The Temple of My Familiar

  "But Carlotta was a space cadet, too, in her own way," said Suwelo, taking another sip of beer. "She was so superfeminine, in the old style, that it was as if she'd never noticed there was any other way a woman could be. She wore these three-inch heels every day. I'm talking serious stiletto. She even cooked--and I saw this after she let me go home with her--in three-inch heels. Three-inch heels are designed to make a man feel like all he needs to do is push gently and a woman is on her ass. Three-inch heels say 'Fuck me.' Carlotta taught women's literature--which Fanny wondered if she ever read--in three-inch heels. She wore sweaters that followed every curve of her luscious body. Sweaters that dipped. Skirts that clung. Short skirts. Makeup. Earrings. False eyelashes sometimes. Her husband, a musician--she never told me his name--had left her, and left the country. She had no relatives, no friends. Only the two children, a boy and a girl. I took them on outings, to ballet and soccer. They grew dependent on me really quickly. Fanny was in Africa again. I knew Carlotta wanted to marry me. She knew I was already married, and Fanny and I never talked about our divorce; what was the point? It was a private matter, really. And she knew about Fanny. The college where Carlotta and I taught was a very uptight place. After ranting and raving about how uptight it was, Fanny had quit her part-time administrative job there and opened a little massage parlor right down the street. Everybody, students and teachers alike, went to her. Even Carlotta went. Fanny never knew Carlotta didn't like her. Fanny that year was into the notion that Jesus was a masseur, that that's what the original healing by touch that Jesus did in the Bible meant! She was into the laying on of hands. She took courses in massage at the San Francisco School of Massage. She also learned to do acupressure.

  "Carlotta disliked Fanny's style. Fanny had given up so much that Carlotta still clung to. The respectable job, the dresses and skirts, the beauty parlor--Fanny cut her hair very short--the high heels, the lipstick. She dressed in T-shirts, sandals, and chi pants. Fanny was mentally in Jerusalem, at the Dead Sea, strolling in Galilee. She was, for about a year and a half, really into being Christ. Or, as she would put it, 'a Christ,' which she said anyone could be. Everybody loved her massages because she enjoyed them so much herself. They never stopped at the appointed hour, but could go on and on, and there were some bodies she worked on that she said made her feel inspired. Soft music would be playing--you never had any idea who the musicians were; you just knew you never heard them anywhere but there--the incense would be burning, the room would be warm, Fanny's hands would be warm and slippery from the fragrant oils she used. Sweet almond was my favorite. I used to go to her myself, especially after faculty meetings. Faculty meetings always left me tight as a drum. All those white male heads of departments, pretending white people get everything on merit, and of course the college wasn't racist just because no one there had ever heard of George Washington Carver; how could one think so?

  "Really, Fanny gave up everything for a long, long time. She even gave up books, which she loved!

  "You know what she said? 'I'd rather read the trees. It's not book burning that people need to worry so much about; it's the trees that are disappearing.'

  "She gave up listening to music, except when she was giving a massage. Even Mozart, whom she adored. 'I find I like silence,' she said. 'It's music to me. I like the eternal nature of silence. It's music you can have living or dead.'

  "Then, when her father died, she went back to Africa. It was a terrible time for her. She'd just gotten to know him, and her sister, as well. And she liked him. He was funny and irreverent and a rebel. He made her laugh. Her mother, she said, who had been a missionary in Africa for many years, when young, had always told her Africans were rather sad people. Her father was so much like her, she felt, it tickled her just to see part of herself out there in the world in someone else. And he was her father! She hadn't even known she had one.

  "Carlotta couldn't understand her leaving me alone for so long. She said she felt sorry for me. She flipped her hair from off her tinted glasses, where it always flopped, and pushed out her breasts. She fingered her fuchsia-colored cleavage. She extended her legs, her three-inch heels. I'd seen women like her, lissome, tan, with tiny flat waists and high breasts, in magazines and naked onstage. In a way, whenever I looked at her, I saw those other women. The first time I kissed her she left lipstick all over my face.

  "But I got used to that. I even got to the place where I lusted after her perfume, which was as insistent as a brass door knocker. I would go to her cheap little apartment after class and watch her clack across the kitchen, making dinner in her high heels, and sometimes I'd just grab hold of her and we'd end up on the kitchen floor. I don't think she enjoyed this at all. But at the time, I thought maybe she did. She was pretty impassive; once, I thought the lipstick was painted on in the shape of a smile she used to have, but I chased the thought away and thrust deeper. I hadn't any idea how hard it was for women to relax sexually when their children were around. And hers were right down the hall. We could latch the kitchen door, which we did, and I was quick; still, it must have been a kind of torture for Carlotta. She really loved the kids and was very religious, to boot. And very religious, pious, and prudish was, for sure, how those kids saw her, because, among other things, she was always praying and lighting candles and wringing her hands and weeping. But would she talk to me about her troubles? No way, Jose.

  "'Tell me about your people?' I asked her once as we lay naked after sex I'd literally dragged her into bed to have.

  "'I have no people,' she said. Tears were, however, running down the sides of her nose.

