Various Flavors of Coffee (29 page)

“Well,
I
care,” Emily says.“I can only give you my opinion—” “Exactly,” Cairns says. “But we do not go by opinion, my dear—yours or mine. Opinion is subjective. We have tested these concepts—tested them with
real
women.” Emily wonders for a moment if he means she does not fit into that category.“What we have in mind is nothing less than a coordinated military campaign. We identify our targets; we calculate how to make the maximum impact upon them, and then we devise our strategy.” He taps the

table. “This is the new, forward-thinking approach to advertising. These advertisements will
sell.
”

When they
have gone Pinker says,“I sense you are not sure.” “On the contrary, Father, my mind is quite made up. There is

something deeply unpleasant about appealing so directly to a woman’s insecurities.”

“Now, Emily.” He looks at her fondly.“Could your reaction be connected at all to your political beliefs?”

“Of course not!”

“I have never criticized your involvement in female suffrage. But you must agree that it makes you less . . .” He hesitates. “Less able, shall we say, to see the position of the ordinary woman.”

“Father—what nonsense!”

“As Mr. Cairns said, these concepts of theirs have been tested— we know they will work. And if we do not take this new, psycho-logical approach, I am worried Howell’s might. And then we will be left behind.” He nods.“We must steal a march on Howell somehow, Emily, and this may be the way to do it. I am going to tell Mr. Cairns to go ahead.”

[
for ty-two
]

ithout the protection of the big trees the delicate

shoots and creepers of the forest floor, dotted with orchids and butterflies, quickly shriveled in the sun. The fallen wood was ready for burning almost immediately. As soon as the wind was coming from the right direction, Hector organized the men to light a series of fires along the northern edge of the valley.

If the felling had been spectacular, the burning was even more so.The flames ran back and forth across the cleared land, filling it with a new growth that reached almost as high as the original canopy: a blazing, crackling forest of fire that sprouted, died and propagated itself over and over again during the course of a week. Sometimes the fires slowed to feast on one particular fallen tree; sometimes they carpeted a clearing with a low, flickering sward.At other times the flames were almost invisible in the brilliant sunshine as if the air itself were liquefying in the intense heat.

The natives were no strangers to fire, of course, but on this scale it seemed to fill them with a kind of superstitious terror, and they carried out our instructions with increasing reluctance. Hector swore he had never known workers so undisciplined; the result, he

assumed, of our being pioneers. Whatever I thought of him personally, I could not be anything other than glad he was there. I would have been completely incapable of overcoming the hundreds of daily obstacles that faced us without him.

After the burning the blasted hillsides resembled nothing so much as a smoking moonscape filled with gray snow. Here and there the remains of charred trunks poked out of the gray, while a couple of giant trees which had somehow survived both the felling and the conflagration intact stood alone in the vast expanse, their lower branches shriveled like lace.

“Best fertilizer in the world,” Hector said, reaching down into a knee-deep drift of ash and rubbing some in his hands. I did the same: it was powdery, unimaginably soft, still warm days after the burning. As it dissolved to dust between my palms it released a waft of ashy, sooty aroma. “Coffee exhausts even the best ground, Robert: you’re fortunate to have plenty of land here. Come on, let’s go home.”

“Home” was
Wallis Castle, a colonial estate which came with the right of shooting through the parishes of Abyssinia and Sudan, comprised of an entrance hall, dining room, drawing room, library, breakfast room, countless bedrooms and their dressing rooms, with the unusual feature of their combination in one circular space about fourteen feet in diameter. In other words, Hector and I were now living like two tinkers in a squalid native hut of mud and grass thatch. The thatch rustled all night long, and occasionally small poisonous wriggling things dropped out of it to visit us (in that respect it was not so very different from my staircase at Oxford).The floor was earth, although we had put down two zebra skins, bartered from the natives, to carpet it. Jimo was rather surprised that we were not going to share this accommodation with a goat—apparently, a good supply of goat’s piss on the floor kept

down the jiggas, whatever they might have been—but we decided that, on balance, we would stick to rugs and slippers.

