She was nineteen years old and already ten days blind. On Friday, I touched her shoulder, then lifted her eyelid with my thumb and leaned in with a borrowed ophthalmoscope. She fixed her eyes straight ahead, rested her hands in her lap, did not speak. The fundus of her eye was red and crossed with vessels. The pediatrician said Follow the veins back to the optic disk, and there it was: yellow-gold, somehow like a coin. Above it, an irregular white ischemia. I whispered my thanks in Bambara, and she remained still, or perhaps nodded once. Her heart was a riot of murmurs. There was talk of bringing her to Bamako. Tuesday morning, she leaned on her arms and struggled to breathe. I wasn’t in the clinic when her lungs failed, then everything else.
When I returned late in the afternoon, she was gone and her father was pacing the grounds, wearing the long, loose robes of the villagers.
I worked until seven, then walked home in the orange light of early evening. The streetlamps came on, the motorbikes spun dust into the air, the children greeted me and disappeared behind mud walls.
Halfway to home, the boy with Down Syndrome waved to me across the paved street, crossed to follow behind, and finally joined me. We walked the last half mile together, and we parted in the dark, down where the main road encircles the unfinished monument.