  "'Aw, come on,' I said. 'Everybody's got folks!'

  "'I don't,' she said.

  "'Tell me about your father, then,' I said. In truth, it was hard to say what nationality she was. Maybe she didn't have 'a people.'

  "'I have no father.'

  "This seemed highly improbable.

  "'Tell me about your mother. Even God,' I teased, 'is rumored to have had one of those.'

  "'I have no mother,' was her reply.

  "'Tell me about your children's father,' I coaxed.

  "'They have no father,' she said.

  "She was just a body, then. It was fine with me if she stayed that way. After making love to her I always thought of Fanny anyhow. I was following her around, mentally, in Africa, trying to imagine the things she saw.

  "Only if I married Carlotta would she tell me who she was, maybe. Who her people were, who her father was, and her mother. Who her husband was. I didn't even know if they were divorced. That was the bargain she had in her mind. If I married her she could trust me with her secrets. But I sort of liked being unmarried. I especially liked being unmarried to Fanny. Strange to say, I felt there was more freedom in our love. And not just because I was banging Carlotta."

  "Men are dogs," said Miss Lissie dispassionately, stirring the black pot of gumbo with a wooden spoon. The smell was beginning to be wonderful. Mr. Hal had found his reefer and they each took a hit.

  "You'd love Northern California," said Suwelo. "We grow this stuff in our yard."

  Their "yard." Friends had loaned them a tiny yurt and five acres of land during the summers. They immediately put in a garden of peppers, tomatoes, onions, collard greens, and marijuana. They hauled water for the garden from the local park and manure from their neighbors' sheep. Their plants were tall, dark, and pungent. They called them "Big Women." One puff and you understood you were where you were supposed to be and so was everything else. Mellow. Suwelo and Fanny used the word a lot.

  "Africa is not mellow," Fanny had written in one of her letters. "The local narcotic is a frothy home brew that leaves you stunned, and people smoke horrible American cigarettes that pollute the air, give them halitosis, and make them sick. I feel like I haven't breathed in three weeks."

  "MY FATHER'S FUNERAL, THE first of three he was to have, was an impressive event," Fanny now wrote. "It was held at one of the formerly all-white churches in the capital, three blocks from
the Ministry of Culture. I had no idea what to wear to such a high-level African funeral, but when I called my mother at home in Georgia--who said she wanted to come herself but the arthritis in her hip is much worse--and told her where the funeral was to take place, she said, 'Of course you wear black.' When I told her about the other two funerals, which would take place in my father's village, she said that one of them, for the men of the village, I would not be able to attend, and that to the other I should wear white, the Olinka color of mourning, and I should paint my face white, too. Also my hands, and any other part of my body that would show. For some reason, information about this last funeral, the village funeral, cheered me, though the white clothing I'd brought with me, a simple blouse and skirt, seemed too informal for something as formal as a funeral. And I had no paint with which to color myself white.

  "I sat through the big national, actually international, funeral (dignitaries from many foreign countries--Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola, East Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, among others--came to pay their countries' respects) with part of my attention already on the next one, and on where to find white paint.

  "My sister, Nzingha, sat beside me, her husband, Metudhi, next to her. She looked at me during one of the rather belabored eulogies and smiled. I smiled back. On the dais in front of us was Ola's casket. A creation of his own design, it was a large, minimally smoothed and polished mahogany log, the ends of which slanted up and inward, like the toes of a caliph's slippers; its oblong, oval top fit into the log as would the lid of a pot.

  "In the old days, Ola's body would have been wrapped in bark cloth and left under a tree in the forest. Now it would have to be buried, but perhaps not very deep. I could not bear the thought of anything 'downpressing,' as the Rastas say, my father."

  Alone in the Broderick Street apartment that he and Fanny had shared, Suwelo had looked forward to Fanny's letters, which read like serializations in a modern African adventure magazine. They were worlds apart, though at times he felt quite close to her. Sitting at his desk by the window that overlooked the busy San Francisco street, he glanced up often from her words to rest his eyes on "their" tiny corner of the Golden Gate Bridge, as the cooling fog swirled about it. Her world, at the moment, was hot and humid, he imagined, and contained all the color and drama his did not. He tried to conjure up Fanny Nzingha's face and to find a place for himself at each of Ola's funerals.

  "As the eulogists droned on, I wondered if Nzingha was thinking about the day our father casually introduced us," wrote Fanny. "She was his assistant at the Ministry of Culture, and when he took me and my mother there the first time, he told me he had a delightful surprise, someone with a remarkable resemblance to me. Who? I asked. My young assistant, he replied. As soon as we walked through the door I saw what he meant, though Nzingha was dressed, as I was to find she always was, in a voluminous, traditional robe and matching headdress. She had my eyes, and I realized for the first time, and happily, that the eyes of the newer African generations, after my father's, were clearer than the old, less yellow from the smoke of the fires in the shanties and huts, less bloodshot. She also had my nose, the Apache nose that had made my classmates, when I was in high school, call me 'Cochise.' There was also something of me in her movements and expressions. Except that she seemed to take pride, I was to notice later, in a kind of learned officiousness that struck me as unnatural. When we approached her, she was giving instructions to an underling--that's the feeling one got. That she was speaking not to her secretary or her assistant, a woman easily her equal perhaps in all but education and salary, but to some lesser being, a servant, in the old colonial style.

