by Rawi Hage
We drove to my apartment and she waited in the car. I came down with a bag of books and then I drove her to a small hotel downtown. When I asked her why she wouldn’t stay the night with me, she said that she had to learn to be alone. We arrived and I took her up to her room. I pulled out a bottle of whisky that I’d brought from home and I left it for her on the table next to the bag of books. Food? I asked her. She shook her head no. Should I call you later? I asked.
If you like, she said, and started to cry.
ON THE WAY back I picked up a passenger in front of a different hotel. The porter waved at me and I was surprised that he did, because all those fancy hotels are rigged. The spider drivers have it all secured in a web of bribes and corruption. The porters and the receptionists are at the heart of it. When a client asks for a taxi to the airport, which is a substantial fare, the receptionist informs the porter, who in turn calls the dispatcher, who is also in on it, and the dispatcher calls one of a few chosen spiders to take the client to the airport. The driver gets the big fare and everyone gets a little something. These few spiders have their rigs set up in most if not all of the big hotels in town, and they all make good money. But once in a while, if the spiders are too busy or too late, the porter is obliged to pick up a taxi on the fly. And this time it was my luck.
I parked and let the porter in his Sherlock Holmes attire open the door for the client. As I was loading the suitcases into the trunk, Sherlock came to my side, blocking the view from the hotel, and stretched out his hand. It remained there, extended, until I took his open palm in my hand and said to him, Elementary, my dear, elementary.
I closed the trunk, got in my seat, and drove the client away.
The passenger was a bit quiet. So I talked about the rain.
Rain doesn’t bother me, he said. It is sweat that I fear.
Indeed, I said, I think I know what you mean. Not to be too philosophical, but I agree with you: it is what surfaces from the inside that counts.
You say philosophical, but I would attribute your comments to religion.
How interesting, I said.
Well, Jesus.
Jesus? I replied.
Matthew 15: It is not what enters into the mouth that defiles the man, but what proceeds out of the mouth, this defiles the man, the man in the back seat of my car declared so eloquently.
Well, well, revolutionary, I said. There goes all that meticulously prepared celestial food down the drain. What an anarchist of an anorexic commie that Christ was!
Are you a believer, my friend? Do you believe in the lord Jesus, king and saviour?
To tell you the truth, I am not too keen on kings and royalties . . . but to come back to your question, I ask, does Jesus believe in himself?
Jesus believes in the Father and the Holy Ghost.
And the Father believes in his own father and so forth, I mumbled, imagining an endless family tree of Godfathers and forefathers and a legion of prophets and holy ghosts moving up and down the branches and clapping their hands between their acrobatic performances that somehow always ended with a fistful of peanuts or a banana peel.
Are you married, brother? the man asked me.
No.
Girlfriend?
Never, I said.
You are not one of those, are you?
Gay, you mean. Not yet, but a fortune teller assured me that I might have a life-changing encounter one of these days.
The fortune teller meant it in the religious sense, I hope. Have you ever considered having a family and kids?
No.
Do you ever think about your old age?
Yes, I said. It is all planned.
I hope not alone?
No, I know exactly how it is going to be, if I am lucky. I’ll grow old, I’ll sell my books, and give my bed to the Salvation Army. By then, I imagine, I’ll already have grown a beer belly and yellow toenails. I shall get a ticket to an old island in the south, live among the locals with the little money that I have saved. Sunbathe and drink rum until the banana regime comes and chases me out, or until the regime chases itself out for lack of any other thing left to chase, whichever comes first.
You should get married and have kids, the man said to me, then you’ll know the meaning of life. Who do you think will take care of you and visit you when you are sick and old?
