Tropic of Night (47 page)

The house we were taken to was built around a central courtyard, paved in the same antique style. It was pink-ocher, two stories, with an external staircase. Awa took us to a room on the ground floor furnished with cushions and a low table. She said she would bring us some food, and left, her kid trailing after her.

What’s wrong with this picture? Two Americans, one of them a blonde, arrive in an isolated African village. We should be mobbed by curious people. There should be kids staring at us through the windows. But people seem to be going about their business with only the most blasé urban-type curiosity about us. It was like getting off a bus in the Port Authority terminal in New York. Even more spooky: no Tshirts, no shorts, no rubber shoes. Western charities dispatch huge bales of used clothing to Africa and somehow it gets into every corner of the bush. Except Danolo, apparently. Everyone we’ve seen so far is dressed traditionally, the women in robes and headdresses, the men in a kind of sarong, with the older men affecting an off-the-shoulder cloak, all in what looks like hand-woven cloth. No plastic either. I have never seen an African household without a plastic basin or jerrycan, or some utensil recycled from tin cans or telephone wire. Here we have pottery and local ironwork. All the adults have parallel keloid scarring or tattooing on their faces. Never seen that in Mali before. It’s Yoruba, and old-fashioned Yoruba at that, the mark of civilization.

Awa came back with food. Fried fish lumps on a bed of something like couscous, but not, flavored with a sauce that’s got coco in it and other stuff I don’t recognize. It was pretty sophisticated cooking & also nothing not native to ancient Africa?no rice, no manioc, no yams. With it we got a thin, bitter beer. The meal was served on pottery decorated with rouletted and combed designs, not all that different from the Ifé ware displayed in the museum in Lagos. This kind of stuff should not be in Mali. OK, pottery is conservative, but still. The beer mugs were brass, also with parallel marks, beautifully made, museum-quality stuff. W. said they were fattening us up for the cannibal feast. He was enjoying himself, the situation & my confusion. He said, This looks like the real Africa. Oh yeah & scary because of it, although I don’t mention this to him. There shouldn’t be any real Africa anymore.

Another woman removed the food & utensils. Little later, three elderly men wearing white robes and carrying carved wooden canes came in and removed W. He was quite jolly about it: See you in the pot, Janey.

Hour or so after that, Awa and another woman, older, who introduced herself as Sekli, led me out through the village to a high mud wall barred by a wooden gate. The gate and doorposts were heavily carved in the combination of abstract and naturalistic characteristic of ancient Yoruba art.

We got hustled through the gate too fast to really study it, noted the ram’s head, & on both doorposts figure w/ crested coiffure, club, and horn prob. = Eshu-Eleggua, had the horrible trickster smile too. Inside found several houses, w/ beautifully made high-peaked roofs of finely woven oiled matting & carved wooden verandas. The center of the compound was Pavement Culture pavé, concentric circles around a rough-looking standing stone, with paths leading to the doorways of the several structures. The woman gestured for me to sit down and wait, then left.

Unpacked and checked the Nikon, the Sony camcorder, the Sony microcassette machine. Discovered the camcorder battery was dead. Discovered the cassette recorder had somehow picked up water on the trip, and the batteries were all split and corroded. Unpacked the solar charger, walked outside, unfolded and set it up in the sun. Loaded the Nikon and took some pictures of the compound. Something was wrong with the film advance. Opened the camera. A long loop of exposed film popped out. Trashed that roll, put in another. Carefully threaded it, closed the camera. Sighted on the group of women, pressed on the shutter. Nothing. I figured a piece of grit must have slid in there when I had it open. Hung it around my neck, planning to break it down later, blow it out. Grit always a problem in this part of Africa. Checked the solar charger and noticed that the little red charging light on the Sony was off. It was on when I plugged in the cable, I thought, but maybe not. Getting a little confused now, I sat down and checked the cabling, which was fine, but when I looked at the little control board on the solar charger I saw that instead of five volts, the transformer was set to twelve, which meant I had fried the Sony battery. I cursed, yanked the battery out of the Sony and stormed toward my hut, meaning to get the spare from my bag.

