The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [8]
“Be strong, be brave, wait for the sign.”
The first sign was that I had to go back and that my mother wanted to come with me. A traveler in her own right, she has been all over the world. She had left the dark and cold of Northern Europe when she was twenty and lived for a year in Lagos, Nigeria, working for the embassy. And later she moved away to Canada. But Africa was her first love. The remnants lived in her house, hide drums, Ibo sculptures, bronze reliefs and camel blankets. It had always been in her heart to return. Maybe that was why I did, again and again. I had been born into her yearning.
We traveled first in Burkina Faso. There was a village called Ourouboro, a name that reminded me of the symbol of eternal unity, the snake that swallows its tail. It was the home of the blacksmith, the clang of metal, the breath of fire. A mass of white chicken feathers hung from the thick woven ceiling and the stone altar underneath was stained with blood. In Boromo we waited three hours in the forest to see the elephants. There was a great buttressed tree that my mother said looked like an elephant’s foot. A stone was placed between the roots, and a carved wooden bench. She put her hands on the trunk of the tree and asked for the elephants, and they came, dark forms out of the bush, wading into the green river, trunks curling and waving, blowing water over their backs, the sound of water.
My mother lit a candle on Christmas Eve in Bobo, on the terrace of Hotel Cocotiers above the busy roundabout, and listened. I was going to transform my relationship with Issa. I wasn’t going to give up. I would stay in Mali with him until the spring and make it work. A marriage procession arrived at that very moment at the City Hall across the road, a Toyota pickup filled with frenzied drummers, and bridesmaids in pink satin on the sidewalk, women in long gowns, men in pressed suits.
We floated across purple lilies in a black pirogue on Tengrela Lake and climbed up into the black Dome Mountains, a million years old, rippled by the sea.
The tiny village of Bani was known for its seven mosques that rose out of the red rock escarpment, empty, ghost-like monuments. They had come by the vision of an old village mystic. We walked up there in the evening. My mother hit her foot on a rock and the blood flowed onto the earth. But she said it was nothing so we continued up to the great tabletop of wind, a view of the Sahel on all sides, the sun like a full harvest moon in the rose-gray sky against a dark red mosque.
That night my mother was stung by a scorpion in the shower stall, in the very foot she had struck on the mountain. The young man, Ousmane was filled with reverence. His motorbike lit the way on the dark pathways to the village clinic. A group of people were sitting by lamplight, holding vigil, the way I later held vigil outside the tent where my mother lay on painkillers with a fire burning up her leg. Ousmane sat beside me, filling my plastic cup with red wine from a box he had got from the tourists. I held the dark sugary wine in my mouth and honored the full moon over the tent and the children running in the alleyways, singing and calling down the light. The scorpion was an ancient creature, master of survival and maternal self-sacrifice, guardian of death and transition. It was also the constellation I had been born under.
The next sign was the chick that was killed at the Edbaf bus station in Ouagadougou. The chicken and her four little chicks came peeping around the passengers’ feet. I saw them so clearly like light and water, the fire patterns on their little warm bodies. One ran off suddenly from the others and a man passing by lost his footing and struck it down. He stood there a moment watching as it fluttered, then he walked away. My heart was beating fast. The chick lay dead, coated with blood and sand.
On the long ride to Mali there were so many stars. I could see all of them between the constellations. It had been six years since I’d seen Issa. I had thought to drift away from him, but the pull