The chambermaid and her mother, I said. The young local girl that I’ll marry in the south. Like I said, it is all in the plan. I’ll be supporting her and her whole family, her gambler of a brother, and her father, who, incidentally, will also become my future domino game partner and who will make fun of my age every time he wins a game, calling me Papa Turko. I’ll be best friends with her mother, with whom I’ll see eye to eye on issues of marriage, cooking, and old age. I’ll make sure that the fridge is always full, that the white sheets of the bed are run now and again through the washing machine that I’ll have bought my young wife for her birthday. My wife, who lost her first husband in an illegal caravan crossing to the north, was in danger of starving with her two kids until I came along from the snowy pole with a dog by the name of Rudolph and offered her a secure life in return for company, good meals, and a tolerant attitude to my sagging old man’s breasts, my belly button’s disappearance under the flesh of my falling beer belly, and, as I’ve previously mentioned, my yellow toenails . . . and that, my friend, would be the sweetest company any chariot driver ever dreamed of in his old age. What a glorious ending, sir! What a reward for a hard life of solitude and wandering. Imagine that I could sit every day on the beach, with the sea in front of my eyes and the white laundered sheets flapping behind my back. I will lie down and watch the passing tourist boats with a drink in my hand, I’ll appear before them in my ridiculous swimsuit that covers the tumbling parts of my decaying body. And, if I am lucky, I’ll die watching the ocean against the backdrop of a white movie screen with memory fragments and episodic replays of my life bouncing on the washed bedsheets as they dance through the turbulent blows of life.
I still think that you should get married and settle down before it is too late, the passenger behind me said, as I drove and watched the road and the rain, as I listened to the sound of the wipers’ monotonous swings. The same rhythm, the same dance, the same swing of the pelvis after dinner and between the news breaks and the sway of the nocturnal toothbrush, the same keys, same breakfast, and same The doorbell is ringing, darrrrling, the same dog with its monotonous tail swings to welcome you after your car engine has stopped above the same spot of oil on the ground of the same garage. We arrived at the airport. The rain had stopped and the wipers rested.
I unloaded the man’s luggage from the trunk. He paid me and we shook hands, and as he was about to turn and depart he said to me, Good luck with your solitary existence. But remember, my son, the Lord’s path is always open.
So long, I replied, may we all have one good flight before we rest among flowers and the orbits of hungry worms.
He left and I turned back towards the city and drove through the empty roads, and I rejoiced at the privilege of a ride through the falling rains.
THE DEALER CALLED my apartment. When I answered, all he said was, Tonight we are on.
So I waited for him once more. He came down wearing shades though it was late in the evening. He got in and sat in the back seat, quiet. I watched him in the mirror and waited for instructions. He waved his hand and I drove straight ahead, and when we reached the end of the street he said, Left and right and straight to the port area. He wasn’t talkative at all. But then he said, You can go home early tonight. It is just a meeting.
We arrived.
Good, he said. Park behind the container here. Then we waited and we both watched in the rearview mirror.
A big car came from behind and pulled up next to us. There were two men inside. I tried not to look. The less I know, the safer I’ll be, I thought.
Stay here, the dealer said. I’ll be back.
So I turned off the engine and opened a book to read, but the light was dim and I didn’t want to turn on the interior light. Carefulness and survival instincts made me welcome the dark. I will give it fifteen minutes, I thought, and then I will leave. It was an overcast night, there was no moon to be seen, and there was a fence between my car and the river. I don’t often listen to the radio, besides it drains the battery when the engine is not running, but some of those spiders pass their lives driving and listening to talk-show programs. With time, if they spend enough years in this land, they start complaining about foreigners just like themselves and lazy people and the government’s waste of money. And though none of these drivers pays any taxes, they start walking like big taxpayers and old men with large umbrellas who feel justified in their sense of entitlement because they fought old wars and gave half their money to the nation state. Buffoons, some of these drivers are. They like to have those voices in their heads.
Once, in Café Bolero, Number 115 stood up and grabbed the public phone in the hallway next to the bathroom and he kept dialling until he got on. The waitress turned up the volume and everyone in the café got quiet, and then the right-wing anchor, with his little-girl voice, interrupted 115, first corrected his English, and then asked him, Where you are calling from? And he followed that with: I thought you were calling from India, pal. How did we let you in here? Everyone laughed and thought it was a good joke, but I left the restaurant, sat in my car, and cried.
