11
One windy day, in the middle of this most unstable June, just before I start to write down my story about Aida, about her mango plant, and all the people around her in Uganda waiting to die of Aids, I visit one of the many medieval churches on the island of Gotland. It doesn't matter which one. The darkness of these old stone-built churches is the breath they all breathe. Darkness has no individual identity. Darkness is eternal, and has no face, no name.
A lone man is tending a grave. The gate at the churchyard entrance is black and heavy. The handle is difficult to turn.
Somebody, a friend from the old days, once told me that dark churches made him afraid of death. It is precisely the opposite for me. In the darkness of a medieval church on Gotland, time ceases to exist. Or perhaps all time, the past, the present, the future – all of them are compressed into a shared moment. Going into certain churches you feel at peace the moment the door has closed behind you. Nothing else is needed. The church creates its own universe.
12
I have a special reason for coming to this particular church. It feels cool within those thick stone walls. The noise of the lawn mower working away outside cannot penetrate the stone or the windows.
I contemplate the frescoes on one of the walls. The skeleton of Death is chasing a human being, smiling wryly and wielding his scythe. The man is terrified of Death, which always comes untimely. In this ancient place I am faced with pictures of the Black Death, the Plague. Time stands still, but the reality of past time is present even so.
It occurs to me that amongst all these images of Gotland peasants, I can see Aida. A black face among the medieval farmers from Tingstäde and Roma. Solidarity among men and women is as much present in horror as it is in joy.
Among the people portrayed are her mother, her brothers and her sisters. Death pursues them all down the ages. The images frozen onto the walls of the medieval church are in some ways a moving picture. The figures come running towards me, gliding through arrested time.
Then it was the Plague, now it is Aids. Then it was bacteria, now it is a virus. But death is never visible. Whence does the illness come? Where do the sores come from, what causes the emaciation?
Why should bacteria and viruses be so small that they cannot be seen? Why should they have this unfair advantage?
13
I sit in a pew in the dark interior and reflect. When did I first hear about this insidious and mysterious illness that seemed at first only to affect gay men on the west coast of America?
I cannot remember.
I have searched my memory and gone through newspapers from the early 1980s to see if there might be a headline I recognise, that could help me to fix a specific date. At certain times in my life I have kept detailed and seriously intended diaries, but they have not been able to help me either. I cannot find a moment that I can point to with any degree of certainty and say: this is when I realised that something momentous was happening. A new epidemic illness had put mankind under threat. Nor do I recall any conversations with friends about the illness, definitely not before 1985 or 1986.
Perhaps it was the sight of the actor Rock Hudson on a stretcher in Paris. I remember that distinctly. There were photographs on the front pages of all the main newspapers. It was immediately clear that the man who – not least together with Doris Day – had made so many films over so many years in which he had played a husband in an idealised and hence dishonest American marriage, was in fact homosexual. What had he been thinking of as he wandered around in his striped pyjamas, always immaculately ironed, Doris Day at his side, also smiling non-stop and fussing around?
Now he was dying, not at all old. His last journey to Paris in a chartered aeroplane was reminiscent of the handicapped faithful who tried to recover their health by going on a pilgrimage to a shrine of the Madonna. A last desperate attempt to keep death at bay by trying a new form of treatment that was said to be available in France.
I remember reading that he slept twenty-three hours a day. The one hour he was awake he devoted to telling stories about his life. I shuddered.
That news photograph of Rock Hudson is among my earliest intimations of Aids. At that time we had not yet been exposed to the mass of pictures and documentation. All the photographs from Africa, with anonymous men and women, emaciated bodies, sunken eyes, people without hope, without strength.
I also recall a young African quoted in a newspaper: "Must we die because we are in love?"
But the first decisive impression? I am pretty sure it was Rock Hudson. It was as if a sculpture guaranteed unbreakable had nevertheless shattered. And yet I am not absolutely sure.
On the other hand, I can say precisely when Aids became real for me, when I myself became frightened of the illness, terrified that I had been infected.
I knew, of course, how one became infected. And, yes, I had friends who were doctors and they assured me that there were no short cuts that the infection could take to attack me. Nevertheless, the fear was there. I know it is a fear that I shared and still share with many people.
