One Day I Will Write About This Place (19 page)

We chat, and when I ask her what brought her husband to Mwingi, she laughs. “You know Europeans always have strange ideas. He is a mKamba now; he doesn’t want anything to do with Europe.”

I can see a bicycle coming in the distance, an impossibly large man weaving his way toward us, his short rounded legs pumping furiously.

Enter the jolliest man I have ever seen, plump as a steaming mound of fresh
ugali,
glowing with bonhomie and wiping streams of sweat from his face. There is a familiar expression of mischief on his face—­something familiar to me, I don’t know why, as a Kamba thing, only with him it is multiplied to a degree that makes it ominous. His face has no irony, also a Kamba thing to me. Gruyere’s wife tells me this is the local chief. I stand up and greet him, then ask him to join us. He sits down and orders a round of beer.

“Ah! You can’t be drinking tea here! This is a bar!”

He beams again, and I swear that somewhere a whole
shamba
of flowers is blooming. I try to glide into the subject of cotton, but it is brushed aside.

“So,” he says, “so you go to South Africa with my daughter? She’s just sitting at home, can’t get a job—­Kambas make good wives, you know, you Gikuyus know nothing about having a good time.”

I can’t deny that. He leans close, his eyes round as a full moon, and tells me a story about a retired major who lives nearby and has three young wives, who complain about his sexual demands. So, it is said that parents in the neighborhood are worried because their daughters are often seen batting their eyelids whenever he is about.

“You know,” he says, “you Gikuyus cannot think further than your next coin. You grow maize on every available inch of land and cover your sofas with plastic. Ha! Then, in bed! Bwana! Even sex is work! But Kambas are not lazy, we work hard, we fuck well, we play hard. So drink your beer!”

I decide to rescue the reputation of my community. I order a Tusker. Cold.

What a gift charisma is. By eleven, there is a whole table of people, all of us glowing under the chief’s beams of sunlight. My tongue has rediscovered its French, and I chat with Monsieur Gruyere, who isn’t very chatty. He seems to be still under the spell of this place, and as we drink, I can see his eyes running over everyone. He doesn’t seem too interested in the substance of the conversation; he is held more by the mood.

It is midday when I finally excuse myself. We have to make our way to Mwingi. Kariuki is looking quite inebriated, and now the chief finally displays an interest in our mission.

“Cotton! Oh! You will need someone to take you around the district agricultural office. He! You are bringing development back to Mwingi!”

We arrive at the district agricultural office. Our meeting there is blessedly brief, and we get all the information we want. The chief leads us through a maze of alleys to the best butchery/bar in Mwingi. He, of course, is well known there, and we get the VIP cubicle. Wielding his potbelly like a sexual magnet, he breaks up a table of young women and encourages them to join us.

Whispered aside: “You bachelors must surely be starving for female company, seeing that you have gone a whole morning without any sex.”

We head off to the butcher, who has racks and racks of headless goats. I am salivating already. We order four kilos of ribs and
m˜utura,
blood sausage.

The
m˜utura
is delicious—­hot, spicy, and rich—­and the ribs tender and full of the herbal pungency that we enjoy in good goat meat.

After a couple of hours, I am starting to get uncomfortable at the levels of pleasure around me. I want to go back to my cheap motel room and read a book full of realism and stingy prose. Coetzee maybe? That will make me a Protestant again. Naipaul. Something mean-­spirited and bracing.

“No, no, no!” says Mr. Chief. “You must come to my place, back to the village. We need to talk to people there about cotton. Surely you are not going to drive back after so many beers? Sleep at my house!”

Back at the chief’s house, I lie down under the shade of a tree in the garden, read the newspaper, and sleep.

…

“Wake up! Let’s go and party!”

I am determined to refuse. But the beams from his face embrace me. By the time we have showered and attempted to make our grimy clothes respectable, it is dusk.

There is only space for two in the front of the pick­up, so I am sitting in the back. I console myself with the view. Now that the glare of the sun is fading, all sorts of tiny hidden flowers of extravagant color reveal themselves. As if, like the chief, they disdain the frugal humorlessness one expects is necessary to thrive in this dust bowl. We cross several dried riverbeds.

