When the jab was punching me from behind my ribs, so strong I almost blacked out, I made up my mind. I would walk over to the woman and try to start a conversation. Carry your bag, Madame? Are you hot, Madame? Shall we go to the hotel, Madame? They love that sort of sweet stuff. I think Malik’s old man knows that too, how to approach white ladies. I think he must have brought back ‘Kind of Blue’ from over there. For a few months he was on a waiting list for a visa and would hang around the airport in Ouaga, until finally he hid in a wooden crate. After a few days of crouching in the dark without water he realized it was sheer rubbish, as he told me with his legs stretched out and his arms dug in somewhere behind his neck, me nodding the whole time like I knew about it, like I had spent countless heat waves crouched on a scant square metre, so he climbed out and turned himself in to the authorities. Deportation was followed by sitting on the terrace. But that too, how I got on with Malik’s old man, I will talk about some other time. Now the question was how to get that yellow bag in my hands. Nicely. Because knives at the belly is fucked up. I do not want to do that anymore. I have got to give it up, Malik’s titties or not. Let him make the most of them if he wants, I have a new day dawning; I don’t know what or how exactly, maybe I will train as a tailor; I’ve been invited, but I will see. First I need to take care of this marbly-eyed white woman in front of me. To get her over from the other side of the street and then lightly, invisibly, brush against her. If she smells good, I will get myself invited to her hotel – if she does not talk too much. But I do not think she will talk too much.
* * *
How did I know how old he was? Well, I didn’t. I didn’t have a clue who I was dealing with or what he wanted from me. Especially not after he fell asleep. I don’t think he knew either. These people can be unpredictable. Just when you think you understand them they do something unexpected. The cab driver at the airport, for example, instead of driving me to the market took me to meet his family. When I hinted that I had to pee, he waited for me by the road, as if from then on he would be my comforter, lover, and bodyguard. That’s also more or less how he introduced me to his family later, despite meeting me for the first and last time only that day. When I asked where I could wash my hands and pointed to the right, he nodded; when I pointed to the left, he nodded again. For him, there was water in the sky and water beneath the earth. He probably saw cloudy water even in me, which is why, after lots of persuading, fifteen cups of oversweet tea, and endless handshaking – how is your family? how are your children? how is your house? – he ended up dropping me in front of some building named after Gaddafi. Then I lugged my bag past insane drivers stirring up clouds of dust – I had arrived in Ouagadougou right at the start of the dry season, which the tourist brochure said was the best time to visit sub-Saharan Africa; the rainy season meant impassable roads, mosquitoes, regular power outages, and so on – past vendors selling butchered meat on which swarms of flies were grazing, big dark flies with green bellies; past troops of children who were trying to attract attention with empty, rusted tomato-paste tins – eventually I realized the tins were not so much functional but were mainly status symbols – past tall, slender women with dark, shiny skin, who sliced vegetables on their open palms.
Somewhere about halfway to the market, beneath a row of acacia trees, I leaned against the edge of a roadside wall with my bag and lit a cigarette. As I puffed out smoke I realized this was that opposite thing I had desired. To leave the silence I’d been cocooned in the past few months; to leave my relationship with my son, which had destroyed, no, not destroyed, but crumbled something in me. He was about the same age as the young man I would meet a few hours after that cigarette. And last but not least, I desired also, or especially, to leave my relationship with my aged father.
I called him that, though he wasn’t in fact my real father. He and my mother, who also wasn’t my real mother, adopted me when I was about three and a half. One afternoon when they were fed up with waiting, or rather my father was, since my mother was always a calm, quiet, too quiet, woman – when he was fed up with putting it in her soft, white, too white, body with no result. And so they came. Not all that far, really. I was sitting with my legs stretched out in the middle of a big, only half-whitewashed room in the orphanage. Shoeless, in a sort of baggy dress, which in fact had been sewn from remnants of the cloth they used to cover the potatoes in the cellar to keep them from sprouting. I’m not entirely sure what happened to the potatoes later; they probably ended up raw and blackened, with all their attendant outgrowths, in our stomachs, and so clothed us on the inside too. And in fact I don’t remember their faces either, which gazed at me expectantly. I could say that her face was kinder, more promising, than his. But I only see this now, from a distance. Back then I suppose I was lucky that they even crossed the threshold of the orphanage, that they even wanted me. Nobody asked if I wanted them. That’s how times were back then and that’s how it happened.
