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A Wilderness Awakening
By Celia S. McClinton “How’d Dr. Condor come to take up with the little African anyway?” “Akata? He thinks she put the juju on him, not that he objects, mind you.” They had met, Celia and her cousin, Bobbie Donaldson, for lunch at the food court at State University, Carolina. The two blondes, who could have been sisters, chatted casually over fruit salad and yogurt. Their conversation turned to Dr. Condor, Celia’s academic advisor, and the wife he had brought back from Kenya at the end of his sabbatical, Akata, The Second Mrs. Condor. “You don’t seem to agree with him, the way you said that,” Bobbie observed between bites of unripe cantaloupe. “On the contrary. She did him a job. Put a hex on The First Mrs. Condor that drove her into the arms of another man in less than 72 hours. And, the day she left, Akata fed Dr. Condor a chicken stew doctored such that he didn’t feel any remorse over her leaving. She had hoped to put the dawa, the medicine, in a murgh vindaloo. Those curries cover up the taste of additives pretty well. But he forgot to get dahnia when he was at the market so she had to make do with chicken stew.” “That’s men for you. Never can remember the important things. If sparrows had their brains, they’d fly backwards” “Anyway, I doubt he’d recognize The First Mrs. Condor now if she waltzed into his office and licked his tonsils. Akata’d also seen to it that he was obsessed with her even before The First Mrs. Condor left. She did that the night she took him down to her little house and introduced him to African dance dressed in nothing but a t-shirt and that a couple of sizes too small. But enchantment of that type isn’t witchcraft beyond the capacity of any of us. What he didn’t pick up on was the salute in the home brew they were drinking out of that gourd.” “What was that? Do you know?” “Not got the slightest idea. Akata never told me. I doubt it’s anything special. Probably the same thing she stewed up with the chicken. The powerful juju was what she used to scare off The First Mrs. Condor. A mixture of pounded cat’s tongues rolled in a ball with goat’s dung and mealie paste. She put it in a leather pouch and hid it under The First Mrs. Condor’s mattress.” “Huh. Doesn’t sound all that powerful to me.” “Oh, come now, Bobbie. Cats’ tongues don’t exactly grow on trees. Even in Africa. But the killer was the pouch she put it in. Made it out of bats’ wings.” “O, my. I see.” “None of it really mattered. Something else had already gotten to him. They loathed each other, he and The First Mrs. Condor. A snooty shrew with a head full of notions and a mouth full of jaybird jabber, she was always fuzzed-up. Always pickin’ at a crow. His way of dealing with her was alcohol and work till his mind was as muggy as clam juice. The more she shrewed, the more he drank and worked. The more he drank and worked, the more she shrewed. The more she shrewed, the mo….” “Okay, okay. I get it. Sort of a syndrome, right?” “Yea. Sort of a syndrome, you might say. So he’s disgusted, and Africa gets to him long before Akata gets around to her stunts. Shortly after they got to Kenyatta University, the University sent him down to the coast, to Mombasa, for some reason or other. The First Mrs. Condor was already working for the International High School, so she stayed in Nairobi. But, he went with another professor, a Yankee of some sort, and his wife. Mombasa’s an ancient Arab city just jammed with streets that look like alleys, and all kinds of cafes and restaurants and markets just awash with strange things from Arabia and India. And mosques, too. And churches and Hindu temples of a dozen sorts. But all his traveling companions did was look for shops selling ice cream. He was all belt and bottom, and she’d a head full of stump water. Together they drove Dr. Condor to distraction. “They went back to Nairobi a day early, and he was by himself in Mombasa and down in the dumps. He went to the New Castle Hotel for a pizza that evening. It’s the biggest whorehouse between Cape Town and Cairo, but he’s so innocent he missed that part of it. At least at first, until a 17-year-old whore got hold of him and cleaned his clock. That depressed him even more. He couldn’t get it up. Or maybe he could and that was worse still, pondering the kind of things an African whore can leave behind.” “How do you know this? Did he tell you?” “Told me some of it, and I’m