2 September, 1980, Gagnoa

I was seated at a table in the restaurant adjoining le Cottage, the hotel where I was staying, when two Frenchmen entered. They could be Alsatian, Belgian, or French, I cannot tell the difference between accents, my bookish knowledge of French learned at university preventing me. One of them announced that he and his mec would come back. J'arrive, he said. Both were wearing shorts, as is the custom of anciens colons, the one with a bald crown like a tonsure was wearing glasses with very thick lenses like the bottom of a Coca-Cola bottle attached to a chain around his neck. His ducktails falling on the nape of his neck gave me the impression of a man who does not admit to a loss of hair. I think this indicates no small vanity, since the latter is in the vicinity of the French conception of twofold pride, as either fierte, say in the name of patriotism, or pride as simple arrogance, orgueil. In other words, why would he keep his hair disproportionately long at the perimeter of his baldness if not to accentuate his baldness by excessive length of surrounding hair? The other wore glasses too, but his hair was cut in a flattop. However, he did not seem lacking in vanity either, albeit it was a perverse, defiant vanity, for he had no baldness at all to boast of. He reminded me of my childhood, of Coe who wore his hair in a flattop that was so perfectly coiffed that each strand on the top of his head was of equal length with its neighbor, looking like the bristles of a brush ready to buff the bottoms of any boy he took a fancy to during the course of his job as newspaper route station manager.

The pregnant woman waited until they returned. In the meantime, a man and a woman entered the restaurant and sat down. The pregnant woman went over and chatted with the women tending the fish and chicken cooking on the grill. The man had a shaved head with a cap and sported a van dyke, the woman I don't remember, she having been sucked into my blind spot like light into a black hole. He, the look-out, glanced at me the ever-intent on-looker. I do not think it was a snapshot because it was of such a long duration. It only may have been an existentialist, Sartrean glance directed at the other as salaud. Even if his glance did not mean anything, I think at least his salut was addressed to each monad of us, therefore not to me in particular. On the other hand, maybe I am just paranoid, I can easily interpret his glance as of the Berkeleyean esse est percipi kind, playing its tricks on me. I do not want to blow my cover. Je est un autre.

Something was going on in the street. Suddenly, an old woman was hooting. One of the women tending the fish and chicken at the grill was talking in a high voice to her in a strange African lingo, and laughing too.

The couple had been served and were all eyes when the fat ones arrived. The latter ordered Beaujolais, and the patron went outside the restaurant to fetch a bottle of it. The pregnant woman had already walked away from the fatties when one of them said, Où est la femme? I watched her outside the restaurant while she stretched her arms in two quick alternating jabs from the elbows.

I had finished eating when I went over to wash my hands in the lavabo. My nose was profusely running. The elderly woman quickly took away my plate while, without showing the slightest emotion, I gleefully finished off my bottle of Flag, the local beer. I do not think I blew my cover by drawing attention to my look of glee. I continued to watch the fatties gloating over their food. The thought of this gluttony and the old woman selling little parcels of spiced sweet bananas fried in palm oil and served in scraps of newspaper outside le Cottage galled me. The rigolant patron waited on them, plying them with apéritifs and digestifs all the while the pregnant woman kept the banter going as warily they ate, chuckled, never letting but a few moments go by without talk and bavardage. They remained dispersed centers of attention, like vacuoles in an amorphous blob, the center being nowhere, the circumference everywhere as the alcohol gradually took effect.

Here is a list of purchases during my stay in Gagnoa before I left precipitately because of the local gendarme's suspicion that I was a spy for the CIA:

31/8/80:Ticket to Gagnoa: 1,400 CFA (+ 100 for baggage)
round trip from Gagnoa to Lakota: 1,200
lunch: 1,920 (+ 260 for tip)
dinner: 4,300 (+ 400 for tip)
room: 3,650
1/9/80: taxi from Gagnoa station to le Cottage: 250
breakfast: 750
lunch: 375
dinner: 850
2/9/80: hotel: 2,900
brunch: 375
supper: 375
dinner: 1,875
3/9/80: watch: 3,500 CFA (asking price, 4,800)
brunch: 375 (schwarma and bottle of Fanta)
small plate of fried sweet bananas: 75
dinner: 1,???
4/9/80: croissant: 60
schwarma: 375
5/9/80: le petit déjeuner: 700
le déjeuner: 375
6/9/80: le petit déjeuner: 700
le déjeuner: 1,900


I also wrote a brief ode to a middle-aged French woman I spied on in the restaurant:

MASTURBATION, MA SOEUR, MASTURBATION

O, platinum blonde with roots of black,
You, of eyelashes thick and painted eyelids blue,
Hawk nose, pursed lips, and lifted face,
Which brand of alchemical rinse do you use
That makes your hair look shiny shellack?
And your parchment skin like porcelain.
I want to screw you to death, old septic tank, old haversack!

I felt compelled to report to the old woman that sells fried sweet bananas outside le Cottage that I was a Peace Corps volunteer. However, with the suspicions of the local gendarme on whom I dutifully called to pay respects after I arrived in Gagnoa, I think my Peace Corps cover was not convincing. (Am I really a Peace Corps volunteer?)

