Brazil, 1969
73. BREATHING, REEKING, SWEARING in thirty tongues. There, in the middle of Carnival season, there is no such thing as space between people. Bonnie keeps her grip tight on Mansour’s arm, letting him drag her forward through the airport as the body of the crowd starts to move.
She thought they came early. Mansour doesn’t perform until Thursday, so she’d assumed that arriving by Monday would be enough to avoid all this chaos. He is a quick replacement for the headliner’s opening act, so there had not been much lead time anyway. Their shot arrived (as shots do) as one of those quick yes-or-no moments, and of course they’d said yes without thinking about what was to follow.
“Can you see any of the guys?” Bonnie’s yelling to Mansour, who, for all his aural gifts, for his tantrums over the flatness of the phone ring in their apartment, cannot hear a word she says over the crowd.
On the plane, Mansour had sat with her in silence for a while. But then he’d lifted the armrest, wanting her closer, and even on the plane she’d managed to encircle him tightly, like she needed to get inside of his skin. The passengers were sleeping, the turbulence had settled, the lights had dimmed.
“What do you dream about? I heard you again last night.”
“My mother. She drowned herself when I was small.”
He was testing himself and her, but his words had passed between them easily. It was only the sudden absence of her hot breath on his stomach that made him look down. She was holding her breath, and when she let it out and finally spoke, her eyes were glazed over, like she’d turned blind.
“That doesn’t have to mean you have bad luck,” she’d said quietly, more to herself than him.
Bonnie has a photograph of the man who is supposed to meet them outside the terminal in her pocket. But the bodies are so tight around her that she cannot reach into her jeans. Then the line picks up pace, and she’s being pushed into Mansour, then into a short man with a swayback. In the movement, there is a little gap and she takes this chance to slide her hand into her pocket. She holds the now-crumpled photograph of their guide: a curly-haired man who grins like a toothpaste model.
She’s been standing for so long, she feels certain she will soon swoon. All of a sudden, Mansour has their things, and they finally hurry out of the doors. There at arrivals, Bonnie looks from the crumpled picture to the room-deep lineup of sweaty people welcoming disoriented travelers with signs. She looks for Mansour’s name and is surprised when she sees her own instead. The man holding it is most certainly not the toothpaste model in the picture. This one looks like he works under cars all day, maybe sleeps under them too. Having barely survived their journey through the airport, and having already tasted the rigor of Brazil, Bonnie decides that she prefers it this way. She’d rather be in this rugged man’s hands.
When the man speaks, she remembers his voice from the phone call in Paris that changed their lives. He is kind, so full of excitement about Mansour’s demo that Bonnie feels embarrassed to ask, but she does. Out in the parking lot in the dark humid night, she peels open the photograph.
“This is not you …” she says gently as the man looks up from handing off their luggage to the Black driver.
“No, that’s my assistant. He reels ’em in. But I kill ’em.” He smiles, so she finds a way to do the same. It baffles her that this man is the promoter. She’d expected someone more debonair.
Just as she goes to get in the car, just as she’s imagining a smooth and fast ride to their hotel so that they can sleep and regain the power of speech before their flight to Bahia the following evening, the man takes a deep breath. She braces herself.
“So, we have a small, small problem,” he says.
“Yes?” she says, impatiently, and she looks at Mansour. As he waves over Davis and Liam, who emerge from the airport doors, Mansour appears more calm and put together here, after all they’ve suffered, than he did on a daily basis at home. She will never make sense of him.
Small as he is, the promoter puts one arm around Bonnie, one around Mansour, and starts to walk with them some paces away from the others. She is quickly enlivened by the mountains in the distance, a scene she almost missed in the thickness of the dark.
“You’re scheduled for Thursday, I know—but could you be available sooner? Why come all the way from Paris for one show?” He smiles that struggling smile again, and Bonnie can see this won’t be hard. He is a hustler, and thank God he isn’t any good at hiding it.
She looks at Mansour, speaking their silent language. Wanna do it? She puts a cigarette between her lips and lights it. He winks, and she knows he’s cool. She turns to the man again. Blows smoke. He looks hungry. He needs them as much as they need him, maybe more. He scratches his sweaty neck.
In the open trunk, fumbling for a while, she finds the contract in her briefcase. She sits on the hood of the car with her legs carefully crossed, the wind blowing her stretched Afro around as she marks up the paper by the light of the opening and closing airport doors.
She gives the man the document, blows smoke, fluffing her hair, feeling herself.
“What’s this?”
“The terms,” she says.
The cheer leaves the man’s face. He looks far better without it.
