Ethiopia Vignettes: Part 4
Alchemists
The darkness of the unlit room pales slowly to reveal the faces of the tella-drinkers, gazing blankly from the shadows. The gulp the yellowish, faintly luminescent tella from bulbous glass demijohns arranged on the wooden table. They look like a row of gloomy alchemists in a medieval tavern. 'Do you want to drink here?' asks my companion. 'Um, another time,' I say. Back in the street, we meet the madman I saw in the market earlier tugging feathers off a dangling chicken. Now he has absentmindedly pulled most of the flesh from the bird's bones; the carcass swings like a priest's censer, bloody fat drips from his hands. 'He says do you want to buy his chicken?' says my companion, grinning. 'No thanks,' I say. And away he limps, in the direction of the concrete piazza the Italians made a shoddy job of before they fled in 1941, leaving only macchiatos behind them.
Washington D.C.
'This, my baby – in Washington D.C.,' says the mama of the house. In her hands is a graduation picture of a smug, gelatinous young man in mortarboard and gown. 'Other baby – in Washington D.C.' She proudly shows a photograph of a fat girl in a tight white dress, flashing lots of thigh before a studio backdrop of a heart-shaped swimming pool fringed with palms. 'This, baby house – in Washington D.C.' A picture of a picket-fenced home complete with car parked in the drive; interior shots of gleaming kitchenware, a woman in a mini-skirt posing on the stairs. The mama rocks backwards and forwards in her chair, cheerfully crunching peanuts. Her granddaughter rubs her feet with chilli paste scooped from a plastic bowl. Coffee bubbles on a charcoal-burning stove. There has been no running water for a week. On the floor sits Maree (what's the proper term? Indentured housemaid? Slave-girl?) smiling at it all and understanding nothing.
