My American dream
The sight of your new born son was marveling, but that was nothing close to the sight of Philadelphia City, the city of brotherly love as the Americans call it. A city beautiful with incredible sky crappers, countless superhighways, clean wide streets and beautiful suburbs, nothing like Malindi or even Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city where you had first stepped the day you first came to board the plane to the America. Your entire life you had dreamt of leaving Watamu, Malindi, destination, Europe! Anywhere actually, as long as it was the West; France, Germany, America, didn’t matter.
In the recent months though, your dreams had been appearing like a mirage of sorts, with no prospects in place, until you met Catherine. Now you were glad that indeed, your dreams had indeed, been validated.
The first time you met Catherine was when she first walked in the pizza restaurant where you worked as a waiter. She had come with a few tourists you’d encountered several times, her olive skin radiating brilliantly in her miniature khaki shorts and a white spaghetti top, as if spa treated, and her sandy brown hair tied in a ponytail at the center of her head falling gently on her upper back. She looked smart and refined, but then again, all white people looked exactly one thing to you; smart and refined. You could tell from eavesdropping in their conversations that she was neither Italian or French or German― who formed the bulk of tourists at the Kenyan coast. All this spying went on as you attended to their needs; pizza and beer. You had hardly interacted with any American or British tourists before, so it would have been impossible to tell how British or Americans sounded, but since her English was so good and it felt like she was speaking through her nose, you concluded that she must be British.
Months later, after she become your girlfriend, you would remind her of that day and she would feign, or so you thought, ignorance of the entire ordeal.
The first time you had asked her out, or typical Kenyan style, asked for her number, which meant one and the same thing anyway, was the time she dropped by, by herself without her expatriate and tourist friends, and stayed in until you closed the restaurant at 10pm.
You remember clearly the fourth of July, the day after, when you called her to wish her a Happy Independence Day. She thanked you for your thoughtfulness and agreed to have a drink with you at the Driftwood Beach club, Malindi. You wondered if you would be able to afford to pay for a beer in such hotel, but you were ultimately relieved when she offered to pay the bill at the end of dinner. She was different from your girlfriend, Kanze, your Giriama girlfriend, be caught dead splitting the bill, let alone pay for it. But it didn’t matter, you had known Kanze your entire life and you had both been making marriage plans. But first you had to get the money.
At Driftwood, your conversations excelled. Catherine, even though you didn’t ask for her age forthrightly, was your age mate. The two of you bonded over the state of tourism in at the coast; the decreased state owing to the Western from recent terror threats etc. politics aside, your personal lives seemed just as interesting to each other from family to dreams and aspirations. God knows you’d be caught dead admitting that your only dream in life was to land a white woman―regardless of age― move to Europe with her where she would buy you a flat and a car and the two of you would live happily ever after. That was your one true dream.
Catherine was interesting to be with. She was attentive and complementing, listening before responding. Her dark brown eyes seemed to be totally focused on you, so much so that you felt a little embarrassed by your rugged luxuriant afro and your mahogany skin tone and your struggling English? Man that was a thwart. You come forthright to explain that your English wasn’t that good, but that you were fluent in Italian.
“Italian?” she lighted up, not from the effect of her red wine, but from what you’d told her.
“I’ve been learning it since I was a small boy.” You said, trying to refine your English skills as she nodded in approval.
“I speak Italian too, though probably not as good as you. My mom is Italian!” she said in Italian, smiling with admiration and you couldn’t help but burst a little laughter.
You were lost for words momentarily. The tall waitress, clad in a tight black skirt suit and a white shirt, had arrived your food, steaming hot vegetable lasagna, which she placed on the round table that was covered with flowing white cloth. She placed your half-full drink a little to your left before placing the food right in front of you and did the same for Catherine before she released a steaming hot hand cleaning towel for Catherine, then another for you.
“I never would have imagined that you are Italian,” you said in Italian, while dipping your fork in the long strands of lasagna.
“And I would never have imagined that you speak Italian so well,” she said, slight chuckle radiating from a distance, before both of you burst out in a laughter. It was the first real laughter between both of you.
The air conditioned expansive dining room was full of white old folks, dining as they spoke in low tones and busy waiters attending to their every need under the moderate lights. You suspected that they were making use of their life savings and putting their bucket lists to fruition. You were not more than five people of color in the dining room including the Indian couple who kept giving you a strange look, like you were misplaced or something, that you had to walk to the bathroom to confirm if everything was ok with your face or your appearance. All was well.
