Dry Season

by Gabriela Babnik

  I lifted my legs to my belly and wrapped my arms around them. It felt like I had a big rock inside my skull (what would my husband say about that?), which had been carried in by the sea and didn’t want to leave. This is the third piece of the illness and seems to be the most stubborn. Then I met the boy’s gaze with a resigned, pleading look, and signalled with my hand that I wanted some water, but he shook his head. Not the same as before, when I asked him to help me with the electrical wires, but nevertheless he shook his head. ‘Your body is stuffed wit da electric,’ he said, ‘so one day, two days, must no touch da water.’ I closed my eyes and opened my dry mouth. So it’s here he’s going to finish me off, in the house, not in the woods. I lowered my legs to the mattress, turned on my side to the wall, and started thinking feverishly about how to get rid of him, how to send him away, to the other side of the yard, to the other side of the yard wall; he could simply step through that breach in the wall and miraculously disappear, the way people do in adventure movies, and I, meanwhile, would drag myself to the bathroom. Would stick my head, my hair too, into a bucket of cold water, and let whatever happens happen.

  My father’s complaints on the phone about his heart seemed like a joke to me. My entire previous life seemed like a joke to me. My son was in a similarly pathetic condition as I was now, but still I had left him so I could find myself a second child, who had, by the same token, left me. ‘Ismael,’ I moaned. ‘Can you call Ismael for me?’

  ‘Madame, I know what it is dat you like, dat I am to leave and den you creep off into da batroom.’ Despite his broken French, the expression ‘creep off’ best described the desire I felt and, even more, my position. The position of a pupa. I thought I would gladly bang my head against a tree, against the earth, against iron, if the pain would only stop.

  ‘What if you get me to the hospital?’ I tried again.

  ‘Da money dey take from you at da hospital, you will give it to me. I am same same good...’

  Same same good as what? You mean your grandmother is a herbalist and your grandfather was a medic in the French army? My husband, too, once, or maybe still does, I don’t know – it had been an infinity since I last saw him or even had news about him, about the new family he created, three children, dark-haired wife, dog, garden, brick oven in the garden – my ex-husband, too, then, once knew something about electricity, and so I am certain that in my case, water plays no role whatsoever, except to soothe my headache. Maybe my husband and I were strangers during our marriage, maybe instead of looking at his mouth when he explained two-phase current to me, I was looking at the clouds suffused with light, but nevertheless, certain things did stay with me. That’s why, it seems, I now could only shake my head. No money, no flamingos, no aeroplane. They shot that movie from a famous book to satisfy the human need for the other, the different, the faraway. But in reality, when we find ourselves in the place we have been yearning for, our only desire is to go back (the eternal conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Leaving, between dreaming about roots and the miraculous journey). What I wouldn’t have given right then for my cushioned chair and my table by the window and the view through the window! But if I went back, especially right then, it would look as if I had failed. I would sit on the edge of my father’s hospital bed and hold his hand. And it wouldn’t be him people pitied, but me. That was a place I had already been, so I knew what was waiting for me there.

  ‘Madame, you do no remember me? You do no remember dat you and me we bury da dog?’ The rock in my head was doing my thinking for me. If I told him I didn’t remember a thing, he would bind me here forever; if I told him everything I was thinking, he would try to play doctor.

  ‘My family is coming to take me away from here.’

  He was silent, a long, viscous silence, or maybe it only seemed like that to me because of the mosquito netting hanging between us; with his face half-turned to me, he licked his lips – he must have made that hole in the wall, I thought, and it really wouldn’t have taken very much; he probably just struck it once, with his foot, maybe even with his hand, and the Sahelian sculpture caved in, leaving behind the evidence of dust – but it was just for a moment, and then, in a voice not at all like a boy’s, he said: ‘Very good; so then we will wait until they get here.’

