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Chicago Center for Literature and Photography
“Eleanor Stanford captures experience with the precision
of a poet and the broad vision of a novelist, translating
the unwritten language of the inner world into a handful
of words as shimmering and polished as sea-glass. In
this book, Stanford goes far beyond a description of
an eating disorder—this book explores the meaning of
body, of place, of home, of language itself. An essential
read.” —Marya Hornbacher, author of Wasted
História, História
Two years in the Cape Verde Islands
Eleanor Stanford
Advanced Praise for
História, História
Eleanor Stanford captures experience with the precision of a poet and the broad vision of a
novelist, translating the unwritten language of the the inner world into a handful of words as
shimmering and polished as sea-glass. Her ability to give voice to the estrangement of being
alive and wildly observant in an unfamiliar culture brings vivid light to both the outer world
she describes, and the interior terrain that is her own. In this book, Stanford goes far beyond a
description of an eating disorder—this book explores the meaning of body, of place, of home,
of language itself. An essential read.
—Marya Hornbacher, Pulitzer nominated author of Wasted
This is a gorgeously written work of travel writing. Eleanor Stanford is alive to the desire and
distance, the hunger and nourishment that inform our most significant journeys. Stanford
leads us outward into creole Cape Verde—“a small stone in the shoe of the great empire”—
and inward into the shadows of the self.
—Rob Nixon, author of Dreambirds: a Natural History of a Fantasy
This book is about the places we travel to, both in the world and within ourselves, the places that
inform our hearts, our minds and the relationships we find ourselves in. Written in gorgeous,
lyrical prose, História, História will inevitably transport you into a deeper sense of self.
—Claire Bidwell Smith, author of The Rules of Inheritance
©
Copyright 2013, Eleanor Stanford. Released under a Creative
Commons license; some rights reserved.
Printed and distributed by the Chicago Center for Literature
and Photography. First electronic edition: March 2013.
Cover image courtesy of the author.
Image preparation: Ron Stanford/Stanford Creative.
All names in this book have been changed.
20 percent of this book’s profits will be donated to the
Cape Verde Children’s Coalition.
This collection is available in a variety of electronic formats,
including EPUB for mobile devices, MOBI for Kindles, and
PDFs for both American and European laserprinters, as well
as a special deluxe paper edition. Find them all, plus a plethora
of supplemental information such as interviews, videos and
reviews, at:
cclapcenter.com/historia
Contents
Learning the Language
6
Joaninha11
Geography Lessons
15
Crazy23
Fomi29
Seven to One
34
Morna39
Long Division
45
Boa Vista
47
Postcard from the Volcano
52
Dove on the Veranda
54
Sobrados58
Sal60
Lisboa63
Return68
A Ship and a Harbor
76
Acknowledgements79
Glossary80
for Danny
Bo é nha cretcheu
Na mund é so bô so
and in memoriam
Cesária Évora 1941-2011
Learning the
Language
We landed on the island of Sal on a July afternoon. We had been
flying over unbroken ocean for hours, and suddenly we were
descending, despite the fact that there was no land in view. Finally
a tiny spit of land appeared, a thin rust-colored strip spotted with
a few skeletons of plants and irregular rock formations. As some
miracle of radar lowered us down on this bald patch of desert in the
middle of the Atlantic, I could hear the small gasps and murmurs
of disappointment among the other Peace Corps volunteers in
the seats around me. “This is Cape Verde? Doesn’t Verde mean
green?” Even those who had done their research and read up on
the islands were unprepared for such absolute bleakness.
I came with my husband and our allotted eighty pounds
of luggage each—clothes and bed sheets; his guitar and violin;
my three pairs of running shoes and fifteen books, which I would
read in the first two months.
All twenty-five volunteers spent the first three months of
Peace Corps training in Praia, the capital. Praia means beach
in Portuguese, but there were only two narrow slivers of sand
where one could swim. We went there in the afternoons. Summer
was rainy season, and when the rain came, it washed the gullies
and dry riverbeds where people threw their garbage. The ocean
turned brown; from the plateau, you could watch the line of filth
spread north to south. No swimming for a week afterwards, the
Peace Corps nurse instructed us.
We spent eight hours a day in a cinderblock school building that
held heat like a secret. Four of these hours were dedicated to
Creole. Our teacher, Madalena, had a halo of dark hair, combed
close to her head but pushing out in small strands at the temples.
Ellipses of sweat darkened the armpits of her fuchsia dress. She
would pause occasionally, erase a “c” with the side of her hand,
replace it with a “k.” Kriolu is not a written language. Even
for Madalena, who spoke this language before any other, the
consonant combinations looked strange, their correspondence to
sound cryptic and incomplete.
Madalena taught with her whole body. She told us stories
about how she had a husband who drank too much, who gave
her five sons, then took off with another woman. At least that is
what I got.
She taught us the names of foods: marmelu, cimbrón,
manDanilo, fijón. They have no equivalent in the temperate places
where we’re from; the drawings in our book were indecipherable.
Madalena took us to the market on the plateau where she greeted
the women by name: “Lina, é modi?” The large black woman cut
a papaya for us into slices. “Sabi?” she asked. Is it good?
Ten-thirty was break time. Passing through the courtyard, we
glanced with envy at the stray dogs sleeping on the tile floor.
7 | História, História
Across the street at the bakery we bought pastries and orange
sodas and watched boys in a dust field beside the school kick a
soccer ball around. We tried our Kriolu on the sullen girl behind
the counter, who stood with crossed arms as we fumbled for
words and the right change. My favorite cookie had the same
name as my teacher, madalena. It was made of corn flour and
shaped like a seashell.
In my mind, I tried to make an oblique connection to the
Proust I’d read in college. I imagined myself airily sophisticated.
I sipped my Coke and compared homestay families with the
other volunteers. Jenny’s homestay father was creeping her out
with his lascivious advances. Jessica was sharing her space with
the homestay family’s assorted relatives fleeing war-torn Guinea
Bissau. I couldn’t complain. As the married couple, Dan and I
had an enviable set-up—a tiny separate apartment attached to
the apartment of a quiet older couple.
Privately, I assessed the other volunteers: Diane, with her
sweet singing voice; Paula, who needed to let everyone know how
experienced she was as a teacher; Thomas, always in a perfectly
ironed shirt, his hair neatly combed. Who among us would
dance on a carnival float festooned with feathers? Who would
go AWOL, abandon the housing Peace Corps had provided, and
move to a remote corner of their island? Who would marry a
Cape Verdean? Who would drop out early, defeated by cultural
difficulties or depression or dysentery? Who would extend for an
extra year?
I had my guesses, but pretty much across the board, I
would be wrong, wrong, wrong.
There are no conjugations in Creole. Just past or present. Kriolu
has no future tense, and certainly no subjunctive. In training, the
volunteers ran a model school, a small preview of teaching for a
group of mostly twenty-two year olds who’d never taught before.
Terrified, I stood in front of the students, who were also volunteers,
spending their summer break taking extra English classes.
When I tried to teach them the simple present in English,
I discovered that it was not so simple. “I have, you have, he
has…” we repeated. The blackboard was feathered with erasures.
Together we studied how this tense could lift above. Sentences
swooped like contrails on the page: we wake up early, we draw
the water, we go to school. My students whispered and folded
love notes into tiny squares, oblivious to the verbs that circled
these days, patient, beaked and black.
When Dan and I came home for lunch at noon, our homestay
mother, Nonó, had laid out platters of rice and beans and fish.
The rice was greasy, cooked in tomato paste and oil. The fish
stared up at me with its glassy eye. Although I had been a
vegetarian since I was twelve, I had decided that I would eat fish
while I was in Cape Verde. It was one of the questions the Peace
Corps interviewer had asked me over the phone. Would you be
willing to change your diet, to try unfamiliar foods? Sure, I’d
said. But now, staring at the dead fish on my plate, I wondered
what I had been thinking. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a Peace
Corps volunteer after all, I worried with alarming frequency.
That fear, though, was balanced equally by an elation I had never
experienced before, and which would overtake me at unexpected
moments—buying a banana from a vendor on the street, walking
down Avenida Lisboa and watching boys play soccer in a cloud
of dust, hearing a Cape Verdean pop song in a crammed minivan
bus and realizing I knew the words.
In the afternoons we studied Portuguese. I pored uselessly over
verb charts, heat and caffeine tightening behind my forehead.
Variable endings wove like the soccer game across the street that
I couldn’t follow. Even after a few weeks in Cape Verde, I also
could tell that Portuguese was largely irrelevant. It’s the official
language of Cape Verde, but Creole is the de facto one. Cape
Verdean Creole is roughly ninety percent Portuguese-derived,
and yet the two are nonetheless mutually unintelligible.
We did need familiarity with Portuguese for any official
purposes—to read a bank statement, to understand the newspaper
or fill out forms for school. Teachers were supposed to use only
Portuguese at school, too, but I quickly learned how unrealistic
this was, given that it was a foreign language for everyone,
teachers and students alike.
These reasons, along with its complicated structures
and strict rules, made Portuguese seem hopelessly stuffy and
inaccessible to me. I was much more interested in Creole’s infinite
suppleness, its ability to convey subtleties of meaning through its
blunt vocabulary and its singsong inflections.
Dan picked up Creole before I did, and spoke it more
easily and fluently. This was partly because he is gifted at learning
languages, partly because Portuguese was his mother tongue.
I wondered what it meant to him to hear words he had not
encountered for years, a phrase from a lullaby, or a reprimand his
nanny had used, but to hear the words altered, repossessed, their
syllables laid down on the chopping block. Falar, to say, becomes
fla; querer, to want, kre.
The English word “Creole” comes from the Portuguese
crioulo, meaning native; it comes from the verb criar, to bring up.
In Cape Verde, you can kria children or goats, corn, friendship.
Intransitively, it means to grow, to grow up: N kria li. I grew up
here. Crioulo comes originally from the Latin, creare, to create.
And it’s true, this language is made and remade, constantly in the
process of being reinvented. It seemed to constantly shift on me;
as soon as I mastered a certain tense, for example, I would hear
someone express it differently. That’s correct, too, they would
shrug, when I asked.
And what is Kriolu when it’s written? A bastard Portuguese
dressed in African orthography. An African chant singing in
Portuguese chains. The language is inevitably changed by the effort
to pin it down. What is lost is the fluidity, the absence of a single
standard that allows for the coexistence of multiple meaning.
Towards the end of training, all the new volunteers took an
overnight trip to Tarrafal, a beach town at the other end of the
island from the capital. It took almost three hours to get there,
over the island’s mountainous spine, then descending into lush
valleys on the other side. It was September, one of the few weeks
of precious green.
In the Peace Corps van, I sat with Jenny and Jessica.
In the three months of training we’d become close friends,
commiserating about diarrhea and homesickness, taking trips
on the weekends in small, overflowing buses to explore towns
and beaches in different corners of the island. Our trainers (both
Cape Verdean and American) had warned us that Cape Verdeans
were terrible gossips, but we volunteers were worse. Alliances
formed and dissolved, vicious rumors made the rounds. Erin was
sleeping with her host brother. Andrew was an alcoholic. Melissa
had misunderstood the nurse’s instructions, and had drunk an
entire liter of oral rehydration solution at once, rather than a cup,
and thrown up all over her host family’s couch.
Jenny and Jessica and I already waxed nostalgic about
what we’d miss from Praia—beers at the Stop Bar, ice cream
cones at Marisol, Madalena’s Creole lessons—but we were eager
to get our assignments, to live in our own houses as part of a real
Cape Verdean community. We speculated about where we’d end
up. “As long as I’m not in Praia, I’ll go anywhere,” Jenny said.
She was sick of the crowded, dirty capital, and wanted to go
somewhere rural.
I didn’t know where I wanted to go. From the pictures I’d
seen, each island was beautiful in its own way, and each of our
trainers held the strong conviction that theirs was the best.
“I don’t care where I go,” I said. “Just please don’t let me
get assigned to the same town as Larry.” Larry was a volunteer
in his mid-thirties, a smarmy former car salesman who managed
to offend everyone he met within minutes. He’d made clear
from our first orientation in Washington, D.C. that, while he
considered himself already fluent in Portuguese, and an expert
teacher, he really saw his Peace Corps experience as one long
stint in Margaritaville.
At Tarrafal, we visited the prison, a crumbling concrete
building where the Portuguese had locked up dissidents during
Cape Verde’s struggle for independence in the 1970s. It was a
long stretch of cells with a corrugated tin roof. There was talk,
the trainers told us, of turning it into a museum. But there was no
money for such a project. It did not look that different, I thought,
from some of the schools we’d seen. Just farther along down the
path of decay. There were holes in the prison’s roof where the
sunlight shone through.
The water at Tarrafal was calm and blue. The monkeys in
the trees were tame, and came down to sit on the railing and beg
for bits of banana. This tip of the island faced northwest, past
Santo Antão, into the vast Atlantic.
We sat on a terrace restaurant overlooking the bay, eating
buzio, the soft animal inside the conch shell. “Can you believe
this country is entrusting the education of its children to us?”
Jessica said, picking up a buzio with her fork, eyeing it skeptically.
“Why shouldn’t they?” Jenny said. “How else are we
going to figure out how to teach, except by doing it?”
“We’re more qualified than most of the Cape Verdean
teachers,” Dan said, which was both true and not true. There
was a teachers’ college in Praia and one in Mindelo, which
certified graduates to teach in Cape Verde. Although in practice
because of the shortage of educated people, and especially in
more rural areas, having completed a particular grade was often
qualification enough to teach it.
We’d graduated from college in the U.S. Some of the
volunteers even had masters’ degrees. But we barely spoke either
Creole or Portuguese. And our understanding of our students’
lives and culture was minimal, to say the least.
“Which is to say, completely unqualified,” I said. The
buzio was briny and tough. I had heard that in some West African
religions, buzios were used to divine the future. The practices
had been transplanted to Brazil and Cuba, but like so much else,
these secrets of prognostication had not survived the crossing to
Cape Verde. In Cape Verde, people simply ate the little creatures,
stewed in garlic and coconut milk.
But qualified or not, we would begin soon enough. We
finished our plate of conch, and walked down to the beach,
where we spread out our panus, the bright cloths we’d bought
from vendors in Praia, and lay in the sun until we burned.
Joaninha
Joaninha introduced herself to us the first night we arrived in
the town of São Filipe, where we would be living. Dan and I
had been assigned to Fogo, the island closest to Santiago. It was
a steep cone, less than 200 square miles, and the only island of
the ten that was still an active volcano. Later, we would scale its
peak—the highest point in West Africa, at almost ten thousand
feet—and stare into the crater, which was still smoking after its
eruption three years before.
But that first night, when Joaninha found us, we were
sitting in Café Magma drinking sodas, trying to avoid Larry. He
was the only other volunteer who’d been assigned to the same
town, and was boasting loudly about something to the bartender
in terrible Portuguese. “Café” was perhaps a hopeful designation
for the few rickety tables and chairs, the narrow counter that
held little aside from a few bottles of grog, the ubiquitous Cape
Verdean sugar cane liquor.
Joaninha kissed me and Dan on both cheeks as though
we already knew her. Her hair was tied back in a headscarf, and
she smiled, revealing crooked teeth with wide gaps. She pulled
up a chair next to me, already explaining in quick Creole what
she would need for us to buy: bleach, steel wool, a laundry basin.
Oh, and some corn and rice and fish if we wanted her to cook for
us, although of course tomorrow night we’d have to come have
dinner at her house, so we could meet her family.
Joaninha had been working for the Peace Corps volunteers
in São Filipe for the previous eight years. She had pictures of all
of them in her house: Jeremy, Ashley, Chad, Wendy. When we
met her she was thirty and had four kids, three boys and a girl,
the oldest of whom was fifteen. Her common-law husband was
a furniture maker by trade, but he appeared to spend more time
listening to soccer games on the radio and drinking beer with
other men in the bar than he did with his hammer.
“He’s Peace Corps, too?” she said, nodding to Larry.
“Your friend?”
“Do you want a soda?” Dan said, quickly changing the
subject. Joaninha would have plenty of time to find out about
Larry through the local gossip mill without us adding to it.
Besides, who knew what Larry was already telling the people at
the bar about me and Dan.
The word for maid in Creole is empregada. Literally translated, it
means simply ‘employed.’ There is no stigma attached to the job.
Any employment is better than the alternative, and a respectable
way to put food on the table. Many Cape Verdeans are day
laborers, piecing together a living, setting stones on a new road
or putting up roofs or cleaning houses.
“What do you do?” Americans ask each other at parties,
in bars, on the bus. A Cape Verdean would be baffled by this
question as a means of introduction. I drive a truck, I clean
houses, I work in the fields. But what does this tell you about
me? Here the important questions are: Who is your father? Who
is your mother? Where do you live? Where were your parents
born? And, perhaps most fundamental: A bo e kuze? What are
you? Meaning, which Portuguese soccer team do you root for?
Are you Porto, or Benfica?
Joaninha came to our house on Tuesday and Thursday
mornings. I didn’t teach until twelve-thirty, and in the mornings
I tried to write. I would sit in the bright pink, completely
unfurnished room at the back of the apartment with the door
closed, notebook balanced on my knees. Beneath the windows,
the chickens gossiped loudly.
Joaninha sang as she swept and mopped. “Licensa,” she
called, excuse me, as she swung the door open with her hip,
carrying a bucket of water in one hand and a rag in the other.
“Always so busy working,” she said, as she began in one corner,
moving backward across the room on her knees. “Teaching is
hard work, isn’t it? I don’t see how you do it. It makes your head
tired. Much harder than cleaning houses.”
It was hard—though not as hard as cleaning houses, I
thought—but it wasn’t my teaching I was working on. I wrote
letters home, and letters to Jenny and Jessica on their separate
islands. I filled thick spiral journals too, trying to untangle the
complicated knot of despair and exhilaration I felt. How isolated
I felt, how I longed for a connection, a real friend, someone to
talk to other than Dan. The thrill of going to the market and
buying cimbrón and papaya in competent Creole. The strange
combination of pride and dread I felt when I walked down
the dirt road by the school and throngs of students called out,
“Teacher, teacher!”
“Licensa,” Joaninha said again, and I shifted to the other
side of the room, pretending to write something, wishing I could
melt into the floor, wishing I could just be alone and mop my own
house, or not mop it at all if I didn’t want to. I liked Joaninha so
much, understood and gladly fulfilled my unspoken obligation to
hire her. But I felt terribly uncomfortable having a maid.
I don’t remember now where Dan was those mornings
while I was writing, if he walked down to the market or sat on
the stoop with the neighbors, or if he was merely in the other
room, talking to Joaninha while she scrubbed our clothes in
the stone quintal and dusted the shelf in the living room. It was
easier to be a man in Cape Verde than a woman, and though I
knew it wasn’t his fault, I begrudged Dan this relative ease. Male
teachers invited him to go out for a grog. Women were friendly
and solicitous.
With me, men were either irritatingly flirtatious, or
ignored me completely. The few female teachers at the high
school were nice to me, but a bit distant. They did not go out
for grog after classes (or sometimes between classes) as the male
teachers did. They went home to cook dinner, plan their lessons,
take care of their children and their parents.
Surely, though, this distance and disconnection was
compounded by my own shyness, my own self-consciousness
and reluctance to make the first move, to endure the awkward
visits that I knew would involve sitting in their stiff, formal living
room, eating stale cookies, trading pleasantries in Creole.
With Joaninha at least, despite my discomfiture at being
her employer, my connection was genuine and fairly intimate.
She was only six years older than me, but had had her first son
at fifteen, and the subsequent years and hard work had taken
their toll. Her back ached; several of her teeth had fallen out.
The fact that she was a mother put something greater than a few
years between us. It gave her clout in our relationship, allowed
her to mother me. “Take off that shirt,” she would order as I
was dressing for school. “Let me iron that.” She cooked for us,
then watched as we tried her katchupa or kuskús with honey.
She scolded me to eat more. I often had stomach problems, as all
the Peace Corps volunteers did, adjusting to the new food and
water. But the truth was, once the occasional bout with dysentery
had given me an agreeably flat belly, and a taste of the floating,
pleasantly buzzing feeling that came with not eating enough, I
used this excuse not to eat—dor di barriga, stomach ache—often.
Did Joaninha guess what was behind my refusal of her food?
Was the idea of someone turning down food when they were
hungry so foreign as to be incomprehensible? Perhaps. But I also
felt—or maybe just imagined—that she sometimes looked at me
askance, a trace of concern or pity in her glance.
Sometimes Joaninha answered the telephone when
I was out. “You mother called,” she reported. “I told her that
everything is fine here, that I’m taking good care of you.” I’m not
sure how she managed that, given her non-existent English, and
my mother’s equally non-existent Creole, but sure enough, when
my mother called back later, she told me that she had talked to
Joaninha. “What did you two talk about?” I asked, imagining
some mother tongue that transcended any earthly language, that
I, still childless myself, could not possibly comprehend.