14
It is easy to lie about this. Easy to boast that one has never experienced any trace of the irrational fear of being infected, despite the fact that common sense tells you that you have not been exposed to any risks. That is how it has always been. People ten or so years older than I am have stories to tell about a similarly needless fear of having been stricken with syphilis. They will tell you about the Wasserman test they had to take before being accepted as a blood donor, and that it was a good way of establishing that one did not in fact have a syphilis bomb ticking away in one's body. I remember as a teenager being scared stiff by stories about gonorrhoea. I don't think I've spoken to a single person in connection with venereal disease who hasn't felt a cold shiver down the spine at least once in their lives.
But the fear of HIV and Aids? I recall it very clearly. There was a period in the 1980s when the fear was especially widespread. All kinds of horror stories were circulating in the mass media. There was an account of how a passenger suffering from Aids was not allowed to board an American flight from China. The captain refused to allow him on board. There were those who argued that people infected should be branded, or tattooed in the groin. Or why not herd them together and maroon them on remote islands, there to await their deaths?
There are moments when the frescoes in the Gotland churches seem to be speaking directly to us, right now. Not only addressing us, but speaking about us, and that we are part of their story.
It was also in the mid-1980s that people started looking for scapegoats. Politicians with extreme views started fishing in muddy waters, but they were not the only ones looking for scapegoats, a lot of "ordinary" people were also carried away by the fear. Homosexuals were branded the guilty party, the ones who were spreading the disease. Just as in the past it was the Jews who had been blamed for spreading the deadly plague by infecting people's wells.
So it was the homosexuals who should all be branded, especially if they were black men. All black men seeking asylum in Europe should be subjected to HIV tests. Those infected should be turned away.
When the history of Aids in the 1980s comes to be written, a lot of ugly truths will emerge with full and frightening force.
In our part of the world at least, the absolute terror is no longer with us. There are nevertheless some people still who maintain that the Aids epidemic is the wages of sin. The scapegoats exist, be they asylum seekers, homosexual men or Russian prostitutes.
15
I well remember the moment when I myself was struck by this fear. It was in Lusaka, in November 1987. I was staying at the Ridgeway Hotel. I'd just driven there from Kabompo where I was living at the time, high up towards Zambia's north-western border with Angola. I was on my way to Europe. The flight was going to leave the following day. I was dirty and tired after the long journey and had checked into the Ridgeway. That evening, after dinner, I went for a walk around the hotel and its grounds. At
one end of the hotel I discovered the entrance to a casino. I took a look inside the dimly lit room and was immediately solicited by several prostitutes who were stationed along the wall next to the roulette table. Young and pretty. Dangerous. I thought at once that several of them were bound to be infected. How many men in my situation, visitors to the hotel or the casino, would succumb to the temptation offered by the girls? A night in the hotel, then goodbye. But death would be there already, inside their skin, sowed into their blood, flowing through their veins.
I drew back in alarm. There before me, a smiling mask, was death. The virus I was so afraid of. The girls were indeed young and pretty, but what they were offering me was death. I would have to be an idiot to accept. And, what is more, be willing to pay for it.
The fear, irrational though it was, stayed with me for many years, certainly until the mid-1990s. Perhaps it is still there, even if my fits of baseless anxiety have become increasingly rare. I took a test once, even though I had absolutely no reason to be scared. But scared I was, no matter what. And, I know, many others, very many, have experienced that same fear.
16
It was in Zambia too that I first encountered someone who quite definitely did have Aids. It was a young man. He staggered from an overcrowded bus in Kabompo. He fell at the feet of the people who had come to meet him. He was taken to the hospital in a wheelbarrow. He was as thin as it is possible to be.
Two days later he was dead. He had only just made it home from Kitwe, back to his mother in order to die close to her. His name was Richard. He was 17, and he was not gay. This was in 1988.
17
At the same place, Kabompo, I listened to a Dutch doctor giving a talk about this terrifying disease. It was an evening in the rainy season. The roads were a sea of mud, but people came from all points of the compass and a number of tribal chieftains were there. The premises belonged to one of the missionary groups and were the biggest in Kabompo, but still the place was packed to the rafters. There were others standing outside, looking in through the open windows. It was unbearably hot.
The doctor described in simple, straightforward terms – and what he said was translated into the local language by an interpreter – what happened in the body once HIV had entered the blood. He said that promiscuity was the principal culprit in the spread of the disease, and there was a rising hum, like a swarm of bees, from the women present. It was a pregnant moment. When the doctor had finished, one of the chieftains, a very old man, rose to his feet. He said: "We must all protect ourselves. For the sake of our children. There must be a stop to all unnecessary travelling. Families must stick together. Men must remain faithful to their women, women to their men. If not, we shall all die."
