Tom Robbins - Tibetan Peach Pie - A True Account of an Imaginative Life

The Tuareg looked stunned, so I said it again. “No, no,” they cried, “Hashish bad. Hashish bad.” Plainly, my request had rattled them, so pushing the envelope, I now commenced to dance around wildly, like a mandrill with its butt on fire, waggling my arms as if I were one of those extraneously limbed Hindu gods directing the orchestra of the spheres or the traffic in downtown Calcutta. The hawkers moved away. In Mali, it’s considered very bad juju to make eye contact with the mentally ill, and the more I carried on, the more distance they put between themselves and me; until finally, in the middle of a particularly paroxysmic pirouette — “Hashish! Hashish!” — they bagged their imitation artifacts, slipped out of the terminal, and did not return.

Successfully signaled, an Air Mali plane did eventually land and take us aboard. We’d get off in Mopti, from where we’d call on the Sirius-minded Dogon and Bozo, but we were done with Timbuktu. Alas, as it turned out, Timbuktu was not done with us.

The first symptoms tagged us in Paris, where we’d stopped for a few days of joie de vivre before traveling on to the U.S. We were dining in an Alsatian restaurant on rue de Buci when both Alexa and I experienced a simultaneous hot flash. I say “flash,” but the feeling that we were standing against our will before the open door of a blast furnace lasted for ten or fifteen minutes. No one else in the room appeared similarly affected, and the source of the heat seemed definitely internal. The next day on the plane home we experienced an identical episode. Our faces turned strawberry red and the jet might have borrowed our plasma for extra fuel.

Back in Seattle, we were tested for malaria. The results were negative, but our relief was short-lived. During the next ten months — that’s how long we were ill — we would be host to a peculiar panoply of symptoms, including chronic fatigue and spontaneous panic attacks, often coming on in the middle of the night. The hot flashes continued periodically, Alexa experienced hair loss, her ovaries hurt and so did my testicles. The most persistent and unsettling feature, however, was the ache that racked every joint in our bodies and led us to be temporarily diagnosed with dengue, an ailment known colloquially for that very reason as “bonebreak fever.” However, when the tropical disease unit at the University of Washington Hospital, where we’d become familiar faces, sent samples of our blood to the Center for Tropical Diseases in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the experts there found no evidence of dengue. Stumped, the UW even tested us for HIV.

Katharine Hepburn said once, “Men and women weren’t meant to live together. They should live across the street from one another.” For the first few years of our relationship, before we bit the sugarcoated bullet of matrimony, Alexa and I did exactly that. In the late eighties and early nineties, I had an apartment adjacent to Seattle’s famed Pike Place Market (spending just two days a week at my house in La Conner). Alexa lived a clam’s throw away on Western. Our symptoms were sporadic yet remained strangely coordinated. When an episode would visit me, I’d ring up Alexa across the street and ask, “Are you feeling…?” Invariably, she’d respond, “Yeah, it just started.” It was like synchronized swimming in a pool of pathology.

About six months into the disease, I consulted the pope’s doctor. The offices of Dr. Kevin Cahill were in Manhattan, where he served the health needs of the cardinals, bishops, priests, and lay holy mackerels of the New York Diocese, and had been medical consultant to John Paul during the pontiff’s visit to America. Dr. Cahill also happened to be the world’s leading authority on West African diseases. Although I was never examined or diagnosed by Cahill, he informed me during a telephone conversation that “We have names and medical profiles for only about one-eighth of the viruses one can contract in West Africa.” Since Alexa and I apparently had one of the anonymous seven-eighths, I decided to name it, christening it “djiggiebombo” after the village where we had rested, half dead from heat exhaustion, before climbing down the Bandiagara escarpment into Dogon country. Once named, the virus was a bit easier to deal with: I could talk to it, flatter it, encourage it to take a hike of its own.

Djiggiebombo lingered on, nevertheless, and three more months would pass before another phone conversation with another New Yorker led to a startling resolution. This time I’d been speaking with Jonathan Cott, a senior writer for Rolling Stone . Jon had recently returned from Niger, a neighboring country to Mali, where he’d been reporting on the location filming of The Sheltering Sky, Bernardo Bertolucci’s big-screen adaptation of Paul Bowles’s harrowing novel. While in Niger, Jon had unintentionally offended a local witch doctor, who cast a spell that caused him — a gentle, sophisticated, worldly fellow — to roll around in the hot sand off and on for three days, begging Tuareg extras to chop off his head with one of their long swords: big bad juju. Jon assured me that in West Africa black magic is a flourishing reality at which only fools scoffed, and encouraged me to consider it as a possible cause of our so-called djiggiebombo.

Consider I did, and at one point in the deliberation my memory bank, like a constipated slot machine, expelled a single tarnished but negotiable coin. I turned it over and over and slowly the hairs on the back of my neck stood in their follicles and looked around in vain for an exit. A particular occurrence in Timbuktu, previously filed under the label “Interesting but Insignificant Local Color,” was now petitioning for a front-page headline in my mnemonic tabloid.

The moon had been full that night — and believe me, Timbuktu under a full moon lives up to its billing as a metropolis of mystery. All around us the mystique was so thick you could have sliced it with a Tuareg sword. With nary a mountain, a skyscraper or even a tree to impede its ascent, the desert moon seemed to pop up fast, like a flat-faced rabbit some magician has pulled from a hat, and earth’s phantom lover was already high-beaming its sweet, fey mischief when Pasquale and the boys interrupted our early supper to invite us to a dance. On such a night, only a wimp would have refused.

As the moon would have it, the dance was an open-air affair, the dance floor itself a concrete slab the size and shape of a tennis court. On its right side, a band of musicians was warming up, their instruments consisting of a couple of Western-style acoustic guitars and an array of strange African contraptions, both wind and percussive; made from gourds, goat bones, wires, bottles, and sticks; all polished, painted, played with expertise and accorded utmost respect. Next to the band there sat on wooden benches the eligible bachelors of Timbuktu. Across the court from the men, twenty or twenty-five young women had gathered, exuding all the poise and assurance the males appeared to lack. Tall, stately, fine-featured, garbed head to toe in those West African fabrics that could make a rainbow blush, the women looked like fashion models, each and every one. Small wonder the men were intimidated.

Once the band commenced to play in earnest, a number of women, impatient with the time it was taking the men to get up their nerve, took to the court and began dancing with one another. It reminded me of my junior prom in rural Virginia. We rubberneckers were huddled at one end of the slab, just taking it all in, when one of those statuesque beauties approached us and beckoned me onto the floor. When I looked to Pasquale for guidance, he indicated that I should oblige. So, I danced with her for a while, and then a second woman cut in and took her place. After that, a third. The band just played continuously, there being no individual numbers as such. I asked my third partner why the other women were laughing at us — I thought maybe my moves were awkward, too Western, too white — but she replied that Partner Number 2 had announced that she was going to marry me. (Alexa! Help!)