Senegal, 1955
50. THE RICE MAKES a mountain well above his head. And were it not for the pile’s utter enormity, Mansour’s hunger would’ve only been hunger; it would have never become rage at the plenty, and certainly not the kind that made him think of running away, a third time, after everything that had happened before. He’s walking better now. His foot is still twisted at the ankle from the Marabout’s grip—but at least the man’s tooth is missing from his left hook. And seven-year-old Mansour’s tears turned to laughter when an older talibé told him that teeth do not grow back, that the Marabout’s smile would look like a messed-over corncob for the rest of his life.
Mansour takes the canister full of rice and cubed sugar from around his neck, pouring his day’s work onto the pile, but not before he sneaks a fist full of the raw rice into his mouth, looking over his shoulder, quickly brushing the crumbs across his torn shorts before the Marabout or the other talibés arrive.
Maybe he’ll work later tonight with his best friend, a savant who memorized the Qur’an at the age of six, or maybe even with one of the older talibés with broken limbs who are harmless but good for protection. Otherwise, Mansour doesn’t like to beg in groups. His voice always yields the best tips, the most rice, the most sugar, and some of the older boys keep him by his shirt, dragging him from corner to corner, until their pockets are full of change and they can be guaranteed a night without a beating. He is still small, short for his age, and seldom the one to best the others in the fights over cash and rice. He’s learned to become discreet. The talibés do not go beyond the Catholic church that divides the white and Black sides of Saint-Louis, but between the tailor shops, the canopied marketplaces, and the taxi ports, they still have plenty of room to roam.
His feet are still pulsing, sandy and raw from begging barefoot on the hot asphalt. Outside of the outhouse, he waits for a girl-orphan to bring him a pail of water to bathe in. She is walking proudly, in that rhythm girls have as if time ought to be glad to wait for them. She stops short before she reaches him.
“Ndox amul.” There is no water, she says.
He tells her that she’s lying. He saw a line of children bathe not long before. But the girl leans on her leg, pointing to the pump.
“Pompu ndox mi dafa yàqu.” It’s broken, she says, and she walks away. When he tries his hand at the pump himself, and hears from the pathetic squeak that the well is indeed dry, he knows he has no choice but to try and steal some water, at least a cup to drink, from the broken faucet outside of the mechanic shop next door.
Mansour takes his chances, slipping expertly through the sliver of the spaced-out fence made of rusty slabs of iron. He rushes to the mechanic’s pump. For some reason, the flow, typically a stingy drip, is for once a steady drizzle. In his excitement, he puts his mouth over the faucet, savoring a whole mouthful of tepid water.
Then he must get back on the street, incanting prayers for whoever will pay, until the bats begin to congregate in the trees. How he envies them, the way they sleep so comfortably, smiling blue-black faces poking out from the cotton budding on the trees. He once knew what it meant to feel that way, nestling in the mahogany bed at his grandfather’s house.
When Mama Eva left for Paris, he had been folded back into the rhythm of his grandfather’s house easily, finding his peers—a dozen cousins, and neighbors around his age. Running with them through the home’s large courtyard, going with them to the beach. Remembering Kiné, he would not go near the water, but he loved getting under the hot sand, letting his playmates stack it on his body until only his head was poking out.
Home life as a child of the house—loved, and cared for at a distance—had gone on well until the tutor arrived. The tutor was a tall man, only eighteen. He had been commissioned by Mansour’s grandfather to teach the science of reciting prayers—Tajwid—to the teenagers of the house. Mansour was only four years old, but on overhearing teacher’s instructions, he would rush into the house and stand in the doorway. Face sandy from a game of tag, he imitated the sounds he was hearing, completely oblivious to the unusual quality of his voice. It had a rare richness that prompted the admiration of the tutor and a report to his boss, the Marabout. When approached now, a second time, about sending Mansour to join the order—a gift through which to derive blessings—his grandfather agreed.
He’s running late now, but he doesn’t want The Lady to see him dirty, so he takes the time to rinse his shirt under the faucet and put it back on wet.
She’s his favorite new patron, and he tries to see her first, right after bathing, hoping that one day she might finally ask him to stay with her. The pretty woman has only been in town for a little more than a week, which, from the long days he keeps, feels like a month; in that time, he’s gone by her room every day. Sometimes he returns to her at the end of the day too.
When he first spotted her, he knew to slip into a gap between the buildings, under the guise of peeing, so that the others would not follow him. He waited until the other talibés had wandered on and crossed the street. On her is where he smelled alcohol for the first time—a nauseating scent—so when she turned and he saw her beauty, he felt for the first time that his mind had betrayed his senses.
