The last days of Jerry, and crosses carved in magma

November 25, 12:20 AMLafayette Political Buzz ExaminerKen LaRive

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Malabo boy playing in the main square

Photo by Ken LaRive

Jerry was six years and two months old when he fell in the muddy street. He tried, but he couldn’t get up. His bony hands disappeared in the well stirred muck, but he could not lift himself. He started trembling. With wide sunken eyes he looked up at his friends, from one face to another, but he couldn’t recognize one.

For weeks he had felt something was wrong. He had lost the taste for food, and was weak in his legs. There was a dull pain in his stomach and sometimes it burned. But he still wanted to play with his friends, and every morning he would rush out of the two-room apartment where his family of three sisters and his mother lived.

He took from the small shed the toy his father had made for him so long ago, a present to his only son. It was a car imaginatively made of wood and aluminum cans, designed so that he could make the front wheels turn from a long bamboo stick with a steering wheel on top. It was his pride and joy, and he took very good care of it.

It was the only thing he had from a man he could barely remember, a man who had left on a trip through the jungle, never to return. He remembered his father was sick, and how his mother had cried when he didn’t return. She left for a long time to look for him, but he was never found. It had been raining ever since.

The soft morning rain always felt good on his face and bare chest, and was a relief from the heat that was typical of high summer in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea. But now the soft rain felt like ice on his back, almost scalding. He began to cry, but the tears melted in the rain.

He tried to prop himself up with his arms but it was as if all of life’s energy had drained from them. He wobbled on one elbow. He could hear his older sister crying and calling for his mother, and in a moment he was up in the air, carried by her running. He could feel her heart beating, and she was like a hot blanket as she held him. Her screams seemed far away, and the hurt in his knees and back subsided. He looked out from the folds of her colorful dress, and the world was bouncing up and down as she ran. He saw the green volcanic hills that towered high above, blurs of old rundown Spanish buildings, and people under colorful cotton awnings. He held her around the neck as she ran with emaciated, sticklike arms, …like the twigs on a dead tree. He held her fast as he sank into blackness.

Jerry knew the comfort of white dry sheets when he awoke. A cool breeze that blew from the hospital room’s open window brought in the sounds of the market, cooking, and the smells of rain and earth. It seemed to be blowing away some strange smell coming from the room he was in, but he couldn’t focus his eyes any closer then a few feet. He was so comfortable, as Sister Charity had administered a sedative to relax him, and there was a bottle with what looked like a long straw that went into one of his arms.

His mind went back to what he last remembered, of his mother carrying him, and her screams as everyone got out of her way. Suddenly, like a bolt of lightening he remembered the toy he had left behind. He tried to yell out to the Sister standing by the bed, but only a croaking sound came from his lips. He reached out, but his arms fell limply on the bed. The toy must still be in the street!

She lifted a wet rag from a bowl of water and wrung it out. With tenderness she slowly wiped his face and arms. He looked into her kind face, into her blue eyes, so like the sky after the rains would end. She spoke to him in words he didn’t understand, and he knew they were French. He knew what she was saying. He had heard those same kind of words from his older sister and his mother after he had gotten sick. He felt better when they were said. They were magic words.

He could hear crying from the room, a great room full of beds, and dying children. He heard the wale of a mother, and she sounded much like his own. He wondered in his fevered mind where his mother was, as he looked into those blue eyes. Sister Charity held a large crucifix in her right hand, and his hand in the other. He felt the warmth from her soft, yet strong fingers, and could feel the love that poured from her. His eyes went blank, and his breathing stopped, but his eyes remained fixed on hers.

Tears fell from those sky blue eyes, as they had a thousand times before, in this paradise of hell.

He was buried not far from there, near a crystal clear waterfall that sprang from a hole not far away. Sunbirds liked this place. There was always plenty of flowers, full of nectar, and bowls of fruit left on the hundreds of little gray stones. No names were marked on them, just little crosses carved in the soft volcanic glass. Long rows, long rows of magma glass, with little crosses carved on each. Every morning, the little sunbirds flashed in their best metallic colors, as they feasted on the gathered flowers, and the fruit that gave off such rich fragrance.

I met sister Charity on the corner of H and two, next to the blue and white painted Catholic Church of Saint Michael. My questions brought her great pain, but she stood before me with the conviction of a true sage. She told me many things that I have pushed back into my mind, things I immediately regretted and wanted to forget.

She told me of the HIV president that lived just over the wall behind me, his hundreds of wives and children and the horror that rang in his household. She told me of the government men who congregated daily in the building to my right, and how they waited with great expectations for his death. She told me that most people died from tropical disease, and that men died before the age of 44, and women to 47, and I realized why I had seen so little white hair like mine. She told me that soon, within the next ten years, that there would be more white men then blacks in central Africa. She told me she couldn’t stop it, that nobody could stop it, that these diseases were transmitted by every conceivable method, from insects, from fruit grown with human excrement, from bacteria in water, virus that grew in the ever present wetness, air-born fungus that grew on sleeping mats, and unprotected sex.

A cloud of bats came from large coconut trees and swarmed together over the bay. She took no notice. Her eyes were distant, and she told me something that has followed me around the world. She said that death is the only relief there.

Death is the only relief.

But then, as the night came clear, and the stars shredded through the coconut trees like diamonds on a purple-velvet blanket, ...when Sister Charity finally sat back in her painted white wicker chair, she whispered a dreadful revelation that I still deny. She said that men all through the tropical rainforests have little or no regard for women, and will kill an infant if too many are born. She told me that men think that to have sex with a virgin will transfer their AIDS to them. That they will rape a young child and kill it after... with hope.

Alone in my room, with a broken ceiling above my bed, while looking for a scrap of paper in the nightstand, I found an empty prophylactic package on top of a Giddings's bible, and in the dim light from the one naked bulb that hung on a yellow wire, I felt a great shudder go through me. Then, wave after wave of sobs and tears I never knew as a man washed me.