I hesitated. Not even my husband at the beginning was this gentle and bold at the same time; not even my son as a child was this playful. But I leaned forward all the same, and I too closed my eyes. The street disappeared, taking with it all those fleeting people who didn’t return my gaze. Then the bracelets on my arm jangled, and because all I could see were golden circles in front of my eyes, it was easy to imagine the path the kneaded food would take as it entered me. I would never have done anything like this at home, I mean let a man two and a half times younger than me, in an overcrowded restaurant, slip food into my mouth that I myself wasn’t able to put inside me, but Ismael was at home here and he was doing it all the same. In front of his own people, despite not being a regular at the restaurant.
I must have blushed as he put it in. From the neck up. It’s true that in these new surroundings I wanted to shed my repulsive snake skin and wanted maybe to shed other words, not my own, the words I used to ensnare customers, but all the same, in one of the concentric circles I saw that even within these dirty blue walls with the window and the woman taking orders in the background I wouldn’t be able to be everything I could be. Because if I was all of it, I’d burn out, evaporate into the air. Like the fleeting motorcyclists on the street. They were there for a while, and then gone. Like the girl who was giggling and showing her dark-blue gums – I’d heard that African girls do that, I mean pierce their gums with sharp metal, which is supposed to make them more attractive to potential suitors – until Ismael’s hand put a stop to her giggling.
My shoulders flinched and I moved out of the way of Ismael’s attempt to put the thing inside me. I know that, to some extent, I don’t feel responsible here for what I do. I can even tell myself I’m living a phantom life, almost like in a novel. The faces that hover at eye level and the plate somewhere below the shoulders of this young man, who is compassionately attending to the old lady across the table, are merely the work of the imagination, of something never realized, something unsated. And even the girl, who isn’t laughing at all anymore, who is simply bending over a washbasin filled with soapy water, is the same as the rest of us. I thought it made sense to get up and check. If I found her in the back and if she was doing what I thought she was doing, then I was right. We all live only the life we want to live. Even me, I ended up here not because my memory was going fuzzy on me, as my father, or my ex-husband or my son would say, but rather because it’s what I wanted. I went to a café one day; I could just as easily have gone to the countryside where people were lighting fires, but I went to a café. Leaning with my elbows on the table, I touched my earlobe. I was born without lobes, but all the same every so often I wear earrings. The waiter stood in front of me asking if I wanted my espresso short or long, just as Ismael was asking me now if I wanted ginger or bissap to drink, when I moved my hand toward the edge of my face. The earring wasn’t there. Emptiness. I took off the other drop earring, and what really annoyed me wasn’t that I’d lost it but that I hadn’t noticed the imbalance in myself.
Without answering, I stood up and ran out, onto the street where people were in motion. But first I had to glance in the rooms at the back, at the giggling girl. I told Ismael I was going to the bathroom; he replied that they didn’t have any bathroom here, the restaurant wasn’t on that level, and if I had to go I should wait until we reached the hotel, although his words held no meaning for me anymore. After I left the café, I mean the restaurant, my only thought was that I had to start everything over, start from the beginning, almost to the point of turning into a child, a child who grows weaker by the day.
* * *
She thought too much. Too much, too much, too much. But it seems like that is how tubabus do it. If I thought about my Mama as much as she thought about the things she left behind I would explode. As it was, I already felt like a horse, every day on the road, every day with Malik on my back. The days we were not stealing we did something else. We rolled ganja and smoked. And that was it. Usually, we leaned against the corner of some house and watched the hustle and bustle of the people in front of us, like in a movie or something. Since we were stoned, we could not understand the subtitles. But now that I did not want to get high anymore, even Malik was getting on my nerves. I imagined him riding his naked moto, waving his arms, and then sometimes standing up because his arse hurt – no other reason, just his arse, although he said it was easier to see ahead that way, right to the end of the road. If I was riding behind him, he would point to the drivers of the luxury cars. ‘Have you see him, dat bastard?’ he would yell to me over his shoulder. ‘Dey have da A.C. but still dey use da kleenex.’ If it was not for him I would not have noticed the tissue box with the pretty design on the dashboard. The car was really too big not to have air conditioning, and basically stuff like that is what made me like Malik. He knew how to see things, knew how to see women too; he would stretch out his hand and open their hearts up in a single stroke. But that was back then, ages ago; now things are completely different.
