Whites (15 page)

Now the
sangoma
wanted him to turn onto his stomach. He complied. Ione materialized near them, enraging the
sangoma
. The old argument began again. Ione was interfering. This time the
sangoma
was obdurate. Ione would have to wait outside while he completed the ritual, which was almost at an end, and he would absolutely refuse to continue so long as she stayed. He appealed to Carl, saying “
Rra
, you must command this woman. She must wait some time on the outside, from this moment. She shall destroy my power.” He had a hoarse, grating voice. He sounded weak. Maybe this was hard work for him.

Carl asked Ione to wait outside. She was unhappy. He said he would tell her everything that happened—that was a promise. Something was bothering Ione which she wasn’t communicating, but there was no time for this. She wouldn’t budge.

He was having to keep her face in view from a painful angle. This business couldn’t be dragged out forever just because she didn’t like some detail or other. She had had her chance to be an observer. The
sangoma
had to be allowed to finish.

She said, “Then are you, yourself, asking me to leave you in here?”

“I think I am,” he said.

He had to shout at her, finally. It took his last strength. He tried to point out that they had paid their admission, that this wasn’t like going into a restaurant and walking out after you looked at the menu. That had been Elaine’s specialty. She loved doing it just a little less than sending food back to the kitchen, which would happen at any point in a meal, so that you were never safe. You were on tenterhooks every time you ate out. He shuddered.

The
sangoma
bent over him. “Thanks, that woman is gone. Now you must set this into your mouth.” The
sangoma
handed Carl a piece of cardboard folded in half. Carl didn’t like this, and now the
sangoma
was untucking Carl’s shirt and pushing it up to expose his back. Carl wanted to say something, but the
sangoma
was chanting again, and the thought of interrupting seemed wrong. The
sangoma
gestured for Carl to bite down on the cardboard, so he did.

The
sangoma
bent down to him again. “Now what I must do is cut you some places, just like this way …” He dragged a thumbnail lightly along the canvas near Carl’s face. “It is just your skin.”

Carl started to get up, but checked himself, overcome by a new sensation. It was the sensation of conviction. The ritual felt real to him for the first time. Someone whose motives were good was going to reach down and cut him while he was wide awake. It was remarkable. He relaxed.

The pain of the first cut startled him. He had to concentrate. He counted the cuts as they came. The first was the worst—the deepest, he guessed. There were six cuts all told, three on each side of his spine, all on his upper back. It was like being burned. He gathered that the instrument was a knife blade, not a razor. He was breathing too fast.

“
Rra
, I must put you some powders,” the
sangoma
said, tenderly. He patted Carl’s neck.

The powder made his cuts sting even more. Carl spat out the cardboard. The
sangoma
tamped the powder down. Carl smelled ashes.

The
sangoma
helped Carl sit up. “You must set your shirt right,” the
sangoma
said. Carl tried. His back was crawling with pain that had to stop if he was going to walk. The
sangoma
helped him with his shirt and then with finding which pocket the balance of the fee was in.

Carl got to his feet. He was all right. He could walk
decently. The
sangoma
would keep the dog bowl, apparently. The
sangoma
said something about not worrying anymore about the dogs. It was over.

Outside, it was brilliant. He kept walking. The air was sweet, overwhelming. There was Ione, pacing and smoking near the car. Now she saw him. She flicked her cigarette butt into the
donga
, which he wanted to stop her from doing because of veld fires, but it was too late.

The thing now was to get to the car. There might be some bleeding. If Ione noticed something, she would start up again with the
sangoma
and they could never leave. He thought, I have to keep my back behind me.

Once they were moving, she wanted to talk. He put her off, pleading fatigue. A taxi passed them, going in the opposite direction—unusual, because taxis mostly stuck to the paved roads. Ione slowed, craned her head out the window: clearly, she was trying to catch the taxi’s plate number, but why? Something is eating her, he thought. He would hear all about it. He promised to be available at the office the next day for a leisurely phone call after lunch. That seemed to pacify her. She was concerned about him. He felt fine. He had done everything he could. There was nothing else. She was driving too fast. The jolts hurt his back. He was nearly faint.

