Life Probe

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Chapter Two

 

A tall, blackish guy, seemingly so sensitive and distant that he would not touch a thing, choosing to look at you with the vault of his eyes lit by some interior fire, while keeping still, still as a rock in his bodily requisite and unmoved as freshly plucked feather in the Congo wind. He came to Adwar’s house on a Friday morning, with a basket of fruits and dried tobacco, asking if he can borrow her manioc grinder for a day or two. She handed it to him somewhat surprised, her chest arched over the wooden tool in a quiet jest, her chin and lips stiffened as if she was wearing an ebony mask sculpted out of her skin. In the most perfect leap of silence her forehead touched his shoulder while her fingers curled in his palms, gently, passing him the old grinder. There was a patch of pigeon pea trees on one side of the garden where she had cleaned a rusty cauldron with moist cloth and a hand of sand, just before he came. Her fingers must have felt moist and rough when she touched him, her breath meandering back from the gasp of twigs and ripe husks. She was wearing a light-colored dress, which he must have noticed, and an old ring tattooed on her finger with the tip of a thorn and dry charcoal dust. He did not lean towards her, but rather stood in the shadow of the house, taking his time to sniff her hair with the nostrils of a baboon, to filter in the herbal chill and embrace her when grabbing the wooden handles, almost without touching her, silently, as if he were taking the pulse of a very sad hostess.

 

“Would you like to stay for a while?” Her voice quivered when she spoke, dusting off beneath the curve of her chin, in a foul stream of regret. She did seem pleased to see him, but not in a mundane fashion.

 

“I’d love to…” He pushed the grinder near the wall, seized a barky log and sat himself without ceremony, asking her if she had seen the fool moon.

 

“This is Milan, he will stay with us for a couple of days. He is a photographer.” She said, nodding in answer to his question.

 

“Pleased to meet you, my name is Neo…” His hand had a moist, complex texture, leaving the impression that he had not ceased holding the log and the grinder, Adwar’s hands or the rattan basket in which he had brought the fruits. His gaze flew by, stirring the grayish trails of his pupils with the softness of a river breeze.

 

“Pleased to meet you Neo, I have heard a lot about you from Adwar, she seems to think the world of you.”

 

“Adwar likes to pay her compliments without letting me know, which troubles me greatly because I never get to see myself in her eyes. You are a photographer, tell me, has she agreed to have her picture taken?”

 

“No, she has asked me to save the film for you. She doubts that Canon lenses can trick a shaman who wears the make up of an artist.”

 

“Ha, ha, ha! Do you believe her?” He asked, boyishly.

 

“Why not? I always listen to the voice of mystery,” I said.

 

“Does Mystery know you are using a digital camera?”

 

Adwar came out of the side kitchen entirely immured by laughter, stirring the red dust beneath her feet with mild, delicate steps. She scaled her way to the wooden table with fresh, quick moves, while keeping her hands firmly clutched on the margins of a brass tray, timing the complicated elixir of hospitality out of a sun-dried clay pot.

 

“Milan had brought us a wonder from the city, a flax, bulky sack of coffee beans. This is for you…”

 

She handed him a pound of coffee beans wrapped in a clean cloth, which he placed in the grinder, beside the wall.

 

“Thank you Adwar, I’ll doze it with care.”

 

Adwar smiled, serving black coffee and raw sugarcane, her silhouette bended over the table in a fleshy rainbow, her breast hardened by solitary arrows and her legs boned to the ground, in shrouds of dust.

 

“Have you taken any pictures of the village, yet?” Neo asked.

 

“As a matter of fact, I did. Would you like to see them?” There was a pile of rustic “clean-eye” photos in the house, by the side of the bed, on a bamboo table. Adwar rushed in and brought them as if she had known their place by heart. They were mainly courtesy photos taken around Bena Dibele to repay for the kindness and hospitality of the locals. The villagers loved to wonder at the sight of photographs just as much as they enjoyed swimming in the Congo river or talking around the fire at night.

 

Neo took his time to scrutinize the entire pile, clearly searching for something other than sticks and stones.

 

“I see you have taken a picture of our church…”

 

“Yes, Adwar had asked me to stop by and take a look at the construction during sunset. I walked around for three days in a row, following the back trail at the edge of the fields and thinking that there is nothing more to it than an oppressing tower and a rusty gate surrounded by palm trees. This picture was taken yesterday, on my way back from the city.”

