Three True Stories about Music in Paris

Arriving in France on the redeye from Newark was pretty easy. You just woke up when the wheels hit the tarmac and groggily gathered your things and sleepwalked up the jetway. The hard part was that the passport control stations were closed. A whole plane’s worth of people let out a collective groan, and then we proceeded to wait. After a half hour some uniformed officers walked over and sat down in the empty booths, fired up the computers, changed the dates on their stamps, and casually waved the first travelers up. It was as if they hadn’t seen the crowd gathered there, propped up on the telescoping handles of their wheelie bags.

The next step was to buy a ticket for the RER line B, a commuter train that runs to Paris. This could be done right there in Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport, at a touch screen machine. A lot of people had caught on to the convenience, so there was a substantial line. I waited. When I got to the machine everything failed in order like dominoes: all the credit cards don’t work, oh there is no bill acceptor, oh I don’t have any coins, etc. All the people behind me were breathing right down my neck. It was a step-out-and-regroup moment. I shuffled to the back of the line and this time watched over others’ shoulders while they nimbly navigated the series of screens. The next time things went better.

Down on the platform, the train glided up like it was on silk wheels. Just a gentle whoosh and a pleasant *ding* and the doors opened and I was on. Seconds after we pulled away from the station there was a hollow sucking sound, the door at the end of the car opened, and in walked a man brandishing an accordion and wearing a black beret and tight blue jeans. As far as I could see, this was not a joke: he seemed serious about the whole ensemble. He scanned the car for just a second, then launched into a very fine rendition of “Besame Mucho”. Ambling slowly and nonchalantly up the aisle of the car, he was looking out the windows, seeming to play not just for us passengers but also for the gray warehouses and the graffiti’d walls sliding by. He came to the door at the other end just as the song finished. Taking his hand off the keyboard, he opened the door and stepped out. He hadn’t given anyone a chance to pay him.

*

On Monday night, June 8, a group of us were walking around Paris in the dark. We crossed over from the Quartier Latin to the Ile de la Cite and we looked up at the towering hulk of Notre Dame. Standing very close to the wrought iron fence in front, inspecting the intricate carving over the portals, all at once and without warning there was a great and frightening sound from inside. It was an organ. It was the organ. Someone was inside the cathedral after hours playing that massive thing, and here it was, emanating like a rumble from the stomach of the great gray church. In my imagination I saw the player sitting at the stacked manuals, surrounded by scores of stops, the bass keyboard underfoot, and the only light on in that huge vaulted stone place would have been the little cylindrical brass light mounted atop the cabinet. You know, the one with the black plastic knob on the end that you turn between your thumb and forefinger.

*

Just minutes later we were crossing back over from the Ile de la Cite to the bank from which we had come, and we heard accordion music again. This time it was not the strange speaking of some inanimate object, or of the city itself. As we came closer we saw it was another bereted accordion player. He had been hidden from the lamplight by the shade of a leafy tree at the near end of the bridge. And there was an old couple, a gray-haired man wearing a dark suit and a tie, and a woman in a long skirt and a jacket, dancing cheek-to-cheek near the rail overlooking the water. It was nothing structured like a waltz or anything else; just a tender procession of soft, turning steps, the two together in planetary motion across the gentle arc of the bridge.

Egads, how the time passes. Two weeks in far-flung corners of the world, and no blogs to show for it. I have half-finished posts from Paris and from Busia, Kenya. (They're coming...) But this one was...urgent.

Yesterday I left the IPA Malawi office in around 3pm because I was delirious and falling asleep in my chair. I hadn't slept in 34 hours due to the outrageous timetables that define international travel within Africa, and so I was aiming for the hotel bed, for a nap before dinner. In the end I didn't get any sleep because of what I saw on the minibus (a larger version of a Ghanaian trotro). It kept playing through my head and chasing away the sandman. So I chased it away by writing it down:

The oldest woman in the world rides the minibus from Old Town, Lilongwe to Likuni, sitting in the back row. She wears a yellow print cloth wrapped around her waist for a skirt, and a red hand-sewn blouse with puffy yellow shoulders. Out of its short sleeves emerge the oldest arms in the world, skinny bones leading to jagged wrists, spanned by ropy veins like the woody vines of an ancient jungle, and paper-thin leather stretched over it all like the skin on a cup of instant coffee left out since last night.

