“I hear your wife is mixing in local politics,” he calls from the truck to Michel, while looking me over with those shameless eyes that have got so many women in trouble. PierLuigi is sixty years old and has streaks of white in his hair, but he is still six feet four and the best-looking man I have ever seen in my life. “Brava,” he says to me. “Good for you, my dear. The local young ladies very often need things put in perspective, but very few of our lovely visitors know how to do it on their own terms.”
After he drives off, Michel looks at me with new respect. “I can’t say you don’t have guts,” he says later. Then, “You really must be in love with me.”
In the afternoon after our siesta, when I emerge onto the veranda from Jean-Claude’s shuttered bedroom, massaging Phyto Plage into my hair, smelling on my skin the pleasant odor of sex, I see—as I somehow expected—that the two girls are back under the mango tree. I walk out onto the burning sand, squinting against the glare that makes every distant object a flat black silhouette, and approach them for the second time. I don’t think that we’re in for another round, yet I feel my knees take on a wary pugilistic springiness. But as I get close, the straight-haired girl says, “Bonjour, Madame.”
The formal greeting conveys an odd intimacy. It is clear that we are breathing the same air, now, that we have taken each other’s measure. Both girls look straight at me, no longer bridling. All three of us know perfectly well that the man—my European husband—was just an excuse, a playing field for our curiosity. The curiosity of sisters separated before birth and flung by the caprice of history half a world away from each other. Now in this troublesome way our connection has been established, and between my guilt and my dawning affection I suspect that I’ll never get rid of these two. Already in my mind is forming an exasperating vision of the gifts I know I’ll have to give them: lace underpants; Tampax; music cassettes; body lotion—all of them extracted from me with the tender ruthlessness of family members anywhere. And then what? What, after all these years, will there be to say? Well, the first thing to do is answer. “Bonjour, Mesdemoiselles,” I reply, in my politest voice.
And because I can’t think of anything else, I smile and nod at them and walk into the water, which as always in the tropics is as warm as blood. The whole time I swim, the girls are silent, and they don’t take their eyes off me.
Anthropology
(My cousin says: Didn’t you think about what they would think, that they were going to read it, too? Of course Aunt Noah and her friends would read it, if it were about them, the more so because it was in a fancy Northern magazine. They can read. You weren’t dealing with a tribe of Mbuti Pygmies.)
It is bad enough and quite a novelty to be scolded by my cousin, who lives in a dusty labyrinth of books in a West Village artists’ building and rarely abandons his Olympian bibliotaph’s detachment to chide anyone face-to-face. But his chance remark about Pygmies also punishes me in an idiosyncratic way. It makes me remember a girl I knew at Harvard, a girl with the unlikely name of Undine Loving, whom everybody thought was my sister, the way everybody always assumes that young black women with light complexions and middle-class accents are close relations, as if there could be only one possible family of us. Anyway, this Undine—who was, I think, from Chicago and was prettier than I, with a pair of bright hazel eyes in a round, merry face that under cropped hair suggested a boy chorister, and an equally round, high-spirited backside in the tight Levi’s she always wore—this Undine was a grad student, the brilliant protégé of a famous anthropologist, and she went off for a year to Zaire to live among Pygmies. They’ll think she’s a goddess, my boyfriend at the time annoyed me by remarking. After that I was haunted by an irritating vision of Undine: tall, fair, and callipygian among reverent little brown men with peppercorn hair: an African-American Snow White. I lost sight of her after that, but I’m certain that, in the Ituri Forest, Undine was as dedicated a professional who ever took notes—abandoning toothpaste and toilet paper and subjecting herself to the menstrual hut, clear and scientific about her motives. Never even fractionally disturbing the equilibrium of the Lilliputian society she had chosen to observe. Not like me.
Well, of course, I never had a science, never had a plan. (That’s obvious, says my cousin.) Two years ago, the summer before I moved to Rome, I went to spend three weeks with my great-aunt Noah, in Ball County, North Carolina. It was a freak impulse: a last-minute addressing of my attention to the country I was leaving behind. I hadn’t been there since I was a child. I was prompted by a writer’s vague instinct that there was a thread to be grasped, a strand, initially finer than spider silk, that might grow firmer and more solid in my hands, might lead to something that for the want of a better term I call of