“Triple?” he says, looking up from the paper.
She nods sweetly. Mansour’s smitten, shaking his head at her gall.
In Bahia, the car winds in steeper and steeper rounds until the vibe splits among the band: half of them screaming, the other half laughing riotously. Bonnie and Mansour are in the laughing half. When they finally step down from the smoking car, when they fall onto the slick cold clay, the cool air quells their dizziness.
Now with a show booked for the day after tomorrow, they wander into the empty festival grounds. At their feet, four-hundred-year-old stones from the torn-down sugar mill are strewn about, marking a path that takes them in a circle. They are told by an attendant with a complexion richer and darker than either of theirs, that the enslaved once toiled here on a plantation so large and notorious that the land likely holds the bones of folks from both of their bloodlines under its ground. Bonnie looks above her head and gasps at the dozens of monkeys sleeping, their bodies clinging to palm trunks like children to mothers. She reaches for Mansour’s hand.
The light is dwindling, but the evening feels particularly alive: men work on the stage in a loud and steady rhythm; cicadas in the dense foliage surrounding them make a sound like sizzling oil. The percussionists who will open the festival can be heard practicing in a layered symphony, echoing around the hills.
They approach the stage and she watches him walk the length of it slowly, as if entering a sacred space. He puts both hands on his head and takes in the risers, starting some feet from the stage and then into the distance where the mountains peak. Preparation for the largest crowd he’s ever sung for. The largest crowd either of them will have ever seen. He sits on the stage, rests his arms on his knees awestruck.
She looks up, seeing the lights that have been installed by the hundreds, the thousands of black cords swaying in the warm, gentle breeze like vines. She sits on the stage’s edge beside him, and protectively he puts an arm in front of her knees. She looks and sees the drop down. Their wide eyes meet: How. Did. We. Do. This?
Bonnie wins some battles—the tripled money, more press—but the promoter wins some too. With a plan not to announce Mansour as a replacement until seconds before he goes onstage, the man will get a big audience for a cheaper act, leaving it to Mansour to turn the crowd around.
Bahia does not believe in secrets. Everything the city says and feels and cooks pours in through their hotel shutters; there is no way to make the room quiet.
In the bathroom doorway, Bonnie tries to keep her eyes on the bright teal tiles, desperate to stop her racing mind. Ever since they’ve entered the hotel suite, she’s been battling a silent panic, certain of some vague danger she cannot define. She crouches down on the bathroom floor now, trying to get as small as she feels.
“What’s the matter?” he calls calmly from the bedroom. When she doesn’t answer, he tells her to come to him, and she does, stopping a few feet shy of where he sits on the edge of the bed, ashamed of herself for being how she is.
Another woman would be out dancing with him, sparkling with his sweat, her ass at his pelvis, her shoes long abandoned in the sand of some beachfront Samba club, dragging him between the giant cars from the 1950s that crowd the Bahia streets. But they will pass the night in a hotel suite with half the lights off and a fuzzy jazz station on the radio because she, despite all they’ve accomplished to be here, cannot simply feel good.
“You should go out if you want. You’re just gonna end up working if you stay here.”
As if he hasn’t heard her, he guides her the rest of the way to him by her wrist. He’s looking up at her, speaking with a pencil in his mouth.
“You’re always thinking too much,” he says, his hands running up and down her arms as if to warm them. She would climb onto his lap, but there’s sheet music in it.
“I’m frustrated,” she guesses wearily, unsure of what exactly she’s feeling. Hoping that maybe he knows. He observes carefully, removing the pencil before diagnosing her. He gets her right most of the time.
“You’re just exhausted,” he says at last. He taps the bed beside him. Instead, she puts the music aside in a heap and pushes him down, falling onto him.
“Hey! Not me. You,” he says, smiling up at her.
She lies there, watching him like a pendulum she’s waiting to be hypnotized by. He removes her glasses and starts smoothing her plaits.
“What are you thinking about so hard?”
He suddenly seems so young. She blinks, but that doesn’t change the softening of his jaw and cheekbones. The way his eyes are a little wider. The way he might’ve looked ten years before. And then she knows what she’s feeling.
“Are you … are you sure she drowned herself?”
“I shouldn’t have told you—”
“It could’ve been an accident.”
He shakes his head, just shakes his head, and says nothing.
“How can you be sure?” she asks.
He won’t look her in the eyes, keeps his head down, and when he finally speaks again his voice is gone.
“She said goodbye to me.”
