Dry Season

by Gabriela Babnik

  * * *

  I was there; I touched the body. In other words, what Baba could not do, Malik and I did. I mean with regard to the MBDHPT. Malik, too, like his father, had joined the Movement, probably because the leader of the Movement was an albino like him, or maybe he had other reasons too, I do not know for sure, but instead of getting high and sitting around like he usually did, he was actually recruiting people. At first he got other albinos from the street to join, then more and more non-albinos, women, children, tramps, and cripples. So an entire army gathered in front of the presidential residence, especially after journalists and members of the opposition party, GD, joined us on Place de la Révolution. The death of Norbert Zongo in 1998 was a major cause for us. We thought our demonstrations, where we passed around the coffin with the symbolically incinerated body of the journalist, would topple the Government; we thought we had the right to topple a government that was torching, slaughtering, and burying people without our consent.

  Norbert was the first person who stood up to them. A few months before the murder he published weekly articles in the L’Indépendant about the disappearance of three of François’s servants. You will ask, who is this François? A high political functionary? The prime mini­ster? A businessman? François was all of that and more; François was the brother of the president. Norbert called him le petit président. And when this same le petit cast his eye on the singer Aïcha Koné from the Ivory Coast, we all knew it would start to stink. What I am telling you now is the honest truth, not some inserted story or African fairy tale, although I suppose it is clear that on this continent, reality often operates on fairy-tale principles.

  But back to Aïcha. I do not know what she looked like, I never saw her, but I imagine that even then she had a thick neck which she loaded up with a ton of gold, long painted nails, and a dress in the style of Miriam Makeba. Just one more griot, then, who functionaries took to bed. And while they are fucking – the griots, I mean, not the politicians – they count their money. To see if it is enough for a new Toyota, a fridge, and education for their eldest son, or if it does not even cover the cost of a lacquer bag. In any case, the ten or fifteen million francs earmarked for Aïcha should have been enough to cover all of the above plus an ice cream sundae. And the woman might have been left almost broke even if le petit’s jealous wife had not taken the money. Compaoré’s brother, thick as he was, blamed the theft on his driver, his right-hand man, who he would send out on his dirtiest business. The man denied it of course. If he did not take the money, then he did not take it, and there was really no need for them to go into the woods – him, the cook, and the cleaner, the big three – and get their backs flayed. The driver died from the torture, while the other two kept their mouths shut. For good, as you can well imagine.

  When the driver’s family began to make enquiries a few days after his disappearance, they went to François first. They were like lovers, le petit and his white-gloved driver, the perfect master and the perfect slave, but François denied any involvement. When I was hanging from the ceiling, which is where they put Malik and me after the round-up at the demonstrations, I imagined him standing in the middle of a spacious courtyard, with bougainvillea and palm trees all around, shaking his head. As if he too was wondering what could have happened to his favourite employee. If he had given them money, had reached that afternoon into his pocket or told his new cook to bring them a suitcase stuffed with banknotes, Norbert’s body would probably not have been burnt and we would not have been standing in the sun reaching out our fingers to touch the coffin, which travelled some five kilometres through the assembled crowd.

  Five kilometres, ten thousand hands, an hour, two or three demonstrations, truncheons at my head, gas in my eyes, then a shaved head and solitary confinement. It is not true that the leaders of the Journalists’ Association and the members of the Burkinabe Movement for Human Rights and the opposition party were not beaten up. It is not true that they were rounded up, had a few million francs pressed into their hands, and then released. If they beat us up, a few random demonstrators, they must have beaten them up too. This is the new strategy African governments are using: they inform the international press that the demonstrators dispersed voluntarily after realizing the senselessness of their protest; what they do not say is how much blood went to our heads when they moved us from solitary into the exercise hall and hung us tied by our legs beneath the ceiling, how many orgasms I experienced when they took a truncheon to my genitalia, which were smeared with some strange, sweet, gleaming substance. That is when I prayed that ‘my’ petit François would open his wallet, that the film would be rewound, but since we were living in the present, I stopped praying. I passed out.