Our chief enemy was boredom. Darkness came early in the tropics, and although we had kerosene lamps we had only enough fuel to use them for an hour or so each night. Hector surprised me by asking me to read aloud from my small library: tentatively I opened
The Importance of Being Earnest,
and he chuckled at the opening lines:

algernon.
Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?

lane.
I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.

algernon.
I’m sorry for that, for your sake. I don’t play accurately—any one can play accurately—but I play with wonderful expression.As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life.

lane.
Yes, sir.

algernon.
And, speaking of the science of Life, have you got the cucumber sandwiches cut for Lady Bracknell?

So I carried on, and eventually he took the book from me and gave a rather fine falsetto Gwendolen—“Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me so nervous.” Heaven knows what Jimo and Kuma must have made of it, let alone the other natives; the strange Scottish falsetto emerging from our hut, the nocturnal gales of laughter, and the rapturous applause with which Hector greeted my Lady Bracknell. He even started to address me as Ernest when we were out and about on the farm.

But it was all unreal—a kind of dream, a hallucination. I partic-ipated in the daily routines of the plantation, but my real life was lived after the hurricane lamp had been turned off for the night and Hector’s snores liberated me from his world of pegs, plantings

and labor. Then, as darkness blew into the hut, filling it with the contrapuntal music of the jungle at night—so much noisier than the jungle by day—Fikre stepped toward my bed on silent feet, whispering, “Soon,” and “Now”; straddling my body with her knees, so that if I just reached up I could shape her hips, her waist, her hanging breasts, between my hands. . . .

Sometimes I summoned other women I had known—even Emily. But her face always wore a slightly fastidious expression, as if lending her body to these fantasies was a distasteful duty that was keeping her from more important matters back in England. She was—quite literally—a distant memory now, less real to me than the whores whose bodies I had once been intimate with.

It was like the Ingersoll watch Pinker had given me before I left London, and which I had tried to keep to European time. Once it wound down in Zeilah, there was no easy way to reset it. It seemed easier to adapt to the local hours, and ultimately to abandon the use of a watch altogether—for watches are like the Guide: only of use if the person you are talking to has the same equipment as you. That is how it was with Emily. I did not suddenly fall out of love with her, but the part of my heart which should have kept ticking away with the thought of her ran down, and somehow never got restarted.

Only once
did I recall her in a different way. The villagers had quickly realized that if they suffered any minor medical mishaps in our employment, such as a finger gashed with an axe or a foot pierced by a chopped branch, we would dress and bandage the wounds more effectively than their own healer woman could. Diachylon, in particular, originally just one more baffling component of our medicine chest, turned out to be a marvelous invention; a mixture of linen and antiseptic ointments which hardened

over a wound and kept it free from both physical damage and infection.

One day a native woman brought us her sick child.The infant was horribly lethargic, and although it was running a high fever its pulse was deathly slow. Even on the black skin one could see the yellow tinge of jaundice.

“This is no business of ours,” Hector said abruptly. “The woman doesn’t even work for us.”

“Pinker would want us to do what we can.”

“Pinker would want us to conserve the medicines for our own employees. And to make sure that the child is baptized, so that at least its soul is saved.”

I thought:
but Pinker’s daughter would disagree.
I dug out our Galton, and deduced the baby was suffering from yellow fever. According to Galton about half of infant cases resulted in death, but I gave the child some laudanum anyway. It slept more easily af-ter that, but the next day it began to bleed from the nose and eyes, and I knew that it was hopeless.

I dropped
various hints to Hector that I would need to go into Harar soon, all of which he ignored.Then, one night, soon after we had turned in, we heard a commotion outside. Jimo came running into the hut, gabbling breathlessly.

“Massa come one time, one time.
Marrano
eat coffee babies.”

We grabbed our rifles and headed outside. There was a little moon, and we could see shapes crashing around in the nursery beds. As we got closer we made out a whole herd of warthogs, grunting ecstatically as they grubbed through our precious seedlings.

We chased them off and set Jimo to stand guard. In the morning we could see that they had wrecked the crop. It was a disaster, one Hector blamed on himself.