Joaninha lived in a little stone house perched on the edge
of the cliff. Sometimes I visited her in the evening; she would
give her son Patriki several escudos and a cloth sack and send
him down to Maria Agusta’s to buy a few rolls and gingerbread
cookies, which came out of the oven every day at six. We sat in her
kitchen, a lean-to structure that lost light fast. Our conversations
were as repetitive as the motions of her hands chopping onions
for katchupa.
“How is your family?”
“Fine.”
“Your mother?”
“She’s fine.”
“And your father?”
“He’s fine.”
“Your brothers?”
“They’re all fine.”
“Ay, tcheu sodadi.” She shook her head. You must miss them.
“Sodadi sim,” I would assent, then proceed to ask her
about each member of her family, after which we would delve
into the gossip of the day, variations on how incorrigible my
students, her children, our husbands, and men in general were.
The habit of economy was etched into her palms. She
kept used grease in a tin by the stove, lit one burner from the
other rather than striking a new match. She waited until the last
minute to light the kerosene lamp, until darkness had closed on
us with the finality of a shut book.
Joaninha had stopped going to school in the fourth
grade. For several months while I was there, she studied with the
Mormons, who had a little night school in the basement of their
church. She practiced her letters in a Mickey Mouse notebook.
I think it embarrassed her to be at the same level as Patrícia, her
five-year old, but I also saw a certain pride in how she left her
notebook lying on the coffee table, so when I came to visit her it
just happened to be there, open to a page of careful, curvy script.
I sat in silence for awhile. She finished chopping, and
scraped the onions into the pot. I wondered how she did it without
crying. I felt like crying myself, although it probably didn’t have
to do with the onions. Sodadi, that all-purpose Cape Verdean
word for longing, for the ache of missing something, contained
only part of it. Outside, on the stone steps that led down to the
sea, the fishermen were mending their nets. Below, the Atlantic
threw itself again and again on the black volcanic ash. Sharks
circled in untold numbers. I was so frustrated. I wished the Peace
Corps had sent me somewhere else, or that I were another sort
of person, more outgoing, better able to negotiate this foreign
place, its gender roles and social mores that could feel as severe
and treacherous—and as invisible—as the undertow.
The kerosene lamp flickered against the stone walls,
and Joaninha stirred her katchupa thoughtfully. “So,” she said.
“When are you and Danny going to have a baby?”
“I...I don’t know.” I was taken aback. Dan and I had been
married for almost two years, and no one had ever asked me that
before. On the one hand, it seemed like such a personal question.
On the other hand, for Joaninha, it was simply stating the
obvious. I couldn’t convey in Creole, a language with no future
tense, why at twenty-two I had a husband and no child, why the
thought of having a baby seemed, at the time, more daunting
and unfathomable than going to live on an active volcano in the
middle of the Atlantic Ocean where I didn’t speak the language.
“Inda sta sedu,” Joaninha said in consolation. It’s still
early, even as the dark slipped in, as she touched the match to the
kerosene lamp, its glass pregnant with light.
This is how stories begin: “História, história,” a mother calls,
drawing the children into the lasso of lamplight. Once upon a
time, there was a wily creature named Nho Lobu—Mr. Wolf.
Nho Lobu, who was lazy as the day is long, was married to
Nha Mana. Nho Lobu lay in bed till noon, sat on the stoop and
strummed the guitar, played cards. Nha Mana ground the corn,
cooked the food, drew the water, tended the chickens. One day
Nha Mana got fed up. She called on the village tabanka to help
her. The group came with their drums and shakers, with their
banners and songs and chants. “We’ve come to kill the sick,”
they called. “Bring out your sick, anyone still in bed must die!”
Nho Pedro leaned in Nho Lobu’s window. “What’s that?” he
asked. “Still in bed?”
“No, no,” Nho Lobu replied, standing up, hurriedly
pulling on his shirt. “I was just on my way out to the fields to
do some work.” Nha Mana, who was behind the house in the
chicken coop and had heard everything, laughed and laughed,
and kept working.
Nho Lobu is the classic trickster of fairy tales—except that
he gets tricked in the end. He’s the lovable rogue, the laughable
picaresque, the prototypical Cape Verdean koitadu—poor thing.
Don’t go out in the dark, parents teased their children.
Nho Lobu will get you. Sweep this porch, go fetch the water,
don’t linger at the well.
The four- and five-year old siblings of our students
bestowed the nickname Nho Lobu on the driver of the school
“bus” (which was actually an enormous flatbed truck, a hundred
kids crammed in the back, hanging on for dear life). When they
saw the giant white truck, the little children would squeal and
chant: “Nho Lobu, Nho Lobu.” The short, squat man with a
mischievous smile who came to whisk their big brothers and
sisters away, would get them all, sooner or later.
Geography Lessons
It is the same word in Creole—as in Portuguese and other
romance languages—for story and history. (“L’Histoire avec
sa grande hache,” as the French writer Georges Perec called it:
History with a capital “h”—but also, History with its big hatchet.)
In history class, students memorized lists of dates, chronologies
of foreign governments and wars. Since independence, there is
more emphasis on the history of Cape Verde itself, but still, there
are few books written on the subject. When Portugal donates
texts, they mention Cape Verde in passing if at all. It is a small
stone in the shoe of the great empire. History is something that
happens elsewhere.
Dan and I had been married for a year before we left for Cape
Verde, but we had known each other since we were twelve, and
started going out at sixteen. We’d been together nearly a third
of our lives, and those years laid down their sediment on us. I
looked at him at twenty-two, and could still catch a glimpse of
the skinny sixth grader with thick glasses.
Dan is beautiful in a way that is difficult to place. He
has thick black hair and brown eyes, full lips. In Cape Verde,
people thought he was Cape Verdean. He has the ability to blend
in anywhere. When he was with his students, he slipped into a
sixteen-year-old personality, joked with them, learned all their
slang. He is a gifted mimic, picks up languages effortlessly.
Sometimes I envied his adaptability. Other times I resented
it. Who is this pseudo-Cape Verdean, with all his swagger and
sweet talk? I groused to myself. Does he recognize himself when
he looks in the mirror? Does he even care?
História, história: once there were ten islands scattered in the
sea. No one lived there: no stone houses leaned into the volcanic
cliffs. No goats browsed the rocky hillsides. Only the call of the
tchintchirote echoed in the dry ravines. Then the Portuguese
came with their machetes and their sweet tongue. They brought
people from Africa and built a village around a stone pole with
iron shackles. Pirates patrolled the coast. Cholera crept in on
silent feet.
The islands grew barren feeding the men with their
large bellies, men who sat in the shade, playing cards, spooning
papaya flesh from soft rinds. The hills dried up to indifferent
husks. Dust storms picked up the earth and threw everything
into a confusion. Ground and sky, Africa and Europe, origin
and destination, mingled in a dust-colored haze. The men played
Portuguese fados on their guitars and longed for a homeland that
no longer existed. In that place a man named Salazar with a thick
mustache and large jowls came to power. He wrote a blueprint
for fascism called Estado Novo, and stretched the reigns to the
breaking point. The fascists fell, and the empire scattered like
beads from a snapped chain: Angola, Mozambique, GuineaBissau, Cape Verde. Suddenly Portugal was only a sliver of moon
on the Atlantic, waning.
And the islands? Like Nha Mana with her chickens, they
laughed and continued as before, knowing better than to count
on anything.
In some ways I feel disingenuous when I tell people I lived in
West Africa for two years. Africa evokes certain exotic (if often
ignorant) images. Did you see lions and tigers? they ask. Did the
natives wear clothes? Do they speak that clicking language?
“Africa” is shorthand for underdevelopment, for
poverty, for heat and stench, for the unknowable. Even if these
connotations are not always true, they are something. When I
tell people I lived in Cape Verde, I get a blank stare. I want the
nod of recognition, even if it is false. I want to be able to place
those two years on a common map.
Most Cape Verdeans do not consider themselves African.
And in some senses it is not Africa, removed by 375 miles and a
whole history. This land was uninhabited when the Portuguese
first stumbled across it in 1460. It was the Portuguese who called
the islands into existence with their breath, giving them the
names of saints and elements.
Charles Darwin spent twenty-four days on Santiago
in 1832. “The neighborhood of Porto Praya, viewed from the
sea, wears a desolate aspect,” he wrote. “The volcanic fires of a
past age, and the scorching heat of a tropical sun, have in most
places rendered the soil unfit for vegetation.” Envy the detached
exactitude of the biologist, who names and names, who weaves
strands of Greek and Latin into a hammock that he strings
between the trees.
The land was strikingly barren, even over a century and
a half later. Perhaps even more so, teetering under the weight
of its relatively recent human inhabitants, drained by farming
practices that wrung every last nutrient from the dry earth.
“Few living creatures inhabit these valleys,” Darwin
observed. “The commonest bird is a kingfisher (Dacelo Iagoensis).
It is brightly colored, but not so beautiful as the European species:
in its flight, manners, and place of habitation, which is generally
in the driest valley, there is also a wide difference.”
Darwin, for all his brilliance and bravery, could only see
this new world in pale comparison to his own. But after several
months there, I was beginning to appreciate the stark beauty of
the landscape. The green of the rainy season was beginning to
dry up and turn brown, and I could read a bit of history in a
parched riverbed, savor the tart pucker of the tamarind fruit.
In São Filipe, Dan developed a taste for blood sausage
and coarse-ground corn, raw manioc and fresh goat’s milk. As
he had with our host family in the capital, he ate copiously at
parties and neighbors’ houses. The food was simple and good. It
was the food of laborers, no-nonsense food to to fill your belly.
But I had already begun to enjoy the lissome, floating feeling
of denial. I could appreciate the islands’ barren beauty; but like
Darwin, I was blind in my own way to what they offered me.
Inconspicuously as I could, I slipped my plate to Dan, whose
appetite everyone admired, who could always eat more, and
never turned down an offer of food.
“One might believe,” Theodor Vogel wrote of Cape Verde, after
stopping there with the British Niger expedition of 1841, “that,
after the formation of the world, a quantity of useless surplus
stones was cast into the sea.” This country is an afterthought, a
speck on the map if it appears at all.
The tenth grade curriculum included a geography class.
I always saw the teacher, Nádia, lugging huge rolled-up maps
through the halls. Nádia’s students proceeded through the Alps
with Hannibal, traced Napoleon’s footsteps from Moscow to
Paris through the steppes. They had memorized the words in
Portuguese for the fluvial cycles of the Danube, but none of
them had ever seen a river. Most had never left Fogo; their world
was bounded by the thin ribbon of road from home to school.
Only Samira aced the geography tests. Samira, who was
my best student, who had long curly hair that she wore pulled
back in a ponytail, and skinny legs that poked out beneath the
blue pleats of her uniform. Her white shirt was starched and
ironed. Samira, with skin the color of dusk, of light reflected off
the bricks of the seawall. She came from one of the wealthiest
families in town, but her parents were divorced, an almost
unheard-of phenomenon on Fogo. Her father bought her things;
she brought lip gloss and Portuguese fashion magazines to school,
which she shared with the other girls, but dutifully slipped into
her backpack during class.
Samira got the material effortlessly. She didn’t raise her
hand; everyone knew I would call on her only when no one else
could get the answer, and she would know it. Sometimes when
there was a blank pause she spoke up. “Teacher,” she would say,
“do you want me to explain?” I waited while she expounded in
Portuguese on articles or how to form the simple past. She was
more poised than I ever was, could flip her hair and giggle with
her friends and discourse on grammatical fine points with equal
ease. Before school ended, I asked her what she was planning to
do over the summer, and she said, “Oh, I don’t know, Teacher.
Hang out with my friends.” Where had she learned the phrase “hang out” I wondered?
I hadn’t taught it to them.
It is said that the first slaves were captured by Nuno Tristão in
1441. In 1447, when Nuno Tristão was killed, they dragged his
body up the Volta River. By then, the names the Portuguese
bestowed had already begun to sour in the mouth, and everyone
knew that there would be no volta, no return; things too small
to see but too virulent to deny had begun unknotting the man’s
cells, starting with his skin, which gave as easily as rotted fruit,
progressing to the tougher inner organs.
Cape Verde was a slave trade post, a transit point between
Africa and the New World. The Portuguese used it as a holding
station for slaves, and established a protectorate there for this
reason. There was slavery on a small scale on the islands
themselves, mostly on Santiago, where Africans worked on the
latifundios, growing bananas and sugar cane in the few valleys
that held water.
We’d visited one of these former latifundios on Santiago
during our training. The Peace Corps van rumbled and shook
over parts of the island so desolate and barren we could have
been driving on the moon. Then we rounded a narrow pass and
suddenly we were descending into a paradise of green: glossy
banana trees, old moss-covered steps leading down to a mill,
where an oxen circled, yoked to a grindstone. We climbed from
the van, a group of twenty-five or thirty Americans, sweaty and
rumpled, cameras around our necks.
A few little boys without shoes on ran up to our group.
“Psst,” they demanded, “dan dez escudos.” Give me ten escudos.
We’re not rich, I wanted to explain. Just because we
stepped out of a fancy white van, just because we speak English
and have cameras and most of us are white.
But clearly, we all understood, it wasn’t the same to be
born here, in this small stone house on this magically green,
secluded former latifundio, and to choose to leave a middle-class
life in the U.S. and live without running water and electricity.
We’re not tourists, I wanted to say. But then, what exactly
were we?
The power within Cape Verde lay with the lançados. Lançado:
literally, “thrown.” They were the overseers, launched like an
anchor from Portugal’s hand to keep the islands from drifting
into chaos. The lançados were mixed race, inhabiting a limbo
between Europe and Africa; before long, most of the population
inhabited this same space, somewhere between Portuguese pallor
and the dark Guinean gulf.
After the slave trade dried up, Cape Verde regained
its economic value as a port. Later it became a refueling stop
for airplanes traveling between continents. For many years,
South African Airways still stopped in Sal on its New YorkJohannesburg flight, a nod to Cape Verde from the days when
it was the only African country that was not boycotting the
apartheid government.
Today there are few Cape Verdean who are not mixed
race. The population is roughly seventy-one percent mestizo,
twenty-eight percent African, one percent white.
The Northern islands, whose Creole is more similar to
Portuguese, and whose people have a lighter skin color, disdain
the southern islands. A bo é burru o bo é badiu? they say. Are you
stupid, or are you from Santiago? A bo é dodu o bo é di Fogo? Are
you crazy or are you from Fogo? They insist it isn’t racist, yet there
seemed to be no equivalent put-downs for northern islanders.
This land has always been plagued by droughts, farming here
close to untenable. Many people leave to seek their fortunes
elsewhere. The first Cape Verdean emigrants left for the United
States on whaling ships in 1790. They worked in cranberry bogs
in New England, loaded freight on the docks in Providence.
They were among the first Africans to settle voluntarily on U.S.
soil. The first Cape Verdean became a naturalized citizen in 1824
in Nantucket.
Today there are as many Cape Verdeans in Boston as
there are in Cape Verde. Many work on assembly lines and in
construction; the women clean houses, cook katchupa on their days
off. Cape Verdean Americans count in their number politicians,
professional athletes, actors, theologians, and various well-known
musicians, including jazz pianist and composer Horace Silver and
the late Lisa “Left-Eye” Lopes of the group TLC.
There are Cape Verdean enclaves in Rhode Island and in
the Boston area, whole neighborhoods where you can spend years
and never speak English. The schools run bilingual education
programs for Kriolu speakers. It is the mythical tenth island, the
missing piece.
Why shouldn’t Samira be one of those to escape? I
thought. I had an idea that she could go to the U.S. I pictured
her at the rich suburban high school I attended, studying for the
SATs, playing violin in the orchestra. I asked my parents if they
would consider hosting her. They were enthusiastic about the
plan. My mother looked into her attending the public schools,
getting a tuition waiver, finding sponsors to cover her airfare.
Samira was beautiful, with her glossy hair and big dark
eyes. Everyone would want to be her friend, I thought. She
would talk on the phone in the evenings, go to the movies on
the weekend with a group of girls. The boys would all ask her
out, but she would not date. She would get into Harvard and
Princeton and Yale, would have to turn down scholarships. She’d
go on to study medicine or law or get her Ph.D. in romance
languages. I imagined her returning to Cape Verde years later
with a delegation from the U.N., or to write her dissertation on
the politics of lusophone Africa.
She wasn’t like my other students, who could not imagine
a place so big. “Are you friends with Michael Jordan?” they would
ask me. “Do you know my cousin Mané?” Or our neighbor, Zé
Miguel, who told me, “Sure, I’ve been to America. Roxbury,
Brockton, Los Angeles, New Bedford…” he bragged, enumerating
the various vicinities of Boston he had purportedly visited.
Samira was different. I could tell she had a subtle mind,
a broader perspective. One day after class I had pulled her
aside. “Obviously this class is too easy for you,” I began. “I was
thinking, I could bring in some books or magazines for you, other
assignments…” I felt uncomfortable speaking Portuguese to her.
I imagined her laughing at my accent and mis-conjugated verbs.
She glanced over her shoulder at her friends who were
waiting in the hall. “No, Teacher, that’s okay,” she said in English.
“I gotta go.” I didn’t know where she picked up these little idioms,
this flawless American accent. She hugged her books to her chest
and ran out to catch up with her friends.
Cape Verde drifts against West Africa’s curved ear, which listens
only to its own internal rush of blood. Still, it is the closest
land mass. Pilots daily pierce the cloud cover in Dakar, thread
the islands again and again through a prick of light. There is a
certain shame associated with Africa. After Cape Verde won its
independence in 1975, the new flag bore the colors of African
solidarity: green, red, and black. At the time, the islands’ ties to
the continent were more difficult to ignore, as the country had
just emerged from a joint war of independence fought in GuineaBissau. Pan-Africanism was also in vogue, perhaps making it
more acceptable to identify with the continent. However, when
an opposing political party, Movimento Para a Democracía,
came to power in 1991, they adopted a revised version of the
Portuguese flag, in red, white, and blue, those more staid colors
favored by Western nations.
In Praia, there are increasing numbers of immigrants
from the continent. Families from Guinea-Bissau came fleeing
the civil war there in 1998. Men from Senegal come on the ships,
bearing masks and fabrics to sell to tourists. They line the curb
with wooden faces they have carried almost four hundred miles.
Mandjaku, the Cape Verdeans spit. It’s because of the mandjaku
that this city is becoming dangerous. Those mandjaku, they steal,
they’re dirty, they’re dark as sin. Pretu, feiu. These words are
uttered by people themselves the gleaming black of volcanic ash.
Pretu feiu. Brancu bonitu. I heard this over and over. Black
is ugly. “Look, you’re so pretty,” my students would say, stroking
my hair, holding their forearms up to mine. “White is prettier.”
“E ka si nada,” I disagreed. That’s not true. But my efforts
to undo a few centuries of history went unheeded. Easy for me
to say. Still, it was an attitude I couldn’t fully understand: my
students and friends flaunted their color prejudice, yet at the
same time seemed ultimately indifferent, not understanding why
I’d make a big deal of it.
These islands understand absence deeply. There is a Creole
word, sodadi, taken from the Portuguese saudade: longing,
homesickness, nostalgia. We have no equivalent in English, this
deep belly-howl, the open-mouthed O of its first syllable, how it
closes off into the internal consonant, the final, aspirated I.
It is in the lyrics to almost every Cape Verdean song:
Sodadi, sodadi, nha mosindadi. Sodadi nha terra. Sodadi ta matan.
Longing for my youth, longing for my land. This longing is
killing me.
But longing wasn’t killing me. I felt suspended—at times
lonely, at times blissfully unattached. I sat on the roof of our
house and stared down at the black sand, the drop-off to the
rough sea. At parties in the countryside, men spun me around
the open-air dance floor, corn stalks rustling on the hills, my feet
barely touching the ground.
Thin blue aerograms from my family and friends arrived
months after the postmark date, misdirected through Taipei,
Saudi Arabia, Brazil. Even the U.S. Postal Service did not always
recognize Cape Verde. Sometimes I began to doubt the existence
of these islands myself. Distance was a bone in my throat, my
body an archipelago of disconnected parts. This geography
transcends maps.
Crazy
Maria went shirtless, her breasts shrunken, her mouth almost
empty of teeth. She threw bottles, smashing them against the
wall of the police station. The men in the bar across the street,
drinking grog at three in the afternoon, laughed, until she turned
on them, shards and curses spraying across their table. Ehh,
calma, Maria, they said, backing away, the laughter fading fast.
They don’t lock up their crazies in Cape Verde, don’t
medicate them or seal them away with diagnoses. They poke fun
at them, provoke them, but give them a plate of rice and beans
when they show up at the door.
Don’t study too much, parents warn their children. Abo ta
bira dodu; you’ll go crazy. “It’s true,” Joaninha assured me. She
inclined her head toward Danilo. He was pacing the cobblestones
in front of Café Magma, a Walkman on his head, dancing and
singing Bob Marley lyrics in perfect Jamaican English. “Danilo
was the smartest kid in his class—he won a scholarship to go to
America. And look at him now. Se kabesa ka sta dretu mas.” He’s
not right in the head anymore.
