Open City (10 page)

Those were the longest two years of his life. He slept in a crowded living room with ten other Africans. Three of them were girls, and the men took turns with them and paid them, but he didn’t touch them, because he had saved almost enough for the passport and his ticket. If he waited another month, it would be one hundred euros cheaper, but he couldn’t wait; he had the option of saving money by flying to La Guardia, and he’d asked the ticketing agent if she was sure La Guardia was also in America. She had stared at him,
and he shook his head, and bought the JFK ticket anyway, just to be sure. On the passport, which was made for him by a man from Mozambique, he insisted on using his real name, Saidu Caspar Mohammed, but the man had had to invent a birth date, because Saidu didn’t know his real one. The passport, a Cape Verdean one, arrived on a Tuesday; by Friday, he was in the air.

The journey ended at JFK Terminal Four. They took him away at customs. On the table between him and the officer that day, Saidu said, was a plastic bag with his possessions, clothes mostly, and his mother’s birth certificate. The bag had been tagged. Voices rose from the other side of the partition. The officer then looked at him, looked at the notes his colleague had made, shook his head, and began to write. Then two women came in, smelling of bleach. One of them was a black American. They took him up, and put a rubber bracelet across both his wrists. The bracelet cut his skin, and when he stood up, the black American woman pushed him. Was he afraid? He wasn’t afraid, no. He hadn’t thought it would take long to sort it all out. He was thirsty, and after being cooped up in the plane, he longed simply to be outside in the air, and to smell America. He wanted food, and a bath; he wanted a chance to work, perhaps as a barber to start with, then something different. He would go to Florida, maybe, because it was a name he had always liked. They steered him forward, as if they were leading a blind man, and as he crossed the partition and saw into the other room where the rising voices had come from, he saw men in uniform, white men and black men, with guns in their holsters.

They brought me here, he said, and that was the end. I have been here ever since. I have only been outside three times, on the days when I went to court. The lawyer they assigned to me said I might have had a chance before 9/11. But it is okay, I am okay. The food here is bad, it has no taste, but there’s a lot of it. One thing I miss is the taste of groundnut stew. You know it? The other inmates are all right, they are good people. Then, lowering his voice, The guards are
sometimes harsh. Sometimes harsh. You can do nothing about it, you learn how to stay out of trouble. I am one of the youngest, you know. Then, raising his voice slightly, They let us exercise, and there is cable television. Sometimes we watch soccer, sometimes basketball; most of us prefer soccer, Italian league, English league.

The security officer had returned, tapping his wristwatch. The visit was over. I raised my hand to the Plexiglas, and Saidu did the same. I don’t want to go back anywhere, he said. I want to stay in this country, I want to be in America and work. I applied for asylum, but it wasn’t given. Now they will return me to my port of entry, which is Lisbon. When I got up to leave, he remained seated, and said, Come back and visit me, if I am not deported.

I said that I would, but never did.

I told the story to Nadège on our way back into Manhattan that day. Perhaps she fell in love with the idea of myself that I presented in that story. I was the listener, the compassionate African who paid attention to the details of someone else’s life and struggle. I had fallen in love with that idea myself.

Later, when our relationship ended, that old cliché had come crashing through: we had “drifted apart.” She had her list of complaints but they seemed petty to me, and there hadn’t been anything in them I was able to make sense of or relate to my life. But I did wonder, in the weeks that followed, whether there was something I had missed, some part of the failure for which I might have held myself responsible.

I
N EARLY
D
ECEMBER
, I
MET A
H
AITIAN MAN IN THE UNDERGROUND
catacombs of Penn Station. I was in the passage along which a long arcade of shops sit with their faces open to the commuters and train departure gates of the Long Island Rail Road. I had stopped in one of the newsagents and bought a guidebook to Brussels, having begun to wonder to myself whether I should spend my vacation time
there. I don’t quite know why I paused that afternoon in front of one of the shoeshine shops. I have always had a problem with the shoeshine business, and even on the rare occasions when I wished to have my scuffed shoes cleaned, some egalitarian spirit kept me from doing so; it felt ridiculous to mount the elevated chairs in the shops and have someone kneel before me. It wasn’t, as I often said to myself, the kind of relationship I wanted to have with another person.