But I tripped on the rough pavement and went down on my face. Sony and Nikon both totaled. Blubbered like a baby, not because of the smashed equipment, but from fright, ashamed of it, couldn’t help the fear. Déjŕ vu. Chenka all over again. I’m supercareful person with equipment, there was Something going on. I sat down on the doorsill of the little house and shivered and snuffled miserably for a while. When I looked up he was standing there, a small old man in a white robe and sandals, carrying a carved black staff. I hadn’t heard him approach. He said something in Bambara that I didn’t get. I held up the smashed camera and said, in English, You wouldn’t by any chance know if there’s a certified Nikon repair facility in this town? He said something else I didn’t get, and then I really looked into his face for the first time.

Hard to describe this. In the faces of some nuns, some Hindu holy men, you’re supposed to see a look of unearthly goodness, the sense that what is staring out at you from their eyes is not an ego like your own but a fragment of divinity. Seen it myself in a nun or two, can’t vouch for the Hindus. This was like that, but not the same. It was as if a piece of sky or a wild animal or a tree had achieved consciousness. Or the moon. Original participation, not just at the height of a ritual, but all the time, in the light of afternoon. I could feel my heart knocking. He came closer and said something else and I caught dusu be kasi (the heart is crying) and the interrogative particle and I figured he meant to ask me why I was unhappy. I shrugged and indicated my broken things, although that was not the reason my heart was crying. And he asked me if I spoke Bambara and I said only a very little. He nodded and came over and sat down on the doorsill next to me.

Had he turned into an ostrich I could not have been more surprised at what he did then. He said, Perhaps you would be more comfortable then, if we spoke in French. My name is Uluné Pa. This is my compound you are in. What do you call yourself, Gdezdikamai? Close your mouth, so that flies do not fly into it.

I said, Jane, my name is Jane. What was that name you called me?

He said, Gdezdikamai, explaining what it meant. And lifted a hand to touch my hair. We have been waiting for you, Jeanne Gdezdikamai.

12/?? Danolo

Have not written in some days, no longer know date with precision. Moon tonight in new crescent. Will have to keep track of passage by her from now on, as in old days. How anthro of me! Almost needless to say my cheap watch stopped, and the local drugstore does not stock watch batteries. Writing slow anyway, something.

I must have drifted off. It seems hard to form letters, have to really focus. Was not the case in Chenka, that I noticed. Here is maybe deeper into the no-write zone? List of facts:

—the place I’m in is called a ganbabandolé . It is a kind of sorcery institution. You come here to get unwitched or to get oracles or like that, just like you go to a post office to get stamps. The man who runs it is my pal Uluné. He is the babandolé, the chief sorcerer in charge.

—the people here speak Olo, a language that seems to use both Yoruba and Bambara roots, but the tone structure and grammar are not like either, and it is more agglutinated than the typical Kongo group language. It’s not like anything I have heard of, but I am not expert in African languages. A creole of some kind. Bespeaks migration, fairly recent as these things go.

—Uluné says he knew I was coming. I am an important person for some reason that he can’t explain just yet.

—My husband is an important person, too, ditto on the explanation. I have not seen him in however many days it has been. Four? A week?

—I am to be taught ndol, sorcery of a type not taught to women. This is because I am not officially a woman. (Note: analogous to Gelede, where women don’t dance but men dressed as women do?) As name implies. Gd = female; ezil = gold(en); dik = outsider, not Olo; ama = head; ai in the terminal position indicates a partial negation of the primary indicator of sex, size, or position. I think. Thus Gdezdikamai means “goldenheaded not quite a female foreigner.” Uluné himself will be my owabandolets, my “father-in-sorcery.” It is quite an honor, or maybe it is a doom. Everyone in the compound treats me with wary respect.

—The Olo, says Uluné, came to Danolo a long time ago. Before that they lived in Ile-Ifé, down in Yorubaland. They taught the Yoruba about the gods, the spirits, about Orun, the otherworld, which here they call m’arun. They also taught them Ifa divination, and just a little bit about m’doli, the unseen world = bridge between m’arun and m’fa, the world of the here and now. Don’t know if I believe this. Explains some things, obscures others. Confirms Tour de Montaille. Want to call Greer and ask him.