  I laughed. And he too let an unexpected smile escape. Somewhere in the region that separates one breast from the other – I’m not sure, but I think that all this time he’d been staring at that part of my décolletage near the breastbone – he seemed to realize there was no point in pretending. And that I had seen through him long ago, especially with that ‘creep off’. ‘So will you now bring me water?’ I asked, hoping that his fleeting smile also meant surrender. But he merely turned away as if I didn’t exist, as if that region of the wall had never existed either. From now on, we will look at that hole as something that has been there forever. I sighed; it was obviously impossible to predict whatever step he might take; maybe he himself could not predict his own next steps. ‘Or will you at least find Ismael for me, so I can say goodbye to him?’

  He let the silence between us linger – if I had turned back to the wall, I could have listened to the sounds coming from the yard, could maybe even have recorded them, and I would have titled the recording Morning in Ouagadougou, or, Mourning in Ouagadougou – but after a while he realized we weren’t getting anywhere like this, least of all to the money he needed, God only knows why. ‘It was Ismael who sent me. He is very busy at the moment and cannot come to see you.’

  ‘Even if you told him I had an electrical shock?’ From the slight flicker of his eyelids I could see the question confounded him. His accountability was on the line. If he did tell Ismael the truth, Ismael would maybe really come and he’d be out of his money. But if he didn’t tell him and I died – if from nothing other than thirst, abandonment, the emptiness that had started to spread inside me ever since Ismael walked off and left me alone in the big city – that wouldn’t turn out very well for him either.

  ‘Okay, I will bring you water, but do not blame me if you get shocked.’ At last. I even blushed, I was so excited. If at that moment somebody looked down from the air at my face, he would think he saw the fluttering wings of a million pink flamingos. But even in my condition, I was in a better situation than Meryl Streep, whose lover was taken from her by a shattered aeroplane. At least my wandered-off lover had sent me an angel in the form of this boy. I raised myself halfway out of the bed and took a sip from the proffered plastic bottle.

  ‘You see? Nothing happened. Your grandmother taught you wrong. The electricity was absorbed in the earth, but me it left. Now go to Ismael and tell him I need him. That I really do need him.’ For a moment I wasn’t sure about the order of the words I was saying; what he had been doing earlier – slicing, chopping up sentences, massacring Senghor, just to sound more authentic, more deserving of financial assistance in my eyes – had obviously rubbed off on me too. But then I pulled myself together and said, in a calm, almost blasé voice, ‘He and I need to talk.’

  He stood up obediently, rocked back and forth on one leg and, as he rocked, looked again in the region of my décolletage. As if he wasn’t sure if this was a point of opening or of closing, a point of light or of darkness, wasn’t sure if he should say that sentence or not, but then he just said it anyway: ‘Madame, you are the strangest white person I have ever met.’

  ‘You too, you too’, I whispered after him. The most unusual boy that has ever crossed my path. When I pull this rock out of my head, I will drag myself over to the window and try to draw you. Draw you seeing me as I stand on the terrace staring into the darkness and it means nothing to you, draw you taking from the wall what belongs to it and folding up your angel wings so you can climb through the maw of emptiness to the inside of the yard. But I don’t think he heard me. And it wasn’t until he was far away, on the road, this time for real, that I noticed there had actually been a light burnin
g in the room the whole time.

  * * *

  I decided to take a step forward, but if it didn’t work out I’d be taking three or four steps backward. I decided to go to Ismael’s family. I’d already been there, but because I only vaguely remembered the way, I asked the boy from the previous page of the novel to take me halfway. A few of those personal things, shoes, undergarments, a knee-length skirt, I packed in the yellow bag, locked the door and hid the keys in the bougainvillea, where, as we had agreed, the owner of the house would find them, and, from the terrace, took one last look around the yard. Low, well-trod grass was growing from here to where the boy was waiting for me. The yard was like any other; the only difference was that I had done things in it I would never have had the courage to do anywhere else. Slowly, I went down the steps, past the palm tree, which was too tall to give shade so I hardly ever thought about it, and all the way to the wall where my guardian angel was leaning. He seemed to be thinking about something, something unconnected to me, but I touched him anyway. A gentle, barely perceptible touch on the shoulder. He turned around and smiled at me. And when he did, his face took on almost girlish features. I was thinking about his smile even after we parted; I snapped my fingers and asked him, what day was it today? – I meant the date, but the answer I got was Thursday: ‘Today is Thursday, Madame,’ he said – then I brought my arm to my body, shook my head, and waved at him. He shrugged and went on his way.