Now mainly I had to visit Malik’s father. I already said that sometimes he would listen to the Blues on the terrace. And if the evening had not really started, he would add oversweet tea to the Blues. He would offer me a sip or two from his own glass, but not always. He didn’t like to share his tea, or his sister either. Right, I maybe forgot to mention that Malik’s father was like a brother to my mother. I do not know if he was that literally, but definitely they came from the same village. A tiny little village where everybody knows everybody else and where a man can get himself as many women as he wants. He packs them into little round huts where they have to cook for him, massage his feet when he returns from the field, and wear a happy face while doing it. But if you look closer, you see a map of sadness on the women’s faces. The ones who are lucky get fat and their skin shines with salt, sunshine, and children’s handprints; those with less luck are tied to a post and in the best-case situation get spat on. I probably do not have to tell you that my Mama was in this second group. She took it for a while but then she couldn’t take it anymore. When, her face all in tears, she caressed my head – I remember the caresses like yesterday; we were standing in the middle of nowhere, the sun at our backs, the bushes high as her shoulders, which we had to beat our way through with our arms, though I do not know what we wanted or where we were going, quiet, I guess, so we could talk in peace, could look into each other’s eyes in peace – Mama didn’t seem crazy to me yet. Even back then she said she was going to run away to Ouaga and I could go with her if I wanted. We had nothing to lose anyway. The priest whose hut we lived in was probably happy that our room was empty and he would not have to leave an extra piece of bread behind the door at the back.
But Mama was used to rummaging through rubbish. Just like donkeys, sheep and chickens did, she would walk through the sparse light-brown grass and pick things up. Sometimes just stones, sometimes entire plastic bottles. She brought them to me as toys. I filled them half up with sand and added water on top and then would turn them around like crazy. The other children trapped flies in plastic bottles and watched them slowly suffocate, but I did not like doing that. Mama told me it was not good. Do not kill and do not steal, she said, which I completely disobeyed later, but the way she said it stuck with me. There was a plastic bottle she would tap on my leg in the evening, making a muffled thump in an even rhythm, and later I carried it around with me. I mean later after she died.
‘The lorry crushed her head, nothing you can do about it,’ Malik’s father said as we sat on the terrace and looked into the moon. A big yellow moon, like in the Lorca poem.
That was something else he and my Mama had in common. Gazing at things they did not understand. And if Malik’s father is not crazy, then neither was my mama. When the other boys on the street called me a bastard, I used to smash their faces in, but then the version became that I ended up on the street because I smashed in the skull of some man who had intercourse with my mama. I say had intercourse ra
ther than had sex with or put it in her because I heard it is more civilized. And I definitely want to be more civilized. Even in Mama’s belly I knew I did not want to live the way those fat women’s children lived in the villages. They hop around naked and climb trees like monkeys because they never heard of anything like school. Public schools, state schools, whatever you want to call them, you can wipe your arse with them. Personally, everything useful I know I learned from Malik, and even more from his father; okay, I also learned something from my Auntie, but I will talk about her later.
