A funny formality had entered the occasion, and she was let off easily with providing her address. She yearned to press him with a hundred shillings, but the ruse of hospitality had become real, and neither could violate courtesy with cash. Even in Mathare, paying for your tea was gross. For the life of her she couldn’t fathom why he didn’t slit her throat and steal her watch.
Though Calvin had agreed to retrieve her readily enough, when she found him in the waiting room he looked annoyed. Eleanor chattered nervously with the nurses, asking about the tubal ligation programme, hoping they didn’t know who he was.
“I hate that language,” said Calvin malignantly once they started down the road. He hadn’t dared park a new Land Cruiser in the slum, so they were in for a slog.
“Swahili?”
“Chumba cha kulala, chakula cha mchana, katikati, majimaji, buibui, pole-pole, nene-titi-baba-mimi … Baby babble. The whole continent has never grown up.”
“Do you hate the language or the people?”
“Both.” The statement didn’t seem to cost him much.
“Do you like English?”
“Not particularly. Angular, dry, crowded.”
“Americans?”
“Grabby, fat, empty-headed pond scum.”
She laughed. “Fair-mindedness of a sort.” She was coming to like Calvin best at his most horrid, and was reminded of a story she was fond of as a child, “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts”. A man goes out and feeds peanuts to pigeons, gives coins to beggars and helps old ladies across the street. When he comes home, his wife reports cheerfully how she shortchanged a salesgirl, screamed at a bus driver and had a child’s pet impounded for nipping her leg. They were very happy together, and this suggested to her that she and Calvin had the makings of the perfect couple.
Calvin sighed, casting his gaze over the hillsides winking with tin. “The Chinese, now. I had great hopes for them once. I thought, here was one government that knew the stakes. But their last census was disappointingly large. And now they’re loosening the screws. They’ll be sorry.” He was airy and aloof.
“China has committed a lot of human rights abuse with that one-child programme.”
“I don’t give a tinker’s damn.”
She touched her forehead. “There’s more to life than demography.”
“Not to me. Population is all I care about.”
She slowed. It was a stark admission if it was true. If he also intended a personal warning, she picked it up. “That’s appalling.”
“Perhaps.” Calvin used mildness as a weapon. “So,” he proceeded, “did you give out a birth control pill today? Fob off a condom on a little boy for a balloon?”
“Why are you so snippy?”
“I’m taking the neighbourhood out on you.”
“It is hard to handle.”
“Get used to it. Mathare Valley will spread over all of Africa in fifty years. I’m not such a Pollyanna that I predict worldwide famine. Why, what do these people survive on? But they do survive. No, we will be fruitful and multiply ourselves right into an open sewer. Whether ten people can eke out a few years in eight feet square is not the question. Look around you: it is obviously possible. But—” He nodded at a mincing radio. “You don’t get much Mozart in a slum.”
“Fine, so one of the values we have to protect for the future is human rights—”
“Human rights! No one has the right to produce ten children for whom there is no food, no room, no water, no topsoil, no fuel and no future. No one has a right to bring any child into the world without Mozart.”
She glanced at him sidelong with wary awe. “Do you ever talk to these people, Calvin? Whose little soul-slivers you’re so concerned about?”
“I sometimes think,” he considered, “that’s not in their interests. One gets attached and loses perspective. Culling in Uganda, members of our team would occasionally form an affection for certain elephants. This maudlin naming, cooing and petting—it made them less professional. And the work a great deal more difficult.”
“The parallel eludes me.”
He smiled. “It was meant to.”
Their accumulation of tittering children on the way back did not seem heartbreaking and inexplicably buoyant as it had on the way in, but plaguesome instead. As they did not realize Eleanor spoke Swahili, she picked up comments about her ugly dress and porridge complexion and funny hair. One of them screamed that he could see her bra strap, and she had to stop herself from adjusting her collar right away. An older boy carped to his friend about wakaburu come to tour the slums when they were “tired of the other animals”. Eleanor allowed herself a tiny nasal whine, jaw clenched.
“Why don’t you say something?” asked Calvin.
“Like what?”
Calvin turned on his heel and menaced, “Nenda zaku!” The crowd froze. “Washenzi! Wamgmyao! Futsaki!”
It was magic. Thirty or forty children seeped back to the trickles of raw sewage from which they’d come.
“Now, that should have been you,” said Calvin.
“I don’t use that kind of language.”
“Go home and practise, then. Your Swahili’s better than mine. What do you think it’s for?”
Eleanor was both mortified and grateful. The valley was suddenly so quiet.
She told Calvin about tea with Peter.
“Don’t tell me. He wanted you to take him to America.”
She kicked at the road. “Probably.”
“Haven’t you had thousands of these encounters?”
“Sure.”
“They still affect you.” He was impressed.
“In some ways, it’s worse than ever. Not prurient. Not interesting, not new. Still painful.”
“They all think you’re a magic lantern, don’t they? That you own Cadillacs and a pool.”
“In his terms,” she soldiered liberally, “I am rich—”
“Aren’t you tired of saying these things? How many times have you made that exact same statement?”
She sighed. “Hundreds.” She added, “I had a feeling the next time I stopped by Mathare I would avoid Peter.”
They had reached the car, from which point they could see the whole valley of shanties bathed in a perverse golden light, under which hundreds of handsome adolescent boys cut out magazine pictures of motor cycles under
