The women with the children were long gone by the time I saw the receptionist in a lovely skirt, who was shouting to me that they had shut down the electricity and I needed to come back to the hotel. If she had come just a moment earlier, when I was still resting my legs on the chair rung, when pensively, almost calmly, as if I’d always known that this too had to happen, I watched the grass being flattened beside the road, the cars honking furiously at each other, the drivers with their windows open and their arms reaching into the air, she would have probably told me that my yogurt was going to spoil if I didn’t drink it soon. I would have looked at her in amazement and understood that this was either her way of telling me to return to my room or a hint that I should give it to her. But because there was too much space, too much wind, between us to hear each other’s words, I just waved my arm to say I was coming. But what was I supposed to do alone in my room, turned toward my menacing thoughts? Besides, it was still possible that Ismael would come. Would call off his absence and come. Now not because of the bag or credit card. Not that I wouldn’t give it to him, but the credit card would be like a pane of glass between us. And I would want his flesh, want his long legs wrapped around my body, want to feel his shadowy smell. At a certain moment in the bathroom in the hotel he had become invisible and I had become even more apparent. But I don’t think he noticed, if indeed he noticed anything at all.
I felt raindrops on my skin, neck, and face; I looked at the street one more time, but no one was there. The motorists, hands clenched into fists, had disappeared; even the lizard had disappeared, and when I strained my eyes I could see that the mango, too, near my feet, was starting to turn to marmalade. I finally decided to stand up, but even before I touched the chair to take it back to the room, the receptionist again appeared in the courtyard. I thought about asking her what her name was, but instead I merely brushed the windblown hair off my face. With a voice that seemed to come from far away, she shouted that I was completely wet and must go back to the hotel right away. I shut my eyes, opened them again, and only then did I see the violet light that spread from the open umbrella and fell onto her suit. The suit looked nice on her, but the women with the children tied on their backs had nobody to come for them like this. Maybe they didn’t even have a room to take cover in. I wouldn’t easily forget this scene, I thought; some moments affect your entire life. The receptionist interpreted my pensive smile to mean she had finally convinced her hotel guest – maybe she’d even heard that white people melt like sugar when it rains and so viewed her duty of persuasion with mortal seriousness – but when I took the proffered umbrella for myself and even thanked her for it, she jumped back in surprise and almost stepped into the disintegrating mango with her heel.
At the same moment she let out a hiss, a kind of snap with her tongue, turned away from me and with an angry face ran back to the reception desk. Not knowing what else to do’ I whispered after her words that had been said countless times before: ‘No need to hurry, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you’.
I knew, of course, that wouldn’t be enough; I would have to apologize to her later, maybe by relinquishing my yogurt to her, but first I needed to look at the street. Was it really empty or was someone there perhaps? I hopped barefoot across a few puddles, the iron chair and my shoes remaining behind my slightly bent back – in other circumstances that would make a wonderful landscape – then, in passing, greeted the security guard in the doorway, who looked at me from under his poncho – the rainstorm in the middle of the dry season had surprised him a little, but that happens sometimes and he should have been ready for anything – and, right in front of the entrance, I stopped. I wasn’t sure whether to go left or right; I couldn’t go straight ahead – that would only take me to a second entrance, to the building next door; from the side I caught a glimpse of dark, swirling water in a sewage ditch and at last decided to go left. On the left side of my head, right above the ear, I have a birthmark; also, my son was left-handed, and besides, there was a pure white dog coming toward me on the left.
For a moment I thought I was dreaming; I shook my head, but the feeling that something new, something unforeseeable, was happening to me, was still there. Just as the short-haired dog was still there. Which the rain had brought, or the harmattan wind, scattering dust, black plastic bags, and all kinds of blossoms and leaves through the air.
I shook out the umbrella, which I knew made no sense since the rain was still coming down, but I shook it out anyway and closed it. I had nothing with me now, just this appendage and it was borrowed. The credit card, the yellow bag, the photo of my son were all back in the hotel room. Maybe the women with the children had moved in. I thought how strange it was that the children on the backs of these women weren’t crying. Their mothers’ breasts were flapping in the wind, and they, with their serious faces, urged them on. I might be mistaken of course, or maybe it wasn’t their first time. It was only my first time, walking through a rainstorm like this, behind a pure white dog that maybe didn’t even exist. But once I closed the umbrella and the soft violet light around me disappeared – a light better suited to some room indoors than out on the street – I hoped I might at least come to the artificial lake my husband never managed to build. And when I was standing on the shore of the lake, I would pick up a stone from the ground, toss it in the water and wish for something beautiful. I won’t say what, though I suppose it’s obvious.
* * *
When Mama disappeared before my eyes, something miraculous happened. I was standing there, in the middle of the city, in the middle of the road, with an empty tomato tin around my neck, looking around confused, and a moment later was thinking about sitting on the ground, burying my face in my shirt, and pretending I did not exist when, not far away, there was a bang. Instinctively, I shut my eyes but even in the darkness I saw blood jetting in every direction from the body of an extraordinarily fat man. I had seen him on the street, on the pavements, near the corners of different restaurants, and he did not seem completely crazy to me. Maybe I decided this from the sheet he tied around his body – to make the kind of knot he made across his chest, pretending he was a woman, and sometimes with the same idea he would even make breasts for himself and shake his hips, a person had to have some brains – or maybe it was the bag he kept under a tree, a big plastic bag with a zip, a substitute, so to speak, for the social infrastructure that never existed; I learned later from the boys on the street that all Africans travel with bags like this, even across the Atlantic, always overloaded, always in the start position for survival.
From the way he would lie under the tree, from his heavy, swollen legs, which he arranged in the shade of the tree, and last but not least from his endless monologues, when sometimes in all seriousness, he would raise his voice, I thought he must be waiting for something. Something to take the weight of his body from him, to pick up his plastic bag from the ground, turn and look at him and, with a gentle smile, offer him a hand. He would return the smile, put his hands on his thighs – at which point his wrap would open slightly and reveal the blurry darkness between his legs – then finally stand up and begin to walk toward whatever it was he had lost long ago.
Maybe it is true he got on people’s nerves, but maybe it is also true that somebody accidentally drove that enormous trailer, loaded with iron rods obviously intended to be used in the construction of new city buildings, backwards and straight into the fat man’s body. One of the rods shot right through him; I saw it as if in slow motion, his sheet tearing and then everything else happening to the inside of his body. Someone across the street started shouting, ‘Swiller! Swiller’s been hit! Swiller’s gone!’ and then I remembered that in fact he was famous for trudging through the ditches looking for food. I had watched in horror as he lowered himself down on his arms and backside to the edge of a concrete drain, dipped a finger in the thick but still moving filth – but first he tied his sheet firmly around his chest – and then waded into the sewage wit
h his entire body. Sometimes he attacked the filth without ceremony: he just opened his mouth and let the liquefied particles flow into it.
For me, this was not the first time I witnessed death. I was used to it from the village and, as an adult, when I went to the outdoor cinema and horrible things happened on the screen, I never hid my face in my hands. That was probably one reason why the man in the uniform tugged my ear. I was too obviously delighting in somebody else’s extinction. But if you had seen how they castrated a bull in our village, tying a wire around its testicles until the pain made its teeth fall out, or saw chickens flying over the field with their heads cut off, then the thrust of that iron rod would be nothing special. Swiller’s body, which all along had been waiting for something to happen to it, which must have found its meaning in this search, simply collapsed, imploded, when it was struck by the iron rod, and the only thing that seemed horrible to me was that the driver who caused the death started laughing like crazy. At the sight of the blood oozing from that mouth, that enormous back, which had lost all its femininity, if it ever had any of course, he displayed satisfaction, as if he had rid the city of who knows what kind of pest.
If I met somebody like that face to face, my skin would probably crawl, although my close encounter with the man in uniform was actually much worse. Back then, even though Sankara had already been dead for a year or so, children like me were sent to collection centres. That’s where they re-educated beggars as workers, and Mama was absolutely terrified of this. If we ever came across a person in uniform, if we even saw in the distance the glint of a beret and clothes in black or olive green, she would press me to her body and I could feel her insides beating wildly. So she was not entirely indifferent; she cared at least if we were lost in some cotton field or forced to dig in some garden bed where they planted lettuce, carrots, cabbage, and all sorts of vegetables – Compaoré too, following Sankara, probably as a sign of true brotherhood and allegiance, promoted a healthy lifestyle. From the beating of her heart when she pressed herself against me, I understood that for her captivity would be the same as going back to the village. And going back to the village would be the same as succumbing to total madness.
The man in uniform came up behind me when I least expected it, when I least imagined that anyone would interfere in my abandonment. With one hand he picked me up and with the other gave me a smack just for the hell of it. I yelped, I punched and kicked, at his belly, at his balls, and though I was completely out of my mind, I suddenly had a strange feeling that this man did not need to be dealing with me at a time like this. But obviously he had his reasons, and I had mine for fighting back. In those days I did not talk a lot, and later I stopped talking altogether, especially when Mama did not come back anymore, at least not under the bridge where the two of us had collected mountains of cardboard, which for me meant home. Leaving home would mean joining the group of other beggar boys, the ones the police were not chasing off so obviously, although of course I could always go back to Baba’s yard, which Mama and I had run away from, but if I admitted to running away that was the same as admitting to being a coward, so somewhere between the tears and the rage I stammered out that he had to put me down. With my vocal cords about to snap, I squeaked out that I wanted to go home.
The policeman’s eyes flashed with confusion: a kid with a tomato tin on the street and home – these were two very different adventures; besides, somebody was calling to him across the road. He had to help them load Swiller’s corpse. He put me down, I guess partly because dealing with a pup like me might stick out from the average, and besides, the laughing driver, now acting all concerned, was turning the trailer around nervously, obviously because a bunch of policemen wanted to load Swiller’s corpse on it.
When the uniform finally started to move away, as I stared motionlessly at his back and thought about the features of his face, which basically I did not remember – I only knew it was one of those sly, resourceful faces – it struck me that I had escaped death by a hair. I did exactly what Mama would have done, only by then she was dead too. At the same time as the fat man, she was lying crushed on a road, her bones waiting for somebody, for anybody, to pick them up. I ran toward our bridge; I had to protect it now, had to stuff the empty bottles under my T-shirt, also the plastic water can we used for washing ourselves, and the stick Mama used for walking. Sometimes she pretended to be blind and I was her beggar guide. That was when we got the most, but from now on – I understood this without any advance warning, let alone explanation – I would have to beg on my own.
I was panting as I ran, the way Swiller would have panted if he had ever had to run, and at the same time I felt Mama’s heart beating inside me. I do not know how it happened, but it was definitely hers. Bigger, heavier, the beats more regular. And it was only when I reached our house of dust and cardboard and found things as she had left them, untouched but different all the same, when I sat down and started to watch the passing cars, that I knew Mama had told me through the fat man that she would not be coming back anymore. After I left, his skewered corpse, which all this time had not just been waiting for something to happen to it but had in fact dedicated its life to not being lost, although it showed this in a rather unhygienic way, had to be transported, more for decoration than anything else, to the police station, where the driver bought the police a few bottles of beer and packs of cigarettes, kept sniggering idiotically for a while, wrung his hands and told his side of the story to a plain-clothes officer, who, sitting on his desk, was thinking the whole time about something else entirely, and then the not-quite-crazy crazy man was returned to the sewage.
