The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [9]
My love of Issa has been a strange dream, like when he told me he had taken up his father’s skill of bronze casting and I never knew this was something he could do. One who works with fire is a guardian between the worlds and the fire must be fed and tended and given the ultimate respect.
A day after our arrival in his hometown in the north he brought me to the blacksmith’s hut. The wailing voice of a Fulani singer came from a small radio while a little boy turned the wheel of the bellows, raising the flames. Faucets, pieces of pipe, old bracelets and locks were laid on the bed of coals. There was an explosion and we all ducked. A piece of hot metal shot over the apprentice’s head. The boys smiled at me. I smiled back and shivered.
The softened pieces of metal were put into an old bent metal bowl, the outside of which was coated with clay and donkey dung. The bowl was covered with a lid and Issa’s sculptures, encased in clay, were laid on the coals. Two men now took turns at the wheel that made a soft clattering sound like a sewing machine. Half an hour, an hour. I was entranced by the heat and acrid smells, by the rose-orange, turquoise, purple and bright green flames, watching the metal melt to liquid. Unlike the surface of a lake it was gleaming white, neither sky, nor sea. The boy raked sparks off its surface. He picked up the bowl with iron pinchers and poured the liquid light—some of it hitting the earth and forming beads—into the sculptures half buried in the earth. Unearthed they turned shades of color. They were alive, threads of heat glowing in them like veins.
Issa said a prayer. “This is sacred for me.”
When they had cooled he gently cracked them open. Each was beautifully wrought, but one. It appeared that the foot had broken off, the left, the female side.
We talked about marriage in the night courtyard on the cane chairs, as we had talked many times before. I could not marry without losing what was sacred to me: my freedom. His father has often asked when I was going to come and “sit” in the family. Issa sat in his blue-dark purple tunic, a surface like charcoal in the darkness. The family thought that my mother had come so that the kola nuts could be given and we could be married. After his brother died he became the eldest and he was still unmarried and childless. He said his parents wanted to live in peace; living with a woman, sleeping with her in the family house was a sin. I said in the older faith the love between a woman and a man was sacred. This was the original holy fire. He said something about the spilling of seed. This was the transplanted patriarchy. Here were two elements, the sun and the moon, and they were directly opposed.
Two days after arrival, at the little cybercafé down the road my mother received an email from Europe. They had found her sister in the river a few days before Christmas. She had been healing from a broken leg for six months when she went to see the river, walking with her cane. She fell off the bridge. My mother’s favorite sister, my dear aunt had left by water.
The servant brought a little stove of smoking incense into the room where my mother lay. Trails of the sweet smoldering root drifted out to us. I sat with Issa in the women’s courtyard, with my journal unopened, watching the black finches in the fern tree while he carved his sun-warmed beeswax. His mothers were grilling fish for us. A mountain of clothing sat waiting to be washed by hand.
Issa called me “Lagere,” favorite daughter, first and last born. I knew every one of his family and they accepted me as one of their own. Not one member of my family had ever met him until now. Issa and I had met in Kayes where the rivers meet. I had followed the river from Senegal on a white