Mortals (30 page)

Iris had a history with these people. She had tried to help them. The bedspreads and tablecloths and mantillas and runners being sold were items that united incredible craftsmanship with appallingly cheap materials. That was the problem. The shawl Iris was wearing constituted a case in point. She was forever fiddling with it, gluing up broken threads, tightening it up in one way or another. Iris had spoken to several of the lace-makers about the mismatch, and they had seemed to understand. As he remembered it, she had gone so far as to locate a source for better linen thread for them, and they had seemed interested. What was the point of constructing these intricate and potentially beautiful objects out of what amounted to packing twine? But there had been no outcome.

It occurred to him that Iris had spoken to the wrong people. There was a hidden government among the hawkers. There always is, he thought. He could delve. There was a top woman, who occupied the prime spot in the encampment and whose lace stand was shaded by golf umbrellas, new ones. She was probably the one to speak to, not that it would do any good. He could find out, if Iris wanted to pursue it. She liked to correct things. She thought the world was more pliable than it is. Every time she saw the cordon of prostitutes around the entrance to the Sun, her mind ran in the direction of what could be done for them. She had a general impulse toward social helpfulness that somehow never resulted in organized action, like working with the gleaners the way Alice Wemberg had, actually getting out of the house and going to the site of the iniquity. He knew what she would say about that. She would say, if they were ever able to discuss it honestly, that he discouraged it, in part because it would raise their profile, which was always to be avoided, and in part because … he needed her so inordinately. For example, he always wanted to know where she was and that wherever she was it was a reasonable place to be, a safe place. Because the fact was that without her the world would be unintelligible to him. That much was true.

“Did I miss anything?” he asked her.

“Oh, only a fascinating dispute between the man who spoke so beautifully,
Mister Kerekang, and a man who’s still not your favorite person, I gather.”

“Tell me.”

“Well I didn’t get all of it, remember. Possibly because I had to stop and concentrate on particular things I knew you’d find interesting, like the reasons Davis gave for wanting to be in Africa …”

He felt taut. It appeared that what she had was Morel’s mission statement, or what he was interested in having people think was his mission statement. He was taut because the underlying burning question of what exactly was going on with her over at Morel’s was with him constantly, like indigestion. That question would be coming up and into the light sometime soon, if not tonight. It would happen before she left for the States, that was certain. It could be tonight, depending on what she had to say about Morel in the next segment. Going to the Sun rather than going home was a way of postponing the conversation, for him if not for her. Was she cooperating with his struggle to postpone the Morel question, the full-dress moment? She seemed blithe enough. He was the one with the problem. He was the one with the full plate. They had to be at home when he picked the moment to thrash the thing out, or was it thresh the thing out? For an instant both words seemed equally correct in the phrase, a sign that he was getting old, proof positive.

“Let’s see,” she said. “Let’s see how I do with my memory palace.”

“Your memory palace.”

“You know what that is?”

“I think I do,” he said. Of course he knew. “You mean where you visualize a building you know every detail of by heart and then use different features of it to pigeonhole pieces of information so you can recover them by association.”

“Davis suggested the idea to me. It’s a simple concept. I must’ve heard of it in the past but just never paid attention to it or never thought it was relevant to me. He mentioned it when I was complaining about my short-term memory.”

“You think your short-term memory is worse lately, but it isn’t. You’ve always had an erratic memory.”

“Well, I beg to differ. But it doesn’t matter. It was bothering me, so I included it in my long menu of objections to myself and my body. And Davis made this suggestion, which I’ve been employing for a few weeks and which, well, which I think helps. I could be wrong. Do you notice any improvement?”

“Maybe so. I don’t know. You’re variable.” There was nothing wrong
with using memory palaces if you needed to. This device had been covered during training. But he never used it. His memory worked without tricks. When he absorbed a scene or a sequence it was an effortless process. It was a form of becoming the scene, surrendering to it. He was unusual, when it came to memory, it was a gift. In the agency he was regarded as a prodigy, or once had been. He was pleased if using memory palaces was genuinely going to work for her. They would see.

He wondered what template she used for her memory palace. It would be one of the houses she’d lived in when she was growing up, undoubtedly. That was what he’d used when he’d tried the technique out. He was curious to know.

“I’m curious,” he said. “I’m curious to know what edifice you’re using for your memory palace. I don’t mean to be intruding.” He realized that he wanted it to be the house they were living in.

“Oh nononono. There’s nothing secret about this. Please. Actually I have two I use. One as you might expect is our house, going in the front door, to the right and then to the left, room by room, and I can start with the driveway, the yard, to expand it. That’s one memory palace. But I have another one for less complicated sequences.”

He broke in. “Ensembles,” he said. She might as well know the technical term.

“Thank you, ensembles, then. So for less complicated ensembles I have another one that works very well, even better. I use it all the time. It’s dynamite.”

Ray was used to acting as her spare brain, her spare memory. He remembered the titles of books she’d read, and their authors, for example. She had relied on him, deferred to him, when a question of authorship came up, or the question of the title of a movie she could remember the basic plot of, and not much else. He might know who wrote the background music, not that anyone ever plumbed him for that. Amazing things from the tail end of movie credits would stick with him. Directors, he always knew. His remembering one thing or another for her had never been the occasion of any sort of fireworks or notice. It was just that he remembered the passing world better than she did, in more detail than she did, and so what?

He asked, “So what is the other template you use?”

“Hm,” was all she said.

“Oh come on.”

“I’m having second thoughts, I think.”

“Now I’m interested. Come on.”

“Hm,” she said again. She was being coy.

He said, “To my coy mistress, please tell me.”

“Okay,” she said. “I use yow.”

“In what sense?”

“
Yow
. I use your body. You naked.”