That was in 1988, during the rainy season. I often wonder how many of those who were there listening to the Dutch doctor were already infected. And how many of them are still alive today.
18
The mist is dispersing. I stare out to sea and I think about Aida and her mango plant. As she showed me it, I felt no doubt that it was one of the moments I shall remember for as long as I live.
19
Just how it came about, I don't know. Nor do I know when Aida made up her mind to take me into her confidence and share her secret with me. But I saw it the second time I visited her and her family.
The first time I met her, it was a very hot day. We left Kampala early so as to avoid being stuck in the chaotic traffic that envelops the city's roads every morning. Beatrice, who was the person helping me to make contact with people carrying the disease and writing memory books, had told Christine that I would be coming. At that time I didn't know Christine had a daughter called Aida. In fact, I knew only two things about Christine: that she had Aids, and that she was prepared to talk to me about it.
When we left Kampala that morning I felt the same distaste I'd been feeling ever since arriving in Uganda. There was something almost obscene about asking fatally ill people to talk about their suffering and their fate with a complete stranger. Somebody who, to make matters worse, had flown in from a distant corner of the world – Europe, the West – in which the terrible disease had almost been tamed and turned into a chronic but not necessarily fatal disease. The same disease that now is killing indiscriminately the length and breadth of the African continent and in other parts of the Third World.
I had slept badly because I had been worrying about the task ahead. My unease was not difficult to understand. I was dreading it because I knew I would find the fate of Christine and the rest of them very hard to take.
Beatrice had given us very efficient directions as to how to get there. We turned off the main road and, as always in Africa, we immediately found ourselves deep in a different world, a world usually, but wrongly, called the real Africa. Africa is always "real", whether it be savannah or slum, old ramshackle urban district or a grim and difficult-to-pin-down shadowland between bush and desert.
Christine had two houses. In one of them lived her mother and father and some of her brothers and sisters. When I arrived and got out of the car, the first thing I saw was her father, who was sitting peeling some kind of vegetable I had never seen before. He was unshaven but very dignified. Eventually I discovered that he was about 80, although nobody could be sure exactly how old. He had a keen eye, and was surrounded by an aura that immediately captivated anyone who approached him.
He went on peeling his vegetables all the time I was talking to Christine. Occasionally some child or perhaps his wife or one of the other women would give him something to drink.
He was like a measurer of time who would reject a normal clock with scorn. For him, a better way of measuring progress in his life and that of others was peeling vegetables.
Christine was thin and tired. I could see at once that she had put herself out in anticipation of our meeting. Her choice of clothes, her face carefully made-up, her meticulously brushed hair. She was typical of all the people suffering from Aids whom I met during my visit to Uganda: the last thing they were forced to surrender was their dignity. That was the ditch that had to be defended at all costs: after that there was nothing but death, and it often struck quickly once their dignity had been lost.
Christine said:"I have a daughter."
We were sitting on two brown stools behind the open but covered room which the family used to prepare food. Christine said something in her native tongue. Her daughter emerged from a clump of banana trees. She was wearing a dark blue skirt, which was ragged and torn, a red blouse, and she was barefooted. She was slim and tall and took after her mother: they had the same features around their mouths and noses and eyes. Aida was shy, she spoke in a low voice and her eyes were cast down. When I shook her hand, she withdrew it as quickly as she could.
Aida was nowhere to be seen for the rest of my long conversation with her mother. It was almost afternoon, when we had to leave to drive back to Kampala and had other appointments, before I saw Aida again. She was with Christine's mother and some of the other girls, not Christine's daughters but the daughters of her sister. One sister had already died of Aids. They were preparing dinner. I watched Aida fetch the vegetables that Christine's father had been peeling all day.
Christine said:"When I'm gone, Aida will have to take on a lot of responsibility. I am trying to live for as long as I can for her sake."
"Does she know about it?"
Christine looked at me in surprise.
"Of course she knows about it."
"What did you tell her?"
"What had to be said. She will become the mother of her brothers and sisters, and if my parents are still alive she will become their new daughter once I'm gone."
"How did she react?"
"She was distressed. What else would you expect?"
We went to the car that was parked in the shade of some tall trees whose name I have never managed to remember. I had said goodbye to everybody, and worked out that Christine's family comprised sixteen people. Christine, who had been a scho
olteacher and still worked whenever she had the strength, was the only one in this large family who had any income, and even that was extremely modest. She had a very direct way of assessing her wages in relation to her own fate.
"The monthly cost of antiretroviral drugs is precisely twice what I earn."