Dry Season

by Gabriela Babnik

* * *

  One night and half a day were enough for me to be seized with wolfish hunger. As far as I could extract from the receptionist, the hotel did not serve any breakfast, let alone lunch. My first thought was a petrol station, or at least a supermarket, but I suspected Ismael wouldn’t want to come along. I know it sounds pathetic that after nearly thirty-five years of living with emptiness you start thinking you can’t go to a shop by yourself. If there is a shop and if Ismael agrees to continuing our story.

  On the stairs I hugged myself, wrapping my arms around my body. If he hadn’t been taking his time, hadn’t been sprawling across the bed, if he had been beside me, he would probably have asked if I was cold. Again I would have shaken my head, all the while thinking, I really have no right. At my age I should just be an observer. I would stay at that same hotel, swim my strokes morning and night, rest in-between, and when I wasn’t resting I would watch through the branches of the trees on the other side of the wall the joined heads of a young couple. Ismael would be walking slightly arched, because of the sun but especially because of desire, trying to conceal his slightly swollen penis, while her body would unconsciously touch his shoulder. I would see them through a gap in the wall, two or three times, and that would have to be enough. With some luck – my luck I mean, not theirs – I would invite them to join me for a glass of wine or milk. They would tell me their story of forbidden love and that would be enough for me. It would have to be.

  But what was happening in reality was hunger. Even in the hotel room I was thinking about a big chunk of bread slathered in butter, and on the stairs I could hardly wait to step into the street. When Ismael finally appeared, he walked behind me, behind my back, so our shadows only halfway overlapped. People who saw us probably thought we were a boy from the street and an old lady tourist shopping for bracelets on the street. We were all of that and everything else too.

  ‘Ismael, will you wait for me outside?’

  Now that I knew his name it was constantly on my lips. That made me feel safer, closer to him.

  ‘I am going in.’

  I gazed at my reflection in the glass door, at Ismael’s reflection, and at once understood that not only was he willing to continue our story but for my sake would even step from one world into another. Earlier, on the stairs, it occurred to me that the real question wasn’t so much our different skin colours, or even the age difference, the main thing was, we came from different worlds. Ismael was the product of the African street, and also, in places, burnt grass, the harmattan, the harmattan season’s flaming birds, while the supermarket we were about to enter was the personification of camouflaged puritanism, of an imaginary and overrated evolution. I hoped, of course, that one night and half a day would be enough for me to forget where I came from, and even where I was going.

  I bent forward slightly, accidentally touching Ismael’s shoulder, and rummaged through a miniature version of the yellow bag. Money, sunglasses, the keys I used to lock my father and his lady friend in the garden, a pack of cotton tissues; everything was still there. And Ismael, meanwhile, with his arched penis was offering me shelter.

  When we finally walked into the supermarket, Ismael for a moment – though I might be wrong of course – held his breath. From all the blinding whiteness, from the spray of the air conditioning, from the vigilant looks of the security guards. Bottom to top. They probably did not imagine we were a random, fleeting couple who on the other side of the tree branches could barely take cover in our desire.

  ‘Choose what you want,’ I said in a lowered voice, as if hiding something, as if I cared about those people who were looking us over.

  He nodded and went to the newspaper racks. For a moment I lost sight of him; I picked up a shopping basket next to the checkout and when I turned around his body was bent slightly toward the glass display case and he was peering at one of the covers. It was obvious he was reading. Slowly, with a kind of raptness, he moved his lips; he would clench his fist when he hit a snag and relax his hand when his reading started to flow again. But he never once moved his arms. They hung from his T-shirt like cut-outs, next to his body. It occurred to me that there was something distinctly incongruous in his pose. I shifted my eyes to below his waist, hoping to find the answer to such a coexistence of fervour and remoteness, desire and repulsion, but there was nothing there that might betray him, that might betray us, and tell a story of forbidden love. We were like all the other tourists who shop for bracelets on the street and like all the other boys from the street. Emboldened, I lifted my head, straightened my shoulders, and went to get my chunk of bread slathered in butter. If that was possible, I would ask the man in the white apron. He leaned across the counter and put on a serious face, as though the matter between us was strictly confidential. We both, it seemed, belonged to the world of brighty-lit streets, sparkling bathrooms, and cut flowers in vases. I might have added pets on leashes, too, only I wasn’t sure about this anymore. Maybe pets, at least for this Arab, were part of some now-unimaginable world. Later, when I’d been a few times in this or some other supermarket in Ouaga, when I wasn’t preoccupied by Ismael’s arms, I discovered the hierarchical structure of the employees: business was run exclusively by Arabs and carried out exclusively by blacks.