I’d heard another story about Danilo, though, that it
wasn’t the studying but too many hits of acid that made him bira
dodu. But who knows what led him from São Filipe to Boston
and back, to this cage cobbled with lava rocks and crumbling
memories. Maybe it was the studying, and not the drugs, which
first drove the wedge between his reality and everyone else’s.
Maybe it was the sodadi, the homesickness. Maybe it started
not when he was seventeen and boarding an airplane for New
York, but when he was eight years old, sitting on the floor of
the municipal library, a book of fairy tales open in front of him.
Era uma vez, he repeated to himself in Portuguese. Once upon a
time…
Language, the poet Czeslaw Milosz has said, is the only
homeland. Danilo’s song was a familiar one. Most people knew
the lyrics, but not the sense. Danilo, though, knew it like a bone
in his own body. How long shall they kill our prophets, while we
stand aside and look? Some say it’s just a part of it, we’ve got to
fulfill the book…
What is the difference between insanity and eccentricity?
In Cape Verde, I found people were not so concerned with
drawing this distinction. It was a fine line between crazy and
komplikadu, someone who is mean or demanding or difficult to
deal with.
In one English department meeting, Larry yelled at the
head of the department. Djoka, the coordinator, tended to push
his questionable teaching methodologies on us, and Larry finally
got fed up. “How can you tell me how I should be teaching the
present perfect when you can barely speak English yourself,” he
declared, gathering up his books in a huff and walking out.
When word of this got around, it was the biggest gossip in
town for weeks; much more shocking than the time someone saw
Danilo pick a cockroach from the thatched canopy of Tex’s bar
and stick it in his mouth. Danilo may have a few screws loose,
but even he would know better than to tell off a superior.
In São Filipe, Dan and I lived in a tentative stretch of
houses on the edge of town, half of them empty or unfinished—
iron wall supports sketching second stories in the air, a jag of
stairs leading nowhere. On Sundays workmen woke up with
their grunts and clatter and rowdy cane liquor breakfasts.
In that part of town we were all foreigners: the Portuguese
couple immured behind their flowered curtains, the Moroccan
who taught English in the high school with us, who woke up
early to genuflect on his roof, prayers slurring into the wind.
Our neighborhood was a ghost town, and I felt myself
turning into a ghost there, pale and invisible, floating to school
and back home, waiting for the day to end. We watched the sun
set from our roof every evening, perched on the edge of a dark
precipice; below us the ocean threw itself again and again against
the cliffs.
At night, we lay on the floor of our unfurnished apartment.
Dan was teaching himself to play the guitar, repeating the same
bars of a Paul Simon song over and over. They’ve got a wall in
China, it’s a thousand miles long... Our talk, too, circled and circled,
without resolution: should we leave? Should we stick it out?
Would things get better? Would we manage to make a life for
ourselves here?
“Why don’t we move to the fora?” I said one night, after
a particularly lonely day. The fora was how people referred to
the countryside: literally, outside, but I knew I could not feel any
more fora than I did in São Filipe.
“How could we possibly do that?” Dan said. We lay on
our backs on the floor, the fan aimed directly at our heads to keep
the mosquitos off.
“Are you kidding? I’m sure any of our students’ families
would help us in a second.” We’d been to a party in the fora a
couple of weeks before, and since then our students who lived
there had been begging us to come back. “Could you imagine?”
I said. “Now that would be a real Cape Verdean experience.”
“What about the Peace Corps, though? Are we even
allowed to do that?”
I shrugged. “We could figure it out. As long as we can get
to school every day, it shouldn’t matter.” I pictured us living in one
of the small stone houses we’d passed in Lomba or Campanas
Cima, learning how to grind corn with a pilón, sitting with the
neighbors on the stone wall chatting, dancing at the parties that
went on all night.
“It is beautiful up there,” Dan said thoughtfully.
“I know!” I said. “That’s what we pictured when we
joined the Peace Corps, right?”
Dan didn’t answer, strumming the guitar idly, but I could
tell that he was turning the idea over, already figuring out the
logistics of who to ask and which fora we should choose.
“Why would you want to live out there?” people asked us
when we told them of our decision. “Are you crazy?” Joaninha
said, clucking her tongue. Joaninha, like many other residents of
the town, had moved to São Filipe from the fora in order to make
a living. “No electricity, no running water, and the crickets are so
noisy you can’t sleep.” And yet, I could hear in her voice a tinge
of nostalgia for that simpler—if more difficult—life.
Through one of Dan’s students, we found a little stone
house in a village called Ribeira Filipe an hour outside of
town. The Peace Corps officers in Praia gave us their reluctant
permission. “Are you sure you know what this means?” said
Helder on the phone. “No running water, no electricity. And
how will you get to work every day?”
“We have it figured out,” Dan assured him. “We can take
the transporte with the students.” He neglected to mention that
the transporte was a huge flatbed meant for hauling construction
materials. “We already have a kerosene lamp. And we’ll get our
water from the well like everyone else.”
“You realize we can’t give you the housing subsidy if
you’re living there,” Helder said. But we’d already figured we
could afford the thirty-five dollar a month rent from our stipend—
there was really nothing to spend money on in Ribeira Filipe.
We wouldn’t be going to Café Magma, or Tex’s, the fanciest
restaurant in São Filipe, where they served one dish: half a
chicken with french fries. We’d rarely buy food at all, it turned
out; most of it was given to us by our neighbors, who grew the
beans or sweet potatoes or manioc themselves.
The high school lent us a pickup truck to transport our
stuff—a mattress, table, two chairs, clothes, books—up the
side of the mountain. When we bounced up the dirt road, our
new neighbors were waiting for us, and they descended on the
truck to help us unpack. There are only two of you? they asked
incredulously. So many things, a whole three-room house for
two people? No kids? Do you want mine? Djidja, Loli, you want
to live with the Merkanus?
Nelinha, who took care of the house we were renting,
brought us dinner: tin plates of katchupa—beans and hominy
with goat’s milk. She sat down at the table, her youngest daughter
on her lap, her sister Filomena leaning in the window, face
propped on her elbows. They asked question after question. “Do
you have brothers and sisters?” “Don’t you miss them?” “Are
you really going to ride in the Majiru with the students?”
When everyone finally left, we brushed our teeth in the
dark, standing on the stone patio behind the house.
The next morning I woke to two little faces peering over
the windowsill, whispering. When I opened my eyes, they quickly
disappeared. I wondered if I was imagining things, or if I was in
fact losing it.
But no: that’s how it was in Ribeira Filipe. From the
goatherd driving his flock past our house at six a.m. until the last
raucous conversation from the little bar up the hill late at night,
we were part of the action, both spectator and spectacle. Even in
our sleep sometimes.
To be alone for just a little while, I would go running in
the mornings. I ran down the mountain and walked back up.
“Dja bu kansa?” people called from the back of pickup trucks
when they saw me walking. Tired already? Little children on the
way to school ran behind me. It was the day’s big excitement.
Who could keep up with the branca longest? Sometimes it was a
scrappy little boy with a Boston Red Sox cap. Sometimes it was
the tall lanky girl in the pink crinoline dress with a crooked lace
collar and torn skirt.
Once two old women, coming in from the fields with
baskets of beans on their heads, joined me for a half-mile, their
loads so perfectly balanced they didn’t slip. Every house I ran by,
people came to the door and waved. “Ellie! Ellie!” the children
yelled. How did they know my name? As fast as I ran, I could
not escape. I only wanted an hour to myself, to be alone without
thinking or speaking. “Wait here!” the children called. But I
didn’t want to be greeted and laughed at, admired, loved. I didn’t
want the gifts they came to the door bearing, a mango or papaya,
a fresh egg, a piece of bread.
In some ways, the fora was turning out to be exactly
what Dan and I had wanted: we were absorbed instantly into
the community. There were no more lonely evenings staring up
at the ceiling, wondering what we were doing in Cape Verde.
When they saw that we had a tape player, Nelinha and Filomena
appeared at our door with a stack of tapes. In the evening,
neighbors came from as far as Campana Baixu to watch and clap
and take a turn teaching the foreigners to badja dretu, to dance
right. The kerosene lamp on the table shook from the stomping.
In other ways, though, living in the countryside was
harder than I’d expected. It wasn’t the lack of running water or
electricity so much as the complete lack of privacy or solitude.
I had felt uncomfortable in São Filipe having Joaninha around
while I was working, or walking through a gaggle of children
chanting, “Teacher, teacher.” But that was big-city isolation
compared to life in Ribeira Filipe.
“There goes that woman who runs,” people said to each
other as I walked past late in the morning on my way to school.
They spoke in loud voices, as though I couldn’t understand. “E
ta korre suma kabalo.” She runs like a horse.
If running was one escape, my other was writing. I would take
my notebook to the goat pen behind our house. It was bruma seca
season—dust storms that blow in from Africa and obscure the
sky. The wind pulled up a deep anger in me, its roots suddenly
uncovered. I was angry at everything and nothing—the weather,
the complete lack of privacy. A line from an Emily Dickinson
poem repeated again and again in my head: “The dust did scoop
itself like hands / And throw away the road.” The bed sheets
rose in wrinkled hills and the dirt mapped new roads overnight.
Flights in and out of the island were cancelled for days. The dust
wrapped me in its soft arms, scuffed its feet across the fields.
I thought about how there was no way out: I was feeling
more and more attached to Ribeira Filipe, enchanted by the
countless stars at night, the view of the ocean a mile down, by the
impossibly warm and generous neighbors. Yet somehow, those
internal conflicts that I’d hoped to leave in São Filipe had only
intensified: my conflicting desires for belonging and separation,
my increasingly restrictive eating. The rift between me and Dan,
obvious and unremarked as the ribeira itself: drought-cracked
ravine that our little house clung to, as though threatening to
tumble off.
Escape routes were mapped in natural disaster, lava
runnels sprouting purple flowers. At night, the moon gleamed
like something trapped in glass.
When the weather cleared, sometimes I would take my
notebook outside, and sit on the stone wall overlooking the
ocean. A tangle of fava bushes with yellow flowers reached up to
the base of the wall, the field slanting steeply to the ocean a mile
down. A few clouds floated by below me.
I wanted to believe that as an American I was exempt from
judgments of insanity, although at times it seemed American
was just another category of dodisa, or craziness; Ellie and her
books—what does she do for hours, locked up in that old goat
shed? What is she studying so hard, as though her life depended
on it? Doesn’t she get lonely?
In fact, it was one of the few times that I wasn’t.
It seemed like this experience, this shared adventure of
living above the clouds, should have been drawing me and Dan
closer together, but I felt more distant from him than ever.
“Nelinha took our frying pan again,” I fumed. “I just
want to make myself an egg, and it’s not here.”
“So what?” he said. “She’s just borrowing it. Why do you
always get so angry?”
“Why can’t she ask?” I yelled. “Why does everyone feel
like they can just come in here and take whatever they want
without asking?”
Was I going crazy? I wondered. Was it so wrong to expect
my frying pan to stay where I left it on the stove?
Later, I would wonder how things might have been
different if I had allowed my Cape Verdean neighbors to save me
from my isolation. “Bon dia,” Nelinha would call, walking into
our house, appearing at the door with a plate of bread and goat
cheese. “I brought you breakfast.”
“Un momentu,” I said. My thoughts dispersed like the
lingering humidity burning off in the bright atmosphere.
Later I would wonder how Nelinha and Filomena,
Joaninha and all the others—Dan, too—could be as patient as
they were with my idiosyncrasies. Later I would want to shake
that twenty-two year old girl, to tell her to get over herself, to stop
being so serious and attached to where the frying pan should be,
and for God’s sake, to eat something.
Often I did master my impulse to be alone, and sit a little
longer with Filomena, shelling peas on the wall that overlooked
the ocean, or let Lulú and Fátima play dolls on the floor of our
house. But maybe not often enough, I think in retrospect.
And still, every day, two tin plates of food waited for us
on the table when we arrived home from work. A fried fish, its
silver scales dulled and flour-dusted. The season’s first guavas in
a wooden bowl. A cup of goat’s milk, so fresh it was still warm.
Cape Verdeans may be baffled by a desire for solitude, but craziness
does not faze them. There the crazy are neither visionaries nor
outcasts. Everybody has his or her role—some lay bricks, some
work the fields, some cook the food. Danilo paces his patch of
ground in dreadlocks and dirty t-shirt, singing his redemption song.
Maria slept on the bench in the praça, or on the beach
below the town. A woman alone is in danger, dangerous. Any
man could have his way with her, but as far as I could tell, she
was left alone. Early in the morning, when the fishermen picked
their way down the stone steps to their boats, they stepped over
her body curled against the lee of rock. The boats were named
for wives and mothers, who in turn bore the monikers of saints
and virtues: Helena, Mercedes, Esperança. Maria would never
have a boat named for her. She was her own vessel, stripped,
unfinished, full of cracks.
Fomi
Nelinha and I lay side by side on her bed. Her room was on
the second floor of her family’s cinderblock compound, open
to the breeze but above the level of spying children and stray
chickens. She had lifted up the ladder and poured us each a shot
of her pontchi madeira: grog boiled with sugar and oranges.
Photographs were spread out in front of us. She went through
my wedding pictures slowly. Here were my brothers playing
music, my parents dancing, me and Dan feeding each other cake,
its almond butterscotch icing smeared on my cheek. Here I was,
alone in a wreath of roses. “Look how fat you are,” she said. “So
pretty.”
The word for fat in Creole is forti, same as the word
for strong. In Cape Verde, fleshiness does not have a negative
connotation. When I taught my students adjectives, and asked
them to describe their best friends, several wrote, “He is fat.”
When we wrote sentences in different tenses, Domingos, a large,
light-skinned tenth-grader, declared proudly, “Yesterday I was
fat. Today I am fat. Right now I am fatting.”
Since we’d moved to Ribeira Filipe, I’d grown even more
fraku: skinnier, weaker. I’d pared my diet to the smallest portions,
measured out in teacups. When I’d arrived in Cape Verde I was
healthy, neither skinny nor fat, but by the end of our three months
of training, I’d tipped the balance toward skinny.
When the Peace Corps volunteers returned to the
capital for training sessions, we’d weigh ourselves on the scale
in the nurse’s office. We’d all lost, though none as much as me.
Although I’d never had eating issues in high school or college,
I wasn’t immune to the standard body image woes of the
American female. I felt a proud flush in my cheeks when my
friends complimented me on how I looked.
Maybe this disease had taken root in me at the age of
twelve, when I became a vegetarian, and decided to define myself
by what I wouldn’t eat. Maybe it started when I began running
cross-country in high school. I’d always looked enviously at the
other girls with their boyish builds, their bony legs that allowed
them to fly up and down the hills. But then after a ten-mile run,
I’d always be ravenous, and unable to restrict my diet, the way
many of my teammates did. Or maybe, as my doctor would
speculate years later, my dwindling ability to eat had its origins in
an undiagnosed food intolerance to which I reacted instinctively
by narrowing my diet more and more.
But whatever the etiology of the problem, it was
undeniably self-perpetuating. The less I ate, the less I wanted to
eat. The more I limited my food intake, the less I was able to eat
without an intense physical or psychological reaction.
When we still lived in town, I’d eaten everything, just
in tiny servings: katchupa (hominy and beans), kúskús (boiled
cornbread with honey and fresh butter), fried eggs, manioc.
Eventually it seemed easier to stop eating Cape Verdean food
altogether, confining myself to the airy rolls of bread, apples,
oranges, the occasional half of a boiled sweet potato.
I dreaded visiting—the full plates set before me while the
host sat by with an expectant smile to watch me eat. I didn’t
understand the web of social obligation that made it necessary
for me to spend awkward hours sitting in someone’s living room,
staring at their collection of miniature saints on the sideboard.
Refusing such an invitation was unthinkable. Instead, I made
excuses: I’m not hungry, I just ate, I’m sick.
“É si mé,” the neighbors said, as though they understood.
“Nos kumida é brutu.” Our food is brutu: coarse, heavy, unrefined.
Their language, too, was blunt, reliant on innuendo and
inflection for shades of meaning. Dan and I were learning to
speak kriolu fundu, deep Creole. People laughed when we switched
our i’s to u’s, transposed consonants, or used arcane agricultural
metaphors. Kriolu fundu from Fogo is hick speak; it struck them
as incongruous coming out of the mouths of foreigners. Kriolu
fundu is also called kriolu brutu, literally impolite or unrefined.
Conversely, though, it is also known as kriolu puru, pure Creole.
This is the paradox of the Cape Verdean language: it is at its most
pure when it is at its most corrupted, at least from the viewpoint
of Portuguese.
Nelinha and Filomena offered food again and again.
Each time I demurred. “You were prettier before,” Nelinha said
bluntly, shaking her head, looking through my photographs.
There is no word in Creole for this condition. And yet,
it made sense to Nelinha that physical shrinking would embody
other lacks; that away from the nourishment of my family and
friends, my own language, I would wither. I slipped the pictures
back into their torn envelope, returned the past to its secret glossy
world.
In Nelinha’s album, men stood in front of cars, women
smiled with closed mouths, their heads wrapped in scarves,
children sat stiffly in starched church clothes. “Where is this?”
I asked, pointing to one of a green hillside, the edges blurred
in fog. “E aqui, go,” she said, laughing. Right here, of course.
Outside, the wind picked up dried cornstalks. The riverbeds
reaching toward the summit dry out in the long stretch from one
rainy season to the next, the water gone deep underground. I
wanted to believe her when she promised that in a couple of
months this place would sprout and blossom, the trees would
bend under the weight of mangoes and papayas, we’d eat and eat
until the sweetness scoured our mouths and we’d be so full we
couldn’t move.
Hunger is not endemic in Cape Verde. It is not Sudan or
Congo; children with swollen bellies and hair discolored from
malnutrition are not a common sight. The kids are well fed and
beautiful, their skin dusky, their eyes flashing. It was only me,
with this strange first-world affliction that would not let me eat.
I nourished myself with words: Wallace Stevens, James
Wright, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton. Their lines had the satisfying
glint and heft of a good knife. I could taste the grit of the powdered
milk in my instant coffee, the bruises in the apple, mealy after
several weeks on the boat from Portugal. The preparation took
longer than the eating. Boil water; turn on the oven and wait for
it to heat (a rush of gas, then the slow hiss); core and slice the
apple, halving and halving until the flesh was translucent. I came
back again and again to the same poems. The day is like wide
water, without sound. Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness.
After breakfast I sat at my desk, cup of coffee by my
notebook. When it started to cool, I would return the liquid to
the pan, bring it back to a boil. It could not be sweet enough or
hot enough. I wanted it to hurt my teeth, to burn my tongue.
I stared at the collage of photographs and clippings I had
taped to the wall above my desk. There was one poem I had cut
from a magazine, with the lines, “Can you gaze calmly at the
Earth / like the perfect astronaut?” I could. The ground outside
my window was pocked and barren as the moon.
I looked forward to my hunger in the early morning.
When it came back at ten-thirty, I cursed it, fed it carrots or
diluted juice. I distracted myself by going to the market. The
stalls would be swarming with women buying food for lunch.
Two tomatoes, one shriveled green pepper, a quarter kilo of fish.
They argued over prices. A bo é tchipi. Cut it a little bigger. Not the
skin. There.
One could buy anything in the smallest amount: a handful
of cimbrón seeds, a few tablespoons of powdered milk, a capful
of olive oil. Plastic bags were ten escudos extra; the women
reused them, sticky and wrinkled, until they tore.
On my Peace Corps allowance I could afford luxuries: the
bright oranges from Portugal rather than the bitter green ones
grown on the island, the last of the sweet corn crop or the first
mangoes of the season. Still, I rarely bought them. It seemed
extravagant, shameful.
In Cape Verde it is rude to eat in front of other people without
sharing, whether you know them or not. One does not eat on the
street. There is no McDonald’s (not yet, anyway). There are no
portable meals, no energy bars or yogurt in a tube. This act that
had once been unremarkable to me—a man loudly unwrapping
a sandwich on the train platform, girls in the park licking ice
cream cones—in retrospect seemed shockingly impolite.
Children in Cape Verde did not bring lunch to school.
Many of them left home at six a.m. without breakfast, and did
not eat their first meal of the day until they returned in midafternoon. It was custom that dictated this, not lack of food;
one could not bring lunch unless everyone else did. There were
faintings at school, nosebleeds. Students drooped in class like
plants in need of water. When one child had five escudos for a
piece of gum, she’d bite it in half or thirds to share.
The residue of scarcity sticks in the collective memory. (I’ve
read that the habits of anorectics and survivors of starvation are
similar: we lick plates clean, dream about food, spend inordinate
hours planning meals.) A meal is worthy of respect, even if it is
just a tin plate of yesterday’s refogadu. It is bad manners to sing
or dance when eating—this from a people who always have a
song on their tongue, a sway in their hips.
These islands have a history of famine. Fomi: the words for
hunger and famine are the same. As though each time it recurred
this growling in the stomach could last indefinitely. In Cape
Verde, drought and famine arrived in cycles, regular as the tides:
1580, 1592, 1610, 1719, 1748. As recently as the 1940s, lack of
food took the lives of a significant percentage of the population.
