I dug a hole in the ground, picked up the tiny skeleton with a bunch of leaves, and laid it in the place where it clearly belonged, but from a kind of tenacity it ended up all the same on this side. Only later, in the city, did I remember that the whole time I felt like I was holding nothing in my hands, emptiness, and that the same feeling must have passed through Mama when she got a calabash of water on her head or when long, greasy globs of spit, the kind our villagers had mastered, were trickling down her face. Before it was done, before the ground was tamped down and the bloody leaves scattered far away, I shoved a fistful of earth in my mouth. I knew from the taste that I had just buried my brother and that that, therefore, was the last day of my childhood. And because the chance that I might ever play with him had been taken away from me, because Mama and her invisible husband had taken away our climbing trees together, I lit a fire and inserted Mama’s name in the humming. I know it was not right. I should have behaved differently, maybe even let the white dog simply eat the foetus. Then Mama probably would not have torn herself from the shaming post and hung on to the lorry. It dragged her twenty, fifty, a hundred metres, until she passed out. She lay in the middle of the road, and nobody wanted to touch her. As if she had the plague, because her belly had been too willing to accept the semen of a spirit. I was sure he must be only a spirit, because what man who has ever dug his way between the legs of a woman like my Mama would let people treat her like that? I wriggled out of the grasp of two or three villagers, which I will never regret even though as punishment they later hung me upside down and left me hanging there for half a day at least, and ran to Mama.
I wanted to bury her just as I had buried that baby, and it would all be over. Abanah, finish, asahme, c’est fini. But because she was still warm, I lifted her head, put it in my lap, and spit at the lorry. The faces were disappearing in clouds of dust, and although they should have been laughing, nobody was laughing anymore. Even their arms drooped. Since they had left body hair behind, with me, nothing would change for them, not even in the city. But they did not know that yet; the only ones who knew it were me and the dog and Mama, in her dreams.
* * *
Violence was not all there was in our village; there were also some beautiful times. Like when it was about to rain. The flies flew down near to the ground, on people’s bodies, and the clouds in the sky kept changing, one after another, like on TV. I should mention that in the village we got our first television at the beginning of the seventies, so I was basically the second, third, fifth generation who stared at those moving pictures. At first I thought the yellow-haired, white women were controlled by some invisible hand in the back. That people brought out chairs, tables, rugs, plastic flowers, gleaming bowls filled to the brim with all kinds of fruit whose names I did not know, and when they saw us children gathering in the yard in the evening, the invisible man’s hand would arrive at just the right time, get into position, and start the show. We held our breath, held it so long and so deep we were unable to wonder how a single hand might possess the reflexes of all those footballers running tirelessly up and down the green backdrop or how it controlled the gestures of the men and women who pressed their décolleté bosoms against the somewhat deflated images of the opposite sex.
But although I knew what was going to happen, I have to admit that the clouds, the big, almost grey clouds, covering the entire screen, bewildered me. Then, sometimes for days on end, I would lie beneath the mango tree and gaze into the sky. When I climbed all its branches, sniffed them and licked them, and knew its crevices and crusts by heart, I became curious about how the tree branches looked from below. I never understood how the mango tree could grow out in such straight lines and give such thick, accurate shade, just as I did not understand who was moving the clouds around up there and showing them on television. Mama did not believe in God, so she could not explain anything to me, and she avoided the television. She said it was evil that came from another world. Which world, I did not know.
