In my studio I worked, slept, ate, and made love. And when in the morning my lovers woke up on top of me, next to me, under me, I would draw their bodies on paper in my mind. Some were eucalyptuses, but really, only some of them; others were ferns, with broad, fluttery, dark-green leaves that covered the entire surface of my body. Birch leaves gave me the greatest trouble, believe it or not, although my favourite were the bougainvillea blossoms. I discovered them fairly late, if memory serves, not until my last months at the Brighton school. I was living with a lady who kept food for her eighteen-year-old cat in the fridge next to the dinner leftovers. From time to time her relatives came to see her and they’d get a close-up look at the Yugoslavian miracle. More often, black men came to see her. I bumped into one of these men one afternoon on the staircase. He was wearing tight jeans and a polo shirt. Outside the summer was dazzling but we were surrounded by darkness. It was one of those staircases with a winding bannister. Although there was enough room for us to quickly say hello and go around each other, he pressed me against the wall. It felt like he put his dark hand inside me, carved something out of me, then pulled his hand out again palm down. It didn’t last long, it couldn’t – the lady appeared at the door and was calling out his name. Her voice rolled down the steps toward us, and a second later the man was at the top of the staircase.
Outside, when I stepped into the summer glare, tears started flowing. What the lady was doing with them, or what they were doing with her, remained a mystery to me even long after I returned home. But I saw the man pottering around the flat a few times; I suppose he came into my room, too, washed the windows, hoovered, made the bed, if I hadn’t done it in my morning rush, and then went out again. He remained a man without a name, the man in tight jeans, which hung off his backside. If, although it’s unlikely since the light in the stairwell never did work, but even so, if somebody had turned the light on, the man might well have vanished. His face was dark and his hand, which reached somewhere near my heart, was as dark as a tropical night. Later, whenever I saw laundry hanging idle in the sun, I thought of him. Because of the contrast, I mean, between the flickering air and the motionless pieces of cloth pasted on it.
It was about fifteen or twenty years before I moved from the studio into my parents’ house, and from fashion textiles to interior design. I found my niche designing textiles. That sounds simple but it wasn’t. Orders from shops in London, Paris, and Hong Kong started coming in only after I had shed a little blood. Especially in my private life – isn’t that what people call it? When I was young we didn’t divide life into public and private, as though living in some novel. Which is also probably why I put my table next to the window that looked into the garden and upholstered the antique chair with one of my cushions. Sometimes when I looked from the birds in the branches over to the glass door on the left I could catch the blue pouring inside. Toward my feet and then up the wall. It was from the electrified sky, I suppose, especially in the morning.
With cup in hand, in the garden, wrapped in my bathrobe, I sometimes wondered what it would be like, what would have happened, if I hadn’t done what I did. If I had done something else – write, for example. Although, if my feelings don’t deceive, writing is not so different from what I’ve been doing all my life. Gilding wardrobes, printing birch leaves on mohair scarves, giving meaning to velvet bedspreads. What I’m doing now – writing, I mean – is also probably about finding meaning. First, of course, it’s about the craft, but if you have a steady enough hand to trace all the indentations of a fern and then between the lines add the right amounts of green, black, and blue mixed with water, maybe on half the paper somewhere these same colours will run together in a way that’s quite all right.
The only question is, what if they don’t? What if they go over the edge, like I went over the edge on that staircase? What baffles me is that even now after so many years what I remember is not so much his smell as that of the recently painted wall he pressed me against. I have it in my nostrils, the smell of salt dissolving in a ceramic dish, the smell of quivering air at high summer. When I was alone and there was nobody next to me, I imagined the man watching me. He’d be sitting on the other side of the windowpane as I made my way through the garden with the dainty steps of a Japanese woman. At a certain moment I lift my arm and touch an invisible cord that stretches through the air and connects the house with a tree outside. I go a little further and when I come to the window I place my open palm against it. Of course there is no one there for me to touch, no one who could reach inside me and pull the bougainvillea blossom out into the open.