As I leaned on the wall by the road, at least ten people offered me a lift to the market, but I shook my head at each one in turn. Even before I’d finished my cigarette, one woman, a huge, dark-skinned woman with a great dome of batik cloth on her head, rolled down the car window and with two fingers let me know that what I was doing wasn’t good. That it did not set a good example. I don’t know if I can describe her gesture effectively, but it certainly had an effect on me. My first reaction was to turn red; then I realized I’d have to get used to a man nodding yes when you ask if the bathroom is on the left and doing the same when you point to the right, and I would also have to get used to non-privacy. I suppose that’s what I wanted. I suppose I wanted to cleanse myself of the blue light that filtered into my workroom from the garden. The cushioned chair, the table in the corner, and the view through the window. A static sight where only the birds changed; eventually it started getting on my nerves. When the situation became hopeless, or maybe only seemed hopeless to me, if hopelessness is like deafness, I tore the wallpaper off the walls – black-and-white, aquamarine, violet wallpaper – shut the pillows away in cupboards, and threw my sketches in the wastebasket. At a certain point I couldn’t draw anymore; I couldn’t create the botanical motifs my customers were demanding. With a little exaggeration you could say I had stopped believing in art, or that the miles and miles of sumptuous fabric, the cashmere and silk on which I drew my stylized images of plants, had softened my skin.
Sometimes at night I dreamed I had cocooned myself in plant roots and couldn’t breathe. When at last I opened my eyes, no one was there in the morning to bring me a glass of water. I had been alone for such a long time it seemed entirely normal. Alone, that is, if I don’t count my son, who was cocooned in a world of his own, or my father, who had started bringing women home after my mother’s death. Not that he hadn’t done it before, but now it was definitely official.
I don’t know if it’s the right moment to reveal this, but my father isn’t the only one to blame for my leaving; mainly, it’s my son. Somewhere along the way I saw it was unhealthy; I mean a mother and her nearly thirty-year-old son living in the same house together. Everywhere you hear people railing against homosexual couples, but no one talks about the chauvinistic and racist relations in traditional families. What would supporters of the conservative camp say about my father’s behaviour toward my mother? He took all the money she earned sewing undergarments and scattered it to the winds. Later she had to ask him to give her something for nylons! What would they say about my son, who for several weeks sat in his room burning photographs from his childhood in a metal jug. When the photos ran out, he started in on my exquisite printed pillows. The tree leaf prints from different species burned like nobody’s business. Even later, after he was admitted to the mental hospital and given electro shock therapy, the black mark was still on the ceiling. I didn’t repaint; I didn’t want to touch anything anymore. His shirts, too, I left hanging in the wardrobe. Maybe he’ll return one day and want to find his things just
as he left them.
The only thing I did after he left was to occasionally play a CD of his on the CD player. But that gloomy environmental music scared away the birds in the garden. So then I would just lay my head on the worktable and fall asleep. My customers, who’d been calling like mad, eventually stopped.
When my father rang the doorbell one afternoon, saying he wanted to introduce me to his new lady friend, who simply adored my stuff and would love it if I could decorate her flat for her – with silk throw pillows on the sofas, pink printed wallpaper, bedspreads in fiery shades – I knew things had reached the end. That I had to do something, go somewhere. For a moment or two I kept looking back and forth from the computer to the garden through the window, but then things inside me started crumbling, like the dust on African roads during the dry season. The last time I visited him, my son didn’t recognize me. I had brought him a carton of cigarettes and some mango juice. I hoped that after strolling through the park we’d light cigarettes and, like in the old days, in those black-and-white films we watched on Sunday afternoons, with all that elegance and all those women in high heels holding crystal tumblers of whisky, in which the crackling of the ice was barely audible – I suppose these symbolic objects were meant to proclaim their self-confidence, their independence, comparable at times to the self-confidence of men – I hoped we would share a few minutes of silence. But nothing like that happened. He looked through me, like the cab driver did when I asked him left or right. Maybe he was thinking about the water in the sky and beneath the earth, was maybe thinking too about the water that flows through our bodies, through his, especially. If nothing else, he must at least have felt his own body, physical pressure, pain.
My father, for example, did not want to visit him. He said it was all my fault. After everything he had done to us, to my mother especially, he had the nerve to utter such filth. So when his new lady friend was spinning around the house, sighing how wonderful, what fiery colours, what a wonderful investment I would be, and when finally they went out into the garden to look at the place of my inspiration, and even more the place of my loneliness, I locked the garden door behind them. I crept up to the door, as if creeping up behind someone’s back, and with an almost thievish smile on my face turned the key in the lock. At first they didn’t understand what had happened to them; what they felt later doesn’t matter one way or another. Had I given them the chance, they would have probably pressed their faces to the windowpane and with two fingers, like that dark-skinned woman with the head cloth, let me know that what I was doing wasn’t good. That it did not set a good example. That they would deal with me when they got out. But as I said, I don’t know what happened later. Then I just turned off the computer, fluffed the remaining pillows, scrubbed the counter a little too, and left. I locked the door and left.
* * *
There’s a scene from film noir which my father never questioned. The woman, her blouse quickly discarded, is sitting on his lap. Her naked arms embrace his neck; she is kissing him; then he pushes her away and goes to the window. Out of the corner of his eye he still tracks her skin and the scent that emanates from her skin, but for him it’s already too late. A few months ago he would still have forgiven her. A few months ago he would not have uttered that sentence: Il y a bien d’autres choses que toi dans la monde. But for her part, she is sure she has done nothing wrong, that things can be fixed. She does not understand the loneliness that engulfed him when she showed him the doctor’s report.
