man behind the curtain. The bird stops singing and flies off, the moon slides behind a thicker cloud bank, the garden grows dark, the wind seems to drop a few knots, or maybe that’s my imagination. In any case, show’s over. As I climb the stairway, I notice my body feels different, and I pause and puzzle for a moment about it. Ah, yes. The Dolores slouch is missing. I am walking like Jane. This won’t do, but oh, my, it’s going to pinch and tickle climbing into that heavy, scratchy costume again. I was trained to stand up straight and be proud of my height and my big- boned body. Winsoum she wase, and like a jolly colte, tall as a maste and straight as a bolte: my husband, quoting Chaucer, of me, lovingly. Faire Alisoun, in “The Miller’s Tale.”
Where does love go when it’s gone?
I am aware that my disguise is something of a libel on the actual Dolores Tuoey, S.M., who did not slouch, and whose poor taste in clothing and coiffure (if any) was masked by the modified habit she wore and her neatly cropped head. I didn’t know her well, but she was a figure on the streets of Bamako and the outlying district. I model thus a product of my sick imagination: what Dolores would be like had she betrayed everything she believed in, her sisters and her church. This phantasm would, I think, be as repugnant to Dolores as it is to me.
I lie back in my hammock, and unconsciously I hook my toes into the strands of the edges on either side, opening my genitals to the tropic breezes. My hammock is a Yucatan string model, colored red, green, yellow, purple, of the larger sort called matrimonio, although, of course, I sleep in it alone. How to fuck in a hammock without falling out was one of the very many things taught to me by Marcel Vierchau, and I find that, what with the night, the night, and the poetry, and thinking about Marcel and my nonflaming, but nevertheless hotter than now, youth, I feel unaccustomed warmth and humidity among the nether petals. Father forgive me, it has been three years and 220 days since my last decent fuck. No, none of that, now. I am in enough trouble and I am not ready to …
I unhook my toes and press my legs together and roll up with sheet and pillow into the fetal crouch in which I generally sleep, and after a bit I think, not ready for what? Run, do nothing, fight. I ran already. I am more disinclined than formerly to do it again. I am presently doing nothing, but with increasing discomfort. Almost four years is a long time, a jail sentence for a fairly serious felony, although the worst of what I did is probably in the codes of neither Florida nor the state of New York. Maybe the kid makes me eligible for parole.
Which leaves fighting. The way of sorcery is often about healing, and fate, and other spiritual activities, but day in and day out it is about war, mainly skirmishes, brief firefights, I sock your guy so you blow up my guy. This goes on in Miami and New York and L.A. all the time, anyplace where brujos, hougans, curanderos, and santeros are found among the believing immigrant communities. Marcel used to point out that it was a great error to imagine that traditional technologies of power were controlled by people any less rotten in the main than those who controlled industrial technologies of power. Spiritual don’t mean nice. Inuit and!Kung villages have, and always have had, murder rates in excess of those current in Miami, and most of these killings are due directly or indirectly to sorcery. There are saints and the wise among shamans, of course, but they are about as common as saints and the wise among generals, corporation presidents, and politicians.
Oh yes, fighting. Back in the day, the Melanesians living in the Solomon Islands had wars of a sort, twenty or so young guys all stoned on kava, with clubs and spears, mixing it up, maybe a busted arm or two, a rare busted head, and maybe they thought they knew what war was like, but when in 1942 the marines landed and blasted the Japanese out of the Solomons, those guys all learned something about a different kind of war, the few that survived. If my husband really is here, and I have to fight him, we will start in Miami something that stands in relation to the kind of petty crap that goes on in the Cuban and the Haitian communities as the battle of Guadalcanal stands to a Melanesian clubfest. I have to decide whether letting him kill me, or worse, is preferable to that. Collateral casualties is, I think, the term of art. A deeply moral question. And there’s the little girl.
The Olo call it jiladoul, the sorcerers’ war. You wonder why there are only twelve hundred Olo left. That’s why. It’s all a matter of technology.
And there was a time I didn’t believe that either. Last thought before plunging into the grateful dark. A memory.
