From the direction of my bedroom, an angry voice roared some unintelligible curse, a door flew open, and someone stomped into the hallway. She arrived in a fury, gaped at the pan-shaped hole in the ceiling and then at the skillet on the tiles, and spewed another torrent of gibberish, which sounded like swearing in the French language or some personal patois spiced with Spanish and English. Her dark brown eyes fixed upon me, and I could see the anger flare and then recede. Acknowledging the absurdity of the moment, she began to laugh in a tone rich as coffee sweetened with sugarcane.
She was a beautiful young woman of African descent, her skin shaded to rich brown, and tall and slender limbed. Like the others she wore an elegant dress, hers a royal purple wrap trimmed with a trail of golden lionesses at the collar, sleeves, and hem. Rings of gold decorated the fingers on both hands, as well as the second toe of her left foot. A thick golden chain encircled her ankle, and enormous gold hoop earrings, round as saucers, hung to her shoulders. Hiding her hair, a cloth not unlike a turban was knotted at the base of her skull. “J’arrive trop tard,” she said. “Il n’a pas re?u la casserole sur la tête. Merde.”
“Ah, you are French,” the old man said, and then seeing the confusion on my face, he asked, “Parlez-vous anglais?”
“Speak French to me. It is the universal language.”
The old man chuckled softly to himself. “Once upon a time,” he said, “but now you are in modern America. Ce fou-là ne sait rien du fran?ais.”
Clearly exasperated by his reply, she said nothing, but simply undid the clasp of her gown and let it fall to the floor. Naked and unashamed, she closed her eyes and reached back to untie the knot of her headdress, and as she lifted the cloth, a torrent of black ink washed down her face and covered her body like a waterfall. When the last drop dripped into the dress at her feet, a pattern remained behind on every inch of her skin. “Don’t be suddenly modest,” she said in halting English. “Come closer and have a look. Don’t tell me you have forgotten your Marie.”
Written on the surface of her body were thousands of words in a small and spidery hand. I studied the sentence running along her collarbone before surrendering to my ignorance. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know how to read French.”
“I do!” the old man shouted, rubbing his hands gleefully. He approached and stood in front of her, his nose inches from her forehead, already inspecting the beginning of the story stamped there. “I will translate for you,” he told me, and then he kissed the first phrase inked on her skin and exclaimed, “Avec plaisir!”
He began in French. “Il était une fois … Are we to have a fairy tale?”
“No,” she shook her head. “This is a true story. Every word.”
From the breast pocket of his robe, the old man retrieved a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles and perched them on his nose and, peering through the lenses, he leaned in closely, inches from her skin, and translated as he read.
“Once upon a time there was a crocodile so hungry he could eat the world. Along the bank of the river, the crocodile would hide in the water and when the other animals came to quench their thirst, for it is very hot all the time in the old motherland, wham, he would catch them in his enormous jaws and chomp, chomp, eat them for his supper. First the zebra, but the crocodile did not like the taste of stripes. Then the giraffe, but he did not care for the spots. He even tried the poppo—”
The naked woman said, “Hippopotamus.”
“Ah, I see. But the poppo was too fat and the crocodile’s mouth was too tired after all that chewing. He would like to try the elephant, but no elephant ever came to this part of the motherland.
“All of the animals came to fear the crocodile with the enormous appetite, and they hesitated to go to the river, even though the sun shone brightly in the summer sky and no rain would fall. A great thirst fell upon them. We cannot be free, said the animals, until the tyrant is vanquished. In desperation they approached the king of the jungle, the lion, but he could not be bothered to leave the shade or disturb his nap. Only a pair of lionesses, who had been listening nearby, were moved to pity, and they agreed to see what could be done about the terrible crocodile.