“Sarax ngri Yàlla.” Please give unto God, he’d said, approaching her in the store. The woman took his hands and pushed them up to the counter. She’d slid her change into them. He noted the red on her nails. The shiny fabric of her pencil skirt. It reminded him of the way colors looked when he closed his eyes and let the sun heat his eyelids.
He’d heard the other talibés before he saw them enter. They prayed raucously, talking over one another, their extended hands overlapping in a pile before the woman, who was soon overwhelmed, digging deeply in her purse as the man behind the counter rolled his eyes.
“If you keep giving, they’re gonna keep coming.”
That was a week ago, and as he walks to where she’s staying (a third-floor suite at the pilot hotel across the road), he wishes that he could stay there all day, that he didn’t have to beg until dark.
He knocks on the door. This time, the white man answers. It is the first time Mansour has seen him on his feet. He is short. Up close, his gray lifeless complexion scares Mansour, so he stands back. Mansour looks to the side of the man for The Lady.
“Sarax ngri Yàlla,” he says.
“That boy’s here again,” the man says before leaving the door open and slowly climbing back into the large bed. Mansour wants to press on the mattress, to feel its softness after years of not having a bed of his own. As the man steps away, Mansour sees The Lady across the room. She knots a cloth belt at the waist of her fitted yellow dress with green flowers, her lips bright red.
“Salam Alaikum,” she says, “jigesil, duggal.” Enter, and he does. She gestures for him to come closer.
Having seen the man’s illness for the first time, Mansour finally understands the cause for her welcoming of him. She’s needs his prayers; she has not taken a personal interest in him after all. He swallows his disappointment and begins to recite the Fatiha. The man motions for him to stop.
“Just pay him so he’ll go,” he says wearily. “There’s no point.” The woman caresses his back. The man’s body flattens, his breathing deepens, he groans.
“Ngóor si, yaa ngi woy ne malaaka.” You have the voice of an angel, young man. The man says in Wolof, perfect Wolof, surprising Mansour, who’s never spoken to a white person before. “But I’m holding off on hearing that sound for as long as I can,” the man continues. “I used to be more fun, believe me.” He laughs into a cough as The Lady smiles softly, first at him and then Mansour. Her hands continue to rub his back in a circle.
Mansour is eager to leave, but The Lady whispers to him, “Wait.”
The man on the bed coughs again. His body quakes afterward like a sounding gong. The woman unties the yellow scarf from her neck and puts it on her head, knots it at her chin, and puts her hands together in prayer.
“What harm could it do?” she says as her husband watches her.
“Muslims open their hands, Sokhna,” is all he says before turning over again. So she opens her hands.
51. ON THIS STRANGE anniversary, hours from their home in Dakar, a week and a half in Saint-Louis, the place where they first met nearly fifteen years ago, there is evidence that Sokhna’s husband, who has been mostly bedridden, has finally gone out, though not far: the trail of muddy footprints from the shower to the bed, maps of Saint-Louis unfolded on the table and sprinkled with flakes of chocolate croissants. The morning after the talibé’s prayers had been good. For the first time in eight months, they’d been intimate again.
They’ve already spent three days in the room together, bewildering housekeeping with the curtains drawn. She needed her body to herself for a while, and she hopes that perhaps, since he’s feeling better, they can spend the day about the city.
Sokhna finds Claude at the estuary, shivering in the pleasant morning weather. He’s watching flamingos sink their jaws into the sand for sardines and come up empty.
“They’ll fly away soon,” he says, taking her hand, tickling the inside of her palm. “There’s no food here.”
She is taller than him, so she can kiss the smooth middle of his head. The pale veins swell when her lips press against them. His veins are bluer, skin grayer, turning transparent. She closes her eyes against the salty air, erasing these changes from her mind.
They take a tour of the old French quarter on a horse-drawn carriage. The young man giving the tour cannot get a word in as Claude comes alive, identifying the stores and shops they pass. He brings their guide to a dumb, adolescent silence. “This old man once lived in a world they could only imagine,” Claude says. Back in the true colonial days, when the town was also the capital of Mauritania. “When it sparkled with the promise of what Africa could be,” he says.
“This was a bar. A good bar too,” he says, his eyes glistening by the lights of the crowded street. They pass a bodega, where a woman in an unraveling hijab roasts peanuts on the front step.
Claude asks the driver to get them some.
“Do you want some peanuts, love?” he asks Sokhna, as he always asks her things, in a way that isn’t really a question. She knows that she doesn’t need to answer. She only smiles and wipes a trace of her lipstick from his cheek.
The carriage driver calls to the woman selling peanuts, and her price is low, so Claude asks for an extra pound.
“He wants more!” the carriage driver calls over.
“I hope they’re not rotten for that price,” Claude says.
“They’re the best nuts in the city,” the young man counters.