We are now so far away from the main road, I have no idea where we are. This lends the terrain around me a sudden immensity. The sun is the deep yellow of a free-­range egg, on the verge of bleeding its yolk over the sky.

The fall of day becomes a battle. Birds are working themselves into a frenzy, flying about feverishly, unbearably shrill. The sky makes its last stand, shedding its ubiquity and competing with the landscape for the attention of the eye.

I spend some time watching the chief through the back window. He hasn’t stopped talking since we left. Kariuki is actually laughing.

It is dark when we get to the club. I can see a thatched roof and four or five cars. There is nothing else around. We are, it seems, in the middle of nowhere.

We get out of the car.

“It will be full tonight,” says the chief. “Month end.”

Three hours later, I am somewhere beyond drunk, coasting on a vast plateau of semi­sobriety that seems to have no end. The place is packed.

More hours later, I am standing in a line of people outside the club, a chorus of liquid glitter arcing high out, then down to the ground, then zipping close. The pliant nothingness of the huge night above us goads us to movement.

A well-known
dombolo
song starts, and a ripple of excitement overtakes the crowd. This communal goose bump wakes a rhythm in us, and we all get up to dance. One guy with a cast on one leg is using his crutch as a dancing aid, bouncing around us like a string puppet. The cars all around have their inside lights on, as couples do what they do. The windows seem like eyes, glowing with excitement as they watch us onstage.

Everybody is doing the
dombolo,
a Congolese dance in which your hips (and only your hips) are supposed to move like a ball bearing made of mercury. To do it right, you wiggle your pelvis from side to side while your upper body remains as casual as if you were lunching with Nelson Mandela. In any restaurant in Kenya, a sunny-­side-up fried egg is called
mayai
(eggs)
dombolo.

I have struggled to get this dance right for years. I just can’t get my hips to roll in circles like they should. Until tonight. The booze is helping, I think. I have decided to imagine that I have an itch deep in my bum, and I have to scratch it without using my hands or rubbing against anything.

My body finds a rhythmic map quickly, and I build my movements to fluency before letting my limbs improvise. Everybody is doing this, a solo thing—­yet we are bound, like one creature, in one rhythm.

Any
dombolo
song has this section where, having reached a small peak of hip-­wiggling frenzy, the music stops, and one is supposed to pull one’s hips to the side and pause, in anticipation of an explosion of music faster and more frenzied than before.

When this happens, you are supposed to stretch out your arms and do some complicated kung-­fu maneuvers. Or keep the hips rolling and slowly make your way down to your haunches, then work yourself back up. If you watch a well-­endowed woman doing this, you will understand why skinny women often are not popular in East Africa.

If you ask me now, I’ll tell you this is everything that matters. So this is why we move like this? We affirm a common purpose; any doubts about others’ motives must fade if we are all pieces of one movement. We forget, don’t we, that there is another time, apart from the hour and the minute? A human measurement, ticking away in our bodies, behind our facades.

Our shells crack, and we spill out and mingle. I care so much for these things that sit under the burping self-­satisfaction of the certificated world. Maybe I am not just failing; maybe there is something I have that I can barter, if only for the approval of those I respect. I have lived off the certainty of others, have become a kind of parasite. Maybe I can help people see the patterns they take for granted. Cripples can have triumphant stand-ups.

I join a group of people who are talking politics, sitting around a large fire outside, huddled together to find warmth and life under a sagging hammock of night mass. A couple of them are university students; there is a doctor who lives in Mwingi town.

If every journey has a moment of magic, this is mine. Anything seems possible. In the dark like this, everything we say seems free of consequence, the music is rich, and our bodies are lent brotherhood by the light of the fire.

Politics makes way for life. For these few hours, it is as if we were old friends, comfortable with each other’s dents and frictions. We talk, bringing the oddities of our backgrounds to this shared plate.

