Dry Season

by Gabriela Babnik

  ‘I’m lost and don’t know how to get home,’ I replied abruptly and nervously raised my hand to the back of my neck. A gesture that in some other life would have given me away, but now it didn’t matter anymore where I was from or what I was, just where I was going. So, like the majority of Africans, for me too the future became my only hope, my only wager.

  His lips curled in a cynical smile. I realized that my plea had given him the upper hand. You could tell that from the way he said, your amoureux should take better care of you, and from the way his hand slipped behind his back and snapped to somebody. It wasn’t just me; he held this entire haunted street in his fist. Black Street, he corrected me later, not haunted street, Ana, Black Street. Whatever. I wrapped my skirt around my thighs, which by now were a little rested, while forgetting to see if Malik too, like those kings from the post-Sankara era, had gold thread embroidered in his garments, and hopped behind the back of a man on a motorcycle. The kingly one gave instructions to the enslaved spirit – a long stone wall, three trees in purple, the electricity in the house only sometimes works and then it’s illegal – and we rode off. Into darkness. With my sandal in the air I was still waving to the ghosts we had left behind when I was overcome by the feeling that things between Ismael and me would never be the same as before.

  * * *

  After Ismael walked away from me I intended to return to the hotel. A serious step backwards, I know, but all the same. I left the gas burner standing where it was before, rolled the rug back to its original state, and didn’t even need to shut off the electricity. Before stepping off the terrace, I tried to point the bougainvillea branches in the right direction. I don’t know how I failed to notice it before, but on my wanderings through the city, perhaps during my battle with the human reptile, I had acquired two deep scratches. They were a shiny pink, just as the balls on my mother’s brother once were. We were sitting outside in the garden, when he spread his legs. I could see he wasn’t wearing underpants. His balls were big and smooth and pink, as pink as the walls of my African house, and his cock was big and yellow, a dull yellow, like the bread he was putting in his mouth. I couldn’t stop looking – not bad for such a crushed man, who clearly was only pretending not to have a sex life. Later I asked my mother if her brother was trying to make an impression on me, what I mean is, was he trying to flirt with me or something – but my mother, turning red, said, no, he was always doing that, it was just innocent showing off.

  So I began to view the garden at the back of the family house as a holy place, a place where innocence was on display. How, then, did I view the minister’s house, which I was abandoning and to which, in a surge of rage – yes, rage was the closest thing to what I was feeling at the time toward Ismael – I had no intention of returning? Langston Hughes, whom I so much enjoyed reading during my English period, would say it was a space temporarily withheld, a dream deferred, the site of lovemaking rolled up and leaning against the wall.

  Holding my newly discovered wound, I at last left the terrace. There was no ground shaking beneath my feet, no dizziness, so it couldn’t be love. To be totally honest, I had expected to find Ismael sitting on the steps, or somewhere else, when I returned, and that I would read on his lips that he was sorry. That way I would know, that way we both would know, he was sorry. Not because he had proposed to me – he could even have repeated those words and I wouldn’t have turned him down – but because he ran off and left me alone on the street. With my sandals undone. But since he wasn’t there, or rather, it was only his absent body sitting on the terrace, I felt I had no choice but to return to my elderly father, to the house, where I hadn’t even covered the furniture with sheets, to my son, who wouldn’t know me when he looked in my face.

  ‘Madame, Madame...’ The voice came out of nowhere. I stood still, but only for a moment. Now that I had made up my mind, I wasn’t about to change my plans. All I wanted was for the world to be real, to step down from the movie screen and have things around me simply be what they are.

  You always had this tendency to slip off the edge of everything, my mother used to say, especially after I unmasked her brother. After that, they no longer closed the kitchen door, although it had been a long time since I sniffed his gloves. He disgusted me, and if my mother had been completely in her right mind she would have said something else, not the thing she said: it’s just innocent showing off. Since I wasn’t her real daughter, she didn’t need to protect me completely for real, completely to the end. She always left enough room for manoeuvre between us, as if she wanted to tell me, so what if he did show it to you? It’s probably not the first time you saw a man’s cock and it certainly won’t be the last, and what’s the big deal anyway, you’re not my flesh and blood. Today, I believe it was not mere innocence, not some disorder he had; it was a genuine attempt at seduction. Maybe even seduction from spite, from hatred, from revenge on my father, who at that same widespread moment was calmly drinking his café au lait. Meanwhile, his hat rested windlessly on an empty chair.

  ‘Madame, please wait. I have take da dog. Dis is his collar here...’ I turned around mainly because of that please. I know why I was in such a hurry – not because I wanted to see my father or go to the psychiatric hospital to see my son, but because I wanted to swim. To let my body float on the water’s surface and think of nothing. The receptionist would probably smile when she saw me again – I told you it couldn’t last, or maybe, those street boys can’t even count to three, what can you do with them? – but nevertheless she would then give me keys and a fresh towel. I wanted to tell the boy with the big head, the head of an old man: go away, go away, go as fast and as far as you can, you’re creeping into my life like a black spot and turning me into a movie actress, the kind I never wanted to be, the kind not even my mother wanted to be, and my head is aching from all this acting – but despite this my hand slipped over to the collar. A brown, worn-out band of leather with a little metal plate hanging from it, the sort of plate men wear when they go off to war. When their bodies are burnt to a crisp, it is the only thing that remains, nothing else. But what remained of that dog was a skeleton, some flesh, islands of white fur mixed with reddish earth, and that engraved number. It was like I had seen it somewhere before, I said to myself, and then just nodded to the boy that I was willing to follow him.

