Dry Season

by Gabriela Babnik

  I suddenly found myself missing Malik, missing his slightly clunky smile, his slightly clunky albino appearance. If he had been there I would have bought him a beer, and in exchange he would have driven me around the city all night on his motorbike. He called it the naked moto. He pinched it somewhere and stripped its skin off so the previous owner would not recognize it. If he was riding by himself he would usually lie down on the seat with his face forward and try to pump the last atoms of horsepower from the engine. Sometimes the naked moto could even run on fumes, but Malik was nowhere around at the moment. I filled my nostrils with the aroma of the cigarette the boy on my left was smoking; then I leaned forward with my hands on my thighs and stood up. Since I did not know what to do with myself, I stared into the dark for a while, then turned my back to the screen. Somebody – I do not know who, probably a fellow mechanic – shouted something behind me, but I didn’t turn around. In the long, narrow room where I was temporarily staying, the only thing waiting for me was a mattress full of bedbugs. And above it, a poster of Pamela Anderson. I had paid a lot for it, but as I walked back from town with my hands in my pockets and kicking up stones in front of me, I decided to take it down. I decided that time had run out on us, me and Pamela. There was nothing original about our life together; it was just a copy of something we thought we were supposed to live. Later, back in the room, I stood the bedbugs on end and fell asleep on a plastic mat. If anybody was looking down at me from the sky, they would think I was a lorry lying in the road, which neither the army nor the police could pick up, though maybe the birds could, flying over my head and soothing the sun in my mind.

  * * *

  After the embrace on the bathroom floor, we each looked in different directions. His hands were just below my breasts, along the line where the flesh starts to curve and rises into the air. How to describe this embrace? Initially, it was about compassion; I know that. Compassion for my slightly sagging figure and my lips with too much lipstick. The lipstick, in fact, I had partly licked off, some of it the wind had taken, and the rest had seeped into my pores. That’s what I was thinking about, that’s all I was thinking about, when I was looking in my own direction. He probably thought I was thinking about my son, the queerboy, as he called him, but I had already thought about him too much anyway.

  I grabbed hold of the edge of the sink. The most sensible thing, I thought, would be to stand up, for us both to stand up and bring this mute scene to an end, but he pulled me back down. His arms tightened, his veins bulged, and it was not until I indicated that we could also stay as we were that they returned to the normal rhythm of his circulation. In fact, I don’t really know how it is with the body – when, exactly, does it start to decline, when does it surrender to that cold blast of wind, not asking, not hoping anymore, that things might change for the better? The only comfort is the here and now, which becomes the best you’ve got. That’s also why I understood that our sitting here on the bathroom floor was half-caricature: an old woman with a young man behind her. I wanted to at least turn around, look him in the face and ask his name. And after he told me his name, I would ask him to tell me the names of his mother and brothers and sisters. He seemed too alone to have anyone, to have anything, but you never know.

  Like I didn’t know who it was I was marrying when I got married. In a long satin gown, which had a scorpion drawn on it but only at the groin. So I played by the rules. Which is why I divorced by the rules. As far as I was concerned. As far as my ex-husband was concerned, I left because I couldn’t do without. A woman like me should be content with physical intimacy, tenderness, comradeship, closeness, and other such rubbish. If anyone should have left because the passion had gone out of our marriage, it should have been him. One afternoon, as the sun fell at a right angle into the room and I was packing my and my son’s things, I suppose he had an inkling of, but could never imagine, the horror I felt at the thought of having to live the rest of my life with him in his navy blue sweater and corduroy jeans. Later he branded me a whore, although I had only let one man into my life, while he, in the twenty years since we divorced, fathered three other children all out of wedlock.

  Despite everything, I tried to turn my face toward him, a man whose name I didn’t know. Nor did it seem like he meant to tell it to me. So there on the floor of the bathroom we were as people without names. If I suddenly got lost, I don’t know how he would call out to me. Tubabu? White lady? No, that was too impersonal for people who have slept in the same bed, touched elbows, know each other’s scent. When he was taking off his T-shirt, when he showed me his dark nipples and even the start of the pubic hair around his genitals, probably without even knowing it, that was when I last thought about my son. I mean really thought about him. For a moment I wished this man with the arms of a car mechanic, arms that could encircle the world in a single embrace, was still a child, but also still a man, my son. And that I could shut my eyes and forget the whole of my former life.