  Malik was strung up not far away. Before I lost all strength, before my body froze in pain, I saw a band of light on his belly. There was no pattern, so clearly, there were no bars on the other side of the windows that might cast some interlacing design. I was alert enough to know that whatever they had done to him they would also do to me. By then Malik had been hanging unconscious from the ceiling for a while, a kind of wilted flower that only at the last moment understood there was no point, it was all a big trick, while in me the darkness was still getting ready. While the last blows were being struck, although it is possible they beat me even after I went inside myself, when that third eye opened, which neither sees nor hears anything and talks only to itself, I thought of the story about the family of the dead and secretly buried driver, about how they went to the reporter and informed him of the disappearance; Norbert, of course in his own style, began investigating. And when he discovered that François’s security officers had killed the driver, he thought it entirely natural to call on the court to condemn the murderer and reveal where the body was buried.

  I never doubted, none of us at those demonstrations ever doubted, that Norbert knew what might happen to him. He started to get threats, and because the threats did not work, they tried to pay him off, but he insisted that he was on the side of the people and was therefore unbribable. What I do not know is if he knew it when he crossed the line, and do you ever know that? Does a woman know when she conceives? Does she know the sex of the child she carries beneath her heart? As for me, as I hung there, there was barely anything I understood: Why didn’t Aïcha Koné do something? Or the wife, why didn’t she prevent the torture in the woods? Do not tell me she did not know. That would be the most obscene joke I ever heard.

  The person I feel sorry for the most in this story is not François, who after Norbert’s murder – let’s just call it murder, even though the court has never ruled on whether it was murder or not, the Association of Journalists merely made a not very convincing documentary, but even there it is clear that the four passengers in the car were shot first and only afterwards was the car set alight – had to be a little more restrained; the older Blaise must have told him, take it easy or I will shut off the tap: no murders, no whores for a few months, this time my presidential reputation is on the line. No, the person I feel sorry for the most is Baba. While Malik and I were out on the street, he was sitting at home, and when we were hanging with our feet tied to the ceiling and getting our balls nearly ripped open by truncheons, he was waiting in front of some entirely different building. They lied to him, told him that was where we were, and he took it as pure gold. What I do not know is whether, when he was sitting in front of the entrance and leaning back on the sharp edge of the wall, he was praying; if I were him, I would certainly have been praying. For himself, for his son, for me, for his wife, for the dead driver, for the dead driver’s family. It was people like Baba who let the regime get out of hand. While he was listening to jazz and talking to his dead wife, they were digging graves. While he was petting the donkey and watching Auntie place her herbal infusions all around the yard, they were setting fire to the elongated backs of innocent people.

  It was only after Baba leaned away from the wall, stood up straight, and then bent down
again, mainly to brush the dust from his trousers – I think that by the time he was bending down he must have figured out that he would not find us in that building, maybe in another one, but definitely not in the one they had pointed their finger at and laughed – it was only then that the two of us also opened our eyes. Malik first, then me. Our torturers obviously realized we did not have any connections and there was no point in wasting any more energy on our empty, stinking, useless balls, so they threw us on the rubbish heap like rats. The glimmering human shadows far away, which were staring at us, at our wretched bodies, must have thought we had got stoned out of our heads the night before. In fact, we had crawled like madmen through tons of discarded plastic bags, and even when we were at last able to stand on our feet, on wobbly ground, we did not know if we were alive or dead. Nevertheless, later, about halfway home, Malik put his arms around my neck and burst into tears. It felt like I was seeing tears of rage, tears of abandonment, the tears of a boy forced to grow up in a single night. Never again did I see him cry like that, nor did I ever want to.