Bonnie’s tears fall without sound, a hand to his cheek, caressing it. For a long while, they lie like this, her touching his face, him just watching her, detached and bewildered. Mute, but he is listening. Listening, and holding fast to her, finally tasting freedom as she cries, and cries, and cries for him.
Mansour drifts into a soundless sleep, her hand still at his cheek. She plays with his facial hair, petal soft when it’s damp like this. The heat has risen with the night and she cannot sleep. She takes her hand from his face and gently pries his fingers apart where they are locked around her waist. When she succeeds at unfastening him, he stirs with a grunt and his eyes pop open, beaming panic for the seconds it takes him to find her in the dark. Then he spreads wider, freeing her body. A breeze rushes along her back and she feels some relief. Farther away now on the large bed, he still faces her, watching her the way he’d been before. He looks, for a moment, like he’s awake enough to speak. His puts his own hand under his cheek as if to recreate her touch. He locks eyes with her and, in seconds, he drifts again.
Bonnie leaves him asleep in the suite and begins to wander. She cannot unsee the look he’d given her. First on the street with the promoter, then again before he’d drifted off to sleep. Something reckless that said he belonged to her and didn’t care what she did with him. A declaration that they were one. As she considers it this first time, commitment scrapes her insides as it warms them. Feeling loved is nothing like she imagined; it is more glorious, but still a raw and heavy thing.
Her route takes her into a neighborhood preparing for Carnival. The stars are visible, but the people’s liveliness generates the warmth of daytime. Tables of dice, old men with young teeth laughing out contact highs. Making room for him, her soul says, Go lower, get even closer to the ground, so she climbs down some rocks to a promontory of houses where the air turns salty, signaling the presence of an ocean far below.
She entices the women there: Black, brown, white, all living Black. A thing she knows without knowing. They want to dress her. They want to adorn her as they are adorned. These performers in a larger festival—in Carnival—lean out of their houses with indigo on their hands as dark as the evening itself. Yards of cloth—golden, yellow, red—bridging the dirt ground from neighbor to neighbor.
The royalty of this world are common people, in slips and girdles, in T-shirts and jeans. They try on headwraps and wigs fit for The Marriage of Figaro on shack porches. There is chatter, there is drumming, there are bells and whistles blown. There are foreigners, fellow migrants like Bonnie who stand in the doorways of the little houses like tourists, procuring culture, and liquor and intrigue, rather than sleeping away the night. She walks on, yards of finer cloth hang overhead, and some women hold it in their arms. As they stand, they hold it out to her: an offering. And that scent from massaging thread that lived on her hands when she worked at the textile shop swims through this air in waves and waves. At her feet, there is a trail of large bright-white feathers that compromise no part of their brilliance for the night. A trail of feathers that seem to go the length of the world’s waist. What dinosaur of a bird made them? Each one reaching from her elbow to her fingertips.
The trail of feathers leads to a dome of a skirt, above which small, fast-moving women stitch by no light at all. Bonnie’s eyes trail up the body in their center, a person on stilts or born as tall as the palm nearby. Blue black, this person doesn’t separate from the night until they move, beginning to dance, feathers flapping, feathers gaining on the air. Will they fly? Will they really? “Please fly,” Bonnie whispers and waits to see.
74. THE DAY BEFORE Mansour’s first performance, they leave their suite and the large clawfoot tub where they’ve been entangled for hours, scaring off the geckos, breathing in the scent of limes, playing and planning their life together as their skin pruned from the tepid water. It’s where he first tells her, not dreamily but with alarming directness, that he wants to get married as soon as they get home, that he wants her to have his children, six daughters, and exhaled, like he’d been holding it in. She’d put a hand to his forehead and said that, clearly, he needed some air.
Now, they climb the mountain until their thighs ache, joining the crowd from the rear to see whatever festival act is playing this early afternoon. It is a Mandingue chamber ensemble from Bamako. They are court musicians, and their king, who has flown with them to Brazil (him in first class, them in coach), will meet Bonnie and Mansour later in the catering tent. Their talk, at a corner table in the bustling place, will begin with the king’s real estate projects in New York City, a place where he does good business but has never traveled to.
What they tell him about what’s happening in Mississippi will reduce his impressive girth and make him lower his shoulders, and over the course of their tale, he will appear, more and more, like an ordinary man. A person to whom the horrors they describe could happen.
