The Other Language(79)

After seven years of European life, she found herself smiling at the predicament she’d found herself in. It was a reminder that there were still places in the world where one could vanish, be lost, be found and rescued by strangers.



She had dozed off only for a few minutes in the driver’s seat when the sound of a running engine approaching behind her startled her. The sun was low, about to set, and the first thing she saw in her rearview mirror were a man’s faded shorts and long legs, unlaced leather boots, an indigo blue shirt. A tap on her window. A mop of unruly hair, shades, a maroon cotton scarf wrapped around his neck.

Yes, she’d had a problem.

No, it wasn’t the battery. Yes, of course she had plenty of gas.

He insisted on lifting the hood and started screwing and unscrewing tops and bolts, rubbing the tip of the spark plugs with the corner of his shirt as men tend to do when presented with a broken-down car and a woman in the driver’s seat.

I’ve checked those as well, she said, but he pretended not to hear.

She stood next to him looking at the tangle of wires under the hood and answered his third degree.

She had come to write a report on an NGO just north of Barsaloi.

Yes, she had been driving by herself all the way.

No, she didn’t need a driver because she knew the road.

Because she had grown up there.

On a farm not far from here.

No, she hadn’t been back in a few years. She used to come visit, but she hadn’t now for a while.

She was heading to the airstrip outside the town to get on a six-seater back to the capital.

She was supposed to fly back to Europe the following day.

“Okay,” he said, “hop in my car, I’ll give you a ride to the airstrip. Forget the car. We’ll send a mechanic tomorrow.”

“Leave it. It’s a rented car, I’ll call them and they’ll take care of it.”

“Then get your stuff and I’ll drop you off.”

She sat next to him in the big Land Cruiser, filled with tools, carton boxes, muddy boots and towels covered in red dirt. They drove off and for a while neither one of them spoke.



She remembered him, of course. She didn’t feel like telling him, because it had been so long ago, at a time when she still lived in the country, and she didn’t want him to think she still remembered their brief encounter after all these years. He had changed, but he looked more interesting now that he wasn’t so boyish, with thin lines around his eyes. He lit a cigarette without asking her whether it might bother her.

“I remember you,” he said, breaking the long silence.

“Really? From where?”

“We met in the bathroom at Jonathan Cole’s house. You had on a pair of bright red sandals you had just bought in Italy.”

She opened her mouth, feigning bewilderment.

“Come on. How can you remember that?”

“We had quite a long chat in there, and I tend to notice women’s feet,” he said.

She had been putting on her lipstick when he’d wandered in with a drink in his hand. They had flirted—mildly, in the oblique way people flirt late at night at parties—and shared his vodka tonic while sitting on the edge of the bathtub. Then Consuelo Gambrino, the alluring Argentinean eye doctor, had walked in.

“What are you two doing here?” she had asked them mischievously, shattering the moment. Consuelo had pulled up a stool and had started speaking nonsense to him in her thickly accented English, ignoring her. Sonia had left the room, meaning to catch up with him later, but somehow she’d lost sight of him, or maybe he had left without saying goodbye.

“Yes,” she said, “I remember you now. You described in detail a scene from a book you were reading.”

“Did I? That sounds rather boring.”

“It was … it was the one with the lion and—was it the heart, the skin?—in the title. The part where the nun falls off the bridge. I actually bought the book afterward.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, you made me want to read it.”

“Did you like it?”

“I did.”

He turned and looked at her and said nothing. She felt nervous for having said that, as though it had been an admission of some sort.

“Sorry if I didn’t recognize you right away,” she added after a short silence, wanting to sound casual. “It’s been a very long time.”

“No problem,” he said and grinned. He knew she was lying and he liked that.



They asked each other polite questions, carefully steering away from the details of their personal lives, avoiding any mention of wife or girlfriend, children or husband. He said that for years he’d had a highly paid job for the UN, driving relief trucks into Sudan and Somalia. Now he worked as a manager on a sheep farm up-country. She suspected this change might have to do with having a family and settling down, though he didn’t wear a wedding ring. She mentioned the name of the foundation she worked for and told him how sometimes she had to travel to assess the state of the projects they funded. They had just started to finance schooling projects for girls in the nomadic areas of East Africa and she had been assigned to report on them because of her knowledge of the place. She didn’t delve into the details, knowing that he, having lived in the country for so many years, wasn’t going to be impressed by her job. It was mainly her friends back in Europe who always introduced her as a kind of heroine because she had lived in a couple of African countries and was working for the poor.