Switzerland, 1969
1. HIS PILLOW RUPTURES between her knees. Feathers plucked from the breasts of live geese burst into the darkness of the room. She watches them by the flashes of the storm’s lightning. Some descend into the gaps of the floorboards; others wilt between the poles of the hot water pipes. They land in her palms, along her pregnant stomach, and on the meeting of her thighs.
August, the third month since his departure, begins today and Mansour and his musicians have still not returned from their three-week tour of Spain. The last of her American cash has now been converted into francs, then tokens, and emptied into the phone booth around the corner. She’s memorized the flat note of the dial tone. Having not reached him since May, she is finally imagining the worst.
Frantic, swollen, urinating often, she goes about naked beneath her nightgown as the night ends. For several days, she has found calm in smoking out of her small attic window and watching the summer storm rage through Switzerland. And though the storm has not left, this morning, fondling the nightstand as the sun rises, she discovers that her last cigarette is gone.
With the dawn, a mix of frying tomatoes, couscous, and dehydrated fish rises from the kitchen below. Beside it, the living room downstairs houses the restaurant of Mansour’s mother, Eva, and the grand opening is two days away.
In feverish preparation, Mama Eva and her three sisters become the enemy of all rest. There has been the clattering of clay dishes; the destruction of garlic, shallots, and pepper grains with mortars and pestles; the pounding of cassava; the rise and fall of the women’s frantic voices. But then, always, comes the good thing—the music they play: the fiery blare of the horns, the contrary percussion.
Whenever Bonnie needs to let more in, to get closer to the sound, there is a loose floorboard she can shift in the middle of her large, empty attic that will send it through.
It is Cuban music, but the singers don’t sing in Spanish. They sing in Wolof, Bambara, Peule, Kikongo. She once read that the founders of the genre were Afro-Cubans whose records first came out on Victrolas some forty years before. Records recorded in brothels and steaming kitchens; harmonies perfected on the wet earth between shacks. Records the recorded never saw a penny from. The Second World War helped carry those same albums to the Congo, where the people made the sound their own, a first stop before it then made its way across the continent.
Bonnie’s favorite record is also Mama’s favorite. It has been played so often that there is a scratch right before the second chorus. Bonnie chuckles when, just like the day before, the record skips and the women lose their place in the backup vocals, their cacophony briefly quieting down to a disappointed silence.
Some of us are helpless before melodies, our great plans for our lives escalated or abandoned with a singer’s choice to wail or wait. This is Bonnie’s nature. Her mother’s too. Growing up in Paris with Claudine—a Black American who’d come to dance with an Allied ballet troupe during the Second World War—Bonnie’s family of two had no traditions, no holidays, few visitors. She knew nothing of the place in the world she and her mother came from, and as a child she believed that they had come from sound.
The spines of albums stuck out from the cabinets where food should have been. Some albums lived in the bathtub, so they took to taking showers. She addressed her diary entries to Ella Fitzgerald and Johnny Hartman, swearing them to secrecy in each.
Please do not tell my mother that I am keeping the gutter cat in the closet. Do not tell her that I made friends with the girl downstairs. Do not tell my mother that my new friend brings me boiled eggs when she forgets to make me dinner.
Her childhood was marked by hunger. Dinner could be stewed leeks and chicken thighs, or the gray dust on the cabinetry when her mother disappeared for days at a time. Twice it was the tulips on the windowsill (first the petals, then the leaves, then the stems). Often famished, Bonnie slept and woke throughout the day, never truly leaving either state. So sleep and wakefulness were her first toys: the balls she juggled, the paints she mixed, as she explored the limits of consciousness. At six, she dreamed of levitation and learned how to change the course of her nightmares by breathing through her nose (inhale and hold), a fading dream reignited by tightening her fists. And by seven, she could bring Sarah Vaughan from a dream and onto the Paris apartment floor to sing beside her. The pensive singer smelled like roads, humming gently until Bonnie’s inevitable exhalation made her disappear.
Her memories of childhood are like this: wispy mixes of dreams and reality, of days alone turning into weeks. His absence has brought those days to mind again.
The night before Mansour set off for Spain, she had whispered her fondest memory of levitation into his ear: her and her mother slow dancing to Nat Cole, just a few inches above ground. He had lifted her up and they danced in the silence.
