Tropic of Night (3 page)

I’m giving her August the tenth for her birthday, in memory of my sister. Perhaps she will grow up to be a little Leo, or maybe the stars are not fooled. In any case, she will officially be five in a couple of months. I will give her a birthday party then, and invite Polly Ribera and her kids, and any friends Luz has made at the day-care center I plan to place her in. I have reached the line where you are supposed to put in the father’s name. I hesitate for a moment, thinking over the possibilities. I suppose my husband would be the logical choice. He is the right color, surely, and he would be amused by the gesture, assuming that what he has become is still capable of humor. On second thought … on second thought, I type in Moussa Diara, which is as close to John Smith as they have in Mali, and in the space marked for dwelling place of father, I type mort. A few more details and it is done. I fold and refold the certificate many times, to counterfeit authenticity, and then I take Dolores’s envelope and shake it over the table. As I expect, a fine drift of red dust appears on the white wooden surface. I pick the dust up on my finger and rub it into the birth certificate, and now it looks like every other document in the Republic of Mali. This gives me a certain satisfaction, although the thing won’t bear serious scrutiny. Still, it should be adequate to get Luz into a clinic for shots, and then into day care and school. In the signature du médecin ou de l’accoucheuse space I use a ballpoint pen to sign Uluné Pa. Uluné is certainly a doctor of sorts, and I know he would be amused.

I replace the forms in their envelope and put the envelope back in the box under the floor. There is other stuff in the box, manuscripts, my journals, and various implements. Cultural artifacts. A little stiffening of the belly musculature as my eye falls on them. I take out the aluminum-covered journal with the lock on it. It is also coated with the dust of Mali, and other stuff, too, and I lay it on the floor before I close the box and stamp down the tile and push the waste can over the tile. We Americans are disposed to act and there is stuff in that box that I could use against him, maybe, but my instinct says not to, or maybe I have just become a coward, or always was. Then again, perhaps I’m crazy, perhaps I’m in no danger whatsoever, he’s forgotten all about me, perhaps it is just the guilt. Still, better safe than sorry, as my dad used to say.

Better to stay quiet and hidden, I think. Only a stupid monkey pulls the leopard by the tail, as the Olo say. Or as my old sensei used to say, sometimes fight, sometimes run away, sometimes do nothing. How wise these memes! In some cultures, discourse consists almost entirely of ritualized exchanges of proverbial wisdom, and an original phrasing will provoke puzzled looks and grumbling. It would be comforting to live in such a place, and not to always have to think up things to say.

We prepare for bed. I draw a lukewarm bath and we get in. I wash Luz’s hair. There were nits and lice in it the first time I washed it, and I had to use a special poisonous compound, but now we are on Breck baby shampoo. I use her plastic beach bucket to pour water over her head, rinsing the suds away. She likes this; she smiles, not the hundred-watt she gives to Jake, but a softer one. “Again,” she says. Her first word.

“Oh, you can talk,” I say, and my heart vibrates, although I don’t make a big thing of it. I pour another bucket on her and she giggles. We get out of the bath and I dry her, and myself, and we don our sleeping Tshirts and go into the bedroom. She runs to the fan and switches it on.

“You turned on the fan,” I say, continuing my project of filling the air with language, as if it will do some good. She might have spent most of her short life locked down in a closet, with no one speaking to her at all, while her language faculty withered. It happens. I tuck her in under the cotton sheet and lie next to her. We look through her bird book. I say the names of all the birds and promise that we will go looking for some of them another day. Then we read the Bert and Ernie book. Bert tries to build a bookcase by himself and can’t find his screwdriver and has to prop the bookcase up temporarily with a humorous collection of objects but still won’t ask for Ernie’s help. The bookcase falls down on Bert’s head. Then Bert and Ernie build the bookcase together. Moral: cooperation is good. But the Olo would want to know the precise kin and status relationships of Bert and Ernie, and what right Ernie had to offer help and what right Bert had to refuse it when offered, and how the results of the building project were to be divided, and, of course, they would know that a screwdriver is never really missing but has been witched away because Bert did not make appropriate sacrifices when he visited the babandolé to consult the auguries before starting his project. So my thoughts go. It never ceases, you never get back your cultural virginity. I stay by her side as she falls asleep. My soul child, sefuné in the Olo tongue. Hardly a gene in common, yet I would gladly give my life for hers, and may have to someday, if he finds us, and what does evolutionary psychology make of that?

