Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [57]
Among the wealthy Olinkans there is widespread denial that anything is wrong. They keep their dying relatives at home. It is mainly the poor we see. A gaunt mother staggers in, her emaciated, fifty-pound husband on her back, her children trailing behind. If there is room on the floor—if someone has died during the night—she and her family receive that space. If no one has died, she must make a space somehow in the hallway or on the landing of the stairs. People die quickly, once they get here, having waited so long before seeking help. That becomes a blessing for those faced with destitute victims who’ve traveled great distances in search of medicine and cure.
By now they know there is no cure. And no medicine, either, other than food, which is in short supply. Watery porridge twice a day.
Among the students who’ve been stricken there is a belief in all kinds of plots against them, hatched by foreigners. Or by their own government. It is bitter to watch them die: their country’s future doctors, dentists, carpenters and engineers. Their country’s fathers and mothers. Teachers. Dancers, singers, rebels, hell-raisers, poets.
Adam spends most of his time talking with the students, the intellectuals. He tells them he has heard that people in a neighboring country were first infected by scientists who injected them with a contaminated vaccine against polio. The vaccine had been made from cultures taken from the kidneys of the green monkey. The vaccine, though presumably a prophylactic against polio, had not been purified, and carried with it the immune deficiency virus that causes AIDS.
One dying student disagrees with this. That’s not the story I heard, he says. I heard Africans caught AIDS not from the green monkey’s kidney but from his teeth! There are helpless derisive snorts at this modern version of the dog-bites-man story. The intellectuals conclude it must have been an experiment, like the one conducted on black men in Alabama, who were injected with the virus that causes syphilis, then studied as they sickened and died. The kind of experiment that would not have been hazarded on European or white American subjects. That they die holding this belief, that an African life is made for experiments, and is expendable, is almost more than I can bear.
Tashi is convinced that the little girls who are dying, and the women too, are infected by the unwashed, unsterilized sharp stones, tin tops, bits of glass, rusty razors and grungy knives used by the tsunga. Who might mutilate twenty children without cleaning her instrument. There is also the fact that almost every act of intercourse involves tearing and bleeding, especially in a woman’s early years. The opening that is made will never enlarge on its own, but must always be forced. Because of this, infections and open sores are commonplace.
The anal intercourse kills women too, Adam says sadly one day, after a sweet-faced, woeful-eyed young woman has died. Her husband, distraught, and also stricken with the disease, explained to Adam that although they had been married three years they had no children because he had been unable to sleep with her as a man does normally with his wife. She had cried so, and bled. He had loved her, he said, but not like a man. His fear of causing her pain, he said, had cost them children. He had no understanding that the way in which he had made love to her had cost her, and him, her life. Though she was but one wife, of four, the number sanctioned by Islam and the Prophet, still it had been as though she were the only wife he had, he said, weeping. Because she alone had been capable of making him laugh. Even her name, Hapi, had sounded, he thought, something like the American word for fun.
OLIVIA
BUT WHY DID YOU CONFESS? I ask Tashi. I know you didn’t do it. You couldn’t have.
Olivia, she says, laughing with all her teeth, it would kill me to get any older. There is nothing more of this life I need to see. What I have already experienced is more than enough. Besides, she says soberly, maybe death