Their conversation will carry on until day turns to evening, until Bonnie, from listening to the stories of the king’s daily life, will create a picture of Africa in her mind. A sky that never makes the same picture twice. Clothes that billow, sand that gets swept. People huddled close. Very close. And she will look to Mansour beside her, and she will see that he’s protecting himself from the king’s stories, even as he listens with a gentle smile. And it will occur to her that it is sound that will open him up. Just as it was for her. What is the sound that will open the rest of him up to me? And she will close her eyes to the smoke of steak and upslope fog and her soul will answer. A child. The answer will startle her, even frighten her, with the ease and speed with which it arrives. But she will find that she needs the rest of him, a little more than she needs to feel safe, so she will wrap her arms around her body, and she will savor the last moments of belonging only to herself.
They are sitting on the grass watching the stage as the music begins. The chamber ensemble plays a wide assemblage of string instruments that, to Bonnie, look like museum antiques. That their sound can reach so far astounds her. There is something close to a guitar among them, but the body of the instrument is round. The lead singer is a woman. She walks from one end of the stage to the other, letting the background, the string instruments, answer her dark phrases as if they are questions. The singer has a voice like a horn: bellowing long and short notes, long and short notes between listening. And she is listening more than she sings. She is waiting for all of the rhythms to lock—listening for that syncing that Bonnie can already hear.
The Malians play. Mansour looks over his shoulder and sees Bonnie grooving with closed eyes. The music nourishes her in a place he thought only he could reach, a place where only she can reach him, a place within himself he doesn’t like to go to alone. Her freedom makes him feel strangely lonely. When the kora player takes over, Bonnie spreads her arms and reaches into the grass, breaking the dirt on either side of him with her hands.
That night, it starts with a taste. A mix of things that makes her push his mouth from hers with a soft hand.
“What does it taste like?”
She tries to describe it: charcoal in chocolate cake batter. The scent of collard greens when they first hit the pan. The aroma from cooking broccoli when you forget to start with garlic and onions.
He gets out of the tub to bring her water.
The water even tastes like the taste.
They stand over the toilet bowl, waiting for her to vomit. Nothing happens.
They go to the bed and sit and wait.
“It’s still there?”
She nods.
“Let’s just go back to the tub,” she says. He says, “No,” tells her to rest.
He’s doing that thing. Switching from playmate to protector at the quietest whisper of catastrophe. Some days she doesn’t mind this. Today, she hates it, tells him she’s not a goddamn child.
Child is the word that brings it again, and she rushes to the bathroom, where it still won’t come up. She sits on the toilet top, feeling his worry more than her own.
Did she drink the water from the tap?
“No, Mansour.”
Did she eat the fruit here without rinsing it?
“No, Mansour.”
Did she eat anything that wasn’t cooked?
“No, man. Goddamn.”
He wakes her in the middle of the night, maybe early morning, she can’t tell. She is sweating, her bones heavy.
He’s very close to her face, that scent of soap and lightning.
“I think something in here’s bothering you,” he says.
She tries to speak, but her throat is clogged.
“On y va.” Let’s go, he says.
She groans. “You’re outrageous.” She rolls over.
She doesn’t remember the walk in the dark to the carriage. Only waking once or twice when the waves crash too loudly in the distance, otherwise sleeping hard on his shoulder the whole way to the road. When they reach a higher altitude, her body wakes her, eager for her to witness the narrow wooden carriage that carries her, drawn by a white mare on a winding clay road. A shimmering teal ocean below as the sun rises. Their shadows, somehow, are reflected widely across its expanse, making her and Mansour and the coachman larger than the green islands that are strewn about the water like jade stones. She calls his name to be certain that she isn’t dreaming all of this. He looks down at her, and the darkness under his eyes lets her know he hasn’t slept.
“La Belle au Bois Dormant.” Sleeping Beauty, he teases, a toothpick in his mouth, a hand to her cheek. “You could sleep through the end of the world.”
Pulling herself up, she clasps the wooden seat in front of her and feels the new weight of her wrists. Both of them, laden with his bracelets. When he reaches toward the sky for a stretch, she notices that his wrists are now bare.
They stop at a yellow house on the hill. Mansour thanks the coachman in Portuguese, shaking hands in that way that is more like a hug, that way she’s seen Black boys do in New York. The man comes and goes through the open front door, bringing them things she doesn’t take note of, too enamored with their surroundings to care.
Mansour tells her this is their home. She is eager for him to come in and close the door, to be inside with her as she walks the bright-red tiles of the cool ground, taking in the house’s stucco walls, the squeal of twin yellow birds in a cage at the corner. The dawn breeze is scented with the sweet foulness of fermenting mangoes. She parts the floor-length checkered curtains with two hands. They are so high up that the boats in the distance seem to be moving through the clouds. “It’s like,” Bonnie says to Mansour, “God took a paintbrush and blurred the line of the horizon. See?”