Mama, in fact, hardly ever told me anything. She did not say, do not climb the trees because if you fall you could break your neck; she did not say, go inside, it is raining. So I was standing there, beneath the dense, slightly ominous branches of the mango tree, thinking how good it would be if Mama paid more attention to me, although, and I knew it even then, our worlds would never coincide, not even enough for Mama to believe she still had power over me, but if I faked it a little of course, I would give her this feeling – when it started to thunder. From the ferocious dust swirls coming up behind my back I realized it was a Sahelian spring downpour, which spits a person out and gives him birth again. The deafening blasts of the universe, the wild lines in the air, the burning trees, all these things I had experienced countless times, but nevertheless, because the joy of course was greater that way, I would always pretend I did not know what to expect. Euphoric, pushing away the sky, which came down on me like the shadow of the falling piano in the cartoon they always showed in the evening on TV, I gazed at the flies burrowing in the ground or crawling into cracks. Clearly, they were holding the thunder back just so they could get down to the earth and even disappear beneath it. I turned to face the open land, but the brilliant light shut my eyes. I remember how I was batting my arm, as if trying to drive something away, then I bent down and quickly tossed off my clothes. Not that there was much to toss off, some tattered shorts and just the sleeve of a shirt, things I got at the market in exchange for wild grapes – although the point was that everyone I saw on TV wore clothes; whenever they did take them off, we were not allowed to watch. Peering through my fingers at all those glamorous TV figures, who seemed less dignified without clothes, I decided that I too needed to find something to wear and that way, one day in the distant future of course, I would earn a place for myself in the television, which children like me all across the villages would gaze at.
Even before the first drops fell from the other world and even before I had finished thinking about how children are always a step ahead of their parents, I turned back to the tree and embraced it. Not the whole tree, just the trunk. I think it understood what I wanted to tell it. On hot afternoons – but now this really is a secret and must stay between us – I used to stick my penis in a little hole I carved out with a sharp stone. At those times too, or especially at those times, the tree understood what I wanted to say to it. Because if it had not understood it would have spit me out, but instead it gave me my first experience of intimacy. A warm, dense feeling, which my mother did not know how to explain. But when there was thunder I tried not to think about that hole; I had the promise of wet earth, of hollows where the rain collected and where I could sit to my heart’s content. Could swim, dive, and splash around in like crazy. Then I would go to the well and watch the water falling in, would gaze at the sky and see flocks of woodpeckers, which were also delighting in the coming of the rain. I did not know for sure why the other children never joined me in any of this, although I had an idea. Even when we watched TV I had to sit a little ways apart. If I sat down in the middle of the dark, warm bodies, which smelled of sweet, sticky bonbons and, even more often, of the karité butter mothers rubbed on their children after the evening shower, one of the adults, or even one of the older children, would give my head a smack. He would not say anything, and I would not either; that scowling face I could answer only with obedience and move to the edge of the yard.
Nature in its rage never shut me out, which is why I did not want to just roll in the grass, in the mud, join my hands and fingernails and stomach and belly button with the clammy, pummelled earth, but to ascend into the sky. And stay there, like those grey-coloured clouds. Mama, and all the children in the yard, too, who stared greedily and a little bit in wonder at the screen – I would tell them it was me who guided the yellow-haired white women with my invisible hand. Up and down, up and down. So I was starting to realize that, despite its uncontrollable violence, nature worked by its own laws, even if they were the laws of
destruction. All of this I understood, and my tree with the little hole, which gave me as much warmth as I had ever known since I left Mama’s belly – it understood too.
For a brief moment I even thought I should throw myself into the fire that was blazing not far from the well. That I should enter it, and all the terrible things, all the smacks, preferably on my head, on my temples, and sometimes even on my mouth, would end. But because I was too much of a coward, I just picked up my shorts and shirt sleeve. They were soaked beyond recognition. If Mama had given a damn about me, if she had at least tried to think she understood me, understood my obsessive visits to the tree, I would have gone home. Meanwhile it was already getting dark. Mama would be fixing supper, and as she leaned over the pots, which whistled with the escaping steam, the rain would stop. I would be shivering from the cold, from the clouds, from the secrets the clouds had told me. And as I put a ball of tô in my mouth, I would see in Mama’s eyes that she thought I was a strange, useless, frivolous creature who was a little weird, a little crazy, who did not belong to village life. Which was probably true, only I did not see it in the way she looked at me, or in the way any other relative looked at me, but in the way the tree looked at me. We stood there like two solitary beings and did not know where to go.