Mortal, guilty, but to me

The entirely beautiful.

I go back to the kitchen and sit at the table and draw little patterns in the Malian dust that speckles it. My journal draws my eye. Why have I got it out tonight? It’s years since I touched it. It’s got things in there I probably don’t want to know, but maybe I need to know them now, because of the girl, because it’s not just me anymore. Some helpful fact. An insight. There is a big water stain on the first pages, but the writing, in my own neat scientist’s hand, is perfectly legible.

August 21, Sionnet, Long Island

Maybe seven months since I last took up this journal. In New York, days were much the same. No useful work, but not unhappy, exactly. Out a couple of times a week, with friends, or with W.’s friends: theater people, literary types, artists (see pages of the New York Review of Books for subjects, authors). At parties, always one sidling up to me, asking what he was really like, or maybe an opinion, how wonderful he was, I must be so proud. Well, I am proud.

My days blur together, but here for the anthropological record:

Residence?loft on Thomas Street in Tribeca, expensive, all the latest stuff, not ours, we are subletting from a friend of W.’s, who is off somewhere doing a film. W. does not like to be tied down to places and furnishings, and he likes that I am the same way. Birds of passage, us, nomad artists, although only he is an actual artist. Children would just tie us down. I lie abed late, stay up late, read mainly trash, or I watch TV with the sound on low. Often need a pill to put me under. I never dream.

Arising, prep. breakfast for me and W., words of greeting, some pleasantries. I do not ask him how it is going, and I make myself scarce. Unpleasant to be in the loft while he is working. Nervous vibration. I’m not his muse at all; in fact, his muse seems to dislike me.

A cab up to 62nd Street off Park, Doe Trust offices, someplace to go. Various tasks, mainly reading begging letters and reports and commenting on them for the trustees and my father; also help to run W.’s business affairs. Not a Lady Who Lunches, me. Try to keep up with the anthropological literature, I use the library at the American Museum of Natural History, and demonstrate to myself that I still have a profession. I don’t go there very much, as it makes me feel sad, or, if I think about it too hard, frightened. In the late p.m., I go back downtown and find W. He is usually at the Odeon, at the same table, and there are the usual downtown types hanging out with him, being brilliant and witty, and he makes a place for me and I slide in there, and the women look little darts at me when they think I am not looking, because they would like to be married to him but are not, and I am. Chattering we all drift over to some excellent and fashionable place to eat, Bouley or Chanterelle, for example, and we always get a table because places like that always have tables for people like us, and then we go to clubs and listen to music and people press tickets and invitations on us. Jesus, I am bored even writing this. Contrast and background to the more engaging now.

But sometimes I miss the long meaningless, leisurely afternoons. Sometimes W., for example, would not be at the Odeon, but up in his room, lounging on the daybed, with some dope or an open bottle, his work finished for the day, and I would join him for whatever substance and afterward a long lazy fuck before returning again to the lush life. Now, busy busy, studying Yoruba language and culture, organizing the logistics of the expedition for Greer. W. is enormously supportive, which I confess I worried a little about, as he has never seen me in high gear before, says it is like having an affair with a different woman.

Later, 8/21

Omitted the real reason I stopped writing here, which is that I discovered that W. was peeking. I never confronted him on it, cowardice I know, and what did it matter anyway, when you get down to it, one flesh and all, and I could have made a game of it, something to amuse us. If I were another woman. Or I could have become angry but I don’t like what my anger does to him, and after all, with all we have together, it’s a small thing. I just include it here, for the record. You can lie all you want in the published papers, but keep the journals honest. M. taught me that, and I took it seriously, although it might have been merely one more of his ironic comments. He said I had an underdeveloped sense of irony.

This journal is a new one, given to me by my father for our trip, God knows where he got it, but I love it. Several hundred unlined pages of the kind of thin all-rag paper they used to use for Bibles, bound in boards and protected with thick aluminum covers. These can be closed with a hasp that has a serious barrel lock on it. It will be my African field journal.

