I wanted to stroke his hair, but he was too old for such things. We were both too old. I knew the scene he was thinking about: a few moments earlier the camera shows us a penis going in. It is big and wet. It goes into the woman and her scream is drowned out by music. Then a few shots later, a boy jumps out of a window. He moves a chair next to the window and falls into the snowflakes. Somewhere in the air a teddy bear is flapping all by itself. She, meanwhile, has her mouth open in pleasure; the man on top of her knows nothing.
That’s the sort of film my son would watch locked in his room, and that’s why he went crazy, I think.
But this sleeping man in front of me was from another time. He had a god drawn on his face. I wanted to say that earlier but it slipped my mind. As I was walking toward him from the other side of the avenue, I felt a strong desire for him to touch the secret territory inside me. Ever since I gave birth, almost thirty years ago, I knew I had to put it aside for a while. I mean, touching the silky surface of blades of grass with my palm or licking honey slowly from a metal spoon and then looking at my face in it. For a while I was about to surrender to this spell, but when my mother died and then the man my mother so strongly believed in left me, I could not shut myself away inside myself and let the plant roots grow over my face. My father, from the very start, in fact from the moment I came back to Ljubljana, made it all very clear. Do your work, print your botanical designs, or we’ll disown you. Glue the gold leaf onto the cupboards, or we’ll take your son away. So when it was time for me to let myself give in, I wasn’t allowed to. And now, when I could, I was haunted by the feeling that it was too late.
‘Are you sleeping?’ he said, and shifted his god-like body. He was from a golden age, when lovers did not hold hands and hardly ever ran their fingers through each other’s hair.
‘No, I can’t sleep.’
I wanted to say, ‘I don’t know how to sleep like you,’ but there was no point; he wouldn’t understand. A random stranger I had been lying in bed with for an afternoon and a night without anything happening between us.
As I was again depositing my bag on the floor, on the rug, which so many feet, mostly bare feet, had walked over, which gave off the smell of journey, of nakedness, of things left unsaid, it occurred to me that this appendage was all I had left from my former life. Outside it was pouring night, dripping stars, and somewhere in the other world my son was watching yet another crazy movie. This time from his own life.
I gazed at his silence, and then at his big hands with their beautifully shaped nails, somewhat strange for a boy from the street who had already done so many things, but which, all the same, were shoved into his jeans. This is that barren, stony realm, which probably only men possess. Or am I just being old-fashioned?
‘I am cold,’ he said, pointing his chin to just below his waist, as if trying to interrupt my train of thought.
‘So you’re warming your hands?’
‘Yes, but it is also a habit.’ I always imagined that when men stick their hands down their trousers it means protection and, of course, they’re making sure the thing’s still there. My son never did this, at least not in my presence. Our lack of concord, too, was part of it. When something was going on with him, he concealed it; when something was going on with me, I had to show him. To teach him. But I thought another woman would have to teach him everything about the birds and the bees. Another woman, just as I was that other woman for this young man in front of me. ‘A lot of men do it,’ he added lazily, and smiled at me, revealing his upper gum. ‘You have seen footballers do it, haven’t you?’
I was confused – confused by him suddenly using the familiar tu. Would he now start repeating again those vulgar words? Spread your legs, c’mon, let me fuck you. Although... although... he never said them the first time. A lot of women – I’ve seen it in those adverts for soap and detergent, read it even in those detective novels and colourful newspaper supplements – have a desire, no, not desire, obsessive craving, for a rapist. The dread that some man might take their body by force, violate them in some shadowy hotel room, especially if he is handsome and young and dark-complexioned and they are old and withered and fair-complexioned, can become a mantra, an invocation. Oh God, if he really does do something like that, my life will be over. I will open my mouth the way she did, with that moist, gleaming thing inside her, as her child fell into the snowflakes. And the chair by the window remained empty.
‘Sure. So?’
