Dry Season

by Gabriela Babnik

  After that, I didn’t ask him why he had all those blue angel wings on his canvases. I doubted he would tell me (the only thing I managed to find out was that angels were why he kept the television on in the room). The day I was going home to Ljubljana, he pressed me to himself on the metro and shoved his tongue deep into my oral cavity. ‘I am jealous of my body,’ he said, when we finally unpasted ourselves from each other, or maybe he did from me, I’m not sure, ‘but to you I won’t begrudge it. If I had the money, I would take you to a hotel this minute, and we’d make love, slowly, on a wide bed, but I don’t.’ I looked into his face, quite close up, with all that smell of tobacco and sandalwood, and knew he was actually in a hurry to get back to the computer to subtitle his new film. And as I was walking away from him, away from the amulets he tied around his leg, around his loins, I felt like a spaceman floating outside the capsule. Instead of giving me love, safety, intimacy, he had sucked them out of me even more. Instead of opening in me the good, feminine side, he took me in a way that made me feel like meat.

  The next time he telephoned – I suppose he was standing right by the sea with his wife and daughter, the water washing over his feet; the daughter even shouted ‘look out! look out!’ (for an approaching wave, I assume), and I knew from her tender voice that I didn’t want to take anything from her, least of all her father, the masculine element, in other words, so that when, later, she’d be playing with the other children on the beach, they would see in the corner of her eye nothing but the boastful rationalism of her mother (a woman who had to do everything herself) – I told him that at our next rendezvous I was not going to dress in panties the colour of the angel wings in his paintings. He kept insisting that he needed me, while I was hanging on the phone only to hear a little more of the sea, a little more of the childish voice. But at a certain point the mother called the girl to come to her, probably so they could get supper ready, grate up the coconut and brown sugar, or fry the fish. ‘Ana, I love you,’ he said in a cracked voice. ‘I miss our Paris strolls.’

  I wanted to tell him ‘go fuck yourself’ or just ‘fuck you’, but it wouldn’t have done any good, because I too, back at the train station, had wanted him to take me to a hotel. On the way there I would have tucked my finger into his trousers and he, instead of floating through the air, instead of explaining the symbolism of his films, would have caressed me from behind, caressed my back. And when we unlocked the door of our chosen room, we would have both undressed at once. Two nudists. After making love, still out of breath and aching from pleasure, we would have laughed, lifted our legs toward the ceiling, and taught each other dirty words in our respective native languages. Until I, for a change, picked up the pencil and paper. I’d start with his dark penis. Its crookedness, I suppose, is what made him moan like an angel from another world when he made love. To the penis I would add amulets from his body – he said they were for luck and also, if need be, protection – and use a lot of blue for the background. The sea, or something similar. His family, or something similar, to whom he had begrudged himself when he was floating like a spaceman with me. But the moment on the metro was too brief for me to remember very long. Especially since afterwards we went our separate ways (the break-up was probably caused, too, by my saying I didn’t want to be like a stray dog, that I wanted to belong – at which point I could feel his shoulders stoop, could feel him pretending to look at his reflection in the shop window).

  * * *

  ‘It is not good that she did not let him leave,’ Baba said as I was telling him the story of my mother and father. We had already got as far as that, although I don’t even know when. When he appeared on the terrace and offered me his hand, he seemed to be floating, or at least not completely on the ground. And the expression on his face was as if he had just been making love to a woman, although, at least according to Ismael’s narrative, he hadn’t done that in a long time. His wife, in fact, had died; first they cut off her breast and then she died. I suppose this was right after he returned to Burkina from the Ivory Coast. He had been helping some Frenchman build bridges, but when he didn’t get paid for a year or two, he saw there was no point to it. The Frenchman had only succeeded in telling him lies about how, in the mother country, they built houses almost to the sky, but this ‘almost’ he swallowed, hid under his tongue, while Baba went on thinking of nothing but cloud-like constructions. He wanted to build – underground railways, banks, roads, houses, lots of houses – but he was at least ten years too late. He should have made his mind up ten years earlier either to be part of the industrial boom in the country next door or to become an ant among a thousand other ants in the post-war period, and right into the eighties, who were constructing the French capital. He chose the nearer option, and when he was trying to make a fast grab for the other one too, there was a shortage of work permits, or maybe the president at the time, Thomas Sankara, wanted to unite people at home and strengthen domestic production – Baba didn’t know for sure.

  I had the strange feeling that this not-quite-old man sitting next to me, just a step away from me, leaning forward on his arms, his eyes gazing out toward the road, where dust clouds were dancing in swirls, was somebody I had known longer than I dared admit. He had the mouth and nose of my Paris lover – it’s better I call him that, not just the black man or the Senegalese or the African film director, but my Paris lover – and Ismael’s walk, or rather Ismael had his – when the billowing cloth was swaying and catching at his thighs, I almost looked away – and short-cropped white hair, which he covered with a Muslim cap, and a long light-blue tunic. It was, I suppose, a Friday when I told him the story of my mother and father and he disclosed to me his experiences with the Frenchman, although clearly he would not have done so if I were even no more than half-French – the distrust of the colonized toward the former colonizers is enormous – and I knew that after drinking this tepid water, which we sipped in slow swallows, and after these words, he was going to the mosque. There he would remove his hole-ridden leather sandals, slightly lift his tunic, and crouch down on the soft rug. He had put his prayer beads in his pocket before he left home. He took them out a few times as I told my story, held them in his palm, and then put them away again.