  As I was leaving that room where the sun fell in longitudinal, right-angled lines – I remember it clearly, and also my husband’s navy blue sweater, which by the way is one reason he got along so well with my mother – I could foresee my future: my husband would condemn me for leaving because I’d supposedly fallen in love with someone else; in his view, I was abandoning my son, too, destroying one family in hopes of creating another. But my son, in my husband’s forecast, of course, would blame me not so much for that as for the fact that I couldn’t hold on to any man. He wouldn’t want to know, or would only pretend he didn’t, what they did with me or what I did with them; he would only want his father. His wilted, prematurely aged image, shown in the photograph the young man found in my bag in the hotel room, would thus be a story of overspreading his earliest memories of a shattered family.

  He pressed himself to me as tightly as he could, his naked belly against my back, and if in the background day was beginning to dawn, in that region there was only darkness. I laughed – what relief to feel this mass of pulsating flesh so close to me. His circulation was probably not what it should have been. Or what it was when he was sitting on the roof of the empty house. Not a lot of people lived inside it, he said later, after we stood up, after our bodies recovered from all the closeness, but you could see the entire world from its roof. It was most beautiful, he thought, during the harmattan season, when the farmers clear land to prepare new fields for cultivation. The animals run from the fire, and if you’re lucky, in the evening hours you see burning birds as they try to escape the flames. They hover for a while like phoenixes, until eventually the fire sucks them in. But before he started spewing out such sentences, I turned toward him in utter seriousness and caressed his face with my fingers.

  I was about to ask him where that nearly empty house was located, in which a man and a woman lived, a couple, though it was still nearly empty, and how it got that way and what burnt grass smelled like, but then I bit my lip and felt the residue of the lipstick that had seeped into my pores clinging to the back of a tooth. I licked my lips and, as I was already at it, thought I might as well go into the cavity of his mouth, too. But when I finally got up the nerve, he swayed back, from his shoulders and neck. His skin, too, I thought, went grey, and because it went grey, he had obviously not been expecting this. And why should he? You sit down on a bathroom floor out of compassion, behind a body in decline, which after a brief silence turns toward you and tries to kiss you. For a while he just stared, not at me but somewhere in the distance, and then with his gleaming hand touched me on that spot where, like a ship run aground, I rested the weight of my entire body. If the same motion had been made by the man in the corduroy jeans on which the sun beamed down that afternoon, everything would now be different. But because he did not make that motion, things are as they are.

  * * *

  Now this is true. I often used to think about how things looked from above. Ouagadougou, for instance. Although I have never flown in the sky, I have seen milli
ons of lights in my dreams. Most of them paraffin lamps. When women, the kind of women my Mama once was, would sit in the road and start heating up the oil. In the meantime, they would peel the red skin off the potatoes and laugh. I see them curling their upper lips and showing their gums. In Ouaga, there are two kinds of women – the ones who leave for the market at the crack of dawn and the ones who don’t carry stuff on their heads until it gets dark. My Mama did not do either. She would sit under the bridge and pick her teeth. Whenever I started crying, she would take a fistful of earth mixed with dust and other filth and shove it in my mouth. Once I got a big piece of plastic caught in my throat but I happily swallowed it down, digested it, and later passed it.

  In my dreams I never land. But if I fly too long, my body starts getting cold. My internal organs start failing one after the other, the way the paraffin lamps come on in the evening. Sometimes I go almost to the end, but often I stop somewhere at the lungs. If I really did ever go right to the end, I am not sure if I would wake up again. Or if the women with the crackling fire, in which they gingerly place chunks of sweet potato, would be able to wake me up. I survived my mama, and if I survived her, and not only her but all those bridges we slept under, then I have to survive my own dreams too. When it gets to the point where my heart starts to beat against the wall really really slowly, that is enough for me to remember what it was like when Mama died. It is true I did not see her body, but that is still no reason for me not to believe it. Not long before they told me that a lorry had run her over – that it was really her, and not one of the night women or morning women – we had grown apart. Or maybe she had grown apart from me, I am not sure. It is possible that I was a burden to her. In our village seven-year-old boys are already responsible for themselves. They bite into green fruit, never meet their mama except in dreams, and eventually get used to her not being around and start paying attention to the things that are around. I do not know if at the same time they also forget that electric shock which makes you shudder when you realize that from now on you are completely alone in the world and there is no point crying since you have to learn how to survive.

  What I wouldn’t have given then for a fistful of earth! Just to have somebody show me they wanted to take me home with them, or if not take me home then at least hug me, stroke my hair. But since nobody was around, I started counting trees, houses, people. Numbers drove me crazy. The good side of being completely alone was that I did not have to talk. Not with people and not with spirits. It was the spirits who told me the lorry ran Mama over because she had been standing in the road looking at me. We had been walking side by side, but suddenly space slipped in between us. Too much space for her not to sense it. Mama turned around, out of the blue, on impulse, like the crazy woman she was, and thought for a minute or two about what name to call to me with, but since I did not even have a name she could not call me, and that was when the lorry ran her over. That is the official version. Unofficially, we just went our separate ways, or rather, I was already old enough to choose my side of the road to beg on.