—Uluné showed me a photograph. As far as I can tell it is the only photograph in the compound. It’s old, cracked, and faded. It shows a man who looks vaguely like Uluné in the uniform the French colonial infantry wore in the years before the Great War. This is impossible, unless he is over a century old, so why does he want me to believe it? Age = status? Ask trick question. Jane: Why did he let himself be photographed? Wasn’t he afraid his soul would be trapped? I was a different man then, he says. That man is dead.

Someday, Danolo

U. doesn’t approve of writing things down. Writing kills the spirit of the thought, he says. He wants me to train my memory. Too late, I’m literate, the rot is too deep. Therefore, I try to keep the stuff in my mind, and then write it down at night, like now. I have pages full of stuff. Ifa verses, spells. Moon in waxing quarter.

Anthropology. Family and clan structure? Who knows? A good deal of ritual life goes on in compounds, each with a central babandolé, all very secret one from the other. U. used to teach sorcery in a kind of university they have here, but not any longer. Now his only student is me.

Uluné’s compound is inhabited by Awa and the girl, Kani; by Sekli, who is supposedly something of a sorceress in her own right (although I have not seen evidence of this) and a formidable battle-ax. She is the majordomo of the compound. Then Loltsi, a jolly, portly woman, and Mwapune, who is quiet and has a little girl of about five named Tola. My favorite is Tourma, a lovely creature of about eighteen, who is pregnant with her first child. At first I thought all these women were U.’s wives, but when I voiced this theory, he seemed shocked. Olo sorcerers are celibate, more or less permanently. Sex makes too much noise in the spirit realm ( m’doli); the orishas and spirits get jealous, and rival sorcerers can use the distraction to get at you. This is also the answer I get when I ask about W. I can’t see him lest we be irresistibly drawn into sexual congress. Little do they know. Prob. why sorcery never caught on at American colleges and universities.

The women in the compound are in fact staff, and honored for it. They have husbands they visit on their day off, all except Sekli, which may account for her temper. The other thing is that Kani and Tola are not the birth children of Awa and Mwapune. They are imasefuné, soul-children. The Olo believe that when weaning concludes, at about age three, the original connection between birth mother and child has quite faded and that the child then becomes the responsibility of anyone who forms a relationship with it in sefuné, the affective soul. Most often this is a close relative, an aunt or uncle, but it can be a stranger from the other end of the village. Unusually, it can even be the child’s own mother or father. But in vono ba-sefuné, as it is called, the merging of souls, both parties immediately understand what has happened, everyone accepts it, and the child immediately moves into the household of his or her new owasefuné or gdsefuné, the soul-father or soul-mother, becoming their imasefuné, soul-child, until puberty.

When I asked U. whether a child ever failed to find a soul-parent, he looked bleak, and told me sometimes not, such children are damaged in the soul. No one talks to it, or feeds it, and it dies. On very rare occasions, it does not die, though; it scavenges food, and lurks on the edge of the village. If it survives to its twelfth birthday, it is considered dontzeh, a person under the protection of the spirit world, not quite human, but considerable. It enters the household of a superior babandolé of the town, and is taught various aspects of magic. All dontzeh become witches, and if you ask the Olo why they help them to the knowledge that will enable them to work evil, they say, who are we to reject what the god has touched? Find myself thinking about four-year-old kids no one will talk to, starving to death in plain sight. Poison in paradise.

As for W., he is well, I am told when I ask, he is fulfilling his destiny. U. won’t divulge what it is. Pay attention to your own, he says. Fulfilling destiny a phrase much used around here, by the way. Many people, says U., wrongly suppose life is like a fishing net on a nail. Shift those nails and the meshes fall into completely different patterns. In fact, it is not a net, but a hook and line. Ifa hooks us in our mother’s womb and although we thrash this way and that we are drawn along our line of fate until we are brought flopping to the seat of Olodumare. The same Olo word, ila, means fate and also a fishing line or a line scratched in the sand. I asked him, can no one escape their fate? Oh, yes, he replied casually, this is what we sorcerers are for, and laughed. This is so Olo, a profundity tied to a silly joke.

Later I press him on this. He has two expressions when I ask him for something he doesn’t want to tell me. One is kindly, like a dad saying It’s too complicated, darling, you’ll understand when you’re older. The other is almost embarrassed, like it’s something shameful. I get the latter when I ask him about changing fate, or manipulating time, or about where the Olo come from. All seems to be related.