75. LATER THAT EVENING, after a good rehearsal with Liam and the others, Mansour returns to their house in the hills, still needing a way into his own voice. Music can be that way sometimes. Blocking him from its insides. And no matter the condition of his voice, which is particularly good right now (the softer water, the humidity, easing up on the alcohol), not being able to get inside makes singing all mechanics, no feeling. Artistic apathy. It’s the kind of thing that can poison an audience against you after a single phrase. Never mind that it’s painful in and of itself to endure. To combat his insecurity, he’s turned, as usual, to ornamentation, overarranging his compositions. He can hear Gil in his head warning him not to overdo it: Stop showing off. You got it, but you gotta trust that you do.
From the living room, where he should be making sense of the strange transitions between songs, jotting down some final notes on arrangements in these last hours of solitude, he’s instead distracted by Bonnie’s wheezy snore. He tries working with the bedroom door closed, but it makes no difference. She’s loud as hell.
When they’d first arrived in Paris, she was a deep, shy sleeper, shrinking from his touch, a tight ball that didn’t seem to even breathe. But tonight, her outstretched limbs circle the king-size bed like the arms of a clock. Now her hair, which has grown past her shoulders, grazes the floor. From the open shutters, the moonlight follows her as closely as his eyes, keeping her spotlighted in its silver glow. He sees his daughters in the bed surrounding her body, sparkling silver limbs flung over one another in the same wild way. Some with her wide nose, others with her mole, and all with that hair she fights with so much.
Turning back to the music, Mansour thinks of what Keifer told him after the band’s first showcase for Onyx Records, after Mansour’s first transformative experience onstage. The next time they’d rehearsed, he’d become frustrated, got to the brink of quitting altogether because he couldn’t get to that feeling again.
“What? You tryna get high?” Keifer laughed. “Mansour, you’re not gonna feel that way every time you perform. And chasing that feeling is the fastest way to driving yourself crazy.”
“If I can’t feel this again then what’s the point?”
“Sometimes it’s just work, man. Believe me, there’s a lot more to life,” Keifer had replied.
In Bahia, Mansour has seen more men who resemble Keifer than he ever did in America. At the market, the beaches; in the men who smoke pipes and play claves, who send samba rhythms into the house from either side of the chilly hills. He keeps seeing his aunts in the Brazilian women too. When he called home to confirm that Mama received his wire for the down payment on the estate, she had been all business, chastising him when she heard the longing in his voice on the muffled line.
“Eh, don’t get distracted, you’re about to be famous.” He’d smiled at the phone; she couldn’t hide her pride in him.
Lost in his memories, Mansour lets out a sigh, and the small noise bothers Bonnie, who stirs in the bed.
“Mansee,” Bonnie mutters now in the dark room, a name for him that came out of her mouth out of nowhere a couple of days ago. “Are you smoking again?”
She lifts her head to see more of him.
“You’re gonna be all raspy,” she says, throwing back her head, as if his grittiness were the most delicious thing in the world, before dropping her face in the pillow again.
On the first night they met, he saw in her what he’d thought he’d never find. Someone with his penchant for manifesting dreams. Someone with a need for a life of wonder. Someone ripped so violently from all roots that they needed the whole world to feel like home.
76. AN HOUR TO SHOWTIME, and when Mansour looks up from the stage, the sky corroborates his plan to chill: it’s overcast but terrifyingly bright. All day the band has buzzed around him with repetitive questions, but he’d dodged everybody’s angst with nods and vague one-word answers. When they wouldn’t leave him alone, he hid out in an old slave cabin on the festival grounds, and when the musicians asked Bonnie if she knew where he’d gone, she kept it vague to protect his peace. Laughing, she’d said that he was communing with the ancestors.
He just needs them to feel it now, doesn’t want to plan it any tighter than it’s already been planned. Given the way he and Keifer carried on about the music, he knows he’s thrown off the New York musicians with these new liberal instructions, contradicting his reputation as a meticulous composer (or, as Bonnie says, a control freak).
But today, even Bonnie would agree that he is weirdly lax, was late to wake. Then made love to her so good and slow, she said, like it was the dead of night and not the most important morning of their lives. Washing her back in the shower, he told her that he’d surrendered the day. He could tell she had enough on her mind without getting too far into his; he could tell that she was half-listening, nodding and pretending to understand what the hell he meant. And now, out on the stage for their run-through, he’s still not quite in his body, his mind hovering just above the preshow scene.
