ballpoint pen to sign Ulune Pa. Ulune is certainly a doctor of sorts, and I know he would be amused.
I replace the forms in their envelope and put the envelope back in the box under the floor. There is other stuff in the box, manuscripts, my journals, and various implements. Cultural artifacts. A little stiffening of the belly musculature as my eye falls on them. I take out the aluminum-covered journal with the lock on it. It is also coated with the dust of Mali, and other stuff, too, and I lay it on the floor before I close the box and stamp down the tile and push the waste can over the tile. We Americans are disposed to act and there is stuff in that box that I could use against him, maybe, but my instinct says not to, or maybe I have just become a coward, or always was. Then again, perhaps I’m crazy, perhaps I’m in no danger whatsoever, he’s forgotten all about me, perhaps it is just the guilt. Still, better safe than sorry, as my dad used to say.
Better to stay quiet and hidden, I think. Only a stupid monkey pulls the leopard by the tail, as the Olo say. Or as my old sensei used to say, sometimes fight, sometimes run away, sometimes do nothing. How wise these memes! In some cultures, discourse consists almost entirely of ritualized exchanges of proverbial wisdom, and an original phrasing will provoke puzzled looks and grumbling. It would be comforting to live in such a place, and not to always have to think up things to say.
We prepare for bed. I draw a lukewarm bath and we get in. I wash Luz’s hair. There were nits and lice in it the first time I washed it, and I had to use a special poisonous compound, but now we are on Breck baby shampoo. I use her plastic beach bucket to pour water over her head, rinsing the suds away. She likes this; she smiles, not the hundred-watt she gives to Jake, but a softer one. “Again,” she says. Her first word.
“Oh, you can talk,” I say, and my heart vibrates, although I don’t make a big thing of it. I pour another bucket on her and she giggles. We get out of the bath and I dry her, and myself, and we don our sleeping Tshirts and go into the bedroom. She runs to the fan and switches it on.
“You turned on the fan,” I say, continuing my project of filling the air with language, as if it will do some good. She might have spent most of her short life locked down in a closet, with no one speaking to her at all, while her language faculty withered. It happens. I tuck her in under the cotton sheet and lie next to her. We look through her bird book. I say the names of all the birds and promise that we will go looking for some of them another day. Then we read the Bert and Ernie book. Bert tries to build a bookcase by himself and can’t find his screwdriver and has to prop the bookcase up temporarily with a humorous collection of objects but still won’t ask for Ernie’s help. The bookcase falls down on Bert’s head. Then Bert and Ernie build the bookcase together. Moral: cooperation is good. But the Olo would want to know the precise kin and status relationships of Bert and Ernie, and what right Ernie had to offer help and what right Bert had to refuse it when offered, and how the results of the building project were to be divided, and, of course, they would know that a screwdriver is never really missing but has been witched away because Bert did not make appropriate sacrifices when he visited the babandole to consult the auguries before starting his project. So my thoughts go. It never ceases, you never get back your cultural virginity. I stay by her side as she falls asleep. My soul child, sefune in the Olo tongue. Hardly a gene in common, yet I would gladly give my life for hers, and may have to someday, if he finds us, and what does evolutionary psychology make of that?
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
I go back to the kitchen and sit at the table and draw little patterns in the Malian dust that speckles it. My journal draws my eye. Why have I got it out tonight? It’s years since I touched it. It’s got things in there I probably don’t want to know, but maybe I need to know them now, because of the girl, because it’s not just me anymore. Some helpful fact. An insight. There is a big water stain on the first pages, but the writing, in my own neat scientist’s hand, is perfectly legible.
TWO
August 21, Sionnet, Long Island
Maybe seven months since I last took up this journal. In New York, days were much the same. No useful work, but not unhappy, exactly. Out a couple of times a week, with friends, or with W.’s friends: theater people, literary types, artists (see pages of the New York Review of Books for subjects, authors). At parties, always one sidling up to me, asking what he was really like, or maybe an opinion, how wonderful he was, I must be so proud. Well, I am proud.
My days blur together, but here for the anthropological record:
Residence?loft on Thomas Street in Tribeca, expensive, all the latest stuff, not ours, we are subletting from a friend of W.’s, who is off somewhere doing a film. W. does not like to be tied down to places and furnishings, and he likes that I am the same way. Birds of passage, us, nomad artists, although only he is an actual artist. Children would just tie us down. I lie abed late, stay up late, read mainly trash, or I watch TV with the sound on low. Often need a pill to put me under. I never dream.
Arising, prep. breakfast for me and W., words of greeting, some pleasantries. I do not ask him how it is going, and I make myself scarce. Unpleasant to be in the loft while he is working. Nervous vibration. I’m not his muse at all; in fact, his muse seems to dislike me.
A cab up to 62nd Street off Park, Doe Trust offices, someplace to go. Various tasks, mainly reading begging letters and reports and commenting on them for the trustees and my father; also help to run W.’s business affairs. Not a Lady Who Lunches, me. Try to keep up with the anthropological literature, I use the library at the American Museum of Natural History, and demonstrate to myself that I still have a profession. I don’t go there very much, as it makes me feel sad, or, if I think about it too hard, frightened. In the late p.m., I go back downtown and find W. He is usually at the Odeon, at the same table, and there are the usual downtown types hanging out with him, being brilliant and witty, and he makes a place for me and I slide in there, and the women look little darts at me when they think I am not looking, because they would like to be married to him but are not, and I am. Chattering we all drift over to some excellent and fashionable place to eat, Bouley or Chanterelle, for example, and we always get a table because places like that always have tables for people like us, and then we go to clubs and listen to music and people press tickets and invitations on us. Jesus, I am bored even writing this. Contrast and background to the more engaging now.
But sometimes I miss the long meaningless, leisurely afternoons. Sometimes W., for example, would not be at the Odeon, but up in his room, lounging on the daybed, with some dope or an open bottle, his work finished for the day, and I would join him for whatever substance and afterward a long lazy fuck before returning again to the lush life. Now, busy busy, studying Yoruba language and culture, organizing the logistics of the expedition for Greer. W. is enormously supportive, which I confess I worried a little about, as he has never seen me in high gear before, says it is like having an affair with a different woman.
Later, 8/21
Omitted the real reason I stopped writing here, which is that I discovered that W. was peeking. I never confronted him on it, cowardice I know, and what did it matter anyway, when you get down to it, one flesh and all, and I could have made a game of it, something to amuse us. If I were another woman. Or I could have become angry but I don’t like what my anger does to him, and after all, with all we have together, it’s a small thing. I just include it here, for the record. You can lie all you want in the published papers, but keep the journals honest. M. taught me that, and I took it seriously, although it might have been merely one more of his ironic comments. He said I had an underdeveloped sense of irony.
This journal is a new one, given to me by my father for our trip, God knows where he got it, but I love it. Several hundred unlined pages of the kind of thin all-rag paper they used to use for Bibles, bound in boards and protected with thick aluminum covers. These can be closed with a hasp that has a serious barrel lock on it. It will be my African field journal.
8/24 New York
Got our visas today, Nigeria, Mali, Benin, Gambia. Others pending. W. like a kid, showing his stamped passport off to waiters, people on the street. I’m also assembling gear for expedition, things people need in 3rd world. Tampons. Vitamins. Ciprofloxin. Imodium. A pound of Xanax. Lots of passport photos. Greer very helpful, been there lots of times. I want to call M., but can’t. Why? Who am I afraid of hurting? Him? W.? Myself?
W. unhelpful as ever, this time not his fault, he’s sick from shots. I am, as usual, not, which he seems to