* * *
He was a beautiful baby, too beautiful even. Platinum hair, exactly like my mother would have had if she had been a movie actress in some never-made movie, crystal clear eyes, snow-white skin. We held him in our hands and passed him around like a toy. He meanwhile laughed his toothless laugh, and the more people were delighted, the easier it was for me. It wasn’t so much that I had now played my part, that after the baby was born I was no longer just an artist with her head in the clouds or an abandoned child who had been taken from the orphanage by a couple who wanted to save their marriage; it wasn’t even that I had pushed life out of myself, with two arms and two legs – in short, everything was where it was supposed to be – but it was that, from now on, the world could never again be the same for me. With a little exaggeration I could even say that, spread open on the birthing table, I was like that poet who realized, on the basis of the existence of his epic and folk poetry, that he himself ‘existed’, and was astonished by the fact.
But first I had to deal with the image of the expectant mother I overheard talking in the waiting room at the gynaecologist’s. She was leaning against the wall – to straighten her back or simply so the baby inside her could find a better position; expectant mothers often do that – and started whispering to another woman. I could hear almost every word she said and I don’t know why she was whispering, maybe because the room was almost windowless. Childbirth, blood, and pain, I suppose, are meant to happen in shadowy rooms. Today, rooms for expectant mothers seem to be better ventilated; there’s no need to hide, though I don’t know why so many pregnant women are out walking on the streets. I don’t envy them, just as I didn’t envy the whispering woman in the overstretched red sweater, who, it seems, was told by the gynaecologist that there was a problem with her baby. I grabbed the chair and for a moment froze. This was the same suspicion I had; maybe all of us have this suspicion. And when she finally said that the gynaecologist had not seen either his fingers or his toes on the screen, I changed my seat. I went to the bathroom, passed water just in case, and went back to a row of empty chairs.
As I walked from the gynaecologist’s to the bus stop, I wasn’t thinking about the random passers-by darting glances at my ample belly but, mainly, about the belly itself. I knew right away it was going to be a boy. From the very day of conception, in fact. My husband entered me, raised his body a little, all the while staying inside, and I opened with my hand that soft part of myself. I rubbed two or three times and came. He came a moment later. He collapsed on my belly; at first I held my breath, then I told him he was too heavy. Even before his long, thin body fell onto the mattress, I knew we had conceived a child. So I wasn’t too surprised when the gynaecologist pointed his finger at the area on the screen between the baby’s legs. I expect knowing the moment of conception was the key that allowed me to draw his picture in my mind. The very same hair that later appeared, the very same crystal eyes, the very same snow-white skin, although in fact I wasn’t so concerned with what he would look like but with how he would break into my solitude. I was neither the first nor the last mother to think this way. Among other things, I knew this because of the woman in the red sweater. When she whispered in the dark to the other woman that the baby’s fingers and toes weren’t showing up on the ultrasound, the half-shadow on her face seemed to say loud and clear that she had been robbed of something, or at least wouldn’t be able to deal with the laws of her own life, and now there was no way back.
That first moment, I admit, I was afraid to hold my son. I let other people hold him. The slimy, bluish little body might have slipped from my arms and then I wouldn’t be able to look away and say it happened in my belly; instead, it would be my fault. Plus, I was infinitely tired. Labour had lasted nine and a half hours; spread open like that, I gazed at the universe and at all my printed scarves, all the hand-drawn veins in my leaves, all the poems I had read as a student in England, dressed in black with black-rimmed eyes, it was dark, it was night, it was the middle of the night, the second half of the night, when the earth was cold, la noche nochera, Lorca – nothing could stop the pounding in my belly. I struggled against it, and when it finally came out, what spilled across the birthing table, across the faces of the midwives, and not least of all across my husband’s face – he was standing nearby and gazing in wonder at the new life – was silence. It seemed for a moment to make the space brighter, or maybe it was just that I myself seemed absent from the room I was in, the room we were all in.