2. BONNIE DOES NOT usually eat with Mama and her sisters. She had retreated after suffering through the questions his mother asked her the first time they dined on the patio: Her father’s name? Her grandfather’s name? Her mother’s address? Simple questions she could not answer. Questions that introduced her to a shame she had not felt before. Black American, for his mother, also seemed to be an incomplete self-definition. She seemed to be asking something else, for something greater, when she asked Bonnie where her people were from.
Bonnie has since kept her distance, so even after months in the house, she is still treated like a guest: her food brought to the attic door on a tray under cloth napkins. But today Mansour will appear on television, his first televised interview, and she heads downstairs to catch it. The only television is in the living room, among the women.
She clutches the banister on her way down; each rickety step is slick with grease from the kitchen to the right of the landing. She is trying to remember if the living room is up ahead or behind the grand staircase. She has mostly stayed to herself in the attic since his departure, and the path of the house remains unmemorized. Even more so now as the restaurant’s ingredients begin to crowd and obscure the large foyer. She steps over sacks of corn—the silk spilling over onto the floor—bags of flour, industrial cans of tomato paste that are stacked like pyramids.
That she booked him on television still seems a great feat, though the appearance fee was barely enough to cover the prenatal doctor’s appointment, where they discovered that she was prediabetic, or maintenance on the used Vespa that was now banished to the garage shed after hardly surviving its first ride onto the sprawling estate grounds. They had both thought that his mother was exaggerating over the phone, had ignored her advice to come before sundown. Arriving at night at the high cobblestone gate of the driveway, they had descended from the Vespa in stunned silence at the forest that surrounded them, the dark so thick they could only see the other’s eyes and teeth. The music, a faint Fela Kuti, helped them find the front yard.
There, Bonnie had seen a striking sight: a low yellow moon waning beside a towering stone mansion, half in ruin, half in repair. She’d started to count the windows but quickly failed. Old ivy had wed with most of the upstairs shutters, pulling them sideways so that they clung to the windows by one hinge, and down in the front yard, tangled brown vines whispered of a garden that neglect and time had long killed. The lone figure working there to restore it, by the light of two lanterns, was his mother. Mama Eva, a woman whose name he did not speak of with warmth. Her feet bare, a loose golden dress slipped off her shiny dark shoulder, her long cornrows ending below her shoulder blades. She was pulling up weeds, and turned around at their footsteps. Her brow unfurling, the wrinkles falling from her kaftan. She had stood, a towering height, to meet Mansour as he approached proudly, with Bonnie by the hand.
Today, the women wait on the sunken couch for his interview. At the top of the hour, they were silent and still, but the barrage of preceding guests and commercial breaks have loosened the atmosphere and now they are talking over the television about silverware orders and napkin rings, coming and going from the kitchen as they await Mansour’s appearance.
Mama has not moved. In the corner of her eye, Bonnie clocks her blank stare at the television, full fingers fondling her wooden prayer beads, her hair covered by a shawl. Bonnie sits beside Marie, the first of his relatives Bonnie had met, and the closest to her in age. Marie manipulates the antennae by the long foil cord she’s constructed, and the women lean forward, finally seeing a picture.
The host emerges. Shiny salt-and-pepper hair. The tight, brooding mouth of a smoker. He tugs his tie before he speaks, his voice waning with the slinking pixels as Marie struggles to straighten the picture. The static competes with the sound of hissing oil from the open kitchen door.
Our last guest tonight is a friend to the show: Mr. Ezra Olivier …
The TV audience applauds as Bonnie and the women sit in quizzical silence.
“Are you sure this is the right show?” one of the women says.
“This is it, right?” Marie asks Bonnie, confused. Bonnie looks at Mama, seeing the panic in her eyes.
“Yes, this is it,” she says finally.
“Maybe he’ll come on later,” Marie replies, hesitant.
“No, that’s it … that’s the last guest …” Bonnie says and swallows, her heartbreak pulsing in her cheek.
Marie’s hands go slack, releasing the antennae, letting the picture fizzle out, the static roaring loudly.
“Excuse me,” Bonnie whispers, racing from the room.
She rushes into the attic bathroom, vomiting. When she can stand on both feet, still dizzy, she pulls their bedroom apart, digging for tokens for the pay phone, but can only find American quarters. There’s a knock at the door.