The drummer, Davis, has food poisoning, but he is coming into the wings now; he has found a blonde to tend to him. The trumpeter is still unclear on the transitions. He’s stopped asking Mansour for clarity because he doesn’t understand his answers, but as he walks onstage, he pulls Liam to one side and vents.
“It’s just crazy how he hears one thing and can’t ever communicate what the hell he means! Play it like this, like that; like what?”
Liam nods, sympathetic, but this many years in, he’s used to it.
“And he keeps tellin’ me to look at the music. I see the goddamn music, I see the notes, that’s not what I’m asking you for, man. Damn.”
Bonnie sits on the edge of the stage barefoot, yelling commands at the tech staff with a microphone in hand. They’re running the lights, but these aren’t the lights he wanted.
The filters finally shift blue. “Obrigada!” she lets out, dramatically applauding in the direction of the tech booth. She speaks into the mic to Mansour.
“Is that what you wanted, Mr. Ndoye?”
“Perfeito,” he replies with a thumbs-up.
“It took thirty-five people but won’t he do it. Hallelujah. Glory in the end,” Bonnie jokes on the mic.
“Don’t you start.” The trumpeter laughs across the stage, making Bonnie laugh louder. She loves having a brother from the States with them.
The new horn section rehearses across the stage. They are perfectly in sync. Crisp. Mansour’s notes pop; they enlarge and flow just as he imagined. Mansour is beaming. It’s a lifelong dream come true to have musicians who play what’s actually on the damn page.
“Hey, you,” Bonnie says on the mic, turning back to him.
“Hey,” he yells over to her on his mic.
“First smile of the day. I saw that.”
“They’re fantastic.”
“They auditioned for me first. So that’s my taste you’re appreciating.”
“I’m forever in your debt.”
“And how would you like to repay me?”
He teases, speaking into the mic with an extra-deep voice—something Don Cornelius–esque. “Mind your manners, Mrs. Ndoye.”
“No proposals onstage, please. You’ll never live it down,” Liam jokes from across the way.
Bonnie is still staring at Mansour. She bites her bottom lip and turns away, smiling her anti-smile.
There is a strange sound growing in the distance. An ocean roaring. A thousand monsters hyperventilating. When Mansour leans to the right of the stage, he sees them: the boisterous audience is arriving at the barriers, too many bodies to count. It’s the kind of gathering that makes him lose all balance, all sense of time and place. The people are held back by an iron gate like rabid cattle. They’ve come to dance and are already dancing.
To preserve his voice, Mansour doesn’t go full out during their last sound check. He sits on a stool in the middle of the stage. But he’s making far too many changes this close to showtime. His final-hour ambition always flips Bonnie’s stomach: pulling songs, changing rhythms. She disappears to the caterer’s tent. There’s a host of problems there too, chiefly that everything has pork in it. She speaks to the promoter’s assistant.
“Did you read the rider? He can’t eat any of this stuff. Can you get me a hotel menu instead, please?”
“Sure, absolutely, ma’am.”
She turns away, gagging at the scent of the food. She rushes back to the stage’s open air. The breeze works well at first.
A poster of the album cover, scaled for the enormous stage, has just been erected. It lords over the entire event. At this size, all its flaws are exaggerated: the awkward shape of Claudine’s left eyeball, the full lips that look misshapen, the chin that is too pointy (she could never do chins). Gaudy, childish, a brazen cry for her mother. And yet it has gone around the world and still, somehow, never reached her. There are copies of the records and posters of it on high tables in the press tent.
She can smell her sweat, realizing that she didn’t use deodorant. Brazilian journalists and seasoned music managers are standing around the stage. Hands in pockets. Swirling glasses of brandy. Approaching Mansour with bad jokes like college boys at a party. Older. White. Connected. Among them, Bonnie knows, is an RCA executive. Someone else from Columbia.
One such man had made a pass at her. Earlier that morning, he’d fondled her hand more than shaking it and then gripped it so long and tight that Mansour had put his hand over hers, breaking the man’s grip as he stared him in the eye. As they’d chewed gum, not speaking, just staring at the ocean for a moment afterward, she’d clung to him, wanting to tell him about everything that happened before—all of the unwanted attention she’d suffered through for him—but she didn’t want to distract him right before the show. These days the balance between manager and girlfriend is critical, and it always leaves her wanting.
Now, as she stands in the wings with the buzz of the crowd building, she worries if a day is coming when she’ll have to completely sacrifice one for the other to thrive. Suddenly her throat is full of too many tastes. She vomits. It splatters loudly, a pale and textured map of her mind at her toes.