Until the bloody lump started crying, until its umbilical cord was cut and they placed it against my body. My legs spread apart, weighted with the new life, among other things I understood why, when I was a little girl, they made a toy for me. In my day, toys weren’t bought, but made – a doll fashioned from tightly wrapped newspaper in a nylon stocking, which somewhere on the face they saturated with an alcohol marker to make a smile, or a wooden car, which was actually just a box on three wheels opened at the top. The point of the doll was to make it easier for me to put up with things later. With the help of the stuffed nylon I was supposed to learn how to be patient, how to keep my composure. Not just on the birthing table but, especially, when the child was throwing a tantrum and beating his fists on the dining table or when with every fibre of his body he was determined to misbehave and have his own way.
But none of those toys helped me. I too often laid them aside to actually learn anything from them. Because I should first have learned things from my mother. When she sat behind her sewing machine, her top two buttons undone, she forgot I even existed. I would stare at her, at the back of her thin neck, which a man’s determined hand could have crushed almost in an instant, stare at her tense, focused hands, her high, somewhat greasy forehead, which seemed all the higher because her hair was pinned back – although excessive pensiveness was never a trait of hers; if it had been, she would have given at least a moment’s glance at the girl who was desperately searching for her eyes, her empty, washed-out eyes. If I wanted a glass of water, I had to ask the housekeeper; if I wanted a piece of bread smeared with margarine, the same. All roads led away from my mother, which is why, too, they could not lead to my son. Even many years later, on the electroshock chair, he said it was because I did not know how to love him. I pretended not to understand. What do you mean, ‘it’? I said, and looked away, like I did at the gynaecologist’s, except that in the psychiatric hospital I couldn’t just stand up and walk away. Not even to the bathroom to pass imaginary water. I was confronted with my son, with the platinum hair and crystal eyes and the fair, too fair, skin.
He didn’t tell me what ‘it’ might mean; I was supposed to know, I had to know. He turned his face toward the tubes wher
e a transparent liquid was flowing. That’s when it occurred to me that things must have gone wrong in my belly, without me knowing, without any of us knowing. Not even the gynaecologist, who, after removing his finger from the screen, said the baby was developing nicely. I smiled and my eyes followed his figure, cloaked in a white lab coat, which in that shadowy space was even more white. So much blood, so much pain, but still white. As I was doing up a button on my dress, the baby inside me turned. I stroked him with my other hand. Not like when I stroked my centre with my husband’s testes, which knocked against the perimeter of my backside, but the baby himself. His not yet fully grown little head, all his fingers and all his toes, his even more internal organs. I loved him then; I loved him very much. And when I walked into the reception area, the woman in the overstretched sweater said I looked happy and that I was sure to have to a healthy boy. I remember her exact words. My only regret, as I waddled to the bus stop, was that it was going to be a boy and not a girl. I squeezed the handle of my basket, as if it was the long ago discarded nylon doll. Then, somewhere there, with a smile drawn by an alcohol marker, I waited for my bus.
* * *
I never wandered into a cotton field, just as my husband never went to the artificial lake. Or did go and forgot to tell me. The desire to have a baby was, for him, a form of control, but there’s nothing new about that. It happened to generations before me and even a generation or two after me, and it undoubtedly happened to the women I was watching from under the mango tree. They were running, their children tied to their backs and dangling like over-heavy fruit, were trying to penetrate the swirling sand that blocked their view. It blocked mine too; sitting on the iron chair with my feet on the lower rung, I kept putting off my return to the safety of the hotel room. When the wind starts bending the treetops all the way to the ground, I told myself, just one more sight to see, just one more tree, then I’ll go – but I waited right up to the rainstorm.
Dry Season Page 10
