But what would I do if Ismael really did come to the hotel? Not just from the other side of the street, but straight toward me, like the white woman in the narrow dress a bit earlier? If he was walking slowly, too slowly, I’d draw him in motion. Then I’d bring him a chair and we would sit beneath the cracks in the tree, where we could see the light-grey sky before the rain. I would ask him what he’d been doing these days when we didn’t see each other. He’d say ‘nothing special’, or say nothing at all and just shrug. I would take the gesture seriously, and to make it even more obvious, I’d slap my forehead – oh right, now I remember, you don’t like women who talk too much. He’d laugh, he’d find it funny, this small detail, and I’d still be drawing him from the side. Pencil on paper, though only in my mind.
My father would say I felt close to Africa because it was so physical, but that’s not true. If I was looking for physicality, I wouldn’t have come here in the first place. It gave me no pleasure when my body was rolling around here and there. I felt how it rippled, but there was nothing I could do about it. After my son was born it spread like ivy. In those days I corrected it with high boots and such things; here, in the glow of brilliant light, kitsch wasn’t an option. My bare feet peeked out from nothing but black, and even that betrayed me.
But none of this was important. All that was important was how Ismael saw me. I wanted to stand up and run out to the avenue because somebody there looked like him, but I stayed in the chair and lifted my feet to the bottom rung. It would still be a long time before evening; the earth was still heating up, the orange, ragged earth, which in the dry season deflected the sunlight to give the landscape a surreal goldish hue, so that people seemed not to be walking but floating. I looked around and noticed, not far away, that the lizard was pecking at the cracked core of the mango. Its stone was lying at an angle from it on the ground. There was nothing around except some grass that hadn’t been run over by motorcycle tyres. It was strange: a manufacturing licence sold in Hong Kong, a partnership in Britain, an upmarket salon in Ljubljana, and I’m sitting here. What’s more, I’ve started drawing like a child. I see things and, in the end, I make a lizard as big as a tree. Then I draw a woman, just as small as can be, a dot beneath the mango stone. A white woman in a tight-fitting African skirt, who is returning from before; her knees give way as she walks past the stone and her outline wobbles slightly, maybe even sways a little toward the ground, but when she regains her balance, she continues on to the hotel room. In the darkness she unlocks the door, steps inside, halfway to the bed starts undoing her zip – my father’s invisible hand would be glad to help, but my father isn’t here, is perhaps still in the garden, tugging impatiently at his field of now-grey hair while his voice on the answering machine announces that he is unavailable – and with her skirt loosened sits on the edge of the bed and reaches behind her neck. There, instead of emptiness, she finds an egg still in its shell.
* * *
At the beginning, we somehow got along – I mean, my husband and me; at the beginning things were possible. He didn’t always wear corduroy trousers and a navy blue turtleneck, although he was always wearing something that, despite the times we lived in, was bourgeois. With a little exaggeration you could even say that with his fine manners and his stories about the family history – his people were supposedly Hungarian Jews who played hide-and-seek during the war and later kept trying to buy American exit visas but never quite succeeded – he was something of a dinosaur. I see that now, from a distance; I didn’t at the time. I remember his mother wearing an antique fox around her neck – she must have worked damn hard to save that treasure from her demolished home, so in the post-war period she flaunted it, almost from a kind of mischief – and I remember his father as a failed industrialist, who in the pre-Communist Neolithic period had managed a company that produced tomato paste. I never gave a thought to that sort of thing, but it won my mother over. A month or two before the wedding she locked herself in the bathroom with me. Literally. She leaned against the tall radiator – I can still see her arm resting there, her long, thin arm, on which, at almost every motion she made, the flesh separated from the bone, the kind of arm I will never have – and asked me if I wanted him. I stared at the ground, my toe poking the rug on the floor. In those days all kitchens were done in orange and all bathrooms in blue, ours included.
I raised my face to my mother, watched her a while motionlessly – that arm and that curly brown hair, which she must have coloured, must have been colouring, I suppose, for so long that none of us, not even she, knew what her natural colour was, will stay with me forever – and then impulsively blurted out that we had already made love and so I had to want him.
For a brief second both of us smiled. I don’t know what my mother was thinking, but I was thinking about that moment of softness that permeates your body after love-making. As if the clouds started moving in a slow-motion film. In the middle of a field, a tree; and a little ways off, a man with an open umbrella. He’s pretending to catch the wind in it, while a naked woman lies on the grass. She has tossed her dress not far away, a washed-out dress printed with tiny flowers and strapless. She made it herself, maybe to seduce him. When they first met, in the family garden, where he was playing chess with her father, she found him promising. Long fingers, Adam’s apple, hair reaching down to his eyes. She already knew herself well enough to know she knew what she wanted. The opposite of her. Tall, gentle men, who would understand her need to draw. Who, when they entered her studio flat, wouldn’t say things were in too much disarray. She had come too far, the smell of too many plants had rubbed off on her, for her to have to explain anything, and that, she supposed, was where his advantage lay. She unlocked the door, invited him into the room with a somewhat bashful gesture and sat him on the sofa, while he blew off the hair that had fallen on his brow, almost in his eyes, and asked him if he’d like some tea, if for no other reason than in memory of her English period; he nodded, and from that point on things happened on their own.