They were still nowhere when Ione stopped. She wanted to know what was wrong. He told her about the cuts. He couldn’t help it. She wanted to go back and find the
sangoma
. Her face was set.

He argued. He said the
sangoma
would be gone. He said it was getting too late. He told her she couldn’t. He had to get home.

She listened to him, finally, and drove in the right direction.

•    •    •

At certain moments he felt like a genius, or fox: only Ione knew about going to the
sangoma
. But he was sick. He was aware that he was fairly sick. His fever was up and his throat was bad. He was perspiring everywhere. But luck was with him. For months he had been warning Lo that everyone who came to Botswana got tick-bite fever sooner or later, which could actually be what he had, although he doubted it. Anyway, she accepted that tick-bite fever was what he had. His cuts were still his secret. They had to heal. Five of them had. The other part of the game was to keep the nurse from finding anything out.

He was getting sleep. He was taking sick days and sleeping all day. At night, if he heard the dogs they blended in with his fever dreams. They were still there. Lo was the best person to be around right now, because she distrusted doctors and loved taking care of him and would go along that way for time immemorial.

But then he was getting too weak. It was hard to really want to get well, because of the pleasure of sleeping. But he was getting too weak, for sure. So far, Lo was just giving him aspirin, because she was all gung ho for letting nature take his or her course, so naturally she was going along with the proposition that you just take aspirin for a week or so and let the tick-bite fever burn itself out and then you’re left immune for time immemorial, instead of going for tetracycline which knocks it out in twenty-four hours but leaves you still susceptible. But now it was time to get well fast, so it was time to go for his secret weapon: Elaine’s pharmacopeia. The glands in his armpits were hurting. Elaine always got doctors to give her their free samples of every damned thing. Elaine always had everything she might need for medication because she for one would never stand for being someplace in the Third World and finding herself where some doctor could say yea or nay. Somehow her medicine collection had wound
up with his effects, not hers, after the split. So now it was his, all the Valium and all the rest. Why did he end up with it? He knew she had dynamite antibiotics in there. Why did he have her medicine? She must have forgotten. If she remembered, she might get a cable out on it. But now it was his.

He was having long dreams. It was always too hot. The walls were sliding up into the ceiling all the time. Lo was scared, he could tell. He was beyond food. Lo wanted the nurse. On the other hand, he would be all right any day because of Elaine. He was only tasting what Lo had given him—broths and so forth. It was too hot for broth. Lo was even letting there be air-conditioning. She loved him. He would be fine because of the neomycin he was taking—plenty of it. Elaine was saving him, Elaine, who got him going the first time they met by saying “Wreck me.” Neomycin saved Elaine once. It was the strongest thing there was. He was young when she said “Wreck me.” She knew what she was doing. Probably she was still doing it. Lo gave him a Compral to take. Compral was stronger than aspirin, and was from South Africa. He faked taking it. His eyes itched.

Before he could get better the nurse came, and then she was there all the time. She was gone, right now. They knew about the scabs on his back and were asking him about them. His throat was a good excuse not to answer things. He was keeping mum. He was worried about the knitting factory, because he was supposed to remind the women about something about business taxes. It was all right, because it was written down somewhere at work. He felt his hipbones by accident. They were like knives.

He was aware of arguments going on, but not really arguments. One thing he could tell was that Lo had been crying.
It was after the nurse found his neomycin. There was telephoning to Pretoria. Now the nurse was giving him injections. Lo should be strong.