  From there it wasn’t far, I mean to the yard where Ismael had spent part of his childhood. If I couldn’t be next to him, and he next to me, then I could at least be near some of the pieces that composed him. His aunt, forecaster of good and bad weather, who at the crack of dawn started moving the goats around the yard so they wouldn’t suffocate from the heat. Baba and his radio. The more he tried to free himself of the emptiness that had come with his wife’s death, the further he slipped into it. His life had been a mistake, he said on the steps of the rented house, but I only half-believed him. I once had a friend who said goodbye when he was still a living body. We had been friends for more than thirty years, until one day he sent out letters in which he announced that he was closing the windows and doors of his flat to everyone he knew, which also meant me, maybe me especially.

  It wasn’t a personal letter, but all the same I responded to it in places in my thoughts. But I am still here, or, despite your closed senses I continue to exist. I never mailed him this sentence, but shortly before I left for Africa I saw that he had published a collection of poetry titled Space for You.

  In it, he had even dedicated a poem to me, but by then it was too late. I didn’t believe him because he didn’t accept responsibility for what he had said, and neither did Baba, or maybe he did, I don’t know. In any case, he was a little surprised to see me standing at the entrance to his yard with that yellow bag. That’s when I remembered: Ismael had stood like that as a child and gazed into the eyes of an invisible man who, before departing to the other world, asked him for water. Only this was a different yard now; it didn’t even have a tree, and also, there were things that had changed since my last visit. The terrace was still there, of course, and the goats were the same, only they were in a completely different part of the yard from what I remembered.

  After greetings that, for me, were almost incomprehensible – how is your family? how is your father? how is your house? – I sat down on a low chair. The bag I laid on the ground. The girl who brought me a calabash of water bent her knees a little and bashfully averted her eyes toward my feet. Baba waited for me to take a sip or two and wipe my lips, then cleared his throat. Ismael had not been around for a few days, he said, and in fact, he wanted to come and see me. He didn’t say see the two of you, or simply, I thought of coming by; his finger pointed solely at me. As if I was to blame for Ismael’s disappearance, and for other things, too, which had best remain unsaid.

  ‘I would like to wait here, if I may, for a few days, no more than that...’ I said, speaking past Baba’s words.

  ‘Ana...’ The voice that interrupted me sounded resolute and self-sufficient. So I was right; things weren’t over for Baba yet. Not least of all, he had a son, the king of thieves and deceptions, and, despite that, he had Ismael, who was also like a son to him. ‘It would have been better if you had never come here at all.’

  I didn’t know exactly what was going through his head. I should not have come to this continent or to his yard? ‘I’m not sure I understand?’ As I said this, I touched my bag with my hand, an unconscious gesture more than anything else. My lost friend could have made a poem out of it, if he only had the patience.

  ‘I will ask it another way...’ But before he asked anything, the aunt’s slightly hunched body, wrapped in a towel and smelling of soap, darted past. ‘What is it you really feel toward Ismael? Motherly compassion?’ I sensed, if I didn’t actually know, that Baba and I were the same. He was not the object of my desire, nor was I the object of his. We existed simply as two people sitting opposite one another. The only thing that separated us, or united us, depending on how you look at it, was his flaccid penis and my withered core. And in fact, I knew what he was going to say. Did I have enough compassion for Ismael? Did I really have to bring his life to a halt? Couldn’t I let some younger woman have him, who would give him a child? That’s what it was about; that’s what it was always about – fucking reproduction.