  ‘Before her suicide, my mother became strangely asexual, sexless,’ I continued, and a moment later, realizing what I was saying, blushed. But Baba merely nodded, as if to encourage me to continue. ‘Only later did I understand that my father didn’t touch her, maybe not since my adoption. I had to be the content of their contract: I arrive in the house, and my father remains but has relations with other women. Or he leaves, and she remains without him.’ I didn’t have the feeling I was talking too much, and he didn’t give me that feeling, but despite his calm demeanour and his willingness to hear my story to the end, I started looking for Ismael. After quickly introducing his uncle to me, after his uncle sat down on the terrace, on the top step actually, Ismael had mumbled something and left. Presumably, to get us Coca-Colas, to leave us to ourselves, but it was taking him too long.

  ‘And your mother’s death? How did you come to accept it?’

  He must have thought I had finished when I made that previous statement, most likely because he did not know my desire. I was his age, or a bit younger, and I was supposed to have a story behind me. Not just the story of my parents, of my womanizing father, my distracted mother, but the story of my own husband and children. In a way, of course, I did have that, but it wasn’t the kind you might expect or that I’d dare admit to. Ismael may have even given Baba a hint of it, in the evening, when they sat on the terrace and gazed at the moon, may have told him he’d found a photograph of my damaged son in my bag, who was passing from childhood into adulthood, somewhat delayed, but nevertheless – but Baba had no intention of wounding me. Not then; later, maybe. Then he had come merely to have a look at me, to greet the woman Ismael said he met on the avenue; maybe he even admitted that he slept with her in the same bed and was now l
iving in her house. So he had no intention of poking beneath the surface of the water, of viewing the lotuses from below, when all the brown, veiny ugliness of the floating plants unfolds before your eyes. Baba was asking me how I survived, not about how I jumped into the swimming pool when I saw my mother’s body, and there, for a few long seconds, pretended to be dead. With my eyes open. Did my mother kill herself because of me? Was it because of me that she lost meaning in her life and gave up sewing? She had not taken the black machine with her. My father later sold it, I suppose because he couldn’t bear looking at ‘that thing’ in the house.

  ‘I survived by drawing. On fabric, walls, paper, anything that came into my hands.’ Baba nodded again, and from the side I saw that the tunic between his legs had formed a funnel. A moment of vulnerability. He was probably in the same position when the Frenchman told him the company had collapsed and there was no reason to keep on building things. Or at the embassy, when they denied him a visa. He took it personally; he didn’t know how else to take it. In the Ivory Coast things didn’t work out the best for him; they worked out for millions of his compatriots, some of whom even envied him at first because he was employed in a white man’s construction company, but they didn’t work out for him, and even worse, the moment he realized he wouldn’t be able to make the things he’d been dreaming about, his future fell apart too. By then his wife’s breast had been cut off; a second operation was anticipated, but he didn’t have the money for it. He had gone into debt for the first procedure, and the chance to get out – whether to the metropolitan capital or not; he could just as well have gone to some little countryside town, dug into stone, into sand, no need to supervise anyone, he would just dig, and there he would again have dug up the body of his wife – such a chance would have saved his life. But because they didn’t give it to him, and even removed him from the airport, by force, with his hands bound, he just stayed on the terrace and began a dialogue with the dead woman. For all the ugly things he had said, she forgave him, and all the things he couldn’t say when she was alive, he told her now.

  ‘It is not good that she did not let him leave,’ he said again, as if only now he grasped all the consequences Mama’s suicide left me with. ‘She burdened you by doing that. But now it is what it is. The fact that she left doesn’t mean that she did not love you. She probably loved you more than you imagine.’

  I straightened my back; my spine hurt; I wanted us to talk about something else. Last but not least, I might have even told him that with my mother’s death I learned that death is only death, and nothing else. Abanah, finish, asahme, c’est fini, as Ismael said somewhere. But Baba suddenly rose and pulled out his prayer beads from the pocket of his tunic. He just stood there a while, tall, slender, with the mouth and nose of my lover from a former life, as if trying to see if the dust outside the yard had settled, if the swirls had been carried to another part of the city, and then he said that Ismael and I shared the experience of the death of a mother and this is probably what brought us together. Except that Ismael’s Mama had been run over by a lorry and Ismael was a little boy at the time, too little to understand what had happened to him, let alone pick up pencil and paper and draw the bridge he slept under, or his mama’s clothes, folded in a bag, which she would never wear again. He had merely walked around and been the victim of all sorts of abuse, so sometimes I needed to forgive him. Like now, for example, when he’d been gone an eternity. When he said this, he smiled and, walking down the steps, lifted his tunic slightly. I smiled too, and brought the calabash of tepid water to my lips.