On the stairs, on our way out into nature, I asked him to wait for me a minute, that I’d left my jacket in the flat. I said it offhandedly, but then, inside, in front of the antique mirror, I put lipstick on my lips. Even then I knew they would match the clouds and the tree, from which, the moment I pulled my dress down and showed him my breasts, leaves would fall. He, meanwhile, would look and gulp back saliva. He’d forget about the umbrella leaning against the tree. He had brought it with him for no real reason. Since it was strapped behind him on the carrier of his bike, he couldn’t ride next to me. But we later made up for the distance between us. As he was entering me, quietly, not too loudly, I thought about the fox around his mother’s neck. That thin, almost rat-like neck, which had seen much better days, although, I have to confess, I only met her a few times, but even then she looked at me as if I were an inferior species of human, an orphan, and not only that, an artist too, she said with a certain derision, a certain haughtiness, as if she was still living in her own century, still wearing an ankle-length skirt and carrying a parasol – what’s the world coming to these days, I mean, really? – which is why I never thought her face worth remembering, only that neck of hers and that cascade of worn-out fox fur. And when my future husband was exiting me – I suppose the sexual shift into the future was also revenge for my not belonging to the bourgeois species, for not belonging to anything at all as far as I was concerned; as far as my father was concerned, he did his utmost, and here my mother fervently encouraged him, to catch a few droplets of that glow of the past which radiated from these people – I was marvelling at how they made the openers on tins. I wanted to ask him if it was true that his family had come up with that protuberance on top of the tin, with the hole you stick your finger in, pull, and open. Elegantly, with no excess effort and, especially, no unwanted spraying. But I forgot. To ask, I mean.
I don’t know how he happened to be playing chess with my father. He was studying electricity – t
hat’s what he said under the tree as the clouds were suffused with light from within – but all the same he was interested in chess. He and my father had twice-a-week sessions. My mother, meanwhile, placing a finger on her lips, would whisper that I should speak more quietly, since an extremely important battle of the minds was being waged outside, and it was only when their voices grew louder and, in her opinion, they had finished, that she would bring them, on a silver tray that told you our family had been around for a while too, slices of bread smeared with butter and cheese. A year went by, I suppose, before I joined them. My father told me to sit on his knee; light as a feather, he said, looking impishly toward my mother, who would probably have given anything in the world to be in my shoes, to have my father caress her, at least a little. I sat down gingerly, bashfully, but I noticed that even the electrician was embarrassed. I knew at such moments just what would follow: he would start to make his farewells, and with exaggerated gesticulations – intended to be discreet but which instead achieved the very opposite effect, so we all knew what this now somewhat elderly, somewhat faded woman wanted, who all her life had been sewing violet, yellow, all sorts of brassieres – my mother would encourage me to see him out. He would walk in front of me, and one afternoon he would finally turn around suddenly and ask, in his Victorian way, if I’d like to go on an excursion with him. Into nature or something similar. I would look at his fingers and wonder if they were capable of something other than moving chess figures, something other than expounding on the magnificent past that had evaporated into the air and didn’t even have time to fall on crumbling ground, and I would all at once feel my advantage. All at once it would be me seducing him. I don’t know, I wasn’t that sort, but he was someone I wanted to have beneath me.
First, however, I wanted to have him leaning against the tree trunk. He had never done that before, he said, but when he did, he’d want to marry the girl. I rolled my eyes, sighed, oh you captains of industry, then let my dress slip even further down, and climbed on top of him. I think that, later, he was the first in my family to utter that old-fashioned, atrophied sentence; my mother in the bathroom with the flesh protruding from her elbow bone only repeated it after him. If I had fallen in love in England, nothing would have been more old- fashioned, but I didn’t fall in love in England, so I thought I might as well give it a try. With him, whose hair hung down over his eyes and who wanted to repair electricity poles, which at a certain moment reach so high they penetrate the clouds.
I again assured my mother in the bathroom that it would be perfectly all right if we gave it a try. She was a little surprised, though it was more a feigned surprise; in her quick laugh I discerned a kind of vivacity – maybe she did sometimes sit on my father’s knee, if only in the dark, if only when they found themselves alone – my behaviour must have embarrassed her and, to curb the audacity I’d contracted abroad – it could only have been there – she asked if I wanted her wedding dress. She had sewn it herself. I know, Maman, I replied, partly from fatigue, partly because that’s how we addressed each other – I called her Maman, she called me various fruit names – there’s no need, I’ll make it myself.