The oldest woman in the world has a piece of plain green cloth around her waist for a belt. In its cinched knot hide a number of old, dark coins. More are hiding in the twists of a triangular brown cloth shawl whose corners are tied in front of her chest. Her head is wrapped in a red cloth. All I can see is a few small yellow-gray bushes of wiry hair at her temples. There are bits of charcoal and sand in the hollows of her ears.

She has exactly no teeth. Her voice is the breaking of dry twigs, the hot, dry air of the oven, and the creaking of an old wooden door, or a rusty pile of scrap metal ribbons.

The oldest hands in the world are bigger than you might think. They used to be reptilian, but their shiny, scaly skin and their claws are dull now from 48,000 years of kneading sharp gravel. They are gnarled from being twisted in the spokes of an ancient wagon wheel. The left thumb-nail is like the blade of a shovel: squared off, pitted and embossed with dirt, the edge bent under.

There is a walking-stick, both ends of it bashed out soft and flat like the head of a railroad stake that has known the nine pound sledge. Its length is knobby and worn smooth as driftwood.

I would like to tell you about the face of the oldest woman in the world, but in truth I barely got to see it. From the moment I sat down beside her until the moment I got up to leave, she was turned away from me, making faces at a baby girl perched on its mother’s lap in the next seat.

The tiny nowhere town of Uyuni has two claims to fame: fantastic freshly-made pizza, and the world’s largest salt flats. It had been pointed out to me that, although it is at least eleven hours away, La Paz is the closest major city in the sense that it takes longer to get to Uyuni from anywhere else. Clearly, this was a golden opportunity.

I left La Paz Friday morning at 10 on a bus bound for Oruro, a smallish city at about the halfway mark. From there I would take the train. The bus was scheduled to stop at the Oruro train station, so the connection should have been easy. But ultimately it was not.

On the bus a woman sat down next to me and struck up conversation, kindly accommodating my horrific Spanish. In a slow, halting way we found out about each other. She is a book distributor dealing mostly in textbooks and technical literature. She sells to retail bookstores in La Paz, and also directly to schools and universities. She was on her way to Oruro to catch the train to Buenos Aires, site of a big international book fair during the coming week. She had friends with her, too—other book distributors from La Paz also headed to the book fair. In fact, theirs was the same train as mine. It continues south from Uyuni, over the Argentine border, and on to the capital.

We talked until the movie came on; after that we couldn’t. I can always count on being seated directly under a speaker. If possible, mine will be the broken, rattling and buzzing and hissing one. This has been true since Ghana and was true again on Friday. The real issue is the combination of excessive volume and poor-quality soundtracks of local movies. In this story, the main character had recurring visions, abruptly cut to, of a roaring tiger and of a deafening drum circle. It was unpleasant.

I put in my headphones and fell asleep. Sometime during the ride I was nudged awake by my neighbor, who told me something about Oruro. My Spanish was even poorer in that confused state; I really only heard the words for “problem”, “blockade”, and “train”. But I was awake enough to know I my options weren’t very good. They were: (1) Ask the bus driver to stop and let me out in the altiplano, that vast plateau of grassland full of nothing but thin air, brutal sun, and a driving prairie wind, where I could try to make alternate travel arrangements myself; or (2) Wait and see. I went back to sleep.

When I woke up we were closer to Oruro, and all the chatter on the bus was about the bloqueo. My neighbor told me more about it. Apparently the city’s residents were unhappy about a fare hike by the combi drivers. (A combi is a just like a Ghanaian trotro: a van whose insides have been gutted and replaced with bench seats to accommodate 13 passengers. It is used for public transportation.) Some routes which used to cost Bs. 1 ($0.15) now cost Bs. 1.50 ($0.22). While not a huge jump in absolute terms, the percentage increase was reason enough to drag out a bunch of sizeable rocks and break glass bottles. These hazards were organized into neat lines across all the main roads in the city, and made it impossible for vehicles to pass.

So eventually our bus came to a stop behind other buses and trucks, on a ring road that ran to the east of the city center. Beyond the bloqueo kids were playing soccer on the empty asphalt, and vendors selling ice cream and bread rolls pushed their carts, calling out to them and to the adults who leaned against the cement barrier in the middle of the road. Except for the kids, everyone looked bored. We were about four miles from the train station, and had a little less than an hour before departure.

