Various Flavors of Coffee (26 page)

The scent, I discover, is strongest in the evening. As night falls, tendrils of that distinctive coffee-bush aroma hang in the darkness,

brushing my palate. I break them as I pass, spider’s webs of scent that float, gossamer-like, drifting slowly from place to place on the still air.

At each halt
Fikre makes us coffee, fragrant and strong. When she wipes the cloth over my face I feel the subtle pressure of her fingers. She strokes me smoothly, slowly, lavishing precious moments on my lips, my eyelids, the side of my nose. I can hardly breathe.These caresses feel as if they last forever, but I suppose they can actually last no longer than she spends doing the same to Hector or Bey.

Before she leaves me, there is always a coffee bean, pushed into my hand. Or, if she cannot manage that, somewhere else—my col-lar, between the buttons of my shirt. I find them later as I ride: small, light touches somewhere on my body, making their presence known, like the piece of grit at the heart of a pearl. And sometimes there is a glance, a brilliant smile for my benefit alone, quickly averted; a flash of white teeth and white eyes in the depths of her headscarf.

The days
are hot, stifling, windless. My eyelids droop as if under the effect of some drug.The rhythm of the camels enters my head, becomes a slow, incessant rhythm of sex.

Obscene lascivious reveries dance around my dazed head like gnats. I could shoo them away but I know that they will return within moments.

Another stop
. Only once do I manage to talk to Fikre.As we are unloading the animals, we find ourselves hidden from the others by the camels.

“In Harar there is a warehouse Bey is trying to sublet,” she says urgently. “It used to belong to a French coffee merchant. Say that you will take it.”

“Very well.”

The camels wheel about, and before anyone can see us she is gone.

I am toward
the back of the column, so I do not see at first why the caravan has halted. I join the others, who have drawn up on a ridge.

Below us, nestled in the bowl of a fertile alpine plain, is an immense lake. Beyond the lake is a town. Even at this distance we can see the walls and fortifications that surround it; the long, ragged flags fluttering from its rooftops; the brown clay houses and the white onion-shaped minarets—and the scavenging birds who wheel over it endlessly, like flies circling a rotten fruit.

“Harar,” Bey says unnecessarily.“We have arrived.”

[
thir ty-seven
]

“Clove”—this delicious complex smell is reminiscent of cloves, sweet-william, the medicine cabinet, vanilla and smoked products. It is prized and appreciated for its delicate, spicy complexity that gives depth to coffee.

—
lenoir,
Le Nez du Café

*

ou smell it as soon as you enter the wooden gate: the
pungent, earthy smell of roasting beans, wafting from a dozen windows. Coffee sellers wander the streets, silver flagons under their arms. In the bazaar, stalls are piled high with jute sacks, their contents spilling from them like polished beads. This is a city of

coffee.

Ibrahim takes me round the French merchant’s storehouse, a fine double-story building overlooking the market. It is empty, apart from a few personal effects belonging to its former occupant. There is a ledger written in French, some letters, a tin chest containing some books, a camp-bed. The whole place gives the impression of having been abandoned in a hurry.According to Bey, it

was an unfortunate case.The merchant arrived in Africa as a young man, eager to make his fortune in the coffee business, but got mixed up in some dubious schemes. Eventually he lost the use of a leg. He went back to Marseille, but his sister later wrote to say he had died. Bey is only too pleased when I say I will take on the lease.

Meanwhile, Hector engages a headman, Jimo, with experience of coffee farming. My companion refuses to stay in Harar a mo-ment longer than is absolutely necessary.

“We’ll leave tomorrow.As soon as we’ve bought our seed crop.” “A few days won’t make any difference, surely.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.You’re a farmer now, Robert; you have to start working to the seasons.The rains—”

“Oh, the rains. I keep forgetting the rains.”

He mutters an expletive under his breath as he turns away.

In the market
I find not only coffee but saffron, indigo, civet musk and ivory, along with a dozen fruits I have never seen before. I also find Fikre, buying food.