“Let’s have a look first,” Claude says. Sokhna follows him to the woman’s stand. When he reaches into the roasted peanuts, the woman pushes him back.
“Ay yo lanla?!” What’s the matter with you?!
“I’m checking the quality!”
Two men approach and stand in between Claude and the woman, defending her.
“C’est quoi le problème, monsieur?”
“I want to check the quality of her peanuts. The price is too low.”
Claude goes to put his hand in again, and one of the young men pushes it away, just as the woman had before, but his force is stronger and Claude shuffles backward, nearly falling to the ground.
Sokhna is facing away from them all, taking a swig from her flask, looking into the street, where the lights of the bridge have caught her attention. The carriage driver calls out from the front seat.
He hops down from the carriage, going over to break up the commotion.
Sokhna looks over to where her husband has now overturned the woman’s first batch of peanuts onto the ground. Claude recedes from the small angry crowd.
“White man, you are a guest here. Go home!” a woman shouts.
Claude immediately retorts, “I was born here! This is my country too!”
Sokhna grabs her husband by the arm, dragging him away. He’s out of breath, spent, by the time they return to the carriage.
He rests his head in Sokhna’s narrow lap. His eyes are on the blackening sky. She can feel his whole body vibrating. Their driver returns, and the tour continues.
They are a ways away from the peanut stand before Claude stills. As the sky grows darker, his gray eyes become brighter. They seem to Sokhna like two perfect full moons.
“It was all planes then,” he says. “Do you remember the plane ride we took?”
“Yes, love. I remember.”
They are back in Saint-Louis for the first time since her father’s funeral three years ago, and as the carriage driver turns the corner, he passes the church where it took place. Sokhna grips Claude’s hand harder. He gently presses her fingers open and tickles her palm until she smiles.
Sokhna’s father and Claude had become good friends over the years. Perhaps too good. When Sokhna sat, one summer night, in the kitchen of her mother’s bakery, watching the baguettes rise and brown in the open hearth, her mother blamed Claude for her divorce earlier that year.
“He’d rather be anywhere else than home … first with that plane and now with Toubab.” She sucked her teeth.
As his illness progressed, her father had insisted that he did not intend to die in the hospital, that he wanted to live whatever remained of his life free, so one day Claude drove him out to the countryside, Sokhna in the passenger seat. Sokhna knew how much her father delighted in the dynamic between her and Claude. The way Claude listened to her tangents. The way he didn’t dismiss or indulge her.
Some miles from Louga, they pulled off the road into the desolate, arid landscape to rest. It had no water for miles, an open terrain divided only by the occasional baobabs, often ninety feet tall—the heights of Adam and Eve, according to local residents. For some reason, her father fell in love with the place at first sight. She watched him take in, with great inspiration, what looked to her like nothing but infertile earth.
Sokhna, in search of whatever was delighting him, began to wander the land too. That’s when she spotted a family of rhinos. The baby waddled clumsily, colliding with the mother’s flank. Sokhna didn’t realize how deep into the bush she’d gone until she heard her father’s voice, so small, calling to her from across the way:
“Perhaps you should ask your husband for permission before running about the world,” he’d teased. Sokhna turned and saw Claude, who was close enough to hear, turning even redder than the African sun had already burned him.
Over the last years of her father’s life, he and Claude built two long sable-colored mansions on this arid land. The houses began as towering alien structures on either side of the same dirt road. A corner store, roadwork, and a water system followed, and within a decade, several families arrived. When they were drunk, the two men liked to argue about which one of them had founded the town, about whether or not their homes would be finished before the country descended into the chaos of independence from France.
Tonight, fifteen years later, Claude asks to see it again.
And the carriage driver, who is renting his horse from the local Marabout and is not supposed to take it more than a fifteen-mile radius from the French quarter, looks back at Sokhna in disbelief.
She shrugs and mouths, “Please.”
They agree upon a price for the young man to take them overnight through three towns to the village to see their homes.
As they leave the city for the bush, the terrain quiets and Claude drifts off to sleep. The loudest sounds are his wheezing and the bluesy rhythm of the stallion’s stride. Sokhna peels open the collar of Claude’s shirt, hoping to cool him down, but closes it quickly when she sees the grayness of his skin. Death whispering. The plane fuel, the inhalation of the fumes day in and day out, had given him and her father the same cancer. Why them and not her? She examines her eyes all the time for the yellowing her father suffered. The fear that she too has been poisoned keeps her restless. She panics when she has no appetite or cannot recall simple things.
The driver’s voice interrupts her thoughts.
“He’s your … employer?” he asks.
“My husband,” she replies fiercely, insulted by the insinuation.
The carriage vibrates as they cross rockier ground. It reminds her of when Claude would come to see her at her mother’s house. As he landed his plane, it rattled the china in the cupboards, lifted the pages of the books from her lap, and, her favorite part, made her tutor wait for Claude to hit the ground before continuing the physics lecture.
