My Dark-Haired, Dark-Eyed Beauty

‘What attracted you to your fiancé?’ Chantal asks me. We are walking back along the beach to our house after going for a swim in the lagoon after work. Chantal is the South African. She is bright and to the point. I envy her because she is African, and she fits in and I don’t. I come from the northern hemisphere, from a cold and clean country where everything is simple. Over Christmas back home I rode the bus and listened to two teen-agers tell about all the parties they’d been to, and all the cars they’d crashed, and all the times they ran from the cops, and it made me think of the Fall of Rome. But you know, I like my country and the fact that it is a dying world doesn’t make me feel any more at home in Africa. All that stuff I said earlier about knowing I belong here was completely borrowed from the movies, blatant, nostalgic Hemmingway-envy.

‘She is beautiful,’ I say without hesitation. Celestina used to wear white to work sometimes, the fitted shalwar kameez native to Pakistan and the flowing shawl that goes with it. She looked like a princess from a story in the Arabian Nights or something. So that was really it; I didn’t really know anything else about her, just that she was beautiful. I can imagine her walking along this beach towards us in white, with her shawl trailing in the wind and her hair blowing everywhere. She likes beaches and oceans; she likes her hair long and she likes wearing white. But all of this I found out later. First, it was beauty.

The beach itself reminds me of a Madeleine L’Engle novel about the south, Louisiana or Alabama, during the time of slavery. In Liberia I feel as if I’m back in time somehow, because the ghosts of Old America haunt the place. Liberia, if you didn’t know it, was where the visionary American statesmen of the enlightened northern states decided to send the newly freed slaves, who apparently no longer had a place in the land of the free. The freedmen came here and started their own system of oppression, modeled on their former southern plantation owners, with the local native people cast as the underclass. Old Dixie in Africa. The whole place, weakened by American commercial interest and rotted further by the greed of leaders lining their pockets with American aid money and kickbacks, finally caved and collapsed in a bloody heap of coup after coup, then disintegrated into a hell of civil wars full of rape and looting and little boys getting addicted to drugs and shooting everything that moved. Then as if God had finally had enough, it stopped. There were UN-monitored elections, which by all accounts were fairly held, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was voted in. The country has stabilized and there is hardly a gun to be seen except in the disciplined fist of a UN soldier in his powder blue helmet. Driving through the city, I have to look hard to find any bullet holes left in the walls. All my fears of being poked at by guns have come to naught. Instead, I’m walking up the beach as the waves roll in and the sun goes down in an equatorial haze, holding pleasant conversation with my teammate. We could be on holiday. I feel slightly let down. I kind of want stories about guns, but I’m sure that’s just fool’s talk.

Cel (I call her) writes me now from where she’s working in Kenya, and she says she’s lonely and she misses me a lot. I think it’s absolutely unreal that a week ago I was with her in London. It feels like it happened in another life. This seems like my real life now, this mad parachuting into an emergency program in some other place I’ve never been, expected to learn everything in a matter of minutes and produce results immediately. Landing and having everyone look at you and say, Oh, good, you’re here now … can you do this? Yesterday? This is my life, this has always been my life, traveling all over, being on my own, surviving - maybe even thriving - on the adventure. London, my engagement, was a dream, long ago. But if I stop and concentrate, then I remember.

She was a lot of work, and she laughs about that now when I bring it up. I like to bring it up, I like to shine up my medals. You should have to fight at least a little to win a princess. A princess in Pakistan has her own challenges for a boy in love, because in Pakistan boys and girls don’t date. They rarely even see each other, except at church and school, or maybe the odd, giggling glance at the shopping centre or during wedding season. So if you like a girl, if you think she’s pretty, how do you go about the whole thing? I tried subterfuge. I made up innocent-sounding reasons for her to come out with me, like: Hey, Cel, can you come and help me find gifts for my mother and my sister? After politely diverting three invitations and just when I was depressed and ready to give up, she said she’d come. So that, I guess, was our first date: we went with two other co-workers and shopped for pashminas. After that, it was a walk by the pond and ice cream at the parlour, and driving her home after work at night. It was staying up late in the compound in Bagh, talking about everything we could think of and squeezing more little moments in when no one was looking. The way she suddenly reached out and held my hand in the car when I got up early to take her to the airport. The way she hugged me the first time, as if I was glass because she’d never hugged a boy before. The letters and notes, dancing around the words for marriage and love with words like ‘fairytale’ and ‘dream.’ You know, Falling in Love. It was like that week before it’s official, that breathless space of time when you both know you are smitten with each other, but no one else knows yet and you are still sneaking around, stealing delicious, exciting little moments with each other when people aren’t looking. Like that, except for us it lasted months. And then one morning I looked at her sitting by the stream in the Bagh valley with the sun coming up golden and said before I could stop myself: I don’t want to leave you. And she looked back and said quietly: Me too.