8/24 New York

Got our visas today, Nigeria, Mali, Benin, Gambia. Others pending. W. like a kid, showing his stamped passport off to waiters, people on the street. I’m also assembling gear for expedition, things people need in 3rd world. Tampons. Vitamins. Ciprofloxin. Imodium. A pound of Xanax. Lots of passport photos. Greer very helpful, been there lots of times. I want to call M., but can’t. Why? Who am I afraid of hurting? Him? W.? Myself?

W. unhelpful as ever, this time not his fault, he’s sick from shots. I am, as usual, not, which he seems to resent. People like to do things for him, however, and he has grown used to good service. I cosset him and give him materials on the Yoruba, which both of us find fascinating. He is reading the big Abrams art book, I am going through Bascom on Yoruba divination. I love them already: the artistic sensibility of quattrocento Italy melded with the religious passion of ancient Israel. Or maybe they are the closest survival into modern times of what the ancient Greeks must have been: artists in their blood and bone, warriors, close to the gods. Like the Greeks, too, they fought one another, the little kingdoms often at war, and subject to the depredations of the empires to the west and north, Fon and Hausa, and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries their chief polities collapsed and hundreds of thousands of Yoruba became prisoners in local wars and were shipped to the plantations of Cuba, Haiti, America, and Brazil, in one last and remarkably homogeneous consignment of slaves. The survivals of African magical and religious practices in the New World?voudoun, candomblé, Santería?are all descended from the Yoruba, or secondarily from African nations influenced by the Yoruba.

This prep is very pleasant. No, more than pleasant. I am conscious of a deep happiness, something I have not felt for a long time, not, in fact, since I was a girl in the company of my father, not since our shipwreck, when everything went sour. And, I can confess now, I was not happy being Wife-Of. I find I need work, serious work that I’m good at. And also, while I’m confessing, it gives me a kick to be for once the senior member of the dyad. (I guess I was happy with M., but that was sort of a delirium I see now, a Gemisch of hot sex and hero worship, and which I understood at some level could not last.) Although I have to say that in our city life W. never made much of being the main guy. I fear that, his particular little tics aside, he is a more decent and generous person than I am.

9/2 Sionnet Labor Day

We drove out, a miserable trip on the expressway, instead of taking the Chris-Craft from City Island with Dad and Mary and her boyfriend. The misery of crawling traffic I have rationally estimated as being not as great as having W. puking his guts over the stern, so I drove the rental with reasonable grace, what I get for marrying a lubber. For his part, W. felt guilty, which he is not really very good at, he tends to get smarmy solicitous, which I can’t stand. We were a little tense therefore, but this got blown away when we passed the Walt Whitman Mall on the road to Huntington, and he did his usual parody, I Hear America Shopping, line after line, biting and hilarious, and this, I think, makes up for a lot of lost time on the water. W. loves Whitman, and he joked once that what tipped the scales for him asking me to marry him was when he found out that Walt had grown up just down the road from Sionnet, and apparently was in and out of the house all the time with my great-great-great-great-grandfather Matthew, who was his contemporary, and who remained a close friend all his life. Matthew Doe backed Walt’s newspaper and received in return signed copies of all his published work and a bunch of manuscripts. The manuscripts are in the Library of Congress, but we kept the books, and my dad gave W. for a wedding present an 1860 Blue Copy of Leaves of Grass , with Walt’s annotations in it, which knocked him out.

It was late afternoon before we arrived, and everyone was already out on the back terrace with drinks. My mother was there because Mary was there, because I doubt she would have changed her plans just to see me off for a year or two in Africa. Mary was her usual self, there is never anything new to say about Mary, she was fully formed at five years old. The boyfriend is new, however, and an improvement on the usual run. He is Dieter Von Schley, the photographer, very proper, blond and bony, lovely manners, a Prussian type, although he is actually from Cologne. A Catholic, too, remarkably, and not apparently a heroin addict like the last one. He and my dad are in love already, Dad has shown him the cars, amid much rolling of eyes by Mom and Mary. Dad looked unchanged, like the house. Mom unveiled the new face-lift, a Brazilian job, and I think she got taken, or maybe it is that her personality has been etched into her features so deeply that even a Brazilian surgeon can’t quite re-create the lovely Lily of yore. She must be pushing sixty now, although she has forbidden birthdays for decades. She has not piled up much treasure in heaven, I’m afraid, and little flashes of fear are starting to show.