I go on this continent I feel ashamed. I’m tired of it, Calvin. I am dying, dying of shame.”
“They like posho. Africans do not identify with your life at all. They see white people the way you look at oryx.”
“Hogwash. They want cars and I have one. Try and tell me they don’t resent that.”
“Give your flipping car away, then.”
“That won’t change anything.”
“That’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said. And at least—” he pointed to her hartebeest—“you now eat your dinner.”
In 1972 they had both attended a Population and Environment conference in Nairobi, when the KICC was brand-new and conferences had seemed better than junkets; at least to Eleanor, who was only twenty-one, an intern with the United Nations Fund for Population Activities and fresh from the Peace Corps. Calvin had just joined USAID himself, and asked her to dine at the Hilton. His fourteen-year seniority had daunted her then, and maybe that’s why she’d felt compelled to make a fool of herself: because he was so much older and more important and she had no idea why he would go out with her. She was only aware in later years, once her looks had begun to slip, that she had once been rather pretty.
Half-way through dinner at the luxury hotel, she had been overcome by nausea. Calvin had done most of the talking; she was sure he would pick up the bill and could not see how her company had earned so much as a hard roll. She was gripped by anxiety that she had no personality at all, and concluded that if she had failed to concoct it by twenty-one it was time to make one up.
“I can’t eat this,” she announced, fists on the cloth. “I’m sorry. The idea of our sitting here paying hundreds of shillings for shellfish while people right outside the door starve—it makes me sick.”
Calvin nimbly kept eating. “If you truly have ambitions to work in the Third World, young lady, you’ll have to develop a less delicate stomach.”
“How can you!” she exclaimed, exasperated as he started on another prawn. “After we’ve spent all day forecasting worldwide famine by the year 2000!”
“That’s just the kind of talk that whets my appetite.”
“Well, it kills mine.”
“If you feel so strongly about it,” he suggested, “go feed them your dinner.”
Eleanor had picked up her plate and left the restaurant. One of the waiters came running after her, since she’d marched off with their china. Eleanor looked left and right and had to walk a couple of blocks to find a beggar, and was promptly confronted with the logistical problem of delivering her food aid and returning the plate. So she stood dumbly by the cripple with elephantiasis, whose eyes were either uncomprehending or insulted. He rattled his tin, where she could hardly muck shrimp, now could she? It struck her, as saffron sauce dripped from the gilt-edged porcelain, that just because you could not walk did not mean you had no standards of behaviour, which parading about Nairobi with a half-eaten hotel entrée after dark clearly did not meet. She groped in her jeans for the coins she knew were not there; her notes were back in her purse. Shrugging, she turned under the stern, disparaging gaze of the dispossessed and shuffled back to the Hilton, where the waiter stood outside with hands on hips. Eleanor ducked around the corner and scraped the rest of her dinner into the gutter.
Back at the table, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him she’d thrown it away, but she didn’t regale him with tales of the grateful needy either. Instead she sulked, quieter and less entertaining than ever. At the end of the meal, Calvin inquired, with that delicate ironic smile he had refined even as a young man, whether her friends outside would like dessert. Eleanor glowered and asked for tea.
They had taken a walk and ended up in Calvin’s room at the Norfolk, and at three in the morning he had had to ring room service for sandwiches when Eleanor confessed she was famished.
I’ll grant that was histrionic,” she recalled, studying the glistening red game on her fork while the waiter filled her wine glass with an obsequious flourish. “But I still feel self-conscious, eating in places like this. I may finish my dinner, but I haven’t changed my mind that it’s unfair.”
“So tell me,” asked Calvin, “if you had your way, you’d make the world over into one big Scandinavia? Generous dole, long paid maternity leaves and every meal with a compulsory salad. Where every can is recycled and the rivers run clean.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Justice is a bore. Order is a bore. No one on this planet has any vision.”
“Well, we’re hardly in danger of all that perfection.”
“They are in Scandinavia. And look at them: they shoot themselves in the head.”
“So you think it’s better, less boring, that we sit carving slices of kongoni with good silver while half this city can’t find a pawpaw tonight?”
“You’re focused on the wrong level, Eleanor,” he said impatiently. “Prawns to beggars. Your sensation of unfairness doesn’t help anyone, does it?”
“I’m still ashamed,” she said staunchly.
“But it is not white, well-off Eleanor who feels ashamed, it is Eleanor. If you were Number Two wife grinding maize, you would feel ashamed—of your shabby clothes, of the woeful prospects for your ten malnourished children, of the fact you could not read. By what, really, are you so mortified?”
She shrugged. “Being here, I guess. Not Africa, anywhere. In some regards I’ve chosen perfectly the wrong field, though I doubt by accident. We all talk about over-population, but most of us don’t regard the problem as applying to ourselves. We think that means there are too many of them. I don’t. I think it includes me. I feel unnecessary. I feel a burden. I think that’s my biggest fear, too, being a burden. I’m constantly trying to make up for something, to lighten the load of my existence. I never quite do enough. I use non-returnable containers and non-biodegradable plastic and non-renewable petroleum for my car. I cost too much. I’m not worth the price.”
“Is this what they mean by low self-esteem?”
Eleanor laughed.
“Why not jump off a bridge?”
“That would hurt my parents. I’m trapped.”
“You can’t possibly have persuaded yourself this shame of yours has the least thing to do with environmental degradation and African poverty?”
“Some,” she defended. “I know that sounds pretentious. At any rate they make it worse.”
“So you have not remained passionate. You realize what you do for a living doesn’t make a hair’s dent in population growth, which is the only thing that would pull this continent’s fate out of the fire. You refuse to become jaded. So what has happened to you? I haven’t seen you in sixteen years.”
She smiled wanly. “I think it’s called ordinary depression. And,” she groped, “I get angry, a little. Instead of helping the oppressed, I seem to have joined them: they oppress me. And after all these years in Africa, I’ve grown a little resentful. OK, I’m white, but I didn’t colonize this place and I was never a slave trader and I didn’t fashion a world where some people eat caviare and the rest eat corn. It’s not my fault. It’s not my personal fault. Anger may be too strong a word, but I am getting annoyed.”
“You are finished, madam?” He had been waiting for her to conclude for five minutes.
“Yes, it was very good. I’m sorry I couldn’t eat it all, perhaps you could—”
“Don’t even think about it,” Calvin interrupted.
It was true that a doggie bag back at her hotel would only rot. “Never mind,” she added. “But thank you. The food was lovely. Asante sana, bwana.” The waiter shot her a smile that suggested he was not used