Him, I gave my answer to just a week after the bathroom scene. I locked myself in my studio and drew a scorpion on light-blue fabric. To put an end to all that orange, not fox but orange, and mainly to find out for sure. If he would bite his tongue when he saw me the way I was, in all my wildness, or would still want to play that game with the umbrella versus the wind, although the only wind was between my legs and nowhere else. When the silence became too obvious, when we’d had enough of flies weaving in the air and the rustling of the tree that no longer had any leaf to toss away, we stood up and started walking toward the electricity poles. On the way back he talked to me about two-phase current, Russian chess players who had stopped playing chess and gone into politics, the furniture in their Budapest house, which they had left in a hurry and so forgot to put sheets over the chairs, tables, statues, sofas, paintings in gilded frames, about my father, who was not a bad sort, who was even too good for him, but I wasn’t listening. Not so much because he was speaking with the kind of condescension the puritanical rich have toward those who are still climbing up the ladder to where they are – and this, I shouldn’t forget to add, was despite the times we were living in – but even more because in my mind I was tracing the shapes of the leaves that were waiting for me in the studio. The further we went, the more he should have noticed that I was no longer wearing lipstick that matched the colour of the tree trunk. But because his head was bent a little toward the ground, a little toward the past, in which he was leaving his parents behind, and which he himself would be glad to leave – he must have suspected that I could help him accomplish this – and also because his hair was in front of his eyes, he didn’t see anything. The scorpion on the wedding dress also vanished from his mind. Which I suppose is why, for a little while, we got along, but only for a little while; then things took their own course.
* * *
In other circumstances I would have told Malik the story from beginning to end. How we lay in the bed, the wide, soft bed, covered by a blanket with a picture of birds and hunters with rifles in the middle of it, the photograph in the yellow bag, the freckles on her back, the dark chunks of meat in the shop run by the Lebanese, which in the light were trying to be a glistening red, and then the bathroom and the bissap. If he had offered me a cigarette or two, I would even have told him about his old man, who was sitting on the terrace with his thing dangling and conversing with the spirit of his dead wife. But things were no longer the same now. I felt more than understood that a bird with yellow feathers was growing inside me. I found it in Ana’s bag, or it flew into me off the bedspread, but that is not important; what is important is just that it was there, inside me, that I felt it ruffling its feathers, and even when it was just crouching there, with its claws grasping my diaphragm, I felt it. As soon as I tried to explain this to Malik, he would say something was wrong with me. That he had slept with white women and nothing like that had ever happened to him. Not even with, or especially not with, the old ones, who instead of attending some Sunday picnic and eating macaroni salad – Malik insisted that that is what white women do; supposedly, Sunday is sacred to them – they come to Africa to get it wet.
I looked at him wide-eyed. ‘Come to get what ting wet?’
He showed me his lower gum with the yellow teeth rising out of it. He once said he was going to have a gold tooth put in, since that was the best and safest investment in the future. ‘Man, you is one stupid stupid fool,’ he growled from the couch and for good measure gave my head a smack.
I knew what he meant; I just thought it would be great if Malik had to find a word for the thing between women’s legs and spit it out at me. Not long ago he told me about meeting this Russian woman whose private parts were as big as a tank. I looked away and drew letters with my finger on the soft undercushion of the couch. I knew he was exaggerating. Why would a blonde Russian woman get into bed with a lowlife like Malik? Maybe he does have a long dick, longer than the rest of us, longer maybe even than some of the tramps you see walking around Ouaga naked, but how would a Russian woman know that first-hand? And from what I saw with Ana, it is not about length or depth; it is about smell, about the silence that settles in between two people, and ultimately it is about how you approach it, what you say. White women are different from our women, whose boobs stand up a little in the air. Instead of strapping them in with, I don’t know, fine undergarments, and saving them for one man, they let them get long. As long as they can get. And by the time they are supposed to have a child, they are completely cleaned out. I’m talking about girls on the street of course. Malians, Nigerians, Ghanaians, Senegalese – though Senegalese girls are a different story altogether.
‘I saw dat you have take da bag from her hand. So come on, talk. What is she like?’ Malik was speaking more or less in the direction of the new plasma TV.
He had taken it off some rich dude. When I started staying clear of him, he found a new gang for himself. During the day they would check out the security system a person had, how many guards, how big the swimming pool was, how many inches deep the safe was. In fact, they were pretty professional, but in a posh neighbourhood like Ouaga 2000 you have to be professional. It was all too much for me. As it was, I had a fucked-up life, so why fuck it up more? No thanks. Malik of course said I was an even bigger pussy now that I had got it wet with that white lady.
I rested my feet on the low table in front of us, mainly to cover up my silence. If I told him I had not even been inside her yet, that I only touched the freckles on Ana’s back, and that when I did it, when I ran my hand along her spine, the bird in my belly started to flutter, a nervous, almost anxious fluttering, which I can only compare with a shock of electricity, he would not have believed me. He would have said I was lying, so I decided to lie.
‘Soft,’ I said. I wanted to add, soft as the mattress on the wide bed at the hotel, which was exactly as far from the window as it needed to be so the sun pouring into the room could not reach it, but I closed the curtains anyway – since they were there, I could play around a little – but then it occurred to me that I should not tell Malik too much. And because he sensed that I was holding something back, he looked at me sideways, trying to size me up, then thought a bit about whether he should give me another smack on the head or just let things stay as they were.
Dry Season Page 8