‘That is where we are most sensitive – down there.’ Again I looked at my bag on the floor. All my women friends, once they had met my son, once they had noticed his somewhat wilted, startled appearance, began eyeing me with suspicion. They saw me as a different person, not the Ana they knew. I was still Ana who wore high leather boots in winter and snakeskin flats in summer, Ana who made soft pillows with botanical designs and wallpaper in fiery colours, all those things because she couldn’t tame her mysterious and unpredictable garden, but all the same, I was a different Ana. Ana the traitress. Ana, her son’s inventor, who looked so strong when she gave birth to him. Ana, who after the birth was just like those divas who slurp whisky barefoot on stage and defy the entire world. But later this same Ana’s child went bad on her. ‘Did you know that when hyenas attack they always go for the testicles first?’
And since I didn’t want to see myself or my entire life from some new perspective, I quickly shot back: ‘If they attack a male animal. But what if it’s female?’
‘You women do not feel pain when you get a shock down there?’ he said, and now wasn’t smiling anymore, wasn’t showing his gums. He leaned a little toward my half of the bed and I thought maybe he wanted to touch that secret territory after all.
‘I wouldn’t know. It’s never happened to me. Although in my opinion a vagina is more meant to be gently opened and touched.’
The language we were speaking was not his language. He gave an impression of being some nonchalant brigand who thinks he’s fully in charge, but there, in a chamber of his heart, he was even more vulnerable than my son. ‘Yes, that’s true. It is more closed.’
Now it was my turn to laugh, to show my gums. ‘Do you know what this conversation is?’ And because it didn’t look like he knew, knew anything at all at that moment, I said, a little too brashly, certainly, for that hotel room and for my years: ‘Do you know that just now we’ve been making love?’
All my watercolours together did not possess half the tenderness of his question: ‘You mean with the tongue?’
I wanted him to run his hands through the forest of my hair, wanted to feel that marvellous, dreamlike moment of closeness between a man and a woman, wanted at least for him to open the curtains, the heavy velvet curtains that had made the night even darker, but he did something else entirely.
* * *
It got on my fucking nerves the way she was always talking to somebody, always looking at that bag of hers, which as I predicted had nothing in it. Just some T-shirts, blouses, shorts, and a pair of high-heeled shoes. I guess she must have sewn her wallet and passport under her skin. Really. I searched the whole thing when she was asleep, when we were both officially asleep, and there was nothing there. Maybe she left the important stuff in some other hotel, but then why didn’t she leave the photo there too? A6 format. I know that sort of thing. I can show you my ID from when I worked at the copy shop, until they fired me. But I will not go into that now. Now what matters is what I saw in the photo: a high forehead with long stringy hair hanging down, narrow shoulders like a woman’s, the start of a belly – even though the dude could not have been more than twenty-five or twenty-six, my age in other words. Plus, he had her eyebrows and those big thighs, in red corduroys. So a relative then, a cousin or something. If it was her son, I don’t know what she is doing in bed with me all this time.
I got out of bed and indicated to her with a slight nod that she should follow me. At first she just stared, a
t my back maybe, or my backside. She was probably thinking it was high time we did it. I was thinking too, mainly that I should do something funny, something unexpected, like pick her up and carry her into the bathroom. That woman needed a serious cleansing treatment. All that dust and dirt. And now she was talking too; that drove me crazy more than anything. Maybe with wussy boy from the picture. He looked like he had just crawled out his mama’s arse. His sort is the worst. Smoking hash, getting into trouble, then putting on some angel face. On the street they would strip him and slap him around, then hang him upside down in the sun for a few hours.
Eventually she got up, but instead of following me she went over to her bag, unzipped it, and looked in the side pocket. I knew she was checking to see if the photo was still there. Then she took out a shower sponge and went into the bathroom.
‘Are we going to have a shower together?’ she said, looking a little surprised, though I could tell she liked the idea. I was about to say ‘yah, together’ but changed my mind.