* * *
Now I need to say something about my mother too. The first time I saw her, at the orphanage, she seemed more indulgent than my father, but later things took their own course. She never spoke much, at least not to me, and most of the time she wore black. After undressing to the waist, after removing one more time that silk blouse which caused my father, sitting at the table, to think her skin looked exactly like it was mixed with water, she never put it back on again. He had told her – more, I suppose, to cover up his desire for her skin – to cover herself up and make him tea, but when she reappeared in the kitchen she looked completely different; she was wearing something else entirely. A dark-coloured dress with three-quarter sleeves, printed with red polka dots. From that time on she would go from room to room wearing nothing else. When she sat at her sewing machine, she undid the top button so you could see the edge of her brassiere. That’s what she was good at – brassieres, I mean. Everyone else was making white, cream-colored brassieres, or brassieres the colour of flesh, while she created an entire palette of colours. I respected her for that, if almost for nothing else.
As a child I sat for hours and hours next to her sewing machine, squeezing some toy and dangling my legs. By then, I guess, I already knew why she had taken me home with her. It wasn’t hard to figure out. But after that half-naked scene where she persuaded my father to agree to visit the orphanage, nothing essentially changed for her. There was, certainly, an arrangement by which the housekeeper would look after me in the late afternoon and my mother would have me during the day. But because my father wasn’t around most of the time, was in his office most of the time, with his papers, with his clients, with the system insects, as he called his law colleagues, and because no one was therefore obliged to show any conscientiousness, kindness, or tenderness, I was left with the housekeeper during the day too. She was a small, pensive woman. Even in my dewy youth, she must have been a few years past sixty, and when I was entering my teenage years, she was found dead one afternoon in a bathtub with toys. After she had done all she could do, after she fell down the steps carrying an entire crate of tomatoes, my parents decided to install her in one of the flats the family owned. Hardly anyone ever checked to see what was going on with her, what stage of dementia she was in, or where those toys in the bathroom came from. But in those days women like her were not so uncommon, and even her demise was, to say the least, not entirely unusual.
What my mother didn’t get from my father she got from her brother. Namely, admiration. Whenever her brother rang the doorbell, a long impatient ring, she would run from the sewing room, embrace him affectionately in the hallway – an embrace, by the way, that I always took as a sign of his insecurity – and return for a brief moment to shut off the sewing machine, by which time I could already see the glassy look of the protector, the guardian, in her eyes; then she would invite him into the kitchen. From that moment on they would behave as if they were the only two people in the world. No pats on the head, no ‘How are you, Ana?’, no ‘My word, how you’ve grown, I can’t believe it!’, nothing. I might as well have been non-existent. And non-existent as I was, the only thing left for me to do was drop my toy on the floor and run to the kitchen door, from behind which came the sound of furtive weeping. At first it frightened me; I didn’t understand why grown-ups would be crying, especially since a minute before they had been laug
hing, but then through the door’s yellowish pane I saw a hazy figure, probably my mother, stroking a man, probably her brother, at neck level and telling him not to worry, everything would be all right.
So I learned the story of Mama’s brother’s crime only in bits and pieces. It seems that when he was eighteen, he killed a girl in a traffic accident. Unintentionally, but nevertheless he’d been running ever since. Especially from himself, while my mother had declared herself his protector, his comforter – in other words, the only one who knew her brother was a good man. Despite the fact that he looked at me suspiciously. Despite the fact that for him I was little more than a stranger, a connecting link of sorts to the man his sister had surrendered herself to, though in his view this same man was hardly worthy of her. I gathered this from the fact that he came by only when my father was not home.
Despite the fact that it was the black polka-dot dress that encouraged me to study in England, and that my mother took me home with her and gave me a name, there was no need, at least as far as I was concerned, for her to do any of it. She could just as well have left me on the orphanage floor. In fact, it made no difference if I went or stayed; the difference came only as the years passed. When I was done leaning against the kitchen door, behind which two strangers were caressing each other, the first thing I did was run to the mirror in the front hall. Now you expect me to tell you that I ran my hands over my face, blew the hair from my eyes like some television bimbo, only for it to fall right back into the same place, made my lips into a pout, or something similar, but it wasn’t like that. I was more obsessed with my entire look. The general impression my figure might make on another person. Were my shoulders drawn with a pencil or fountain pen? How defined were my calves, and how long was the shadow I cast on the floor in front of the mirror? I did it in a such a way that nobody could really tell I was looking at myself. Just a quick glance of the eye, and then back to the umbrella deposited in the front hall, the man’s trench coat split at the back, the leather gloves carefully folded on the little stand.