But, on this occasion, I stopped and looked into the brightly lit interior which, with all its mirrors and tufted seats upholstered in vinyl, reminded me of an empty barbershop. An elderly black man I hadn’t noticed stood up, waved, and said, Come in, come in, I’ll shine them very well for you. I shook my head quickly, and raised a hand to decline but, not wanting to disappoint him, gave in. I stepped inside and got up on the little stepping stool, and sat in one of the buffoonish red thrones, toward the back of the shop. The air was laced with lemon oil and turpentine. His hair was curly and white, as were his sideburns, and he wore a dirty apron, striped blue and white. It wasn’t easy to guess his age; he was no longer young, but he was sprightly. A bootblack, not a shoeshiner: the older term seemed right for him. He said, You just relax, I’ll make this black as black as night for you. And, with that peculiar sense of metamorphosis one experiences on waking up from an afternoon nap to find that the sun has set, I heard for the first time the faint trace of a Caribbean French accent in his clear, quiet baritone. My name is Pierre, he said. Setting my feet into a pair of brass pedestals, and folding up the cuffs of my trousers, he daubed a rag into the tin of polish in his hand, and began to work the dull color into my shoes. Through the soft shoe leather, I could feel his firm fingers push against my feet.

I haven’t always been a bootblack, you know. That is a sign of changing times. I started out as a hairdresser, and that is what I was for long years in this city. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I knew all the fashions of the day, and always styled according to what the ladies required. I came here from Haiti, when things got bad
there, when so many people were killed, blacks, whites. The killings were endless, there were bodies in the streets; my cousin, the son of my mother’s sister, and his entire family were slaughtered. We had to leave because the future was uncertain. We would have been targeted, that was almost certain, and who knows what else might have happened. As it got worse, Mr. Bérard’s wife, who had relatives here, said, Enough is enough, we must leave for New York. So that’s how we came here, Mr. Bérard, Mrs. Bérard, my sister Rosalie, me, and there were many others. Rosalie was in the service with me, in the same house.

Pierre paused. Another customer, a balding businessman wearing a too-tight suit, came into the shop and, seemingly out of nowhere, a sullen young man appeared to clean his shoes. The businessman labored for breath. Pierre glanced at his co-worker. He called out, You need to call Rahul about the schedule for next week. I’m off tomorrow, and I can’t do it. Then he rubbed my shoes down with a dry cloth and picked up a foot-long brush.

I learned the trade of hairdressing right here. Our house then was on Mott Street, the area of Mott and Hester. A lot of Irish in the area, Italians, too, later on, and blacks, all working in the service trades. The houses were bigger then and many people needed servants. Yes, some people worked in terrible conditions, I know, inhuman conditions. But it was a question of what family you were with. The loss of Mr. Bérard was like the loss of my own brother. He wouldn’t put it that way, of course, but he taught me to read and write. He was a cold man, at times, but he also had a heart, and I give thanks to God who saved me from any lasting injustice. We heard reports of how bad things were, how many people had been executed by Boukman and his army, and we knew we were fortunate to have escaped. The terror of Bonaparte and the terror of Boukman: there was no difference to those who suffered.

When Mr. Bérard died, I could have walked away, but I had to remain
in my work, because Mrs. Bérard needed me. They were higher, we were lower, but in truth it was a family, as the apostle describes God’s family, in which each part plays a role. The head is not greater than the foot. This is the truth. Through the good graces of Mrs. Bérard, I took the trade of hairdressing, as I told you before, and I went into the houses and salons of many notable women in this city, too many to count, and received money for my work. At times, I went up as far as Bronck’s River for work, and no one troubled me. In this way, I earned enough to purchase freedom for my sister Rosalie, and she was shortly afterward married, and blessed with a beautiful daughter. We named her Euphemia. After a while, I had enough money even for my own freedom, but I preferred the freedom within that house and that family to the freedom without. Service to Mrs. Bérard was service to God. My meeting during those years with Juliette, my beloved wife of blessed memory, did not change that. I was willing to be patient. I see from your face that it is hard for you, that it is hard for the young, like you, to understand these things. I was forty-one when Mrs. Bérard died, and I mourned her as I had mourned her husband, and only then did I seek the freedom without.