  I went and joined the street kids – where else could I have gone? Street kids are children who huddle together at night and sleep under some leaky roof, or not, and during the day give directions to people on motorbikes or in cars on the road. They usually have a wet sponge and compass in their hands. When a car stops at a traffic light they show up like spirits. Some drivers get angry and wave them away with their arm, saying they do not want their windows cleaned, but then they let them do it anyway; others hurl insults at the boys, calling them vermin and little shits who only smear the windscreens on their precious cars; a few of them, however, will drop a coin into the big, too big, childish hand. And I liked them the best. They were usually women. Big, light-coloured women, whose skin smelled of lotion and the soft spray of air-conditioning. When they rolled down the window – I mean, they just pushed a button to do it – their other hand would drop twenty-five francs on the ground. They were always careful, of course, to avoid physical contact.

  The money we begged we mostly spent on movies. I liked Indian and Mexican movies the best, where white people swapped miles and miles of spit. Burkinabe movies we saw only from a distance, from trees or on posters, and we got food from the night or day women. I felt respect for these women, not all of them, I mean, but mainly the ones who would first shout at us that we really were vermin and little shits but then would anyway wrap two or three sweet potato chunks in a piece of newspaper for us. A few were so generous they would sprinkle some crushed peppercorns on top, fried onion or a pinch of salt, too. One of them, who did this every time I showed up at her fire, though I did not show up there all the time since I did not want her to think I had bad manners, no sense of proportion – I chose to be my mama. She had big eyes and very dark skin, so sometimes in all that darkness I could barely find her. Once, when she moved her fire somewhere else, to the other end of the road, and I thought she had gone for good just like my Mama had, without calling to me before she left and saying ‘take care of yourself’ or at least ‘good luck’, my heart almost stopped beating. I felt like it was a dream or, later, when I started going to the cinema, like it was a movie. But then I saw her. She was standing there, among all the other night women, made from ebony and zealously, like someone who feels responsible for her family, who wants things to be good for her family, wrapping chunks of sweet potato in coarse paper. She would tear off a small piece of paper from a big sheet she had on the side, put the oily potato on top of it, sprinkle salt on it, and then wrap it up carefully. I would have to be looking at her from above for her to be more beautiful to me.

  At that moment she lifted her face, as if she knew what I was thinking, smiled, although the smile was probably not meant for me so much but could be attributed to the night, the flickering lights around the two of us, the smell of burnt oil, which in us street boys always triggered enormous, insatiable hunger, and said, ‘Ismael, come closer.’ I ran to her as if flying and, in front of that big clay pot, which was throwing starry sparks into the air, nearly flung myself on my knees. Grateful, I guess, that somebody finally decided to call me by my name.

  After the ebony woman wrapped a few thick potato chunks up for me, and I, in the darkest possible corner, obviously, so I would not have to share any, gulped it all reverently down, the newspaper was all I had left in my hands. I bent down over the letters, over the printed sentences, but at the last minute remembered that it would not be the taste of salt that stayed on my tongue, but the taste of ink. In our country newspapers are printed in the old, prehistoric way and the last time I licked a front page, I had a horrible, stinging pain. I scrambled to my feet and went over to the ebony woman. I stood right behind her back. For a few long minutes she did not say anything to me, did not even turn around. Maybe she thought I was just a moth and would soon enough fly away. Or she knew it was me and was pretending not to see me unfolding the paper over the lamp and moving my lips. I had learned quite a lot from the conversations of the idle lorry drivers I ran errands for, and from the shouts of newspaper hawkers. After endless pleading and sometimes even stolen bottles of beer they would draw the shapes of different letters on the ground, so that later I carried them around in my head and tried putting them together. I knew, for instance, how to write my name and the name of my mama, the one the lorry ran over. This made it easier for me to imagine her painful death. ‘A’ meant a body standing straight. ‘S’ was the approaching vehicle. ‘I’ depicted how she was about to be crushed. The other letters, which I didn’t know yet, spoke of how she went to join the spirits, from where she would never come back. At least not yet.

  The ebony woman finally did turn around and look at me. She said, ‘Ismael, what are you doing? You’re blocking my light.’ I left, since I was not even supposed to be standing there, crumpled up the piece of newspaper and stuck it in my trousers. Walking along the road, past the cars, past houses and people I had registered long ago, I swore to myself that
I would learn to make sentences, not just letters and words, but long weaving sentences, and would someday write it all down in the dust, in the ground, in the earth. And when somebody looks down at my writing from above, their heart, from all the beauty of it, will cling to their inner walls and simply stand still.