‘You get wet first, then I will scrub you. If you want...’
I do not know. At first I used vous with her; then I started using tu. But after spending the night together, after ogling her thighs and going through her bag, I guess I could do that too. And besides, I did not dislike her. Despite all the dust, which in the harmattan season can fill your mouth and nose and ears and literally turn you into a mummy, she still smelled of something sweet. But here again, I cannot remember what. It’s like she was taking my memory away.
‘Because somewhere you heard that we white people scrub ourselves like this?...’ She showed me with her fingers. It meant as gently as possible. And basically I agreed, though I had no idea how white people took showers. I had never seen them do it, at least not close up and certainly not in a bathroom like this, with walls covered in ceramic tiles. I tell you, that was a five-star hotel.
‘Turn around,’ I blurted, a little too fast and too loud, which made her turn around right away, without hesitating. ‘And get undressed.’ Now that was not so easy. She hunched forward slightly, as if hiding something, as if trying to shield something on her body. Her belly, her backside, I don’t know, maybe her privates. Then I started to whistle. From sheer embarrassment. I sucked in my cheeks and made a kind of warble.
‘It’s taboo to whistle at night. You might summon up the spirits...’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Somebody told me.’
I looked at her naked back in the mirror. It was slightly curved, the spine shaped like an S, which told me that when she is alone, when everything disappears around her, when there are no sounds for her to listen to, no faces for her to touch, what pain she must suffer. The top of her back was painted with spots that were strangely grafted into her skin; below, nothing. Just a lot of pink. ‘What do you have here?’ I said, and from simple consideration put my finger on the glass. ‘These spots, I mean...’
‘Freckles,’ she said. ‘They’re just freckles. Nothing to be afraid of. You can touch them. They come from the sun, if you have sensitive skin.’
That one in the picture had skin the same as hers. His arms, too, were full of freckles. At first I thought they were hair. But again, I could not tell her this or she would find out why I followed her into the hotel in the first place, why I closed the curtains, and especially why now I wanted to wash her.
I shut my eyes, as if to gain time. And when I opened my eyelids she had the sponge in her hand and was holding it out to me. The expression on her face, or maybe just the way her hair was slightly tousled after she pulled her T-shirt over her head, reminded me of my Auntie. She was married to a Nigerian, a short, black-skinned dude who was always saying scheisse. He promised to bring her some day to that country where mostly they say scheisse and generally shit on everything, except their chocolate and gold watches, but in the end he just stayed there and completely forgot he was ever married to my Auntie and was supposed to make a baby for her. Because if he had made a baby for her then my Auntie would not have rubbed lotion on my body every night. When she pulled me out of the plastic basin, which was painted blue so I could pretend I was swimming in the sea, in the Atlantic almost, I would lick my lips and stare at her dark, ringed nipples. We were both of us naked to the waist – I forgot to mention that. Me and my Auntie, I mean. And when I dropped my towel on the ground, I had an erection. My Auntie smiled, shook her head, and rubbed lotion on my penis.
‘I think you need to take your shorts off too if you are going to take a shower,’ I said. I was still avoiding her eyes.
‘And my panties?’
‘Yah, well, I do not know, I think...’
I started feeling hot, like I was plugged into 220 volts, or like somebody had hung me upside down in the sun. If my skin was white, as white as hers or her son’s, I would probably not get freckles but blisters. As it was, my eyes merely bulged out of their sockets.
‘God, you’re adorable,’ she said, and laughed my Auntie’s laugh. ‘Do you really think I’m going to let you wash me?’
It was like that one in her bag was laughing at me too. Like he curled his lips and then suddenly turned around and stuck his arse in my face. Fuck. I would slice it off him if I could. And I would also slice off those delicate shoulders, those thighs and that belly stuffed with European shit – Coca-Cola, chewing gum, hamburgers and I do not know what else. Because that photo does not tell you the entire story; if you don’t know about such things you would not even notice that the dude has a problem. But I knew about them and my dick swelled up. She was not even undressed but there it was already. ‘Your son is a queerboy, isn’t he?’ I blurted out in a moment of inspiration.