Between 1941 and 1942, twenty thousand died; between 1946
and ’48, another thirty thousand. Over half the population was
lost. In January of 1942, the death toll in the capital was reported
at one hundred a day. This is in a city of some tens of thousands.
Others went south, to the country of São Tomé and
Príncipe, to work as indentured servants on the coffee plantations
there. From 1940 to 1973, 120,000 left. They still sing songs
about it: Kaminhu longi, kaminhu pa São Tomé—that long road,
long road to São Tomé.
The cycle of droughts and relatively fertile years continues,
but since the forties there have been no more famines. There is
no political turmoil, no civil war to hinder food distribution; the
markets are stocked with sacks of USAID rice, with flour from
Portugal and tins of powdered milk from Holland. The global
economy somehow keeps Cape Verde afloat, barely.
Even if it doesn’t rain, even if the soil does not yield
enough corn to last all year, there will still be food. The islands
provide less than five percent of their comestible needs. Even
corn, the staple and largest crop, is imported.
But to subsistence farmers in the countryside of Fogo and
Santiago and Santo Antão, this is irrelevant. Our neighbors in
Ribeira Filipe still rose at five to feed the goats and tend the fields.
Like the oxen yoked to the sugar cane press, they treaded the worn
track of their day, even as their children moved in with relatives in
town, or tried for visas to Portugal or the United States.
Even in Ribeira Filipe, a few houses scattered at the edge
of a ravine above the clouds, wants multiplied like flies in rainy
season: video games, brand name sneakers. Now that there was
enough, no danger of starvation, there was a constant low-level
hunger. And why shouldn’t my neighbors have wanted more?
They saw the things relatives sent in big barrels from Boston and
Rhode Island. Weren’t they as entitled as Americans to the fancy
clothes and shiny electronic toys? Let alone the basic necessities
of life? Who was I, having grown up with my own bedroom, a
refrigerator full of food, electricity, everything I could possibly
need, to judge their desires?
But I also knew that desire led to only more desire. It was
an emptiness that I felt, too. Even on my Peace Corps stipend, I
could afford to buy tuna at two dollars a pound, a luxury most
families could not. I could afford an eighty-cent chocolate bar,
or a dollar scoop of ice cream, when the electricity was working
long enough to keep it frozen. I could afford it, but I couldn’t
force myself to eat.
In some ways I was poorer than the poorest neighbor,
poorer even than the Ramos family, who slept eight in a oneroom house and sold eggs for fifteen cents apiece. And still when
we left their house, Nuna slipped two into my pocket. “One for
you and one for Danny,” she said. They were the smallest, most
perfect eggs I had ever seen. I cupped them, one in each palm,
their delicate shells containing yolks bright as the sun on the
orange hibiscus in front of the Ramos’ house.
Seven to One
Nelinha and I sat on the concrete ledge outside her house,
shelling peas. “You see her?” Nelinha said to me, tilting her
head to indicate a woman down the hill, walking with a small
child. The woman was maybe a quarter of a mile away, near the
schoolhouse. I could barely make her out. “That’s my rival. If
she comes any closer than that…” She snapped her fingers in a
gesture meaning, watch out.
Later I asked Nelinha’s sister Filomena about it. “Oh,
yeah, that’s Carla. She’s from Praia, the little girl is Djoza’s
daughter. Nelinha hates her. Just don’t let them get in the same
room,” she joked. “One time they met each other in the market,
and it wasn’t pretty. Nelinha came home with her shirt all torn.
And who knows how Carla looked afterwards.”
“But why doesn’t Nelinha get mad at Djoza?” I asked.
“Your husband’s girlfriend is your rival,” Filomena
patiently explained to me. As simple as, your father’s father
is your grandfather, your mother’s sister is your tia. It was an
attitude I couldn’t fathom.
In Cape Verde, I often heard that there were seven
women for every man in the country. Entirely unsubstantiated
by the census, which reveals a ratio closer to fifty-fifty, this
rumor nonetheless persisted, propagated like wind through the
cornfields, a whisper without origin. Walk the streets of any
town and you will not believe it. Men fill the cafés and bars, sit
on street corners arguing and playing cards. You glimpse women
in the shadows: a figure standing in a doorway, an arm hanging
laundry on the roof. Go to a dance in the countryside: teenage
boys strut and pose, lead imaginary partners across the floor.
The girls arrive later, leave earlier, and never match the boys in
number. A good mother does not allow her daughter to go to
parties. How to ask a girl to dance? Grab her arm, pull her onto
the floor. How to turn him down: waggle an index finger, don’t
make eye contact, push his hand away with force.
During the winter, Djoza would come visit on weekends or
sometimes in the evening. Nelinha fed him first, serving him an
extra portion of pork or chicharru. The women ate later, in the
kitchen, while the men played cards in the bar. The family was
fond of Djoza, but he made me uneasy. He was big and had a
loud, sudden laugh that always made me jump, and a habit of
hugging one a little too forcefully as a way of greeting.
In March Djoza moved in with Nelinha. She told me the
news with a big smile and a wink. Maybe he was ready for a new
level of commitment, or maybe things had soured with his other
woman. Nelinha didn’t really care; either way she was happy.
The next day I found her sweeping out an old shed beside
the family’s house that had been boarded up. “He’s going to open
a store here,” she told me. “Here’s where we’re going to have the
bar, and here we’ll put the sacks of flour and rice, and then we’ll
get a refrigerator so we can sell cold drinks. It’s going to be much
better than Zé Miguel’s store, you’ll see.”
“Mmm,” I nodded, sneezing from the dust her broom
was raising.
Whalers and fishermen, wayfarers, drifters: Cape Verdean men
leave for school and work, to try their luck on another island.
The women stay. Dressed in black, they grow fat from lack of
movement, they shell beans and crochet elaborate runners for the
table. It’s called renda, this art of tying knots, making something
beautiful and useless and full of holes.
Apparently the store required that Djoza make numerous trips to
town for provisions and other business, which meant someone
had to stand behind the counter all day. Someone had to sweep
the floor, had to boil the grog for the pontchi, had to fry the
cornmeal pastries that Djoza decided would be a good idea to
sell. Suddenly the only time I was seeing Nelinha was when I
went to visit her in the store.
“Where’s Djoza?” I asked.
“He went to the festa in Salinas,” she said, wiping down
the counter with a wet cloth. She feigned nonchalance, but we
both knew there was only one reason men went to parties by
themselves.
Seven women for every man: it rang with rationalization,
a demographic justification for male irresponsibility. As though
it proved something inherent and irrevocable in the nature of
Cape Verdean men. A nos é diferenti, I heard them say. We’re not
like American men. We can’t help it.
But what could you do? Men are like that. It’s the women
we hold to higher standards; it’s the other woman who keeps
breaking our heart. We recognize her across cornfields and
smoky bar rooms, fall on her with claws and curses. When a fight
breaks out at a festa, more often than not it’s two women, rivais
over the same guy. Shoes fly, handfuls of hair come out. The men
stand by and cheer them on.
Zé di Tchika was a living legend on Fogo. In his seventies, he
was one of the first men on the island to own a truck. Mobility
and money along with charm proved a dangerous combination:
estimates of his progeny range from eighty to more than a
hundred. The oldest long since grown, the youngest still nursing.
I had three of his daughters in my ninth grade classes alone. And
these were only the ones he knew about or acknowledged. This is
one reason why one of the first questions you ask upon meeting
someone is, Bo é fidju di kenha? Who’s your father?
There were few fathers there. There were uncles and
cousins, younger brothers, but few men who come back nightly,
again and again, to their children. Ask a student to describe his
or her family, and you get paeans of praise to the mother. “I
love my mother,” one boy wrote. “My mother do everting. She is
beautiful black round African skin woman.” “What about your
father?” I asked. They shrugged. “My father is truck driver.” “My
father live in America.” “My father…” the sentences trailed off,
fragments, incomplete.
Centuries before, Portuguese settlers had set the precedent.
They left their wives in Lisbon or Porto. After months at sea,
unsettled by the constant motion, crazed by sun glare, Cape
Verdean women were a calm and steady harbor. They could carry
buckets of water on their heads without spilling a drop, could
dance without moving their upper bodies, could stare through
you with their unrelenting stillness.
The town in the crater of the volcano on the island of Fogo
is called Chã das Caldeiras, and was founded by a Frenchman
named Montrond. He came from Burgundy in the nineteenth
century, carrying grapevine seedlings with roots wrapped in
wet cloth. He arrived on the shore and started walking, people
directing him up the steep incline toward the serra, the peak. He
knew he had arrived when the earth flattened and turned black.
The crater walls reached around the village like an enormous
arm. Chã das Caldeiras: the bottom of the pot. The soil nothing
but fine black gravel. He dug a hole and put in his plants.
With his broken Creole he showed the people who lived
there how to tie the vines to stakes, how to harvest the fruit and
crush it into wine. He spoke with his body, with his blue eyes and
small hands. He fathered children the color of the sky when dust
storms blew in, with thick, pale hair and washed-out eyes, but
with the African features of their mothers.
There were tremors and there was calm. The volcano
erupted in 1564, 1785, 1816, 1951. A total of thirty times since
the Portuguese set foot there. The road into Chã was cobbled;
trucks came in with canned milk and sacks of rice and left with
baskets of grapes and squash and apples.
The volcano erupted most recently in 1995. Lava
flowed over thirteen houses, burying them in ash. The German
government, in an act of misguided generosity, built new houses
down the mountain, near Tchada Furna. They stayed empty.
When the smoke cleared, everyone moved back, rebuilt their
stone huts in the same spots.
The grapevines, gnarled as old women, lean into the wind.
Their tragic postures tear the passing clouds to shreds. The grapes
they bear are tiny and thick-skinned, full of seeds. They make a
wine that is dark and acidic, that stains one’s teeth purple.
After the ’95 eruption, the government declared Chã das
Caldeiras a danger zone and closed the elementary school there.
Now the children grow wild as the stand of pines beyond the
village. They gather pieces of volcanic rock to sell to tourists.
They appear silently with bundles of firewood on their heads,
then sink back into the fog like ghosts. It is the same face again
and again. Bo é fidju di kenha? Who’s your father? The answer is
always the same. Ami é Montrond. The earth circumscribes this
life like cast iron.
Most of the female Peace Corps volunteers in Cape Verde dated
locals, each convinced she’d found the one who didn’t cheat. Or
that he was reformed now. He was twenty and had two kids on
other islands, but now he was ready to settle down.
I would have liked to think, too, that being American
made me immune to any cultural differences I found distasteful.
I wanted to believe that, because my husband was also American
and we had gone there together, we could build a wall around us,
that our deepest selves were not affected by the culture around us.
As our time in Cape Verde wore on, though, I grew less
certain. Did I have a rival? Perhaps some girl I kissed on the cheeks
at parties, or danced with while my husband traded partners,
made the rounds? The wife is always the last to know. The man’s
buddies wink and nudge, the other women in the town quickly
change the subject when she approaches. Don’t meddle between
husband and wife; it’s none of our business. The rival is always
the least expected, not the prettiest or the most outgoing, but
once you know you realize that she could be no other. She is your
slant reflection, the woman who sleeps in your bed and tries on
your shoes, who kisses your husband, checks out her face in your
bathroom mirror, and then leaves. The one you could have been.
In April Djoza’s other woman, the mother of his child, moved
to Praia. She couldn’t take the girl with her; she would be busy
trying to find a job, and everyone agreed that the capital was not
the best place to raise a kid. So Sofí moved in with Djoza and
Nelinha. She spent her days playing with Nelinha’s daughters
who, although they were several years younger than Sofí, bossed
her around, blamed her when someone broke a plate or forgot
to feed the chickens. Nelinha looked on and said nothing. In the
evenings, when the wind picked up, banged the windows and
threw things, she would take her daughters on her lap behind the
counter of the store and hush them, stroking their unruly braids.
Sofí sat in the corner on a feed sack, watched, drawing in the
dust with her finger.
Did Sofí’s mother, on a different island, see Nelinha at
every corner, waiting for the bus holding her girl’s hand, sitting
on a stoop combing her child’s hair?
The rains came late that year, both on Fogo and in the
capital, and the lack left everything covered in a dry film. In Chã
das Caldeiras, the grapes withered on the vines. I sat in the store
with Nelinha, and we wondered together if summer, with its
green blessing, would ever come. Some things make themselves
felt more acutely in their absence.
My own rival lived a ghost-life, stranded on an island in
the cold Atlantic. I imagined her walking the cobbled streets at
night with a bougainvillea flower in her hair, letting the men buy
her Cokes at Tex’s bar. I imagined her waking early before the
heat of the day and bathing in the stone quintal, pouring cupfuls
of cool water over her breasts and shoulders. She hummed a
song whose only word was the untranslatable sodadi: longing for
something that you can’t have, a longing so strong that it eclipses
the object of desire.
Morna
On the island of Brava, I sat in the living room of the town’s
only boarding house. It hadn’t rained in months, and outside,
dust whipped at the windowpanes. The audience consisted of a
German biologist who was there to study the island’s marine life,
three Cape Verdean businessmen on a trip from the Praia, plus Dan
and me. Finally, two women wrapped in colorful shawls emerged
from the door to the kitchen. They seemed entirely unfazed by the
meager turnout. Their accompanist kept his head bent, pulling
minor chords from the hole of the guitar. The women took turns
tossing ropes of song into a deep well of sorrow.
Brava felt eerie, chilly and soaked in fog. It was the most
inaccessible of Cape Verde’s nine islands. It had an airport, but
the airport had closed down, so you could only get there by boat
from Fogo, which was the adjacent island. Dan and I had a week
off in March, and had thought seeing another island would be a
nice break. Other volunteers talked about island fever, how after
a few months, they itched to get off of the speck of land where
they were stationed and see something new. It wasn’t island fever
I felt so much, though, as a general gloominess—we were in the
long stretch between Christmas and summer vacation, when
students slumped in their seats and misbehaved even more than
usual, and my own well of ideas and teaching inspiration was
nearly empty. It was also bruma seca, season of endless dust and
dry wind.
I didn’t understand how our Cape Verdean neighbors
endured it: the changeless rural, small town life, the relentless
dust that covered the sun, and coated everything with a fine film.
They shook their heads when we talked about our traveling. Dan
and I were always going back to Praia, the capital, for training or
to see the nurse. We talked about going to Mindelo for Carnival
next year, and taking a vacation in Boa Vista over the summer,
to stay with another volunteer, to swim in the calm, blue waters
and lie on the expanse of pristine white beach. And now we were
heading off again for Brava.
“You couldn’t get me onto that boat for anything,”
Filomena snorted. We were sitting on the roof, shelling bongolón
into a large basket.
“Why not? Have you been?”
Filomena shook her head. Her hands moved quickly,
scraping the little beans out of their pods. I worked much more
slowly, emptying one pod for every four or five of hers.
At thirty-two, Filomena had three daughters and two sons,
no husband, few teeth, and hair that, even when combed, defied
gravity and bobby pins. She also had one crooked arm from a car
accident six years before. The driver of the pickup truck, drunk
on grog after the festival of São João, turned off his headlights on
the windy cobblestone road, smashed into Zé’s store at the turn
into Lomba. They could have died. Once Filomena had rolled
up the sleeve of her t-shirt to show me where the bone veered out
at the shoulder. Both her arms were thick and muscled.
“No,” she said. “I’ve never been. But I’ve heard.” She
lifted the basket of peas to see how many we had. “Just don’t
wear flip flops on the deck.”
I felt I’d integrated pretty well into Cape Verdean
culture, and in some ways I had. I spoke a pretty good Creole,
even reproducing our neighbors’ rural dialect. My teaching
had improved somewhat, too—I was adapting to the students’
eagerness to help each other out with their tests and copy
homework. (There wasn’t even a word in Creole, as far as I could
tell, for cheating.) I’d grown to enjoy spending a Sunday afternoon
shelling peas on the cement rooftop with the neighbor women.
But there were other ways in which I simply could not
relate, barriers too steep for me to cross. One of these was the
norms of relationships between men and women. Students
cheating on school exams was one thing. But the universal
acceptance of male infidelity was hard for me to swallow. I
already felt this cultural expectation, along with the highly
segregated gender roles, straining my relationship with Dan.
Another local habit I found hard to fathom was the
resigned, almost indifferent attitude of Cape Verdeans toward
not just school, or marriage, or drunk driving, but seemingly
toward life in general.
“Boa viagem,” Filomena said—have a good trip—hoisting
a sack of rice onto her head. “Brava, eh?”
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Fábio said, as Dan and I
threw our bags for Brava onto his truck. “It’s just another island.”
It was only an hour boat ride from Fogo to Brava, but a turbulent,
nerve-wracking hour. I quickly understood Filomena’s warning
as I watched the vomit sloshing across the deck, the ship rocking
violently. Brava means rough or angry in Portuguese, and the
seas surrounding the island lived up to the name.
When Dan and I had lived in São Filipe, in the evening
we’d often stroll down to the praça, the town square, to watch the
sun set behind Brava’s shadowy bulk. It was only 20 kilometers
away, but often it was simply an outline, vague, floating cloudshape. Other days, when it was clear, you could see everything:
the window sashes on the houses, the little pickup trucks like
matchbox cars on the winding roads.
You would not have known—and in fact we did not find out until
later—that the performers we’d seen that night in a little living
room in Brava, Teresinha Araújo and Maria Alice, were two of
the country’s most famous singers.
As much as I wanted to assimilate, in a profound sense it was
virtually impossible. I never intended to stay in Cape Verde forever.
I’d come from somewhere else, and eventually I’d return there.
The hardship Teresinha and Maria Alice sang about was
not a metaphor. They had pounded grain and hauled water,
could transport a full bucket on their heads as effortlessly as they
carried these melodies. I could appreciate the wistful, refined
yearning abstractly, on an emotional and aesthetic level.
But the sorrow these women balanced on their shoulders
was a literal one.
Morna is a descendant of the Portuguese fado, which first
landed in Cape Verde centuries ago, mingled with music
from West Africa and Brazil. It is a cousin to the samba and
half-sibling to the blues. The etymology of the word morna is
uncertain; it might be related to the English mourn, or it might
come from the Portuguese morno, which means lukewarm (but
with connotations of gentleness, not like the English lukewarm,
which implies a lack of emotion or conviction). The songs are
mostly contemplative ballads dealing with drought and hardship,
longing and loss, anonymous cries that echo from small bars and
front stoops to the accompaniment of broken-stringed guitars
and untuned violins.
On a clear day, after Dan and I had returned from Brava,
Filomena and I sat on a stone ledge overlooking the ocean a mile
down. The fog had finally blown out from the cliffs, and the dust
was gone. The way down was dizzyingly steep: scrabble of rock
and dry underbrush, the dusty fringe of the manioc field clinging
to the slope. “Mar é morada di sodadi,” Filomena murmured.
“What’s that?” I said.
“It’s my favorite morna,” she said. “Mar é morada di
sodadi,” she sang louder. The sea is the home of longing. She
closed her eyes and continued: oh, longing makes me cry, without
the certainty of ever seeing you again...
She worked in the fields, scrubbed the family’s clothes in
the tin washbasin, pounded corn with the pilón, separating the
husks in the round, flat basket, throwing the grain skyward again
and again.
She also worked at the school’s kitchen, where she laid
out plates of crackers and honey and jugs of powdered milk for
the children. They paid her in sacks of rice, which she lugged up
the hill on her head. She left her house at seven in the morning,
stopping at our house on the way, leaning her head in the bedroom
window where Dan and I were still sleeping. “Bread is ready,”
she would call. “Go get breakfast.”
“Do you know Cesária is performing in São Filipe this weekend?”
I asked Filomena. Cesária Evora, who’d introduced morna to
the rest of the world, who performed to packed theaters in Paris
and New York, was touring Cape Verde, and she’d be singing in
Fogo!
“Do you want to come?” I asked Filomena, thinking
she’d be thrilled.
“All the way to town, at night? How would we get home?”
“I don’t know. We can find a ride. Or we can sleep there
with someone.”
“But it’s a Thursday. I still have to get up the next morning
for school breakfast. That’s okay,” she said. “You and Danny go,
you have fun. When Gil comes, or X-trem”—Cape Verdean pop
singers-—“then you can take me, okay?”
Morna was something serious, beautiful and a source of
cultural pride, but maybe not worth the trouble of arranging a
ride to town. Even for Cesária. The music was poignant, it was
enchanting, but you couldn’t dance to it.
The amphitheater in São Filipe was half-empty. Dan
and I had thought the tickets were a good deal at a hundred
escudos (about five dollars), but that was a lot of money. The
crowd consisted mostly of the Fogo’s small middle class—other
schoolteachers, government workers, the few expatriates.
Cesária appeared on stage, imposing and regal in a maroon
velvet dress and no shoes. (She always performed barefoot.)
She opened with her famous quintessential morna “Sodade,”
about having to leave Cape Verde. When she launched into her
rendition of “Mar e Morada de Sodade,” I thought of Filomena
in Ribeira Filipe. She would be washing the dinner dishes on
the stone patio, singing to herself while the dark sea broke on
the rocks below. Watching the waves break gently, brings me a
feeling of sorrow...
