excerpt from Fragments from the diary of woman X

Jaime Robles

August

10th-Sorting through shelves I found a photograph on a
page in a college textbook, the cliffs of Olduvai gorge
undulating in and out of shadows, in blurry black and white
halftone. Broken rocks and bones.

A moment reappeared in my imagination. The moment of
discovery when, while walking among the rocks in the dry
heat of Olduvai, Mary Leakey saw the fragment of bone she
had been seeking for decades. Then, reached down to touch
bone rather than rock. Yellow white bone among yellow white
rocks. How in that vast texture of heat did she find that
fragment?

Another Africa now seeps into that grey photo. It is my
Africa, an Africa of twenty-year-old memories. The mauve
colors of drying leaves, the interminable heat, brown
savannah, the gait of giraffes running, the expressions of
young Maasai men, their decorous movements, a greeting spit
into the dust, the afternoon colors of the Drakensburg, a
four-foot snake springing away into the grasses beside the
highway, black women dancing in a slow circle among
bright-green-leaved tea bushes, crumbling European cities, a
child squatting on the bathroom floor of the steamer,
shitting. Jacarandas, mosquitoes, gauzy nets. Nights
restless from heat. Africans washing their clothes near the
sea, the water warm turgid. Me, sloshing cautiously through
water, wondering if the ooze beneath my feet was just
ordinary muck or an accumulation of feces. There was no
tide, it seemed, the waves were small, lacking foam, rising
and falling like shallow breaths of sleep. Air so moist,
both sky and sea grey: as if we had suddenly awakened in
entropy, some soup of sensations, lacking definition:
definition being dependent on differences, extremes. Then
through the thick air, Charlie, the white dragoman, calling
out-It's the Indian Ocean; and I, looking up, searching
for the horizon at the water's edge, grey and lusterless,
beyond which lay another land, saw at last an image
materializing, forming itself, at the core of which lay
desire carried for years, unsuspected, now revealed.