“I should have made fences. It never occurred to me that scavengers could do so much damage.” He sighed. “It looks as if ye’ll get your trip to Harar after all, Ernest.This will all need to be replaced.”

“What a pity,” I said, although inwardly I was exultant. “I’ll go tomorrow.”

Tomorrow.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow . . . That night I barely slept, my brain feverish with erotic imaginings.

As I left the camp next day, Hector had the workers burning again. Long after I had left our valley I could still tell where in that endless, rolling expanse of hills it lay by the smokestack that towered over it, its huge black branches spreading across the sky like some giant new species of tree.

[
for ty-three
]

“Honey”—this note is redolent of flower-scented honeys. It also brings to mind beeswax, gingerbread, nougat and certain types of tobacco.

Phenyl ethylic aldehyde, isolated in coffee, evokes this scent very well.

—lenoir,
Le Nez du Café

*

nce in Harar, I alerted Fikre to my presence by sending her a note, claiming to need her help with some translation. A servant brought her reply—something equally innocuous and guarded. There was no reference to Bey: that meant he was away.The gods were smiling on us.

I waited. And waited. The anticipation was unbearable—my very senses seemed tuned more tautly, as orchestra players before a concert retune their instruments to a higher pitch. I passed the time improvising a bed from sacks of coffee, spread with silk shawls. It was surprisingly comfortable, the beans shifting under my weight to make a soft, yielding hollow.

And then—so lightly I barely caught the sound—the door downstairs opened. I heard footsteps hurrying on the stairs.

Her beauty, each time I saw her, was still a shock: the dark, an-gular face, the light, piercing eyes, the slender body wrapped in a saffron-yellow robe.

Now that
we were finally together, it was as if neither of us wanted to begin. She made me coffee—the delicate, fragrant cof-fee of the countryside—as she had done in the desert, watching me solemnly as I drank the first cup. I remembered what Bey had told me about the coffee ceremony, that first time in his tent: that it is also a ceremony of love.

With a sudden rush then, desire overwhelmed me. I unwound the robe from her body with an impatient tug, until she was standing before me naked—or almost naked: she was wearing a thin chain belt on her slender black hips. It was hung with piastres, the golden discs swinging and glittering against her skin as she moved toward me.

I, who had made love to many women—some compliant, some desultory, some resentful, some furtive, but all of them, in their different ways, eager for it to be over—had never known anything like this: what it was to love someone whose passion was as great as my own, who gasped and quivered and trembled with pleasure at my every touch. She smelled of coffee: there was the taste of it in every kiss, the perfume of the roasting ovens in her hair. . . . Her hands were coffee; her lips were coffee; it was there in the taste of her skin and the glistening clear liquid in the corner of her eyes. And—yes—between the dark thighs, where the skin opened like a series of petals to reveal the honeysuckle-scented pinkness within, I found a single, tiny bean, a hard nub of coffee-flavored flesh. I slipped it into my mouth and gently chewed on it; as if by magic, even when I had eaten my fill, there it was again.

I was determined not to cause her any pain—to go slowly. It was Fikre herself who finally became impatient. Twisting on top,

she eased herself onto me until she met a slight resistance; then, leaning forward so that she could look directly into my eyes, pressed herself down. She winced once as something gave, and then I was fully possessed of her.A smear of purple cobwebbed our bellies, briefly, soon rubbed away by the circular movements of her hips.

Her eyes blazed with triumph and fury. “Whatever happens,” she whispered,“now I have won.”

And then—something I had never seen before, although I had read of it—as we fucked she was gripped by a series of shuddering spasms, deep within herself, almost painful in their intensity, the effects of which passed through her body and even made themselves visible on her skin, the way an explosion underwater will briefly churn the surface. After each of these spasms her body went limp, and she covered my face with kisses, murmuring with delight, un-til suddenly her back would arch again, straining and gasping as the pleasure took her again. I felt muscles inside her squeezing me as each spasm took hold. I realized then that all the whores who had ever moaned and panted in my arms had been doing so in feeble imitation of this. Perhaps not one of them had ever felt the real thing, nor had I ever stopped to wonder what they might be getting out of it besides money.