My neighbor told me to come with her group—they had a plan, she said—and we stepped over the stones and the glass and began walking south. The women split off on a side street and I continued with the men. One of them was on his phone, furiously smoking cigarettes. He looked around in all directions. Just beyond the next bloqueo, about 300m down the road, a white pickup truck pulled up. The man with the phone raised his arms in triumph. We walked to the truck, got in, and took a winding tour of Oruro’s back roads, avoiding the rocks and broken glass and indifferent protesters. We were at the train station inside of ten minutes.

I thanked them as profusely as I could with my limited vocabulary, and they in turn insisted on buying me lunch. How about that?

It's been a while. I will not claim there was nothing to write about--of course, something interesting is happening everywhere and at all times. Too often I just don't have the eyes to see it. Thankfully, India is abrasive, even corrosive. It rubs those cataracts right off.

Even at two weeks' remove, some of the visions still feel miraculously fresh. Below are three. Sorry they're late.

*

1. Nirmal's Math

During our first conversation, while I was seated on a tiny stool in his shop, Nirmal said, "For me, I have a saying: 'Come as visitor, go as friend.'" This, it turned out, was no empty threat. I can say so confidently because the very next day he risked life and limb taking me to the train station on his scooter. We were weaving in and out of a wedding procession, around palanquins and around people dressed in incredible sequined saris and around a wooden cart loaded with huge blaring speakers and around an elephant. Actually, we were heading towards my hotel--and away from the train station--as we lurched out from behind the elephant, but that's only because we had to get my big, unwieldy suitcase and try to wedge it onto the scooter with us.

He parked his scooter and we rushed across a footbridge to Hanuman Gat, the neighborhood where my hotel was. We were hustling around couples and groups out for eveningtime strolls. Many were stopped, leaning on the rail of the bridge, looking south onto the lake and the fairytale palace that seemed to float in its center. The palace was all white and lit with white lights. It looked like a huge, organized assembly of candles out there on the dark lake.

Nirmal said, "You know, we get a lot of Indian tourists here in Udaipur."

"It looks that way. What percentage of all tourists to Udaipur are Indian, do you think?"

"Oh, at least sixty to seventy percent."

"Wow," I said. "So most of the tourists in the city are actually Indian?"

"No. It's about equal."

"Oh, so half-half? I thought you said at least sixty percent were Indian."

"Yes. Half-half. Sixty percent Indian, sixty percent foreign. It is like that."

*

2. Two scenes glimpsed out the side of an auto-rickshaw in Calcutta. Each lasted less than 30 seconds.

First, a little boy not more than 5 years old. He was filthy, wearing filthy pants and a filthy shirt, and his cheeks and forehead were marked with little circles of soot or ash, as if he had been stamped by a filthy stamp. He was doing awkward and jerky somersaults on the sidewalk and in the side of the street. Not fully in control of his limbs, he moved like a rag doll. A woman, presumably his mother, sat to one side playing a tin drum with a wooden mallet. She was smiling. After his fourth somersault he sat with his legs splayed out and the woman handed him a metal ring about 16" in diameter. He pulled himself through it, sitting doubled over with legs outstretched, cinching it around himself perfunctorily, working it over the sad little hump of his shoulders. The ring, free of him, clattered to the ground and the woman banged twice on the tin drum to mark the end of the show. The boy walked around to the cars and rickshaws stopped at the intersection, braying feebly at the drivers. He made his loop and walked back towards the sidewalk. In his filthy, sweaty, sooty little right hand he clutched the shiny rupees my auto driver gave him.

Second, at night, close to the Shobhabazaar metro stop in an auto-rickshaw bound for Ultadanga. The road is impossibly crowded. Dingy orange-yellow light from incandescent bulbs and coffee-can oil lamps spills over vendors, pedestrians. It smells like burning ghee; it smells like cigarettes. On my teeth I can feel the grit from diesel exhaust, from burning gas and plastic. The driver spits a vile missile of dark red juice out onto the street. His left cheek is stuffed with pan (a mix of betelnut, tobacco, sugar, fruit syrup, candied dried fruit, anise seed, dried coconut, other nameless pastes and powders, all rolled in a green leaf into a cone-shaped pouch the size of a golf ball). Looking up to the sidewalk, there they are BOOM! two perfectly white cats in a wire cage perched on a high stool. People stream by the cage carrying briefcases, carrying plastic bags with sticky, dirty hands, bearing in their cheeks huge wads of pan. Yet here are the cats, perfectly white, impossibly white, actually, given the dingy orange-yellow light of the street, but undeniably there and undeniably as white as they seem. They were cute, too, their fur attractively matted and tousled. One playfully batted the other with its paw, gentle as a lamb.

