Walking with Abel (33 page)

“In Côte d’Ivoire city women let you touch them. If you touch them you get hard. And those women touch you back, too. I think if a girl likes you she shouldn’t be afraid to touch you. But not with her mouth. I saw in a film once women touching men with their mouths. It was pretty disgusting.”

At that point Hassan said that if he kept listening to any more sex talk he would end up breaking his fast. And that was that.

B
y the time the cows finished drinking, the plateau had hardened into a rock-smooth sheet. At Oumarou’s camp night blankets and mats hung from the thorn tree to dry: ensigns of a happily waterlogged nation, releasing clammy smells of sour milk and baby pee. Fanta disinterred the dead perch and hung it up to dry as well, in a scavenged fishtrap. It stank like death, and the soft wind bathed the camp in its heavy odor. For many nights everyone would sleep in licks of putrefaction. Eventually, Fanta would deem the fish too rotten to eat.

Afternoon shadows were long and the light golden. Toward evening stormcells once more trailed rain toward Ballé.

At last, days of drizzle began—but not enough, the Fulani said, not enough. Fine rain sieved from the sky, but by now it should have been a deluge. It should have been sweeping away entire hamlets in flash floods. A marabout in Senossa ordered the villagers to walk in circles around the village, asking God to send rain to the bush. A marabout in Gagna ordered the villagers to recite under their breath a secret word in Arabic three hundred and thirty times. Of course, each marabout possessed a knowledge the others did not. Each had his own way to ask for rain.

Still, what rain did fall brought some comfort. The bush swelled with frogsong and the sated lowing of cattle. The cows began to eat enough and to lie down at pasture, signaling full stomachs. By the end of July the herds returned to camp each afternoon fatter than the day before. No longer did dust trail their unhurried step. For the first time in weeks the women in Oumarou’s family had some extra milk to take to Djenné to trade.

T
he fast had rendered Djenné catatonic. Few adults were out of doors. Petrol dealers dozed in front of greasy rows of Bordeaux and J&B bottles. Housewives dozed in front of flickering television screens, the volume turned low. Men of piety prayed and listened to sura recordings on their cellphones. Men of means sat on bamboo chairs in the shade and measured out half-kilo bags of Ramadan sugar to distribute among needier neighbors. Pygmée’s bar turned off the disco lights, turned down the volume of its television. Schools were not in session but foosball tables stood on street corners unused, rainwarped. Cricket songs and frog croak replaced the usual nighttime revelry of laughter and cassette music, and after iftar men and women prostrated themselves in the last prayer of the night in streets filled with steam rising from seasonal marshes. Even the town smells were subdued, as if the month’s inertia extended somehow to motorcycle exhaust, to the petrol-oil mix on which small corner grain mills ran, to sewage rotting in the streets and sewers clogged with plastic bags, to laundry soap and grilled meat and smoked fish. Here on display was the luxury of city life that Allaye craved: the luxury of winding down work for a full month—of ascetic devotion, or simply of sanctioned idleness. In the bush, work never stopped.

Fanta, Kumba, Kajita Pain-in-the-Ass, Djamba, and Allaye’s sweetheart Hajja had hiked four hours to reach Djenné and moved slowly through the empty streets, pausing in sleepy doorways, calling out their wares into the quiet clay semidarkness of courtyards. They stopped by the house of Gano’s mother. Outside the narrow anteroom of the parents of Amfala Koïta. In the middle of the square where René Caillié had lodged almost two centuries earlier in a second-floor room he described as “exceedingly wretched and dirty.” They walked slowly and with purpose through the woven alleys of the town mostly emptied of other walkers, a town trying to survive the month of ceremonial thirst. They marveled at the presidential election posters that plastered every house, every gate. They could not read the posters, did not recognize the candidates. They would miss the vote, which would take place at the end of July with a huge turnout and largely without incident, although at the polling station established inside the Sory Ibrahim Thiocary School someone would shoot out the eye of a sixteen-year-old girl with an arrow.

In the deserted square by the Grande Mosquée a friend beckoned me, the young man who in spring had shared with his friends the lynching video from Gao. It had turned out, he said, that the man who in the video had appeared hacked in half had not been an al Qaeda executioner. That the man in the video never had performed any floggings and amputations. He had been some other man altogether, not a criminal at all. My friend was dispirited. “I think,” he said, “that war is not good. It makes people crazy.”

Elizabeth Costello, the title character of a Coetzee novel, proposes that broadcast violence is obscene “because such things ought not to take place, and then obscene again because having taken place they ought not to be brought into the light but covered up and hidden for ever in the bowels of the earth, like what goes on in the slaughterhouses of the world, if one wishes to save one’s sanity.” I have written about violence up close because I believed its obscenity had to be exposed and examined so we could take collective responsibility, both for it and for our inherent and ruinous capacity to perpetrate or condone or even ignore it. I wrote: Behold the charred remnants of a suicide bomber flung into a housewife’s cooking. Behold the children killed by a mine that had been lying in wait since before they were born. Behold a soldier shoving condolence cash into the limp hands of a widower deranged by grief. I hoped my work somehow could stem the obscenity of war. But there was a risk that instead I, like the videographer from Gao, was helping it flourish.

The double-edged power of a narrative to devastate or strengthen extended beyond accounts of ignominy. All storytelling was magic. It could cast spells. It affected lives in profound and unpredictable ways. Maybe it even begot lives—maybe it was the
poïesis
that mapped the existence of things and determined their being. Its faculty underlay the authority of griots, the pervasive public fear of their transcendent skill.