“Yeah,” she says, and the door opens slowly to Marie, smoking.
“I thought you were up here balling,” she jokes, easing the mood, and Bonnie sits on the bed, reaching for the cigarette. Marie brings it to her, and she inhales and closes her eyes.
“Not exactly.”
“I’m sure he’s fine. You know how he is. Just letting life carry him.” Marie winks at Bonnie.
It was true. He had always been that way. She sits now on the serape blanket he had returned with after disappearing for two days in Los Cabos. He’d returned to their hotel room renewed, melting her rage in seconds, as he recanted his forty-eight-hour adventure with a Mexican sextet. He’d held his hands very close together to demonstrate, a tiny bit of space in between.
The harmonies … they’re so dangerous. Right on the edge, right on the edge, but they never clash. Always perfect.
“No one has reached him in months, Eva!” An argument grows fierce downstairs.
“Anyway,” Marie says, covering her terror, talking over their row with a forced nonchalance that cannot hide her voice’s trembling, “I’ll leave you to your princess thing up here, but if you need anything, you know where to find me.”
“Actually, there is something.” Bonnie suddenly remembers why she came upstairs. “Do you have a pay phone token?”
Blinking rain out of her eyes, Bonnie goes to the phone booth a block away. The homeless man inside treats her knocks like an alarm clock, pulling his jacket over his ears like a pillow, making a great display of being disturbed.
When she finally gets inside, she reaches the show’s producer, but all the woman knows is the obvious: that he did not show. Then she calls the Spanish police and gives the officer on the line the date she last heard from Mansour; the letters of his name, which the man repeats back incorrectly every time; a physical description; and the phone number to call if they discover anything.
In broken French, the man tells her that these details and his tour schedule are not enough. He will need more dates, times, places. She argues with him, growing desperate as thunder begins to drown him out.
Then, a golden line appears. Lightning that moves with the grace of fire as it races atop the trees and glides along phone lines. Bonnie freezes; it’s approaching her in the booth. Thunder cracks. The town blackens. The call drops. The line of lightning sizzles out in the drooping leaves of a tree before her, the sound of a steak searing. She opens the door where lightning has left the smell of a busted light bulb in the air.
Bonnie places the phone on the hook and marches back out into the rain. Her feet slip as the sloped road carries a current. She rolls her jeans up to her knees and walks on toes in her sandals through the water’s flow, following the path back to Mama Eva’s, her thoughts turning dark as the sky.
3. AT HOME IN DAKAR, it is around the time of the country’s busiest holiday. The sheep to be slaughtered will be heard braying in the distance. The roar of a thousand sewing machines and the gossip of tailors toiling through the night. But this evening, as she gazes across the serene Swiss countryside from the foyer window, waiting and watching for Bonnie’s return, it occurs to Mama that Mansour’s child may only know this silence.
Silence was always the sound between her and Mansour. She knew so little of what went on in his mind. As she’d tried to explain to his aunt Sokhna earlier tonight, Mansour had disappeared to America this same way three years ago. Called to inform her of his whereabouts on a muffled line from overseas, two months later. It was only the way he’d been with the girl that makes Mama question if he meant to stay away so long this time.
There was a rawness, an ease to them, that Mama had never seen between a man and a woman before. They were quick to tug and tickle and pull one another around the house, maneuvering limbs without words, like the body of one belonged to the other. Life had convinced her early on that the deepest bonds were born from pain. What dark thing had they weathered together to grow so close in so little time?
The night before his departure for Spain, when he entered her room, Mama had observed him closely. He was as slender as he’d been when he ran off to America three years before and still had that walk—the footsteps of a thief, she always thought: weightless, soundless, gone before you noticed—but his presence had tripled in size. It exaggerated the silence of her bedroom, breeding that uneasiness they could not navigate.
Unsure of where to begin, in this last moment together, Mama had thrown incense cloves into her pot and asked about the girl.
“Ndax mu ngi nelaw?” Is she sleeping? “Waaw.” Yes. Mansour had said and rested his arms on his knees. Though they spoke in Wolof, there was a new rigidity to his tongue; it refused to be loose in the ways their language required. And as she listened to him speak, a strange panic brewed in her. Yes, you should never look an elder too intently in the eye, but on this night, she’d wished that he would.