  * * *

  A fear that had always been with me then became real. The fear of getting lost. Ismael was not just a body that kept me warm at night and sometimes during the day too; he was, mainly, my guide. We had gone for a walk, into town, although I didn’t know if I could find my way back. Of course I could not have suspected that he would ask for my hand beneath the Coca-Cola umbrella and then, after being turned down, walk away from me and disappear into the unknown. My plan about picking up the dog would have been absolutely fine were it not for the endless distance between me and the house. What could I tell the cab driver? That I live near three trees that bloom in purple at the beginning of the rainy season? That the electricity in my rented house sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t? There are lots of houses like that in Ouaga, he would probably reply, or, what sort of tree do you mean, Madame? Lots of plants here bloom in red, lilac, and pink.

  But all the same, after the tro tro disappeared from view, I kept follo­wing the road, stumbling over discarded chicken bones, the brilliant white light, sleeping dogs. If I must include an animal in my novel, then let it be a dog. They have their logic, after all. At night they lie two or three together on the heated asphalt, and during the day they almost never growl and generally seem quite shy and, primarily, famished. Hunger makes them special. Hunger makes them unaggressive, ghostly shadows. I would have followed a dog if it had been possible, but more than not, they just got out of the way of my feet. Clearly, now that Ismael had left me, I held no interest anymore, not even as a target of ridicule. I wondered where all the potential lovers or, perhaps, thieves, had gone. Although now I had nothing they might have taken, just the sandals strapped on my feet, my washed-out skin and some small bills tucked in my bra.

  I took my sandals off again. I wasn’t sure if I was going forward, backward, or in circles, and the only thing I could come up with was that it might be easier to find my way home if I was barefoot. Who knows? A tree, a stone, a lamp might remind me I had been there before, had left my mark, and that this was the way to ‘my’ terrace. The house, after all, wasn’t mine; I didn’t buy it, nor was I even contemplating anything like that, certainly not now; I didn’t even have any real objects of value in the house – but still, it was the house where Ismael and I made love, where we left our hair and our sweat and our urine, and last but not least, it was the house we sat in front of in the morning almost naked. That, I think, is why it was important to find the way back to it.

  At a certain moment I realized I wasn’t walking anymore, wasn’t making any progress; I was just sitting by the side of the road. Sitting and watching and unable to believe that a crippled man was crawling next to my feet, a man I had noticed even long before this scene, who had seemed not to be moving at all but only staying in place, his stumps turned in the air and his belly too ravaged to be capable of pushing him forward. But in fact, not only was he moving; he was crawling with all the suppleness of a snake; it took me a moment to remember what sort: a boa, I said to myself, the same boa Ismael told me about, sitting next to me on the terrace, almost naked, but not entirely – the definition of nakedness could be rather ambiguous on this continent – that boa, then, which one night in 1988 slithered into the camp of a remnant of revolutionaries. They wanted to organize a coup, Ismael said, leaning his arms on his knees, although I wasn’t looking at him, not even sideways, and in fact I was only pretending to listen, only pretending to be interested in these stories about Thomas Sankara, Burkina’s assassinated president. Boukary Kaboré, who had asked Sankara to let him dispose of Blaise, heard the boa weeping after the leaders of the revolution had died. This was the second sign. The first related to the king’s envoys. They arrived in their togas, starched garments embroidered with gold thread, and asked Kaboré to call off the wholesale slaughter. They had had a vision, Ismael’s floating voice continued to insist, and since it didn’t seem as if he intended to stop – just as the slithering cripple did not intend to relinquish my leg, which he had climbed onto and which I was insistently shaking as if my intention was to shake off the flies and not the body of an almost-entire person – I leaned forward and pretended that I was not looking at Ismael’s crotch. But then I couldn’t help clapping my hands. Although we had made love not long before, his penis was still fully swollen. I get horny in the morning, he shrugged, and shifted away from my inquisitive eyes. And because for a moment he was even embarrassed, he stood up, in underpants printed with little American flags, and adjusted his upraised penis so it arched downward. I wanted to ask him if the king’s men had had a vision about Blaise’s future victims. Four soldiers look the wrong way at his mistresses and a month later their skeletons are found in the woods, big, powerful skeletons that could only belong to well-trained bodies. But now I was on the street, lost, my sandals in my hands, with my leg somewhere out in the air, the leg I was trying to reclaim, but the human reptile was a lot stronger than he seemed at first glance, and I wasn’t able to count all these stories. But if I did somehow count them all, there would be enough corpses in them, enough skulls taken separately, enough limbs taken separately, for an entire civil war and then some. That boa might well have come into the army camp for no special purpose, or at least with no higher purpose.