speculating about the rest. Anyway by the time he and his bottle of Scotch got on the train the next night, he was so low he had to reach up to touch bottom.” * * * The train’s serene deliberation, its self-obsessed, rhythmical swaying, had come to a sleep-disturbing stop, and he awoke to meet the morning with a fuzzy tongue, a mouth soured with the taste of whisky, and a muddled head. He knew not the hour, but a new day was a emerging, its pale light beckoning him insistently through the window blind. He raised it to look out, faced the new dawn, his first fabulous African dawn, and sat up, startled, on his wide berth. Morning had only begun its invasion of the night’s edge but was about to burst into flame and consume all of Africa. The savanna, a desolate wilderness, rolled away to the horizon. The sunrise was imminent, and a tenuous, hesitant light tinted the savanna, still gray with night, a strange, faint gold. Streaks of lustrous orange from the invisible sun ran across a soft, purple sky. As yet, there was nothing in view but the enormous level surface deserted except for a single conical hill on the horizon, a monadock on a peneplane he thought. Dr. Condor, staring spellbound, awaited the new day. As he watched, the hill turned from black to purple. The dew and the spider webs in the grass started to gleam. A grouping of huts emerged from the darkness and sat dark, sleepy, and motionless except for the first wisp of smoke rising like a burnt offering for a strange god. Then suddenly the red disk of the sun edged above the horizon and gray turned to silver, purple to blue, black to vivid yellow. Excitedly, he threw on yesterday’s clothes, wrinkled khaki trousers and a shirt still damp with sweat. It rested across his shoulders like a dead snake. He climbed down from the train. The cold dawn was surrendering to the powerful sun and from its warmth the smell of Africa rose, an odor of burnt earth, dried grass and acacia blooms that struck him with tangible force. He walked forward toward the engine. Black faces peered at him through sooty windows while others climbed down and stretched their stiff limbs. At the engine, one of the train crew smiled at him, and he asked, “Bwana, what is the problem? Why are we stopped?” “The track ahead is finished, kwisha, gone. There will be some little delay.” “How long?” “Most of the day, I think, bwana. It is most regrettable.” “It’s of no matter. I’ve nothing better to do,” he said, turning to stare at the sky and the limitless plain around him, listening to the savanna sunrise, the quickening buzz of bees and the sharp chatter of birds among the acacias. Dr. Condor forgot his truculent wife, the Mombasa whore, his depression. He ambled slowly gazing down at a formation of ants scurrying along their path of destruction, and at the front of the locomotive, he turned, raised his head, and in that instant Africa bewitched him. He stood before Kilimanjaro in its full morning splendor, a hazy, mauve giant crowned in splendid rose pink. He leaned against the locomotive’s buffer and gazed at the mountain, as its crown turned to the sterling white of fresh snow, and then as the entire mountain, as if a ghost, slowly disappeared into the warming day’s heat haze. He had studied Nature all his life but realized in that moment that he had never before seen. This morning, with carefully predestined intent, Nature had revealed herself to him. The solitary, fantastic moment shamed him, and he felt an immense relief. * * * “He had been taken to the river,” Celia continued while licking yogurt from a plastic spoon. “He was washed clean as a hound’s tooth, all his sins swept away in the flood. He was left alone in that bush, naked in yesterday’s stinking clothes, his butt resting on the buffer of the ancient locomotive. He was an empty vessel, open to any suggestive breeze. Eager for it, in fact. “So when Akata started boilin’ up a mess of clouds, Africa had already done the important work. Africa had gotten under his skin, and he could never really leave it, or it him, even if he knew one day he would have to come home, come home to us. So he did the next best thing. He brought a little piece of Africa home with him.” “Little piece is right,” Bobbie observed with a smirk. “But tell me,” she continued, “did she give him the clap?” “Who give who the clap? “The Mombasa Whore. Did she give him the clap?” “Oh. He never said.” |
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