want to read it.”

“Did you like it?”

“I did.”

He turned and looked at her and said nothing. She felt nervous for having said that, as though it had been an admission of some sort.

“Sorry if I didn’t recognize you right away,” she added after a short silence, wanting to sound casual. “It’s been a very long time.”

“No problem,” he said and grinned. He knew she was lying and he liked that.

They asked each other polite questions, carefully steering away from the details of their personal lives, avoiding any mention of wife or girlfriend, children or husband. He said that for years he’d had a highly paid job for the UN, driving relief trucks into Sudan and Somalia. Now he worked as a manager on a sheep farm up-country. She suspected this change might have to do with having a family and settling down, though he didn’t wear a wedding ring. She mentioned the name of the foundation she worked for and told him how sometimes she had to travel to assess the state of the projects they funded. They had just started to finance schooling projects for girls in the nomadic areas of East Africa and she had been assigned to report on them because of her knowledge of the place. She didn’t delve into the details, knowing that he, having lived in the country for so many years, wasn’t going to be impressed by her job. It was mainly her friends back in Europe who always introduced her as a kind of heroine because she had lived in a couple of African countries and was working for the poor.

“Do you ever miss your life here?” he asked.

“All the time,” she said, and felt herself blushing. It seemed inappropriate to admit such a thing in front of him. A betrayal to the new life she had chosen.

When, almost eight years earlier, Sonia had made up her mind to move to Europe, it had seemed like a final decision. At the time she could no longer bear the corruption, the frustration of living in a hopeless country constantly on the edge of disaster where—if she was ever to have children—they would grow up like wild things without a clue about what was going on in the rest of the world and never adjusting to it. She convinced herself that she needed to live in a place where one would be able to
go to a museum on a whim, see a movie, get proper clothes, eat decent food and be surrounded by people who could talk about ideas rather than dams, engines, electric fencing, wells and cattle. When she’d met the man who was to become her husband—a director of photography who’d come into the country to shoot a documentary on the Ndorobos, a disappearing tribe—she hadn’t let him escape without her, holding on to him with the resilience of a castaway grasping a wide, steady plank of wood.

She had adjusted very quickly to her new life—after all it was much easier to go from bush to city than the other way around. The “how to” instructions were easy and written on every wall; the comfort of European life was strongly addictive, she discovered, and one immediately forgot how to live without it.

Now that she felt something of an exile returning to her homeland, she’d been assaulted by nostalgia, not only for the raw beauty of the country, but for her former self, a person happy to live with few clothes, who didn’t wear makeup and who didn’t think much of crossing a river in a four-wheel drive.

Sometimes, in the city where she lived now, glancing around the crowd in the bus, she would single out a couple of faces. She recognized their shy smiles, the way they moved their open hands around their faces, the familiar singsong in their voices—certain words that she’d catch in the distance. Usually they would be cleaning ladies, sometimes they’d be young nuns or street sellers just arrived—she could tell from the clothes they wore. She couldn’t restrain herself from moving closer and closer to them, elbowing other tired passengers until she’d find herself standing right next to them in order to catch the gist of their conversation. She’d wait for the right moment to barge in and they’d open their eyes wide, stunned to hear a
mzungu
lady in her nice coat address them in their language.

“I grew up there.”

They would laugh and slap their thighs.

“So you are an African too!”

“Oh yes,
sana kabisa
,” she’d say and join their laughter.

Often she would not get off at her stop, wanting to prolong the conversation; the sound of Swahili was like music to her.

He hadn’t been exactly present in her thoughts for all those years; she seemed to have almost forgotten him, to have lost track of his existence as if he hadn’t left such a big impression after all. But the memory of that encounter on the edge of a bathtub must have been lingering somewhere beneath the surface—invisible, yet bobbing about. All this became clear to Sonia only once she sat next to him in the car, so that coming across him in such an unlikely circumstance seemed the obvious segue to their encounter of nearly ten years earlier, when she was still single, hadn’t settled anywhere yet and still had a sense that the future was a sheet of white photographic paper on which her life was still waiting to emerge.