But sodadi (or sodade as it is written in Cesária’s northern
dialect) is a particular kind of ache, one tinged with an almost
pleasurable wistfulness. “Cape Verdeans are not a sad kind of
people,” Cesária—who died in 2011, at the age of seventy—said
in one interview. “Actually, we are a very happy kind of people.”
At thirty-two Filomena was resigned to the fate of the older
sister. Nelinha, two years younger, preened, went dancing, wore
her party dress on Tuesday if she felt like it. Nelinha had the
nicest room in the house, above the level of prying kids and
stray chickens, accessible only by ladder. Nelinha and I would
pull the ladder in and lock the door, lie on her bed at two in the
afternoon, windows open to the sky, drinking pontchi from shot
glasses, laughing.
Preguisoza, Filomena called her sister, lazy, but she said it
without bitterness. Most negative qualities, it seemed—laziness,
arrogance, drunkenness—were accepted with a shrug. El é
komplikadu, one says about someone who is mean or difficult or
touchy. Literally, complicated: there is no direct judgment passed
on their character—they are just hard to deal with.
After half an hour or so of singing, Cesária paused. She sat
down in an armchair on stage and sipped from a small glass of
whiskey that was on a small table beside her. “What’s going on?”
I whispered to Dan.
“I don’t know,” he whispered back. But no one else in
the audience seemed to find it strange. Cesária’s backup band,
a drummer, guitarist, and bass player, commenced an intricate,
accomplished instrumental, and Cesária sat back and thoughtfully
smoked a cigarette, listening.
“Preguiça dja dan,” Nelinha often sighed, when she didn’t feel like
shelling more peas, or sweeping the eternally dusty floor for the
billionth time: laziness has struck me. I heard students use this
phrase as an excuse for not doing their homework, heard teachers
utter it in the faculty lounge when they didn’t feel like planning
another lesson. This laziness was considered as inevitable as any
other impulse; it was the same phrasing used when hunger or
thirst or tiredness overtakes one. I could think of no equivalent
in English. Isn’t that how it works though? These forces befall us,
and we are at their mercy.
Mundu é fetu pa vivé, tambem el é fetu pa morre, Maria Alice sang
that night on Brava. This world is made for living, it is also made
for dying. The wind rattled the windows, and the singer drew her
shawl closer around her shoulders.
I slept restlessly that night, tossing and turning like the
boat had. I felt unsettled, provisional, at a distance from my
home—and even that home, a temporary one. The next day, Dan
and I walked around the little town in Brava—the steep, cobbled
streets, the girls fetching water on their heads. The dust in Brava
was a slightly different color than it was on Fogo, paler, more
muted. But otherwise, perhaps Fábio had been right: it was just
another island.
Fortified by her cigarette and her brief rest, Cesária stood, and
resumed the performance. She sang “Tchintchirote,” one of her
more upbeat numbers, which goes, “You talk too much, like the
tchintchirote in the fig tree.” I thought about Darwin, and his
unfavorable assessment of the little bird’s dun coloring.
I wondered what Darwin would make of these islands
now—their evolution from barren, uninhabited archipelago to
vibrant, growing nation struggling with modernization and all of
its attendant woes. Would he be able to appreciate the beauty in
Cesária’s evocative and haunting melodies? Or would the sound,
like the tchintchirote itself, be too foreign, too unfamiliar, for
him to understand?
But we were all incorrigible in our own ways: Darwin,
despite his brilliance, with his provincial European frame of
reference. Cesária and her refusal to wear shoes, her devilmay-care insouciance. Nelinha and her self-professed laziness,
Filomena and her crooked arm. Me, the American with my
restlessness, my inability to see the positive side of the fatalism
with which I found fault.
You talk too much, like the tchintchirote in the fig
tree. While I sighed about the weather, complained about my
students, planned my next trip, my Cape Verdean friends and
neighbors went on with their lives. They accepted their own
and other’s faults—including mine—and laughed at them. One
would as soon expect someone to change as you would ask the
tchintchirote to stop its chatter.
Long Division
I held a match to the wick of the kerosene lamp, then fit its
curved glass in place. Nelinha’s face was all round edges, her
skin dark ochre in the half-light. Small gold hoops in her ears
dangled charms of clenched fists. Her hand cupped her cheek
in concentration. On the table, her notebook was a complex
reckoning: ladders of division unfolding down the page. I tried
to help her with her homework, but the mathematics here was
different, based on the European method. My brain moved
slowly, translating and inverting to the way I learned.
Nelinha would turn thirty the following month. In June
she would finish the equivalent of sixth grade. The pink fourroom schoolhouse down the hill offered night classes for adults:
Portuguese, history, science. Math was Nelinha’s best subject.
The numbers had a logic that she liked, the columns lined up as
orderly as the rows of manioc and sweet potatoes on the hillside.
Education in Cape Verde often means physical
dislocation. Many of our rural students commuted hours each
way to school by dump truck; others moved in with relatives in
town, since there were only two high schools on the entire island.
But Cape Verde demands of all its students a separation in some
ways even more jarring and irrevocable. This is the switch from
Creole, the mother tongue, to Portuguese. Beginning in the
first grade, children are thrown into an environment where all
communication takes place in a foreign language.
I imagined Nelinha as a six-year old: her wide smile, hair
in pigtails, skipping down the hill to the schoolroom, only to
find the teacher, whom she already knew, speaking in a strange
language.
The schools have hot cinderblock classrooms, with
peeling paint and no glass in the windows, no decorations on
the walls. The children sit at wobbly wooden desks and copy
into their notebooks from the blackboard. “Repeat after me,” the
teacher intones, reciting Portuguese conjugations: Eu tenho, tu
tens, ele tem… The teacher herself has only completed the sixth
grade. What is Portugal to her, to any of them? She will go home,
make supper, beat clothes against the washboard. What can they
pin to the thin line stretching north? Not today’s washing. Not a
single hope flapping in the stiff wind like a shirt.
Nelinha had five children. The oldest, César, was thirteen. He
commuted an hour and a half each day to school in town, like
all the kids in the village, because the school in Ribeira Filipe
didn’t go higher than sixth grade. Then next in line, Enrique,
was the smartest, Nelinha bragged. Only eleven, and he already
knew more than his older brother. João Domingos was nine, he
lived with an aunt half a mile down the hill. Nelinha saw him
on Sundays. Lulú was seven and Fátima six. They could pass
for twins, both miniature versions of their mother. Thick braids
sprouting from their heads; arms and legs always covered in a
thin film of dust.
The children’s father lived in Portugal. He left before
Fátima was a bulge in Nelinha’s belly. She would count on her
fingers the months since he’d sent a check. When money does
come, she’d say wryly, ta kumpra midju pa galinha—it buys corn
for the chickens.
Usually her concentration was fierce, for at least fifteen
minutes, before a neighbor leaned in the window to pay a visit
or she remembered that she left the pot on the fire, or her mother
came in to tell her to put the books away, to come help shell
beans. But tonight I could tell she was distracted by something
else. The numbers kept evading her, hovering like the dust that
wouldn’t stay swept.
N sta pensa na ba Merka, she told me, a bit sheepishly,
looking up at me for approval. I’m thinking about going to
America. “Just for a few years,” she said. Her voice grew distant,
as though she could picture it. “Save some money… My cousin
Isildo says there’s work for me in Brockton, in the factory. He says
I could stay with his family there.” Her pencil traced curlicues
on the paper. She lay the words down like a carefully worked
answer, waiting for my verdict.
The smell of kerosene sharpened on the rough-edged
silence. I felt it in my sinuses, a suffocating headache. With my
college education, I could explain the basic math Nelinha was
learning, but not the equations that really mattered: how was it I
found myself thousands of miles from my comfortable suburban
upbringing, on this remote speck in the Atlantic? How was it
Nelinha, who’d lived her whole life on this ribeira, and dreamed
of something else, couldn’t leave?
And how did Nelinha imagine America? Probably
not the tumbledown tenements outside Boston, windowless
factories, cold cracking like mean jokes in a language she couldn’t
understand. Her math skills could not calculate the long hours,
months multiplying into years, how a paycheck reduces itself
into smaller and smaller fractions: rent, food, bus rides, things
you hadn’t counted on.
She put the pencil down. “Of course I’d have to get a
visa first,” she sighed. We’ve both seen the lines at the American
Embassy in Praia, trailing out the door like a long remainder. We
both know the tiny percentage that get in, of those the smaller
fraction that get the coveted piece of paper. We both knew that
at thirty she was past her prime, that the consul would see no
currency in her waist thickened from childbirth, her breasts
already beginning to sag.
“Ja tchiga,” she said, closing her notebook, shouldering
her school bag. That’s enough. I watched her walk the few meters
up the hill to her house, where she would fall into bed, wrap her
body around the small sum of Fátima’s limbs. “Nha kodé,” she’d
whisper, the name for the last loved child, the caboose.
Boa Vista
When the school year ended, Dan and I took a vacation to the
island of Boa Vista. We stayed with Jessica, who’d been stationed
there. It was good to catch up with her, to speak English and
trade stories about difficult students and nosy neighbors.
Boa Vista lives up to its name, which means beautiful
view; the island is one endless dune and stretches of pristine
white beach. The main town on the island is called Sal Rei, King
Salt. It was like any other town in Cape Verde I’d been to, except
here the stones and cinderblocks were a shade paler, cut from
sun-bleached sandstone.
Each island has its foreign patron: people from Fogo and
Praia go to Boston; from Mindelo, it’s Holland or Providence,
Rhode Island. The men from Boa Vista emigrate to Bologna,
Italy. There is an Italian resort half a mile outside of the town of
Sal Rei. A paved road cuts across the dunes. It was the first asphalt
I’d seen in almost a year. This way, tourists can be transported
from airport to hotel without a single jostle, a bump that might
make them aware that they are not in Rome or Naples.
We walked to the resort, where we lay on wooden beach
chairs under canvas umbrellas. Jessica took us on a tour of
the grounds, which were perfectly, surreally manicured. Huge
hibiscus bloomed from the sandy soil, and a bougainvillea vine
stretched a leisurely arm along the fence.
“The resort’s always deserted,” she told us. “It’s gotta be
a front for money laundering or drug running or something. But
as long as they’re providing employment for people in town,” she
said, “no one says anything. Not that it would make a difference
anyway, if they did.”
I could see that Jessica, too, had changed, was both proud
of her deep connection with and knowledge of the place, and not
a little jaded. When she spoke Creole, she spoke barlaventu, the
dialect of the Northern islands, more clipped and less musical
than the sotaventu we had learned on Fogo.
Every year the resort owners would tell the municipal
government that they would construct a desalinization plant to
make up for the enormous drain they placed on the town’s water
supply. The imaginary plant grew in size each year, but so far the
promises had yielded only an ongoing trickle of money into the
pockets of certain council members. In town, girls with dusty
feet carried twenty-gallon buckets on their heads, careful not to
spill a single drop.
Jessica introduced us to her friend João, whom we found
sitting on a couch in the lounge of the resort watching television. It
was his job to entertain the guests, when there were any, to let the
children beat him at ping-pong and to flirt with the women enough
to flatter them but not so much as to threaten their husbands.
In the whole week we were there, we saw only one family
at the resort. The woman, preternaturally tan in a white bikini,
assiduously ignored her little boy, who was engaged in filling and
emptying a plastic bucket with sand. They left the beach before
noon, and later the woman reappeared on the terrace with her
husband, both of them smoking cigarettes and gesturing in their
broad language.
We floated in the eight-lane, twenty-five meter pool. “I
could never come here with my Cape Verdean friends,” Jessica
said. We all felt a bit guilty, as though we should have been
boycotting the place, that these people were not worthy of our
trespassing. There was no one to stop us anyway, though, and
after half an hour we went back out to the beach.
On Fogo we didn’t swim. Most of the shoreline was steep
cliffs; the water that washed up onto the few spits of black sand
was rough and shark-infested. On Boa Vista, though, the sea
was warm and blue and completely still. I swam far out, then
flipped over onto my back. Fifty feet from me, a sea turtle lifted
its pointed head, and I gasped.
When we couldn’t take the sun any longer, we went
back to Jessica’s, took cool bucket showers and sprawled across
the floor, talking. We filled her in on gossip about Larry who
according to the word on the street, had acculturated to Cape
Verde in his own way, and was dating one of his sixteen-year-old
students. Dan did an impression of some of the new volunteers
we’d met in Praia: Sally, who stopped, dazed, in the middle of
a class she was teaching to watch a bumblebee buzz across the
room; Alex, who instructed his befuddled students who knew
little Portuguese and no English, let alone Latin, to “use their
Latin knowledge.”
Jessica told us about the aerobics class she was teaching—
having never even done aerobics, let alone taught it—in the
courtyard of the town’s nursery school. She had a loyal following,
including several teachers, the woman who sold bread in town,
and a Russian expatriate. Her aerobics class had had their own
float in Sal Rei’s local carnival celebration in February, where
they danced and sang in elaborate feathered costumes someone
had made.
In the evenings we ate buzio and lapa, tiny barnacle-like
creatures that they pull from the rocks just below the surface
of the water. At night Jessica took us to the one restaurant
in town, a patio that reached right up to the sea wall. It was
empty except for a table of men drinking beer and playing oril,
scooping their handfuls of pebbles from one hole to the next. We
ate bowls of spaghetti with tomato sauce and tuna. The owner
of the restaurant, a Cape Verdean who had spent some time in
Italy, came out to impress us with his command of the language.
“Sorry,” we said in Creole. “We’re not Italian.”
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“A nos é di Fogo,” Dan joked. We’re from Fogo.
“Ah,” he nodded. “That would explain the accent.”
Dan and I took long walks across the dunes. Boa Vista
is tiny, 240 square miles, but once you turn your back to the sea
it feels unbounded. It felt as though we could walk forever and
disappear into the flat landscape. Now, away from our village
for the first time in months, out of the clouds that close in like a
curtain, I could suddenly see a wider scope.
“Danny,” I said, “I don’t think I can go back.” We’d
been living in Ribeira Filipe for five months. “I can’t live there
anymore,” I said, and as I said it, I knew that it was true. Now
that we were away from there, the place seemed surreal—the
lack of privacy, the dust, the wind. How difficult the smallest
task was: taking a bath, feeling my way out to the outhouse at
night, cupping the candle flame in one hand.
“No way,” he said. “We can’t leave. Not after all Nelinha
and Filomena have done for us. Wouldn’t you miss them?”
“Of course I would. But I can’t take it anymore, Danny.
It’s too hard.” I couldn’t, or didn’t want to, put into words
everything I meant. It wasn’t even the physical hardships, really.
Those were a distraction from the real issues. The discomfort I
felt watching Dan disappearing into a different person: putting
an arm around a student, saying something in perfect Creole,
clicking his fingers against each other in the quick gesture that
meant something I couldn’t quite define.
We walked in silence for a while, and I knew he was
thinking of the dust storms, the nights coming home to a bed
covered in dirt and no water for a shower. How we were forced
to spend almost every hour of the day together in that tiny stone
house, how we both needed space that this arrangement couldn’t
give us.
“I can’t take it,” I repeated, angry that he seemed to be
weighing our marriage and my sanity against an imaginary
responsibility to our neighbors.
“Remember why we moved there in the first place?”
he said. “What about the having an authentic Cape Verdean
experience?” I thought about our life there. How each evening
we would eat the meal Nelinha had prepared for us in silence,
then after supper walk up the hill to the little store which stocked
dry goods, flour and powdered milk, kerosene, soap. Nelinha
poured grog behind the counter. The men konta parti, told the
same stories over and over.
The men bought us both drinks. I took one pontchi
and sipped it slowly, letting the ice dilute its syrupy alcoholic
sweetness. They forced drink after drink on Dan—pontchi, grog,
Portuguese beer. He built a tolerance I couldn’t fathom. He
laughed when Fábio joked about his pikena, offered to find Dan
his own girlfriend in the next village. When the men looked at
me, I’d laugh too, on cue. It felt more like choking.
“Tchiga,” I said. Enough. As though if I said it in Creole,
that made it more final, more comprehensible. The word in
Creole that could mean not only enough, but also move over,
make room.
Something like relief came over Dan’s face. It had often
been that way between us. It had been my idea to move to Ribeira
Filipe, my idea to join the Peace Corps in the first place. Dan
would resist initially, insist it was a crazy proposal. But once he
came around, he would be the idea’s biggest advocate, possessed
of a convert’s fervor.
“Hard doesn’t necessarily mean virtuous,” I said quietly.
“Sometimes it just means hard.” We walked a few hundred yards
in silence, but I saw something lift from Dan’s shoulders—a
weight, an unspoken expectation.
“We could still visit them on weekends,” he said.
“They’ll understand,” I promised him. “You know that
given half a chance, most of them would end up moving into
town, anyway.”
The wind picked up a spray of sand, and I wrapped my
panu with its pattern of tiny suns around my shoulders. My
suitcase was full of these cloths, one for every month I’d been
in Cape Verde. Sometimes I wore them to the beach, but I felt
foolish in their bright designs, against which my pale skin looked
washed out.
I loved Ribeira Filipe, the breathtaking views to the ocean
on clear days, the cold, glittering bank of clouds rolling through
Lomba and up the hill. I loved Nelinha and Filomena, Fátima
and Djidja and the other kids. But the hour and a half commute
each way by foot and dump truck was wearing on me. I felt torn—
accepted in Ribeira Filipe, exhilarated by what we’d done, going
off the trodden path, even for the Peace Corps. But I was tired, too.
Eight kilometers from the town of Sal Rei are the remains
of a Spanish freighter that shipwrecked there in 1968. We didn’t
make it there—too long a hike, Jessica assured us. “We could try
to arrange a ride,” she said, listlessly.
I thought about the effort of walking around the town
trying to find someone with a truck, more hours in the scorching
sun. “Preguiça dja dan,” I said, lying back on her cement floor.
“That’s okay,” she said. There was an undeniable pleasure,
and relief, in letting laziness overtake us.
I thought about it, though, the ghosts of Spanish sailors
haunting the beach, the iron skeleton jutting up from the sand.
I didn’t feel American, exactly, I thought, at least not the
way I had before. It was no longer an identity I took for granted,
but a complicated, difficult thing I carried around with me. I was
different than I had been when we arrived: more cynical, less
impatient. Skinnier. I was a better dancer, and an even worse
Portuguese speaker. Like my students, I couldn’t conjugate a
Portuguese verb to save my life. Patches of dirt shadowed my skin
like bruises, impervious to brief, cold bucket showers. It wasn’t that
I thought I could be Cape Verdean, of course. Neither did Dan,
despite his looks and perfect Creole. The sand burned, even under
my flip flops. “Let’s turn around,” I said, and Dan picked up my
hand. He looked at it, turned it over, laced his fingers into mine.
We were something else, I thought. An odd species,
neither fish nor fowl.
Just a few hundred yards beyond the town, the horizon
went on forever in all directions—both sea and land unmarred by
any evidence of human existence. It would be so easy to get lost
here. We walked back in the direction we’d come from, hand in
hand, each adrift in our separate thoughts.
Postcard from the
Volcano
Back in São Filipe, the Peace Corps found us a new apartment,
this time in a more central location at the top of the hill, near
Café Magma. A new school year was beginning, but it felt almost
like we’d been returned to where we started. I ran early, winding
through the hills behind the airport. There was the rush of grass
on the steep slope of the volcano, the skinny cows and goats
grazing the dry ravines. Once I stumbled across a skull, hollow
eye sockets staring off at nothing.
I’d spent months deciphering my body’s runes. Muscle is
a pulse of fear, born blind. The nerve’s loom spins taut. But bone
is a dead end, irreducible except to ash. In the hills, the footpaths
attenuate. Even my words were stripped bare, my journal
disintegrating into a collection of fragments. Piece of bread,
I wrote. Coffee. An orange. As though these words contained
some story, some truth I was trying to unpeel.
Guava trees clung almost horizontal to the slope. The smell
off the fruit’s skin was something animal, alive in the sunshine,
petulant and rustling in the wind. I did not eat breakfast. Or I ate
too much. Later it would be catalogued in my journal, every bite
of bread, every spoonful of yogurt that had entered my body. I
stripped myself to bone and sinew, stored the flesh in the lined
pages of my notebooks:
I woke at 5, starving. At six I ate a yogurt. Apple, coffee, some leftover
rice. Milk and sugar. Loneliness. Mid-morning snack: 2 squares of
chocolate. A handful of raisins.
What led me to this place where I could no longer see
the trail? How would I find my way back? Plenty of times before
I had eaten like this, first idly, to pass the time, then gathering
speed, then panicked, my heart pounding. A handful of carrots,
still gritty with dirt. A piece of bread left over from breakfast.
Rice and beans, straight from the refrigerator, their smoothness
intoxicating. Dried milk, too much trouble to mix it, just drink it
down, warm watery liquid with powdery lumps.
Plenty of times before I had stood at the sink, had probed
a tentative finger into my throat, then pulled it out in disgust as
my body recoiled.