*

3. Some types of houses seen on Feb 17th, around 5:00pm, from the window of a Sleeper Class car on the overnight train from Chennai to Hyderabad.

• Houses made all of dried palm fronds woven together
• Houses made all of odds and ends of corrugated aluminum
• Houses made with walls of corrugated aluminum & peaked roofs of dried up interwoven palm fronds
• Houses with walls of dried up interwoven palm fronds & one-way slanting roofs of cardboard and plastic sheeting and corrugated aluminum
• Houses in the mud
• Houses that are just cloth sheets held up by 4 or 6 wooden poles
• Houses of cloth and poles fallen over like a horse
• Houses caved in like rotten tomatoes
• Houses all deflated like an old pumpkin
• Some brick houses
  

In the last post we learned that Elizabeth, our housekeeper, didn’t want to put a cast on her broken leg. She wanted to spend another month’s wages on a second round of topical herbal treatment, but we convinced her to have a consultation with the doctor before putting her money down.

Nobody said it would be easy. Elizabeth went to Korle-bu Hospital on Monday morning, signed herself in, and waited. Around midday she was told that the doctor wasn’t coming in; she should come back Wednesday. So she was there Wednesday morning, name on sign-in sheet, sitting in the folding chair. In the afternoon the woman came out from behind the reception counter and told Elizabeth she had seen her name on the sheet with “x-ray” written next to it and watched her all day in the waiting room. Didn’t she know she should be at Ridge Hospital? If she wanted to see a doctor for an x-ray she was in the wrong place. By now it was too late to go to Ridge, though, so she should go tomorrow morning, first thing. Thursday at Ridge Hospital the doctor should have been in—he hadn’t called in sick—but nobody could find him. Surely he would come tomorrow.

In fact he did come Friday and Elizabeth was there waiting for him. He took an x-ray of her lower leg and reviewed it with her. The partial fracture that was a hairline crack in her January x-ray had opened into a wider fissure, which helped to explain why the swelling and pain persisted, even months after the injury. Fissure or no fissure, the fact that a PoP cast would leave her foot slipperless for a month spelled ignominy at church; and this was reason enough to seek other options.

The doctor was adamant that the cast was the right treatment. Nothing else would do. Refusing a cast now, he said, might earn her an amputated foot somewhere down the line. Understandably, this proved to be the decisive blow; after all, an amputated foot is just as unslippered as one wrapped in plaster. It looked like some amount of disgrace at church was inevitable. Elizabeth opted for the PoP right then and there (though she would spend about 16 more hours in hospital waiting rooms over the next three days before actually having the cast put on).

Elizabeth has taken a temporary leave of absence until it is removed. I suppose it’s only fair that some of the waiting be passed on to us, though it is less clear why an immobilized foot is a greater impediment to work than a broken one. The slipper issue is a moot point since housework is done barefoot. We certainly will not argue, though; after so many months of constant aggravation, any excuse she finds to take a load off is a good one.

---------

A few days ago I hailed a taxi on the street just in front of the bank. We were driving down Beach Road, smooth and newly-paved, not much traffic. I asked the driver my usual suite of questions—whether he owns his taxi, who pays for repairs, whether he’s married, how many children he has, whether he saves money with a bank or susu association—and he asked me about my work. When I told him I was working with the bank where he had picked me up, he wanted to know more.

His goal was to own his own car, and he felt he needed a loan to buy one. He asked good questions about the process of accessing credit through the bank. Would he have to hold a savings account? (Yes.) What kind of interest rates do they charge? (3.17% per month, flat, on the initial balance of the loan.) How often would he have to make payments? (Monthly.) Could he repay over a year? (No, the maximum maturity of the first loan is six months.) Does he need to use land to secure the loan? (No, he must provide a guarantor for security—not collateral.)