  Apparently, the only way I could win this battle was to scream – screaming, after all, would explain my frantic blow to the reptile’s head with my sandal – and then run like crazy into the street and, further, into the white-hot belly of the city. The sun was scorching, as it always is in Ouaga, but my flapping breasts and flapping thighs, which bumped against each other as I ran, made it even more scorching. I tried to tell myself this was nothing compared to being confined in prison, in the woods, in front of execution squads; nothing compared to what happened to the people Ismael told me about. And I didn’t stop running until I felt a whistling in my chest. If I had been from here, I might have said the spirits were preparing an ambush against me – first, heels that were too high, then Ismael disappearing, and now the human boa, although, and this I have to stress, I have never believed in that sort of hocus-pocus. I didn’t come to Ouaga because I was interested in black hens or ascending into the sky; I came here for a holiday. Fourteen days under a coconut palm, a straw, a long-stemmed glass, and bands of suntanned skin. All right, I’m lying; none of that could have happened; the moment you open the tourist catalogue and they start selling you that sort of exotic shit, you know it’s not true.

  I took a deep breath and tried to determine what my situation was after that panicked run; on first inspection, the street felt like a cage, houses on every side with open windows and doors and tin roofs – and I realized that my solitary body would not be able to, would not know how to, fight against the multitude of invisible bodies trapped here, still roasting chickens here, only you couldn’t see the hand of the one who turns the meat, the foot of the one who tries to shoo away the canine couple lying on the heated a
sphalt. I wrapped an arm around my waist, as if to say none of this is happening to me, it’s happening to somebody else, and even that is just a dream – and despite the sweat on my drooping eyelids, I could see, on the other side of the street, the reflection of women whose moist lips and heavily powdered faces were asking you to touch them. It occurred to me that Sankara, as Ismael had assured me on the terrace, his boxers hanging low on his hips, was betrayed not by his love for a woman but by his love for a comrade. But if he had disposed of his dear Blaise, not directly of course but through Boukary Kaboré, he would have acted differently even before that too. And the Burkinabe revolution would not have been what it was.

  I turned around; even my body turned around – I thought I saw a figure I recognized. A fair, almost white complexion, white hair, pink lips. An African tubabu, Ismael said when he wished to be mean. But from fatigue, and partly too from alarm that things from the tourist catalogue were happening to me, and also, probably, uncertainty as to whether I should go or stay, whether what I was seeing was a ghost or a person, I just stood there as the familiar shape came nearer. When it reached a distance of about three steps away and I could also see the small, devious eyes, and not only the albino hair and sun-ravaged skin sprinkled with dark, almost black spots, an inner voice nodded to me. It was all a joke, a big tasteless joke. Ismael walking away and leaving me holding my sandals. If this was him trying to prove the seriousness of his intention, then it was pretty damn stupid. At the moment of my greatest surrender, he caused my greatest humiliation. It was for this, and only for this, that I confided my story to him. About my son and my husband, about my father and my mother, about myself and my business. So that in the end he would understand why I couldn’t do exactly the thing he wanted me to do. Marriage at my age, oh please!

  ‘I like your tall,’ Malik said in place of a greeting. In fact, I never considered myself particularly tall, although I might have seemed taller because of my backcombed hair, but mainly it was clear that he too was checking. Making sure that he was really seeing what he was seeing, or was it maybe a dream.