A light beamed from behind me. I thought it was the dealer come back to interrupt my thoughts, but then a man in a guard’s uniform knocked on my window. I could see the silhouette of his partner in my mirror, standing behind my car on the other side. I slowly rolled down the glass and made sure he could see that both my hands were on the wheel.
What are you doing here? This is private property.
Whose property? I inquired, for no reason.
It is the port authority’s property. There is a sign back there. No one is allowed in after 8 p.m.
Well, the sign must not be lit, or I would have seen it.
You are trespassing. Licence and registration, please.
I had just handed him my licence when another car pulled up. The dealer stepped out, walked towards us, and said, He is with me.
The security guard immediately handed me back my papers and the dealer got into the car. As I was about to drive away, the dealer asked me to wait. He lowered the window and called the man back. Thursday, he said. The guard nodded and turned away.
FREDAO
IN THE DAYS when I lived with Otto and Aisha, Linda would come around. And often she would bring Tammer and leave him for the night. Other times, a week or more. Tammer was a quiet boy; he accepted things and hardly complained. He seemed not to object to being around new people. When his mother left, he would just stare after her and then look away. Once I made him laugh by turning myself into a clown. I juggled a few balls and I balanced on the edge of the sofa with an umbrella in my hand. I pulled coins from his ear and sang with water in my mouth. The kid laughed and said, More.
One day Otto went looking for Linda on the streets because Tammer had a fever and was asking for his bed and for his mother. That was how Otto met Linda’s pimp, Fredao, who was from Angola and claimed to have been a child soldier with UNITA, and to have participated in the liberation of Angola from the Portuguese.
Soon after, Otto decided to talk to Fredao about helping Tammer with his school fees and books and clothes. Otto, man, Fredao said, when they were both drunk, sitting under a bridge on the banks of the town’s river, listen, the worst kind of colonization was us poor niggers who were colonized by the Portuguese. The French gave us some culture, the British some laws, but those Portuguese gave us nothing. And when the filth left our lands, they dismantled everything down to the last light bulb in the factories and the last neon light in our stores. But then the Cubans came and they were not colonizers . . . I started my career, Fredao smiled, by providing women to the Cuban soldiers, and that is how I learned the pimping business. He laughed. A soldier needs guns, food, and sex no matter what, and our women were willing to give their bodies to those fighters because the Cubans installed schools for our kids, provided us with doctors for our sick, clean water, medicine. What did the European colonizers leave behind after hundreds of years of ravaging our continent and our bones? Nothing!
After Fredao was done with his rant, Otto looked him straight in the eye and calmly said, The kid is asking for his mother and he needs to be in school again.
The kid’s mother is working hard. She is working for the cause, the pimp said, and laughed.
ONE DAY, AISHA came home and asked Otto, What are you going to be, Otto? Where are we going with this?
I am going to take care of you, he said, and held her in his arms.
Otto took on many jobs after that. He was a shoe salesman and a warehouse clerk. He delivered Chinese food, and sold shirts on the street, and he always organized at night. He wrote ferociously, demanding public housing and protesting against greedy developers. He wrote some fiction, but Aisha read a few of his stories and then one day she told him: Otto dear, you are no Baldwin, I say you should stick to propaganda. And she passed her fingers through his hair. Some of Otto’s articles were published in fringe newspapers and activist pamphlets; others were read aloud at demonstrations.
Late at night Otto and I would listen to old speeches by Stokely Carmichael and play Black Panthers cassettes and sit at the window and smoke. Before demonstrations or meetings, we would fill buckets with warm water, gradually pour in starch, and mix it to make wheat paste. We’d carry the pamphlets in our backpacks and walk the neighbourhood with our buckets and brushes, pasting electric poles with our homemade glue and covering walls and blocks in calls for justice and revolt.