By the time he eased the car around the traffic circle in front of Independence Square, he was enthusiastic. “Tomorrow morning I will come straight to the Banking Hall before I start work,” he said. He knew what documents he would need to open an account and whom to ask about starting a loan application. The path forward had been illuminated. You could tell by talking to him that he had the will and the aptitude to succeed; he had just been unaware of the resources he could access.

He had one question left: “Do you know another obruni at that bank called Matthew?” He recalled driving Matt home from work one day some time ago. “At least one year. I think even more than that.” Still, he remembered his name and where he lived. During their cab ride, he said, Matt had answered “so many questions” and told him all about the bank’s products and procedures. I asked, “Well, what did you say to Matthew once he told you all of that?”

There was no irony here: it was as clean as a clean plate. He said, “I told him I would come tomorrow.”

---------

The rainy season has begun. Sometimes the sky darkens up like someone pulled a great gray cloak over the city. It gets very cool all of a sudden, and the air feels empty and thin. When the wind blows, the dust on the roads and sidewalks swirls up into your eyes. It tickles the inside of your nose. The rain comes lashing down furiously in sheets. It plays a very loud drumroll on the tin roofs of our house and our neighbors’ houses. Sitting on the couch inside it roars like white noise on TV. If it keeps up for more than an hour, the seams of the corrugated roofing sheets start to leak. Then little droplets of water splash down on the back of the couch and on the tile floor. They explode into tinier droplets that collect on me like dew on the grass.

---------

Our landlady is Elizabeth Amankwa, wife of the late O.B. Amankwa, former Ghanaian ambassador to China and all-around heavy hitter. Recently she had to travel to Kumasi to attend to the preparations for the funeral of a tribal chief. She left her house in the care of her daughter and the two small girls, Bridget and Irene.

These two are the girls who make the sounds that populate our mornings and our nights. They are the ones bent over the brooms that scratch on the pavement; they are the ones pounding the plantain and cassava into fufu; they are the ones who sing gospel songs in voices soft and light like dandelion fuzz. Only one of them sings at a time, so the tune is always like a fine silk thread.

If you sit on the couch and listen, you won’t have to wait long to hear Elizabeth call one of them her signature harsh, barking tone. Akosua! Akosua! Bra! (Irene! Irene! Come here!) Either there is some secret, untranslatable affection in grandma’s voice, or the girls have learned through years of painstaking practice not to cringe. The sound, like a wet and rusty cheese grater gnawing through an old brown tire, doesn’t seem disturb them at all. In fact, they’re almost always smiling.

But how much more does the age of fifteen have to offer Bridget than the perfection of quiet, deferential obedience? What buds would burst open while the shadow of unceasing obligation was briefly cast out? This is what we hoped to discover when grandma took a trip.

I came home one day last week and found her standing near the front gate. Her head was down, resting on her forearms, which were crossed and laid on the flat top of the compound wall. When I approached, she looked up. “Oh, Bridget. How are you this evening?”

“I’m very well, thank you. How are you, too?”

“I’m also fine, Bridget. Are you taking a nap on the wall?”

“No.”

“What are you doing, then?”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“How long have you been not doing anything?”

“A long time. I can’t remember.”

“Up to an hour?”

“Yes.”

“How do you mean you weren’t doing anything?”

“I’ve just been watching the road.”

“What were you looking for?”

“Irene and I were watching for beautiful cars to pass by.”

“Did you see any?”

“Yes, we saw about three.”

“Which was the most beautiful car you saw?”

“A Hummer.”

Later that night I was happily scandalized to find Bridget inside the compound leaning against the wall of the house, talking with a boy. The moon, almost full and very bright, caught her cheeks and her white, white teeth. She laughed and fidgeted and flirted, oh the boy was flirting, too, and this was easy to see because the flirting of fifteen-year-olds is unmistakable in any language; it was all very chaste and very fine. I only watched long enough to see her smile flash a couple of times in the moonlight.

In a small, dark cabinet under the bar, a vicious snarl of dark cables guards the open USB ports. I felt around for a place to insert a flash drive and hit my head. It was another Thursday Trivia Extravaganza at Champs, and we stalled while we tinkered with the projector that would display our questions on a big screen at the front of the bar. The usual crowd of ex-pats, Tex-Mex platters, and beer was on hand. There isn’t a great deal to say about it. Although some people are bound to feel that the contest is unfair, we still refuse to ask about cricket, former British PMs, and Formula One racing. These and other grumblings were drowned out by the din of conversation and the clatter of plates and mugs on servers’ trays.