 

“What’s with the donkey?” He asked, amused.

 

“The priest’s donkey? He rides it home every evening, you must know that…” Adwar replied to him, half-smiling.

 

“I have known the church since my childhood and I’ve always had the strange feeling people in your country must have when going down in an elevator, I mean down to the entrails of the earth, voyaging on nothing but strong, dark currents. Forgive me for asking, but do you see that in your picture?”

 

He placed the picture up side down on the edge of the table, sniffing boldly on the sugarcane stick.

 

“It’s a hell of a picture, Neo. Adwar has asked me to take it.”

 

“Did she tell you that she never goes to church? She prefers to sit by the pigeon pea trees and watch the priest riding his donkey. She thinks it’s the sound of hooves on a dusty road and not the church’s bell that summons forth the soul of the believer…”

 

“She might be right, Neo, I once sat in a Baptist church in my neighborhood with nothing better to do than listen to the way sound traveled beneath the vault, producing extraordinary chants out of the rudiments of chaos, turmoil, passion, or ordinary bores. There were pigeons   gathering outside, on the windowsills, I could see their shadows growing on stained glass, flying away when the vibrations of the organ became too oppressive or too strong and returning when they softened enough to whiff ash flakes over us from the tip of the walled pipes…”

 

“That was no Sunday baptism, I suppose…” Neo turned the picture very slowly, making it look as if his fingers were running behind the shadow of a sundial.

 

“Right! No hooves, no bells, only the luster of surfaces and the whirls of the instruments. The air was heavy with candle smoke and chants, misting by as if the façade of the altar had to be pushed forward to meet the believers in the most perfect stillness… silence.”

 

All this time Adwar had churned red sand by mounting her fists on top of one another, forming restless, delicate clepsydras. She finally poured the powder on the corner of the table, raising a small ant-hill.

 

“There is your church… And there is your priest, too, rushing to open the gates.” She pointed to the left side of the main street, to a shadowy Sancho Panza staggering on Dapple’s back in the loamiest setting imaginable. Leaf roofs, rocks and dusty bushes staggered around him with the faithfulness of shaken Luba gourds, making him look as if he was on his way to a kingly ceremony. He was wearing an oval, sun burnt hat and a shirt sealed over his chest with a row of seashell buttons. Adwar waved at him just before stepping into the house to fetch the corkscrew. He, too, saluted her from a distance, proud as an Egyptian eunuch hanging from a comet’s tail. Just then he must have fancied the church tower at the end of the road because he kept spurring the animal and bathing it in an orange cloud…

 

As soon as the priest was out of sight Neo wished to leave, he grabbed the grinder and sneaked away on the same road filled with the tapping of hooves and esoteric dust. He came back the next day to spend an hour with Adwar and see the new photos, which he had found extremely flattering and at the same time prejudicial to the originality of the place. It could not have been the light, the random shots of natural surroundings or the way things jammed together in the eye of the camera, for him there was always something else laying in the shadow of technicality, in the very substance of simple, ordinary picks. And yet (!), there was nothing that could intrigue him more than the fact that an ordinary scene, which seemed awfully disquieting to him, should turn into a virtual stanza in the presence of another man.

 

“When I look at this picture I see my father in it. The same old loam house trimmed with two dull steps on which he used to sit, gazing quietly over the sunset. I remember looking at him just as I look at your picture now, the door was in the same place, opened behind him like a mute, toothless mouth, his brown knees bended up to his chin, just as the man’s in the photo, his eyes taking in the same doze of black venom, making him irreparably sad; his arms hanging by the tip of his fingers, rounding up his bony chest and legs. I would keep quiet and gaze at him for hours on end and yet, sense nothing but that deep, humid smell of earth coming from the house, embalming him to such an irremediable extent that I could not dissociate him from it, not by the sharpest snuff, as if he were not my father but an old fellow guarding a subterraneous secret that eluded me…”

 

“Would you let me take a picture of your father?” I asked, impressed by his words.

 

“You can’t, he is dead. But I like the man in your photo. He seems to enjoy the same afternoon rest by the bamboo door, so intoned and at peace with himself I can barely look at him without thinking that he, too, must be a fellow descending from the same species of antiquated guardians…”