with his back against a fig tree. Berne asked him if I could video him at work, A. gave me funny look, said he “didn’t think you could take pictures of that,” meaning the spiritual work. Taped mere physical work, however, for hours, strange, a numen coming off him and off the mask he was working on, hard to describe. A sense of groundedness in culture, in the earth, in the flow of ashe?
He was using a tool that made a tiny triangular dent in the wood and he was making a pattern with it on the side of the mask, just hundreds of tiny three-cornered dents, in lines and swirls, and I could not pull my eyes away. Night fell. A woman came out with a lantern. Both Berne and I gasped and then laughed. It was like being in church used to be like. Compare artists’ studios in SoHo, they don’t have this there.
Mentioned this later to Berne, he called it the unspoken and secret rewards of anthro, far more significant than the plaudits of our peers, why we put up with the sulky camels and the insects. Said, surely he taught you that, meaning M., who actually did teach me that, or tried; he lived for it, and I have been trying to forget it, because it’s a drug for us poor etiolated, alienated, mechanical corpse-colored people, and I think I have a tendency to OD. Changed subject just then, because I knew if conversation went on in this vein, he would press me on what happened in Chenka, which I can’t talk about.
10/5 Lagos
Reading the paper on Tour de Montaille. I took our little Canon down to the library this afternoon, and copied Berne’s paper and the original French journal. Interesting stuff?the Olo or Oleau, “real magic” again? It would be like discovering a tribe in Iran or Russia who still had the oral version of Homer as a living, bardic experience. TdM. was vague about the location but somewhere north of the Baoule in present Mali. (??ethnographic traces, artifacts?) Interesting tradition of infant sacrifice, too. Not uncommon in recent Nigeria, but typically a mere ritual murder, a burial with the chief, or you knock a kid on the head in hard times, avert some curse, or the old Ibo habit of burying twins alive in jars. According to these journals this is not the same thing?this is somehow using the body of the neonate, ritual cannibalism, or drugs. M. would say drugs?using the mother-child system as a chemical retort? To produce what? If I didn’t have the Gelede project set up already, I’d take a shot at going up to Mali and poking around.
W. not at dinner, no one seems to know where he’s off to. Asked Soronmu, but got a shifty answer. He’s with some of the loki, local hard boys, getting color (so to speak) for his work.
10/6 Fucking Lagos
Total disaster. Can’t write now. The idiot!
EIGHTEEN
Where are you going?” Mrs. Paz asked as he headed for the door.
“I’m going out, Mami,” he answered. “I’m going to do some shopping, and get my car washed and cleaned up, and then I’m going to clean my place. Then I might go over to the pool and swim. Or I might do nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?” Giving him the stone face.
“Nothing means nothing. See, Mami, this is what we call in English a day off. I’m taking a day off today, and I plan on taking a day off tomorrow, too. It’s the weekend. I only get one weekend in every four off and I’m going to take it easy.”
“I need you here tomorrow,” she said, not amused.
“You may need me, but you won’t have me. I realize you don’t think the police do work, but we do, and so I’m taking what we Americans call a break.”
“You know, son of mine, you’re not too big that I can’t slap your face if you talk to me like that. What about tonight?”
“I’m going out,” Paz said.
“Who with?”
“With a young woman. I will buy her a meal, not here, and take her to the theater, and afterward I expect to take her home and have as much sexual intercourse as I can manage.”
She threw a good one at his ear, but he was ready for it and rocked back so that her fist sailed past his face, and then he made his escape out the back door of the kitchen. She stood in the door and yelled imprecations at him as he trotted down the alley. As always after these incidents, he resolved to quit working for her and move out of the rent-free apartment. The place was booming; she had more money than God and could easily afford to hire any chef in the city. These resolves never bore fruit, however, other than a dull depression that blighted a day he had anticipated for weeks. He did not do the errands he had planned, nor did he go to the pool. Instead, after showering, he sat in his shorts in his apartment with the shades pulled down and watched sports on television and drank Coronas until they were all gone, and then fell into a doze. As he slipped off he remembered the dashboard statue. He had meant to ask his mother about it but hadn’t, and probably wouldn’t now. Not that she would tell him the straight story anyway. Lies and secrets chez Paz, that was the rule. Why he had become a dick, he thought, and slept.
Willa lived in a tiny apartment on McDonald, from one window of which, when the wind was just in the right quarter to move the leaves of a royal palm, one could see a patch of bay the size of a paperback novel. She was ready, and looked as well as Willa ever looked in clothes: a loose knit top with a roll collar, made of some rough and sparkly dark purple yarn, and wide white trousers in a silky material. Her springy hair was piled high up on top, compressed, but still allowing delicious little red coils to protrude against her white neck. Paz planted a soft kiss beneath one of these. Out they went.
He took her to a ferny joint on Commodore Plaza, the kind with incompetent (hi, my name is Melanie) young women waiting table and a menu of dishes that were healthy, generally pastel in color, and pale in taste. He did not care for this sort of food, but she liked it, and she knew he didn’t, and was grateful. They walked holding hands down Main to the Coconut Grove Playhouse and took their seats.
After a few disorienting minutes, Paz to his surprise found himself enjoying the show. It was really a series of satirical sketches, loosely tied together by the story of Simple, a black kid who wanders Candide-like across America in search of the authentic black experience. When playing black people, the cast members put on “black” masks and costumes, right onstage, and sometimes they also layered “white” masks and costumes on top of the black ones. The actors exchanged masks and costumes and shifted around on the minstrel-style set, and their skill was such that after a while it was hard to tell the actual race of the performer. You saw only the masks, which was the main point.
“This is un-fucking-believable,” said Paz to Willa during the intermission. “I’m glad you talked me into it.”
“Yeah, it’s terrific. You notice people checking us out, we being the only interracial couple in the place.”
“What interracial? I’m Cuban,” said Paz, and she laughed. “Who is this guy? Moore, the writer?”
“Oh, DeWitt Moore?he was quite the enfant terrible a couple years back. He had a couple of smashes, including this one here, and since then he’s been keeping a low profile, reviews and poetry mostly. He’s got a lot of enemies.”
“I can see why. This thing’s an equal-opportunity fuck-you.”
“Indeed. He’s supposed to be here tonight, by the way.”
“Yeah?” Paz looked around the crowded lobby. “Where?”
“Onstage. He likes to show up and take one of the chorus parts, like Alfred Hitchcock. In New York, people who hated him used to buy tickets on the off chance that he’d take a bow after and they could pelt him with refuse. That man is staring at you.”
“Where?”
“Don’t look. Middle-aged white guy in a turtleneck. Arty type. Now he’s telling his date. She’s staring, too. Are you more famous than you’ve let on?”
“No, probably someone I arrested,” said Paz, turning to look the arty gent in the eye. The man nodded at him familiarly. Paz had no idea who he was.
“What’s that buzzing noise?” Willa asked.
“Shit! It’s my damn beeper.” Paz pulled it out of his pocket and studied its tiny screen, his brows twisted. “Some asshole probably misplaced a time sheet or something. Wait here, I’ll go call.”
But when Paz called on his cell phone, the operator patched him through to a radio car, and after a minute or so he found himself talking to Cletis Barlow.
“Jimmy, you got a pen? You need to get out here right now.”