On my way out of the washroom a young, skinny Lebanese man with a ponytail struck up a conversation about a company he had recently joined. As he explained the work, which was going exceedingly well for him, it became clear that he was describing a pyramid scheme. I tried to convince him of this but he became incredulous, even agitated, and moved to put the conversation to rest, summarizing his position with great conviction: “The market for making money can never be saturated. There is no bottom rung!” Beware the olive-skinned seller of souvenir coins.

Soon after the Trivia contest finished, the bar closed and I went to the road to hail a taxi.

It was after midnight when I stepped out on the shoulder of Ring Road. I crossed the wooden bridge over the deep gutter and walked onto the rough track just beyond. Some cars drove by on the main road, traveling fast; but because they didn’t honk they seemed quiet. The main sound that could be heard was a rhythmic chanting from a group of men crowded around a small fire in the scrubby area between the rough road and the gutter.

As I walked towards them more sounds emerged. The edge of a butter knife was tapping on a beer bottle and there was the shrill scream of a metal referee’s whistle. Plastic elephant horns, like the ones that were so ubiquitous during the Cup of Nations tournament, accented the chanting. They seemed to slice stinging crescents out of the heavy night air. There were about ten men by the small fire and most of them were in a tight circle, stomping around and around it in rhythm with their chanting, “HEY com bey sey la la la OH come bey sey la la la…”

About 20 feet away, across the rough track, two women sat on the edge of a cement slab in front of a metal shipping container that had converted into a barber shop. Beside each of them was a bare candle standing up on the concrete. The night air must have been very still not to blow them out. The women were wearing Western-style skirts and blouses, sitting comfortably with their legs extended and crossed at the calves. Each one held a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, which glowed in the soft light of the candles. I wanted to sit down on the slab with them and watch the men, but it seemed that I would have been gawking.

I continued past them, but then thought better of it and walked back to the women. When I came up to them I said, “Please, madam, I’m sorry. What are these men doing?”

“Our brother has passed away, one year today. They are mourning him.”

“Oh, Ok.”

I didn't sit down beside them, though I’m sure they would not have protested. Probably I could have sat there and the women wouldn’t have said anything more to me, in the remarkable way Ghanaians often sit together without talking at all. I wanted to ask questions about the chanting, what the words meant and which tribe it came from; but it was the wrong time for asking questions. I nodded deliberately to the women, wished them a good night, and turned around for home.

As I walked the short distance—not even 100 yards—along the rough track to the gate of my compound, the men’s chanting grew quieter, but the despairing crescent calls of the elephant horn could still be heard clearly. I went inside the house and the sound followed me there, too. It was like a dog pawing at the door to be let in. Sitting on the couch by the louvered windows, all at once I felt very lonely, like a clump of dried leaves and grass bobbing down through the eddies of a cold creek.

-----

Elizabeth, our housekeeper, injured her ankle almost two months ago. She was crossing a ditch at the market, walking on a plank that had been laid across it. The plank broke and she fell a couple of feet onto the uneven dirt. Her son Godswill, held on her back by the usual fabric wrap, was lucky not to be hurt.

I found out about the incident a couple weeks afterward when I called Elizabeth to ask why she hadn’t been coming by the house to clean. I said, “Elizabeth, we haven’t been seeing you recently.”

“Oh, Brother Jake, I’m sorry I haven’t been coming. I broke my leg."

“Oh, Elizabeth! What happened?”

“I was at market and I fell inside a ditch.”

“Oh! I’m so sorry. Have you seen a doctor?”

“Yes, I went to hospital.”

“And the doctor told you your leg is broken?”

“Yes. He said I have twist it near the foot.”

“Oh, so it is twisted. But is the bone broken?”

“Yes, the bone is not broken.”

We had reached the limit of our ability to communicate over the phone. Elizabeth said she would come the following Monday and tell me the whole story then.

