He spoke to me often about the wide skies he grew up beneath in Eritrea, and the red rocks in the highlands. It sounded like what I had heard about the American Southwest, so I planned a trip for us. We went to Albuquerque, and Santa Fe, drove the high road to Taos, ate fresh tortillas and saw the blood-stained walls of the church of the penitents, followed a black hawk down a river for dozens of miles, and sat on boulders in the cool fresh air, tilting our faces to the impossibly bright sunshine, soaking in its pure energy. Everywhere we went, fleece from cottonwood trees swirled around us, like a conjurer’s transformative wind. We lived out of time for two weeks.
The advent of the Hale-Bopp comet was imminent. We felt we were chasing it, or it was chasing us. In Ojo Caliente, a hot spring in northern New Mexico, we watched stars streak across the sky, the moon evaporate into eclipse, all gone save a bright white sliver and red Mars. We watched from a lithium spring, arsenic bath, iron tub, and salty water steaming from the ground. In the lounge we watched our first TV in days and saw that people from a strange cult called Heaven’s Gate interpreted in the same comet a doomsday directive and so ate poison in applesauce, drank vodka, and died. They believed they were going to the spaceship. When we kissed, we tasted minerals on each other’s lips. We ate peach pie on the wrap-around porch. We saw a total lunar eclipse in Sedona. Somewhere there is a picture of us that we asked a stranger to take as we watched the sunset from a hillside in a crowd of hundreds, and everyone clapped when the burning orb dropped out of view. In Havasupai, we hiked the ten miles down to the reservation. You could hear the waterfall before you saw it. Brilliant-colored wildflowers abounded. You could also hear reggae; the gospel of Bob Marley played everywhere. The Indians respected Ficre because he was an African, an ancient man. We ate what seemed to be there: hot dogs and ketchup and fry-bread and M&M’s.
We drove—he drove—2,000 miles. He prided himself on being a road warrior. One night we drove across an infinite field under the stars and heard Navajo, and then someone speaking to Jesus, and then, sounds from the spaceship. I found a bit that Ficre wrote about that trip, and for some reason, it was in Spanish. It begins, “Eramos dos.” We were two, the last people left on earth.
Five
He called his mother in faraway Asmara to tell her we were marrying. I got on the phone, having learned my “selam”—“hello”—and “Kemay aleka”—“how are you,” if speaking to a woman—and though we did not share a language, I felt her gladness at her beloved son’s happiness in the tones of our talk. He hung up the phone and said, “I miss my mother,” and wept for the first time in my presence. This was life in diaspora.
We waited a year impatiently until the end of my teaching quarter at the University of Chicago and then he drove out to the city of big shoulders I had come to love so well, loaded up the car, and took me to New Haven. That was June of 1997. August 16 we were married in Saint Barbara Greek Orthodox Church in Orange, Connecticut, the closest we could get in New Haven to the church of his childhood. Then I changed from my simple wedding gown into a traditional Eritrean dress and we danced in hundred-degree heat in his brother Gideon’s New Haven backyard to Congolese rumba played by a pan-African band called Dominicanza. Our guests ate injera and stews. We danced the consecrating guayla under a canopy held aloft by our families, who each took turns coming under to bless us. Two of his older female relatives beat small oil drums. The men danced with ferocious grace in a circle together. My brother’s two small children, Maya and Jonah, twirled from soul to soul. In the middle of it all I slipped away and went inside to lie down in an upstairs bedroom, my cheeks burning with our secret. The heat and the music came through the wide-open windows from outside. I fell into a profound sleep, my hand on the baby quickening within me. When I woke and rejoined the celebration, at the peak of the August New Haven humidity, a wild storm briefly broke and then, Dear Reader, there appeared a double rainbow, the first I had ever seen. Some of the Eritreans slept under the wedding tent in the backyard and even the next day, there was ululation as they awakened. Ficre and Elizabeth were married.
Six