Walking with Abel (18 page)

Before midnight I woke and couldn’t sleep again for a long time. My chest shrank with anger and grief and unresolved longing—for all the dead, for my lost lover, for the simpleminded village girl in the horsecart. I lay under the insatiable African stars frustrated with myself. I had been expecting from the magnanimous vastness of the Sahel some pronounced and palpable deliverance, heartfill, even an epiphany, but all I got were stronger legs, skin sore from the sun, and thicker foot calluses. I was no wiser, no less vulnerable, no less heartbroken.

In 1973, Peter Matthiessen traveled through the remote mountains of Nepal on a quest for something ineffable—a rare animal, closure after the death of his wife, mysticism, serenity, self-forgiveness. In the book about his journey,
The Snow Leopard
, he called it “a true pilgrimage, a journey of the heart.” But if the heart cracked open at each encounter with pain or beauty, then what?

In the early days of our ill-starred courtship my beloved had given me a beautiful brass pocket compass. He’d had the lid engraved with
“Solvitur ambulando,”
the Diogenes aphorism that promised walking as a cure-all: a lodestar, or an unintended portent of the separation to come. Now I thought: Diogenes was wrong. The walking didn’t stanch the bleeding, did not alleviate the hurt. You could not really hike away from sorrow, nor did callus grow over love.

Around me Oumarou’s cows rose colossal against the far sky. Night magnified each sound and thought. A brocklefaced cow ambled up and exhaled in my face and licked the ground around me and I drifted off thinking that I might never again be able to fall asleep any other way.

—

The next morning before dawn a white goat came to stand on my knees, the better to reach an acacia branch under which I was spending the night. It was a young goat; only one of its horns had come in. A unicorn, I thought, not quite awake. A good omen.

O
n the Bani right after sunset brown frogs pecked insects out of the heat. At that hour the tranquil river was the same color as the sky, the color of pearl. Freshwater oysters shone dully on the strip of green riverside grass. The water exhaled a metallic tang and fishermen poled their pirogues across time.

A large Bozo man pulled his boat ashore next to me. The pirogue cut into the grassy bank with the soft sound of skin caressing skin. In the bottom by the bow lay a small heap of silver fish, toothless garras that liked to nibble the bare ankles of laundresses. Western foot spas used them for pedicures. The man caught me looking at them. “A small catch for a small net,” he explained. He said his name was Mohammad Kayantau. He did not ask mine. He wiped his palms on the seat of his canvas pants then on his mudcolored t-shirt and shook my hand and stepped on the grass.

For a time we didn’t speak. He sat down crosslegged next to me and prepared to roll a cigarette with a piece of graph paper. I shook a Gauloise out of a pack and held out the pack and he nodded, took one cigarette, crumbled some tobacco out of it into his paper, added a pinch of dried marijuana leaves from a narrow plastic vial, and handed the half-gutted cigarette back to me. He rolled his joint, lit it with a match, tossed the match into the river, exhaled. We listened to the hiccupping loops of cicada symphonies. Then he spread a plastic gunnysack on the grass and emptied onto it a small cloth pouch of cowrie shells and read to me my fortune.

He said I had a good heart. Said I had traveled for work. Said I should stay out of cities and sleep in the open. Said to sacrifice one white bird. Said to give someone I liked ten kola nuts.

“You can give them to anyone, even me,” he said. “I will be very happy if you give them to me.”

Mohammad Kayantau finished his joint, collected his cowries, picked up the gunnysack, and stood up.

“Who is the genie that advises you?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Not a genie. Genii are bad. I listen to the wakula.”

Then he left. Bats came to blot out the Milky Way. Night in the bourgou.

T
he world is divided into the above and the below. Below lie the anabranched rivers, the swales and the floodlands, the lakes and the blind creeks. Above are the dry bush, the dunes, the highlands where the Diakayatés take their cattle on rainy-season pasturage. Genii live above and below; they both control the flood and the rain and the drought and are controlled by them. They meddle with time. They enter humans at whim and turn them into healers or madmen. Sometimes they kill humans altogether.

Wakula are lesser creatures in the genie world. They have magical powers, good and bad, but they control only the mundane—objects, material wealth. They are sprites, about the size of a four-year-old child, and they talk gibberish in high-pitched voices. They are invisible to most humans, but there is a marabout in Djenné who can summon a wakula named Samirou with some alcohol and snuff.

Wakula are untrustworthy tricksters, fond of mischief. When you fight a wakula for the first time he will let you beat him easily. He will do so to trick you into fighting him again. When you fight him a second time he will say: “Wait, wait, I’m not ready yet!” That is a trap. If you wait till he is ready he will kill you. If you fight him right then without waiting you will pin him to the ground after some struggle and he will say: “I will give you whatever you want.” You then have to wait for him to grant your wish while you are still holding him down, because if he gets up he will break his promise. After you receive what you’ve asked for, you have to test whether it is good or not without releasing him. Only then, if you are satisfied, can you let a wakula go.