When I came home from work that day I found her sitting on the front porch of the house. Her left leg was extended awkwardly in front of her, swollen below the knee and wrapped tightly in an Ace bandage from the shin down to the foot. She wore her usual wide smile and greeted me kindly. As we talked she described the accident and her visit to the hospital. The doctor had recommended she seek treatment at an herbal clinic. There they put her on a one-month regimen of weekly checkups and daily applications of a topical cream to the affected ankle. The cost was GHC 60, about half her monthly salary.

Elizabeth wasn’t told what was in the cream, but it seemed to be a mild analgesic. Patients at herbal clinics are rarely allowed to know what medicines they are taking, since most of them could be acquired much more cheaply at a local market.

There were good days and bad days. Sometimes her leg seemed normal and wasn’t painful or sore at all; other times, when it was swollen, she was forced to walk tenderly on it. She unwrapped it and rewrapped it tighter. On these days she sometimes described pain coming “from inside,” pointing just above her ankle. Through the ordeal she was convinced that the treatment was helping, though, and that she was getting better. She wanted to sign on for another month of the regimen, but didn’t have the money for it.

Last Monday her leg looked worse than ever, and I asked her to tell me again about her initial visit to the hospital. Now she said she had been x-rayed and that the doctor had first recommended a cast. Only when she refused did he refer her to the herbal clinic. I asked, “Why didn’t you want to have a cast?”

“Oh, Brother Jake, if I get POP [a plaster of Paris cast] then my leg would be too big. I could not put a slipper on this one foot. And I could not go to church wearing only one slipper.”

George Tries for the High Note

In the weeks surrounding Valentine’s Day, which finds a devoted following in the residents of Accra, the local radio stations change their playlists. Edem from the Audit Department keeps his radio on all day, and the office is filled with love songs. Favorites include the original Lionel Richie/Diana Ross version of “Endless Love” and Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You”. Those familiar with the latter (or with the movie “Vegas Vacation”) will know that it is notable not only for its sweet sentiment, but for its outrageous high note. Not many popular songs make use of the elusive whistle register of the human voice.

Nor is this lost on listeners at the office. There is a lot of humming and singing along with all songs, and there is a real feeling of anticipation when the unmistakable opening of “Lovin’ You” wafts out of the Audit corner. Most people are on board through “La la la la la/La la la la la/La la la la la/La la/Doo doo doo/Doo doo”. When the high note hits you can adjust your ear to hear a thin, quiet caterwauling from the desks of many big, hulking men who continue looking at their computer screens like nothing was going on. It sounds like recorder hour in the third grade mouse class.

The exception is George, who takes time out from work for the attempt. He puts his hands on the edge of his desk and pushes his chair out a little bit to give space. When the time comes he squints his eyes, tilts his head back, and tries to squeeze the note out from the base of his spine. He doesn’t get very close.

One time I asked him if he thought he could hit it. He said, “Yes, I’m going to get it.”

“But George, you’re nowhere close to it. You’re at least two octaves below it.”

“I know I’m not getting it now, but if I practice I could get it."

“I don’t think any amount of practice will let you get it.”

“No, Jake, I know I can do it. Hey, maybe on the weekend I can just stay indoors and practice it straight. If I come down—Doo doo doo/Doo doo—then the next part I’m going to get it.”

“Well, George, I’d love to see it.”

So the gauntlet was laid. For a couple weeks George updated me on his progress every day before lunch. He would sing the part as we walked down the street to the rice seller: “Okay, I’m coming.”

“Okay, George, I’m ready.”

He would put his hand out flat in front of him and raise and lower it with the pitch like he was marking out the tune on staff lines. The approach came, “Doo doo doo/Doo doo” (middle down middle/up up-slide-middle), then he would stretch his mouth into a wide, flat line, screw up his face, and send his hand way up while he tried to wrench out the “Oooohhh” from the very top of his throat. The hand always came fluttering down with his finger wagging while I started laughing. “I’m coming close to it. I didn’t get it yet but I know I will get it. I’m very sure of it. I’m going to get it!”

I’ll be sure to let you know if he does get it, but I still don’t think he will.

----------------------------------

Elephantiasis Lady

She sits on the sidewalk in front of the Central Post Office, around the corner from work. Her back is up against a low wall that forms the edge of a cement patio, which wraps around the outside of the Post Office. Most of the day the sun is behind her and she is in the shade of the patio.