77. “OH-OH-OH, ça va là? Bonnie—” Mansour rushes to the wings, grabbing her before she falls. Two women working the stage approach and one caresses her back while the other speaks to her too loudly in Portuguese. He responds for her, and they begin to usher her to the greenroom. A moment later, he brings water. Squatting before her, he hands her the glass, then grips her knees.
“You’re like Aquaman,” she jokes, seeing his worry over her and trying to quell it.
“I don’t know who that is.” He wipes her face, still serious.
“Didn’t you ever read comic books?”
“I was too busy listening to Vivaldi,” he says and winks.
“Naturally.” She rolls her eyes. “And I’ve been meaning to ask: When did you learn Portuguese?” she says, mimicking his accent.
“I don’t sound like that,” he says, and having finally made him laugh, she smiles, satisfied.
“Yes, you do—”
“Shh. Stop talking,” he says. “Bois.”
He’s watching her drink the water, waiting for her to get all of it down. She holds eye contact, studying him. The audience roars; the wind blows open the tent. Twenty minutes to showtime. He’s shaking at the sound, his nerves, for a moment, turning frazzled. She doesn’t mention it but takes his hand.
“Do you think that maybe …” He’s talking quietly, carefully.
“Hmm?” she says, her mouth full.
“Do you think that maybe you’re pregnant?”
Panic crosses her face. “No.”
“Have you been … pregnant before?”
“Was it not obvious that you were my first?”
He starts to smile. “I got that sense. Yes.”
“How?”
“You were … as the Americans say … biting off a little more than you could chew.”
She starts to laugh, burying it behind her hand. He’s chuckling too as she pushes him playfully.
“What can I say? That’s me.” She looks beyond the tent, where the fruits of her enormous ambition can be heard in the sound of the people. Like the crash of the ocean. When she looks back at him, he’s staring at her, a little dazed, and she knows that he’s thinking the same things about her that she’s finally thinking of herself, seeing her magnificence. She drops her eyes, humbled by the reverence on his face, snapping them both out of it.
“But, listen, I’m making a point at you.”
“What point are you making at me?” She clowns his English syntax.
He leans closer, says, quietly, in French, “How can you be so sure that you’re not pregnant if you’ve never been pregnant before?”
She shrugs, feigns indifference, plays with his talisman necklace.
He shrugs, imitating her. She smiles. He studies her for a moment, as if assessing something. Then he stands abruptly.
“That’s it. Let’s get you back to the house.”
“No, I gotta be here! This is it!”
As if on cue, the audience swells even louder, and he has to speak up to be heard.
“What if it happens again?”
“Can’t you find me a bucket?”
He stares.
“Mansee, I’m just kidding. Relax.”
78. SHE’LL REMEMBER THAT SHOW most for the way the air grew thin, the dense concentration of bodies for miles.
She’ll remember the way the crowd changed after a few songs, from having a good time to trusting Mansour with their souls. The way that fifty thousand bodies could be as silent as one.
She’ll remember it for the panting, drenched musicians. A band thrown together in a single weekend from every part of the world, telling its story from Switzerland to Kedougou, from Mississippi to Belgium, from Brooklyn to Brazil, never losing the rhythm.
She’ll remember it for the rain that should have washed out the show, for the way the people had shouted, threatening the festival organizers with murder when an early closure of the concert was announced.
She’ll remember it for the way that Mansour walked back up to the mic in the downpour. Would you like to stay with me? he’d said, and she watched thousands of bodies jump high, a dark wave that merged with the night sky. The rain was warm, and when she let it touch her tongue, she found it sweet.
She’ll remember the moment she came closer, sitting onstage. In the darkness of the backdrop, watching him from behind, trying to imagine what it felt like to do what he did. He only wore jeans, his sculpted back bent forward, one voice filling up the world.
She’ll remember the way he looked at her when it was over and the audience was roaring. Didn’t speak, only looked at her like she had just appeared. A wonder. And how he didn’t bow, just paced the stage for twenty minutes of applause, until he jumped down, disappearing among them. The crowd carried him and his song for miles and miles.
79. WHEN MANSOUR LEFT the stage, he cemented his future as an artist and hers as a manager. The weekend after his second performance, there is a constant stream of calls at their little house on the hill. In the mornings, she walks like a zombie to the living room, takes the phone off the hook to finally get some sleep. In the evenings, she receives all the messages, returns the most important calls, and sits through enough pitches (now she is the one getting pitched) to change their lives forever.