  Instead of to the garden of innocence, I would go with him. So let it continue, this movie role of mine; let me slip off the edge of everything. Maybe there, in the end, I will meet a divinity and not just a dying dog.

  ‘You have injure yourself, Madame,’ the voice from nowhere said and, still walking, stared motionlessly at the scratches on my hand; I, meanwhile, simply gazed onward. If I couldn’t swim I could at least walk. Onward, always, only onward, until the many-voiced reality of the street disappears, to be replaced by silence and muteness. And the sound of sandals striking against heels. When we have gone far, too far to turn back, I will say, now it’s too late for the hotel, too late for the receptionist’s scornful smiles, now there’s no point in it. Then the boy will wave his arm and shoo away the flies settling in patterns on my wound. Just a little further and we’re there, he’ll say, although the signals in his brain inform me that we’re not even almost there. Not even almost far enough from the centre for it to take more than a few hours to find my body. So we have to keep walking onward, keep walking toward the speechless truth and forget about all the pink cocks in this world. But then the old-man’s head turned around suddenly and indicated that I should follow it. There it is, he said, or maybe he said something else, I don’t remember anymore.

  I only know that the place where I stepped shook beneath my feet. Read my lips: this is love. I got down on my knees, shut the dog’s eyes with my scratched hand, and then its muzzle too, and told the boy to hurry, that we had to do it before sunset, before I made any decision about anything, we had to bury this little god next to the terrace beneath the bougainvillea.

 
* * *

  I like the way she peels melons. With a big army knife that has USA Army written on the handle. I like the way she carves out the soft centre with it, then the seeds, one after another, and at last brings the yellow strip into her mouth. I like the way she asks me if I would like some too. Leaning against the cool wall right next to the slit-like window, I shake my head. In the morning she said, don’t be so gentle with me, Ismael, I do not deserve such devotion. I mean no woman, nobody in fact, deserves to be worshipped like that. Although I was not worshipping her; I just liked the way she said this.

  Maybe I inherited from Baba not just the desire to be politically active but also the desire to be with white people. Him, they told stories to; me, I had her. I was not looking for her, she came of her own accord; at first, she even thought I was somebody else, her Paris lover waving to her, calling to her, from the other side of the avenue. But it was me, and since she did not show any disappointment, we went to the hotel. I am not reviving the mythology of that first night – in fact, it was nothing special; it’s just that I like the way she walks around the house. And I like the way she wears my shirt, comes up to me and, almost furiously and painfully, presses herself to me. She cannot control her true size, and because that is true, I easily lose myself too. I can tell you, sex with her is fantastic, so I do not know why I should give it up. With her at least I come. I do not need to pull out in the middle of a movie or say something like, no, no, I shouldn’t. Things are clear with her. Maybe she does need a little more attention, a few more compliments, than some girl with upturned breasts, but with her, I also like the length of her skirt. So it is not just about her strong, firm torso and – I will say it again – her calves and nicely shaped, somewhat muscular thighs, and the same goes for her arse, but it is also about her world, the world she left back there.

  She told me she was adopted. She also told me about her mama and father. I mean, the kind of relationship they had. She thought it was a disaster, but for me it was not anything special, so I kept quiet. She probably thought I did not understand, the way, for example, I would not understand the loneliness of somebody who stayed home while other people went to the seaside. We do not have that here. Not just the sea, but holidays too. I mean, our whole life is a holiday. We sit around and wait for something to happen. That is Baba’s motto now, by the way: sit and wait – for Malik to come home, for his dead wife’s spirit to appear, for A Love Supreme to play on the radio.

  But I do not want to wait anymore. I would like to go with her. To that fucked-up town of hers, as she called it; I would like to see the swimming pool where her mother drowned, the house where she had her things, the garden where she locked the door on her father and his mistress, and last but not least, I would like to meet her son. I would bring him cigarettes in the hospital, if she let me. And there is something else too; I would like to find out if the story she tells about her son is true. When she talks about him, she looks at the wall. She avoids my eyes, and I do not like that. I do not like it when she says, Ismael, I don’t know if we’re doing the right thing. And most of all I do not like it when she says that the things we do abroad or really far away in a different city, it is like they do not exist. That we are not responsible for them, or at least not as much as we are at home. That is when I tell her to take off my shirt, that I do not like to look at her in it. And then I bark at her that that story she tells about the suicidal son does not add up. I say she had better tell me the truth or else. But she refuses. She sits down on the floor, like she did that time in the bathroom, hugs her legs and says she is still not ready. And since I cannot do anything else, I sit down behind her and press my belly against her back. This calms her. We sit there in silence, and then I say, why did you pick me and not somebody else? There is always somebody who stands in for us, or we are standing in for somebody else, she says, and because I do not understand, because all I can think is that I heard this somewhere before, on television or the radio, I keep quiet and caress her.

