Walking with Abel (32 page)

After breakfast the nomads returned to their mats, for their second sleep. When they woke again the sun was a palm’s width above the eastern trees and it was very hot. Hassan and the cattle were still gone. There were dishes to clean, laundry to wash, firewood to fetch. There was a long day ahead to lie in the speckled shade of a thorn tree, suffer the thirst, and watch the land shrivel in the sun.

Blackbirds and weavers pecked at the rice grains spilled around the hearth. By the river, spotted kingfishers fluttered in dizzying black-and-white drizzle, and four pied crows fought over a dried piece of carrion. An African fish-eagle flashed its fleecy throat in circles round the sun, which rose another palm, inched southward. Oumarou and Fanta stood up and moved their mats to keep them in the shade.

A Fulani family trundled toward Hayré in a cart drawn by a lovely dapple horse. Oumarou followed the cart with his eyes. Thirsty, tired people to match the thirsty landscape and spent livestock.

“Where are they going, idiots? There’s no water in Hayré now. They’ll have nothing to drink there.” But Fanta rose from her mat and wandered over to the campsite of the departed family to salvage a perfectly fine clay waterjug they had left behind. She hoisted it upon her head. On the walk back she paused over something on the ground. A large dead Nile perch. She bent her knees, picked up the fish by the tail, and returned to camp with her two finds. She set the jug inside the hut, dropped the fish on the ground by the hearth, palmed some dry clay over it. “It will be delicious with rice later on,” she said. Then she lay back down, exhausted and in pain.

Sita Dangéré walked up, leaned on his clubbed staff, foot on knee. He greeted his uncle and aunt.

“May we see another Ramadan.”

“Amen, amen, amen. How are the animals?”

“They are eating very little. If we have one big rain—just one big rain—there will be enough for them to eat. How are your animals?”

“The same. Hungry. Everyone is waiting for rain.”

“Indeed. God willing, it will rain soon.”

The sun stood at its apex. Oumarou and Fanta moved their mats to keep them in the shade. Except for the buzzing of flies it was absolutely quiet.

It was true that the year was uncommonly dry, that the rain was unusually late. Yet the echoed laments and the underlying worry were as practiced as the journey itself: well-worn implements from the toolkit of transhumance that the Fulani deployed with familiarity in response to trials that were as old as nomadism itself. There had been dry spells before and there would be again. To an outside eye the Fulani on the plateau looked like a flock of evacuees, skinny refugees fleeing with emaciated herds some unspeakable calamity. Up close, each hour of their hardship seemed dreadful, draining. But they were not refugees at all. They belonged exactly where they were at any given moment: they were here now. Every movement and pause had been choreographed over centuries, and this excruciating waiting was an inherent and ritual part of life in motion, just as the difficult Ramadan fast was an inherent and ritual part of belief. In some way, the waiting also was relief—a stop along the journey like a breath drawn, a caesura. Inevitably, after every break came the next step, and within each footfall there lay a wonderment, a precious not-knowing of what came after.

Time passed. It was hot and humid. Fanta wove for a bit, then napped. In the afternoon came distant thunder, and a single raindrop fell from a furrowed sky. Then the sun came out again. Oumarou and Fanta moved their mats to keep them in the shade. I lay on my back with a copy of Hampâté Bâ’s rendition of
Kaïdara
, the Fulani initiatory epic that predated Islam. The English translation read:

It was only a few years after the mountains had hardened,

when the world-forces were just finishing carving out the river beds . . .

“
Kaïdara
?”

“What’s it about, Anna Bâ?”

“It’s about the beginning of everything, and the search for the meaning of life.”

“Eh? Never heard of it.”

“But it’s part of your own tradition, Fulani tradition.”

“No, Anna Bâ. We only know what we heard from the Koran.”