I believed in willpower. I ran six miles a day. I wrote every
day, dutifully filling the college-ruled notebooks. I did not take
days off, did not eat meat or anything with fat, did not spend
money, deliberated over each escudo.
What made this time different? I was alone in the house.
Where was Dan? The times when he was gone were both precious
and dreaded. The minutes seemed to drag on forever. I was free
to work without him intruding, to read without the constant
sound of the guitar, the song he played over and over, always
stumbling over the same notes. They’ve got a wall in China…
Except I didn’t want to work, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t even
leave the kitchen. You’ve got a wall around you…
Just this once, I told myself. Then I’ll be good, there’ll be
no need to do it again.
It wasn’t hard. The unpleasantness was so easy to erase,
not like the fights that left me feeling bad for days. I flushed the
mistake down the toilet, wiped my mouth with the side of my
hand. I tried to ignore the broken veins around my eyes.
“Have you been crying?” Dan asked later, when he came in.
“Yes,” I said, and shrugged. It was an easy lie. I didn’t
want to worry him. Besides, what mattered was that I wouldn’t
do it again. What mattered was that I wouldn’t have to. I felt
empty, clean, absolved.
“Joaninha invited us for lunch,” he said. “Want to come?”
“I’m not hungry,” I said. “I think I’ll stay here.” I sat at my
desk, unable to concentrate. I flipped idly through the dictionary.
There is something satisfying in giving names to things, in
uncovering the roots of words. Bulimia: from the ancient Greek,
cow hunger. White stone carved to whiter shadow.
What was this need that pushed me further, over this hill,
then the next? Dumb, bovine desire, that could graze all day and not
be satisfied. The animals, harmless though they were, frightened
me—their intractable bulk, impressive even when underfed.
That night a shakiness overtook me. Dan and I walked up to
Tex’s Esplanada and sat beneath a sky thatched with stars. “I
can’t stop shaking,” I said. I felt my teeth rattle in my head. The
night was warm, but I was shivering.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dan said. “You’re fine.” But there
was an edge in his voice. He was impatient, didn’t see the ghosts that
hovered just behind him, waiting for him to leave me alone again.
We sipped pontchi from shot glasses. The liquor was thick
and sweet. I let the ice melt, tipped the glass so the liquid barely
touched my lips.
Below the terrace where we sat, a dry ravine separated us
from the rest of the town. Across the bridge, the Hotel Xaguate
was lit in each square window.
“You’ll be okay,” he said more gently, and took my hand.
The ring on my fourth finger had grown loose, and slipped easily
over the knuckle. He slid it off, replaced it on the third, where
it fit more snugly. I noticed in the half-light the bones of my
hand, how finely articulated they were. The shaking didn’t stop
completely, but it abated. I moved closer to him, nestled myself
against the warmth of his body. The questions in my head went
out one by one, their luminous inflections falling into darkness.
Dove on the
Veranda
According to the gossip, I had been pregnant at least five times in
the first year I lived in Cape Verde. Every time I went to the capital
for a training session or vacation, or to see the nurse for some
digestive ailment, people nudged and smiled, nodded knowingly.
“It’s medical problems,” I’d explain, which was of course
exactly the wrong thing to say. Problemas di barriga, stomach
problems—to them it was my oblique way of confessing my
true condition. Grávida. The Portuguese (and Creole) word for
pregnant has echoes of severity, weighted with the pull of the
earth, of the possibility of death inside the swell of new life; but
also resonates of the momentous, the all-important. The cognate
to the English word pregnant, prenha, is only used for animals. It
is a nasty thing to say about a woman, that she is prenha.
There were plenty of women who had seven, eight,
nine pregnancies. Birth control, as far as I could tell, was used
sporadically and often incorrectly. Once Nelinha showed me the
pack of pills she had just gotten from the hospital in town. She
wanted me to admire the new pink case. “Isn’t it pretty?”
“Do you take them every day?” I asked.
“Sure.” She traced the raised dots with her finger.
“When?” I persisted. “In the morning? At bedtime?”
She shrugged. “Ora ki n ta lembra.” When I remember. I
thought of the havoc of hormones circulating in her body and
wondered how long until she would again tie her hair back in
a headscarf to make the weekly trips to town, accepting with
lowered eyes when Fábio offered her a seat in the cab. She would
step out sheepishly in front of the hospital, knowing what they
had been saying in the back of the truck, the men with their sacks
of corn, the old woman holding a baby goat on her lap: prenha
again, can you believe it?
Joaninha was delighted that Dan and I had returned from the
fora. “See?” she said, grinning. “I told you it was hard.”
“Are you still studying?” I asked her. “Dificil,” she said
vaguely. Hard to explain. Her mother had gotten sick, then
the old Mormons left and were replaced by new ones. She’d
lost momentum. Her cousin had come up with a new business
proposition, selling cornmeal pastries in the prison down by the
cliff. This meant long hours grinding flour, shredding fish, and
frying the pasteis. The guard let them in at six, and Joaninha
and her cousin walked up and down the rows of cells with their
covered baskets, slipping pasteis between the bars, collecting
five-escudo pieces. Her cousin seemed to take a disproportionate
share of the money, though, and most of the rest went back into
fish for the next day.
“Anyway,” she said, “I’m glad you’re back. Tuesdays and
Thursdays are still good, e ka si?”
Rumors notwithstanding, I could not have gotten pregnant
while I was in Cape Verde. I had stopped menstruating. Cathy,
the Peace Corps nurse, attributed my period’s disappearance to
stress, the change in climate, diet, other habits. When it did not
return after several months, though, it was obvious that there
were other reasons. I had lost more than twenty pounds. My
body no longer had enough fat to produce sufficient estrogen.
Cathy chided me over the telephone to eat, to gain weight, to
start taking birth control pills. She told me what was happening
to my bones, how they were becoming porous and fragile.
I resisted taking hormones for a year before she convinced
me, wooing me with a free trip to Praia. I could see my situation
as a metaphor, but not as a serious threat to my health. One way
or another, though, my body was engraved with the choices I
was making. Every day I sat at my desk, but nothing happened.
“I cannot write,” I complained in my notebook. “I cannot draw
a box around anything to call my own. These pages hold nothing
but painfully aborted efforts, unformed embryos of poems. How
appropriate that my body should shut down the capacity for
creation, even as my mind does.”
In the capital, I went with Jenny to a batuki festival on the beach
in Pedra Badejo, a town carved from the ribbed cliffs of the island
and named for the rockfish they catch there. Batuki is a music
performed only by women and only on Santiago, the largest and
most African-influenced of the islands, where the people’s skin
is darkest, their Creole most colored with continental patterns.
The performers sat in a circle with sacks between their
legs. (The sacks are a holdover from the times when drums were
forbidden.) They beat out rhythms on the cloth: starting slowly,
gathering momentum and complexity. One woman stood, began
a slow rolling in her hips. She tied the colored panu low around
her bottom, which shook faster and faster. The leader, an older
woman with few teeth and a jagged country Creole, started to
sing: Pomba na baranda, pomba na baranda. The other women
answered: pomba na baranda. The dove on the veranda. Each
word had several meanings, some literal, some vulgar, some
feathered in a plumage of irony.
The drumming, which started like a gentle drizzle,
intensified into a downpour, a rain so hard it overturned a year
of drought in minutes. The dancer, sweating, breathing hard,
passed off the panu to another drummer and resumed her seat.
Jenny and I watched spellbound, the rhythm weaving a bright
sash around us.
Even the youngest girls, three and four years old, moved
their hips like that. It was fascinating and disturbing to watch
them perform this blatantly sexual display before a crowd of
men. And yet there was something supremely innocent about
it, too. A circle of mothers and grandmothers closed around the
girls. The men stood on the periphery; this had nothing to do
with them.
In February, Joaninha started bringing her cousin Voi along with
her to clean. Voi would do the heavy work, scrub the floors and
beat the clothes against the washboard. Dan and I debated—was
it true or was she just gaining weight? There were mysterious
headaches, stomachaches, and she was forever going to the
hospital for remédios.
I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t know how. And yet it
seemed rude to say nothing, as though it were not important
enough to notice, or too shameful to mention.
I tried to be solicitous without prying. I visited her, and
sat on her veranda, the enclosed square of sky where she hung
the laundry out to dry. I thought of her asking me, “When are
you and Danny going to have a baby?” But somehow I wasn’t
sure how to say it. Instead, we talked about the weather, the
bruma seca season that was beginning, the stifling, dove-gray
dust covering the sky. Above our heads, the laundry flapped its
bright wings.
Women who could afford it sometimes went to Praia or Mindelo
to have their babies. The flights were always delayed, and there
was often a woman in the airport keening over an enormous
belly, looking ready to deliver any minute.
Sitting next to a pregnant woman on the airplane, I
wondered: what did she see when she stared out the small
window, looking down on the rocky island where she lived? Did
she watch her own house recede under the looming peak of the
volcano? Did she see in sharp relief the cycles of destruction and
rebirth in the hills: the lava’s fertile, ashen bed, the runnels from
the floods thirty years before that had washed the pigs and goats
straight down the mountain to the sea?
Women’s creativity in Cape Verde is largely defined by preparing
meals and giving birth. The batuki serves both to defy and to
reinforce women’s traditional roles. On the night before a
wedding, the bride’s friends and women relatives put on a
batuki circle for her. The advice they give her is both ancient and
immediate, pragmatic, bawdy, some of it codified in lyrics, the
rest improvised.
Call and response, call and response. The leader lifts off
on a wing of words. Oh, men, what are they good for? They give
us children then they leave. Men are shiftless, men are weak. She
riffs amid a scattering of cheers and laughter. Look at us women,
we raise the children, we plant the corn, we harvest, we draw the
water from the well.
If there are men in the audience, they laugh too. Sometimes,
when one is young enough or drunk enough, a dancer will grab
him with the panu and tie it around his hips. The crowd erupts
in hysterical laughter as he tries to shake his behind, which, no
matter how much rhythm the man may have, can’t move like
that. You could sooner make a goat do the funaná, or find a
donkey that speaks Creole.
February turned into March, and Joaninha continued to
complain of stomach pains. She asked if I had any medicine I
could give her.
“Is it diarrhea? Cramps? Did you eat something bad?”
She shrugged. “There’s this.” I offered her a bottle of
Pepto Bismol. “But, you know, you have to be careful now what
you take.”
One word: now. It was as though I had suddenly pulled
aside the curtain. Joaninha broke into a grin, a smile that was
at once secretive and absolutely open. She laughed and laughed,
until I joined in. Dja, she said, placing my hand on her belly. Now.
I was an oddity: twenty-three and married with no children.
“Bo sta sabi,” my neighbor Flávia had said to me, stirring a
large pot of katchupa. “You must be so happy. No kids, money
in your pockets, time to go out and have fun.” And yet I heard
pity mingled with her envy. I could go dancing, or spend my
time studying, or pursue whatever frivolous pastimes I chose
because I did not have the responsibility that made a woman’s
life meaningful.
Samira, her six-year old, ran in. “Mommy, give me a
drink,” she commanded. Flávia gave the girl a playful smack on
the backside. “Ay, vida di pobri,” she sighed, pouring a cup of
water. “By the way, did you hear that Camila is pregnant?”
“Camila? Arcinda’s daughter? But she’s only fifteen.”
Flávia shrugged. “Things happen. I was the same age
when Loli was born.”
“But what about school?”
“É ta guenta.” She’ll manage. “Here. Taste.” Flávia held
a wooden spoon of corn to my mouth. The kernels were tough
and salty, flavored with a tinge of iron from the pot. It was the
same well-seasoned pot her mother had given her as a wedding
present, the same dish that she had learned to prepare as a child
still clinging to her mother’s hip, while neighbor women shelled
peas at the kitchen table and gossip simmered on a low flame.
Sobrados
The town of São Filipe was famous for its sobrados, old
houses that the Portuguese built for themselves along the cliffs
overlooking the ocean. They painted them in pale blues and pinks,
and governed the island from behind their cool stone façades, sat
in the quintais, the enclosed patios shaded with papaya trees, and
read month-old papers from Portugal. The maid brought coffee
in small cups.
The Portuguese left in 1975. The news came over the
radio that the war in Guinea-Bissau was over, and Cape Verde
was independent. Too bad for this country, they shrugged. Why
stick around and watch it sink into a swamp of mismanagement,
laziness, and inefficiency? They packed up their books, ruined
from the humidity of the rainy season, and the collared shirts,
never suited to the climate to begin with.
Sobrado is Portuguese for a two-story house. It has the
same root as the word for leftovers, and the adjective meaning
extra, superfluous. Twenty-five years later, the wooden railings
rot under bougainvillea vines. Most of them are locked up, the
original owners having long since died, the deeds now split among
fifteen grandchildren who are scattered on different islands.
Foreigners have bought others, maybe imagining a quaint bed
and breakfast where tourists will sleep with the windows open
and wake to sip their coffee in the quintal. Perhaps they failed to
account for the fact that they would have to live there, though,
because these houses also remain empty.
Sobrado comes from sobre: above. On the balcony, a girl
leans on her elbows, surveying the sea, waiting.
Everyone in the town of São Filiipe knew Lígia. Lígia
and Katia, who claimed to be sisters but weren’t, lived together in
the sobrado on the corner above the fish market. A German man
named Friedrich bought the property several years ago. Soon
after he moved to the island of Maio to pursue development
opportunities there. He let Lígia and Katia stay in the house,
under a dubious arrangement in which he would come back
every few weeks and stay there with them.
Sometimes Dan and I would buy the girls sodas at the bar.
Katia was thirteen with curly hair and a wide, flat face. Lígia claimed
that she was seventeen, although she later confessed to us that she
had just turned sixteen. She was tiny, with the coloring and skittery
gestures of a dust-covered sparrow. Her chest puffed up when she
told us about her family in the countryside. There were seven other
kids, including a twin brother, whom she missed terribly.
Behind my back, she asked Dan about me. “Why is Ellie so
quiet? Is she sad? She must miss her family.” Lígia wanted to be my
friend, Dan told me. I wondered what he told her about me, or how
much he himself understood of my moods. When I fell silent, did
he chalk it up to a temperamental personality or homesickness?
Perhaps we were both more affected by the culture
around us than we chose to admit. In Cape Verde, only a fool
holds her husband accountable. Men are expected to let their
women down. The wife turns her back, doesn’t question. She
takes what she can get, serves her husband first then eats the
leftovers standing at the stove.
Sometimes in the evenings Lígia and Katia would come
sit with me and Dan on our balcony and watch the movimentu—
the old men out for a stroll, girls walking arm in arm, a truck full
of boys in town from the countryside, flying around the curves,
whooping.
Our talk was desultory as the passeu, the evening stroll,
meandering without direction down familiar paths. I got bored
quickly with the endless prattle, the same jokes told over and
over. I excused myself early to go to bed.
Dan kissed Lígia in the kitchen. No, he qualified later, she kissed
him. He was scooping a spoonful of yesterday’s rice and fava
onto the frying pan.
“They can’t come here anymore,” I said, not looking at
him, my stomach tightening.
“Let me explain.” He added olive oil, stirred, scraping the
Teflon surface with the spoon.
He had gone to the refrigerator to get another beer, and
she had followed him in. “It was her,” he said. “It wasn’t me.”
Spit and hiss. He turned down to the fire, not looking up.
I thought about the sound I’d heard Cape Verdeans make.
Psst, men hissed from the side of the road as I walked by. They
waited until I was almost past, until it was too late to react.
Quiet, offhand, almost an endearment, but laden with irony. Psst.
Merkana, branca, bonita.
In Praia, where the Cape Verdean army trained, the
troops careened through the streets in green dump trucks, calling
out to passing women. Psst! Bonita!
Psst. It’s how you get the attention of a waitress in a
restaurant, how students pass notes in class, how a mother calls
her child in from the street. The sound was neutral to Cape
Verdeans, tinged with neither fear nor anger. Not to me. Even
now, I make the sound and my heart beats faster, a mute anger
tightens my lips. Psst, men whispered as I ran past, walked
through the market, boarded the bus.
What did the neighbors say to each other when they
saw Lígia and Katia walking up the stairs to our house again?
Psst, they muttered, cocking their heads. Did you hear about the
Merkanus?
“No,” I said, not knowing if I meant no I don’t want to hear it
or no it didn’t happen that way or no don’t leave the beans like that, they’ll
stick to the pan. I felt my gorge rising, rice scorching in the pan.
Psst. It’s an introduction that promises only
disappointment; it’s the sound of a tire going flat, of a gentle,
ongoing letdown.
Sal
Sal is a hinge, flat sliver of an island connecting Cape Verde to
the rest of the world. This is where the international airport is
located. Air Portugal flies twice weekly to Lisbon, and South
African Airways stops here on their New York-Johannesburg
route. The plane lands at one a.m. and lifts off again at three.
South Africans pace the small waiting room in a haze of
exhaustion and cigarette smoke.
After I had been back in the U.S. for a few months, I ran
into a South African acquaintance. We chatted, and I mentioned
that I was in the Peace Corps in Cape Verde. “Oh, I’m so sorry,”
she said. “Was it really awful? When we go to Johannesburg our
flights always stop in Sal. What a God-forsaken country!”
“How can you say that?” I snapped, surprised at the
vehemence of my reaction. “What do you know about Cape
Verde?”
She either ignored my indignation, or didn’t notice it.
“That awful airport,” she said. “No air conditioning, nothing.
And those horrible plastic chairs. At least they could have
comfortable seats.”
I passed through Sal on three occasions. It was the first and the
last that I saw of Cape Verde. I arrived in the middle of July,
dazed by heat and jet lag, and left almost two years later, in the
middle of a night opaque as lava rock.
The other time I saw the island was in February of our
second year. My parents came to visit, and Dan and I flew to Sal
to meet them so we could spend a few more days together.
Sal, like Boa Vista, has several resorts, but unlike the
one on Boa Vista, these are full, packed to capacity with Italian
and German tourists. There is a windsurfing competition every
February. It was scheduled to take place the week after we were
there, and already the sails dotted the bay, bright triangles of red
and green and yellow rising from the blue water.
A paved road led from the airport to the beach town of
Santa Maria. Espargos, the town where most of the locals live, is
several miles inland. Its name is Portuguese for asparagus. There
was nothing green on the entire island, and I couldn’t imagine
where this name came from, unless it was an oblique reference
to the spindly watchtower that jutted from a plateau above the
town. We stayed at the boarding house in Espargos with my
parents, drank Cokes in a café called Bom Dia and talked to the
locals. I had a bit of trouble with their Creole, which hovered
between the northern dialect and the southern.
My parents watched me with a mixture of confusion and
amazement. They had known that I spoke the language, but it
still surprised them, as though someone had taken their daughter
and replaced her with a close replica, but not an exact one. I felt
like I was putting on a show for them: look how well adjusted I
am, how fluent my Creole is.
My mother held my hand across the table. I hadn’t seen
them for a year and a half, but there were things we didn’t talk
about. They didn’t mention how much weight I’d lost. I didn’t
tell them about the immense loneliness that often gnawed away
at me. Instead I ordered them bowls of lapa and búzio, and
they caught me up on family gossip. I taught them a few words
in Creole, how to respond to a greeting. Tudu fixi; tudu dretu:
Everything’s cool, it’s great, it’s all right.
We took a taxi to the salt mines for which the island is
named. It is inside the crater of an ancient volcano, shallow
beds of water edged with sharp crystals. There is a huge wooden
skeleton of a pump. They used to harvest the mineral here, but
now even salt is imported from Portugal.
Sal had lost some of its character to the homogenizing influence
of tourism. The hotels and overpriced restaurants on the beach
achieved a sort of generic third-world tourist destination effect.
Even in Espargos, there was a shop that sold masks and necklaces
imported from Mali, colorful panus made in Indonesia.
The high school in Espargos had a reputation for having
some of the worst behavior problems in the country. These
students were exposed to wealth in a way that students on other
islands were not. Tourism had brought jobs, but most were not
the kind that required a high school education. The boys would
end up waiting tables in Santa Maria, or loading and unloading
planes at the airport. Maybe the girls would clean bedrooms in
the hotels; many would end up on the arms of German men who
would buy them dresses from the store in Santa Maria, later brag
to their friends about how young the girls were, how beautiful
and docile.
In certain ways, though, the contact with the outside
world had only exaggerated Sal’s essential Cape Verdeanness.
This island seemed to embody the transitory nature of the
whole country, its history as a port, a stop in the slave trade and
shipping industry. Sal is the most arid and desert-like of all the
islands; there were Peace Corps volunteers who had been there
for two years and seen it rain only once. Without agriculture
to tie them to the land, the sense of impermanence here was
even stronger on Sal than on other islands. The neither-here-northere feeling creates the illusion of being cast adrift, beholden to
neither geography nor history.
Physically, Sal is the closest point to Africa in Cape Verde,
but in other ways, it is the farthest. Our friend Michael, a black
volunteer who was originally from Trinidad, was stationed in
Sal. He hated it. The principal of his school reprimanded him for
wearing an African print shirt to school. “These people have no
sense of history,” he complained in his lilting accent, shaking his
head. “No sense of pride. I felt closer to Africa when I lived in
Harlem.” Identity in Sal was constantly held up against the mirror
of Europe and the U.S. and white South Africa; the whiteness of
these places glinted blindingly off this tiny point in the Atlantic.