The places and people we talk about are rendered exotic and distant this night. Warufaga… Burnt Forest… Mtito Andei… Makutano… Mile Saba… Mua Hills… Gilgil… Sultan Hamud… Siakago… Kutus… Maili-­Kumi… the wizard in Kangundo who owns a shop and likes to buy people’s toenails; the hill, somewhere in Ukambani, where things slide uphill; thirteen-­year-­old girls who swarm around bars like this one, selling their bodies to send money home or take care of their babies; the billionaire Kamba politician who was cursed for stealing money and whose balls swell up whenever he visits his constituency; a strange insect in Turkana that climbs up your warm urine as you piss and does thorny unthinkable things to your urethra.

Painful things are shed like sweat. Somebody confesses that he spent time in prison in Mwea. He talks about his relief at getting out before all the springs of his body were worn out. We hear about the prison guard who got AIDS and deliberately infected many inmates with the disease before dying.

Kariuki reveals himself. We hear how he prefers to work away from home because he can’t stand seeing his children at home without school fees; how, though he has a diploma in agriculture, he has been taking casual driving jobs for ten years. We hear about how worthless his coffee farm has become. He starts to laugh when he tells us how he lived with a woman for a year in Kibera, afraid to contact his family because he had no money to provide. The woman owned property. She fed him and kept him in liquor while he lived there. We laugh and enjoy our misfortunes, for we are real in the group and cannot succumb to chaos today.

Kariuki’s wife found him by putting an announcement on national radio. His son had died. We are silent for a moment, digesting this. Somebody grabs Kariuki’s hand and takes him to the dance floor.

Some of us break to dance and return to regroup. We talk and dance and talk and dance, not thinking how strange we will be to each other when the sun is in the sky, and our plumage is unavoidable, and trees suddenly have thorns, and around us a vast horizon of possible problems reseal our defenses.

The edges of the sky start to fray, a glowing mauve invasion. I can see shadows outside the gate, couples headed to the fields.

There is a guy lying on the grass, obviously in agony, his stomach taut as a drum. He is sweating badly. I close my eyes and see the horns of the goat that he had been eating force themselves through his sweat glands. It is clear—­so clear. All this time, without writing one word, I have been reading novels, and watching people, and writing what I see in my head, finding shapes for reality by making them into a book. This is all I have done, forever, done it so much, so satisfyingly. I have never used a pen—­I have done it for my own sensual comfort. If I am to grow up, I must do some such thing for others.

Self-­pity music comes on. Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton. I try to get Kariuki and the chief to leave, but they are stuck in an embrace, howling to the music and swimming in sentiment.

Then a song comes on that makes me insist that we are leaving.

Some time in the 1980s, a Kenyan university professor recorded a song that was an enormous hit. It could best be described as a multiplicity of yodels celebrating the wedding vow:

Then just
amens,
and more yodels.

Of course, all these proud warriors, pillars of the community, are at this moment singing in unison with the music, hugging themselves (beer bottles under armpits), and looking sorrowful.

Soon, the beds in this motel will be creaking, as some of these men forget self-pity and look for lost youth in the bodies of young girls. I am afraid. If I write, and fail at it, I cannot see what else I can do. Maybe I will write and people will roll their eyes, because I will talk about thirst, and thirst is something people know already, and what I see is only bad shapes that mean nothing.

…

It is late afternoon. Sunlight can be very rude. I seem to have developed a set of bumpy new lenses in my eyes. Who put sand in my eyes? Ai! Kariuki snores too much.

Somewhere, in the distance, a war is taking place: guns, howitzers, bitches, jeeps, and gin and juice.

“Everybody say heeeey!”

The chief bursts into my room, looking like he spent the night eating fresh vegetables and massaging his body in vitamins. This is not fair.

“Hey, bwana chief.”

Is that my voice? I have a wobbly vision of water, droplets cool against a chilled bottle, waterfalls, mountain streams, taps, ice cubes falling into a glass. Oh, to drink…

“Sorry about the noise—­my sons like this funny music too much. Now, tell me about all this cotton business.”