She is wearing a dark red robe, the top looped over her hair. She turns her head, and my pulse quickens at the sight of that perfect profile.

“You must not be seen with me,” she murmurs, picking up a mango and pressing it with her slim, dark fingers, as if its ripeness is all she is interested in.

“I’ve taken the French merchant’s house,” I mutter. “Can you meet me there?”

She is giving the seller some coins.“I’ll try to come at dusk.” Then she is gone—a dark red robe slipping into the shadows.

At dusk
I am waiting.

I wander round. There are dozens of small wasps’ nests in the

corners of the rooms, and a parrot is nesting under one of the ceil-ings, the floor below spattered with its guano. I pass the time by poking among the French merchant’s papers.

Item: 1 bundle of colored wools.The blue merino is good stuff, as is the red flannel, and at the price I am offering it you have nothing to fear, except for worms if it is kept too long, but at present it is in good condition. . . .

A sound. I look up. She is there, hurrying toward me, her feet bare on the wooden floor. Her eyes, under the red hood, are bright. She stops. For a moment we stare at each other—if we are to step back from the brink, it must be now.Then I open my arms, and with a gasp she runs to me. Her skin tastes of coffee: she has been working amongst Bey’s sacks all day, and her lips and neck still carry the smoky, toasted flavor of roasting beans. And something more, a
mélange
of spices, scents: cardamom, rosewater, myrrh.

Eventually she pulls away.“I didn’t realize it would be like this,” she whispers, placing a hand on my cheek.

“Like what?”

“That I would want you so much. Like hunger.”

I feel her fingers slipping under my shirt, cool on my bare skin, as we kiss again.

“I can’t stay,” she says. “I only have a few minutes, but I had to see you.”

She is squirming against me. I push back against her, on fire. “We have to wait,” she says, almost to herself.

“Wait for what?” I gasp.

Every sentence takes an age, the words slipped in between kisses.“For him to go away. Back to the coast with his coffee.”

“Then what?”

“Don’t you see? I’m going to give myself to you. It’s the only way.”

Her expression
is triumphant. She has it all worked out. She is going to sleep with me—to shatter her precious virginity. Bey’s investment will have been wiped out as surely as if he had taken his wealth and scattered it in the desert.This will be her grand revenge on the man who bought her.

“When he finds out, he’ll be furious.”

“Yes,” she says. “He will kill me. But he’s killing me anyway, keeping me like this. And if we can have one night . . .” She looks into my eyes.“It will be worth it. At least I will die knowing what love is.”

I am sick with apprehension and lust. “There must be another way. Less dangerous—”

She shakes her head. “Don’t worry, he will never know it was you. Even if they torture me before I die.”

“You don’t have to die,” I say urgently.“Listen to me, Fikre. No one has to die.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she whispers. “A night of love, and then death. It’s enough.”

“No. Fikre, I promise I will think of something—”

“Kiss me,” she says. I do.“I am ready for what he will do to me.

We have to wait until he goes away. Just until then.”

With a groan I release her. She steps away from me, hesitates, looks back at me one last time. Then all that is left of her is that scent—coffee and rosewater and spice.

[
thir ty-eight
]

*

Yamara

August

My dear Hunt,

We have now left the last vestiges of civilization behind and are trekking deep into the forest in search of the land we are to farm. It is like traveling into the Stone Age—there are no buildings, except thatch huts; no tracks, except those made by animals, and so dense is the canopy overhead that we can no more see the sunlight than can earthworms in a flowerbed. Occasionally we come across clearings containing enormous wooden phalluses the height of a man, painted with gaudy designs.We assume they are some kind of
ju-ju
or fetish.

We encounter curious natives—each valley seems to play host to a different tribe.The bucks sport ivory bangles and copper earrings, and the girls dye their hair scarlet or daub their faces with whitewash.

Everyone—men, women and children—smokes huge stogies made from rolled-up tobacco leaves, and no one does much in the way of work.