Once, Michael told me, he offered to help a neighbor carry a sack
of rice. When he hoisted it onto his head, she hissed, “That’s
how mandjakus carry things. This isn’t Africa, you know.”
The feeling of dislocation was acute. Dan and I spent a
few days on Sal by ourselves before my parents arrived. Once
we took the bus to Santa Maria. On the way we met a black
Gabonese traveler who had stopped in Sal, due to some mystery
of airline scheduling, on his way to Paris. His name was François.
He came from a very wealthy family, and spoke flawless English
in addition to French and several Gabonese languages. “In the
fall I will start at the Sorbonne,” he told us. “Before then, I want
to see Italy and Switzerland and the countryside of France. I
hear it is very beautiful.”
“What is Gabon like?” we wanted to know.
“It is the beginning of the jungle,” he said. “Very hot.
Corrupt.”
The bus deposited us at the entrance to one of the luxury
hotels. We cut between the buildings to the beach, and spread
our towels beneath the colorful umbrellas in front of the beach
bar. Dan and I lay down on our towels, and François went out
for a swim. I could see the hotel employees eyeing us from a
distance, but they did not approach us. As soon as François
returned, however, dripping and exclaiming how cold the water
was, two Cape Verdean waiters came up and announced, with
smug expressions on their faces, that we’d have to leave. Praia
privadu, they told us, though we all knew what the unspoken
rules of the private beach were.
The few days I spent with my parents on Sal were marked by
a certain strangeness. A year and a half was the longest I had
ever gone without seeing them, and now suddenly our roles were
reversed: I was the one constantly answering questions, counting
out the correct amount of money, teaching them the words for
things. Later they would travel with me and Dan to Fogo, meet
our friends and students and see where we lived. We would relax
into old patterns; I would lie across their bed at the pousada and
ask their advice about what I should do after these two years
ended. My mother would stroke my hair and my father, cleaning
his camera lens, would come up with all kinds of authoritativesounding suggestions.
On Sal, though, we were in between. We made our way
with tentative footing across the scarred surface of the island.
Sal unsettled me, its primary function as a stop on the way to
somewhere else. Every night the roar of the jet engine cut through
my sleep. I dreamed I was attached to a huge machine that made
my body shake with electric jolts and turned me into an x-ray, a
photographic negative of teeth and bones. I saw myself inside
out, and woke in stages, fear deepening before it dissipated.
Lisboa
During our second year in Cape Verde, thinking ahead to the
end of my service there, I decided that I would go to Portugal.
I wanted a vacation that was at once foreign and familiar.
Wanted the first-world luxury I had once taken for granted,
clean sheets and running water. I wanted the concatenation of
cars and buildings, the elaborate flourish of iron gates, parks and
churches with their spires of light. A room in a pensão with brass
faucet heads and a down comforter, sleep waiting, gabled and
ornate, at the balcony door. I wanted to go shopping, to buy a
sweater and a pair of jeans, a pocketbook to hold my ticket stubs
and matchbooks. I wanted to watch the pigeons in the square,
their breasts swelling, light in the lower branches of the trees. I
missed fall, the season spinning out like a flapping reel of film. I
wanted to watch obscure movies in the afternoon, emerge alone
in darkening streets.
Dan and I seemed to spend less and less time together. We taught
opposite schedules, Dan in the morning, me in the afternoon. It
was easier that way; the less time we spent together, the less we
bickered about money, or food, or whatever else we could find
to fight about. Sometimes in the evenings, though, we’d taken
to visiting Café Magma again, sitting quietly with our Cokes,
watching the girls line up with their buckets at the xafariz to
draw their water.
Magma was Larry’s hang-out, too, and I could see that
he’d made friends, that he had his own Cape Verdean circle, who
laughed at his jokes and bought him beers. He waved at us from
the other side of the café, where he was leaning on the counter,
teasing the bartender in his surprisingly competent Creole. The
English coordinator, Djoka, with whom Larry had butted heads,
sat next to him, laughing. He’d found his niche in São Filipe,
and had told us he was considering extending for a third year.
I thought about my own Cape Verdean friends, about Joaninha
and Nelinha and Filomena. How tolerant and nonjudgemental
they were, in a way I wished I could be, but clearly hadn’t quite
yet mastered.
Despite my idle fantasies, I never made it to Lisbon. In the
mornings, before I taught, I was trying to read a book of Cape
Verdean stories called Vidas Vividas. Lived Lives. My mind
wandered, lost in dictionaries and tentative translations. Reading
in another language was not the same thing as reading travel books
or novels in translation. English bound me to my body. When
Dan and I spoke, the sentences felt as palpable as a frying pan.
But Portuguese was a disembodied tongue, its letters untied from
sound and murky layers of connotation. I could spend hours in
the town’s municipal library, parsing complex sentences for verbs
and nouns. I floated above my body, the workmen hammering
and shouting to each other outside the window. I read through
lunchtime, the air hot and motionless, the swatch of sun shifting
slowly across my table.
I could read the language, but I couldn’t speak it. When I
tried to practice Portuguese with my colleagues or my neighbors,
we all felt silly, uncomfortable in the overblown phrases, and
soon reverted to kriolu. This was another reason why I wanted to
go to Portugal, to hear the language spoken in its birthplace, this
language that I almost knew, but that I had learned backwards,
through a disowned offspring. In Lisbon, Portuguese is spoken
with an elegant old-fashioned diction. Horses clop along on the
old streets, slowing traffic. No one opens their mouth to speak;
they elide the vowels and barely touch the consonants, leaves
scuttling across the cobblestones.
Cape Verdean Creole is roughly ninety percent Portuguesederived, but the two are nonetheless mutually unintelligible,
obscured from each other by a haze like the dust that hovers over
the islands, brought in on the Saharan harmattans.
Trying to read Portuguese gave me a new admiration for
my students, especially the ones who managed to excel. Not only
did they have no books, no backpacks, no breakfast, they were
essentially learning in a foreign language.
Samira was in my class again this year, now in eleventh
grade. Still, the pace of the class, with forty students and no
textbooks or materials, was glacial. We were still reviewing ‘to
want.’ “What do you want to do?” I had asked my students.
“Write three sentences.” They read them aloud, garbling the
pronunciation, swallowing mouthfuls of consonants. I want
drive car. I want talk English. I am want drink Fanta. “Okay,” I
encouraged them. “That’s good.”
Then Samira read her sentences. “I want my family to be
happy,” she said. “I want us to live together, and I want for it to
rain this year so Cape Verde will have food.”
The rest of the class was unimpressed. Romina went on
scribbling hearts in the margin of her paper. Magno kept poking
Fátima in the back with his pencil. Samira and I were alone in a
foreign place that the rest of the class could not enter. “Samira,”
I said. “Do you want to go to America?”
“No,” she said, surprising me with how quickly she
answered. “I don’t.”
Sometimes Dan and I planned trips together. We lay on our
mattress on the floor, sweating, imagining ourselves backpacking
through France, or on a swift train passing through the Italian
countryside. But whenever I pictured myself in Portugal, it was
always alone. I had been eating less and less. I could feel my body
becoming lighter. When I ran early in the morning, climbing the
hill out of town toward the airport, my legs carried me effortlessly
along the dirt paths parallel to the runway. It almost seemed as
though I could lift off.
História, história: A boat of three fishermen from the island of
Maio got carried out to sea. They drifted for forty days and forty
nights, living off rainwater and what fish they could catch. They
washed up, finally, on unfamiliar sand, a wide white beach shaded
by palm trees. Their salt-dizzy ears heard a drumbeat echoing
the ocean. They looked up into the burnished black faces of a
crowd murmuring over them in a musical language that wove in
and out of sense. Portugal? one whispered, but the other shook
his head. Portugal was neither so warm nor so beautiful. Nos sta
na Paraiso. In fact, it was neither Portugal nor Paradise to which
the currents had carried them, but the northeast coast of Brazil,
where the men lived out their days in the shade of jackfruit trees
and coconut palms, dogged by street children, three-legged pups,
a longing that nipped at their heels and slipped its fingers into
their pockets.
I heard this story several times in different variations. It
combined elements of Noah’s ark and Robinson Crusoe and the
popular telenovelas. What mattered, though, was not whether
the story was true, or even possible, but why it captured their
imaginations. We’re all defined by what we miss. It’s the longing
for a place that makes it real.
I was taken aback by Samira’s abrupt and self-assured response.
I stood in front of the class, a stub of chalk between my fingers,
my heart sinking. “Why not?” I said.
She twirled a lock of hair around her pencil. “I love my
family,” she said. “I love my country.” In two perfect English
sentences, she dismantled the entire imaginary life I had
constructed for her. “Really,” she said, as though daring me to
challenge her. “Believe it or not, not everyone here wants to go
to America.”
Duly chastened, I turned back to the board, erasing what I’d
written there, my sentences disappearing in a cloud of chalk dust.
Dan worried about me. He alternately coaxed me to eat more and
ignored me, trying not to notice my crying jags or my distracted
gaze. On days when I had eaten only enough to keep my hunger
from devouring me, I was happy in a manic sort of way. On days
when I surpassed my self-imposed limits, when I let my body’s
needs win out, I despaired, complained to Dan about how much
I had eaten. I wish I could throw up, I said, again and again. I
always gave him that way out, though, the wish that let him take
it as a statement of desire rather than intent.
He wanted to go to the bar, to go dancing and visit people.
I wanted to stay home and read. We didn’t fight, but resentment
grew like the mold on the bathroom tiles. Invisible at first, then
undeniable, although we still pretended it wasn’t there. Go, I said,
you go, I’ll stay here by myself. But I couldn’t disguise the bitterness
in my voice. We were eating rice and beans, reheated, and kale
greens. I finished the meager portion on my plate, then took another,
and another. It had no flavor, but the texture was satisfyingly thick
and mushy. I was full, but I kept eating as Dan scraped his plate and
slid it into the tub of soapy water. I felt as though I might explode.
“I won’t be too long,” he said, tying his shoes.
“I want to throw up,” I announced, pushing back my chair,
heading toward the bathroom. I felt him hesitate. I had left the
want there for him, an escape hatch. I closed the door and knelt
in front of the toilet. “Ellie,” he said softly, his face a blur behind
the thick textured glass. Then louder, “Ellie, open the door.”
He didn’t go out; instead he stayed in bed with me and stroked
my back. “That’s the first time you’ve done that, right?” he said,
clearly rattled.
I hesitated. It would be easy to lie. It was true that I never
meant to do it, that each time I vowed it would be the last. It
was something I did sometimes before class, when Dan was at
school, after lunch had marred the day’s smooth surface, and I
knew I had to face a room of forty students and their impossible
demands. Sometimes after a fight with Dan, or more often,
instead of fighting with him.
I couldn’t see Dan’s face, but I could feel him looking at
me, waiting for an answer.
I shook my head.
I couldn’t explain it to him—the rush of relief, like wiping
the blackboard after a particularly wearying class. The way it
allowed me to simply erase my mistakes, those parts of myself I
didn’t want to face.
“You won’t do it again, right? Promise me you won’t do it
again,” he said.
I promised. “Please don’t call Cathy,” I begged him.
But he had already picked up the phone and was dialing
the nurse’s home number.
“She wants to talk to you,” he said, covering the mouthpiece.
But I shook my head, scared and mortified and secretly
relieved.
Dan listened and nodded while Cathy talked. A few days
later, she sent me an airplane ticket, escape slipped into a glossy
envelope with a picture of a long white beach on it.
I arrived in the capital nauseous and disoriented from the bumpy
twenty-minute plane ride. I dropped my bag in the familiar
shabby living room of the Peace Corps transit house, and walked
up to the plateau. The sweat evaporated from my back. People
passed by, women with plastic tubs of bananas and fish on their
heads, girls in striped school uniforms, two men holding hands.
I sat in a paneled café with slow ceiling fans and flies
and watched the Portuguese soap operas, impressed by how
unattractive the actors were, yellow-toothed and pock-marked,
badly made up. I drank coffee that tasted like cigarettes, ate a
cornmeal and fish pastel that left a film of grease on my fingers.
I visited Jenny, who had ended up being stationed in Praia
after all. We sat under the acacia tree at the Stop Bar and drank
fifty-cent beers. She told me about her neighbors who had a pig
that the children used as a sofa. “Do you remember when you
said you’d go anywhere but Praia?” I said.
She took a sip of her beer. “It’s not what I thought it
would be,” she said, but the affection in her voice was clear.
Then again, nothing was what we thought it would be.
We bought cigarettes one by one as we smoked them. It
required less commitment that way, and besides, we were always
quitting; each cigarette was the last one.
I had told her what was happening, but we didn’t talk
about it. Instead, we talked about going home. What would be
the first thing you’d want to eat, we quizzed each other. What
would be the strangest thing to get used to again? Running water?
Driving a car? Everyone speaking English?
We sat on the stoop in front of Jenny’s house. She knew all
the kids in the neighborhood. Sometimes she gave them a drink
of water when they asked, or a few coins for candy. Sometimes
she said she didn’t have any.
We took the bus to the beach, spread out our towels and
took turns going in the water. Men sat down next to us. They
were boys, really, younger than Dan had been when I had first
kissed him, furtively, in my parents’ kitchen. We were bored, and
made conversation. If the boys spoke English, I asked their age.
“How old are you?” I enunciated carefully. I tried not to laugh
when they earnestly replied, “I am fine.”
“No, no, how old, how many years do you have?” The
language we spoke was somewhere between direct translation
and complete misunderstanding. They wore swim trunks
or soccer shorts, no shirts, smooth bodies shocking in their
perfection. They leaned back on their elbows, sand sticking to
their skin in the wet patches. One wore a knit cap of concentric
circles pulled over his dreadlocks. His name was Lisboa. I liked
him, even though he sat down with every white woman on the
beach, sometimes leaving me when a new prospect came along.
He swam with his cap on, the waves stretching it out behind
him like a fishing net. I wondered what strange sea creatures he
caught in it. I wondered if he slept with it, if it was sewn on to
his hair.
I. Spring
Return
14 April. I am in Praia for the second time this month. The flight
was almost cancelled due to the dust. We jerked and tilted, then
broke through the brume to clear blue. The old woman next to
me in a black dress and headscarf crossed herself. When we
landed I took a taxi to the Peace Corps office, where the scale
said I had lost another pound and a half. The nurse wanted to
medically evacuate me to D.C. I pleaded with her, promised that
this time I would eat enough, that I would not lose any more
weight, and she agreed to let me stay.
I sit in a café on the plateau, the espresso machine hissing,
flies circling. Why do they proliferate now, in April, rain still
months away? More dying matter to feed on, I suppose.
I didn’t sleep last night. Why did I beg to stay here? What
I want is to be forced to leave, to be sent home.
But what can match the perfect clarity of Praia on
any sunny morning, the familiarity and strangeness? The
dreadlocked rastas on the bench in the praça, the old women
in their headscarves, men flipping through this week’s Horizonte,
filling the room with cigarette smoke and arguments.
História, história: Once I lived in a stone house on the side
of a volcano, ate bread caked with dust, shat outside on a hill
overlooking the ocean. I drank cheap Portuguese wine and
learned to dance. I walked through a pine forest in a mist so thick
I couldn’t see my husband right beside me, so cold I couldn’t feel
my fingers.
Maybe I thought symbolism would save me. Not realizing
that there was a clinical explanation for everything: the constant
cold I felt, the desire for sweets, the measuring, cutting food up
into smaller and smaller pieces. All of my education in literature
had not prepared me to read between the lines of my own body.
I was a textbook case.
Anorexia: lack of appetite and inability to eat, often based on
abnormal psychological attitudes. Except it isn’t lack of appetite
at all. It’s surfeit of appetite, it’s letting your needs consume you.
The meaning’s hiding in the etymology. An, without. I define
myself by the negative space around me. Which keeps expanding.
Orex(is), longing. (Oreg, reach after + sis.) The center of the word
is desire. Even negated, it’s still there, the empty core.
História, história: I ran at sunrise through the hills behind the
airport in São Filipe. A cow appeared suddenly around a curve,
frightening me. The dry rush of grass, my body attenuating like
the dirt paths, diminishing to nothing. The cow, with her large
eyes and jutting ribs, knew that we were kin. The island had
worn both of us thin.
15 April. Saturday morning, Café Asa Branca. I slept better
last night, but not great. The constant monitoring, the self as
specimen. Men line up with their backs to me at the bar, watching
a Brazilian soap opera. Maybe I will go to America. So many
things are a mystery to me. Then they suddenly come into focus,
and it seems as though they were inevitable, there all along.
Last night, lying on the narrow bed in the Peace Corps
transit house, Dan encircled my wrist with his thumb and finger.
It fit so loosely I could almost slip it off. “Danny,” I said, “I’m
scared. I need help.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m scared too, sweetie.”
They put us both on a plane and flew us home. It was the end
of April, still cold in D.C. but thawing. It was a different kind of
cold than I’d felt in Ribeira Filipe, where the chilly morning fog
would burn off by noon. Here I shivered nonstop, unable to get
warm. The cherry blossoms were open, their petals paler than any
flower I could remember. Every day I ran across the Roosevelt
Bridge to the monuments: Vietnam with its black mirror, the
scummy surface of the reflecting pool. I felt even more foreign
than I had in Cape Verde. The tourists snapped photographs,
flocks of families like heavy, flightless birds, feeding on popcorn
and hot dogs. I felt unaccountably, illogically angry at them.
At the Peace Corps office, I met other volunteers who had
been evacuated from the countries where they were serving. It
was reassuring to talk to them, to find people who were going
through a similar transition. We were supposed to be returning
home, but everything felt wrong and unfamiliar. You could always
tell the recently returned volunteers at the office. We were the
ones who moved hesitantly, seeming not to know exactly what to
do with a telephone, fumbling for certain words in English.
The other volunteers had been evacuated for different
reasons—civil war, rape, life-threatening illness. On top of the
typical readjustment issues, I felt like a fraud. I wasn’t really
sick. I hadn’t been the victim of a violent crime. I should have
been able to stick it out for a few more months, I thought. I’d cut
short not just my own experience, but Dan’s. Sometimes, though,
when I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a window, it took me
a moment to recognize the skinny, awkward figure as my own.
They made me see a therapist named Judith. She dressed
in graceful, flowing clothes—chenille sweaters, loose knit pants,
long necklaces—but her manner was unyielding. You need to
learn how to take care of yourself, she instructed, in a Long
Island accent that reminded me of my mother’s. You need to
figure out what you want and ask for it. She made Dan come in,
too, and everything started falling apart.
One afternoon we took the Metro to the museums. We
didn’t go inside. Instead we sat on a park bench among the throngs
of school children and Japanese tour groups and he told me he
didn’t want to be married to me anymore. I wanted to hit him. I
wanted to hate him, but I couldn’t. We were like wind-up dolls set
in motion by Judith. Everything we did began to seem inexorable,
the trajectory from the past suddenly becoming visible.
I told her things and cried, and even as I told her I knew they
weren’t wholly true. On another day I could have said the
opposite and not been lying.
The Peace Corps sent me to a doctor weekly who would stand
me on his scale and measure my progress. The numbers barely
budged. I took a perverse pleasure in this stubbornness.
They sent me to a nutritionist, a perky woman named
Faye who pulled models of portion sizes from her drawer: plastic
grapes and bagels, a serving of spaghetti that looked like fake
vomit. She mapped out my eating goals in numbers—calories,
fat and protein grams. Could you try some nuts? she prodded.
Olive oil with your bread? Ice cream for dessert? I agreed, swept
up in the optimism, then left her office and stopped at a salad bar
for lunch: vegetables, no dressing, a bit of hard-boiled egg and a
few chick peas.
After two years in a desert, April seemed surreal: its gray-green
damp, its glazed skies. The vocabulary of rain, its varied rhythms,
syncopations. The language of water in Cape Verde is blunt, unnuanced—the thud of dishwater emptied on the street; women
in the market with jugs, cholera in a cup, five cents; rain a oncea-year release that unbraids the hillsides in a rush of mud, carries
feces and plastic bags, goats and bony cows in sudden rivers to
the sea.
America swallowed me whole, its cars and bridges, its wet
grass and flowers, candy wrappers and machines. If America was
movement, Cape Verde was stillness, the steady breath of sleep.
Even to say its name, to write it, disturbed the calm. I wanted
that place to go nameless. An undiscovered organ in my body,
useless as an appendix.
America. Full of distractions, pulsing with life and lights, everyone
moving like water bugs, quick and directionless, held by fragile
surface tension. The first time in a grocery store, I stared at the
tomatoes large and dull red-orange under fluorescent lights, the
many varieties of apples, hard in their skins, unyielding to my
thumb. I said the names of things, trying to stir an excitement
that wasn’t there. I chose a yellow apple, the one fruit I had eaten
almost every day for the past two years anyway.