She always wears the same flower-print dress. Maybe it was white once, but now it’s as grey as the sidewalk. She sits with her right leg flat on the ground, pointing straight out towards the street. Her leg is turned out slightly so her foot sags down to the side. A rubber sandal dangles by its thong between her first and second toes. It is badly askew like a sloppy wooden signboard in the Old West that says “Keep Out”.

Her left leg is bent at the knee. Its upper half is hidden by her dress and its lower half is ballooned up with elephantiasis. The flesh is so swollen that the network of tiny, fair-colored canyons in her skin has been forced out flush with the surface, where it appears as a web like the fat in marbleized meat. I have never touched it but you can see that her leg is scaly and hard. Her foot is swollen in the same way and it looks like a badly-drawn cartoon foot, like a football with stubby toes. I’m not sure whether the condition comes with chronic pain, but to see her leg you can only think that it must hurt all the time, some kind of dull stinging from the skin being stretched so taut.

All day she angles for coins from the passers-by, and she keeps the money in a thin red handkerchief that stays spread out on the sidewalk next to her. When someone presses a coin into her outstretched right hand, she slowly folds her rough, callused palm fully around it, and as she makes her fist she raises her head. Then she deposits the coin onto the handkerchief and replaces her hand in front of her.

During the few steps while I approached her, as I dug in my back pocket for some coins, I decided I would smile and greet her as I made the handoff; but when she looked at me I saw her eyes for the first time and got stuck. The centers were painted with milky clouds and the whites were a sickly, mucus yellow. My greeting caught in my throat and I just had to keep walking as I thought: That must hurt all the time, too.

--------------------------------------

Free Cinderblock

When a friend left two issues of Men’s Health on the coffee table in our house I was inspired to try one of the exercises inside. It’s a simple exercise:

(1) Find something pretty heavy

(2) Hold it out in front of you at chest height with your arms straight and your hands pushing in on its sides

(3) Put it down when you can’t hold it anymore

I knew that if I could do (1) I could do (2) and (3). But I found out that it’s not easy to assemble a home gym on a budget, even here in the capital city. I tried a plastic bag full of 30 water sachets but it was big and awkward to hold. Next I figured I should try a cinderblock. Luckily there were some nearby.

The land between my compound and the main road is divided into three distinct strips: first is a narrow, rough road the runs parallel to the larger one; second is a strip of uneven, dusty dirt about 30’ wide with some scraggly trees and scrub grass growing on it; and third is a wide, deep gutter.

Directly across the rough road from my gate on the dirt strip, in the shade of a wide neem tree, there is a neat pile of cinderblocks. There must be 100 cinderblocks there. I walked over and found a man sleeping on the ground with his feet up against the pile. He woke up when I approached.

“Good evening, sir. Are these cinderblocks for you?”

“No, they are for somebody.”

“Oh. Is he here?”

“No, he is not here now.”

“Do you know if he plans to use them?”

“Yes, he is using them.”

“What is he doing with them?”

“He is building a house.”

The cinderblocks in the pile are nice enough, but they aren’t the right amount for a house, even a very small one. The whole neat pile of them isn’t more than 3’x 3’x 6’.

“Where will the house be?”

“Just here.”

The dirt strip is also nice enough, but it isn’t the right place for a house. There are no structures anywhere along it, though it runs the whole length of the main road. It’s too small and scrabbly and uneven to do any serious building on.

“I don’t know if he can build a house here with these blocks.”

“Oh, he is building it.”

“Well, do you think he would mind if I took one block from here?”

“Oh, you can take all.”

“Oh, sir! I only need one. Anyway, wouldn’t it be difficult to build the house if I took all?”

“This man, don’t mind him. For the house, the blocks wouldn’t catch.” (To say something doesn’t catch is to say it’s not enough for its intended purpose. Taxi drivers will often tell you that your offer doesn’t catch.)

“Well, I agree. Anyway, I will be very happy just to take the one.”

“You can take it.”

So I took one of the nicest blocks from the top of the pile and carried it to the alley behind my house. We already had a good wooden pole with a bent nail in it, which could be wedged into the corner at the base of the back wall to herd the clotheslines to one side. That way there is plenty of space to stand up and hold the cinderblock out at chest height, then put it down when it becomes too heavy. Voila, home gym.