As a free man, I married my Juliette, and God’s mercy was enlarged in our lives. She, like me, had come over from Haiti during the fighting; I bought her freedom before I had mine. Our life together here was difficult at times, abundant at other times, and through the intercession of the most Holy Virgin, we served those who had less than we did, in every way we could. The years of yellow fever were the most difficult. It fell on us like plague, and many were those who died in this city. My own cherished sister Rosalie succumbed to it, and we took her daughter, Euphemia, into our home as though she were ours. I am not a physician, and I know nothing of medicines, but we cared for the sick as best as we could in those years. When the worst of it was over, Juliette and I established our school for black
children in St. Vincent de Paul down on Canal, down where the Chinese are now. Many of those children were orphans, and through the learning of a trade, the good Lord improved their situation, so that they were not in the debt of any man. He honored his servant in this work, he honored us both, my Juliette and I, and no honor he did us was greater than to enrich us so that we could further his work. The money we gave for the establishment of the cathedral down on Mulberry was his alone, this is the truth, and it all happened by the good graces of the Holy Virgin. He established it, we only helped build it. Nothing in a man’s life happens except as ordained from on high.

O
UTSIDE, THE TEMPERATURE HAD DROPPED, AT LAST
. I
TIGHTENED
my scarf and walked two blocks up to Thirty-fourth Street, past the brick-face Carmelite monastery there. No entrance was apparent on the continuous wall. My shoes gleamed, but the polish revealed only that they were old and in need of replacing, as now the lines and wrinkles in the leather were more visible. At the corner, the lights of a diner flickered with large neon words:
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS
. The first two letters of
TROOPS
failed to light. Christmas shoppers stalked the streets, huddled under black cloaks rimmed with fur. As I came to Ninth Avenue, there was a silent commotion along a stand of trees just one block to the south, on Thirty-third, where I saw pamphlets opposing the war fluttering in the wind like a flock taking sudden flight. I had the impression of a crowd dispersing, the height of their activity just past. A police barrier lay on its side.

That afternoon, during which I flitted in and out of myself, when time became elastic and voices cut out of the past into the present, the heart of the city was gripped by what seemed to be a commotion from an earlier time. I feared being caught up in what, it seemed to me, were draft riots. The people I saw were all men, hurrying along under leafless trees, sidestepping the fallen police barrier near me,
and others, farther away. There was some kind of scuffle some two hundred yards down the street, again strangely noiseless, and a huddled knot of men opened up to reveal two brawlers being separated and pulled away from their fight. What I saw next gave me a fright: in the farther distance, beyond the listless crowd, the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree. The figure was slender, dressed from head to toe in black, reflecting no light. It soon resolved itself, however, into a less ominous thing: dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind.

M
y attending NMS, the Nigerian Military School in Zaria, was my father’s idea. It was a distinguished institution, its admissions policy was not preferential toward the children of soldiers, and it was famed for producing disciplined teenagers. Discipline: the word had the force of a mantra among Nigerian parents, and my father, who had no military background himself, who indeed had a strong distaste for formalized violence, was taken in by it. The idea was that, in six years, a wayward ten-year-old would be made into a man, a man with all the coolness and strength the word
soldier
implied.

I had no objection to going. King’s College was more prestigious academically, but it would have been too close to home, and that would have suited neither me nor my parents and, in any case, going as far north as Zaria promised its own freedoms. It must have been in July 1986 that my parents drove me up for the one-week interview. I had never been in Northern Nigeria before, and its broad, desertified
territory, with small trees and parched shrubs, might as well have been another continent, so different was it from the chaos of Lagos. But it was also part of one single country, across which the same red dust blew, all the way from Yorubaland up into the Hausa Caliphate.