But she, she finally plucked up courage. Shirt rose, camera flashed, I got a much better view than him, beads were thrown. And I had my near-death experience.
My story in the tango, yes, and maybe it features bewitching figure-eights and an angry Mardi Gras flasher-by-demand. Then I remember a smile.
At the start of a three-day ride in a rattling bus, bumpy and hot in eastern Madagascar, a sturdy young woman sat herself primly beside me. Day and night and day and night and most of the next day we sat there, lacking a language to say anything to each other. But some things don’t need saying, don’t need language, know what I mean? In the daytime, she looked resolutely in the other direction. But through those long night hours, both of us still sitting in our seats but not sleeping like the rest of the bus was sleeping, some little electricity crackled. Enough said.
In truth, my affections were already spoken for. But don’t ask, because I don’t know and it troubles me still.
Home for her was a town about an hour short of Tamatave, my destination. When we stopped there, I said a formal “Au revoir” as she got up and walked out. She only nodded gravely. But when she stepped off the bus, she walked around to my window, looked up at me and flashed a smile that totally, magically, transformed her face. Nobody else saw it, for somehow she made sure it was only for me. All these years later, it remains imprinted on my mind, that smile, that sole acknowledgement of something precious and fleeting, shared and locked away.
I don’t know her name, she doesn’t know mine. But once in a while, especially on dark nights when the stars gleam knowingly above, I find myself wondering. Somewhere in a beautiful country is a woman who once got off a bus short of Tamatave, a woman with a smile that once weakened my knees.
Does she sometimes remember too?
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