Between The Harmattan And The Seine

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The morning was already bright at six o’clock, light hammering the white walls without mercy.

She kept a notebook. She always kept a notebook. Her professors called it a habit; her mother called it a disease; she called it the only honest thing she owned.

She had been in Lagos exactly 1 day, which was long enough to know that her first impressions had been wrong about almost everything, and not long enough to have entirely replaced them.

Isabelle Fontaine arrives at Lagos harbour on a French steamer, watching the city materialise from the heat haze. She is writing in her notebook before she has even disembarked.

He had been born into a world that organised itself around the assumption of his inadequacy, and had spent every year since then being meticulously, methodically, furiously excellent in spite of it.

She opened her notebook — she always opened her notebook — and wrote a date at the top of the page with the deliberateness of someone staking a claim. Then she wrote what she saw. Then she crossed out what she had written and wrote what she actually saw, which was different, and better, and harder to send home in a letter.

She was, she acknowledged in the privacy of her own chest, in some difficulty.

He had grown up in the Ajegunle neighbourhood with his mother, three sisters, and the certainty that intelligence was not the problem.

The city moved around her in its full, layered way: vendors and office workers and schoolchildren and market women and harbour men and, above all of them, the sky, which in Lagos had a width that Paris did not prepare you for.

She wrote: *Lagos is a city that happens to you.* Then, underneath: *I wonder if I am happening to it in any way. I wonder if that is possible.* Then, underneath that: *I think it might be.*

She closed the notebook. She looked out at the shaded courtyard of Adaeze’s family compound. Somewhere in this city, she thought, was the thing she had come here to understand. She had not found it yet. She was, she was beginning to sense, very close.

The afternoon extended itself in the way Lagos afternoons did when you were paying attention — spaciously, generously, as if time understood that some things needed room.

The Franco-British Cultural Mission existed, officially, to facilitate cultural exchange. Unofficially, it existed to ensure the right people remained comfortable.

She had been adding to her notebook’s Lagos glossary: words Adaeze had taught her, phrases from the market, the particular cadence of Kolade’s English which was architectural and precise and unlike any English she had learned in school.

He thought of what Tunde would say. Tunde would say something unhelpful and exactly right.

“You could go home,” he said. “To Paris. To the version of yourself that never came here.”

“She sounds lonely,” Isabelle said. “That version of myself.”

She had the feeling again: that Lagos was showing her something the world did not want her to see.

She looked at him. He was looking at the horizon, or at something inside himself that he was sorting through with the careful efficiency she’d come to recognise as his most private mode. She waited. He turned.

“I’m glad you stayed,” he said. He meant Lagos. He meant more than Lagos.

“So am I,” she said. She wrote it in her notebook later, verbatim, with the date beside it, because some sentences deserved to be kept exactly as they were said.