For years, it felt like Mama had been watching Mansour from the back or the side. On the floor with the record player or walking out the door on his way to another town, or continent. Just gone for three years and leaving again in some hours, there seemed to be no way to bring him closer to her.
In the room, Mansour’s eyes had stayed on the floor, his back straight against the wall, committed to keeping his distance, it seemed. Had it been obligation or a show of appreciation, the money he handed her? When he left the room, she’d cried. For his generosity—with that money, he had finally granted her dream of starting her restaurant, the only dream she’d ever had for her life—but in mourning too. The money felt like the end of something, a way, perhaps, to say thank you and goodbye.
Please take care of her, he’d said as he left, along with a stream of warnings. Bonnie was not going to do the traditional things: to curtsy before Mama (though she’d done so the first time they’d met, her left hand still holding Mansour’s when she gave Mama her right, like she needed his support for this simple gesture); to greet her first thing in the morning; to sweep and tend to pots and pans without being asked. It was a cultural thing but, he swore, she meant no harm. And the more that he talked, worried about the girl’s doctors’ appointments, high blood pressure, and the resulting medication that she couldn’t keep down, the more girlish Mama had felt. Impending fatherhood had made the eighteen years between them suddenly worth no more than a few minutes.
Mama had wanted to chastise Mansour, for failing to marry the girl and expecting her to pick up the pieces, and yet she was frustrated with herself: Why did she always find it so difficult to be pleased with him?
The following day, at a chicken farm not far from the estate, the storm has cleared. Mama is prepared to haggle for a good forty minutes for chickens and feed, but the man concedes to her price within ten. He tries hard not to seem eager, but she can tell that her business is a godsend. The place is falling apart: the tin ceiling so cracked that she could see plenty of the sky, a floor practically made of chicken turds. She walks cautiously, her face tied with a scarf, the off-white feathers in the air an endless snowfall. The man gruffly instructs her on how many times a day to feed her chickens, how much the chicks will cost her over their lifetimes, and where they should be stored.
As the man speaks, Mama’s eyes move to the chicks closest to her. A trio, just born. Their skin is translucent and gray, and loose along their necks. Their beaks look soft. Mama touches one, and the chick collapses. She recoils, and the man looks at her in a way no one has in a while—like she’s delicate.
“Chicks die all the time,” the man says. “By the hundreds, the thousands. You sure you want to get into this business?” The man is sweating. He hacks a dry cough, and feathers come out of his nose and mouth.
Mama counts out the money in front of him and then waits by her car while he assembles the cages. She listens to the chicks chirping. They are a chorus of distressed fervor, a sound as menacing as the heat. She thinks of the money again, contemplates the man’s warning. What if they all die?
Buying the property had been expensive enough. Perhaps owning a farm and raising her own chickens is now reaching too far. But Mansour left her plenty of money before he went to Spain, and now that he’s making a name for himself, she tells herself not to worry. He’ll return with more.
When the man is gone, Mama rearranges the chickens in the trunk so that the grown ones are next to the chicks, comforting and quietening them. But while the chicks scream, the mother hens remain somber and indifferent. They are so still and sunken that she wonders for a moment if they are male.
Fifty chicks, sixty cartons of eggs, and twelve full-grown hens. She heads home.
4. THAT NIGHT, to keep from blowing the power, the women must choose between ceiling lights and the record player as they prepare the food. There is no contest. The music wins, so they light a pack of candles. A Cuban record plays as the living room becomes a night market. Bonnie watches them again from the stairs, an outsider once more. She observes their rhythm as the women count and cut ninety-eight yams, stem amaranth leaves, peel one hundred garlic cloves, and fuss over the twenty-eight malformed cassavas grown in their own yard. The sun is rising as they finish with the vegetables, and Bonnie retreats upstairs. But there is more work to be done.
The women venture outside. Bonnie watches from the attic window as they toil in a misty rain, venturing far deeper into the forest than what she had first imagined they owned.
Clearing a road and parking lot for the restaurant’s future patrons, the Africans axe down the forest’s silver firs and Napoleon oaks with high, triumphant grunts. With the trees goes the shade the local elders rely on while tending to their gardens and flocks. But this is the doctrine of conquest: anything the conqueror cannot see—the invisible order of a people and a place—does not exist.