  The belly behind the counter gave a sudden leap. No, he doesn’t do that. Doesn’t slice bread and spread butter on it. When I was a child we’d sprinkle minced nettle on top, too, but it wasn’t my childhood unfolding here, but my sunset.

  ‘Let’s go somewhere else,’ Ismael whispered to me.

  Somewhere we can eat our fill. If at that moment I was sitting by a plastic table, on a plastic chair, in the hotel, right after swimming and just as I was about to turn my eyes toward the tree and then, farther, toward the hotel wall, which allowed the life of the street to enter only through aestheticized gaps, I could not have wished for a gentler bow from a man who, despite the air conditioning and the perfumed space, despite all the sterileness emanating from that space, smelled of cars, of dust from the street, and so represented the negation of the Cartesian, rational, sophisticated world. And I myself, when I put the shopping basket back on the stack and pushed my way past queues of other hungry Cartesians – the fact that only representatives of the light-skinned race can allow themselves the luxury of a supermarket in Africa is, after all, hardly in dispute, and if Africans do show up in one it’s because they have just run out of some expensive soap or powdered milk – I had now stepped out of it. If I had renounced the pillows on the sofa, renounced the view of the garden, renounced my own father, I could renounce this as well. Outside, in the wide-open light, where it was different from earlier, different from when we went in, where you could sense a kind of muffled hue, something between brick and gold, between calm and quiet, though it was possibly all due to the wind, which weaved around our ankles and then higher and higher, I took off my striped H&M jacket and draped it on Ismael’s shoulders. That would make it clearer who we were and where we were going. Now he no longer walked behind me; his shadow was no longer overlapping mine only halfway, but fully. Somewhere below his waist I also glimpsed the edge of a newspaper in his hand. Then we walked on, in silence and in sunlight.

  * * *

  My father was my first love, despite everything. A small, elegant man, who raised his hat to every female acquaintance. His arm in the air burnt bridges, removed earrings, undid the side zips on skirts. So it’s all the more peculiar that he never made any of them a child. He had only me, or more to the point, I had only him. He supported me when I opened my studio and when I left my husband. He did not oppose either of these actions, but I also knew he did not approve of them. His lips remained sealed; they only unsealed when one day from somewhere I brought a black man home. At first he just hid in the house, as if he was looking for something and had even forgotten that I was sitting with a black man at the solid-wood dining table drinking tea. While the water for the teapot was heating up, I wo
ndered whether I shouldn’t tell my father about that encounter on the stairs. But he wouldn’t have understood, nor probably would the black man, who had picked up the cup, not by the handle, but with his entire hand and was slowly lifting it to his lips.

  By then, my mother was long dead. She had floated away with her brassieres. Literally. One winter afternoon she carried the things she had sewn on her sewing machine down into the pool. We should have cleaned it, but nobody could be bothered since the grime was penetrating deeper and deeper. I don’t know where everyone was, I don’t know where I was, when my mother walked down the steps into the sludgy water. Lotuses were floating on top, and moss had overgrown the sides of the pool. Later I made wallpaper on that theme, a whole series of wallpapers in a shade of green. Some of my customers told me that when they entered the salon they felt like they were under water. And in fact we were – my mother and I, I mean. I found her lying on the surface with her face turned toward the bottom. I dropped the things in my hands and ran to the pool. Even now I don’t know how I understood in a moment that the floating hair and scattered brassieres signified the end. Of everything. Not just eavesdropping at the door when my mother’s brother came for a visit, sniffing the leather gloves in the hallway, and so on, but also the end of things from my later, grown-up years. If I remember correctly, even my father, for a few moments back then, stopped greeting female acquaintances with his hat in the air.

