“I don’t know . . . Thirty dollars here, thirty dollars there . . .”
“Yes?” said Fern brightly—he often failed to pick up on tone—and when I looked up I saw in his face so much optimism and interest in this small, new problem that it irritated me. I wanted to crush it.
“No, I mean—look, you go into the city, to every other village around here, you see these Peace Corps kids, the missionaries, the NGOs, all these well-meaning white people busy worrying about a few trees—as if none of you see the forest!”
“Now you are the one speaking in proverbs.”
I stood up and began urgently burrowing through the pile of supplies in the corner, looking for the Calor gas stove and the teapot.
“You wouldn’t accept these . . . microscopic solutions in your homes, in your countries—why should we accept them here?”
“‘We’?” queried Fern and then began to smile. “Wait, wait.” He came over to where I was wrestling with the gas canister and bent down to help me attach it to the ring which in my bad temper I was managing badly. Our faces came very close to each other. “‘These well-meaning white people.’ You think far too much about race—did anyone ever tell you this? But wait: to you I am white?” I was so startled by the question I started to laugh. Fern drew back: “Well, it’s interesting for me. In Brazil we don’t understand ourselves as white, you understand. At least my family does not. But you’re laughing—this signifies yes, you think I am?”
“Oh, Fern . . .” Who did we have out here except each other? I directed my torch away from where it had lit up the sweet concern in his face, which after all was not much paler than mine. “I don’t think it matters what I think, does it?”
“Oh, no, it matters,” he said, returning to his chair, and despite the dead bulb above our heads I thought I saw him blush. I concentrated on looking for a small and exquisite pair of Moroccan glass tumblers with a green stain. He told me once that he carried them everywhere with him on his travels, and this admission was one of the few concessions I ever heard Fern make to personal pleasure, to comfort.
“But I am not offended, no, all of this it is interesting to me,” he said, sitting back in his chair and stretching out his legs like a professor in his study. “What are we doing here, what is our effect, what will be left behind as legacy, and so on. It all has to be thought about, of course. Step by step. This house is a good example.” He reached to his left and patted a patch of exposed wiring in the wall. “Maybe they paid off the owner or maybe he has no idea we are in it. Who knows? But now we are in it and all of the village sees we are in it, and so now they know that it belongs, in essence, to nobody, or to anybody the state on a whim decides to give it to. So what will happen when we leave, when the new school is up and running and we don’t visit here much any more—or at all? Maybe several families will move in, maybe it will become a community place. Maybe. My guess is it will be taken apart, brick by brick.” He took off his glasses and massaged them with the hem of his T-shirt. “Yes, first someone will take the wires, then the sheeting, then the tiles, but eventually every stone will be repurposed. This is my bet . . . I may be wrong, we will have to wait and see. I am not as ingenious as these people. No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.”
“I don’t see anything ingenious about poverty like this. I don’t see anything ingenious about having ten children when you can’t afford one.”
Fern put his glasses back on and smiled at me sadly.
“Children can be a kind of wealth,” he said.
We were silent for a while. I thought—though I really didn’t want to—of a shiny red remote-control car, bought from New York for a young boy in the compound of whom I was especially fond, but it had come with the unforeseen problem of batteries—unforeseen by me—batteries for which there was sometimes money, most of the time not, and so the car was destined for a shelf I had noticed Hawa kept in the living room, filled with decorative but fundamentally useless objects, brought by clueless visitors, to keep company with several dead radios, a Bible from a library in Wisconsin and the picture of the President in a broken frame.
“I see my job this way,” said Fern firmly, as the kettle began to whistle. “I am not of her world, that’s clear. But I am here so that if she gets bored—”
“When she gets bored—”
“My job is to make sure something of use is left here, on the ground, whatever happens, whenever she leaves.”
“I don’t know how you do it.”
“Do what?”
“Deal with the drops when you can see the ocean.”
“Another proverb! You said you hated them, but see how you’ve caught the local habit!”
“Are we having tea or what?”
“Actually, it’s easier,” he said, pouring the dark liquid into my glass. “I respect the person who can think of the ocean. My mind no longer works that way. When I was young like you, maybe, not now.”
I couldn’t tell any more if we were talking of the whole world, of the continent in general, of the village in particular, or simply of Aimee, who, for all our good intentions, all our proverbs, neither of us seemed able to think of very clearly.
? ? ?
Woken at five most days by the roosters and the call to prayer, I got into the habit of going back to sleep till ten or later, getting to the school in time for the second period or the third. The morning of Aimee’s arrival, though, I felt a fresh determination to see the whole day while it was still mine to enjoy. I surprised myself—and Hawa, Lamin and Fern—by appearing at eight o’clock, outside the mosque, where I knew they met each morning without me and walked together to school. The beauty of the morning was another surprise: it reminded me of my earliest experiences of America. New York was my first introduction to the possibilities of light, crashing through gaps in curtains, transforming people and sidewalks and buildings into golden icons, or black shadows, depending on where they stood in relation to the sun. But the light in front of the mosque—the light I stood in as I was greeted like a local hero, simply for rising from my bed three hours after most of the women and children I lived with—this light was something else again. It buzzed and held you in its heat, it was thick, alive with pollen and insects and birds, and because nothing higher than one story interrupted its path, it gave all its gifts at once, blessing everything equally, an explosion of simultaneous illumination.
“What do you call those birds?” I asked Lamin. “The little white ones with the blood-red beaks? They’re beautiful.”
Lamin tipped his head back and frowned.
“Those? They are just birds, not special. You think they’re beautiful? We have much more beautiful birds than that in Senegal.”
Hawa laughed: “Lamin, you begin to sound like a Nigerian! ‘You like that river? We have a much more beautiful river in Lagos.’”