We were staying in a hotel room on 18th Street, courtesy
of the Peace Corps, watching movies, taking hot shower after
hot shower, eating chocolate bars and strawberries and Chinese
takeout. Nothing tasted as good as I’d remembered it. It was
almost a relief. The more food there was, the less I wanted.
It was Passover. I didn’t observe the rules. I was trying to observe
my own rules, trying to eat enough, to demystify food, strip it
of its ritual power. There were no seders, no chalky coconut
macaroons or interminable readings in Hebrew. Still, I felt the
metaphors pulling on me, remembering what I had left behind:
dust storms that swallowed the sun, wind that broke glass and
threw things, bugs that pissed on one’s arms and raised boils,
the droughts, the floods, mosquitoes, diarrhea, the electricity
shutting off, leaving the town buried in darkness.
If there was a burning bush, it was my body.
If there was an exodus, it was South African Airways
Flight 107 to JFK, splitting the night sky over the Atlantic.
Dan wanted to return to Cape Verde. We talked about it in
therapy, how we were trapped in our roles, married too young,
inexperienced. Outside Judith’s window, the drone of a lawn
mower, the grass turning greener and greener, the season pushing
out of tentativeness, growing into itself.
I don’t remember how he touched me in those weeks. We
sat on the floor in the hotel room and I cried, gripping his arms,
repeating the words we had read to each other at our wedding:
Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm. For
love is strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave.
He left anyway. That night I threw out all the food he had left
in the hotel room—an unopened box of cookies, vanilla ice cream,
leftover Chinese vegetables. I pushed it down the garbage disposal,
watched it dissolve into a indistinguishable mess in the sink.
I composed self-pitying, melodramatic letters I knew I couldn’t
send. Danny, I wrote. On the layover in Sal, you wandered the
streets looking for a bottle of pontchi to bring back, the kind
with proof so strong it had sent you reeling at parties, where
girls pressed up against you on the dance floor and your wife
waited in the dark. As if drinking it in the U.S. would not be
entirely different. As if it would not sit in the cabinet for a year,
evaporating to a thick, disgusting syrup, until eventually you
threw it out.
As if you would not taste the liquor here and want to spit
from its cloying bluntness. That island’s name is Portuguese for
salt, but the old mines are disused, the beds supersaturated. The
problem with that country is that everything is qualified, and
once I start explaining I can’t stop. One thing leads to another.
Leads back to the island where we lived, Fogo, whose name is
Portuguese for fire, but where the only thing burning was the
trash in the ribeiras, acrid secrets smoldering in the underbrush
among the milk cans. The things that didn’t burn left carcasses,
metal ribbing with the words scorched off.
To leave our island we had to wait for days, because that
time of year dust obscures the sky. What else had been obscured,
by the scrim of those girls’ bare shoulders, by the sweet liquor in
thick glasses from which you left the ice for me to suck, and the
pain it pulled from my teeth.
II. Summer
In the late spring and early summer, while Dan was back on
Fogo by himself, in our apartment with no sink, but a view
of the rough ocean, I traveled. I visited my mother’s sister in
Santa Barbara, California. We floated in her swimming pool,
drove around and looked at the old mission churches. On hikes
through the dry canyons, she told me about her own battles with
bulimia and anorexia when she was in college and high school.
The same old stories, candy wrappers and empty ice cream tubs,
shame flushed down the toilet, transgression weighed daily on
the bathroom scale.
That wasn’t me, I averred. I didn’t weigh myself, didn’t
care how I looked. But did that make my motivations somehow
purer? I still got anxious at the thought of having to eat in front
of other people, made mental calculations of calories consumed
and burned. My aunt watched me, said nothing as I spread my
toast with the thinnest layer of butter imaginable, then tore it up
into little pieces.
In Florida, my grandmother took me shopping for clothes, bought
me a silk shirt, linen pants, a woven hat with beads around the
brim. We sat on the balcony and watched the ocean, its surface
flat and dull. The sun was like a gash bleeding from all sides,
hiding the wound. Mar e morada de sodade, I thought. The sea
is the home of longing. I wondered if, thousands of miles from
here, Dan was standing in the praça in São Filipe, staring out in
this direction, past Brava’s cloud-draped mass.
My grandmother told me about how she and my zaydee
had been married at twenty, then left for Switzerland two weeks
later. She had never been more than fifty miles from Brooklyn,
and thought leaving was the most exciting thing in the world.
How could she know that no one would rent to them because
they were Jews, that the next nine months would bring hushed
arguments behind thin walls, tepid baths in the tiny European
tub? They left New York in November and my mother was born
in July. She had a shock of black hair and an unassuageable
scream. My grandmother, rocking the baby while Zaydee slept,
was surprised how much she missed her own mother; the feeling
was as violent and shameful as morning sickness.
“I had thought,” she said, a slightly bitter smile on her
lips, “that marriage meant I’d never be lonely again.”
I visited my friend Damian in Seattle and we went hiking. It was
early July, but there was still snow on the ground in the shaded
spots. We talked and talked, dissected both our lives. He had just
finished his first year of graduate school at MIT, and the stress,
the long hours in the lab without sunlight, had caused him to
come down with shingles. He showed me the scar that ran along
his hairline. I told him how my heart had started palpitating, an
occasional fluttering in my chest. The body, we agreed, will only
take so much before it rebels.
In Pike Place Market, we bought ripe plums, pints of
cherries and strawberries. We stopped to watch the men tossing
fat, glossy fish from one end of the counter to the other. Such
abundance seemed to provide me with only more elaborate forms
of self-denial; in this country it was possible to find anything
without sugar or fat, stripped of nourishment. I put artificial
sweetener in my coffee, a scant cup of skim milk on my cereal.
During those months, I often awoke in the middle of the night
with a familiar feeling of displacement. I dialed our phone
number in Cape Verde. Sometimes Dan picked up, groggy from
sleep, and we talked for a few minutes. Sometimes it rang and
rang. I told myself the lines were down, reassured myself by
calculating time zones on my fingers.
On Fogo, I knew, the rains would be starting. When I
thought of Dan, I tried to picture the hillsides in their first green,
that color that is too delicate to fix in memory. I tried not to think
about the discotheque crowded with bodies, shots of grog lined
up on the bar. I had seen Dan dance with other girls, how tightly
they pressed against him. How young they were, fifteen, sixteen.
The age Dan and I had been when we first started going out.
The mail was too slow; by the time anything arrived we would
have forgotten what we felt or why. I remember writing one letter
in those six weeks. I don’t remember what it said, just that it
contained these lines: How strange it feels to be writing you a
letter. Like writing a letter to my own left leg.
Dan sent me one, too. Hey Ellie, it said. I told your
students that you aren’t coming back. I almost cried too when I
saw them almost crying. They really like you. Today, Elisângela
from 6a turma told me to tell you that out of all her teachers you
were her favorite and she misses you so much. I’ve heard quite a
few students saying the same.
I saw Nelinha and Filomena today. Their uncle (Rui’s
brother) died last week. Anyway, they’re sad about you leaving, of
course, but it’s weird, you can read in their faces that they’re sure
that you’ll come back one day in the future. They send their love.
I send mine too.
Dan
When Dan came home it was mid-summer. We slept in his
parents’ house, in two twin beds pushed together. We went
blackberrying along the suburban roads, where bushes sent up
their runners under the fences. We scratched our arms and legs
reaching into the thorns. Dan had almost forgotten how to speak:
in English, his voice hesitated, groped for words while his fingers
sought out the fragile orbs.
“I can’t talk about it,” he said when I brought up our
marriage. Instead, we filled plastic tubs with the fruit, which
broke and bled before we could get it home.
III. Fall
I dressed for synagogue in a black skirt and dark stockings. Dan
adjusted his tie. These days were clear in a way I had forgotten
they could be, living in a place where the only seasons are dust
and unbearable humidity.
“We’re going to miss Kol Nidre,” his mother yelled,
banging on the door. “I’m going ahead, meet me there.” My
stockings were twisted, and I couldn’t find my lipstick. Dan’s tie
wouldn’t cooperate, kept choking him or bulging out from the
collar, until finally he pulled it out.
“I’m not going,” he said, and suddenly I realized that I
didn’t want to go either. The chapel would be close with the smell
of perfume, the low hum of people talking under the cantor’s
chant. Outside, limousines would line the driveway, congregants
outdoing each other in lavish displays of penitence.
One of the few things that still held Dan and me together
was our history. All the times I’d gone with him to synagogue.
All the times he’d cut Hebrew school to watch television or go
sledding with me and my brothers.
The other bond was our difficult readjustment, our shared
cynicism and longing for a place we both missed, but where we
didn’t want to return. It was a thin thread, but one we clung to.
We changed into jeans and made fried egg sandwiches. The
tomatoes from the garden were sweet, the lettuce just beginning
to go bitter at the root. “Can you imagine what Nelinha would
say about the services?” Dan said.
“I know,” I said, laughing, picturing Nelinha in the
suburban temple, trying to fathom the ancient chants, the
davening, the loud bellow of the shofar. “It’s no crazier than
Deus é Amor, though.” We smiled, remembering the neighbors
who belonged to the Pentecostal faith, who sacrificed chickens
and spoke in tongues. It was true. Nelinha probably would have
shrugged and taken this in stride as gracefully as she did Deus é
Amor, as she did drought and heartache and everything else.
“I’m going to have another egg,” he said. “Do you want
one?”
I nodded. I felt like I could eat and eat, even full I would
never be satiated.
IV. Winter
In January, for my birthday, my in-laws gave me a down coat,
gloves, slippers, a scarf. It had become a joke, how I couldn’t keep
warm. My body was still spare, a sketch of who I was before I
left. I felt provisional, as though I could erase these lines at any
time and redraw them.
That night I woke at three-thirty from a dream that
I was wandering the aisles of a huge department store, lost.
Disoriented, I stumbled to the window. It was snowing. I shook
Dan awake. We slipped on our shoes and coats over our pajamas
and went outside. The snow gathered in white galaxies, orbiting
the street lamps. He put an arm around my shoulder, and I leaned
into him. We stood like that for a long time. So it began: the fall
back into ourselves, the drift toward some fragile clarity. A slow
descent, falling awake.
To live is to build a ship and a harbor / at the same time. And to
finish the harbor / long after the ship has gone down.
—Yehuda Amichai, “A Letter”
A Ship and
a Harbor
História, história: Mosteiros is a fishing town on the northeast
side of Fogo. There, men leave their homes before first light,
swinging tin lanterns which they hang from their bows. The
women wash the breakfast dishes and look out at the lights
hemming the shore’s ragged sleeve. Each woman knows her
husband’s boat the way we know our loved one’s walk from far
away, the way we recognize the slope of his shoulders or the
angle at which he holds his neck. Filipa sees her João’s boat slip
just beyond the cove, where the water turns suddenly rough.
She steps outside, drying her hands on her apron, squinting
into the pale horizon. The bow rises and falls, and then is gone:
Filipa is running toward the boat launch. Several other wives see
her pass, skirts flying, and follow her. “João,” she cries. “João,
torna ben.” Come back. The other women stand at a slight remove
as Filipa wades out, keening, the water lapping at her calves. A
few pick up a soft harmony, their hum buoying Filipa’s grief.
What does Filipa think as she tries to bring him back
with her voice, with her heart-wrenched song? Does she forgive
João his quick temper, his pikena in Fajãzinha, his habit of not
putting away his shoes? What thoughts swim through her head
in those moments? Does she picture, however briefly, another
life for herself—the terrifying, unencumbered drift of a woman
on her own? The veranda uncluttered with fishing nets. No knee
pressing into her side as she sleeps in the narrow bed.
Finally, after we had been back in the States for three years,
I decided I wanted to have kids. It was a feeling that crept up
on me gradually, then undeniably. It overtook me. I thought of
Nelinha, laying down her broom. Preguiça dja dan. Except this
time it wasn’t idleness, but desire.
I was in graduate school for literature, and Dan had
dropped out of engineering school to return to teaching. Slowly,
carefully, we had rebuilt our marriage. We had both spent time in
therapy, and were talking more, trying not to let resentment and
confusion simmer. I thought sometimes about the workmen I’d
watched in Cape Verde, restoring an old sobrado. The hard labor
of it, and the satisfaction of seeing the house rise from decrepitude,
sturdy and durable. The structure was a bit uneven perhaps. No
amount of work could make the slanting floor straight again, no
coat of paint completely cover the deep cracks in the stucco. Like
our marriage, the sobrado would remain flawed and beautiful,
simple but functional, singular and pride-worthy.
Dan was hesitant about having children, though. How
could we afford it? he worried. Weren’t we too young?
I nearly laughed. I was twenty-six years old. We had
been married for more than five years. I remembered Camila,
pregnant at fifteen, her belly pushing out the waistband of her
school uniform. I thought about Joaninha, and her prying,
innocent question: When are you and Danny going to have a
baby? Her youngest son, the one she’d been pregnant with when
we were there, must be almost three years old.
As I had done before we’d left for college together, before
we joined the Peace Corps, before we moved to the fora, then back
to São Filipe, I reasoned with him. I prodded and cajoled.
“Okay,” he finally agreed, hesitantly, after a week or two.
He took a deep breath, as though once we made the commitment,
a baby would appear immediately, fully formed and demanding
new shoes and college tuition. As he had done so many times
before, though, once Dan took to the idea, he was its most
passionate supporter. Within a few days, he was suggesting
names and asking me if I’d taken my prenatal vitamins.
But my body was slow to forget. It held onto its old fears;
the habit of starvation haunted me. I thought I had recovered,
but I had not, entirely. Recover: To let the skin grow over old
wounds. I thought about my mother planting tulip bulbs in
October, smoothing the soil over the holes and trusting the
earth to incubate them. Slowly, I began to cover my bones
with flesh where they were most exposed. It was not a simple
thing. I needed to remind myself repeatedly, when I would have
preferred the floating, untethered feeling of not eating enough,
that I was trying to find mooring, to anchor myself in this most
fundamental way.
After we decided to try, it took months to coax my body
back to something resembling hardiness, half a year before we
could conceive. Even now, years later, I am occasionally tempted
by the siren song of abstention—the alluring gleam on the horizon,
the false sense of buoyancy. Dan and I are happily married, the
parents of three sons. It seems like another world entirely now,
that mythical island where I once lived. I’ve learned mostly to
ignore hunger’s bright-feathered lure, the sleek, phosphorescent
flash of fin.
Finally, as if in answer to Filipa’s rising wail, from behind the
jagged spit of rock there appears a small fleet: the other boats
are bearing João back, pale and supine, but alive. Filipa’s cry
rises once more, then sinks, dissolves into the hiss of the wave
breaking at her feet. The men drag their boats up to the dock,
and the women quietly disperse, leaving Filipa and João alone,
the daylight now delineating each rock and crevice.
So many other ways this story could have ended. The
cracked hull. The tangled nets. The current carrying him away,
or under, or to some other life, some distant shore. The beach is
narrow and black, igneous outcrop of hardened magma. Filipa
and João, still shaken, gather the empty buckets, the nets that
need mending, and make their tentative way over the sharp rocks,
towards home.
It was April, almost three years since we’d left Cape Verde, when
I found out I was pregnant. Spring was slow in coming, and I sat
in a coffee shop, watching a late snow swirl outside the window.
Worry and hope whirled and eddied in me, commingled. How
could my body, which I had mistreated and deprived for so long,
sustain another life? How would Dan and I withstand the cost,
financial and emotional, of having a child? At the same time, it
seemed I could hardly bear the excitement, the happiness that
billowed up, sudden and uncontainable. I recalled the anticipation
we’d felt on the flight to Cape Verde five years earlier—how
nervous and exhilarated we were, unable to imagine the difficult,
beautiful, utterly foreign terrain where we would land.
I was rereading Yehuda Amichai, the poem called “A
Letter,” which ends: “I remember only / That it was foggy. And
if that’s the way you remember— / what do you remember?”
I remembered Joaninha, her wide smile, her generosity, her
fish pasteis. I remembered lying on the bed with Nelinha, sipping
pontchi, looking at photographs and laughing. I remembered
being spun across an earthen dance floor until I was dizzy and
out of breath. I remembered Filomena singing Mar e morada de
sodade, staring out at the steep drop-off to the rough Atlantic.
The air in Ribeira Filipe—the fog like a flurry of doves, giving
way to the blue, knife-edged clarity of June. The small yellow
flowers that bloomed on the edge of the volcano, sprouting from
the rich dark ash.
I remembered descending through a thick haze to the
island where we lived. We were shaking violently, and could see
nothing. The old woman next to me crossed herself. Half the
people on the plane had never flown before—including, quite
possibly, the pilot. What kept us aloft, prevented us from crashing
headlong into the sheer cliff of the volcano? What set us down at
last, safe on the bumpy stretch of runway?
It was foggy, but the fog was burning off.
Then it was clear, the air like glass, and then I wished for
the fog again, for its feathery wing which had held me suspended
for so long.
Acknowledgements
My deepest gratitude to: Peace Corps Cape Verde, and the
volunteers and staff of 1998-2000, in particular Ana Lisa Silva
and Rita Querido Vaz.
Jason Pettus at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography,
for his hard work, artistry, and vision, and Cathy Bradford and
Emily Jones, for meticulous editing.
The dear friends whose love and support have sustained me
in Cape Verde and beyond: Jessica Lee, Jenny Smith, Jessica
Broome, Diane Wohland, Ashley Minihan, Erin Hanusa, Judith
Rizzo, Rebecca Benarroch, Catherine Robinson.
The women of WordSpace: Andrea Ross, Lori Tharps, Miriam
Peskowitz, Tamar Chansky, Meredith Broussard, Eileen Flanagan,
Jude Ray, and Hilary Beard.
Rob Nixon, who believed in this book from the beginning.
My parents, for encouraging me to follow my own path, even
when that path took me halfway around the world.
Brothers and sisters: Isaac, George, Nikole, Sam, Michelle,
Michelle, Brett, Viv, and Ted.
Sonia and Shotaro: fellow travelers, resident medical advisors, inlaws extraordinaire.
The Cape Verdeans who took me in sima familia, and without
whom there would be no história to speak of: Joaninha, Nelinha,
Filomena, Fábio, Antónia, Ruth. Brigadu pa tudu nhos da’n.
Tcheu sodadi tudu nhos.
And as ever, to Danny, Ezra, Ruben, and Joaquin: queridos meus.
Glossary
badja: to dance
barlaventu: the Creole dialect spoken in the Northern islands
(Literally, windward)
batuki: an African-influenced music and dance, traditionally
practiced by women on the island of Santiago
bon dia: hello, good morning
bongolón: a kind of bean
branku (branka): white
bruma seca: season of dry wind and dust
buzio: conch
tchitcharu: small silver fish, sometimes called horse-mackerel
in English
dodu: crazy
e modi?: How’s it going?
empregada: maid
fado: traditional mournful Portuguese music
festa: party
fidjón: beans
fla (or fra): to say
fomi: hunger (can also mean famine)
fora: a rural area (literally, outside)
funaná: traditional music performed on accordion and
percussion (also the name of a dance)
grog: distilled sugarcane liquor, grog
história: story; history
katchupa: Cape Verde’s national dish, a stew of hominy, beans,
meat and vegetables
koitadu: poor thing (often slightly ironic or self-pitying)
komplikadu: complicated, difficult (said of a situation or a
person)
kre: to want
kriolu: Creole (Cape Verdean Creole is a mix of Portuguese
and West African languages)
kuskús: steamed cornbread
latifundio: plantation
licensa: excuse me
mandjaku: a derogatory term for Africans
manDanilo: manioc (thick starchy root, also known as cassava
or yucca)
marmelu: quince
Merka: America (the United States)
merkanu: American
morna: slow Creole ballad
panu: cloth or rag (also sarong)
pikena: girlfriend or mistress
pilón: pestle used for grinding corn
pontchi: a sweet alcoholic drink made from grog
praça: town square
preguiça dja dan: expression meaning, laziness has overtaken
me
pretu: black
refogadu: leftover katchupa or rice and beans, often eaten for
breakfast (literally, reheated)
remédio: medicine
ribeira: a ravine or gorge
sabi: good, tasty, pleasurable
sim (or sin; final consonant is nasalized): yes
sobrado: leftovers (food); also the colonial Portuguese houses
in São Filipe, Fogo
sodadi (also spelled sodade): longing, nostalgia
sotaventu: the Creole spoken in the Southern islands (including
Fogo), Literally, leeward.
tabanka: a half-religious, half-social organization, that engages
in a sort of theater involving music, dance, processions, and
drinking
tchintchirote: kingfisher, native to Cape Verde
transporte: school transportation
vida di pobri: woe is me
xafariz: fountain (as in the tap at a cistern or well)
Eleanor Stanford
is the author of The Book of Sleep (Carnegie Mellon Press). Her poems
and essays have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review,
The Iowa Review, The Georgia Review, and many other journals. She
served in the Peace Corps in Cape Verde from 1998-2000. She lives
in the Philadelphia area with her husband and three sons.
CCLaP
Publishing
Daring writers. Exquisite books.
cclapcenter.com/publishing

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