But how much storytelling was too much? There was no blueprint. No matter the deference, no matter the elusive sense of entitlement, the loftily so-called poetic license to represent before my readers the iniquities I witnessed, there existed an inherent contradiction in the purpose of my writing—to bring the world closer, to make it accountable—and my keen awareness that I was intruding upon and exposing something exceedingly private. It baffled me. Maybe a true writer of conscience was one who never put down a single word.

In the early nights of the Hoping I had a dream in which I needed to transport a snow leopard to the United States by plane. In my dream my task seemed unfair: Who gave me the right to package something so magical, and why? What if all life could only be truly beheld on its home ground? Awake, I wondered about the straightforward covenant between my hosts and me: that I would absorb their caring instruction and recount their story to the world. “Mother?” little Kajita reported to Fanta once, jubilant. “Amadou was running and Anna Bâ was writing him run!” They trusted me with all their intimacies without hesitation, and their absolute and instantaneous acceptance humbled me. But I was flailing. I was full of doubt.

My friend and I sat on a bench in front of the Grande Mosquée, thirsty and silent. A goat tethered to our bench ate pineapple bark, and a small boy turned and turned the wheel of an upended cart like a Tibetan prayer wheel. Swallows flew from steeples. I thought of the mosque floor. It was made of sand. Like the floor of the ocean, the oldest sanctuary of all life on Earth. As in the ocean the sand in the mosque rippled in asymmetrical tongueshaped waves, ordered and reordered ad infinitum by the ebb and flow of thousands of feet. Most parishioners came in for one or two of the five daily prayers. But some men knelt on that ersatz seabed for hours, meditating in the light that sifted calm and lean through vent openings in the startlingly high roof thatch that rested on ninety-nine oblique and unembellished clay pillars. What did they learn there, these seekers in the deep of spirit? Could they have been learning that there was no absolute knowledge, no absolute right? Could they have been learning to put their faith in doubt?

A Fulani woman in Somena told me once that the Grande Mosquée never could appear in a photograph. That if you photographed it the picture would show only a blank spot, or a blur. It was not so, of course. But like Elizabeth Costello, she wished for a world in which some zone of sanctity lay beyond the manipulations of storytelling—a world in which something holy in the soul could remain unmarred.

—

All trade was finished by midday. Fanta and her companions took turns napping in the shade of the meat aisle inside the empty market, watching over one another’s purchases: a new pair of flipflops, a calabash of mangoes, some spices, millet, salt. They spread extra pagnes on the ground and prayed, folding their feet to the side neatly. At last they covered their calabashes with lids woven of straw and gunnysack string, stacked them into pyramids, hoisted them onto their heads, and set off for Ballé.

They walked out of the town’s east gate single file. They crossed a paved bridge to where a new pirogue sat in the wharf, freshly painted at the bow and stern with the maker’s signature of geometric shapes in bright colors; passed the point bar where old boats sat sunken to the gunwales and the slipoff slope where city artisans fired clay vessels and braziers by day and where by night lovers met to make out in the dark; crossed a gully that in two months would rush with neck-deep water; and leveled out onto a long walk through the bush.

Gone was the bourgou’s dry idle pasture. In its place was a rolling pastiche of farmland, uneven tesserae primed for crops. Everywhere rimaibe and Bambara farmers, men and women in broad straw hats, tilled and planted, their handheld ploughs so sunbleached that the farmers looked as if they were picking at the dirt with wishbones. Lines of young millet—some shoots only a few fingers tall, some a foot—undulated like the braids on the head of a Fulani girl. The roads were soaked and motorcycles wove dangerously in and out of the red mud, spraying it as they swerved. The Bani had begun to rise, and nearer Djenné the slopes of the wadis were completely green with low thick grass that glistened in the wind. Steam rose from the ground. The air smelled of manure. Tattered pale mushrooms flared along the roads.

Fanta walked first with a load of millet and mangoes on her head. Now and then, with a slight motion of her fingers, she pointed out dangerous thorns, slippery patches of mud, the tail of a lethal saw-scaled viper. When her path ran into a young bull she slipped her right foot out of her flipflop, picked up a stick with her toes, grabbed it with her right hand, and tossed it underhand at the bull, in one fluid and casual movement and without bending her head. The bull shied away. The women passed.

They talked, of course. About fasting, about being tired, about the people they had met in Djenné, about how the cattle were filling out at last. They pointed out bush rats, green bee-eaters, hoopoes, jackalberry bushes, dwarf persimmons, mimosas in bloom, things they already knew by heart. As though simply to fill the savannah with voice. Their jabber was as wasteful—of breath, of words, of precious biofluids on a hot day of thirsty Ramadan—as it was ancient. In the seventh century, Abdullah Ibn Mas’ud, the companion of the Prophet Mohammed, praised a pious man’s silence over the indulgent prattle of nonbelievers. In the nineteen fifties, a French abbot told the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor: “In the outside world, speech is gravely abused.” But chatter was a prerequisite to human dispersal across the planet. The command of complex language enabled our ancestors to share plans; without it, we might never have had the cohesion to strike out from the mother continent. Sixty thousand years ago, as they walked single file out of Africa, did our foremothers also list the familiar shrubs as they passed, did they sing out the names of wildlife?