  We have not talked yet about death. I think she talked about it with Baba, but I am not sure. When I lean my back against the cool wall – I really like the minister’s house, its cool walls and high ceilings – I have the sense that, basically, she is not at all frightened by her own approaching physical decline and that she has been fighting against this worry with great success. If she was afraid, she would not have been sitting on the only chair we possessed in the house slicing yellow melons with the USA Army knife. I like this courage. Maybe a little less I like the anxious feeling she sometimes tells me about when she is spread out on the mattress, the feeling that her world will disappear and that it is already dwindling away. Sitting on the tile floor in the hallway, which opens into the room where she is lying, I want to ask her if she even sees me, or am I just the lover from her Parisian spring, but she is determined to continue. Some of the people she has known all her life have died in the past few years, some of them too soon – a bad period; others have retired, while yet others are being forced to accept early retirement. Like with the holidays, I did not know if I really understood. But this time I asked. It is about the fear of going hungry, she said, the fear of extinction. In Europe even young people talk about retirement, and they count the years to their first life annuity payment.

  And so, because she was having trouble finding people to have fun with, she found me. I imagined that all these words had some figurative meaning and that she really wanted to ask me something different. But because I was a man, a much younger man, and she was a woman, a much older woman, it was up to me to speak, to call things by their right names. Would you marry me, can I offer you my hand? A sentence maybe I never should have uttered, at least not under that Coca-Cola umbrella, on that bench, which, when I said what had been unspoken between us, she feverishly grabbed on to. And if from nothing else, I understood from her cold, sweaty hands on the wood that I was the one she had come here to tell her story to. The story of her son most of all. The story of her mother and father, and even of her Paris lover and ex-husband – these were merely side currents. Everything revolved around that haggard figure. But for this, obviously, we needed time – I mean, she needed time.

  Let’s take a walk into town, I said, leaning away from the wall. She raised her eyebrows. Nothing special, I repeated, just to stretch our legs. She put the army knife down on the empty margarine tub, washed her hands and, in the hallway, put on a skirt. Looking at her knees I knew it was also about the colour of her skin. I like her colour, the colour of seeds in the belly of a peeled fruit. And mainly, what I like most of all, is when she is in motion, and less, when she is at rest.

  * * *

  My body has never given me problems. Not after I had my son, not during my marriage (my climaxes were minimal), and even less on the chair in front of the open window with my Paris lover, so I thought that would last. When things last, we think they will last forever, but in Africa I joined the long queue of the sick, people suffering if not from malaria then hepatitis, or one of the various bowel infections, or something similar. Initially, maybe even before my arrival on this continent, I was imagining liberation – a linen shirt, safari trousers, flying over millions of flamingos – but the very opposite happened.

  It began piece by piece. On the way back from the woods to the rented house – the boy and I were going to bury the dog in front of the terrace – I felt a pain in my belly (my ex-husband would have said it was from the too long African penises). It was a sharp, unusual pain, but I didn’t give it any special importance. What occupied me more was the thought that I would start drawing again. In the rented house I could have the same window with a view of the garden, almost the same table and chair, only not cushioned. But by the time we finished burying the dog, it was already getting dark – even as we stamped down the ground I noticed that the bougainvillea was acquiring that muted violet tone – so the first thing that had to be done was to connect the wires in the house. I don’t know what I
was thinking, that it couldn’t be more complicated than a socket. I came back out of the house onto the terrace and motioned to the boy with my arm for him to come and help me. He shook his head, or maybe he did something else, it wasn’t possible to see in the darkness; from the silence that had settled on the yard I thought he might even have left. I stood a while in the doorway and looked for him. In the dark I began to distinguish shadows – the steps leading from the terrace, the narrow path leading to the road, the masonry wall along the road, which somewhere near the middle had collapsed, which I only noticed now – but then I just turned around, marched back inside, and tried to feel with my hand for the gap where the switch was supposed to be.

  I didn’t have a clue which wires needed to be connected and which should be left alone. When I got my first shock, I wanted to run to the nearest phone centre and call my ex-husband, but after a moment’s consideration, I decided it might seem like a cry for help. So I just held my breath and got back to work on the ragged wires. Of course, I got another shock, stronger than the first, and when I had almost convinced myself that it was pointless – that I could stay like this, in the dark, maybe sit a moment on the terrace before going to bed and try to remember when I last saw the wall intact – my hands went on their own to where they shouldn’t have gone.

  I was thrown a metre or so from the point of contact. Except for a dense, grubby pain that drained me of everything there was to be drained of, I don’t remember a thing. The boy who I thought had left had merely been hiding behind the wall, and now, with a pensive face, was staring at me. He knew what I was going to do, he said, so he decided to wait. ‘You have luck. You could be no more.’