From the faraway hills of Bandiagara, where Hampâté Bâ was born in 1901, dark medusas of rain dragged toward the plateau. Dust blew strong and hard and Fanta and Oumarou rose and rolled up their mats and dragged them into their hut. “Life in the bush is hard,” said Fanta. “No it’s not,” Oumarou replied. “Not if you are used to it.”

The wind died down. Late afternoon sky pressed to the ground the hot air. A faint stink of rot escaped from the dead fish mound. Oumarou and Fanta took the mats out of the hut again and laid them in the shade. They napped some more.

—

The first day of Ramadan ended in a celestial lightshow. Stormcells rimmed the earth, lightning crackled on the horizon, pressed closer from all sides. Immediately overhead, in the infinite space between galaxies that could accommodate the secrets and pains of the heart, stars shot in every direction with an almost audible whoosh. Some said it was Satan throwing rocks. Some said it was the souls of men of consequence. If you swallowed as a shooting star peeled off the Milky Way you were protected from all curses.

We broke fast with
boiri
and dates and millet
toh
, our first meal in seventeen hours. We drank tea and river water and more tea. Cicadas drowned out thunder. After dinner Hassan took the cattle out to pasture.

The storm crashed into the camp all at once. The air filled suddenly with thick dust and after a few beats a tremendous squall spun into the plateau. It flogged the land with heavy rain, stabbed it with lightning, whipped it with mud. Walls of water collapsed one onto another. Nine sodden disoriented sleepers squeezed into Oumarou’s hut. It leaked near the entrance, at the edge of the blue tarp. Fanta tried to catch the stream in a plastic bucket and the water splashed upward, sprayed people and blankets and mats. Inside and outside it rained and rained all night.

The sky met the earth

and weighed down on it with rain and wind.

Columns of water could be heard falling

and thunder sounded like gunpowder. . . .

Caught between these vast spaces,

men and animals were mere buds bursting

amid the tumult of that foaming, unleashed sea.

—
AMADOU HAMPÂTÉ BÂ,
KAÏDARA

The storm was so loud that the women slept through cockcrow. The Diakayatés would fast that day dehydrated from the start. But when they woke, sore and chilled in damp clothes, a striped scarlet and purple dawn lay reflected in enormous pools of rainwater and frogs were singing everywhere.

T
he plateau was inundated. New short grass had sprouted overnight and bristled in drowned fields. Between its blades an inverted sky blued. The air was still and clear like glass, and everything shone. More termites had corkscrewed out of the flooded earth and the crystal shards of their discarded wings twinkled in puddles. In the sparkling wadis frogs in necklaces of brilliant bubbles croaked laconic mating chants: pick me, pick me, pick me, pick me. Women with waterjugs slid across the clay, squinting at all the light, laughing despite their Ramadan privations. Mud clung to bare feet, to rubber shoes, weighed down walkers. Red soil lipped pale spills of rainwater. The sun was bright like a song.

Oumarou walked a fastpaced lap around the plateau, greeting the neighbors, looking for something. He returned to his campsite and stopped by the hearth.

“Where is Allaye?”

In all directions, an unpeopled pink and bluegreen expanse of water and sky.

“He was wandering around the camp last night, with his music on.”

“He was strangely quiet yesterday. And he asked about his ID.”

“Look!” said Fanta. She pointed to a wet length of blue and purple cotton cloth. “He left his blanket here. He never leaves his blanket. Maybe he left.”

“And his bag, too,” said Hairatou. She picked up her brother’s small polyurethane bag with broken zippers, went through it. Some extra cellphone batteries. A small jar of petroleum jelly. A ballpoint pen. Nothing else. He had taken his cologne and his rings.

“I know him,” Isiaka had said soon after Allaye had returned from Côte d’Ivoire. “He’ll go off again. He’s ready. He’s been to a big city and he’s changed. He’ll never want to stay in the bush now.”