  I was the one who then got the house with the garden and the pool. I was trying to explain to the black man how this had happened. We had known each other an eternity but it never went further than lying in the grass, nibbling on triangle sandwiches, and in moments of confusion interlocking our fingers. Looking back, I can’t even remember his face; I just know he had very dark, almost papery skin and a penis that was slightly crooked, but my father thought I was going to have a child with him. One, two, three children, and then people would be laughing at us. He was a member of the League of Communists and maybe in some newspaper from the sixties had even seen a yellow-­suited Mrs Tito holding a skinny black boy in her lap, but the image didn’t stick in his memory. When the black man left, leaving the cup separated from its saucer, my father showed himself. Sometimes he slept at our place, mine and my son’s, out of habit, certainly – this, after all, was the family home – but also to keep an eye on me. Then he’d appear in the doorway bareheaded, with a slight droop in his shoulders, but still elegant. He wouldn’t say ‘I’m going for a walk’ or anything like that; he’d just stand there. Maybe he was thinking he should have incinerated my mother’s water-swollen body after all, instead of leaving it and hoping that putting it on view for a few days might help dry it out. Nothing changed; my mother remained as she had been. Big, indomitable, with her white, too white, skin, which now was literally mixed with water.

  I touched the earlobe and then the earring. My hand, on its own, forced its way to the edge of the hole where the back of the iron or gold penetrates the flesh. I didn’t want to be the first to speak, and my father, too, was clearly at a loss.

  ‘We should call somebody to clean the pool,’ he finally said.

  That, in fact, was my son’s job, by mutual agreement. But for a good while now I had not been able to count on him. He would shut himself in his room, lie on the bed with the headphones over his ears, and stare at the ceiling. If I had told my father to go call him so we could have a talk, he would have done it. But the double reproach against me would be too great. The black man was enough, and the way he brought the cup to his lips. I really did want to tell him everything, the story of my mother’s body in the pool, even the story of the just-opened salons, and most of all the story of how he had pulled something out of me that day on the stairs, but it didn’t seem like he’d be too interested. He had come here from London on business. That was it, that was as far as he would allow me. No more interlocking hands; the grass, too, was left far behind us. I stood up, started putting things away – the sugar bowl, the napkins, the big glass platter with a cake gleaming on top of it, and then suddenly my father struck his cane on the floor. The chandelier, the big, lavish chandelier from the nineteenth century, an heirloom I suppose, though I couldn’t say for sure from which side of the family, began to sway. The sound of the crystal travelled from my father to me and back again to my father. I knew what he wanted to say. That the house was mine, that’s a fact, but if only out of respect for my mother’s memory, I shouldn’t be bringing unusual individuals into it.

  That’s how he talked, my elderly, bashful father, who, before undoing a woman’s side zip, would kiss her on the neck and all the way down to the shoulder. He made love in a way that escapes the present age. But all the same, I don’t know why my mother escaped him. Why she went deeper and deeper into the pool, despite not knowing how to swim. In fact, I don’t know why we even had it. The swimming pool, I mean, with the lotus blossoms. But I arrived after it. First there was water and then everything else.

  I didn’t want to show my father he had hurt me. Not only by not knowing how to behave in front of a person whose skin was a different colour, but because he had let me be the first to find my mother and her floating brassieres. If anybody knew why she did it, he did. If she did it because of me, because she had no use for me, because I had not filled that space for her which should have been filled from the start but wasn’t, then my father must have suspected it. But at the scene of the crime he stood there as if it affected him least of all. His absent gaze swam through the water, just as now he was staring absently at the cup in my hand. We stood opposite each other, father and daughter unconnected by blood, with the now no longer swaying chandelier hanging between us. I hid behind my hair, hid even further inside myself, and went to the place where he had been playing his game earlier – that he was busy, maybe even a little deaf, and didn’t know I had a visitor.