She is surprised by her agitation. Somehow, despite all this good news, she would like to curl back into bed with him and keep life the way it is for a little while longer. Instead of the meetings in Rio she now has to take to close new deals, instead of the trip back to Paris to consider the other artists pursuing her for representation (that was a surprise), she would rather spend the day walking through the market with him, maybe going fishing in the little boat the owner of the house has loaned them. Staying out on the water, hiding from life until dark. To Bonnie’s surprise, good things, even great things, brought along fear and joy in equal measure.
She calls him awake from across the room to eat food that has turned cold since the first time she tried to wake him some hours before. He sits up in the dark, silent for too long.
“Mansee?”
His head is down, unmoving. He tells her there’s someone at the door. Insists that he’s heard a knock. When he yells for her to check, she goes, though she heard no knocking. When she’s just barely out of sight, he is unable to resist any longer, letting the seizure come over him.
There is first discussion of a helicopter to take them to the best hospital in São Paulo, but after the logistics go in circles, Bonnie hitches them a ride down to the nearest hotel. In the lobby, loud and barefoot, patrons gathering to watch her and her Afro, she insists that they get him somewhere now. They make it to a crowded hospital in Bahia forty minutes later. His Senegalese passport doesn’t do much, but her American one helps them cut through the standing-room-only waiting room, and the presence of the promoter’s assistant (a white Brazilian) does just as much to get him seen.
Bonnie spends the night and the following morning in his hospital room, waiting for him to wake. She’s offered water and the slimy white flesh of a cold coconut, but she only eats two morsels before her stomach starts to turn. She steps out for air, and when she’s returns, he’s complaining of a headache, cursing out the sunlight in Wolof, that language with all the round notes from his dreams.
“Who the hell are you?” he says with a furrowed brow.
“C’est moi,” she says, frightened. “It’s me, Mansee.”
“Are you my nurse?”
“Oh my God, it’s me, Bonnie.”
“Bonnie has very distinct features; I need to check to be sure.” He starts to lift her skirt; she slaps his hand as hard as she can. He grabs his wrist, reeling in pain from the strength of her slap as he chuckles.
“Merde.” He shakes it off.
She’s swiping tears from her eyes.
“You should know me by now,” he says. “You’re so easy. Come here.”
“No.”
“Come on.”
She straddles him. She’s looking him over. He, somehow, for all of his melanin, looks pale, but when she touches his forehead, it’s surprisingly cool. She takes in the disjointed rhythm of his heart, the way his stomach lifts and drops in a wonky beat.
“You had a seizure.”
He nods gently.
“Has this happened before?”
He nods again.
“Since we’ve been together?”
“Yeah.”
“How come I’ve never seen it happen?”
“I can usually get rid of you. You finally didn’t fall for it.”
“Are you sick?”
“You could say that.”
“Elaborate.”
“Your voice is getting deeper,” he says, imitating her sultry tone.
“Mansour, I’m serious.”
He looks away to the window where one enormous green leaf fills the view, dripping dew.
“I don’t know,” he says. “It just happens. It’s like I’m separated from everything, like I go someplace else.”
“Does it hurt?” She puts a hand to his face.
“Not really.”
He swipes the single tear from her cheek with his thumb, adjusts her glasses. “Hey. I’m OK. It’s just a thing that happens sometimes.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because,” he gestures to her, “women freak out.”
“Now I’m being grouped with past women—your harem? When you were seeing Amal, were you seeing all those girls that hang around her place at the same time?” Bonnie’s voice is gossipy and light. She wants to gloat.
“This is the perfect time for that thing you do.” He shrugs, demonstrating. The American shrug: the shoulders up to her ears, has no place in his culture; he’s been guessing exactly what it means since they met. He does it again. “Comme ça, n’est ce pas?” Like this, right?
She just looks at him with a slight smile, shakes her head. He touches her new and very subtle sideburns, feels again the new heat of her hands, taking in the fullness of her cheeks.
“What?” she says, smiling at his stare.
“I think you’re pregnant.”
She gets quiet, combing the tassels on his blanket with her fingers. “Stop. I can’t … I can’t think about that.”
“Then don’t. Let me think about it …”
He sits up a little, adjusting her body on his.
“Bonnie. I need to know. Don’t be scared of anything.” He kisses her until she turns her head from his mouth, just the slightest turn so that his lips remain on her face, so that her lips graze his face too. She’s very quiet.
“Mansee?”
“Hm.”
“We’re not so good with kids in my family.”
“We’re the same way,” he says. “But maybe you and I can be … maybe we can be different.”