The land’s only true aborigines—the bearded vultures—land at the women’s feet in protest, curiously tilting their heads at all the dark bodies and braids. Then they take to the air, circling, beating their enormous wings until the women are petrified, shooing them with boots and headwraps and rocks.
The women move on to the willows.
Bonnie looks away, slipping down under the sheets. Under those trees, now golden in the early morning sun, there is spray paint on the grass from where she and Mansour marked the staging for his Spanish shows. It is where they had walked off her nightmares in the days before he left, bare toes parting the knee-high grass. And, after time spent together in cities, there under the willows is where she also saw his true complexion for the first time. There were no streetlights, no fumes of industry to temper the strength of the moonlight and the emerald-green hiding in his shade of brown.
5. THE RADIO ANNOUNCES: A Black man was found dead in Geneva.
Twenty, maybe even forty-something. He was bloated from the water so they couldn’t tell his exact age.
It is a week into the opening and the best night they’ve had. The news plays quietly beneath the chatter of their diners.
Covered in layers of dark soil from the Arve river’s shore.
There is the pattering of dancing feet, the squeaking of the front door as more people enter.
Six foot three … No ID … A single silver bracelet corroding on his wrist.
The story is heard by each woman at a different moment as they work the crowded dining room floor.
Their panic moves through the room without the patrons noticing, like a stench overpowered by a stream of good aromas. The mountain dwellers are busy letting their guards down, smearing tomato jam and garlic on bread that is fresh, while more of it rises under checkered towels over the raging hearth. This is all to say that they wouldn’t have noticed a thing if Bonnie had not screamed.
The African women crack jokes to keep the diners cool. They migrate to the kitchen slowly but all at once, bumping into each other along the way. Sokhna spills yassa on a baby’s bald head, the dishwasher scorches the town’s banker with palm oil, a carafe of bissap smashes on the floor.
They find Bonnie in the kitchen, desperately twisting the dials on the radio for a clearer sound. Her frantic tuning only makes for more static, blurring out the report. Sokhna snatches the radio from her, tries her hand at tuning to no avail.
“Get Mama’s radio! Go!” Sokhna shouts at the dishwasher girl, who runs across the hall to retrieve it. Marie notes how Bonnie shakes and tries to be gentle with her, pulling her to a bench against the wall. Bonnie flinches with each buzz of static, her arms wrapped tight around her body as she tries hard to breathe.
The women huddle around the radio, still trying to make out the report. They shush one another and shut the windows to block out the noise of diners driving in and out of the yard. Their ears are so close to the tiny speakers that they are skin to skin, and, in feeling the heat of each other’s flesh, the fear and sweat, they all become more afraid. The chatter in the crowded dining room only seems to get louder, the laughter reaching a high-pitched shrill that makes Marie throw the kitchen door open. She yells into the dining room.
“Shut up! Please!”
Before the door swings closed again, Bonnie notices a bread roll fall from a woman’s mouth, stunned stiff by Marie’s command.
“Marie!” Mama exclaims, entering the kitchen last, hands holding an empty tray and streaked with peanut sauce from an order of maafe. She puts everything down and grabs her by her ear.
“Foog naa ne Mansour lañuy wax.” I think they’re talking about Mansour, Sokhna warns Mama.
Mama releases Marie.
The dishwasher girl finally returns with the good radio, her head down. “It’s over,” she says sullenly.
The women watch Mama for a cue, a directive on what to do next. But Mama will not meet their eyes. She wanders to the pot of frying fish, uncovers it, muttering quietly that they should know better, that covering the fish while it fries will make it soggy. When two of the women start sniffling, it gives the others permission, and soon the room is heavy with sobbing and moans of despair.
“Put your hands in cold water when you’re chopping onions,” Mama says to no one in particular, as if that is the cause of their tears.
The only place for peace in this house is out in the horse shed. Mama goes there most mornings to empty her mind. This evening, after calming down the women and ending the night’s service, she goes out to feel the chill of the night air. As she settles herself, Mama thinks a familiar thought: This house will fall down. And I will go with it.
She said it every time a doorknob dropped to the floor or when another light bulb burned out; when the carrots choked the pipes out in the yard and the sink water turned orange; when mice invaded the rice bags in the basement and dropped dead from Bacillus cereus a week later.