Catherine was funny and smart and interesting and you envisioned future dates. She was far more interesting than your fifty something year old Italian ex with whom you’d never had any real conversation with you except the weather and how hot it was and how young you were or your sexual prowess vis a vis her ex-husband’s.
You were not wrong about Catherine. She thought of the exact same thing. Actually, she seemed un-condescending if not unbothered by your level of education or status. The two of you would be fine. This would not pose any trouble between you and Kanze. If anything, it was acceptable. Just like the way people go to college to secure their future, you knew the way to secure yours was to hook up with a rich White woman, fool her into falling for you and trick her into marriage. This would be followed by ‘painful’ years of waiting for a change of citizenship, then a divorce where you’d at best take her possessions or at worst, leave with at least half her wealth and marry your long awaiting black partner who’ll have been standing in the sidelines awaiting for the completion of the mission and the two of you would live filthy-rich-happily-ever-after.
Kanze would understand, after all, she had had no problem with your immediate ex, a fifty seven year old Italian woman you had been dating last summer who had dumbed you after calling you a gold-digging, blood-sucking parasite. Good riddance! You thought. She had been as stingy as hell! Actually, Kanze was also free to hook up with a rich White Man if ever she wanted to. The more, the merrier and the fatter the bank account ultimately!
At the end of the evening, you hooked Catherine the best way you knew how to. After not being able to foot the bill, you still had to prove your masculinity and power over her by confessing your ‘love’ for her. Too early? Not where you came from, and even though she said nothing to that, you knew, hoped, that your charm had worked.
Several dates, afternoon walks in the beach, swimming in the blue waters of the Indian Ocean, several beers and wines, and a couple of weeks later, Catherine was officially your girlfriend. You bragged to your friends and family about the young American you were seeing who was pursuing a PhD in Aquatic Sciences and with whom you were in love with and were planning to leave Kanze for. They said no. They reminded you of the rules of the trade. This White woman business was just that, a business plan. You lure her, make her crazy in love with you, hint at marriage, get her around it, and get married and all her earthly possessions will be yours.
The first time you introduced Catherine to your closest friend Ahmed, the two would fail to connect miserably. You did not have enough time that evening to quiz Ahmed on why he reacted that way towards your girlfriend considering that you had been very receptive and utterly warm to his stream of old White ex-girlfriends and current wife. You thought he was just jealous because Catherine was far younger than his wrinkled, overweight, senile and partially crazy Hanna who was his grandmother’s age.
Later that night after Catherine and you knocked boots, Catherine asked you why Ahmed was a little weird towards her. You feigned ignorance of the whole situation. You knew she was right. It was a perfect excuse considering that this was their first encounter. Many future encounters later, you’d never quite put your finger on the reason as to why these two were like water and oil.
****
Your back had been against hers all this while, on the bed. You finally turned to face her, switched on the lights via the overhanging bed switch and lifted her up to lie on top of you. Her long hair sandy brown was now all over your sweaty hairy chest, and shoulders, sticking onto your skin while you shared her breath and enjoyed the smell of her skin. You loved the way her nose had just morphed into pink and how narrow and long it looked against her oval face.
You realized that while this may have started out as a joke, as a business plan, you had grown to genuinely care for her. Too late! You were a man in love.
“Catherine, I love you. Marry me please.” You told her in Italian, even gliding at the name Catherine just to make it sound romantic, or sexy, or both, before she quickly disentangled from your embrace and sat uprightly on the bed, with her legs crossed.
“But Safari―”
“No buts please,” you said, in English, holding your finger against her pink lips, “shhhhhh…..” you paused to stare directly in her brown eyes “just tell me you’ll think about it please.” You concluded in Italian.
“Is this not too soon?” she asked, giving you a confused gaze. “―how long have we been dating?” she paused, before answering her own question, “nine months? Ten?” with another question, her thumb on the tips of her other fingers, doing the counting.
“I know―” you said, rising up from the sleeping position, and slapped the mosquito that was lingering on your face causing an untoward zzz-sound. “―I know, I don’t have the wealth to give you―” you continued with your speech like you hadn’t stopped, before she quickly jumped in
“―let me just cut you there Safari. Wealth? Where is this coming from? Did Ahmed say something? Like me being too broke or too old for you?” stepping from the bed and quickly picking her t-shirt off of the floor and putting it on.