All this time something has been trying to make me write that my mother and her brother were drinking tea in the kitchen, but once you write something down you can’t go back and change it, and the truth is, the strangers behind the kitchen door were never drinking tea. The tea was for the husband and the wife, who held the husband to his promise to stay with her because they were going to adopt a little girl. Ana. More than once I’ve wondered if the woman who set me down in the empty room at the orphanage ever gave me a name. Did she ever stroke her belly when she was carrying me? Or was she from a different generation of women, who didn’t do that? My mother and I never talked about where I came from, only about where I was going. The fact that I had a triangle of a garden, where I sat for hours and hours watching the sky, searching it for faces I would never know; that an elderly woman looked after me and not the woman who was supposed to – all this should have been enough.
My eternally absent father too – he should have been enough, and also the chair, among all the chairs in the room, from which I had to watch my mother at her sewing, and the bread with marmalade and margarine every morning, no matter how disgusting the jar from which we spooned the marmalade, and the window that looked out at the roof of another house and which my father had stood in front of when he agreed to visit the orphanage. At that moment of not-looking, he did not yet know the child’s name, although that changes nothing. He was thinking only that he had reached the point where a woman was ready to sacrifice everything for him. He was not thinking about the little girl; nor later, on those rare occasions when he happened to be at home and in a quick glance caught her eyes in the front hall mirror, and maybe even saw something in them of the loneliness that belongs only to people, adults or children, trapped in an empty room, not even then did he think about her. This was all part of the contract; the tea, too. In the kitchen, after my mother and her brother left it, as my mouth was cleaning the tiny elongated glasses in which they had drunk their schnapps and, in the front hall, the unintentional killer was pulling on the detective gloves and clenching the umbrella under the arm of the trench coat, I noticed a spot of blood on the chair where my mother had been sitting. Because I didn’t know if it was a polka dot from her dress or an actual stain, maybe because I didn’t want to know, I sat down on it and waited for my mother to return.
When she opened the kitchen door, paned in a heavy yellowish glass through which you could see the outlines of people and objects on the other side, so I was sure that my mother and her brother knew about my eavesdropping but in their self-absorption forgot they should tell me to go away, she was the same as before. Slightly out of breath, slightly tousled hair, but still with the same pencil-drawn shoulders as always, with dark shading on just one side. It occurred to me we could even be related by blood, that this woman in front of me could even be my mother, but, fortunately, that was impossible. I leaned over, as my father had once leaned over long ago, who had tried, quite unsuccessfully of course, to get away from her, and picked my toy up from the floor, pushed the chair in so the housekeeper wouldn’t have to, and ran upstairs.
* * *
I will not deny there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since I last put it in somewhere, and the pressure was mounting. It’s also possible of course that last time I did not do a good job of it. The girl – who could not have been more than seventeen, maybe sixteen even, and you know what girls that age taste like: watermelon, warm, soft and wet – she and I were hiding behind a movie projector. It was an outdoor cinema, and since I was focusing too much on her trousers, I was not really following the movie. Before it all started, before the girl, whose face I don’t remember but then she probably doesn’t remember mine either, signalled to me that she knew a hiding place where we would be covered in darkness – not total darkness, because she probably would not have done it if it was total darkness – I heard they were going to show a Yugoslavian movie. When her trousers were down at her knees, I saw a man on a horse. And when she sighed and I knew she liked it and had done it before, and would certainly do it again, some black bloke with soft features was digging into an old lady’s wall. This same old lady was somehow connected to the other bloke, who had been riding the horse on the prairie. Like you’d expect in a cowboy movie, lots of guns were going off, and then mine went off too. At the same moment I put my hand over the watermelon’s mouth, probably more to keep myself quiet than her, but she wriggled out of my hold – I do not know what else to call the position we were in, one leg tightly around another as we kept checking to make sure nobody saw us. She ran off into the dark, away from the jumpy screen, and when I tried to follow her with my eyes, at least to see what she looked like from behind, she did not leave any cloud of dust behind her like there was behind the horse’s tail in the movie.