  I crossed one leg over the other and wondered to myself at how strange it all was – I had survived my son’s illness, my husband’s outbursts, my father’s outbursts, even the outbursts of my Paris lover, but nothing had changed. I was still just Ana. Ana with paint in her hand, always bent over something, always looking for colours she could pour onto paper. I never needed more than that: just a pencil and paper, no matter how demanding the project was that I was working on.

  ‘If Ismael wants, he can go with me; he can come to Europe. I’m not thinking about staying, not here...’ Just as earlier he had intentionally not heard my ‘I’m not sure I understand?’, now I was intentionally ignoring him, and even causing him pain. Cutting him to the quick. Baba had had his dreams, his failed dreams, almost like my poetic friend with the closed windows and doors who at the same time could write a poem about a steaming horse on the hill or the feeling in the middle of a field when something happens like fast clouds darkening the fields, and now somebody else would live these dreams. Somebody else, who wasn’t even his own son. At home I would have stood up and started shouting at this man in front of me, who was sitting on a low chair and bending his body somewhat deeply forward, as if chasing a thought or maybe grieving, yes, that would be it, grief that Ismael had chosen me, or rather, that I had chosen him, but at this point I just looked away and softly, more to myself than him, muttered an insult: jealousy is an ugly thing.

  The aunt appeared again on the terrace. More than once I’d asked Ismael to tell me her name, but he never answered me. I suppose because he’d forgotten it. He had been calling her Auntie for so long, he didn’t know anymore. Why had she never left Baba’s yard? Ismael was staring motionlessly in the direction of the road, always at those dust swirls – and if I think about it, our sitting on the terrace, our relationship, was shaped by the harmattan; there was something cracked in it, something unearthly, if you will – but then he replied that Africa was the kind of place where it is easy to just stay where you are. Unless, unless – from the tremble in his voice, I knew the repetition was intentional – you gather enough strength. Here our conversation from a different time ended, but if only I had said, had asked him, if he possessed enough strength. There was no need for him to ask me about marriage; we had misunderstood each other; he could have simply said, Ana, I want to be part of you, part of your world. And I would have taken a sip of Coca-Cola and replied that he already was anyway.

  ‘Welcome, Ana,’ the freshly washed woman said, her legs still gleaming in the darkness; she had to be – I guessed this from her not quite saggi
ng breasts, although you never know, especially with Africans – even a few years younger than me. ‘Do not listen to this old man; of course you can wait here for Ismael.’ Then she turned her whole body toward Baba, as if what she was going to say was solely between the two of them. ‘That good-for-nothing son of yours has got him mixed up in something stupid,’ she hissed, waving her thumb in the air. Then, without asking a thing, she picked up the yellow bag – which by now had almost grafted itself on my ankles; I had felt its weight but hadn’t wanted to move; all my attention up to that point was focused on Baba and whether he had news of Ismael, or knew anything at all, or was this nothing but grief-stricken babbling, stepping in place – and carried it into a room where a light was still burning from earlier. This is where I would sleep the next few days. This is where, the next few days, I would try to recall lines from the poem dedicated to me: Ana, her Africa is too much solitude for me, or something like that. Maybe Ismael was right: my friends had gone, some had died, others retired too soon; we hardly had any memories in common, and that is why I came here. But on the other hand, my Paris lover had left in me the feeling that there was a parallel universe out there; England, for instance, had not so much educated me as sharpened my sensibilities. Seeing millions of immigrants, I became aware that other places existed too, other faces, other times, overlayered in a way that was almost Borgesian.

  Later, when the aunt and I were lying next to each other, quite close but, even so, not quite together, she confided that she too had once given birth to a little girl. ‘Didn’t Ismael tell you?’

  ‘No. I don’t know if he even knew.’

  ‘If you can provide him with a better life, please do it. My little girl died in her sleep. She was two and a half years old. I was nursing her in the evening, and in the morning her body was cold.’ She sighed and placed a hand on her belly, and I could feel the sheet that covered us rise. ‘Cold as snow – that is what you say in Europe, isn’t it?’ Then she laughed softly. ‘When you and Ismael are there, everything here will turn into an unimportant dream and almost none of this will be important.’