  I left the things on the counter, including the gleaming cake, and went out. For a short walk. By the time I returned, maybe my son would have taken off the headphones and stopped staring at a point on the ceiling. If he didn’t want to go to university, maybe he could help me with my business. There was, for example, a wedding set – dress hanger, photo album, and sachet of lavender, all in the same colour – which he had come up with himself. But when, in a surge of delight, I tried to hug him, he pushed me away.

  In the park, the grass beckoned me to sit in it. I loved things like that, how the light reflects off the ground. I used to think my basic colour was metallic blue; even customers told me that that was where I was at my best, but it’s not true. It’s green. Exactly the kind of green it was on the day I waded into the swimming pool to pull my mother out. Even though it was all over, even though she only rarely, even in my childhood, ran her fingers through my hair. She preferred shutting herself in the kitchen with her brother, or in the sewing room with her brassieres. In the end those brassieres came to nothing. I pulled her by her dress, by her swollen fingers, and because she was too heavy, too stuffed with her unfulfilled life, I went to get a cane. In the meantime my father arrived; he used his hand, not to lift his hat, but to cover his mouth. I remember it clearly. An adult, elegant man, who could make poignant love to women, stands, elderly, next to the swimming pool, holds his hand over his mouth and does not move. I wanted to scream at him and knock his teeth out with the cane. This is the saddest scene in my life. It flooded me with homesickness for love, for old things, for the chandelier from the nineteenth century. But I didn’t strike him, at least not with the cane; maybe I did later with my unusual acquaintances. I merely dipped the cane in the water and used it to guide my mother’s corpse to the edge of the pool.

  * * *

  I couldn’t help looking at him. As he ate, bent over the plastic plate. He took me to a place he only went to once in a while. I could tell that from how he entered the restaurant. But it was nothing special. Walls painted a dirty blue, two benches on the side, a freezer in the far corner that was constantly
being opened and closed, and behind the woman taking orders – ginger, bissap, bissap, ginger – the outline of a curtained window. I felt like everybody was looking at us, though nobody said anything. They spoke only with their eyes, and my eyes spoke back. And why not? Should I be like other elderly people who sit in remote villages and gaze into the fire and at certain rare moments think their life could have encompassed something other than simply what it is now? Or like the elderly lady who watches people’s faces through the window of a café, people too preoccupied to return her look? All my life I had lived the way other people wanted me to live, my mother, my father, my son, my ex-husband, my customers; all my life I had been the person they wanted to see. I could remember periods of my life lived through as somebody else, so now I had no need to pretend. So all those men sitting at that low table, and the woman by the window – I was able to return their gaze.

  Ismael chose and I paid. This was the unspoken agreement between us. I knew he didn’t have any money, but it wasn’t about that. If he listened to my story, if he chose a sauce for me and walked beside me on the road, I could give him something in return. He hadn’t told me much about himself, other than his name, of course. In the bathroom he had mumbled something about living under a bridge and a lorry that had run over somebody, but I didn’t want to force anything out of him. When the time came, he’d tell me.

  The sauce was steaming hot, too hot for me. The girl, who stood right next to our bench, started giggling when she saw I didn’t know how to eat tô, kneaded balls of dough soaked in sesame sauce. Ismael darted her a quick glance, and I thought that would be enough to make her leave, but because she was still standing there almost as if frozen, from youthful mischief I guess, Ismael’s hand made contact before she could get out of the way. She turned serious at once, started collecting the plates from the table, and then disappeared somewhere in the background. I imagine she went to a big plastic bucket filled with plastic plates. We continued in near silence, without needless commentary, without forks or knives, away from the street, though that was merely for shade. I was glancing toward the exit, carrying tiny bits of food to my mouth, and then stopped. I should have been sitting somewhere else right then. Also on a bench, also in some out-of-the-way place, but with an elderly man across from me, who wouldn’t close his eyes when he ate, and who wouldn’t insist that I open my mouth so he could stick a well-kneaded ball of sauce-drenched dough into it.