Marcel and I are in Paris, after our first night in his apartment on Rue Louis-David in Passy, behind the Palais de Chaillot, where the Musee de l’Homme is. Pearly dawn is peeping in. It’s June again, a year after I first laid eyes on him, I’m a graduate of Barnard and I have finally let us go to bed together, and am glad I did and also glad I held off for so long. We have been at it all night, something I’ve never done before, not that I was at the time any kind of expert in the love arts, although he, as I have just learned, is. I am twenty-one, and it is my first serious, industrial-strength, heavy-duty, military-specification fuck. He is five years younger than my father, but I have almost stopped thinking about this. We are on his bed, sticky and exhausted, staring up at the high cream ceiling, with a flap of sheet over us, the French windows are open and that Paris scent is coming through, sharp and tickling to the nose. Marcel whispers in my ear and runs his hand down my body and places it on my sopping what I have just learned to call le con. I mumble about being sore, and then I feel something cool and hard and smooth inside me, and he draws out an egg. I guffaw and say gosh, I didn’t think I was ovulating, and he laughs, too, and claps his hands together, crushing the egg, and out flies the pigeon. I have this stupid frozen smile on my face.
Legerdemain. Leger-my-ass! The pigeon flutters around the room and finally alights on top of a high wardrobe. We’ve been together all night. He is grinning at me. He’s naked. I pull off the sheet and roll him over on his side and tear the slips off the pillows and then I get out of bed and look under it, him laughing like a lunatic, and I run out bare-assed to the little balcony outside the French windows, where sits the wicker cage in which Marcel keeps his pigeons. All four of them are sitting there on their perches, looking as stupid as I feel. I run back inside and there is no pigeon in the room at all.
EIGHT
9/12 Lagos
Desmond Greer amp; others are back. I like him. Back story is ghetto kid, horrible family, street-fighting man, now cool with white academic culture. Headed for the usual, dope amp; crime, one Sunday he happens to drop into the Field Museum to get out of the cold, runs into Ndeki Mfwese, the greatest African Africanist of his generation. Des sees this carbon-colored guy in flowing robes amp; skullcap floating down the hallway amp; he follows him like, as he says, the pied fucking piper. Mfwese befriends him amp; the rest is history. Man knows more about Yoruba cosmology amp; religion than most Yorubas do, he’s an initiate in the Shango cult, adopted into the Ogunfiditimi clan. He’s incredibly sweet to me, as if he knows what happened the last time I tried fieldwork?strange because I don’t even know that. He knows M., though … has he talked to him? About me? A natural anthropologist, like M., that scuba-diver talent, total immersion amp; then withdrawal. Where does it come from? Deracination? M. a Jew, a refugee in childhood, transplanted into French culture, family killed by the Nazis. Des a black guy in white (mainly) profession.
W. somewhat frosty to him, and I can’t figure out why. Oedipal thing? Jealousy of Des’s authentic ghetto upbringing? A little spat later in our room.
The rest of the crew reasonably pleasant. Coleman Lyttel amp; Carol Washington are Des’s grad students; Godwin Adepojin, Nigerian grad student, did his undergraduate work in the States at Madison, back home to do his dissertation under Des on Aripon mask dancing in the Ketu region. Godwin, unfortunately, has made himself into what seems to me a parody of hip-hop-ness, backwards ball cap, baggies, big sneaks, the boxer shorts over the belt line. Tunji worships him as a god. Music sometimes drifts through the hotel?he has a boom box in his room?and it drives W. nuts. Six thousand miles amp; I still have to listen to Dr. Dre? A little culture war available for study without leaving the premises.
Des not pushing me, my Yoruba still crummy, also studying the dialects over in Egbado, Gelede cult center. Godwin helping me at this, because his area is in the same region, to the west, in Nigeria amp; the Rep. of Benin. In return I am teaching him French, as Benin (where Ketu proper is located) is Francophone. Des thinks Gelede will be a good area for me, a female-dominated witch cult, one of the few here in macho Africa.
Also working with Ola Soronmu = project major domo, semi-official liaison with the bureaucracy amp; our all-around fixer. Mrs. Bassey has no use for him, confirms my general opinion, hints broadly that he was connected with the military government. Mrs. B. says he is low, a flash man.
Ola’s working w/ me on our shipment problem, cases containing laptops, tape recorders amp; video