Whenever Malik’s father – maybe it is best if I use his name, Baba, though it is not entirely his real name, but that is not important – so whenever Malik’s father let me take a sip from his glass he did not tell me anything about Mama, and whenever he did tell me something about her, he did not give me tea. An unspoken agreement, you could say. Baba was the kind of person who knew how to take the measure of things. Malik must have got that from him. It might have looked like they did not have enough for an ounce of mustard, but they always had an eye for the right thing. Especially when it came to women, my Mama included. I mean, I doubt Baba would have got her out of that village, would have come to her aid, if she was not beautiful. I know it sounds like a cliché, a beautiful beggar-woman and her lost son, who says, when she has been run over by a lorry, that when she died I felt the first shadows and I know there are things they did not tell me, but somehow I know that Malik’s father – sorry, Baba – will tell me. When and with whom did she conceive me? Was it when she was rummaging with the animals in the light-brown grass or after she entered the priest’s room? Why did she run away from the village to Ouaga? – though that is getting clearer for me . It was an existential yearning for freedom. Baba told me that’s what it is called. I mean, if and when you want to be free. So you are not like that donkey or like some goat that people milk whenever they feel like it.
If I understand those sips of tea right, then there must have been a time when he put it in her too. You know who I mean. But in the end, he was not the one who made me. Just so there’s no misunderstanding, let me say I never tried to force it out of him – with his Blues and his measure for the Blues, he would not have allowed it. The idea that a p’tit like me should lay into Baba, that was out of the question. We would sit there in silence; sometimes we talked a little, a very little, sometimes not at all, and look at the sky. I do not think he did that with Malik. I would pull him toward Mama, he would pull me toward Malik. He wanted to be closer to him but did not know how to do it. So I was one possibility, though clearly not an ideal one. I would never tell him that on the motorbike Malik once told me he did not give a fuck about his old man. That he had let them cut off his mama’s boob and then she died anyway. ‘Can you imagine,’ he shouted into the wind, and to me, who was sitting behind him on the naked moto, ‘how da two of dem fuck after dat, if dey can even to do it!’ I did not want to imagine anything, least of all Malik’s mama, who was the sweetest woman in the world and who never shoved clumps of sand into her son’s mouth, just powdered milk, mashed bananas, sweet-boiled rice – speaking of which, children’s food has always been my obsession, my desire, my yearning – and Baba, one on top of the other. They were just what they were. Not naked people, not two people fucking in a dark empty room, with one boob left on a counter in the hospital, and who knows what they did with it, I suppose they grind things like that down and make them into creams for black women to smear on themselves so they look lighter, and the other one dangling directly above Baba’s face, but I think Malik blamed his old man for them being left alone. His old man had given him everything, but then he also took everything away from him. I did not say this to either one of them, since I had my own story with Mama.
Maybe now it looks like I’m thinking too much and that I will burst my seams sap-sap, but it is not true. Maybe things are just going fuzzy on me, like when Malik and I were sitting by the corner of a house completely stoned and looking at the street. I nudged him and asked if he too ever got the feeling people were not telling him things, and when his mama died did he too feel his first shadows? But he did not hear me. He was in his own movie, like Ana was in hers when she made the excuse that she was going to the bathroom and then fled out past me. I let her go, what else could I do? I could not behave like the men in the villages with the round houses and the naked children.
‘The lorry crushed her head, nothing you can do about it,’ Baba said again, when the cassette reached the end and nobody felt like getting up and turning it over. ‘You have to understand, it was not easy for her. When she was seven she saw her mama die. The baby got wedged in her belly and she died. Your mama was afraid the same thing would happen to her. She ran off to the city when she was already pregnant with you, but they brought her back.’ Before he could say, by force, I looked away. To where the donkey was strolling through the night. I wished I could run my hand through its bristly fur and touch all the wounds it had got during the day.
‘Do you think Mama knew she was going to die?’ I said, trying to hide the fact that a little boy was speaking from inside me. The boy who let the tubabu woman run away from him and who now was not sure if he would ever meet her again or if that was that.