Wakula wear funny pointed hats. If you get a hat of a wakula your life will become very easy. But it is very hard to get one, harder even than pinning a wakula to the ground, harder than catching a pied crow alive.

—

In 1986, Jean-Marie Gibbal, a French anthropologist and poet who studied magic rites in the Sahel, set out down the Niger River to witness and record the summoning of genii by genie priests called
gaw
. During one ceremony, Gibbal felt “overtaken by waves, vibrations, and shaking that had me participating physically in a rite whose meaning partially escaped me . . . I had the feeling of a strange presence.” He suspected the
gaw
had tried to test him, perhaps even draw him into a trance, and likened his experience to the “assault by magic or sorcery” upon his American colleague Paul Stoller, who, as a young anthropologist, became a sorcerer’s apprentice in Niger.

“I am well aware that I can produce no tangible evidence of this,” Gibbal recalled in
Genii of the River Niger
. “I sometimes seem to tip over into a different reality.”

Gibbal did not enter a trance during that possession ceremony. But the slim lyrical gem of a book he wrote after his journey is full of the quiet wisdom of a wanderer at ease with traveling on the brim of things:

“Void is added to void; we only pass, incapable of retaining anything of our passing. These moments of abandon—are they not the finest? And then to let oneself be overtaken, drunk with useless movement.”

A
ll night the wind blew from the north and shook down stars. The goats woke at cock’s crow, at the chromatic calls to prayer that gusted first from Weraka, then, louder, closer, from Doundéré. The bush smelled of old firesmoke, sour milk, manure, sweat. The smells of ten thousand years ago. I washed my face with tepid water from the tomato paste can.

Oumarou greeted me from the dark. “Anna Bâ?” The sleepy salaams, the goodwill of forward-turned palms. We sat on our mats and quietly watched morning fill the Sahel.

Fanta came out of the hut and prayed and moaned the lament of all aging women with bird-hollowed bones—“my knees, my joints”—and walked in small barefoot circles tidying up her camp. A slow morning ballet. She picked up a rag with the toes of her right foot, bent her right knee, reached with her hand behind her back for the rag without looking, shook it out, deposited it onto the roof of her hut. Another rag. A cooking stick. A box of wooden matches. Never stooping. She picked up a ripped black plastic bag and tossed it to the wind and it blew east toward a marsh. Then she swept. Then she collected all the flipflops and plastic shoes mismatched in last night’s after-dinner dark and paired them and stood them in a row at the entrance to the hut. Pedestrian monuments to human presence. Next to the hearth a white newborn calf with brown ears, a female, unsteady on its day-old legs, took in its first morning.

A blue mound outside Ousman’s hut shifted and rose and became Ousman. He stumbled to the fen, squatted to piss, washed, prayed, stretched, walked over. Shivering and clutching around his skinny shoulders a polyester blanket with scarlet tulips on a yellow and blue field.

“Papa? Was your night peaceful? Mother? Anna Bâ?” He found a pair of plastic shoes in Fanta’s row that fit him and bent to put them on. In the east the sky turned red, then livid-yellow with cloudy sunrise. It was time to bring the cows back from nightherd.

O
usman walked fast through a land cupped in sifted golden light, a land doubly illuminated: from without, by a sun made soft by flaky cirrus clouds, and from within, by yellow trampled straw. Fifteen minutes west of the camp he spotted the contour of his father’s cattle in a fallow millet field, a swelling bunting that rose out of the ground in overlapping layers of powdered clay and legs and bodies and projected skyward in the curved tapers of horns. The herd was still moving slowly west, away from camp. He kept his pace and approached until he could tell each animal by the coloration and pattern of its hide, and he hooked around the herd to the south so he could see every cow at once in the early light and there he came to an abrupt stop. He took them in. Fewer than fifty head, ten in milk. He appraised their stomachs with his eyes. The rumens big but not full. They could stand another hour or two at pasture. He strode ahead of the cattle and when the distance between him and the front of the herd measured a hundred or so paces he stopped short again and sat down on dry turf in one downward motion like a marionette collapsing. He watched the animals drag heavily toward him. When they passed he could hear them crop sparse shoots of sharp couchgrass, breathe against the dry clay, against the minced straw. After the last heifer, a yellow, had caught up with the rest he stood up in the same easy marionette flow and overtook the cows again. He knew their destination: a lotus marsh a mile or so farther west that still held two feet of water and some hippo grass rhizomes. He walked briskly, leaving the cows far behind. The banks of the marsh were green. In the hummocked sod there were drops of dew yet unburned by the dry sun of April and in that cool damp Ousman sat down again and leaned back on his elbows and after a few beats lay down on his back completely and closed his dreamy eyes and drew a corner of the tulip blanket over his face. He waited for the cows. He slept.