The Senegalese receptionist at le Cottage converted me to Islam. He belongs to a sect called the Moueed. Their most holy leader is called Serigne Touba Ben Rekla. He gave me an I.D. and the secret greeting each Moueed makes upon meeting each other. It was easy, all I had to do was repeat the prayers in Arabic after him. Now I can pose as a Muslim like Burton did.

My exercise to travel alone having been accomplished, I am proud that I could make plans and carry them out. Just having bought a wristwatch gave me an exhilarating sense of accomplishment that lifted the feeling of inertia because of a recent attack of the palu.

I guess I had better get back to Duékoué.

July 3, 1980

Yes, I leave this city behind, my home, Columbus. Might I be at least a notable exception? Do those who have known me plead with me to stay? Will they remember me? No, I don't think so. My image will fade, a flicker of light, a guttering candle flame along a farmer's track in a cornfield on a glum, lonely, bright summer day whose anomalous brightness a vole shuns, for what is a votive candle set up to time to a vole in the middle of nowhere? -- Perhaps, as a signpost to the transitoriness of time? With a click of their camera aperture eyelids I departed. But then, if and when I return -- Will it be a return to that same image each of them held at the instant of their respective batting eyelids at my departure? No, it will be a lost cause, an anachronism. (And this is a lost cause with you, dear reader, an issueless expatiation.) I will be like a letter disposed of in the dead letter office of their collective memory, or more instantly, like a contrarian Kodak snapshot, fade into a white emulsion in their retinas, my respective images at each of my departures from them sucked in by the gyring cones and jousting rods of their retinas, not even the impression of a meme left behind in memory's cloaca, not even a cipher left of me.

Even my natal home in Columbus at 3474 Milton Ave. is razed, my parents' home in Mudsock, an empty crossroads, an iota of black ink on a Rand-McNally map of Ohio. And what of my friendships? –abandoned weigh stations along a highway. But, the past must not be latched onto, dwelled on. The man I met who couldn't remember his girlfriend of six years ago... Mon Dieu, six years ago? Depuis quand? Time encroaches on me and I wish it were Friday.

20 Sept., 1980

Dear Dad,

Where can I begin? Where am I? In Abidjan, of course. Abidjan again. Abidjan, Abidjan, Abidjan. Say it as fast as you can and you come up with a mumbo-jumbo word. What can I say about these boogies? They aint boogies. They's Betes, Dioulas, Gueres, Ebries, Baoules, Agnis, etc. You name it. The night watchman at the C.A.F.O.P. was Gourou. He taught me a little Gourou lingo: manama idale (I say, come here), manama igo (I say, go away). He didn't know how to write. He spoke French like Gourou. He wanted a gift from me because I was leaving. He wanted a photograph so he could kiss it. He imitated a television by clenching his fists and bringing them up and down together. He did this along with making a funny sound. Houphouet Boigny wants at least one T.V. in every village in the Ivory Coast. This is what I've heard. In Daloa I saw a T.V. on a table with everybody watching it on a porch. They were watching the "Muppet Show" in French.

"Serigne Touba Benna-reck-la", is what you say to a Muslim Senegalese while shaking his hand. If he laughs you say, "Serigne Touba Amoul Morom." This means that "Serigne Touba is one" and "Serigne Touba has no equal". Serigne Touba is some famous Senegalese Muslim leader. It's Wolof lingo. It's guttural like Arabic. I met this Senegalese Muslim in Gagnoa. Before I knew it I was praying with him on his mat facing the East. Now I'm a card carrying member of the Gagnoa section and my new name is Seydina, who was the first man to say yes to the Prophet Mohammed. He couldn't understand why I didn't pray. He asked me if I wanted to. I said yes. He was tall and very charming. I received a very warm feeling from him. I felt safe with him and I trusted him. I felt that he would never hide anything from me. He invited me to his humble house three times for dinner with his friends. His wife was Bete. One eats with one's right hand when one eats Senegalese cuisine, and at any African meal, for that matter. One always washes one's hands before eating in a bucket of water with soap. Then everybody gathers around the large pan filled with rice in a tomato sauce with manioc, fish and indigenous eggplant. The rice is moist enough with the tomato sauce that one can squeeze the rice into a ball. It is difficult to do, the simple act of squeezing a ball of rice. I heard her speak Bete to her brother who came to visit her one night. Her husband doesn't understand it. Truly, French is just the surface of all these lingos underneath.

My school is in Duekoue ("Joe-kway") in the west in the forest region near Liberia. It is a sub-prefecture with a doctor and a telephone. It is a town, not a village. I will be leaving for Duekoue this Tuesday with Phillipe, the driver of the Peace Corps, and with a Peace Corps representative. I deserve a formal introduction because I will be the first Peace Corps volunteer to go to this town. It is in Wobe and Guere country. Phillipe told me not to mention that they have eaten human flesh in their past history. I will probably be eating a lot of monkey meat.

The photo enclosed was taken in Daloa before we became volunteers.

I've been writing in a journal as much as possible. There is so much to write down. One's memory surely is an uncertain asshole.

That postcard you received which was in French is for Mitchell Imhoff, the French graduate student. I don't have his address so I sent it to you.

How is everybody? I got the birthday card from Mary Ann. Thank you, dear. I got the one, with the photos, from Mom too. Thank you, mom. Keep writing your dull letters, mom. They are a real booster. And, of course, keep sending your letters, Dad. They keep up my spirits.

Love,
Matt