“I think we’re here,” the driver announces the next morning, but Sokhna, still half asleep, isn’t sure.
There is so much development, the town so full of life, that it’s difficult to spot their properties. Children in blue uniforms, filing through an unpainted concrete gate into a school; women behind wooden tables, selling breakfast to construction workers.
“There they are!” Claude says, somehow immediately spotting the buildings. He pulls her along as he rushes inside.
They have no keys with them, so he breaks the glass of a side window. The air of the house is stale, the floors and furniture are browned with several layers of dust, but everything, even two unfinished cups of scotch, are still where Claude and her father left them three years ago.
Later, she hears Claude’s voice calling from the bedroom. It has no door—just a curtain, holding place for the handcrafted one from Bamako that never arrived.
“What’s taking you so long? Come here, love.” His voice sputters into a husky cough. “Come here …”
She sits beside him and reaches for his cheek, hoping for softness (a cheek must be soft). But the illness has conquered there too, leaving it leathery and hard. No place on his body is safe. Everywhere is an echo of death. She takes her hands away, keeping them safe in her lap. And he, from the look in his eyes, heartbroken but wise, understands. He touches her instead. But soon, in his weakness, her flesh is too smooth to grip. He’s apologizing for far more than his weakness as he lets her slide through his hands.
She lies beside Claude, watching him sleep. Then she stands up from the bed in a sudden panic and stares, looking down between him and the dust. Claude and the dust. He is sprawled wide and peaceful. Not a sneeze or a cough. She considers for the first time that he might be done with living. Happier with the earth.
52. AFTER YEARS WITHOUT USE, the bathroom faucet spits out a roach before clear water flows. Dressed in Claude’s shirt and jeans after bathing, she steps out into the night with wet braids. Letting the clay wall of their house warm her back, watching the frogs hop high from puddle to puddle, she stumbles on a thought that comforts her: her talibé. His words had been the only thing that made a difference. She believes this, even though she would never say it aloud. Doctors had done them no good, but after the boy had incanted whatever he’d incanted, for the nights that followed, she’d become blind to the changes in her husband’s skin; her passion and peace had been briefly restored. And though today the spell has expired, the protective blindness has dissipated, and death seems omnipresent, she is hopeful that the peace could be summoned again. Even if Claude is through wrestling death, fighting its grip on their lives, she is not.
The next day, Sokhna returns to Saint-Louis alone in search of the talibé. Claude, possessed by some strange solace, refuses to leave their dirty village house. The maid Sokhna has hired is overwhelmed within an hour. The weight of the dust from the bedroom alone has warped and ruined her broom.
Sokhna does not know where to find the boy (where do talibés live?), knows only that his name is Mansour. She knew it as the name of a Persian mystic who was known for spontaneous spiritual trances and was said to have lit four hundred oil lamps in Jerusalem with the touch of his thumb.
She cannot remember Mansour’s face exactly, but as she looks at the boys outside the boutique where she first met him, she knows that he is not here. She spends the afternoon in the lobby of the Pilot Hotel, where he visited her and Claude, but he never shows. Around sunset, under the fans at the hotel bar, she wearily watches the street for him, the scraps of her hope leaking out now with her sweat. Her head rests sideways on the counter between her two empty wine glasses. She is staring at a building across the way that looks like a jail. It was once the force-feeding chambers for the Atlantic-bound enslaved who protested their fate through self-imposed starvation. When the bartender comes by, announcing, again, the dinner specials, she waves him away.
From the bar, she hears the Adhan called from the local mosque, announcing Maghrib. For its overwhelming volume, it is a sound so common that it would not have pulled her attention, save for the voice incanting it. She knows it is the boy. She gets back on the street, cooler as the sun sets, and, having run, she is there when he, small and barefoot, emerges from the grand white mosque’s enormous arch.
For some time, they meet daily. A meal for a prayer at the river. He teaches her the Fatiha’s seven verses over seven nights: carving the Arabic letters around the shells steeping in the hot sand. They work a few feet away from the flamingos that sleep standing on the water. The single leg they stand on is so slender that their fuchsia bodies seem suspended in air. By their third meeting, though he does not ask about Claude, though he hardly says anything, she finds herself reporting to the little boy like a doctor. She tells him when Claude has a spell of energy, racing her around the house. She tells him when Claude takes her out dancing, so renewed, that she is the first to need to sit. But soon, her reports shift. She tells him when Claude can no longer walk the distance from the bedroom to the kitchen without help; she tells him on the day that Claude calls for her from the tub, now needing help to wash himself. She tells him, one day, that Claude will not recover; that day is the day that she tells him everything that happened before.