One night a police car pulled up quietly behind us. Only when they were nearly touching us did they switch on their beams. I, Fly, who was accustomed to the glaring floodlights of circus spectacles and the harshness of stage lights, jumped over a fence and fled into the neighbouring backyards. But Otto, nocturnal creature that he was, froze like a deer in the road. Two officers began pulling down the posters. Instead of running away, Otto protested and kicked one of the buckets. It hit the police car, covering the hood with glue. They pulled Otto into the shadows and beat him with sticks and left him half-conscious on the road. That was for dirtying my shoes, one of the officers said on his way back to the car.
When I realized that Otto had stayed behind, I ran back. I saw him lying on the ground. I went to him and tried to pull him up. His shirt was bloodied, his eyes rolled in horror, he hissed, spat red colours, and cursed, Fucking cops, fucking pigs. He wiped blood from his face and said, It is not over between us . . .
Aisha kept up her work with battered women, neglected children, and evicted tenants until one day, not long after Otto’s beating, she collapsed. We are both burned out, she said, crying. It is time to rest. We decided to split up. Otto and Aisha left the house and the neighbourhood, and I went my own way. They put the struggle on hold because they had watched each other getting older and poorer and seen their comrades leaving the cause and getting married, holding jobs, and raising children. Aisha said to me that now they wanted to take care of each other, and I understood. And she wept and told me how much they both loved me.
For years afterwards, I wandered alone, though I stayed in contact with Otto and Aisha. Once in a while they would come and live with me for a week or so, and we would talk about books, music, and the old days. Once or twice they mentioned Tammer and his troubled mother. Then they would leave and I wouldn’t hear from them. Until one day Otto called me and asked me to meet him at the hospital. Aisha was in a single bed and looked much older and very frail. She hardly recognized me, and I held her hand and wept. I looked at Otto and I said, Forgive me, I
am crying, and Otto said, We are all crying.
AFTER AISHA’S DEATH Otto withdrew for a while and no one saw him. I would call him but he would never call me back. And then, suddenly, he showed up at my door with a beard and a six-pack of beer and he said, For a short while. He slept in my bed at night while I went to work. In the morning I would wake him up and take the bed and sleep while he sat in the kitchen and smoked and drank coffee until the afternoon. Then he would eat a piece of bread and leave, and the apartment would be empty for a few hours.
Otto stacked the kitchen table with files and literature. He would sit there and write, copy, and take notes. He borrowed books from the library and read and bent pages and underlined paragraphs. When I asked him what he was working on, he said he was gathering a list of important people.
For donations? I asked.
He laughed, puffed a few rings of smoke, looked at me with a half-smile, and said, Yeah, donations. You are a joker, Fly.
Once I tried to bring up Aisha, but he looked at me and said, She is dead. They killed her.
Who killed her?
This world killed her.
One night I came home and found the kitchen table cleared and a note telling me he was moving on and that he would be in touch.
A few weeks later, Otto joined a large march organized by community groups, unions, leftist intellectuals, anarchists, and activists. They had mobilized to protest a three-day summit held by the leaders of the region, who planned to impose a series of neoliberal economic policies.
The march was attended by thousands. The police erected fences and closed a part of the downtown and forbade all access to it. Speeches were made by various workers and leaders, flags of resistance waved, banners flown, and songs sung. One evening a few hundred activists camped out around a big fire in the park. They drummed and danced all night.
Otto was there. All of a sudden he heard the sound of activists yelling. A voice from the police megaphone ordered them to put out the fire and vacate the park. The activists started to boo and shout and the police, in full riot gear, banged their sticks against their shields and marched, pushing the crowd back, and then another platoon approached in the same slow and relentless manner from the opposite side. Otto shouted, It is a sweep! and he raised the beer bottle in his hand, ran towards the line of police, and threw the bottle against the shield of an officer. The bottle fell and shattered. Many were arrested, but Otto was singled out.