“What? No!”
“Well I know I’m thirty-two, and you’re twenty-two and that you still want more time to put your life together, go to college, get a proper job, you know…..and I’m ok with that. If anything, I’ve always thought that I’ll first complete my PhD before thinking about or actually getting married.” She said, putting the actually married in air quotes. “Look, there’s nothing to think about. It’s not yet time. Let’s just have fun, for now, ok?”
The last statement kept ringing in your head for the next couple of days: let’s just have fun. For now, ok? Were you mistaken about where you stood with Catherine? Never once had she ever responded to any of your I-love-you-s. You had just assumed it was an American thing or a Western thing, but a lot of time had lapsed already and you did not know exactly where you stood in her life. It was like that Pwagu kapata Pwaguzi Swahili proverb in full play. Goodness! It was quite unsettling.
When Ahmed dropped by the pizza joint a couple of days later, you couldn’t help but confide in him about the recent events and how greatly bothered you were. He looked at you like you were crazy and guaranteed you that no woman in her senses, especially not one with a PhD on the pipeline would marry you. He said that if ever that was to happen it would be out of desperation on the woman’s part for having been overeducated, and way too old especially not to you a form four leaver. And that was not all.
“I told you so. White women are not there to be loved. They exist to supply our material needs. To give us a comfortable life. Look at me! I have Hanna and Mama Shaffie! Hanna bought me an apartment in Rome last year and that!” he said, in a braggadocio, pointing at his sleek black Mercedes kompressor parked in the sunny Watamu Street across the pizza place. It was about eleven in the morning and customers were drawing in the pizza place fast. “You’re wasting Kanze’s love on this Catherine woman.” He concluded.
“I should not be talking to you about this at all.” you said, wiping the counter with a cloth, moving further away from him. The barman must have been listening to you two as he pretended to wipe the liquors, you thought.
“I’m exactly the person you should be talking to.” He said, in Swahili before rising from his stool, an indication that he was just leaving.
You were thrown out of gear, now more than ever. You looked at him fade away in his two-thousand shillings haircut, his baggy t-shirt printed with the New York City’s logo, his designer sunglasses and his sagging black jeans and your eyes couldn’t leave him until he entered and disappeared in his flashy Benz down the winding street. You envied him. Your old and withered jeans and Ts back in your crappy bed sitter needed a revamp like yesterday. Only money could make that happen. You envied Ahmed’s lifestyle. You’d have given anything to trade places with him. Hanna, Ahmed’s White wife had tried to match you with her seventy-one years old friend but it had almost coincided with you meeting with Catherine, and with Catherine being all young and with you hoping that she was wealthy, it had felt like you had just killed two birds with one stone. You had in turn turned Hanna’s friend down and chose Catherine. But now? It all seemed like one big mistake, because ten months later, it seems that all Catherine was interested in was an African adventure. That’s all you were to her.
Later that evening, you proposed a rendezvous and Catherine agreed to it, at her place. As you alighted in the yellow Tuk-Tuk, you made a clean sweep of the place. Old low concrete units sitting side by side, well lit stood there and fronting them were boda-bodas. A boda-bodas ride would cost you a whooping fifty shillings which you did not have! There were other priorities and a luxurious motorcycle ride was not one of them for a less than one kilometer distance. One way or another, you’d have to get to Catherine’s place, and that involved passing through Miembeni, a miniature forest. On foot it would be!
You walked through the path between the thick undergrowth under the humongous mango trees, and supper tall coconut trees, where you could hear nothing or see nothing except for the occasional falling down of fruits from the trees. The aura of the place was chilling. Growing up, everyone had avoided Miembeni like a bad plague, as the forest had always been associated with evil spirits and ghosts. It was rumored that the spirits emanated from the people that had been buried there centuries before! Yes, rumor had it that Miembeni was an old gravesite! And the demeanor of the creepy black cats, rumored to be real people either as ghosts or witches affirmed many people’s suspicions and reinforced their fears all the more.
In the recent years, though, it looked like Miembeni had attracted another set of trouble makers; violent robbers, with statistics indicating that it was the most feared part of Watamu. Nobody wanted to go through a robber’s playground, not consciously anyway. Nobody wants to be mugged and or raped or assaulted. You knew it was a big risk walking through the place which was as chilling as death, but it was the only way to Catherine’s.