Yesterday I traded a fishhook for a necklace of lion’s teeth.The lion was a meat-eater, to judge from the smell, and not one in possession of a

toothbrush. But I fancy it will cause quite a sensation when I am next in the Café Royal.

Something else has happened to me—something so strange that I hesitate to write it down, in case you think me perfectly mad. But I need to confide in someone, and it certainly can’t be Hector. Here goes, my friend: I seem to have fallen in love.Yes: unlikely as it sounds, here in the middle of the wilderness I have begun a grand passion.The object of my affection is a girl called Fikre—an African—I know, even more unlikely; and a servant as well, of a sort. But she is highly educated and has had the most extraordinary life. It is, as you may have guessed, a rather delicate situation—the lady in question is already attached to someone else, someone for whom she has no affection whatsoever.

Whatever happens, I can’t see how I could ever marry her, and it would be awkward to break off my engagement to Emily while I am the manager of her father’s plantation, so it is ticklish on every score. All I know is that I never felt like this about anyone before—and I think she feels the same way about me. I am riding along in a sort of delicious reverie, thinking about our last encounter with a dazed smile on my face. Hector has accused me of chewing
khat
, which is the local narcotic! But far from being stupefied, I feel more alive than I have for months.

I have no idea when I shall be able to post this: perhaps I will be able to give it to someone to take to the coast. Sometimes, looking down through gaps in the forest at the endless valleys filled with green, I have the sense of stepping across a threshold, as if I am about to push through a great hedge and vanish utterly from view.

Yours, Robert

Part III

The Law of the Jungle

New districts have been opened up, supplying fresh fields for enterprise and capital, and changing by their prosperity the face of regions which, though once clothed in dense jungle, and now patched with the luxuriant green gardens characteristic of the industry, and dotted with the white bungalows of European superintendents. To gaze over the tract thus changing hands—from Nature’s to Men’s—is an experience not easily forgotten; the fair and fruitful plantations already won from primeval barbarism lying along the hollows of, it may be, a wild upland valley, surrounded on every side by the swelling masses of forest only awaiting their turn to come under the woodman’s axe.

—lester arnold,
Coffee: Its Cultivation and Profit, 1886.

Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

—oliver wendell holmes,

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

[
thir ty-nine
]

“Coffee blossom”—this is the sweet perfume of the lovely white flowers of the coffee tree that used to be called Arabian jasmine in the seventeenth century because the two plants are so similar. The essential oil of
Jasminium grandiflorum,
fruitier and more highly perfumed than that of Sambac jasmine, is what gives us this cheerful note in coffee.

—
lenoir,
Le Nez du Café

*

awn rose over the jungle, light and sound sweeping
through the canopy together, the first glimmers of day greeted as always by a cacophony of calls, screeches, roars and rattles that slowly subsided into the lethargic mutterings of morning. Up on the hill, the white men snored in their camp-beds. In the native village the women put wood on the communal fire, pounded coffee, and went to the ravine to shit before waking their husbands. The dawn was chilly: breakfast was taken squatting

around the fire, wrapped in brightly colored blankets.

There was only one topic of conversation: the visitors. There had been white men before, passing through the valley with their

long caravans of animals and provisions; but these were different: they had built a house.True, it was a very bad house, too close to the stream, so that it would be infested with ants when the rains came, and too close to the ravine, so that their animals would sooner or later end up breaking their legs; but a house nevertheless.What did they want? No one knew.

There was one amongst them who was particularly uneasy. Kiku, the medicine woman, sat on her own, deep in thought. It was true that the white men did not seem warlike, but her fear was that their arrival might herald something even more worrying than war. She did not know what this thing might be, or even where her foreboding came from, so perhaps it came from the
ayyanaa,
the spirits of the forest, who sometimes told her things that could not otherwise be known.And so she sat apart, trying to listen to the forest, as another person might tune out the voices around them in order to listen to whispers from another room.