The first step toward disaster had been the arrival of Bonnie. Prior to this, all Mama knew of Black Americans was what she’d gathered from dubbed episodes of Amos ’n’ Andy, American Bandstand, or sometimes a news program. She knew that women marched beside their men in a fight for rights. Some were good singers. Some were ignorant, others glamorous, others were lewd. Once or twice, she’d seen her own face mirrored in Aretha Franklin’s, but she said and thought no more about it.
What surprised her most about Bonnie was the way she thought the world of herself. Mansour thought the world of her too. Mama had yet to discover why. Bonnie seemed to be such a strange choice.
He’d had many girls around before. Mama had loved Amalia, his last girlfriend, most of all. She was the one she’d thought he should marry. A broad-legged, beaming Italian girl he’d met in Paris, who knew to take off her shoes at the front door and who could rattle off four hundred years of her ancestry in the time it took to plait her hair. All blood is ancient, handed down, borrowed for a lifetime. Nobody’s blood is new, nobody’s life is their own, Amalia had said in response to Mansour’s passionate soliloquy about individuality.
Amalia knew where her blood had come from, all the way back to the beginning of things. She was pure nobility, just like Mama. So they talked heritage. Long nights swatting away the smoke drifting off Mama’s grill, the noise of the streets drifting in, swapping stories of forebearers, men and women long gone who’d made buildings and dug wells and gave wisdom that was still at work in the world.
Mansour had found another noble, an equal, in Amalia, so why did he now want to be with a ghost?
Still, Mama has worried about Bonnie incessantly. Lately she’s been thinking that the old roof will surely collapse into the attic and strike the girl and unborn child. Half of the mansion’s thirteen rooms are uninhabitable due to fallen ceilings and mold and God knows what else. She can’t imagine a time when she’ll have the means to restore it all. In the meantime, she’s deemed more than half of the house officially off-limits.
She had no choice after the dishwasher girl wandered out to the east wing and found a man squatting there. A wood-carver. He’d done a beautiful job with the mantle and bedposts of the room he’d chosen. He tried to bargain with them, first with labor and then with good Catholic prayers, promising them that as a former Latin scholar, he was privy to special words that could get them into heaven even though they didn’t have souls—a conclusion he’d likely come to from the propaganda defaming the Black soldiers moving about Europe in the Second World War. These pamphlets, for many of the elder villagers, showed the only Black faces they’d ever seen, before now.
Even here in the horse shed, Mama can see that the beams are rotting and liable to collapse. She grips her knees and notices the lightness of her skin, worries again that she is losing the pigmentation on her hands, even though the doctor told her that she was perfectly healthy, that her skin was only adjusting to the years she’s spent on a colder continent. She works hard to think of anything but Mansour.
In the end, I didn’t save him. Coming here didn’t save him.
But they cannot call the police. It could reveal Mama’s illegal status: a sponsorship from a job she’d been fired from over a decade before, the immigration applications she’d filed but that had been lost in bureaucratic wastelands. The rules of permanent citizenship seem to change with the seasons, and her temporary status—which, in her first few years in Europe had been a tremendous source of anxiety—soon faded into the background. She’d long learned to live beside impending disaster. Life meant daily triumph or defeat. She stayed alert and ready to move.
Mama had once been a twin, her sister disappearing in the wake of a storm. The day she lost her, Mama started a story in her mind, a life for her twin that ran parallel to her own. The story was now almost two decades old. In Mama’s mind, Kiné was married and had children. She owned her own restaurant (not as nice as Mama’s) in a small but lovely building in Dakar. Her restaurant was shrouded by bushes of limes—her favorite seasoning—and she sold soursop juice in glass bottles. Kiné had witnessed the independence of their country; she had watched the French run out of the Presidential Palace.
Those first years in Europe, Mama had written her sister letters, asking after these imagined life events as if they were true. She wrote in cursive, asking Kiné to tell her what revolution and childbirth felt like.
It’s been ten years since her last letter. The letters she drafted and redrafted until there were no blotches or marks, letters for which she walked the five miles to the post office, pretending to mail them. Pretending so much so that she believed her own lie.
Tonight, there is pen and paper in the horse shed. And there is news that Kiné must know: Mansour is missing. And though she will write this letter because she cannot bear this news alone, Mama tells herself that she is only writing this because Kiné, Mansour’s real mother, deserves to know.