  "After her rather long, detailed, and, I felt, extremely patronizing instructions to the woman, who heard her out with bowed head and averted eyes, Nzingha turned her face up to be kissed, which Ola did with a resounding smack, and which she endured.

  "'My two Nzinghas!' he cried, expansively, even flinging out his arms in his joy. Didn't he feel a trace of uneasiness or remorse, I wondered afterward, introducing us this way. 'At last you meet!'

  "Coolly, for she was a woman used to welcoming foreign dignitaries, she extended her hand. We were exactly the same color, a rich, coffee-bean brown. I took it in my own.

  "As she looked at me, and then at my mother, then at her father, beaming down on the two of us, a slight frown formed between her brows.

  "'Ah,' said Ola, whose other nickname, 'the Quipper,' given him by the people, was well earned, 'the frown of recognition!'

  "We were both clearly puzzled. I looked at my mother. She was smiling, composed. Obviously she had expected something like this. Yes, I thought, it would have been highly unlikely for my father not to have married, not to have had other children. He was an African. Perhaps he married many times, had many wives, many children. The thought that I might have half a dozen siblings took possession of me. How did I feel about this? I didn't know. Meanwhile, my hand clung to Nzingha's, as hers did to mine. I felt I was looking into a mirror as an African-American (in jeans and loose blouse, sandals), and the mirror was reflecting only the African.

  "'You are sisters, my daughters,' said our father. 'Fanny Nzingha, meet Nzingha Anne.' This was his big surprise, and it pleased him, as all surprises, parties, unexpected verbal exchanges with people on street corners did.

  "She was first to open her arms, to embrace me, which she did carefully, as if we were both breakable, and wrapped in tissue.

  "A moment later, after pleasantries about our visit to the country and compliments to my mother on her stylish blue pantsuit, Nzingha excused herself and moved off regally down the hall. Later, she told me she went to the restroom, sat on the toilet, and cried.

  "She had tried to be everything for her father: beautiful, a quick-minded student without discipline problems, interested in restoring the country's culture; she'd even married early in the hope of giving him grandsons. And then she discovered that she could not have been everything to him anyway, because he had my mother, an educated woman, and he had me, a beautiful and educated daughter. We had come before her and her mother; not so much in terms of affection, but in terms of time.

  "I didn't get it.

  "Patiently, one night over drinks in her cozy and colorful apartment, near the Ministry of Culture, where every wall was hung with weavings and paintings by the women of the villages, Nzingha explained it to me.

  "We had eaten, and she had put her two boys, my young nephews, to bed. I could see that caring for them wore her out and that Metudhi was no help. He had eaten and muttered something about a meeting, as he made for the door.

  "'We are trying to bring back to people's consciousness that it takes two parents to raise a child,' she said, wearily kicking off her shoes and sinking onto the couch. 'It is only one of many beliefs the Africans have lost. In the old days what is happening now throughout the country would have been unthinkable; men are giving these women children, and that is all they give. Not a cent do they give for food or clothing or education. It is a scandal. Even men like Metudhi think it is enough to provide financial assistance; after they put down a part of their paycheck, they are out the door. Men who pay something, anything, are considered the good men. Every woman wants to get hold of one of these gems.'

  "Her accent was charming. The way she said even this grim thing made me smile.

  "'Yes, it does no good to cry, I suppose,' said Nzingha, 'yet there are times when that is just the way I feel. And I feel so frustrated, because the men can always run on and on about the white man's destructiveness and yet they cannot look into their own families and their own children's lives and see that this is just the destruction the white man has planned. Meanwhile, the women are starting to crack from the white man's blatant success and the lack of their men's support.'

  "'The same things are happening to us in the United States,' I said, 'only, there it is happening to everyone; there are many more white women and children receiving public assistance than there are black ones, for example. Thou
gh the media and the government try to make it look otherwise.'

  "'Men are mangled by the system, as we are,' said Nzingha.

  "'Yes,' I said. 'The difference is that they help create it. At least the part of it that oppresses women.'

  "'That is true,' she said. 'And I learned this from the life of my mother.'

  "Nzingha went about the room and switched off the lights. 'You haven't seen the moon until you've seen it in Africa,' she said, and, sure enough, there began to rise a giant yellow moon that soon filled the window and then the room with its cool yellow light.

  "'My mother worshiped the moon,' she said, thoughtfully, sitting down again. 'She had since she was a child; and she could see in moonlight as clearly as most people can in sun. Ironically, this was to mean she would grow up to become a great guerrilla fighter, always the one who volunteered to go on missions at night. But I am getting ahead of my mother's story. Do you want some more coffee?' she asked, pouring a bit more into my cup. 'We grow this, you know,' she said, raising her cup, a booster of her country's products in all settings.

  "I was enchanted by the cup, hand-thrown, a brilliant cobalt blue, with small crocodile heads decorating its sides. I turned it around and around in my hands while my sister talked.