Oumarou stood in the middle of the camp. All of a sudden he seemed terribly small. A stick figure in a green boubou that was beating hard in the morning wind, in a turban that left only his eyes uncovered. All around him the glorious, radiant, indifferent vastness of his choosing, the vastness Allaye so consistently spurned.

From the folds of his turban Oumarou’s voice sounded flat and old.

“That morning at the end of the last rainy season, in Hayré, I woke up and Allaye took two, three cups of tea. Then he walked away. I thought he was just going to greet the neighbors. It was the day he was supposed to herd cows, so I thought he’d gone to find them where they were grazing. Then he didn’t return and the next afternoon he called and said—and not even to me directly—‘Hello, I’m in Bamako.’ I couldn’t accept that. He should have said, ‘Father, I’m going to travel.’ Why run away like that?”

Fanta clutched a handful of rainsoaked blankets to her chest. “If he’s gone,” she said, “who knows if we will see each other again in this life? I am old.”

And then Hairatou pointed at the sparkling wet eastern horizon.

“Look, Papa! That’s Allaye!”

Trim and smiling, the boy approached through the puddles. He greeted his parents, his sister, his sister-in-law, his nephews and niece. He said he had spent the night with Hassan and the cows, and that the cows were very happy with the rain.

—

When his parents were out of earshot, Allaye told me that before he joined Hassan he had spent a few hours with his new sweetheart. Her name was Hajja, and she was very beautiful. Her parents’ camp was between Oumarou’s hut and the Bani. Hajja was engaged but she had agreed to run away with Allaye to Senegal.

“What about Binta?”

“I don’t love her anymore. I love Hajja now.” Allaye smiled. He had discovered passion and he loved being in love, the regenerating aliveness of it.

I saw Hajja later that day, at noon. It was time to water the cows and Allaye and Saadou’s son Hassan took their fathers’ herds to the river. The animals moved slowly and stopped to piss. Their humps hung to the side. Allaye teased his cousin.

“Hassan has a wife, Kajata. He wanted to take a second wife. To pay for that wife he was going to sell a bull—that brown one over there, the big one, see it? But the bull refused to go. It just wouldn’t go to the market. No one could make it go! It’s because Kajata had gone to a marabout and the marabout cast a protective spell so Hassan doesn’t marry again.”

“All lies,” Hassan said, and laughed.

Everyone knew that you could charm an animal any way you wanted. When a bull refused to go to market, you whispered a special sentence from the Koran upon a stick, you spat on it, and when you whipped the disobedient animal with that stick the animal was no longer defiant. In Gagna, the village where Bomel and her skinny daughter lived in a mudbrick house that tilted toward sunset like an open palm asking for rain, there was an old cowboy named Boucary Sankare. He was blind and his arthritic hands no longer could clutch a staff or milk a cow. But he was a very pious man, a man initiated into the mysteries of the Koran, and he was famous for knowing just the right incantation. Many old people in Gagna were famous for spells that broke disobedient cattle.

We reached the river. It was silty, swollen with rainfall. Next to it, on a low cliff gashed by runoff, beneath a swift marbling of cloud, Hajja stood with her family’s laundry. She spread the clean, wrung clothes on wilting couchgrass, arranged the bright rectangles of pagnes and blankets at deliberate right angles. It was Sunday, laundry day in the bourgou, in Mali, perhaps in all of West Africa. Imagine: an expanse as large as the United States slapping wet pagnes against washboards. A half a continent of suds.

Hajja kept her back to Allaye. She looked at him longingly under her arm each time she bent down, then turned away again. Gold coins weighed down her thick long cornrows, and her skin was creamy and smooth.

Allaye pretended he was not looking.

“Women in the bush are so shy,” he said. “They don’t let the men touch them anywhere, or even look at their bodies. When they have sex they only want to be penetrated, but not touched. Not even their breasts.”

Now he was walking away from Hajja, strolling upstream with Hassan. The men walked arm in arm. The river was a sluggish green mire at their feet. The cows waded in knee-deep and stood drinking.