  * * *

  The ebony woman eventually let me leave of her own accord, so I did not need to run away or slip out secretly in the middle of the night. She had started to notice my staring. Because I was not eating anymore, because the welder had moved the sacks of rice, powdered milk, cornflour, and so on, to their bedroom, I would, especially at night, when the silence had spread all around, choose a point on the ceiling or the wall and stare at it. On the street, I had learned to distinguish the different shades of darkness, from fiery blue to almost white. And so once when I was trying to find a name for the colour of the night, the ebony woman came into the kitchen. The first thing I saw was her sad face, and then that she was wrapped in her dressing gown. The welder had given it to her as a present, in better times. Now, however, they were far apart. In their thoughts and in other ways, too.

  ‘You are not asleep?’ she whispered. I shook my head, no, I am not asleep. ‘But you should be.’

  Of course I should have been, at my age, but I had the nights for thinking. I no longer remember what was going on; the time I lived with the ebony woman and the welder was a special time, a time devoted to the world of the spirits, until it all ended in a single instant. As if I had cut it off with a knife. The only thing I remember very clearly is that a few weeks before I left, I was standing at the gate that separated the outer yard from the inner yard and, with a calabash of water in my arms, was watching people. Some people responded to my greeting, while others acted as if I was invisible. I was just about to turn around and run over to the ewes, one of which had recently lambed and the young were already standing and sucking, when I noticed a man dressed in white beneath the tree. He motioned me to come nearer, and when I shook my head, he smiled and pointed at the calabash with his finger. I do not know how it was possible, since we were far apart from each other – not so far apart as the welder and the ebony woman were, but nevertheless – but I heard every word he said. Later the ebony woman told me that it was her dying brother whispering in my ear. But why should he appear to me and not to her? Because you are that age, she said, do not think I don’t know about your visions. I know a lot of things that you do not know. I almost felt embarrassed.

  She untied her gown, in the dark, in the middle of the kitchen, and then tied it again. I looked at her and thought, a person should always be careful what he does, what he says, the least inattention can become infinite, like an unstoppable arrow that never hits the black and flies on to the end of time, never slowing its flight. If it had been day outside, if she had found herself here in the middle of the afternoon, she would have said, I cannot do it all, the shop, him, you, the dead child in the corner; okay, maybe she would not have said that, but the silk sash, tied casually on the side, was speaking for her. I had recently started seeing her differently; I would gaze at her buttocks as they bumped against each other as she walked, a little lazily, a little wearily, around the yard, at her shoulder with a strap slipping off, and this, too, it seemed, was why we were now staring at each other and speaking words that before were left unspoken.

  ‘Sometimes it seems like you really are my son.’

  ‘But I am not.’

  ‘No, you are not. We met on the street.’ I let my arm drop from the bench and my fist instinctively reached into a non-existent sack of powdered milk as the ebony woman continued: ‘You scared me with that story about my dying brother under the tree. My husband says I have to let you leave, that your presence in this house is not a good sign.’

  She spoke as if she did not know the order of things. Was it the welder who scared her? Did she become scared when I almost ran into the inner yard and told her a man in white was outside asking for water, or was it later, when she received the news that her eldest brother had died and so had final confirmation of my vision? She had come from inside the house onto the terrace looking dignified but nevertheless quite broken, as if she already guessed that she had lost not only me but her brother too. ‘Why are you so cruel?’ she said, holding a comb in her hand; somewhere in the house she had been braiding her hair, and as my eyes wandered from her mysterious face to her unruly hair floating in the air, I thought she meant the welder, but it was me she was talking about, her child. The man outside, what did he look like? Still holding the calabash, I was confused. That is when she must have known. If she had gone to the gate herself and looked out, nobody would have been under the tr
ee. The brother had come to say goodbye, maybe was still there by some miracle, but her eyes, accustomed only to light, would not have perceived him. I told her he was dressed in white, with an embroidered red border running from top to bottom but only in the middle. And did he have any cuts on his left cheek? the ebony woman asked, still on the terrace, although somewhat closer to me now. I nodded and crouched down. Then I let the little bit of water that was still in the calabash spill onto the ground.

  ‘Okay. I will go back.’

  The darkness had gone just far enough into day, the arrow of light was just far enough from its point of origin, that I could see the change in her face. A change that reminded me of being scared. She probably understood ‘back’ to mean back to the other world. Ever since she had lost her child, fear had taken up permanent residence in her. And because of this fear, she now had to choose between the welder and me. I was not her real son, while he could give her another boy, or at least bring back, call back, the one who for some time now had not been sitting in the kitchen. But if he had sat there once, he could sit there again. How the welder would do this, she did not know. She must have just believed that matters between them would be right again if I left. Went back to the street – just so there’s no misunderstanding.