‘I don’t know; none of us knows that,’ Baba said and sighed softly. ‘But I know that what she loved more than anything else was freedom.’ I did not ask if she loved it even more than me, because he lifted himself from his half-reclining position, picked up the tape recorder, weighed it in his hands as if he was thinking about what I had just asked, and whether his answer had been the right one, and then with a short goodnight went inside. He left an empty glass rimmed with light-brown froth on the handle of the chair. Twenty years ago, or a little less, I would have taken it as a toy. I would have filled it half with water, half with sand, and covered it with my palm. And when everything else disappeared, I would have watched the grains of sand sink to the bottom and then back again toward the opening and onto my tongue.
Chapter 2
‘A bird cannot be angry at a tree.’
(What Ismael said at night, on the other side of the mosquito net)
It’s not that in the desert I miss things – the Chagall girl, Millais’s stained-glass windows, Bach fugues – but there are things I don’t know how to see. Things in a tree, in the air, at the edge of a house.
I brought a chair from the hotel room and put it under a tree. The receptionist and I had reached a compromise. She showed me a fridge where I could keep my yogurt and a bottle of mineral water. Some time had passed since I last saw Ismael. Meanwhile, things happened that we didn’t share. For instance, I called my father and told him I wouldn’t be back anytime soon. That I intended to rent a house and sit on the roof, where I’d watch the grass in flames, the burning birds, whose wings were licked by the fire when they flew too close to the ground, or at least I’d see whirlwinds. Some people here believe that a woman will be born from the whirling wind if you throw a boiled egg in its eye. But I didn’t tell my father that, I mean, I didn’t tell his answering machine. A deep, well-tempered voice came on, sporting dark hair with just a dash of silver at the temples, and said he was out at the moment. Not, I hope, because of the key turned in the latch.
The night before had been unbearably hot, so we all expected a downpour. I arranged myself so I could see half the building and half the avenue. Something static and something moving. Some people were riding motorcycles and creating exhaust fumes, while others merely walked on foot, their light sandals making a clop-clop sound. I looked at my own feet. Here I liked to go barefoot, liked to feel the hot red earth ooze between my toes, liked how, as evening approached, when the landscape grew still, when even the clouds stopped moving and the trees for a time lost meaning, the coolness would touch my ankles and travel up through my body. I might have gone on with this description of the loneliness that had settled in me if a white woman in a narrow printed skirt hadn’t then been approach
ing from the direction of the hotel entrance. We smiled at each other sourly – she tucked her hair behind her ears, from embarrassment, I suppose; I looked at the ground bashfully, although from the corner of my eye I caught the slight thrust of her hips against the batik, which made me think she wanted to be somebody else. Not a woman walking past me, but somebody else.
I poked at the ground with my foot, as if looking for something, as if some time earlier I’d lost something there, something I longed for, although in fact I was longing to run into Ismael again. He’d be standing across the street, tall, slender, and would be studying me with his eyes. Should he approach, or not? Should he smile, or say simply, you were looking at me? And I wouldn’t say what I said then, but something entirely different.
But maybe it would be better to admit something at this point. Ismael knew the hotel, knew the city like the back of his hand; he would know how to find me. So the ritual with the chair was just a momentary scene, and at the same it wasn’t. It was a good thing the electricity went out in the room, in the whole building in fact. That way my barefoot set-up under the tree was more legitimate. Although I think a few people had seen through me already. Like the man watering the hedge nearby. He kept looking over at me, as if he wanted to ask me something, but I stared past him determinedly and pretended to admire the cascade of green, which then really did engulf my senses. Because I didn’t know what else to do, I took some paper and a pencil out of my bag. The first thing I drew was a lizard, how it lifted and lowered its head. It came down from the line that divided the building and the avenue in half, down toward my legs. I mean, near my feet, where I had tossed a mango, or the tree had tossed it. When it hit the ground it opened, like my hand opened when I gave the young man from the other side of the avenue my bag. I keep it as something sacred. If I had a stained-glass cabinet, that’s where I’d put it. I’m exaggerating – a little, maybe.
Dry Season Page 7
