The best cinematic experience of my life was when I was stationed on the coast of Zanzibar in the 1980s. The locals set up what I can only describe as a makeshift theater using linen bedsheets spread using a pulley system across the crumbling, festively-painted side wall of an apartment building abandoned for the past ten years over rumors of a ghost. All the other houses, shanties really, were single storey, so the people sat on blankets spread on the rooftops while wooden planks afforded access to attractive young girls selling from green glass bottles held by ropes around their slender necks cigarettes and candy, and if the whispers were to be believed, love. A projector was set up atop the ward office, and a single speaker provided sound. I brought a girl with me, a fellow Anglo. Her blonde hair drew every eye, and she sat firmly in my lap with my arms wrapped around her as we lounged on a pile of cushions beside the projector, a place of honor. I remember the feeling of her breasts through her summer dress. The dandy Muhammed, a towering man in his bird’s egg blue suit, patrolled the rooftops to keep things respectable. I watched as the elderly magistrate operated the machine, desperately scrambling to assemble feed reels with an antique splicer, his eyes always alert for cigarette burns. I would say that his antics were more fascinating than the movie, but the main feature that night was Cinema Paridiso, played from a pirated copy. Of course the audio was in the original Italian, which I speak, and the subtitles were in Swahili. My lover understood neither, so I whispered a running commentary in her ear. I do not remember if we watched the censored version or the uncensored version, but for some reason I could not describe the climax to her, as my throat had seized. She felt my tears, though, and understood. Later that night, as we made love in my apartment, I told her that I had decided to leave Zanzibar. Perhaps this was the worst.