I’m not supposed to be in Liberia. I’m supposed to be writing in Vancouver, settling down to an official, legitimate attempt to finally follow my true calling as a writer. One day I’ll just admit that I do this because I like it. I’m in Liberia because I like being the guy who suddenly gets to say: I’m going to Liberia. Next Tuesday, in fact. I want to be a writer because I like stories, but this way I get to be the stories.

The office here is way too cramped and hot, and my room is dingy and devoid of all charm. Mice run around at night, keeping me awake, and the power goes off at midnight, stopping all fans and letting the muggy heat settle on my skin and, like a cheap polyester hotel blanket, vex what little sleep I get. In the office I’m asked to do a million impossible things a minute, and then computers break and pumps break and suppliers show up with demands, and emails scream in like Japanese Zeroes until the power goes off and the fans stop again and the sweat trickles in itchy lines down your back and legs. By the end of the day, my inbox is overflowing and my desk is littered with little half-scribbled notes. My brain is scrambled and when I take stock I’ve maybe done one complete thing the whole day. If I have to drive into Monrovia, it takes hours to go a few kilometers and everything is dirty and hot and no one has any answers or motivation, and when they do it’s too expensive and usually wrong. The whole place literally crawls all over with people and stuff – shirts and shoes and fruit and trash and beggars and wheelbarrows and car parts and taxi drivers yelling. The cars are backed up and everyone sweats and the heat glimmers off the standing water.

I watch myself here in disbelief that anyone buys it. I feel like I’m pretending.

But here I am, and here we live on the beach with the ocean out our front door, and we spend Sundays lying on the sand or swimming in the water. And Jonas is our boss, a man who used to be a boxer and who brings an orange football to the beach and rounds up the local boys for a game, which they all play with such stunning moves you might be watching the World Cup. We sit with the Irish from Concern and the French from Solidarites and watch the Ukranian UN soldiers stand around in white flocks, showing off their speedos and talking on their cell phones as if they are some kind of ritualistic herd on a rest stop during migration. And after the beach we go up to Anna’s porch, and she smiles her impish smile and offers us wine or a cold beer and we sit and tell stories as the sun goes down in the west over the crashing pink waves. There is nothing between us and the ocean, and there is nothing stopping us from being this story. Here we are, with a millionaire’s view on the coast of Liberia, drinking white wine under an African sunset, and Anna is a French Huguenot Afrikaaner nurse who used to assist on open-heart surgeries, and Chantal is an English South African who used to make millions of dollars for a multinational company, and I am a little boy from Langley, BC, who somehow walked out of a deadening average life into this splendid scene. Then I remember that I’m also marrying a princess from a far eastern land and my mind goes into a white-wine-fuzzy flat spin at the unlikelihood of it all.

Yes, I’m marrying her. Just before Christmas I was in Taos, New Mexico, living in a trailer in my friends’ meadow, waking up to absolute silence and the sun knifing over the shoulder of the hill to melt the frost. Jesse and I watered the top layer of the little pond by the meadow so it would freeze again smooth for a hockey rink. I would get up early and skate around and around, fingering my rosary and trying to cast my future in the warp and weft of the Eternal. Or I would walk into the shadow of the mountain and sit in Eva’s shrine and pray with the little girl I held in my arms only a year ago. I let the tumbling in my head slow and stop, I let my heart beat a little. Celestina left me in London on a Thursday afternoon at the departure gate in Heathrow airport and nothing was sure. I left London two days later with my heart growing walls, just in case, because we had no plans. I know what it was like for her, going back to Pakistan where all the memories lived like ghosts in an empty room. I’ve gone back to empty places, too. It takes strength to keep moving. Willpower. At least some dribbling love of life. In New Mexico, with Emma as my soft-spoken coach I managed to get a phone card and call. It took a few tries before the tipping point, but then it was like a tree falling, slow at first, then the rush, unstoppable and beautiful, the light breaking everywhere. And we knew we were getting married.

There were two engagements. In honourable Pakistani tradition, my father and mother called her parents and discussed, then agreed upon and blessed the engagement of their children. And four days later, on a Sunday night in London’s Green Park, I got down on one knee in the rain and asked her to marry me. The willows and the bridge over the lagoon were lit up and the palace watched from the far side of the water. The rain poured and our hair clung in wet strands, and she lost all her words and could only nod, breathless. A week later, she left for Kenya, and I came to Liberia. But this time, there are plans …

On Anna’s porch the level of wine in the bottle is sinking just a little faster than the sun into the sea. They ask if I have a picture, so I show them. There is general agreement that I have done well. I look at the picture again before putting it back in my pocket. Her long hair is tied back, and she is not smiling because it is a passport photo, but she looks gentle and wise, and she looks patient and kind. Her eyes are large and dark and she has her own Mona Lisa mystery and a delicate, regal beauty. One night years ago, my heart torn apart by my latest misadventure in love, I prayed for a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty. It was the kind of prayer that I hardly believe in, the kind that’s like rubbing a rabbit’s foot or tossing a coin in the fountain at the park. A child’s prayer. I put the photo away again, and raise my glass. My dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty.