When it was all over – I mean, when my body was covered, Ismael’s body was covered – he said it was the children who disconnected the electrical wires. If they hadn’t been playing estate agent, pieces of light might already be pouring through the room. I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Then we probably wouldn’t have made love.’ He also shrugged, although not his shoulders, and said we would have made love in any case. That it was time; that was the reason I moved into this house, wasn’t it?
* * *
I don’t know how to say this so it sounds right, but I feel like I’ve crossed a border since I’ve been here. I was sitting on the terrace waiting for Ismael’s uncle, the father of that boy who drives the ‘naked moto’ – a somewhat conceited fellow, a little too crude for me, but I understand why Ismael follows him around, because he sometimes lacks confidence – when it occurred to me that I stepped off the edge of the earth, off the map, almost into chaos. I’m not saying that Africa, with its primal nature and other such nonsense, has done this to me, but rather I did it to myself. When I shut off the telephone, fluffed the pillows, and locked my father and his lady friend in the garden. That was a moment of inspiration, but here on the terrace, next to the pruned branches of the bougainvillea, which now gave almost no shade whatsoever, I knew it was all inside me from the very beginning. Even before my mother held me in her arms at the orphanage, even before my father first combed my hair.
I suppose I forgot to mention that. Every morning after breakfast he would take a brush and untangle the knots that had formed in my lion’s mane during the night. I don’t know if I liked it, but in any case my father’s hand in my hair was not unpleasant.
I licked my lips and slit my eyes. On a tall tree across the road red-bellied birds were swaying back and forth. The garden was, on the whole, filled with birds competing to see who could wake us up first. Two or three would alight on the window grating early in the morning and beat their wings against the glass. Sometimes I lifted my leg off the mattress toward the open window and tried to shoo them away; sometimes, from my reclining position, I simply admired their bellies. Ismael, meanwhile, found my arm and asked me if I wanted to meet his family.
That time, I lifted my leg all the same – the still well-preserved calf, as he said somewhere, the soft oiled heel, and the distinct bulge of the bone at the ankle. As a teenager, because I was growing too fast, I fell down on the road a few times and even passed out. The worst time was one afternoon when I climbed up on a table and was trying to turn off the TV, which was on a high shelf. I remember the window, the heavy olive-green curtains, and after that, nothing. Emptiness, descent into chaos. I imagine this was the only way my body could relax, could deflect the pressure being exerted on me by my mother and her brother in the kitchen, and by my father opening zips, and I suppose I was even afraid of the swimming pool with its lotus plants. It foretold not only my mother’s fate, but our entire future. Even the future of those who were not yet born and appeared only later, doomed in advance.
‘I can meet your family,’ I answered Ismael, ‘so long as they’re not going to open up my belly and check the condition of my ovaries.’
We had an agreement. We would tell each other the truth, even if it hurt. I mean, without openness, as it’s called, I couldn’t stay in the relationship. Couldn’t sit in the house, on the mattress where a band of light was coming in through the window, or on the terrace, under the shadeless bougainvillea, and talk about Ismael’s uncle. I didn’t dare ask where his mother and father were. It wasn’t about hiding things, but Ismael was teaching me a certain tempo. If you want to leave your family relationships, and later your national relationships, you need well-measured doses of air. That is to say, I realized it was also possible for me to suffocate in this chaos, by my own doing, of course. Then all Ismael could do would be to hold my head in his arms and let the tears flow, but it seems I’m getting ahead of myself again.
‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to,’ he said with a deep but still lacerated voice.
‘I do want to.’ I returned my leg to the crumpled sheet and tried with my toes to touch the rim of the light, which was darting between the folds of the material, then I changed my mind and, twisting a little to my side, hooked my leg behind Ismael’s thigh. ‘So long as they don’t disown you because you’re with me. So long as your uncle doesn’t belong to some category of human who think that right now you should be lying with a girl two and a half times younger than me and making her a child.’
He lifted himself on his elbows, as quick as a cat. ‘What is this obsession of yours about children? And what about that son of yours?’
Now it was me who wasn’t ready to talk. Not yet. So I wasn’t liberated, in fact, wasn’t relaxed enough, wasn’t really and truly thrown off the map. I get up when I want, make love when I want, and don’t have to answer for it, but obviously this was not enough. I wasn’t there yet, not the way I was when, after tumbling off the table, I opened my eyes. When I was filled with a feeling of complete alienation, the complete cosmos. The darkness was so complete that for a while I wasn’t even aware of pain. Everything seemed to be happening to somebody else, not me, but when my mother came into the room with her foggy brother and started screaming that I had broken her vase, I saw that my ankle was swollen to the size of an onion. The doctor suggested I might be growing too fast and that the bones in me were trying to find a balance. I’d say sooner that I was trying to free myself of my own weight. But at the doctor’s office my mother just nodded and promised to keep a closer eye on me.
I got up from the mattress, which was too hard anyway, threw on Ismael’s T-shirt, which the evening before had been tossed carelessly on the floor, a tile floor, so it had a certain coolness, and, thus dressed, stepped out on the terrace. If anyone was watching me, and undoubtedly someone was watching me, they’d have thought a crazy woman lived here.
By the time I lowered myself to the ground next to the cool wall, I knew this must be the next phase. Liberation from this environment, which cultivated its own idioms of home, family relationships, and national relationships. I even had the sense that Ismael had once freed himself from all this, not by his own doing, and that now he wanted through me to again enter the severed framework.
I heard more than saw him behind me. He appeared with his penis dangling and, just so, lowered himself along the wall. I wanted to ask him if it wasn’t a little strange, I mean for an African, to walk around the terrace so freely, to offer his god-like body so magnanimously to uninvited eyes, but at the last moment I changed my mind.
No, it wasn’t about jealousy, but about the memory of my Paris lover once bending his head before an open window. He had put it inside me – we were in a hurry and had left the window open – but that bend of his head ruined everything. He was afraid we’d be caught in the act, while I reached orgasm precisely because of some long-haired bloke with a joint in his hand in the apartment building opposite us, who had probably seen all our positions.
‘Do you want your shirt back so you can go get your uncle?’ I said instead of the other thing.
He looked at me a long time, as if he was somehow looking through me, and then tugged at my hair. Roughly and gently at the same time, almost like my father. Only Ismael didn’t have a comb, or trousers either. Just his skin and his naked life, and an uncle, who supposedly listened to jazz in the evening on the terrace. Not the blues, but jazz – I remember that clearly.
‘I am going, yes. And if my Auntie should stop by with her goats, tell her she cannot leave them here.’
I didn’t know why his aunt should bring goats to the rented house, or when Ismael had told her about me, or what words he had used to describe me – sort of tall, sort of sad, sort of old, or maybe, not too loud, not too pretty, not too old – but, all the same, this is the first memory I have of a woman who I still didn’t know at the time. Obviously, Ismael too could not decide whether to sever the cha
in or not, whether to stay on the map. Even in the doorway, when he had already pulled himself away from my hair and my lips and, naked to the waist, was clinging to the edge, he wavered. Before he finally left to go to a different terrace, he let out a big shhhhhhhh to the birds. They scattered away, as if they weren’t birds at all but some other kind of animal, but that was just for a moment; then, with their red bellies, they were again there above me.
* * *
The frog does not know there are two kinds of water if he never falls into the hot kind. And if I understand the proverb right, which the ebony woman so much enjoyed repeating, something similar happened with the nigger who attacked me when I was pulling the Nescafé-can car by its string. Now this is true: the welder could be rough at times, but he knew how to make things. Since we were always running out of water, he installed some lead pipes in the air over the roof and during the rainy season they would fill up pots that were placed all around the kitchen. Only there and nowhere else. At night when he came home drunk, there was a huge racket, as if spirits were rising from the earth. Two-, three-, five-headed spirits. But because, during the day, he turned empty cans into spinning stars, Nescafé cars, aeroplanes, and other gadgets, the ebony woman and I forgave him.
For example, he made her a pair of metal sandals wrapped in bamboo string, which meant she needed at least half a day to get to her resale shop and back – it was all out of love, she said, as she massaged her aching heels – while for me he made the red car. With a steering wheel, doors that opened, a clutch, all those things. It took him some time of course, but when he stood beneath the tree with his legs spread slightly apart and his waist all narrow – even now I remember vividly how he was standing – and told me to bring him a string, I started glowing like the moon. And later, when the ebony woman sent me out on an errand, I could nearly have burst with pride. I held in one hand an ounce of oil, a dried fish, and a line or two for a distant neighbour; in the other, I clung to the string, pulling it behind me almost ceremoniously. Between the glare of the sun and my fantasies about being more than just a boy with a new toy, being maybe the general of a mercenary army or at least the foreman of a car repair shop, the only thing I saw in front of me were the approving nods of the old people who crowded along the side of the road. The welder is a good father – I read their thoughts – even if sometimes he makes too much noise under that tree; the welder has lots of imagination and he has found a good way to express it. I suppose that in such reflective moments the old people even forgot I was not his real son and that the ebony woman was not my real mother.
Before too long, I spotted the nigger among the heads of the old people. He was toasted like bread. Spiteful like the seven-headed spirits. With a slight squint in one eye and the other completely shut, he was following not so much my footsteps as the string. I thought of the lead pipes in the air and the rain that ran into them. He and I were also going to meet like that; for a while we would just walk side by side, and when our bodies finally made contact, the old people would tell the story. I suppose that is the real reason I planted them there on the side of the road, not so they could appraise the welder’s handiwork.
‘You. Come here.’ The nigger was pointing an outstretched thumb at me, but I kept walking as if his mouth had never opened.
I knew he would be bold, but not so bold. The Nescafé car was gleaming in the sun, and because it was gleaming like that, the nigger decided to attack. He flew at me with unearthly speed and swung at my stomach without connecting – he had obviously chosen the tactic, first me, then the car – but I smacked him right in the chops. Just like I am telling you. He staggered back, digging his heel in the ground – a big mangled heel, which had never seen oil, let alone the kind of cream the ebony woman rubbed into her heels at night in slow circular motions – then his whole body rocked back and forth for a while until he finally found his balance. I checked to see if the old people were watching. They were. Watching and seeing the welder’s car lose its shape. The nigger had run up again and was kicking it, over and over, until he broke off the doors, the steering wheel, and the roof. My body shook with rage and all I could do was stare at his crooked face, feeling the seconds drag out like hours, no, not hours, centuries, wondering what the ebony woman would do if a woman on the street was trying to steal one of her sandals. I finally decided she would take the other one off and whack her head with it.
When the sun was briefly in the nigger’s eyes, I picked up the twisted car, with the string entangled in my fingers, and was already thinking it was not going to work – the snake-like coil made me feel cold, powerless, maybe even sorry for myself – but I walloped him anyway. Once, twice, five times. I thought those heads of his would never lose strength, until finally I lost strength. I do not know how long the blackout lasted, but it was some time, because when I woke up the sun was no longer blazing as brightly in our battered faces, or maybe it just seemed that way to me from all those injuries and all that blood. I shook my head the way actors sometimes do in adventure movies – which I still had not seen at the time, of course, but I must have had some idea about them all the same – then I picked myself up, brushed myself off, placed the crumpled car on the ground, and started pulling it behind me. That, it seemed, was the only way I could retrieve my shattered pride. Besides, I saw the old people still nodding their approval. I was not sure if this was because of the spinning stars in the nigger’s head – with his imagination the welder would certainly have known how to make him a more human-like being, especially now that a trickle of almost dark-blue blood was running from his forehead down to his mouth – or if it was because of my flattened toy.
I had moved a good ten steps away when behind me I heard a voice full of rage, screaming: ‘He killed me! he killed me!’ And although I felt him pointing his finger at me, I did not turn around. All I could do was breathe. He was still just a child, not some spirit rising from the earth. But then, instead of me, a woman answered him.
‘Best you wash your mouth out. We saw the whole thing. If he killed you, you would have crossed over to our side, and not be crouching there like some scalded frog.’
I raised my arm to my face, I suppose to drive away all the darkness that was now descending on my aching neck and shoulders. It could have been from a blow, or maybe from my sleepless nights. The welder was coming home later and later, the pots in the kitchen were making more and more noise, and the ebony woman was going to her shop in her metal sandals less and less. The strings were popping and it took her far too long to get anywhere, she said. I did not believe her, but in fact it did not matter what I thought. I tried to move forward, one step, two steps, and when my legs started moving on their own, when they even found a certain rhythm, I started revising in my mind what had happened. If the ebony woman was now left without oil, without the line for the distant neighbour, without the dried fish – all of which I had lost even before I left the house, amid dreams of mercenary armies and car repair shops – then at least I owed her a story about the nigger’s attack, not to mention the spirits who were lying in wait. I would tell her the old people betrayed me. By the time I had managed, in a total daze, to pick up the Nescafé car and bash my adversary with it, they were all gone. They had left with the sun, or maybe I cut off their seven heads, too; I do not remember anymore. The last thing I do remember is trying to follow a path that would take me home in the straightest possible line.
* * *
If love had been taken from me by my husband (and what else could I have expected, since my mother chose him?), then I hoped the black man could return it to me. The same black man who, on that shadowy staircase, put his hand inside me, who sat at my mother’s big dining table and tilted the cup to his mouth just like that, with no thought of using the handle. It was in Paris – we had selected this city specifically and not some other as our rendezvous point, hoping its fame would take us to a happy ending (but things turned out quite differently) – that we first e
mbraced each other, more often and more intensely than on the English grass, which was there merely as the overture to a love affair – if you didn’t have a flat or at least a room where you could strip naked, you were left hanging – and tucked our fingers into each other’s trousers. I mean, I did this. He just walked beside me.
As I said, he was my hope, my attempt at an investment in the future. He told me, certainly, that he had grown up mainly among women, which is why it was impossible to see in the corner of his eye both principles, and I was so desperately seeking them both; my son was so desperately seeking them both. That’s why in him I never saw man and woman battling each other, only woman and woman, which was a bad omen, very bad, but back then I didn’t want to read it. He made films with a lot of symbolism, strong female characters, and prominent soundtracks (what do you think an African film would be like if it wasn’t full of music? was his response to my comments), and in his spare time he even drew pictures, shipping big canvases to some gallery in New York. I never told him that I didn’t think his drawings were any good; I was probably afraid he would leave me, although he left me later anyway. He went back to his second wife and the children he had sired, while I cocooned myself in my drawing studio.
He was quite a bit older than me and, on the stairs, my youth might have confounded him. Enough to make him press me against the wall and reach inside me. At the table, with the cup tilted against his lower lip, he didn’t remember, but then I didn’t expect him to. Not until he called me a few years after my English period – just before my divorce, I guess – did he feel the desire to sleep with my raspy voice. He said I seemed mature to him now, or at least more mature than in England. Then, he was merely sniffing me out; the main item on the menu was my landlady with the cat. As we were holding each other close, my finger tucked in his trousers, his hand somewhere in the wind explaining the symbolism of what was yet to come – this was now in Paris, you understand – I asked him if he hadn’t been disgusted by the meowing and all that stale food in the fridge. He stopped at once and even pushed me away a little, maybe just to look in my eyes, or maybe, too, to see if I was serious. ‘If you come from the continent I come from, there are a lot of worse things that can happen in your life than cat hair on the bed.’
Dry Season Page 14