Ione woke him up, bringing him something, money, talking too fast. She was talking so fast that powder was falling out of the lines in her throat. He had a compress on his forehead. She put the money in his nightstand drawer, and she was whispering. She felt it was her fault about the
sangoma
, so that was the why and wherefore of the money. She said she had to talk fast because she had used a trick on Lois to keep her out, so she could apologize—that was why she had to talk fast. Some of it he understood. The
sangoma
was a fake, just an actor jumping ship from a troupe from South Africa putting on plays in churches in Botswana—morality plays. He was an illegal person. She had been duped. She had gotten suspicious when he was speaking English and wouldn’t use Setswana. Later on, she had realized he had the same voice as the go-between on the telephone, when she was searching for someone. And also, she found out afterward that he had taken the whole thing out of a book—it was Shona and not Tswana. She wondered if he had felt he had to do the incisions partly because he assumed she knew more about the ritual than she had. She was saying how sorry she was. And then when Lo came, she changed the subject. He felt sorry for Ione. He kept his hands under the covers. He was better, he told her. He was understanding more. She told him he looked like a carving.

Now he could get up all right. The world bounced when he walked, but he could walk. It was going away with the injections. People were watching wherever he went. Lo was sleeping on her exercise mat at the foot of the bed. He almost walked on her.

•    •    •

He woke up with a mystery to solve. It had to do with the night before. The dogs had been active, and he remembered that clearly. But somehow he had slept hard at intervals while—he was sure—they were doing their worst. The answer wasn’t sheer fatigue, because he was better. His tremor was fading. His appetite was back. Today he was going to read at least two back issues of
Finance and Development
, cover to cover.

Something told him the nurse was in the wings. He turned onto his side. He would pretend to be asleep, in the hope that she might look in and go away. Lo wouldn’t let the nurse wake him up. He closed his eyes.

Bacon was what he wanted, but American bacon. That was one thing to be said about going back. Because it was clear they were going to have to go back. He had to stop fighting it. It was important not to panic over it. At least in America they put the lettuce inside the sandwich, not strewn in shreds all over the outside. Money was going to be the problem. He was afraid. People would tell him to go into business, leave the agency. He was an expert on business. But the idea repelled him. Why was everything in the world for sale, exactly? In fact, he was with the government because selling things seemed repellent to him. The government gave things away.

But nothing could be done. He was leaving Africa to her dogs. Lo would have to forgive him. Lo had worked before. She had been a cashier. She could learn bookkeeping—he would teach her. He had never taken one thing from Africa. This was too much self-pity. He had never touched an African woman, never, even when he could have. And when Elaine wanted to hide jadeite and tiger-eye in their household effects to smuggle back into the United States, he had drawn the line. He was through here. He was being destroyed.

Somebody was coming.

The nurse shook his shoulder. He rolled onto his back. Something was wrong.

“I’ve been talking to you,” she said, but not impatiently. She was being kind. She had an instrument in her hand. Lo was with her.

Making a show of fatigue, he turned back onto his side.

He was beginning to understand something. He lifted and lowered his head slightly, blotting out her voice when he set his head down. He sat up violently, full of hope.

Lo was saying that the nurse had something to tell him.
He knew what it was
. The nurse said he had been septicemic. He had self-medicated and he shouldn’t have. He had used something that was ototoxic and had made himself deaf in one ear, and she was sorry. Lo took his hand. She was weeping. The nurse was snapping her fingers to either side of his head, while he smiled. They could stay.

It seemed to Frank that he was adapting surprisingly nicely to life without a wife around the house. He wondered what it meant. By now, Ione was in Genoa or Venice or some other watering place in Italy. All her stops involved lakes or the beach. It was all there in the itinerary on the wall next to the phone. He could read it from where he was sitting and drinking, if he felt like it. He thought, Ione likes it overseas and she likes being here in Botswana, but the drought is wearing her down. The government was talking about cutting the water off from eight till dawn. It was going to be inconvenient for compulsive hand-washers, which he no longer was, but which a lot of other dental and medical people were. Ione felt parched, she said. So it was goodbye for three weeks. He toasted her again. There was a poet, an Italian, who had had Dante’s works printed on rubber so he could read them sitting naked in a fountain with the water running over him: that was the image of her vacation she’d said she wanted Frank to have. So it was goodbye, because he had the dental-care design team due in from the AID office in Nairobi to praise his plans for Botswana’s dental future, or not. There it was again, the small sound in the night he was trying to ignore. It was probably animal or vegetable. He was going to keep on ignoring it.