* * *
It happened so fast I had no time to think. He lay down next to me, took off his trousers and, with an adult hand, touched my thighs. I froze; everything in me froze. If I had been awake and the man had approached me in broad daylight, I would have said it did not happen. But his hand travelled up to my most intimate part and there was no way that it did not happen. At the time I still did not know what masturbation was; experiments with the tree or the dog were leading in that direction of course, although officially nobody knew, or the only ones who knew were those I had whispered the secret to in their ear; I always slept next to Mama’s body, nobody else’s, and even when I was not asleep I did not try anything. At least not with the children in the village. But now, looking back, I think the man with his trousers down must have known that. He must have seen how, when things were happening with the fat man, I ran toward the bridge; he must have seen how the policeman’s hand lifted me in the air and then, after I hovered there a minute or so, put me down. He must have seen the bird in me, and that is what made him appear beneath the bridge like that in the middle of the night, when cars and motorcycles were flashing past – bicycles did not usually have lights – and open up the place between my legs and go inside.
My penis reacted at once. As if it had been waiting, as if it had pulled knowledge from the earth about the kind of pleasure caused by convulsions. I heard music in my ears, not just sounds but a mingling of tones. It was a physical pain, if not an actual need, that made me queasy to the very core of my body. I did not dare look at him; I just waited for it all to end. And when the night visitor seemed to have stopped, when he removed his hand, he turned onto his back and let out a contented moan. He did not say ‘did you like it?’ or ‘should I go slower?’; in fact, I do not remember his voice and would not recognize it among ten, let alone a hundred others, though I cannot say the same about his smell. He reeked very slightly of sardines, or maybe it was the smell of days-old rainwater in a rusty barrel. I noticed the same smell when Ana took off her shirt in the bathroom, but she was turning away whereas the man was pushing into me. And it was a man; that I will never forget.
After a brief rest, when we both gazed into the heavy, viscous silence that had thickened around us, he lifted himself up on his elbows and said I should do the same thing to him. And because I did not react right away,
he took my little hand, checked with a quick tug to make sure my fingernails were not too long, and placed it on the warmest part of his body. What I touched, I think, reminded me of the tree trunk; at the same time I realized that the man had not come here to give me a good time, he had come here to give himself a good time. When he pulled my trousers down my legs, his thing got hard; when he rubbed mine, he came, and when I rubbed his, he wanted to come a second time. It was not for nothing that he had followed me to the bridge, although here, beneath it, he took no risk at all. People rumbled by calmly in their cars, not thinking that below them a boy without fingernails is convinced that he will die of shame. If Mama saw us, and maybe that is why she left, so she would not see us, she would lose her mind completely. I always thought of crazy people as sort of half-angelic beings, who do not entirely belong to this world but do not belong to the other world entirely either, so they see one and a half times more than what ordinary people see – but even so, right then I was praying that Mama, wherever she was, had her eyes shut and did not see anything, least of all that the two of us, both of us, liked what we were doing.
Never again did I experience anything like that. Coming so naively, I mean. It’s true that in the village I tried to have intercourse with the tree, but me and the tree – how should I explain it? – we had a lot in common. The man beside me, however, came out of the night and disappeared into the night. I did not know his name, not even his face, and it did not seem like he wanted me to know anything about him. It aroused him, obviously, to take possession of me, maybe even to jog me out of sleep. If I had known that he would follow me, that he would wait until night behind one of the pillars supporting the bridge above us and then pounce like a wild animal from his hiding place, I would never have come back to this paper house. I would have forgotten everything Mama and I had. She would have gone her way, and I would have gone where I later went in any case. But in the insanity of what happened with the fat man, or rather with the policeman, I did not know anything, least of all that I was being watched and that because of this momentary lack of caution I would have to stick my hand into the frozen universe. And when I pulled it out, it would no longer be the same hand. In all the days and nights that followed I could only remember the boy I had been, before the man tracked me down, the man who was now already starting to tire of the game.
Dry Season Page 11