He has always been alone, he said, but this was a completely new loneliness. More bitter, more painful than before; a loneliness that was like being abandoned.
She slowly got up from the chair and crossed her arms over her breasts. Wearing only her skirt, she was cold, although she knew the chill came not from the room but from inside her. At the same time, she also knew how trite this scene was – her at one end of the room, him at the other. In fact, the only view from the window was the roof of another house, so there was nothing for him to see but himself. There are plenty of other things in this world besides you. Where did he get that sentence anyway? Did he really think they were in some movie? But her hair was not platinum blonde, just ordinary hair held in place by a gold-plated barrette, and his were not the powerful loins of a movie actor, from which he might make a child for her.
But all the same, she asked him again to forgive her. Maybe the doctor made a mistake; maybe nothing he wrote in the report was true. Maybe she isn’t empty inside; maybe he’s the one who’s empty, although she could not say this to him now, undressed as she was, with her exposed shoulders and breasts, her pink nipples erect from the cold; she felt herself becoming even a little embarrassed, that she had put herself in an impossible position, all the more impossible because at this very moment he was gazing out the window and thinking lofty thoughts. Something, she supposed, about how a person is always lonely, alienated, cast into the world. But if you are guaranteed offspring, if you know that this here and now is not all there is, then, presumably, things might be a little easier.
‘What if we adopt?’ she asked, although she’d been thinking about asking something else. Like, was it true that men don’t think of themselves as frivolous, or afraid of loneliness, let alone afraid of losing love? But this was exactly what was happening to him. He was afraid. She could tell by how he pushed her away, stood up, and went to the window. But now, from a distance, she also understood that, mainly, he was blackmailing her. Because they wouldn’t have children, because she could not give him children, he would extract certain privileges for himself. Women. Going out at night to films. And, again, women, and especially her consent, that he could have them whenever he needed. And money, too. What she earned from sewing undergarments would go straight in his pocket.
But all this she could still bear if, in the scene, he would turn and look at her. And kiss her naked breasts and tell her they didn’t have to be so lonely, they could adopt a child.
Instead, he only stepped away from the window, bent over – a painful, unnatural bow, by which he was trying to conceal his hesitation, that despite everything he desired her milk-fragrant skin, her fine hair, which never grew past her shoulders, her slightly pink nipples – and then picked the blouse up from the floor all the same. He told her to get dressed and go make him tea in the kitchen. He spoke French, but in the late afternoons he still had his cup of tea. Sitting on the bench by the table, he still stared blankly in front of himself and wondered how he could overcome alienation. How does he explain to a woman who’s been fighting body and soul for what she ultimately saw as the only good – how does he explain to her that he does not believe it’s possible to eliminate dissonance in the realm of the empirical? What was she trying to say with that unbuttoned blouse? That everything would be different if they made love? That that was how they could reclaim their dignity?
‘There’s a three-year-old girl in the orphanage. I’ve already chosen a name for her. Ana. We’ll call her Ana.’
He lifted his face. He lifted it as if lifting it for the first time. Her skin really did seem mixed with water. Now he was already sorry for that sentence, though not for anything else. But since he had said it in a different language, she had not understood. There would always be an insurmountable barrier of loneliness between them. At first he thought they would overcome it by having a child, but he changed his mind when, in that skirt and blouse, she handed him the doctor’s report. All he had expected from her, nothing more and nothing less, was offspring. And a little lightness too. Like this tea and the plucked sprig of cherry blossom on the table. So far everything seemed fine, if only there wasn’t that obsessive look in her eye. That she had to hold on to him at any cost, that she would consent even to other women, would give him all the money she earned, would learn French, and, if he wanted her to, would perform that scene in the film where the man pushes the woman away when she tries to embrace him. Deftly, with a practiced motion, she slips out of her b
louse and stands behind his back. Together they gaze at the roof of the neighbouring house. Because there is nothing for them to see, they are gazing mainly at themselves. The man thinks about the fact that, because she has consented to his meeting other women and taking them to evening films, he remains alone with himself and with the world, he has learned to experience himself and the world, and he knows what has been taken and what has been given; she, meanwhile, thinks about the sentence he said in French. Where did he get it anyway? Did he really think they were in some movie?
Suddenly, he leaned across the table; the darkened, half-cooled surface of the tea lurched and threatened to spill over the rim. ‘Ana’s a nice name. If you want, we’ll call her Ana.’
* * *
Despite all that happened between us, my son knew that the doors to the mysterious and unpredictable realms in the depths of my thoughts, overspread with gardens of strange and dread-inducing flowers and plants, were closed to him. This forbidden territory was at most the target of certain adverts for soap and detergent, and maybe detective novels and colourful newspaper supplements. I sometimes noticed him watching me from under his brows or from the side, trying to catch a glimmer of this oily female domain. Or when we’d be strolling in town and meet one of my girlfriends, he’d scrutinize her as if searching for a clue. Only once did he ask if I agreed with that Lars von Trier movie. The one where the woman loves her orgasm more than her son.
Dry Season Page 2
