The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [7]
ERIKA CONNOR
Fire and Water
She is a wanderer. There is no cure.
IT WAS A FULL MOON IN HOMBORI ON THE EDGE OF THE Sahara. I was drawing in the sand as Issa and I argued our love. Across the open came the laughing, playful sounds of adolescents. Above us, in the incredible rock faces I could see the markings, traces of ancient portals that had been sealed forever. I had come back to make things right, but nothing had changed. Our words were the same after six years of separation. I knew him by his words.
We had been traveling all day, speeding along the broken road, wind in the windows. The way he drove incensed me, forcing the breaks at the last minute, dancing around the potholes and coming down on the sand verge, sometimes at a tilt, half on, half off, again and again, choosing the way in his mind, never speaking, as if we weren’t there. My mother and his gentle younger brother, who looked up to him, were gazing out the windows in the back, equally silent. This was our last excursion. My mother had never agreed to rent this 4-wheel drive, but he had talked me into it. After our trip to Dogon country she had wanted to go up the Niger by boat. Instead we were going to Hombori. They had not gotten along. He was lazy, she said, bossy, didn’t have any drive.
I was up in the cliffs, the strange orange and black walls lit like fire in the sun, where climbing goats were just dots of white. The walls gave way to passages and other worlds unseen from the road. Crevices were filled with green. I saw how there was life in the recesses, looking for shadows and water.
I returned to the road, as if my eyes could help him to drive, my foot on an imaginary brake. He was always too fast, too reckless and it made me angry, made him angry, that I had never really trusted him.
“Tu as peur?” he cried. “Tu pense que tu vas tomber?” You’re afraid? You think you will fall?
The Hand of Fatima appeared before evening, the great bluish-rose pillars rising from the white desert floor like five fingers. As we came closer the deep orange cliffs towered above us. I saw in the closest pillars the figure of a veiled woman standing with her left arm pointing to the sky. A portal. It was a holy place, ethereal, and yet I knew that travelers from my world had passed through and left their spikes and rope pinned to the fiery walls.
In Hombori I drew in the sand and it was like a divination, all the lines and waves were the years, all the love and anger, fights over money and distance, beliefs and circumstance. It was like a flower, a star, a storm, a whirlwind. And then I erased it.
“J’ai peur de toi,” he said. I’m afraid of you.
For twenty-five years I was pulled to Africa as if by a living rope, something made of plant fiber, tree bark, animal hair. I can see all the initiations now, all that I had gone through. It comes into my dreams. A certain light on a bare tree in the Quebec hills will conjure the dust light of the Sahel. The smell of burning kindling or sizzling meat, a crushed plant, diesel, mulching leaves, a candle. It taught me about magic, how to see the signs. For fifteen years I was in this relationship with Issa. Are you afraid? Do you think you will fall? Our story traveled back well over a decade, over cattle trails and highways, along the rivers. It lived in clay huts, among mice and stars, divinations, ritual offerings to water, in tenderness and laughter, under scorching heat on Le Pont des Martyrs in Bamako, and mango rains. It lived in the images of a white horse, a miscarriage, malaria, a car crash, in the phone line from a farmhouse in the snow, the failed immigration papers and business ventures, all the wire transfers, plane tickets, emails and silence. I learned to carry it all inside, sealed off, until I found the magic words: which way do I go? It was inevitable that I would cross the line in myself and come to the crossroads.