I thought she would say something different. Like ‘go fuck yourself’ or ‘you have got to be kidding’. When she admitted it right away, I was stunned. I just stood in that bathroom, pressed against the ceramic tiles, and tried to keep my eyes focused on her back. If at that moment I had taken the sponge she held out to me and started massaging her sensitive skin with tender strokes – she’s the one who said it was sensitive – then this thing now would not be happening to us. Basically, for the first time in the entire history of my short life, I would have touched white skin. And if I had touched her on the back I would have touched something else too. But now it all turned to scheisse. I will probably never eat chocolate with seventy per cent cocoa or wear a gold watch, at least not in the country where that Nigerian who forgot about my Auntie works up and down from one end to the other. More than once I heard her crying at night behind that gauzy sheet. When she realized my eyes were open, that I was listening, she said, go to sleep, Ismael, go to sleep, it has nothing to do with you. But if it had nothing to do with me, then how did I end up now with this woman in a five-star hotel?
‘Well, what did you think? That I would have a nap, give you a massage, then magnanimously stick it in you? And do not give me that shit that black men have no feelings, that we all live in tribal communities...’
I would have kept going if she had not just sat down on the floor, right on the ceramic tiles. Her back wasn’t in the mirror anymore, not even her half-tousled hair, let alone those stars sprinkled across her back. If I took a step or two away, I would still have seen them sparkling. But I stood very close, so close I had no choice but to sit on the floor too. I wrapped my legs and arms around her belly from behind. She did not move; she did not show that she knew where such an embrace would lead. I pressed my legs a little harder, held her waist a little tighter, and listened to see if maybe she had stopped breathing. And since I still did not hear anything, I thought it best if I held my breath in too. That’s sort of how it was with us. Complicated, I tell you.
* * *
In my own city I would rise at the crack of dawn. I loved the electrified morning sky that descended on the houses, the backs of cyclists, the sidewalks the cyclists were riding on. I was doing things that didn’t require me
to go anywhere. I mean, I went from the house to the garden with a cup of Japanese tea and watched the birds, who were sometimes scared off by a passing train, or sometimes just by me going back into the house, but I never had to stand in front of a mirror. To get dressed, put on makeup, go to work.
After graduating from the academy I went to England, to the Brighton School of Art, and was soon working in my own studio. In those days people looked at me as if I fell out of the sky. My parents, especially, expected me to follow a more traditional path: to work for Labod or some other garment manufacturer. Mura or something. My mother projected all her unfulfilled dreams on me. To appease her, I took a job at a factory whose name it’s best I don’t mention. For a month, two months, three, I crouched in a foetal position over the women who worked there, whom I called into my office for a talk and whose wages I was forced by circumstances to lower, until one day one of them took her clothes off in front of me right in the office. I looked away and was already reading the director’s letter in my mind, where he noted that I possess definite artistic talent but no organizational skills at all, or rather, no sense of teamwork.
After that minor scandal it made no sense for me to stay there. One morning I decided to use my savings to rent a studio flat – in England it’s called a ‘studio’, in our country a ‘bachelor’ – and started working. I started by hand-printing a few scarves and selling them to Mama’s friends. Until one of them realized she wanted an armchair printed in eucalyptus leaves. And even before I had a clear idea of what eucalyptus might look like, even before I embarked on this journey of long, slender leaves, which I printed in a shade of red on a dark lilac background, which later became my trademark, I was getting more serious commissions. Not from Mura or Labod, of course – I was too fiery for them – but from a shop in London I worked with during my year of postgraduate study. But that had been a happy time, so happy that, especially when I look back on it, maybe it never happened.
Dry Season Page 3