Finally, and this was about five minutes or so later, you spotted lights and effectively buildings. Catherine’s residence was the third block from the dangerous Miembeni.
Even though it was nine o’clock, most kids were out playing as many adults gathered in small circles gossiping away and trying to pass the night. The hot weather prohibited most people from staying indoors, with most of them unable to afford fans, so they would stay outside and make use of the outside breeze, if any at all, until bedtime.
A creepy black cat quickly crossed your path and your leg missed it with a whisker.
The plumb old woman, Mama Riziki, who occupied the first unit, indulged in her filter-less cigarette, as she rested on the concrete steps of her house, with an African-print wrapper tied above her breasts and an all-white hair short afro.
“Shikamoo mama!”
“Marahabaa Mwanangu!” she said, ejecting a white plume from her wrinkled black lips, her cigarette now between the index finger and the thumb with the burning part facing away from her. Her fair skinned-face, hands and legs contrasted her mahogany black body, a result of lifelong skin lightening creams.
*****
It was the fourth time you had been to Catherine’s place, a small bed sitter with a bed, a reading table and chair as the only furniture. The only electronic appliances were a six kilos gas cooker, a fan on the extreme corner of the room and a laptop. Was she truly poor or was she faking it? Her apartment looked almost exactly like yours in size and style with nothing of real value.
A long block of about ten houses with no entry gate, in a low end neighborhood, with the paint on the walls peeling off and plain cemented floor, no tiles or anything and an outside pit latrine and bathroom that the entire block shared! Even if Catherine had money and was using modesty as a pretense, surely she would have settled in a different neighborhood, not this one where security was just a distant dream and dirty needy kids hovered all around the place! Not cloth lines hang side by side in a low fashion and it was not only a challenge to access her unit once the entire block had done their laundry, but a frustrating sight. I mean trying to avoid the water from dripping all over you was truly a big deal! Catherine was poor, you concluded. But where was that putting both of you? Keeping in mind that you had lived with the stereotype that all white people, especially Americans were filthy rich? Yes, some were stingy, but rich nonetheless. And if Cate, as you called her, was truly poor, you wouldn’t want to keep investing your time in a relationship that was headed nowhere because you had sworn to never live the kind of life you had grown up in, and you would have given anything to have Ahmed’s life. God knows how much you had wanted to be like the Ahmed Omars of this world!
Catherine prepared a cup of coffee for you and served you with a digestive few biscuits as the both of you talked about how your respective days had been. The bed coupled up both as a bed and a couch and your back was getting sick from having nowhere to lean after a long day of waiting on tables. You did your best to avoid talking about how envious you were of Ahmed’s life and how you hated to risk your life going through the dangerous Miembeni on foot and not in a taxi or a private car to some fancy beach hotel or an upmarket estate to rendezvous with your girlfriend! Really! Surely you’d have given anything for a couch and a pillow and a working fan. You rose from the bed and pressed a high-power button. All you had dreamt of was a filthy rich, or moderately rich, or any kind of rich White girlfriend, was that too much to ask?
“I didn’t know its hot Hun. I barely feel the coastal heat anymore.” She said after you settled on the thin-mattressed bed next to her and took your coffee mug in your hands.
She leaned in and stroked your firm lips gently with her thumb, her eyes locked in yours and planted a kiss on your lips.
“Cate, my mother is sick and I need some money.” You piped out, unblinkingly, doing a one-eighty degrees direction on her small talk.
“How much?” she asked, concerned and pulled away.
“Around ten thousand shillings.” You said, as she sighed in exasperation rising from her position on the bed to the cooking area, barely that far owing to the miniature room. She warmed up more water on the cooker before pouring it in a cup. She opened a bag of instant coffee and two spoonfuls of sugar before coming back to her position on the bed.
“I’m sorry about your mom. Can I visit her?”
That was the wrong answer. The right answer would have been her proposing to give you the money! Damn it she’s so dumb! You leaned your back against the bed as your feet remained firmly on the floor as you shut tight your eyes.
to be continued................on 21st Dec 2015
PS: The above piece is a work of fiction.The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are a work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental
Catherine Amayi is a Scientist and an Author. I invite you to follow me on Twitter @catherine_amayi and write to me on ccamayi@yahoo.com