“You like it?”
“Yes, thank you.”
I stared at my reflection. I didn’t recognize myself. I looked foreign.
18
The days passed. Monday grew closer. If Adrian’s schedule was free, we went around Segu, sometimes by bus, sometimes with the driver, and always with Adrian’s voice providing background, history, context.
“Liberty Square, where Kofi was sworn in, 1978.”
It was an Olympic-size stadium with seating on three sides. The fourth was open to the ocean, and the breeze that blew in served as a sort of air-conditioning. The design was clever.
“The euphoria of that night,” Adrian said. “The place was packed. The whole country wanted to be here.” I imagined the stands full of people waving flags and cheering for my father.
I didn’t always mind Adrian’s trivia. I liked knowing that Segu taxis were once black, but after independence, in a show of patriotism, drivers repainted them blue and white for the flag.
Other details were more obscure, for example, “Bamana has forty species of sunbird, a close relation of the hummingbird.”
It was like traveling with an encyclopedia, novel at first but grating by lunchtime. Adrian had not lost any confidence. He was a white man in Britain and a white man in Bamana.
Sometimes I wanted to shake him off and attempt the city on my own again. After all, half my DNA was from here. If I were a wild animal, I would have some instinct for the place, but each time, I remembered that first trip to the market and the chorus of “obroni” that had rung after me with every step. With Adrian, at least, we were a pair of obroni.
While Adrian was teaching, I stayed in the hotel and took my meals in the French-themed restaurant. I loitered in the lobby. There was some art for sale: tourist pieces—bright paintings of village scenes, crude wooden replicas of the intricate carving I had seen in the British Museum.
I was reminded of my first exhibition, in a Hampstead gallery just off the high street. It was run by Robert’s manager’s wife, Martha Reuben, a tall, elegant woman who wore silk scarves to hide the wrinkles on her neck. The Reubens came to dinner. I cooked and Robert carved.
“What do you do?” Martha asked.
“I’m a housewife.”
“And an artist,” Robert added. I couldn’t tell whether he was being supportive or whether he was trying to make me seem more exciting to his boss.
Reluctantly, the canvases were brought out. Martha insisted on buying one. It was her way, I thought, of showing gratitude for the seasoning of the lamb. The next day she called to ask how many canvases I had, could I paint more, did I want a solo exhibition?
The works didn’t sell. At the opening, Martha invited a crowd that pressed into the medium space, their backs turned to the canvases, their eyes tracking the flutes of champagne drifting through the room.
Martha said my work was ahead of the market. I painted subjects cut out of newspapers and magazines. I labored over their hands, their watches, their shoes, but instead of faces, I painted a storm of color.
The work was too figurative for those who loved abstraction and too abstract for the figurative crowd, and there was nothing particularly black about it, which confused another type of buyer.
Perhaps I gave up too easily. The paintings were still in my garage. I could have brought one for my father. I should have come with a gift.
The day before our meeting, my period arrived unexpectedly, brought on by the stress of anticipation. It was only a matter of time before it ceased altogether. I had no mother to take me through this last great change, not that she’d been that adept at taking me through the first one. There’d been some mumbling about sanitary napkins and the dangers of sexual relations without a sheath. Aunt Caryl had filled in the details.
That night, I stayed up to read the diary. A passage from the beginning of their affair.
In the evenings Caryl’s sister plays the flute. Her room is below mine and I hear the low mournful sound that is made in Segu only when a chief has died. The music has taken me back to my childhood, the night procession of masquerades with flaming torches, dragging their smoke through the town until everywhere smells of burning. They have come from the spirit world to escort the chief home and the roads are emptied for them. Even the British officials respect this law. I used to watch from the window while my mother lay down with her eyes shut. A woman cannot look on this sight and live.
My room faces the street and I see Bronwen when she leaves for work. Her clothes are beautifully made. I particularly like a red dress with pearl buttons running down the back.