Obviously I had been too rough; obviously I was too much into it and that scared her. Or at the last minute she decided she really should not be doing this, that it was the last time and she would never do it again. In any case, I was almost crippled down there, not because I expected so much from that watermelon, but because there had been a whole lot of water under the bridge since my previous love-making too. That is what it’s like in Ouaga, or should I say that is what it’s like in Ouaga if you live on the street. Every twelve miles or so somebody takes pity on you, like that girl did behind the movie projector. Who knows, maybe she had a fight with her ex, or maybe she just liked the way I smelled. That is what women say in this city. They chase after this or that man because they like the way he smells, although basically they too are doomed to waiting. They think the ideal man is a man with a lorry. It used to be that men went off to hunt in the forest, but today they order lorries from Europe. Even if what they get from the Lebanese dealer is some beat-up hunk of metal, they hammer it, smooth it out, rewax it. I know because I have done it. Morning to night I used to bang cheap cars together. When I looked at the sun and the sun looked at me, my
head would spin like I was going crazy. But it spins even more when I think about how I could not put it in right. How I just put it in somewhere in the folds of our trousers and then stupidly sprayed the both of us.
When the girl disappeared into the night with her trousers half down and my penis throbbing in pain, I don’t know why but I thought of a lorry lying in the road. Nobody can pick it up, not the police and not the army; only the birds can. And the natural enemies of beautiful women. That is how they see it, I think, though my watermelon was not one of the most beautiful ones. Despite the darkness between us, I could see her all the same. Malik would probably say, Big for nothing! It was the only English sentence he knew by heart. But at least Malik knew how to get things moving in the right direction; he never had to go through any dry season. Sometimes he would say his English sentence with such enthusiasm that women thought he must be from Nigeria. It might not be true that all Nigerians are in the Mafia, but it is true that most of the Nigerians in Ouaga have money, and for Ouaga women that is what counts. The smell of money. I think that’s what the Yugoslavian movie with the horse and the black bloke was mainly about. The black bloke digs and digs in the old lady’s flat, and meanwhile she tells him a story about saddles with no cowboys in them. There were two brothers and a woman, although I do not really get the point of that Yugoslavian-Macedonian triangle. Here we have polygamy for things like that, but now I’m just making it up because I didn’t see how the movie ended. The boys told me later that the black bloke gets on an aeroplane with some white girl and you just know he is going to put it in her.
I pulled up my trousers and went over to them. They were smoking 57s and laughing their heads off in front of the jumpy screen. Most of them cannot read the subtitles so they make up stories as it goes along. A day or two later they are still telling them to each other. In tattered overalls, even more tattered than the movie screen, as they crawl beneath the corpses of cars or take engines apart. When I was a teenager I wanted to be just like them – they looked like adults to me, with their big rags tucked in their pockets, or wearing jeans which they always put one pair over another mainly to hide their scrawny lion-fleeing legs. Banging cars together, waxing, screwing on pipes end to end – in reality that was all more of a side business; the main stuff came later, at night. So when I was opening up that watermelon, I was just doing what they did. I copied their movements, pulled down my trousers just like they did, and even the words I whispered in the watermelon’s ear were the same as their words. The whole time I was somebody else, and it was not until I sat down on one of the benches around the movie screen that it dawned on me: I wanted to be somewhere else – not here. I stared at the screen. The names of the actors and a few other blokes scrolled across it, then suddenly the picture gave a jump and went out. The official part of the show was over, although for me it had not even started. I realized that it was not so much the girl I wanted, but her warmth, her moistness, her softness. I wanted to touch something other than banged-out metal. For a few weeks I had been one of the links in the long chain of car repair – a trivial, sun-blackened link; now suddenly I did not know anymore how long I could stand it.
Dry Season Page 4