“Good God.”

“If I dress you up, say, and put things in different pockets and so on, it doesn’t have the same power.”

Eros, he thought … Oh my.

She said, “I tack different items to different body parts.”

“My naked body.”

“Yes.”

“And this was your own idea, not something the good doctor suggested.”

“No, my very own.”

“Using my body as a sort of bulletin board. I guess I’m flattered. And so where on my body would you tack say the most important thing in an ensemble that you wanted to remember?”

“Try and guess. Where would I put the seminal item?”

“Shame on you. Ahem. Well. You were going to give me your doctor’s mission statement.”

“Don’t call it that again, if you don’t mind.

“It wasn’t something he was eager to talk about. It wasn’t an announcement. And how would you like it if someone was being so bold as to ask you why you were in Africa, you yourself, why? You wouldn’t like it. You’d be taken aback. But of course it’s a legitimate question to ask any non-African who’s hanging around in Africa. It’s just that it doesn’t normally
get
asked, people are too polite. The answer to the question of why people turn up in Africa is never simple. Look at us. But he was asked, so he answered.”

“Don’t be defensive.”

“I’m not. And one other thing, just refer to him as Doctor Morel or just Morel if you can’t stand to call him Davis. You’ve met him now. He introduced himself to you as Davis. I don’t particularly want to hear good doctor or your doctor anymore. So call him Morel, which is probably what he is to you. Call him that. Calling him Morel has a slight touch of hostility to it, which you have toward him, so be up front. It’s fine with me.”

“Done,” he said.

“
Pointless
hostility I might add.”

Say nothing, he thought.

“So. What he said. There are three gifts, donations was his actual term, three donations the white world has given Africa, three poisoned gifts that have wrecked or distorted Africa’s own course of development, however that might have come out if Africa had just been left alone a little longer. These are perduring, his word, donations, things persisting long after the physical occupation of Africa ended, persisting long after independence.

“The three donations are, one, plantation agriculture … two, the nation-state … and three, the Christian religion.

“There was a parenthesis on slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, which would normally be included among the main poisoned gifts. He leaves it out because, even though it stimulated local slave-trading into something much more monstrous than it already was, it’s over with. And there were even worse sponsors, like the Muslims. The Arabs, that is.

“This he sort of rushed through. He sees himself in some ways, at least, as a beneficiary of white or Western civilization, an African beneficiary to boot. And he feels an obligation to do something about what the West has done to Africa.”

Ray contained himself.

“And he thinks Africa is dying.

“Obviously nothing can be done about the nation-state system.

“And nothing can be done about plantation agriculture. And here there was a little exchange with Kerekang, who wanted to know if Davis was including extractive industries, like mining and timbering, in the category of things that nothing can be done about, to which the answer was yes. I would say also that Samuel Kerekang was reserving his position on whether or not something could be done about agriculture, if somehow or other export agriculture couldn’t be supplanted by something else, but he agreed that it was a titanic problem.

“But something can be done about Christianity, which Davis thinks has had the worst effects of the three. So the major thing he is pledged to do … in addition to his medical work … is to lift the yoke of Christianity from the neck of Africa, help to. I don’t exactly see who he’s going to be helping, since nobody else is doing it that I know of. But that was his formulation.

“Also, I know from things he’s said at other times, not today, that he probably should have included the standard Western urban diet as another one of the poisoned gifts, and also one of the things he wants to do something about, in a lesser way. But I know what he thinks of the
town diet the Batswana are adopting, the Simba chips and the orange Fanta, the grease and sugar way of life, the reduced food palette …”

Ray said, “It’s funny to think of bush diet as a palette. People desperately scrabbling through the landscape for tubers and insects …”

“Yes, but you know what he means. In the bush the diet has hundreds of vegetable items that disappear in the town diet. You don’t disagree with this. People move to town and in old age they become obese, they gain mass, instead of getting leaner, which is healthier, and which is the norm in the countryside.”

“But he didn’t bring that up today, you said.”

“Right, he didn’t. Anyway, he laid some stress on his deciding to come to Africa and do this work particularly because he’s black, which brought a smile to Kerekang’s face because Davis is pretty light. His mother was white. I think he saw it wasn’t going down especially well, so he dropped it. But he has a perfect right to mention it. His background is Caribbean and everybody who’s black in the Caribbean was once a slave, even if his family somehow did very well in Montserrat and then when they came to the United States.

“His father was black. It’s an interesting family. His father taught at Harvard Divinity School for many years. Davis refers to him as a Protestant divine. His father also owned the company that produces the prewritten sermons Protestant ministers use when they don’t have time to write their own. It was enormously lucrative, I understand.

“I knew you’d find this interesting. His mother was an actual Boston Brahmin. Davis was close to her, but not to his father.”

“I wonder why not.”

“I don’t know, but this brings me close to the end of what I know about Davis. He trained for the ministry but not for very long. He switched to medicine.”

“Thus overthrowing his father.”

“I suppose. And then in medical school he fell in love with a Nigerian exchange student and married her and that didn’t work out …”

“What went wrong?”

“There was a divorce.”

“But over what?”

“His wife betrayed him, which almost killed him. There was a bitter divorce. There were no children, thank God. So then he finished medical school and went through a process of disillusion with conventional medicine, and he developed his own ideas of what goes on in healing …”

“Eclectic medicine.”

“Right. And that’s the story up to the present. He had his practice and he met these people from Botswana, government people, and he decided to come here.”

Ray said, “He tells you everything.”

“No he doesn’t. He tells me what I get out of him. You know how I am.”

“Well pardon me if I find this unusual. He could resist your curiosity if he wanted to, great force that it is. I would think. He could draw lines, right? He’s the doctor, you’re the patient.” Contain yourself, he thought.