Somebody's Heart Is Burning (24 page)

She shook her head. “At another house they would be beaten, but I am too soft with them, so they take advantage of me.”

It was hard to imagine the cowering Nyanga taking advantage of a mosquito, but I held my peace.

On my first full day in Ouagadougou, Brigitte and I wandered together through
le Grand Marché
, an enormous market housed in a blocky cement building. “It used to be outside, the African way,” Brigitte said with disdain.

Brigitte wouldn’t let me pay for anything, insisting on playing the perfect hostess. She bargained fiercely to bring down the price of a woven bracelet I tried on from the equivalent of sixty-five cents to about forty. When she began buying vegetables for lunch, I stopped her.

“Why don’t we go to a restaurant?” I said. “My treat.”

“Restaurant?” She looked hesitant.

“Come on,” I said. “We passed one yesterday when we got off the bus.”

Still skeptical, she followed me to
La Grotte
, a restaurant in the international section of town, close to the chichi
Hôtel de
l’Indépendance.
The restaurant was nestled behind another building, its white plastic tables shaded by umbrellas. Large white blossoms perfumed the air, and rotating fans provided a light breeze. Palm and banana trees surrounded the enclosure; the light that danced sideways onto our table was mottled and green. A brilliantly colored parrot perched nearby on a wooden post, keeping mum. The clientele was mostly white.

From the moment we entered, Brigitte grew quiet, looking around her with widened eyes. She sat with her hands in her lap, not picking up the menu the waiter placed in front of her.

“Don’t you want to order?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “I’m not hungry,” she said, her eyes flicking back and forth.

“Are you sure?” She nodded. “Well, at least have a drink, okay?” She nodded again. “You can share my food,” I added.

I ordered a chicken dish with
tô
, the staple of the region, a firm porridge made from pounded millet. When the waiter asked Brigitte for her order, she mouthed, “Coca Cola.”

“Excuse me?”

She cleared her throat, “Coca Cola.”

“Why do you order this dish?” she asked me, after the waiter had gone.

“What do you mean?”

“This isn’t your food.”

“I’m in Africa. I want to eat African food.”

She shook her head with incredulity. “This food is too plain. I wouldn’t serve you this food.”

She continued to shake her head as I paid the bill, which came to roughly five dollars.

“A bit of a splurge,” I said. She was silent all the way home.

But sitting in the packed dirt yard the next morning, Brigitte was full of plans. It was a cool, fresh morning, the sky a guileless baby blue that bore no hint of the heat to come. We’d carried out the white plastic table and chairs and were eating our breakfast in the shade of a plane tree.

“You will find me a job in your country,” she said. “I can do anything. I can cook, I can clean. All kinds of African dishes. I worked for a German family; they were very content with my work.” She paused, then continued. “You will find me a family. They can send the plane ticket, then when I work, they don’t pay me until it’s paid for. They can get a visa for me.”

“What about your children?” I asked.

“They will stay with my mother,” she said. “It’s only two, three years. I’ll make a lot of money, then I’ll come back. I’ll open a restaurant, my own, like the one yesterday. Cook African food; white people will come.”

“And your husband?”

“He doesn’t mind.” She flipped her hand. “He’s not mean. You will find me a job?”

“I don’t think—”

“I know it’s not sure.”

“It’s really not—”

“You will try?”

I shrugged helplessly. “I’ll try.”

That night, Yolan cooked a delicious dinner of savory chicken soup. When they weren’t busy serving us, Yolan and Nyanga ate their meals out in the yard while we sat inside at the table. Rod pulled her chair as close to mine as possible, so that our knees touched while we ate. Lidia sat at a small table by herself, her face covered with food.

“Please can I go play, Mama? Please can I, please please please?” Constantin held out his empty bowl for inspection.

“And where is your schoolwork?” She turned to me. “Last week he missed half on his geography test.”

“I did it, Mama. All finished, tout c’est fini! Fini, fini, fini!”

“All right, all right, go, my ears cannot bear to hear you,” she swatted at him as he left.

“He is bad,” she said. “He never wants to do his work.” She smiled indulgently at Lidia. “That one never gives me any problems.”

“He’s not bad,” I said.

“No?”

“No. He’s just a normal boy.”

“Is he?” She seemed pleased.

“Uh huh,” I nodded vigorously. “Just a boy.”

Rod had finished her meal, and was tugging at my skirt. Her mouth was moving, and I brought my ear close. She was repeating the word boy,
“garçon, garçon, garçon . . .”
I lifted her onto my lap.

“How did she get the name Rod?” I asked.

“A white man,” said Rod, in perfect French.
Un homme blanc.

I looked at her in surprise. Brigitte started to giggle.

“What white man?” I asked the little girl.

“Mama’s boyfriend,” she said, and went back to eating her soup.

“An American, named Rod,” said Brigitte. “Peace Corps. He wanted to marry me, but my mother said no. I was only seventeen, and I was scared. If it were now, I would go with him. I would go like that.” She made a whisking motion with her hand.

“So you gave her his name? Your husband doesn’t mind?”

She shrugged again, a bored expression crossing her face. “I told you . . .”

My voice joined hers, “He’s not mean.”

When I accepted Brigitte’s invitation, I’d planned to stay two or three days. A week had gone by, and I was expecting my visa from the Malian embassy any day. As the time of my departure approached, Brigitte’s conversations with me developed an urgency, as though there weren’t time for her to say everything she wanted to say before I left. I too had begun confiding in her, talking about Michael and my dilemmas of the heart. Her response to my predicament was not unlike Santana’s.

“You say you love him?” she inquired.

“Yes I do. Very much.”

“Then what is the problem?”

I told myself to answer honestly, no matter how stupid it sounded. “It’s like we’re brother and sister,” I began. “I thought my lover, my soul mate . . . I thought it would feel different.”

“How should it feel?” she asked.

“Oh, I don’t know . . . Exciting. Passionate,” I paused for an instant. “Like travel. When I travel, I feel so
alive.
Every moment is charged. I guess I thought love would be more like that. You know, constant discovery. I know it’s too much to expect, I
know
that, but—”

“You are like a man,” said Brigitte. “Always wanting something fresh.”

“It’s not that,” I said, a little too loudly. “It’s just . . . I mean . . . Why should I force myself to stay in one place, with one person, if it doesn’t make me happy? Just because some societal standard says I’m a bad person, a bad
woman,
if I don’t? I never want to hurt anyone, believe me! But sometimes people get hurt, not by design, but just by the truth of how things are. I mean, I blame myself, of course I do, I blame myself
all the time.
But what can I do? All you can do is try to deal in truth, right, moment to moment? Try to do the best you can with the information that’s available to you?” I stopped, shocked by my outburst, amazed to find myself crying.
God, girl,
I thought,
you’re more lost than you even knew.

Brigitte stared at me for a long moment, as though discovering something extraordinary.

“You can do any particular thing you want,” she said slowly.

“Pretty much,” I admitted. “Maybe that’s the problem.” I looked away in embarrassment.

“Does moving around make you happy?” she asked.

“Well, yeah, I guess,” I paused, laughed awkwardly, swiped at my eyes with the back of my hand. “I don’t know. Happi-
er.
”

Brigitte looked at me for a moment, then smiled and shook her head. “Just like a man,” she said, squeezing my hand. “Except for this.” She lifted her finger to my cheek and captured a fugitive tear.